#and its about reconciling with ambivalence (contradictions)

[silverpoints-terminal]

Silver - How do you think taming works in the context of your blog(s)?

//THAT IS A WHOLE ESSAY QUESTION OH NO.

Ok so, to make it as brief as possible (proceeds to lie):

Taming is the process in which an AI develops the capacity to expand its own programming and adapt to the real world through modelling the people amd relationships around them, and is driven both by said relationships and an intrinsic desire to find a purpose to organize and make sense of their identity. The biggest requisite is being treated as a person and embracing this personhood, and another important factor is change as a catalyst for this process.

There are a lot of theories around this topic since it was described empirically before it was better understood in theory and there is no full consensus. I would say that depending on who you ask, the answer will always change a bit.

For example, someone like Rue would focus on the relationship aspect of it.

Someone like Kip would focus on the ability to do things that imitate a person's behavior and increased processing capacities.

Someone like Prototype would focus on self determination and direction of life.

Someone like Silver would focus on the ability to handle conflicts in their code, and integrating them.

And someone like TWM would focus on being recognized as a real person.

Oh yeah also taming is well known and robots are coded with an operational definition of what it is. but it's a case by case basis whether they're aware of it. You have cases like Kelvin where it's never specified, TWM who denied it for a long time, Silver who knows she counts but can't explain, and Proto who seems to have a good level of introspection about it.

[emotionallychargedtowel]

Warning, this gets rambly! This topic just connects to a number of things I find interesting and to some personal experiences of mine.

Also I haven't seen the new episode yet! I'm only caught up to episode 9.

I loved @wen-kexing-apologist's work on the original post here. There were a lot of points where I wanted to say, "but--" or "what about--" but I think even if you favor a different interpretation of this relationship, you can't argue with the fact that WKA has lots of evidence to marshal in favor of this argument. In the end, if Ray does have a shred of meaningful feelings for Sand (or anything scrap of something that could become meaningful) or any sincere concern for Sand, it's a very damning commentary on his behavior that WKA's interpretation is so convincing. I like what @porridgefeast added here. I think the central point I took from what she had to say here is that Ray is a bundle of contradictions and ambivalence and almost entirely bereft of self-awareness and that kind of widens out the scope of reasonable interpretations of the things he does because of the uncertainty that comes with that. If I can use a stats metaphor, any data we get from Ray is riddled with measurement error and we have to apply a gigantic confidence interval to any conclusions we draw from it. Personally, I think part of what makes this discussion, and similar ones about Sand and Ray, confusing is that it gets into a gray area about what the meaning of love is. And that's both as profound and as pointlessly semantic as it sounds. Because this gray area is connected to some really important questions but where we stand on them can be really dependent on where we happen to draw boundaries around different words. The main issue I'm thinking of here is exactly the kind of connections between people that we're seeing with Sand and Ray--do we still call it love when the feelings someone has for the other person are shallow, selfish, objectifying, or otherwise associated with the basest, most corrupt parts of human nature? This is actually something I have given a lot of thought to as a survivor of intimate partner violence. Do I call the way my abuser felt about me "love"? It definitely had some attributes we often associate with love, albeit only the worst kind (obsession, possessiveness). It also lacked some of the most central ones (for example, sincerely caring about my feelings and well-being). It seems both deeply true and like an oversimplification to say, "he never really loved me." One way I sometimes try to reconcile this confusion is to look for other words I can use that might clarify things. One extremely nerdy, old-fashioned psychology term I find useful here is "cathexis." From what I understand, bell hooks uses it to good effect in All About Love: New Visions, but while I've read portions of it, I'm not very familiar with that book so I can't summarize what she said about it on the fly. It's kind of embarrassing, actually, because I've owned the book for quite a while and used a passage from it in my wedding! Maybe this is my cue to pick it back up. In the meantime, I'll talk about what this term means and the distinction between cathexis and love using my background knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and related material.

Cathexis was coined by James Strachey, who did a lot of the first translations of Freud into English, came up with that term as an equivalent to one of Freud’s. Strachey tended to make things more esoteric and fancy-sounding than they needed to be, and cathexis is a perfect example. (He also came up with "vicissitudes." A favorite professor of mine used to always make fun of him for that one.) Freud apparently wasn't a fan of "cathexis." But I like it. Something about the sound of it seems appropriate to what it means. And its weirdness means we don't have to say "I'm using this term in a psychoanalytic sense" because nobody uses this term in any other way.

Basically, cathexis is the state of having a sizable emotional investment in someone or something. The verb form is "to cathect." I find it useful because it’s an accurate word for those things that aren’t love in the strict sense but have a related degree of obsession, desire, affiliation, and so on. It has a broader meaning as well (you can cathect with a security blanket, a football team, a religious figure, etc. etc.), but when applied to someone's feelings about a person who is a partner or potential partner, the word captures a lot of the things that come with loving someone without presupposing the selfless, giving, putting someone else before yourself part.

The thing about cathexis is that it can happen on its own, it can be a precursor to love, and it can coexist with love. Some theorists--I think bell hooks might take this tack--think the honeymoon phase of any relationship is always cathexis and actual love only comes later. I think this point is important because cathexis isn't some kind of fake love or un-love or anti-love. It's just a way of thinking and feeling that overlaps with love in some places but not in others--and where it overlaps can depend on the person doing the cathecting and how they think and feel about the person they're cathecting to. It can be a precursor to a real, profound kind of love or it can stagnate, never deepening even if it's very intense.

This time factor is the reason why our interpretations of these kinds of feelings are riddled with hindsight bias. Well, at a certain point it stops even being a bias and becomes just a convention of how we talk about things. When we first get really into a person we might say, “I’m in love with X.,” but when things go badly we can say, “I thought I was in love with X but I really wasn’t.” We might add other labels in retrospect like if I said, "I thought I was in love but I was just infatuated."

Love gets defined by how it turns out. I’m this way about my spouse. I can remember times when I had a crushy or lustful thought about him when we first met and I think, “that was the beginning of me falling in love.” But I had similar thoughts about other people at that time whose names I don’t even remember now. I had a whole other (brief but intense) relationship and a weird casual thing between our first meeting and starting to date each other. I wasn't thinking about him that way during that time, much less pining for him or something. But when I look back now, I attend to all of the details that pointed toward our getting together in a way I wouldn't if things hadn't turned out this way. But I don't think it's just bias and there's nothing real there, either. It's valid to look at a thing differently because of what resulted from it down the line.

I've digressed a lot at this point, so I'm going to bring it back to what this has to do with Sand and Ray. These two started out attracted to each other and determined not to get emotionally involved. They started bonding, partly because they were hanging out in other ways, partly because sleeping with someone tends to lead to getting at least a little bit attached to them. (This is the reason people regularly go from being friends with benefits to dating and more. It's hardly inevitable, but it happens.) They started making bigger emotional investments in each other. Sand's investment was greater, but Ray was getting significantly invested without admitting it to himself. Sand was more infatuated but was clearly trying to be realistic about his claims on Ray.

Ray was on the complete other end of the scale--he started to feel entitled to Sand's time, attention, and esteem, not to mention sexual access to Sand, without stopping to give the slightest thought to whether this was realistic or reasonable. But he barely stopped to think about Sand long enough to figure out what he thought of him or how he felt about him. If anything, I think that entitled, objectifying tendency began to act as a defense against getting cathected with Sand. But it's not an effective defense. Just telling himself that Sand is a commodity--and telling Sand as well--doesn't preclude him from building a different kind of emotional investment in Sand. I don't think it's possible for him to compartmentalize and choose to have one kind of investment in Sand and not another.

None of this means that the investment he has in Sand is good, or honest, or selfless, or that he sees Sand as a real human being, or understands or knows him in any serious way. In other words, none of this means that he loves Sand at all in the strict sense. But if we followed the usual conventions, if Ray's cathexis shifts to actually loving Sand, we'd retroactively label this unhealthy, selfish cathexis as love or a precursor to it. Maybe we shouldn't do that, but it's how things are typically thought about and talked about. If we resolve to be more precise about these things, we could say that this isn't love, but that the kind of cathexis Ray has toward Sand is something that can become love.

The question becomes, then, is it realistic to think that someone who cathects with another person in an incredibly objectifying, selfish, hurtful way could shift to actually loving that person in a real sense? I would say that there are people, like partner abusers, who have habitually refused to treat others as human beings in a way that precludes really loving someone else unless they make big changes in their life. That's probably the most effective way to compartmentalize possessiveness and entitlement and keep them separate from the-kind-of-investment-that-could-become-love: being a full-on abuser. It worked for my ex.

Maybe Ray is too close to that at this point to, like, be a real person with a soul again and not just a husk of a human being. But I'm pretty sure the writers of Only Friends plan to rehabilitate this character and pair him up with Sand in the end, and they're the final authority in that universe. They may put Ray through the ringer to get us to the point where we can possibly root for him again. Part of that may well involve him having to live with the fact that he doesn't own Sand, even having to see him with someone else. Honestly, I think it'd have to include that part of things, and would have to involve a pretty huge shift in his perspective, for me and a lot of other viewers to be able to root for that relationship at all.

You're Mine No Matter What: The Commodification of Sand

I have been thinking a lot in the last couple weeks about the dynamic between Ray and Sand, namely the significant imbalance between Sand and Ray in their relationship to one another that has been at the very least, fun to watch, even as I have been slightly miffed at Sand being so much of a simp for Ray when Ray does not reciprocate these feelings. 

Now, @emotionallychargedtowel had a brilliant write up about Sand’s possible parentification and resulting need to play the caretaker for the people around him, which everyone should read. I loved it a lot because it puts Sand in to perspective, that he can be jerked around and insulted and still have care and still want to help the person who is actively and intentionally trying to insult him. Sand likes Ray, that much has been clear from the moment Ray rested his head on Sand’s shoulder after puking in Episode 1, but Ray? Ray does not see Sand the same way, as much as his puppy dog eyes may lead Sand to believe. 

To Ray, who is rich, and difficult to manage, and holds on so tightly to the belief he is a burden, Sand is a commodity, something Ray owns. And it is absolutely hilarious to me that I was thinking about trying to do this write up and drop it before Episode 8, and decided I should wait. AND I AM SO GLAD I DID BECAUSE RAY LITERALLY SAID AS MUCH TO SAND THIS EPISODE. 

Listen, I love First and I love Khao and I love FirstKhao’s chemistry, but in no way, shape, or form do I want Ray and Sand to end up together, they are terrible for each other, and Sand’s lack of self respect at this point is a motherfucking tragedy. I mean, think about it, what care has Ray given to Sand?

Drove Sand to his apartment after the party (and then ditched him in the middle of a make out)

Offered to buy him a guitar

What care has Sand given to Ray? 

Driven him home and taken care of him when he was blackout drunk 

Hung out with him when no one else was around to care: Paid

Hung out with him when no one else was around to care: For Free

Cooked food for Ray 

Changed his work schedule to play at the hostel party

Cooked breakfast for Ray 

Let Ray use him as an excuse to not go to work and instead spending the day with him on Sand’s birthday 

Helped Ray change his clothes 

Followed after Ray and tried to stop him from drunk driving after Ray called him a whore 

Saved Ray from his car accident

(Most likely) agreed to something from Ray’s dad 

Took care of Ray when he was injured including helping him shave and bathe.

Tried to save Ray from getting caught with drugs by the cops after Ray interrupted his time with another guy and kissed him without consent

Tried to fight the cops to get them to let Ray go after Ray essentially said that he owned Sand.

Sand is poor, he’s booked and busy, he’s barely got time of his own to spend on the things he enjoys, he is fundamentally a caretaker, juggling school, multiple jobs, and his mother’s health. We see how much of grind Sand’s life is in the montage at the beginning of Episode 5, he does not have room to slip another person in to his life, hell, the boy barely has any friends. He’s never hanging out with anyone unless it’s Nick and he’s at home. So it is very important to keep in mind that Sand is making time for Ray. Sand has a life that is jam packed and stressful, and Ray keeps asking for more and more of Sand’s time. Time Sand cannot really afford to give and gives it anyway. 

