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pyrrhesia · 3 years

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FF14Write - ‘Preaching to the Choir’

In which Cwenthryth Sadler speaks her truth.

Strix Athene belongs to @three-fulm-thaumaturd

It had been a quietly infuriating hour. Cwenthryth had earned a place back in the inner circle, albeit hovering on the edge. Fordola's presence was contentious and Arenvald... couldn't get around so easily, so of the Ala Mhigan scouting party it was Cwenthryth who wound up reporting on what exactly they'd seen. She was nobody's choice, particularly not her own. But there was a certain urgency to her words that was difficult to discount. So went the theory, nobody would take her for a liar, and certainly Fourchenault had felt she wasn't prone to embellishment, even if it was because he thought she wouldn't know what it meant. But that didn't mean he cared. And Then The Night Turned Undiplomatic. "You don't understand what I'm saying," said Cwenthryth, and there was a faint plap as Alisaie smack her forehead. "I understand perfectly--" "You don't understand," she repeated. "If you understood, you'd do something. Unless you were stupid, or if Sharlayan's just that weak." That was the point at which other people began to take over the negotiations. She slipped away in the middle of it all. It was only headed one way, with or without her. She found her way to the Archers' Guild, strode through the door with the air of someone who was entitled to be here and not about to be stopped, found her way to the targets. Nobody seemed particularly minded to question her, though some of the wildwoods glared daggers at her back. Still, none were stupid enough to get in her way when she was seething so. Slowly, methodically, she bent and strung her monster of a longbow, nearer seven than six feet. Her breathing began gradually to level out, as she took a few steps back from the targets, and by the time she'd nocked her first arrow, she was calm again, in flow. Back home, she'd cut her own targets in the shape of people. Catch a midlander in the throat, a lalafell in the head, a roegadyn in the heart. She'd learned from more experienced bowmen what put people down, when to move on and when to keep shooting, how many shots you got to bring down a charging man before he brought down an axe on her head. She learned three rushed shots were far worse than one calmly driven through the neck, and that an archer who panicked under pressure was either a poor hunter or a dead soldier. People could say all they liked about the way she talked, but Cwenthryth was a damn good listener. After a time, one of the wildwoods cleared his throat. "Is this your first time?" "Look again," said Cwenthryth. "We've been watching," he scoffed. "Three sheafs and you haven't hit a single bullseye." Cwenthryth didn't turn. "People don't come with targets. I'm hitting my mark." She loosed off another shot, driving into the middle of