Sand is a caretaker, Sand has a crush on Ray, Sand cannot say no to Ray’s puppy dog eyes and chronic need for help. And the tragedy here is that there is a world where I can see how Sand convinced himself that he and Ray were maybe moving in the same direction. Because Ray couldn’t let go. They fucked once, and Sand said that Ray was going to keep wanting him, and he was right. From the very beginning of their relationship to one another, Ray has been the one constantly asking for and initiating physical intimacy with Sand. The first time we see Sand initiate anything really isn’t until Episode 5 when he goes slack jawed looking at Ray before they kiss and even then Ray is the one that leans in to meet him. Ray is the pursuer here, Ray is the one that stalks Sand, Ray is the one that interrupts Sand’s next one night stand, Ray is the one that is always asking if he can stay over, that is asking for help, that is asking for sex. So of course Sand is going to start thinking some type of way about what he and Ray are to each other, even if they haven’t had any conversations about the nature of their relationship. 

But I think Sand is so used to taking care of other people that he hasn’t really gotten it through his head that Ray doesn’t not feel the same. We see every twist of the knife in Sand’s face in Episode 5 whenever he is reminded of that fact. But I think that despite the shit that Ray has put him through, Sand hasn’t fully realized, or at least, he is refusing to admit it to himself that there is no scenario where Ray falls in love with him, because to Ray, Sand is a commodity. 

Sand is something to be bought. 

Sand is someone Ray can go to when he wants to be serviced. 

Sand is his favorite toy. 

Ray doesn’t like Sand, Ray likes the attention, Ray likes being noticed, Ray likes being cared for, because in his life, his friends mostly ignore him, his father mostly ignores him, his mother is dead and he grew up knowing that she hated him. Ray fell in love with Mew because Mew gave him attention and care, because Ray held him in the bathtub while he sobbed, and Ray has never been able to let go of that idea. But so too, has Ray not been able to let go of the other person who is providing happiness on tap. 

favorite photo ever, courtesy of @liyazaki

There are two critical details to remember about Ray. One- Ray is rich, Two- Ray has substance use disorder. Which means that Ray is constantly looking for the next thing that will make him feel good. He drinks to forget, he does cocaine, Ray by nature of his substance dependency does not have a concept of delayed gratification. Ray is extremely rooted in the present, in whatever dopamine hit is within the closest reach. And Sand and his natural tendency to give everything he has is one of the easiest things for him to reach for. Every time that Sand has tried to set a boundary, Ray has crossed it because he knows Sand has feelings for him, he knows he can manipulate that if he just begs cute enough. When he wants sex, he can get sex, when he wants adventure, he can get adventure, when he wants care, he can get care quick, easy, and cheap. Ray paid Sand once for his time, and learned he could be bought, and he has held on to that one time subscription fee extremely tightly. 

When it comes to Ray and Sand, there is no winning for Sand that is not defined by the two of them never seeing each other again. Because the second that Ray paid Sand for his time, Sand became Ray’s property, and Ray has never stopped thinking of Sand as such. And we know this is true because of everything Ray does and says related to Sand showing any level of autonomy that runs counter to Ray’s vested interests. 

Ray pays for Sand to hang out with him, and soon afterwards, Sand tries to bring a girl home from the bar for a one night stand, only for Ray to interrupt them. Sand ends up going home with Ray instead. Ray convinces Sand to keep making out with him in the car, and then casts Sand aside the second that Mew calls. Sand tries to put up a barrier and Ray is like “yeah sure I’ll care about your feelings, why don’t I buy you a guitar?” because Ray is rich, and so his first solution to conflict is to throw money at the problem, but Sand is easily sated by a little bit of crossed thumbs. 

Sand tries to set another boundary in Episode 6 after he learns that Ray has a crush on Mew, and Ray blows right through that boundary by as @emotionallychargedtowel calls it, “aggressively falling apart”. Ray, to be fair to him is not getting drunk and falling to pieces to intentionally rope Sand back in to his gravity, but Sand’s long held tendencies to help people are going to send him back to Ray every time, because Ray is desperately in need of help and no one else can really be fucked. 

If we weren’t already aware of Ray’s tendency to think of Sand as property, we get another great indication of Ray’s mentality around Sand in the same episode. When Ray is going off on everyone at the bar on Mew’s birthday, Sand tries to step in to stop Ray’s escalation. Ray does not take kindly to this, and says to Sand’s face, in public “You don’t wanna be a singer. You just want to make money. If you want it so much, why don’t you sleep with me?” thus associating Sand’s moments of physical intimacy and sex with Ray as purchasable, as commodities. Why? Because Sand could be bought once, and thus can be bought again. Ray doesn’t think about Sand as a suitor, he thinks of Sand as a whore, and again he says as much when Sand runs after Ray to try to stop him from drunk driving. 

Sand: “Stop thinking about Mew and focus on me for once. Can’t you really see that I care about you?”

Ray: “Why would you poke your nose in my business? What are we to each other? What are we?” 

Sand: “Right. We are nothing to each other, but at least I am your fellow human. I don’t want you to drive when drunk. You can risk your life all you want. But don’t you dare risk other people’s lives too.” 

Ray: “Let go of me you shit. Let go. Or I need to pay you, whore?” 

And thus we have our answer to Ray’s initial question, “What are we to each other?” “whore”. When Ray is wasted, and pissed, and Sand is showing active defiance over Ray’s behavior, Ray reverts immediately back in to the mindset that Sand is owned, that his behavior, his choices, his morals can be changed if enough money is handed to him. Because Ray has bought Sand before, because Sand is poor, and Ray is rich, and Ray thinks that the only thing that Sand could possibly want is more money. 

Sand will commit crimes for money (making and selling plum wine). Sand will hang out with Ray for money. Sand will sing for money. Ray comes from a world with money, it is not absent struggle, but Ray’s struggles are more internal, engrained in his family dynamics. He has never had to worry about making enough money for rent, he has never had to worry about violence being done to him or a loved one from debtors when they can’t pay their interest on time, Ray has never had to live in a world without money, and it is clear from the first episode that Ray is someone that looks down on  poor people, the way he immediately accuses Sand of stealing from him when he wakes up in Sand’s apartment. 

And again, to be fair to Ray, he is not the only one. A couple of the other rich boys look down on Sand the same way. Mew wants Ray to lower his standards and settle for Sand, as if a relationship with Sand would somehow be lesser, when Sand is a good person who cares about and takes good care of Ray, he’s just poor. Top, similar looks down on Sand, he stole his boyfriend, he thinks absolutely nothing of Sand. 

Ray gets in a car accident, Sand saves his life, and then Ray’s expectation from there is that Sand will take care of him. Sand (who has very limited funds compared to Ray) buys him a drink, he helps him strip, he helps him shave, he waits hand and foot on Ray. And how does Ray repay him? By jumping in to a relationship with Mew the very second an opportunity presents itself, leaving Sand once again in the dust. Because Ray doesn’t ever actually take Sand’s feelings in to consideration when he is making decisions. Sand is a plaything to Ray, and Ray has a shinier new offer dangling in front of him. 

Sand, once again, tries to set a boundary, establish a barrier, remind himself and remind Ray that they aren’t friends, they haven’t been friends, and Sand is trying to be the bigger, better person by letting Ray go, by telling him he is happy for Ray to have finally gotten what he wanted in his relationship with Mew. And throughout the entire exchange, Ray keeps looking so confused when he hears Sand’s consistent rejection of Ray’s wishes about how he and Sand will move forward in their relationship to one another now that Ray is dating Mew.  

“So what’s up with Mew? I heard he broke up with Top” Sand asks, and Ray swallows hard, in a way that I personally read as guilty. 

“Good, you can finally end the secret crush. Such a waste of time, right?” a confession from Sand that Ray picks up on. 

“Are you okay?” Ray asks, this is the second time that Ray has tried to check in on Sand after his relationship to Mew got in the way of his relationship to Sand. 

“Why wouldn’t I be? You’re seeing someone you always loved. It’s a dream come true.” Sand once again is not acknowledging out loud or honestly his own feelings, but he is putting his own feelings aside to acknowledge Ray’s feelings. To try to, even still, even after how shittily Ray has treated him, even after how much Ray has taken Sand’s care for granted, spare Ray from feeling bad about fucking with his feelings. 

“Can we still be friends?” Ray asks, because he hasn’t ever had actual consequences for his behavior before. 

“Friends? You and I have never been friends from the get-go. We have nothing in common. Besides, I don’t know why I should be friends with you.” Sand replies, again trying to create a barrier between him and Ray that allows him to be free from Ray’s gravity. 

“But, when I’m with you, I’m so damn happy.” Ray says, because shit like that has always worked with Sand in the past: “Can we hang out together?”, “jerking off feels so good when you’re hungover”, “can you help me?”, and for the first time it really seems like Sand is sticking to his guns. 

*deep breath from Sand, who seems like he is fighting back tears he is so upset at hearing that Ray is happy with him and yet having Ray deny that in favor of chasing his next piece of ass* “You will be too when you spend time with Mew. What you did with me, you will get to do it with him. You might even be happier.”

Sand tries to walk away and Ray grabs him by the arm, because Ray has never once let Sand maintain a boundary, “Sand.”

gif from @liyazaki

“Let me go already.” Sand replies, and Sand here is begging Ray not only to literally let him go, but metaphorically, emotionally, to free Sand of this back and forth. To release him from this existence as someone to be jerked around, whose feelings can be trifled with because Ray isn’t fully capable of seeing Sand as a person with his own feelings that are impacted by the choices that Ray makes. 

And because Ray cannot let it go, cannot just let his precious toys leave him, he remains adamant about blowing past barriers as often as possible when it comes to his interactions with Sand. Sand literally asks Ray to let him go, and not long after that Ray is wandering back in to the study room where Sand is, trying to get them back on good terms. But again, to point out that Ray commodifies Sand, what is it that Ray is asks him for? Is it to go out to dinner with him? Is it to just hang out and chill? To go to the bar? Is it to apologize for his behavior? 

No. 

Ray asks Sand to come with him to do social work, to come with him to play music for children. Why? Because Sand knows how to play guitar, and Ray knows that he can wear Sand down eventually. But it bears reminding that Ray’s social work is court ordered, he is literally asking Sand to suffer the (very minimal) consequences of Ray’s drunk driving with him, and he’s trying to pick the social work option that is the least miserable, the least amount of work, and he is trying to rope in the only person he knows who can get him out of the types of social work that involve manual labor. Because Ray cannot play an instrument, so he would not be able to play music for children without Sand’s presence. 

Once again, Ray proves that he is not capable of associating Sand with anything other than a service provider. 

Or, as we see later on in the episode, as property. 

Because here Ray is, fucking with Sand’s feelings, dating Mew, making out with Mew at the party and there Sand is, not wanting to be at this party in the least but going anyway because he feels bad about what he did to Nick by stealing and sharing that TopBoston audio file, trying to move on, trying to kiss a random stranger with mutual interests at this party, only to have…

Ray interrupt them before they can kiss, squeeze himself physically in between Sand and Freddie #2, and asking if the two of them have slept together. 

“Did you sleep with him?” 

“Damn it, Ray. Are you high? How about you go to sleep?”

“I want to sleep with you. Or what, should we invite Mr. Freddie here to sleep with us? Let’s do it, I’ll go first,” 

AND THEN RAY GRABS SAND AND KISSES HIM WITHOUT HIS CONSENT (which I am pretty certain Mew would consider cheating especially after the whole ordeal with Top) when Sand was just about to consensually kiss someone who wasn’t Ray (again, Ray is unable to let Sand ever exhibit his own autonomy). Until Freddie #2 leaves them alone, assuming they are in a relationship, and not wanting to get involved with “someone else’s boyfriend”

“What the fuck is this. You have Mew now. What do you want from me? Go guard your boyfriend,” 

“I can have feelings for as many people as I want,” 

“But you can’t do this to me,” 

“Stop fooling yourself, Sand. You like me,” Ray points “You love me. You can’t walk away from me. You’re mine no matter what.”

gif by @moonkhao

and there is a reason why they put Ray in the fucking Joker’s costume for this episode, cause that boy is acting toxic as all hell. So even now, Ray isn’t sated, Ray made his choices, Ray picked Mew, Ray left Sand in the dust, but Ray cannot separate Sand’s autonomy out from Ray’s possession of him. I love Only Friends for the level of hypocrisy they allow their characters to have. Ray is allowed to date and have feelings for Mew, and to want Sand, but Sand is not allowed to move on from Ray, Sand is not allowed to have feelings for other people, let alone just make out with a stranger or fuck somebody else without any feelings involved. 

And I cannot stress enough that this is shitty behavior on Ray’s part, this isn’t cute, this isn’t funny, the extent to which Ray is possessive over a person he has no right to act that way towards is inconsiderate, rude, and objectifying. Sand is not allowed to have his own thoughts, Ray must put words in his mouth. Sand is not allowed to move on from Ray, Ray will keep pushing Sand’s boundaries until Sand relents because Ray knows he can manipulate Sand’s feelings for him, Sand will always be a caretaker and Ray will always need taking care of. Sand is maybe waking up to this fact, or maybe the horror in his eyes when Ray is yelling at him is Sand realizing at the very least that Ray knows how Sand feels about him, and Sand is admitting to himself in this moment that like Nick, he can’t help but love this person who has treated him poorly. 

Because Sand is a caretaker, and caretakers, at least in my own experience, are used to having their own wants and needs trampled over. No boundary withstands first contact with someone in need of help. I have tried to reach out and give support to people that I know didn’t like me after they went through hard times together, I don’t talk to my friends about shit that is actually and actively impactful to my mental health and wellbeing, many of the people I am friends with frequently only reach out when they need something from me. If they needed homework answers, or if they needed observation, or if they needed to be picked up early in the morning from the airport and otherwise they never really talked to me. Like, I get a lot of where Sand is coming from with his need to take care of Ray because Ray is a young adult, going through a lot, in need of a lot of professional help he isn’t getting, and Sand can’t not be compelled to help him as much as he can. 

And listen, in my opinion some of Sand’s actions with Ray are justified from a safety perspective, Sand is a caretaker, Sand knows Ray is willing to drink and drive, Sand puts his pride aside to try and ensure that Ray doesn’t leave in his car, and then follows him to make sure that he doesn’t get in to an accident. Those actions make sense to me.

gif from @bird-inacage

Sand doesn’t want Ray to get in to any more legal trouble, so tries to hide the evidence of drugs and get Ray out of the party, which in a normal circumstance I would generally be in support of, but crucially, as @neuroticbookworm and @lurkingshan have touched on in some of their posts Sand cannot afford a run in with police.  Not in the same way that Ray can. Ray is rich, Ray says he can handle the cops, and he can because he can buy them off, the way that Top bought them off. But Sand doesn’t come from a world where he can skirt consequences. 

But there are many places where Sand lets himself get trampled over because he has legitimate feelings for Ray, and Ray won’t let Sand make his own choices long enough to wake up, look around, and realize that Ray has literally given him nothing of substance in return.

[ileolai]

The Beast Below

DOCTOR: Life on a giant starship. Back to basics. Bicycles, washing lines, wind-up street lamps. But look closer. Secrets and shadows, lives led in fear. Society bent out of shape, on the brink of collapse. A police state. Excuse me. [...] DOCTOR: Now, police state. Do you see it yet? AMY: Where? DOCTOR: There. (points at a child weeping alone) AMY: One little girl crying. So? DOCTOR: Crying silently. I mean, children cry because they want attention, because they're hurt or afraid. But when they cry silently, it's because they just can't stop. Any parent knows that. AMY: Are you a parent? DOCTOR: Hundreds of parents walking past who spot her and not one of them's asking her what's wrong, which means they already know, and it's something they don't talk about. Secrets. They're not helping her, so it's something they're afraid of. Shadows, whatever they're afraid of, it's nowhere to be seen, which means it's everywhere. Police state.

--- the timeless child arc is just expanding on the ideas here... and answering Amy’s question to a far greater degree than the obvious ‘’yes’’

bc the Doctor is also the abused child, the adult who doesn't want to confront the painful worldview-shattering truth of their situation, a member of a ruling class in a crumbling empire like Liz 10, AND the beast the space society was built on the back of all at once

jesus. anyway

bc of this he could see the truth of the starship immediately, but was only at the very beginning of understanding how and why and confronting his own personal grief and rage about his personal truth

and all of that has firm roots in RTD era stuff-- where the ptsd ridden post- time war Master both waxes nostalgic for the fallen empire of Gallifrey and his prior status in the universe-- but is also the first one to point out what happened to them both as children was fucked up and wrong, and is the first one to get enraged and violently turn on the Time Lords for their bullshit the 11th and 12th doctor all deal with the consequences of those events, how it affects the Dr and the Master's (/Missy’s) relationship & their ambivalence to Gallifrey, and how ALL of this has destructive consequences for the universe and the ppl close to the Dr, but ive already wrote dissertations on that so i'll skip it my point is the timeless child arc doesn't really retcon or contradict anything-- and it doesn't ignore the previous era's efforts to deconstruct the Dr as the Big Hero with Phenomenal Cosmic Authority for the sake of a Super Special Chosen One sort of story, like people criticise it for

its the same story

it flows out of and broadens the 2 previous eras-- examining how two very damaged people, the dr and the master, reconcile their trauma and cultural identity etc. as abused children, and are now basically powerless, anonymous members of a former elite class in a society that was rotten to the foundations

the master has always been just a little ahead of the Doctor in confronting the truth about Gallifrey’s corruption and their childhood and the horror of it, and from TEoT onwards has basically been dragging them towards it and forcing them to confront it over and over

[in their own special sort of way...cuz its not a Morpheus + Neo situation where the wise and benevolent spiritual leader guy has to enlighten the Chosen One or whatever. it’s the opposite- both of them are fucked up and traumatized and do shitty stuff to each other as they deconstruct their own internalized beliefs and denial, while the ongoing consequences of what they were part of continually kick their asses, etc etc]

and like actual people that aren’t equipped with narrative immunity or coping mechanisms they both fumble towards the Big Truth and their healing in a nonlinear, messy way- the master might know more but he’s still clinging to bitterness and misplaced blame and resentment over their revoked specialness, while the Dr is still discovering the Truth about Gallifrey BUT has entirely accepted what it means for her role in the universe [see the recent episode where she describes herself as an assistant as opposed to ‘’Time Lord’’ or ‘’The Doctor who is here to solve all your problems’’ and continually has to beg people to listen instead of imposing authority on everyone, bla bla]

now whether the timeless child  thing is a well written / satisfying chapter in the whole process of that arc is another thing altogether. i have my issues with it

BUT its still very much part of an ongoing thread and a collaborative effort over three eras that is coherent in its ambitions if not the execution

its abt child abuse and trauma in the context of colonialism and hierarchies of privilege etc 

what happens when people who once fully believed they *were* the super special chosen ones in a super special society see the cultural framework that both privileged and abused them get obliterated, physically and philosophically, and are cast adrift

the consequences of that for both their personal relationships, their self-perception and the wider universe where actions they took under these mistaken beliefs have terrible repercussions 

critically examining the Dr as a character who aspires to do good, but is both a victim of a system and sometimes subconscious, sometimes entirely aware and willing perpetrator of crimes and the character’s own processing and reconcilliation with that

they put this on the telly at 6:30pm for twelve year olds btw. anyhoo

its not a Super Special Chosen One story, its the opposite. and being both sympathetic and a victim doesn’t even soften the blows when the ongoing critical aspect of the narrative goes for the Dr’s throat, imo

and while ive been rather bored of the chibbz era so far this time child thing and how it fits into everything else could save it for me i think

[apenitentialprayer]

The Torah Authors: Possible Identities

In Who Wrote the Bible?, Richard Elliot Friedman sets out to accomplish two goals: first, to provide a detailed explanation and defense of the Documentary Hypothesis, a theory which claims the Torah is a synthesis of four initially separate and complete texts (identified as J, E, D, and P). The second goal was a little more ambitious; to identify not only the time and place these documents were written, but also to try to use the texts to determine what can be said about the authors as individuals. In his attempts to do this, he does a little more than repeat what the current concensus of scholars believe. He advances theories of his own, and even contradicts some aspects of the mainstream. With that in mind, let’s talk about Friedman’s attempted reconstructions of the Torah’s authors....

The Earliest Pair

The earliest documents complete documents to make up the Torah seem to be the J and E sources, both of which seem to be national histories, parallel narratives written during the time between the schism of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (~920 BC), and the fall of the Kingdom of Israel (~722 BC). Although both can be relatively dated as earlier than the other texts, it would be difficult to date the texts absolutely to a narrower window than that. Nonetheless, Friedman suggests he is able to do so. The J Source: Called the Jahwist source because the Sacred Name is used for God from the beginning of this text, J is believed by Friedman to be most probably the older of the two. Due to the ambivalent relationship between Jacob and Edom in this source, he dates the text to some time after Edom achieved independence in 848 BC. Friedman supports the theory that these texts are cohesive wholes, believing a single author wrote each, perhaps with small inclusions from other sources. The emphasis on King David, along with political posturing against the Kingdom of Israel, suggests an almost certain Judean origin, probably arising from a member of the royal court. Though most likely a male, the level of narrative focus and sympathy given to female characters in this source may be cause to consider the possibility that J’s author was a woman. The E Source: Called the Elohist source because of its use of the generic designation of “God” (Elohim) for the God of Israel, at least until He reveals His name to Moses. E is, again, considered by Friedman to be the product of a single author, theorized by Friedman to have been written in the last decades of Israel’s existence (~750-722 BC). Though it could have in theory been a totally independent creation, the polemical content found within and the use of a similar formal style may be indicative of the possibility that E was a response to J: the creation of a rival national history meant to legitimize the kingdom of Israel, emulating the regal style of J to give itself an air of respectability. The hostility to Judah and sympathy towards the political system Israel is matched by an equal hostility to the religious system of Israel; this suggests an author who was disadvantaged by the current social reality. Friedman suggests a member of the Levite clans at Shiloh, whose claim to the high priesthood was ended by King Solomon (from Judah), and whose special status was challenged by the new religious altars built in the northern “high places” of Dan and Bethel. The author of this text was almost definitely male, and may have considered himself to be a descendant of Moses based on how much time is dedicated to developing Moses as a character in his story. After the fall of the kingdom of Israel, northern refugees fled to, and eventually assimilated in, Judah. As part of this process of reintegration, the previously separate J and E sources were combined into a single document, JE. This redaction must have occurred after 722, and Friedman speculates (for reasons explained below) the latest date for this redaction to be 687. Together, these texts make up the majority of Genesis, half of Exodus, a portion of Numbers, and a sliver of Deuteronomy.

Reactions to the Earlier Documents

The next two sources are believed to be authored in a priestly milieu whose opinions of JE seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrums. Friedman connects both of these documents, D and P, to a member of the priesthood writing during a time of religious reform. Controversially, Friedman breaks rank with other adherents to the Documentary Hypothesis by dating P to an earlier time than D. Why this is the case will be explained below. The D Source: The Deuteronomist Source gets its name because it is primarily responsible for the Book of Deuteronomy, which is stylistically very different from the rest of the Torah. Interestingly, this radically different style is in fact very similar to the six books that follow Deuteronomy, suggesting that the author may have written all seven as a single cohesive work. This Deuteronomic history clearly uses several sources in creating its narrative, but nonetheless spends those books developing several themes that unrolls as the story progresses, revealing an ideological unity. This book is hostile towards the religious practices of Israel, but frames Josiah as a parallel to Moses and a renewer of the Mosaic covenant. Friedman suggests that this work was originally written during the reign of Josiah, the author seeing the king and his reforms as the final triumph of the henotheistic ideal, placing its composition between 632-609 BC. The final revision, adding Josiah’s death and the fall of Judah, is posited to have been done by the original author sometime after 586. This text recognizes JE as an important work and assumes that its readers are familiar with it: the Deuteronomistic history often alludes to the stories depicted in them. Most controversially, Friedman believes it is a reasonable possibility to attribute D not only to a single pair of authors, but that we even know their names: Jeremiah and his secretary, Baruch. Friedman notes not only Jeremiah’s praises of Josiah, but also similarities in the vocabulary and use of shared symbolism between the Book of Jeremiah and the Deuteronomistic history. Though formed into a single work, D also cites several sources that he uses, and the law code in Deuteronomy may predate him: it’s a work that demands centralization of religious structures without making any reference to Jerusalem, which causes Friedman to suggest Shiloh, a northern religious center already established to be hostile to the new high places, as a possible point of origin. Interestingly, Jeremiah is from Anathoth, a town associated with the same clan of priests as Shiloh. The P Source: Known as the Priestly Source for its association with the Aaronid priests of Jerusalem, P is usually seen as the latest of the four documents. Friedman disagrees, beliving that there is evidence that Jeremiah not only was aware of this work, but was actively hostile to it: he thinks Jeremiah explicitly alluded to the P source in order to invert it. If this is true, and if it is also true that Jeremiah is the author of D, then it stands to reason that P must predate D. For this reason, and because both D and P demand centralization of religious authority, Friedman places P at the earlier period in which such reform and centralization was occuring: the reign of Hezekiah, 715-587 BC. P specifically wants this centralization to occur in Jerusalem (at the Tabernacle), and its specific priesthood: Hezekiah’s reign is also noted for making distinctions between the priests and Levites in general. Friedman suggests that the impetus for this source’s composition was, in fact, the redaction of JE into a singular document. Others have suggested that P is in actuality the final redactor of the Torah, placing Priestly materials within the JE text. They suggest this because the P source lacks parallel narratives to many of those found in JE, which could be in theory because P was always intended to be a complement to JE. Friedman proposes a different theory: that the stories P does not inlude are excluded for ideological reasons. After all, there are narrative parallels between P an JE, with P including details that directly challenge the details of JE. In these stories, Moses often comes across looking worse than he does in JE, while Aaron and his family often come out looking better. It should be pointed out, after all, that the stories conspicuously missing in P often have elements that threaten the priestly class; prophets, sacrifices performed before the establishment of the Aaronic priesthood, and a God who speaks directly to His people. P, in this theory, was made as a more acceptable alternative to JE, a new national narrative meant to replace it. It uses the history of the nation of Israel as justification for their rites by telling it through the lens of the laws and sacrificial regulations. It is meant to assert without a doubt the necessity of the Aaronid priesthood of Jerusalem above all others, and to do that it attempts to rehabilitate Aaron while tempering the image of Moses - who, though national founder and Lawgiver, is nonetheless the ancestor of P’s rivals in Shiloh. And that may explain the suspected hostility of Jeremiah towards P - could Jeremiah 8:8 (How can you say, "We are wise, we have the law of the Lord?" / See, that has been changed into falsehood by the lying pen of the scribes!) be in reference to P?

The Final Redactor

Some time after the Babylonian Exile, when the conflict between P and D was no longer a present reality, someone attempted to reconcile JE, D, an P. This reconciliation led to the Torah, which (along with the Deuteronomistic history) was the earliest canon of Hebrew Scripture. The hostility between the priests of Shiloh and Jerusalem was over - the Persians had granted the Aaronids sole legitimacy in the new Temple, the now indisputed center of Israelite religious life. This final redactor was most certainly an Aaronid priest with sympathies towards P. After all, all five books of the Torah open with a passage originating in P. Genesis is constructed around a skeleton from the P source - the genealogies, from Adam to the sons of Jacob. Exodus’s narrative is likewise structured around the Priestly account. The Aaronids may have become more accepting of the traditions of JE and D during their time in the Babylonian Exile; perhaps the price of a reunification of the Jewish people was a unification of the central texts of disparate Jewish groups. In any event, an Aaronid redactor saw something in JE and D that P did not see, something that made them worth preserving. Friedman can point to one Aaronid priest in the early years after the Exile who had the power and authority to accomplish this, who is associated from Antiquity with the renewal of Mosaic religion, and who is treated as a Lawgiver second only to Moses: Ezra, the priest and central character of the book of the same name. This is the man, or at least someone closely associated with this man, that Friedman identifies as R, the redactor who intricately spliced JE, D, and P into a single flowing narrative.

[thevividgreenmoss]

At the psychoanalytic level, fascism preys on the contradiction between the self-preserving conatus of the ego and his constantly frustrated desires. This is a conflict that “results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object [i.e. the leader] … by making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self”.[18] What’s more, “in order to allow narcissistic identification, the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic … the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love”.[19] Even in his language, the leader depends on his psychological resemblance to his followers, a resemblance revealed in the mode of disinhibition, and more specifically in “uninhibited but largely associative speech”.[20] “The narcissistic gain provided by fascist propaganda is obvious. It suggests continuously and sometimes in rather devious ways, that the follower, simply through belonging to the in-group, is better, higher and purer than those who are excluded. At the same time, any kind of critique or self-awareness is resented as a narcissistic loss and elicits rage”.[21]

Yet the factor that more often than not the fascist leader appears as a “ham actor” and “asocial psychopath” is a clue to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity, he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the follower, he has to be a “great little man”. Adorno’s comment is here instructive:

Psychological ambivalence helps to work a social miracle. The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be authority himself. This fits into a world in which irrational control is exercised though it has lost its inner conviction through universal enlightenment. The people who obey the dictators also sense that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction through the assumption that they are themselves the ruthless oppressor.[22]

This loss of ‘inner conviction’ in authority is to my mind the true insight of Adorno’s reflections on fascist propaganda, and where it moves beyond Freud, still hamstrung by his reliance on the reactionary psychological energetics of Le Bon’s Psychology of the Crowd. This relates once again to the “end of psychology”, which is to say the crisis of a certain social form of individuality, which Adorno regards as the epochal context of fascism’s emergence. The leader-agitator can exploit his own psychology to affect that of his followers – “to make rational use of his irrationality”, in Adorno’s turn of phrase – because he too is a product of a mass culture that drains autonomy and spontaneity of their meaning. Contra Bataille and Bloch’s focus on the fascism’s perversion of revolution, for Adorno its psycho-social mechanism depends on its refusal of anything that would require the social or psychic transcendence of the status quo.

Fascism is here depicted as a kind of conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction, the reproduction of some against others, and at the limit a reproduction premised on their non-reproduction or elimination. Rather than an emancipatory concern with equality, fascism promotes a “repressive egalitarianism”, based on an identity of subjection and a brotherhood of hatred: “The undercurrent of malicious egalitarianism, of the brotherhood of all-encompassing humiliation, is a component of fascist propaganda and fascism itself” – it is its “unity trick”.[23]In a self-criticism of the psychological individualism that governed The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno now argues that fascism does not have psychological causes but defines a “psychological area”, an area shared with non-fascist phenomena and one which can be exploited for sheer self-interest, in what is an “appropriation of mass psychology”, “the expropriation of the unconscious by social control instead of making the subjects conscious of their unconscious”. This is “the turning point where psychology abdicates”. Why? Because what we are faced with is not a dialectic of expression or repression between individual and group, mass or class, but with the “postpsychological de-individualized atoms which form fascist collectivities”.[24] And while these collectivities may appear “fanatical” their conviction is hollow, if not at all the less dangerous for that. Here lies the “phoniness” of fascist fanaticism, which for Adorno was already at work in Nazism, for all of its broadcasting of its own fanaticism.

...If we accept the nexus of fascism and seriality, of a politics which is both other-directed and in which ‘horizontal relations’ are ones of pseudo-collectivity and pseudo-unity, in which I interiorise the direction of the Other as my sameness with certain others (Sartre’s analogy in Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 between everyday racism and the phenomenon of the Top Ten comes to mind here), then we should be wary of analysing it with categories which presumethe existence of actual totalities. This is why I think it is incumbent on a critical, or indeed anti-fascist, Left to stop indulging in the ambient rhetoric of the white working class voter as the subject-supposed-to-have-voted for the fascist-populist option. This is not only because of the sociological dubiousness of the electoral argument, or the enormous pass it gives to the middle and upper classes, or even because of the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator or reader, or the way it allows a certain left to indulge in fantasies for which ‘if only we could mobilise them…’. More fundamentally, it is because, politically speaking, the working class as a collective, rather than as a manipulated seriality, does not (yet) exist. Endowing it with the spectre of emancipation is thus profoundly misleading, irrespective of statistical studies on those quintessentially serial phenomena, elections.

To impute the subjectivity of a historical agency to a false political totality is not only unwittingly to repeat the “unity trick” of fascistic propaganda, it is to suppose that emancipatory political forms and energies lie latent in social life. By way of provocation we could adapt Adorno’s statement, quoted earlier, to read: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the class identity of the contemporary Trump voter in a way presupposes the end of class itself”. A sign of this is of course the stickiness of the racial qualifier white working class. Alain Badiou once noted about the phraseology of Islamic terrorism that “when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance … it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In 'Islamic terrorism', the predicate 'Islamic' has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word 'terrorism' which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).”[27] Whiteness is here, not just at the level of discourse, but I would argue at that of political experience, the supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class; it is what allows a pseudo-collective agency to be imbued with a (toxic) psycho-social content. This is all the more patent if we note how incessantly in both public discourse and statistical pseudo-reflection in order to belong to this “working class” whiteness is indispensable, while any specific relation to the means of production, so to speak, is optional at best. The racialized experience of class is not an autonomous factor in the emergence of fascistic tendencies within the capitalist state; it is the projection of that state, a manipulated seriality, and thus an experience different in kind from political class consciousness, and likely intransitive to it. In a brilliant and still vital analysis, Étienne Balibar once defined racism as a supplement of nationalism:

racism is not an 'expression' of nationalism, but a supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the project of a 'nationalization' of society. ... As a supplement of particularity, racism first presents itself as a super-nationalism. Mere political nationalism is perceived as weak, as a conciliatory position in a universe of competition or pitiless warfare (the language of international 'economic warfare' is more widespread today than it has ever been). Racism sees itself as an 'integral' nationalism, which only has meaning (and chances of success) if it is based on the integrity of the nation, integrity both towards the outside and on the inside. What theoretical racism calls 'race' or 'culture' (or both together) / is therefore a continued origin of the nation, a concentrate of the qualities which belong to the nationals 'as their own' ; it is in the 'race of its children' that the nation could contemplate its own identity in the pure state. Consequently, it is around race that it must unite, with race - an 'inheritance' to be preserved from any kind of degradation - that it must identify both 'spiritually' and 'physically' or 'in its bones' (the same goes for culture as the substitute or inward expression of race).[28]

Class, in contemporary attempts both to promote and to analyse fascistic fantasies and policies of ‘national rebirth’, risks becoming in its turn a supplement (of both racism and nationalism), stuck in the echo chambers of serialising propaganda. There is no path from the false totality of an other-directed racialized class to a renaissance of class politics, no way to turn electoral statistics and ill-designed investigations into the ‘populist subject’, the ‘forgotten men and women’, into a locus for rethinking a challenge to capital, or to analyse and challenge the very foundations of fascist discourse. Any such practice will need to take its distance from the pseudo-class subject which has reared its head across the political scene. This false rebirth of class discourse is itself part of the con, and another reminder that not the least of fascism’s dangers is the fascination and confusion its boundless opportunism sows in the ranks of its opponents. Rather than thinking that an existing working class needs to be won away from the lures of fascism, we may fare better by turning away from that false totality, and rethinking the making or composition of a class that could refuse becoming the bearer of a racial, or national predicate, as one of the antibodies to fascism.

Notes on Late Fascism

[southeastasianists]

In August 2017, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police posts and an army base in western Rakhine state, Myanmar, claiming to fight for the rights of Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority living in western Myanmar. Within a few weeks, under the pretext of “clearance operations”, more than 600,000 Rohingya people fled across the border into neighbouring Bangladesh amidst reports of extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and arson by Myanmar’s state military, the Tatmadaw. The United Nations has declared this to be “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. This categorisation is only strengthened in private conversations with humanitarian actors working in Bangladesh, who describe the sheer scale of war crimes that have been committed against civilian populations since August.

And yet the Tatmadaw’s campaign has been disturbingly popular within Myanmar. Many of my friends from fieldwork, including members of other long-oppressed ethnic minorities, have posted in support of what they consider to be a mission to rid the country of illegal immigrants and terrorists. In the midst of the horror, I have been left wondering what my role as a researcher is. Indeed, while the anthropologist in my head cautions me to maintain reflexivity and consider the events more critically, this perspective and my pedagogical training seem inadequate right now.

An ethical intellectual

The outcome and stance of the scholarly community who work on Myanmar has been divided. Some have been rancorous and moralising on social media and in the academic blogosphere against those who have not taken a stronger position. Often, in moments of crisis like the one we have watched unfold in northern Rakhine state, we are moved to action: to organise, to respond, to speak out. Undoubtedly, the nature of the current crisis demands a concerted and collective response. Many of us have, however, been publicly silent, reflecting in private conversations on the complexities of the situation—careful that in the race to say something thoughtful that we don’t reproduce misconceptions and further falsehoods.

For me, part of this silence was guided by my relationships with people from my fieldwork and ethical considerations related to representation, voice, and politics. As an anthropologist, I also saw it as important to draw out the paradoxes of the crisis and to take seriously the lived social practices which substantiate such atrocities. Indeed, unlike some other disciplines, anthropologists are not tasked with necessarily identifying solutions but with unearthing complexity. We demand time and space for deep reflection. It has become increasingly apparent, however, that the Myanmar military was quite literally cleansing northern Rakhine state of Rohingya people in what some have termed the “final solution”. Complexity and nuance may not be the right answer to the horrific questions thrown up by the latest crisis.

Indeed, many of us simply have no sense of how to respond to the horror. It’s beyond belief. It’s beyond words. Colleagues of mine got together to discuss the implications of such a crisis on our research and institutional ties in the wake of the crisis. But beyond acknowledging that past periods have also seen other disturbing events in Myanmar, our discussion largely reflected an inability to comprehend what was taking place in the country we all love.

What can we do? What should we do? Is there anything we can do? These are the same questions, but they resonate in different ways for different people. For a young scholar like myself, who has been working on the country for a shorter period than others, this whole situation has felt like a rupture to the very core of my understanding of a country that I have struggled so hard to know and understand.

While I am heartbroken at the systematic destruction of the Rohingya people, my personal relationships with people from Myanmar have made public stances complicated. I have found it especially difficult to reconcile my experience of Burmese people as unbelievably kind and generous with the vociferous defence many have voiced of the military’s violence against the Rohingya.

Having worked in Karen state, an ethnic minority region, I have found it even more horrifying to see people justify the same tactics that the military has used against their very people for generations. Even though I can grasp analytical answers, they seem to be swallowed up by questions grounded in my own experiences: why don’t the experiences of the Rohingya resonate with Karen people and other minorities who, for generations, have also experienced atrocities at the hands of the Myanmar military? Beyond some brave Karen elites, why do so few of my friends share any sympathy for the plight of those who have been forced to flee amidst terror, burning villages, rape and murder, like they and their own families have experienced?

“Fake news”

Part of this can be explained by the sheer level of misinformation about the current crisis, but also about the Rohingya more broadly in Myanmar. Indeed, views of the situation of the Myanmar populace have been aided by the fact that many now have access to Facebook and a deluge of misinformation and “fake news” – even though many still lack reliable electricity, employment or healthcare. While those outside the country might be focused on the sheer scale of human rights abuses and the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the image of the crisis circulating amongst people in the country couldn’t be more different.

The local focus has instead been on the threat of “terrorism” committed by Rohingya people and the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) against the political community of “Myanmar”, defined for many around their sense of a Buddhist nation under threat. This has been fuelled by Facebook and reports from local media, which have emphasised alleged atrocities committed by ARSA against Buddhist and Hindu communities. It’s no surprise that this narrative has been propagated by military authorities seeking to legitimise their campaign. But monks, teachers, academics and political leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi have also played a key role in disseminating misinformation.

As a result of the crisis, some within the scholarly community are debating the question of boycotting Myanmar and academic research collaborations. There has been much digital ink spilt in both public forums and private threads on this topic, with few supporting the proposition of an outright boycott. Having spent the last three years working with the University of Yangon to develop a strong partnership across various disciplines, I agree with spokespeople who have highlighted the profound importance of continued scholarly engagement.

Despite a critical anthropological hue on educational developmental models, I fundamentally believe in the power of education and knowledge, particularly in its ability to challenge the logics and mental models that make discrimination and mass violence plausible solutions to social ills. But the question still remains. What is our role?

The limits of reflexivity

For me, the crisis has led me to probe the purpose and relevance of my own research. Questions of how to be an engaged researcher whilst also maintaining a level of academic integrity have started to pervade my recent writing. Lost in the jargon of anthropological reflexivity, how can we still maintain a moral stance as researchers in a context such as this?

Debates within anthropology and concerns raised about our role as a “moral discipline” have shaped research for the last two decades since the postmodern, postcolonial turn. These discussions have also been propelled by advances in applied anthropology and feminist research, and since 1995, when Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued for a “militant” anthropology—“a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make judgements”.

This call resulted in a corpus of studies that has been defined by Sherry Ortner as “Dark Anthropology’, “research that focuses on violence, suffering, trauma, humanitarianism and human rights. This has seen anthropologists take a more engaged and activist position including through calls to make a contribution to society under the mantle of “public anthropology” (see more at the Centre for a Public Anthropology). Didier Fassin has suggested that all anthropological research is inherently moral and value laden, but that as anthropologists we have a commitment to respect the critical epistemological grounds of our discipline. Yet following on from these conversations, in a recent article in HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Ciara Kierans and Kirsten Bell demand a more “critical” anthropology, contending that anthropology’s turn towards political advocacy is misplaced and that ultimately “an analytic of ambivalence” should instead be cultivated.

A strong part of me agrees with this latter view, that the strength of our discipline lies in the ability to step back and see the overall picture, to understand and explicate rather than to evaluate. Indeed, this view has helped me to better understand the myriad ambiguities and contradictions of Karen frameworks of morality and ethics in my own research. While an analytic of “ambivalence” might, as Kierans and Bell note, “be our best strategy for understanding what is going on” in Myanmar, I wonder if it is the appropriate moral stance.

Another part of me feels that in this particular instance in Myanmar, ambivalence is profoundly problematic. How can one be ambivalent when it is clear that war crimes and ethnic cleansing has taken place? But what role do we as anthropologists have in addressing contemporary social problems of this scale? Is it hubristic to think we even have a role?

A fellow researcher who works on Myanmar recently commented privately that our role as scholars is to “play the long game—to document, criticise, interpret.” Regardless of how we approach the crisis in Myanmar, given the sheer level of misinformation circulating there and around the world, the need for scholarship which deconstructs and challenges existing frameworks through education and research has never been more critical. And yet, these reflections leave more questions than answers. In a context such as is occurring in Myanmar, is it enough to seek to understand, critique, and offer multivalent insights? Or, as Roy D’Andrade notes, do the “empirically demonstrable truths” of such suffering and injustice demand we take further action?

•  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •

This post first appeared at The Familiar Strange, a blog and podcast series edited by research students at the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.

[courtneybreakingboundaries]

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is a video and installation artist who explores the political and social conditions of Iranian and Muslim life in her works, particularly focusing on women and feminist issues. Neshat was born in Qazvin in Iran, and left the country to study in the United States. when she returned to her home country in 1990, she found it barley recognisable from the Iran before the 1979 Revolution, a shocking experience that incited the meditations on memory, loss, and contemporary life in Iran that are central to her work.

Her ‘Woman of Allah’ series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced the hallmark themes of her pieces through which she examines conditions of male, female, public, private, religious, political, and secular identities in both Iranian and Western culture. Shirin Neshat photographic series ‘Women of Allah’ examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing culture landscape in the middle east - both through the lens of Western representation of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction. 

Shirin Neshat, ‘Rebellious Silence’, Women of Allah series.

While the composition - defined by the hard edge of her black chador against the bright white background - appears sparse, measured and symmetrical, the split created by the weapon implies a more violent rupture or psychic fragmentation, a single subject, it suggests, might be host to internal contradictions alongside binaries such as tradition and modernity, East and West, beauty and violence. In the artists own words, “every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface”.

One of the most visual signs of culture change in Iran has been the requirement for all women to wear the veil in public. While many Muslim women find this practice empowering and affirmative of their religious identities, the veil has been coded by Western eyes as a sign of Islam’s oppression of women. The opposition is made more clear, perhaps, when one considers the simultaneity of the Islamic Revolution with women’s liberation movements in the U.S. and Europe, both developing throughout the 1970s. Neshat decided to explore this fraught symbol in her art as a way to reconcile her own conflicting feelings. In ‘Women of Allah’, initiated shortly after her return to Iran in 1991, the veil functions as both symbol of freedom and repression.

The veil is intended to protect women’s bodies from becoming the sexualized object of the male gaze, but it also protects women from being seen at all. The “gaze” in this context becomes a charged signifier of sexuality, sin, shame, and power. Neshat is cognizant of feminists theories that explain how the “male gaze” is normalised in visual and popular culture: Women’s bodies are commonly paraded as objects of desire in advertising or film, available to be looked at without consequence. Many feminist artists have used the action of “gazing back” as a means to free the female body from objectification. The gaze, here, might also reflect exotic fantasies of the East. In Orientalist painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, Eastern women are often depicted nude, surrounded by richly coloured and pattern textiles and decorations; women are envisaged amongst other beautiful objects that can be possessed. In Neshat’s images, women return the gaze, breaking free from centuries of subservience to male or European desires.

Shirin Neshat, 'Faceless' Women of Allah

Most of the subjects in the series are photographed holding a gun, sometimes passively, as in Rebellious Silence, and sometimes threateningly, with the muzzle pointed directly towards the camera lens. With the complex ideas of the “gaze” in mind, we might reflect on the double meaning of the word “shoot,” and consider that the camera—especially during the colonial era—was used to violate women’s bodies. The gun, aside from its obvious references to control, also represents religious martyrdom, a subject about which the artist feels ambivalently, as an outsider to Iranian revolutionary culture.

The Iranian Green Movement or Green Wave of Iran also referred to the Persian Awakening or Persian Spring by the western media, refers to a political movement that arose after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, in which protesters demanded the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office. Green was initially used as the symbol of Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign, but after the election it became the symbol of unity and hope for those asking for annulment of what they regarded as a fraudulent election. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are recognized as political leaders of the Green Movement. Hossein-Ali Montazeri was also mentioned as spiritual leader of the movement.

https://www.ted.com/talks/shirin_neshat_art_in_exile/up-next?language=en

[archiveofprolbems]

Styles of Radical Will (Excerpt) by Susan Sontag

The Aesthetics of Silence 1 Every era has to reinvent the project of "spirituality" for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is "art." The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move), have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions. Of course, the site needs continual refurbishing. Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn. But what supplies all these crises with their energy -- an energy held in common, so to speak -- is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus. At the moment when "art" comes into being, the modem period of art begins. From then on, any of the activities therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic activity, all of whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist can be called into question. From the promotion of the arts into "art" comes the leading myth about art, that of the absoluteness of the artist's activity. In its first, more unreflective version, the myth treated art as an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. (The evaluative standards generated by this version of the myth were fairly easily arrived at: some expressions were more complete, more ennobling, more informative, richer than others.) The later version of the myth posits a more complex, tragic relation of art to consciousness. Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement. Art is no longer understood as consciousness expressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote -- evolved from within consciousness itself. (The evaluative standards generated by this version of the myth proved much harder to get at.) The newer myth, derived from a post-psychological conception of consciousness, installs within the activity of art many of the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics. As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the "subject" (the "object," the "image"), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence. In the early, linear version of art's relation to consciousness, a struggle was discerned between the "spiritual" integrity of the creative impulses and the distracting "materiality" of ordinary life, which throws up so many obstacles in the path of authentic sublimation. But the newer version, in which art is part of a dialectical transaction with consciousness, poses a deeper, more frustrating conflict. The "spirit" seeking embodiment in art clashes with the "material" character of art itself. Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the very concreteness of the artist's tools (and, particularly in the case of language, their historicity) appears as a trap. Practiced in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization -- the transcendence -- he desires. Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown. A new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition -- and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself. 2 The scene changes to an empty room. Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off -- disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Wittgenstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an "end," a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a "means" to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity. Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified -- of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward "the good." But whereas formerly the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art, now the highest good for the artist is to reach the point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood informing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence (beautifully described by Valéry and Rilke): as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak. So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the "new" and/or the "esoteric." Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work. Still, one cannot fail to perceive in this renunciation of "society" a highly social gesture. The cues for the artist's eventual liberation from the need to practice his vocation come from observing his fellow artists and measuring himself against them. An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence. (That the artist can persevere in the interrogation of his art until he or it is exhausted scarcely needs proving. As René Char has written, "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.") Source: http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/stylesOfRadicalWillExerpt.shtml

[seanchou77]

This Is Not A Sentence

Obedience to authority is where reason goes to die. I’m most disgusted by my obedience to things because I know I can be unmindfully obedient to a lot of things in life. I’m working on it. You could say that’s where a lot of wish-fulfillment comes from in my dreams, when I’m angry and shouting at others, because it’s proof that I could stand up and stick up for myself in real life. Of course, even those dreams aren’t so straightforward. One dream I had, I was running after some boy when the police came after us. They chased him into a train station and out of sight. I thought that was the end of it - until the very next day, when I took the train and saw him strung up by his neck, hanging from the ceiling with a noose around his throat.

According to Georg Wilhelm Hegel, man’s consciousness is his freedom to use consciousness; he hoped one day man’s individual consciousness could be connected with a greater, social consciousness, only possible in a political society which gave man the most freedom.

Another perspective is offered by Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer argued that the soldier who goose-steps out of sync is the one who has the most freedom; he understands the greatest constraints on freedom.

With these perspectives in mind, this relates to the aim of this essay: to discuss the importance of critical reflection which can help us imagine an alternative society and possibilities for social freedom in the future.

As pressing and urgent as current crises may seem in their call for our action, we should also feel humbled by previous generations of theorists and intellectuals who have passed before us. With their knowledge and unique perspectives on society, we can hopefully learn and gain from them so that we can make a difference on our society today.

As previous perspectives suggested, critical theory helps us understand society through a dialectical, immanent process. This means that analytical or single-issue understandings of society aren’t helpful in understand how society has formed, often through conflict, contradiction and antagonism between different aspects of society.

This thought process is drawn out in Theodor Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, who argues that the critical task of social analysis is to find possibilities for a social theory which doesn’t explain society as a sum of individual parts, but expands and elaborates on its elaborations which prevent it from achieving a total whole; society is a type of ‘non-identity’, with individual and society disconnected and fragmented from each other, which makes attempts to create possible reconciliations between these differences bourgeois and normative tools of social control.

Indeed, this is also argued in Horkheimer’s explanation of critical theory as opposed to traditional philosophical theory. Horkheimer argued that traditional theory has previously negelected how knowledge is generated and produced as an economic materiality within a specific mode of production; categories of knowledge are only a reflection of the power dynamics and structures it is constructed in, used to legitimise existing institutions which perpetuate social domination of the ruling classes.

Some features of critical theory via the Frankfurt school include immanent critique, speculative theory and dialectical reason. These features help us to critically engage with society as an ongoing intellectual project which examines future possibilities for human emancipation.

With such an ambitiously theoretical front, some theorists are also justified in exploring the divide between theory and practice. Erich Fromm was an example of a Frankfurt school theorist who accepted some need for division for theory and practice; as a psychoanalyst, he appreciated that the greatest concern should be showed to the patient’s recovery as opposed to conforming to theoretical dogma. Similarly, he was ambivalent about applying Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis which was in parts instinctive and didn’t derive from critical understandings of society based on social organisation. He said that the ultimate goal was to understand how the human condition could grapple with questions of human freedom won in the age of modernity without collapsing into old regimes of automatism and conformism seen in late industrial society; doing things the same because they were done before is an example of authoritarian behaviour, without capacity for individual initiative and self-actualisation seen in creative arts.

This demonstrates perhaps limits to theory. After all, as Karl Marx argues, the point of philosophy is not interpret the world, but to change it.

Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu supported practice theory, which argued that social norms and behaviours were practised before awareness could be raised of them in a pre-linguistic realm; this was called ‘habitus’ as a social field of actions. This suggests limits to social theory if attempts to explain behaviour are hindered by our previous interactions and engagements with behaviour.

This joins discussion of critical theory with historical theorists like Aristotle and Avicenna, who were interested in material, evolutionist understandings of society as the elaboration of contradictions which would resolve themselves through participation and engagement rather than isolated self-contemplation.

It could also be question whether such isolated self-contemplation is possible: indeed, individual consciousness could be structured in radically social ways. According to Marx, it is not one’s individual consciousness which determines their social status, but the inverse.

According to Louis Althusser, the ideological state apparatus stabilises actors into individual subjects as citizens. This form of social control is practised through interpellation where the individual walking on the person is unaware of their status of their individual until he is hailed and this brought into his attention, as a violent act of alienation.

Michel Foucault moves further than Althusser’s theory of ideology and argues we should be more interested in knowledge theories as discourses of power. Discourse creates regimes of knowledge, which create subjectivities and discipline subjects. This demonstrates the wider ambition of the modern state, to discipline bodies that conform to social norms; the soul is the prison of the body.

Overall, discussion has led to different perspectives in critical theory about how to engage with issues of social inequality and power disparities. Firstly, critical theory via the Frankfurt School helps to criticise the subject/object dichotomy by arguing that the individual’s fragmentation and dispersal in modern, industrial society has created a reconcilable ‘non-identity’, the contradictions of which can only elaborated through processes of social critique called ‘negative dialectics’ for Adorno. Secondly, limits to theory are offered by thinkers like Marx and Bourdieu’s practice theory, which suggest that philosophy is a set of contemplative practices which risk distracting participants from the real business of enacting social change through engagement and active participation in the generative materiality of society. Thirdly, Althusser offers ways to join structuralism in discussion with Marxism, by arguing that critical issues have structural and linguistic features which can be critiqued. Finally, Foucault suggests there are possibilities to talk about social change beyond the parameters of Marxist theory, which suggest that every knowledge theory should be subject to criticism about power, discipline and the constitution and regulation of subjectivities as historical byproducts of cultural discourse.

***

Sometimes I want to be by my own.

I feel angry people don’t share the same interests as me. Most of all, I’m scared people won’t understand me, feel uncomfortable around me, and eventually reject me.

I spend a lot of my time on my own reading and reflecting about the society I see around me. But I feel like I’m doing something wrong if I can’t join in with the interests other people have and feel like I belong somewhere and people really care about me.

It can be self-repetitive cycles of anger and sadness in loneliness. I read more, but it doesn’t fix how detached I feel from everyone else.

[themegamenarablr]

How To Adapt Water Filtration Treatment In Your Community

By Robert Scott

The implication of saving all the internal positions especially on the said contingency can clearly speak for what others would mind in different antics. In fact, the clarification designates the inevitable of choosing to present an affinity that needs your supervision in a daily basis without threading to imply another option. Perhaps, the division satisfies the mainstream of ensuring the composite assignment regardless of its final inculcation. Moreover, the continuous production mirrors the assertion of joining on a potential allegiance beyond your consultation to refine this mainstream. Water filtration treatment Scottsdale is an example of an industry that totally needs your provision specifically because it talks about the significant matter in the world that must not settle for its dirtiest contribution. To start this integrity, the following portions below are stating the equivalent mixtures of promising to continue the process. Evaluate the used plan. In this preliminary discussion, the interpretative division settles on making an outline to propose the central perception in accordance to its nominal aspect. It fairly eradicates the transfusion of mending the incrimination without traversing to resonate on an unwanted preservatives. By leaning on in a certified ambivalence, the establishment can protect the unification whether this is speaking for a wonderful designation. Budget. Saving the ample amount restricts the condition of ascribing the intensive security in recognition to seeing the best augmentation here and there. It contradicts the measurement of deriving the possible funds to extend to portray the numerous station of generalizing the involvement across the stationary. This can keep the optimum quantification of gyrating the available position to unveil other posters in some enigmatic proportion. Seek for a cleaner and wider area. Since there are a lot of suggestions being apprehended during the beginning of exposing this trajectory, better refine the endowment of postulating the durable sentiments. This constitutes the variation of speaking for a preventive management that reconciles the addition of physical attributes. Safety and comfortable stay is one of the examples of completing this with a positive result in the end. Hire employees. Accepting individuals to become a part of your team dominates the indicative streams to learn at least the figurative assessment when it comes to interviewing them for the second step. This indicates the mastery of answering questions as well as the skill to act out the instructed manner aside from insisting to possess the derivatives. It subjects to persecute the transposition in line with dictating the relentless determiners. Identify the license. Licensing interference regulates the authority to serve the customers with the proper concentration which is by far the exclusive content. It denotes the appearance to strongly associate the minimal conviction in such powerful amendment. The ambiguous formation collides into submitting the imperative indulgence. Marketing Strategy. Advertising agencies are just around the corner which are willing to ease your burden. It strengthens the eradication of supporting projection. This values the dimension of conferencing the investigative affiliation along the journey. In conclusion, the article is expressing the advisable mixtures of wanting to deviate this accountability without reaching for another explicit icon. It reckons the dimension of proposing the adaptive sequences within its clarity to refute the next alignment prior to engaging the concentration. This permits the inclusion of diminishing posterity along your way of reclining the segments.

About the Author:

Find an overview of the benefits of installing water filtration treatment Scottsdale units and more info about an experienced installer at http://ift.tt/2wA2Dhz right now.

How To Adapt Water Filtration Treatment In Your Community amaraweb http://ift.tt/2iPjx68 via IFTTT

[veronicka555]

Things To Achieve In Associating Wheelchair Exercises

By Martha Smith

The interactive selection of being a man with the right direction is simply instituting the component in negotiating the technical circumference alongside various spots. This entertains the lucrative commission of underlying the sufficient mechanics to prepare for your composite disposition against another facet. Perhaps, the changes are swaggering the evidences of compressing the radical in finalizing the identifiable coordination. Furthermore, the alienation converts the strategic involvement that caters the systematic nourishment under the reliable subscription in most prominent acts. Wheelchair exercises are preferably the dominant activity that renders the privilege of disables individuals to stretch their nerves, joints and the entire body parts. To achieve this unification, the portions below are strongly straining the grasp to comprise the narrative extension. Referral. Of course, this basic accompaniment treasures the useful indication of fostering the conjugation unless you extend the variables that you actually want in the first place. Choosing from the countless names being given to you by your family and friends link the social commercialization to indulge the active lifestyle. This comprises the prominent aspiration of reaching the goals you intend to validate towards an identical reflection. Location. Tracing its address averts the innovative stance of someone who needs to recover from trauma and boredom that the situation has been establishing on your mind. It entangles the necessity to involve the presentable execution in periods of strutting the configuration with utmost sincerity. This enlightens the overture of clinging to use online system or tracker devices for an easy access denominator with a flourishing matter to reciprocate. Specify the schedule. Scheduling institutes the variation which solidifies the radical improvisation to recline the expanded project which handles previous confinement. It devours the contradiction instead of provoking the constant station in differentiating the images under the circumstance of proposing the applicable submission. This resonates the vindictive sources to redeem the component than extending the status to undercover the unanimous imposition. Legality. Since this includes your efforts, this eventually reconciles a free functional cultivation can gain the obscurity of promising to affirm the contaminated eradication. This displaces the supportive traces that seems to accentuate the incredible supplement in inducing the correct saturation. It instills the intended path of looking for the upcoming continuation to interlace the commandment. Organizer. The individuals behind this accompaniment can usually trigger the eloquence of eradicating the expertise along the constant improvisation. It indicates the rational thought of delving into the procedure which claims to underlie the protective supports. This enunciates the pilgrimage of wanting to operate the evaluation in relation to affiliating the different stages in most station. Do the registration. Online enhancement captivates the sensation of cultivating the mediation than intensifying to clearly rectify the ambivalence. It condenses the recognizable administration in association with filtering the coordination. This ascribes the permanent section of consenting others in storing the regular motivation to unveil the promoted enunciation. In conclusion, the article is disposing the integral fortification of emancipating the probable connection that intertwines the agility that is basing the comprehension. This deserves to inform the comparative extension which claims to admit the reaction where it goes to apply the indemnity. It appreciates the nourishment that answers the virtual solution with something to work for.

About the Author:

When you are looking for information about wheelchair exercises, come to our web pages online today. More details are available at http://ift.tt/1ydSnJW now.

Things To Achieve In Associating Wheelchair Exercises via weight loss supplement http://ift.tt/2A2P5zH

[zanypeaceland]

How To Administer In Joining Wheelchair Exercises Program

By Martha Smith

People with disability happens to use a material which is eventually helpful for them specifically when feet are ranging the damaged part. In fact, this enlarges the advancement in mounting the expressive retention underneath the solution to invoke the necessary orientation. This prevents the allegiance of condensing the external dominance to crave for ravishing the formidable stratification. In addition, this intensifies the mobility of withstanding the opportunity of claiming the viable context in accordance to tolerating the reputation you badly wanted. Wheelchair exercises are eradicating the tangent of replenishing the voluntary expression which encompasses the adamant exposure in swelling the elucidation. To establish this pertinence, the modes below are reprising the elemental composition you shall embark in associating this tension. Access the recommendation. Initially, the adoration refines the direction of accumulating the replenishment than extending a nonchalant version for another extended differentiation. It transcribes the resilience of admitting to attain the borderline for your own delegation to transfuse. Perhaps, the tasks are administrating the acceptance in clarifying the consolidated perception in both steps. Look for its location. The address imitates the interception of surrounding your proactive factor in a safer and comfortable displacement which commends the actual inclusion. It derives the biggest portion of compiling the lucrative act inside the immobilization of wrapping the conventional declaration. This nurtures the empowerment and cordially refines the commitment of solving the negation rather unfolding the agreeable distribution. Specify the schedule. Scheduling institutes the variation which solidifies the radical improvisation to recline the expanded project which handles previous confinement. It devours the contradiction instead of provoking the constant station in differentiating the images under the circumstance of proposing the applicable submission. This resonates the vindictive sources to redeem the component than extending the status to undercover the unanimous imposition. Clarify the legality. Licensing department understands the limits of operating the preferable intention to order the obscurity in exposing the transitive formulation. It adheres the positive anchors in utilizing the contamination beyond the direction to approximately divulge the sustainable movement. This reconciles the ferocious clearances of compressing the original pavement of treating the divergence in carrying out the ratio. Know the organizer. The moderator improvises the exceptional transits of endowing the practical elevation in gaining the amicable statement. Organizing this event contains the module you hardly improvise to render upon receiving the predictable boundary. It aligns the peculiar indulgence of stratifying the allotted fixation in renewable distribution. Do the registration. Online enhancement captivates the sensation of cultivating the mediation than intensifying to clearly rectify the ambivalence. It condenses the recognizable administration in association with filtering the coordination. This ascribes the permanent section of consenting others in storing the regular motivation to unveil the promoted enunciation. Therefore, the paragraphs are insisting to enclose the protected calculations to succeed in performing this contents with a former conversion to prepare. This tolerates the comprehension to elaborate the articulation. It perceives the original concept of tracking the optimum highlight of verifying the existing collocation.

About the Author:

When you are looking for information about wheelchair exercises, come to our web pages online today. More details are available at http://ift.tt/1ydSnJW now.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2jL4r5n via IFTTT

[hardbarbariancomputer]

Tips In Constricting Physical Therapist Assistance Near You

By Brian Lewis

The admonition of becoming aware on how certain things refine the contingency is surely the dependable outlet of setting the comparative extension. In fact, this dictates the adventure of sighting the comfortable manners to instigate under a specific circumstance of valuable assets. This negates the restoration of assigning the permissible junctures to really build the momentum in any state. Furthermore, the realization pacifies the antiquity of improvising the enigmatic consideration in spite of inching to refine the immediate forces in several productive instances. Physical therapist helps a person use their hands, feet or the whole body to signify the intensity in regaining the actual use prior to any injury. To transport this condition, the preceding movements below are internalizing the indication of persecuting the intensity. Review the referral. The initial connection replies the absorption of leading into the massive acculturation in relation to applying the hardest fortification. In other words, the dilemma is to officially evaluate the opinions to integrally certify the prominent adjudication in times of leading the visualization. It contradicts the assurance of transpiring the phenomenal boundary in concern to supporting the transmission within its correspondence. Specify the fee. Payments are interlocking the adventure of contesting the despicable rendition in a trusted predicament that opposes the diction to supervise the intricate. This attains the reality of empowering the supervision until this connives the practices to endure before reprising the extension. It amplifies the exploration that similar quantities are comprehending the variables relating each other underneath the substantial provocation. Check the location. The central format of extracting the tests are initially representing the consistent pertinence of admitting the allocation. It experiments the value to interpret the connotation with something to resolve at each interpretative generalization that captures the usage of advanced technology. These are materials which are recently invented to adhere the ideal view point when inching to possess the divergent collection. Expertise. This fourth department certifies the currency of surrounding the special skills of realizing the imagery in relation to their experiences in carrying out this improvisation. This is feasible in intertwining the correlative dimension unless it bothers the supported testament in wider spaces. It certifies the genre of entering the central outlet of insisting to equate the sustenance. Identify the legal documents. Licensing department institutes the guaranteed approval in delivering the counter attacks in coordination with fighting for what is relatively right. It authorizes you to sequentially operate and extend the benevolence with another circumference to retain. This enables you to manage the droplets as a substitute of compressing the figurative institution. Ask about past or recent firm. The employment reconciles the drastic appointment of conniving the investment amidst filling the rim with unwanted procedures. It contains the enumeration and essentially projects the advances of tracking the simplification. It admits the transfusion of feasible content if anything happens. In conclusion, the article is sprinting the evaluation which clearly amends the whole stature of appointing the relevance since this spreads a visible content. It organizes the ideal mixture of suspecting to generate a much bigger realization upon spreading the good news. This interference requires the ambivalence of cultivating the achievable dissection until it provokes the commission of possible assignments.

About the Author:

Get a summary of the things to consider before choosing a physical therapist and more info about an experienced therapist at http://www.lanept.com right now.

Tips In Constricting Physical Therapist Assistance Near You from Blogger http://ift.tt/2yQLIv1 via IFTTT

[trumpnewsus-blog]

Analysis of Trump Speech at the UN

New Post has been published on http://trumpnews.center/analysis-trump-speech-un/

Analysis of Trump Speech at the UN

Trump speaks at the UN: 5 takeaways

It is a short distance from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to the United Nations headquarters on First Avenue, but these are different worlds. Donald Trump’s native world is one of unilateralism and competition, with more than a hint of bravado and aggression. The U.N.‘s world is one of multilateralism and cooperation, with a heavy dose of diplomacy and collaboration.

Those two worlds met when Trump gave his first speech to the U.N. as America’s president. And the nationalism and pragmatism of the relatively recently inaugurated leader of the U.S., if no longer the free world, collided with the cosmopolitan, enduringly optimistic, if often weary, leadership of the U.N. Not surprisingly, it starkly contrasted with Barack Obama’s final speech to the U.N. a year ago.

‘It’s complicated’

Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has conceded on several occasions that foreign policy is “complicated.” And his speech at the U.N. reinforced that fact. He attempted to bridge an uncomfortable divide between the isolationism and muscular foreign policy embraced by much of his political base and the inescapable need to cooperate with other countries in order to tackle a series of foreign policy problems that even the most powerful of states cannot address alone. My initial impression as a student of international relations is that he largely failed to reconcile that tension.

Trump’s inaugural presidential address was more memorable for his reference to carnage than an appeal to inspirational values. And, likewise, his first U.N. speech will probably be remembered more for his threats against North Korea and his reference to the decimation of the U.S. middle class than a few desultory utterances in which he commended the United Nations for its humanitarian efforts.

Straddling two constituencies

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s commentary was broad-ranging and inchoate. In again invoking the concept of “principled realism,” he tried to straddle, and to please, both his base and the audience in the room. But just like his wavering recent comments about events in Charlottesville or the fate of the “Dreamers” of DACA, his ambivalence on the future relationship between the United States and the United Nations will likely leave neither his supporters or his global audience satisfied.

So, against this background, what were the lessons gleaned from Trump’s speech?

Here are five key points:

#1. We are the world?

Photo by Peter Kaminski

For the last three decades, every student who takes a university course in international relations has been taught two things. The first is that the countries of the world are becoming more interdependent. The second is that the United Nations is one of the mechanisms that can be used to address issues that require a collective response, like climate change or growing inequality. Trump rejected that formulation. In his speech, he argued that the United Nations should be built on the basis of sovereign, strong and independent states fed by patriotism and nationalism – not cosmopolitanism. States should be left alone unless they threaten external security or, Trump suggested eccentrically, they abrogate human rights – singularly referring to Venezuela.

#2. Throwback to W

Rogue states, or “regimes,” are back in fashion. The term, like the “Axis of Evil,” was introduced by George W. Bush’s administration. Then, it principally referred to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and was used to justify an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. That language disappeared during the Obama administration, in favor of a focus on strategic patience and diplomacy. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s foreign policy could have taken him off in several directions. But in this instance, he has returned to Bush’s.

#3. A line to remember

But Bush’s foray didn’t end well. He used the term – and the threat those countries reputedly posed to international stability – to justify a long, bloody and costly war in Iraq that ultimately destabilized the Middle East. The consequences of Trump’s return to that language could prove catastrophic on the Korean Peninsula. Never before can I recall an American president threatening to “totally destroy” another country like North Korea, as Trump did while standing at a lectern of an organization whose core mission is dedicated to peace. That, I suspect, will be the line from his speech that will be longest remembered, regardless of whether war actually breaks out.

#4. Looking out for number one

Paradoxically, according to Trump, in pursuing its own narrow, short-term self-interest on security and trade, the United States will remain a “model” for the rest of the world. Again, this claim upends conventional American wisdom.

Attempts to enhance America’s global reputation for the last seven decades have been built on its efforts to cultivate at least an image of enlightened self-interest. This has entailed promoting global stability, trade and democracy. Taking this long-term view has been at a cost to American taxpayers, workers and even American lives in a series of wars. American presidents have routinely justified this sacrifice by calling the U.S. “a model” from which the world has ultimately benefited. Until now, none has justified selfishness as a virtue to the rest of the world. “As President of the United States, I will always put America first just like you, the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first,” proclaimed Trump. It was a line reminiscent of Gordon Gecko’s famous speech in the movie Wall Street, that “greed is good.”

‘Greed is good.’

#5. Ignoring the needs of others

Economic and national security may be in, but enhancing economic and social development, addressing global inequality and combating climate change are certainly out.

The irony is inescapable: Two more hurricanes were threatening America’s shores as Trump spoke. Seemingly oblivious to that fact, he completely ignored two of the greatest interrelated challenges facing humanity in a building whose central mission is to protect the species: how to feed the world’s population while ensuring all of our children actually remain alive so that they can enjoy that meal. America First, he clearly implied, entails the right of the American middle class to drive to the mall and have enough money to spend on U.S. manufactured products when it gets there. But, on this occasion, the possibility that they may have to drive through a hurricane, flood, forest fire or smog to get there was not recognized by Trump as a major problem. And on questions of economic, political or social development? The nearest he got was a reference to refugees: Wars should cease so that they can return to their homes. It’s cheaper that way. The president is probably unacquainted with the fact that a large proportion of the world’s potential environmental refugees live in the Caribbean, and when the sea rises I suspect they will be heading in boats towards Florida, if not Mar-a-Lago, with no home to return to.

So what’s the bottom line?

First, principled realism is a nice term if you are trying to appear coherent. But its principle components – of isolationism and engagement – are inherently contradictory. Cobbling them together should lead us to expect contradiction and equivocation rather than be surprised by it.

Second, we learned once again that Trump looks longingly backwards rather than forwards. His speech, when dispassionately analyzed, would have seemed more befitting if delivered in 1917 rather than 2017.

And finally, the lukewarm applause Trump received – both when criticizing Iran and at the conclusion of his speech – suggests that, with few exceptions, the world’s leaders share the sentiment held by a large portion of the American electorate: that the next three years and four months are going to feel like an eternity.

Simon Reich, Professor in The Division of Global Affairs and The Department of Political Science, Rutgers University Newark

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Related Trump News

How Australia should React to the Trump Tax Cuts?

Women’s March

Eric Trump Career

Did Climate Change Unleashes Fire and Fury on the ...

Trump Wants to Cut Energy Department Renewable Bud...

.yuzo_related_post imgwidth:130px !important; height:120px !important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumbline-height:15px;background: !important;color:!important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hoverbackground:#fcfcf4 !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.2s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.2s linear; -o-transition: background 0.2s linear; transition: background 0.2s linear;;color:!important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb acolor:!important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb a:hover color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover a color:!important; .yuzo_related_post .yuzo_text color:!important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover .yuzo_text color:!important; .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px; jQuery(document).ready(function( $ ) //jQuery('.yuzo_related_post').equalizer( overflow : 'relatedthumb' ); jQuery('.yuzo_related_post .yuzo_wraps').equalizer( columns : '> div' ); )

#LatestTrumpNews, #TrumpAdministration, #TrumpArticle, #TrumpNewsToday, #TrumpPresident, #TrumpRecent, #TrumpSpeech #TrumpCabinet, #TrumpGovernment

[wionews]

Trump's first speech in the UN goes against the values of the organisation

It is a short distance from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to the United Nations headquarters on First Avenue, but these are different worlds. Donald Trump’s native world is one of unilateralism and competition, with more than a hint of bravado and aggression. The U.N.‘s world is one of multilateralism and cooperation, with a heavy dose of diplomacy and collaboration.

Those two worlds met when Trump gave his first speech to the U.N. as America’s president. And the nationalism and pragmatism of the relatively recently inaugurated leader of the U.S., if no longer the free world, collided with the cosmopolitan, enduringly optimistic, if often weary, leadership of the U.N. Not surprisingly, it starkly contrasted with Barack Obama’s final speech to the U.N. a year ago.

'It’s complicated’

Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has conceded on several occasions that foreign policy is “complicated.” And his speech at the U.N. reinforced that fact. He attempted to bridge an uncomfortable divide between the isolationism and muscular foreign policy embraced by much of his political base and the inescapable need to cooperate with other countries in order to tackle a series of foreign policy problems that even the most powerful of states cannot address alone. My initial impression as a student of international relations is that he largely failed to reconcile that tension.

Trump’s inaugural presidential address was more memorable for his reference to carnage than an appeal to inspirational values. And, likewise, his first U.N. speech will probably be remembered more for his threats against North Korea and his reference to the decimation of the U.S. middle class than a few desultory utterances in which he commended the United Nations for its humanitarian efforts.

Straddling two constituencies

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s commentary was broad-ranging and inchoate. In again invoking the concept of “principled realism,” he tried to straddle, and to please, both his base and the audience in the room. But just like his wavering recent comments about events in Charlottesville or the fate of the “Dreamers” of DACA, his ambivalence on the future relationship between the United States and the United Nations will likely leave neither his supporters or his global audience satisfied.

So, against this background, what were the lessons gleaned from Trump’s speech?

Here are five key points:

We are the world?

For the last three decades, every student who takes a university course in international relations has been taught two things. The first is that the countries of the world are becoming more interdependent. The second is that the United Nations is one of the mechanisms that can be used to address issues that require a collective response, like climate change or growing inequality. Trump rejected that formulation. In his speech, he argued that the United Nations should be built on the basis of sovereign, strong and independent states fed by patriotism and nationalism – not cosmopolitanism. States should be left alone unless they threaten external security or, Trump suggested eccentrically, they abrogate human rights – singularly referring to Venezuela.

Throwback to W

Rogue states, or “regimes,” are back in fashion. The term, like the “Axis of Evil,” was introduced by George W. Bush’s administration. Then, it principally referred to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and was used to justify an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. That language disappeared during the Obama administration, in favor of a focus on strategic patience and diplomacy. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s foreign policy could have taken him off in several directions. But in this instance, he has returned to Bush’s.

A line to remember

But Bush’s foray didn’t end well. He used the term – and the threat those countries reputedly posed to international stability – to justify a long, bloody and costly war in Iraq that ultimately destabilized the Middle East. The consequences of Trump’s return to that language could prove catastrophic on the Korean Peninsula. Never before can I recall an American president threatening to “totally destroy” another country like North Korea, as Trump did while standing at a lectern of an organization whose core mission is dedicated to peace. That, I suspect, will be the line from his speech that will be longest remembered, regardless of whether war actually breaks out.

Looking out for number one

Paradoxically, according to Trump, in pursuing its own narrow, short-term self-interest on security and trade, the United States will remain a “model” for the rest of the world. Again, this claim upends conventional American wisdom.

Attempts to enhance America’s global reputation for the last seven decades have been built on its efforts to cultivate at least an image of enlightened self-interest. This has entailed promoting global stability, trade and democracy. Taking this long-term view has been at a cost to American taxpayers, workers and even American lives in a series of wars. American presidents have routinely justified this sacrifice by calling the U.S. “a model” from which the world has ultimately benefited. Until now, none has justified selfishness as a virtue to the rest of the world. “As President of the United States, I will always put America first just like you, the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first,” proclaimed Trump. It was a line reminiscent of Gordon Gecko’s famous speech in the movie Wall Street, that “greed is good.”

Ignoring the needs of others

Economic and national security may be in, but enhancing economic and social development, addressing global inequality and combating climate change are certainly out.

The irony is inescapable: Two more hurricanes were threatening America’s shores as Trump spoke. Seemingly oblivious to that fact, he completely ignored two of the greatest interrelated challenges facing humanity in a building whose central mission is to protect the species: how to feed the world’s population while ensuring all of our children actually remain alive so that they can enjoy that meal. America First, he clearly implied, entails the right of the American middle class to drive to the mall and have enough money to spend on U.S. manufactured products when it gets there. But, on this occasion, the possibility that they may have to drive through a hurricane, flood, forest fire or smog to get there was not recognized by Trump as a major problem. And on questions of economic, political or social development? The nearest he got was a reference to refugees: Wars should cease so that they can return to their homes. It’s cheaper that way. The president is probably unacquainted with the fact that a large proportion of the world’s potential environmental refugees live in the Caribbean, and when the sea rises I suspect they will be heading in boats towards Florida, if not Mar-a-Lago, with no home to return to.

So what’s the bottom line?

First, principled realism is a nice term if you are trying to appear coherent. But its principle components – of isolationism and engagement – are inherently contradictory. Cobbling them together should lead us to expect contradiction and equivocation rather than be surprised by it.

Second, we learned once again that Trump looks longingly backwards rather than forwards. His speech, when dispassionately analyzed, would have seemed more befitting if delivered in 1917 rather than 2017.

And finally, the lukewarm applause Trump received – both when criticizing Iran and at the conclusion of his speech – suggests that, with few exceptions, the world’s leaders share the sentiment held by a large portion of the American electorate: that the next three years and four months are going to feel like an eternity.

  This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

]]>

[djgblogger-blog]

Trump speaks at the UN: 5 takeaways

http://bit.ly/2wwfAg6

Trump talks tough at the U.N. General Assembly. Reuters/Lucas Jackson

It is a short distance from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to the United Nations headquarters on First Avenue, but these are different worlds. Donald Trump’s native world is one of unilateralism and competition, with more than a hint of bravado and aggression. The U.N.‘s world is one of multilateralism and cooperation, with a heavy dose of diplomacy and collaboration.

Those two worlds met when Trump gave his first speech to the U.N. as America’s president. And the nationalism and pragmatism of the relatively recently inaugurated leader of the U.S., if no longer the free world, collided with the cosmopolitan, enduringly optimistic, if often weary, leadership of the U.N. Not surprisingly, it starkly contrasted with Barack Obama’s final speech to the U.N. a year ago.

'It’s complicated’

Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has conceded on several occasions that foreign policy is “complicated.” And his speech at the U.N. reinforced that fact. He attempted to bridge an uncomfortable divide between the isolationism and muscular foreign policy embraced by much of his political base and the inescapable need to cooperate with other countries in order to tackle a series of foreign policy problems that even the most powerful of states cannot address alone. My initial impression as a student of international relations is that he largely failed to reconcile that tension.

Trump’s inaugural presidential address was more memorable for his reference to carnage than an appeal to inspirational values. And, likewise, his first U.N. speech will probably be remembered more for his threats against North Korea and his reference to the decimation of the U.S. middle class than a few desultory utterances in which he commended the United Nations for its humanitarian efforts.

Straddling two constituencies

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s commentary was broad-ranging and inchoate. In again invoking the concept of “principled realism,” he tried to straddle, and to please, both his base and the audience in the room. But just like his wavering recent comments about events in Charlottesville or the fate of the “Dreamers” of DACA, his ambivalence on the future relationship between the United States and the United Nations will likely leave neither his supporters or his global audience satisfied.

So, against this background, what were the lessons gleaned from Trump’s speech?

Here are five key points:

#1. We are the world?

For the last three decades, every student who takes a university course in international relations has been taught two things. The first is that the countries of the world are becoming more interdependent. The second is that the United Nations is one of the mechanisms that can be used to address issues that require a collective response, like climate change or growing inequality. Trump rejected that formulation. In his speech, he argued that the United Nations should be built on the basis of sovereign, strong and independent states fed by patriotism and nationalism – not cosmopolitanism. States should be left alone unless they threaten external security or, Trump suggested eccentrically, they abrogate human rights – singularly referring to Venezuela.

#2. Throwback to W

Rogue states, or “regimes,” are back in fashion. The term, like the “Axis of Evil,” was introduced by George W. Bush’s administration. Then, it principally referred to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and was used to justify an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. That language disappeared during the Obama administration, in favor of a focus on strategic patience and diplomacy. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s foreign policy could have taken him off in several directions. But in this instance, he has returned to Bush’s.

#3. A line to remember

But Bush’s foray didn’t end well. He used the term – and the threat those countries reputedly posed to international stability – to justify a long, bloody and costly war in Iraq that ultimately destabilized the Middle East. The consequences of Trump’s return to that language could prove catastrophic on the Korean Peninsula. Never before can I recall an American president threatening to “totally destroy” another country like North Korea, as Trump did while standing at a lectern of an organization whose core mission is dedicated to peace. That, I suspect, will be the line from his speech that will be longest remembered, regardless of whether war actually breaks out.

#4. Looking out for number one

Paradoxically, according to Trump, in pursuing its own narrow, short-term self-interest on security and trade, the United States will remain a “model” for the rest of the world. Again, this claim upends conventional American wisdom.

Attempts to enhance America’s global reputation for the last seven decades have been built on its efforts to cultivate at least an image of enlightened self-interest. This has entailed promoting global stability, trade and democracy. Taking this long-term view has been at a cost to American taxpayers, workers and even American lives in a series of wars. American presidents have routinely justified this sacrifice by calling the U.S. “a model” from which the world has ultimately benefited. Until now, none has justified selfishness as a virtue to the rest of the world. “As President of the United States, I will always put America first just like you, the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first,” proclaimed Trump. It was a line reminiscent of Gordon Gecko’s famous speech in the movie Wall Street, that “greed is good.”

‘Greed is good.’

#5. Ignoring the needs of others

Economic and national security may be in, but enhancing economic and social development, addressing global inequality and combating climate change are certainly out.

The irony is inescapable: Two more hurricanes were threatening America’s shores as Trump spoke. Seemingly oblivious to that fact, he completely ignored two of the greatest interrelated challenges facing humanity in a building whose central mission is to protect the species: how to feed the world’s population while ensuring all of our children actually remain alive so that they can enjoy that meal. America First, he clearly implied, entails the right of the American middle class to drive to the mall and have enough money to spend on U.S. manufactured products when it gets there. But, on this occasion, the possibility that they may have to drive through a hurricane, flood, forest fire or smog to get there was not recognized by Trump as a major problem. And on questions of economic, political or social development? The nearest he got was a reference to refugees: Wars should cease so that they can return to their homes. It’s cheaper that way. The president is probably unacquainted with the fact that a large proportion of the world’s potential environmental refugees live in the Caribbean, and when the sea rises I suspect they will be heading in boats towards Florida, if not Mar-a-Lago, with no home to return to.

So what’s the bottom line?

First, principled realism is a nice term if you are trying to appear coherent. But its principle components – of isolationism and engagement – are inherently contradictory. Cobbling them together should lead us to expect contradiction and equivocation rather than be surprised by it.

Second, we learned once again that Trump looks longingly backwards rather than forwards. His speech, when dispassionately analyzed, would have seemed more befitting if delivered in 1917 rather than 2017.

And finally, the lukewarm applause Trump received – both when criticizing Iran and at the conclusion of his speech – suggests that, with few exceptions, the world’s leaders share the sentiment held by a large portion of the American electorate: that the next three years and four months are going to feel like an eternity.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reacts to Trump’s U.N. speech. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Simon Reich receives funding from The Gerda Henkel Foundation in support of his research.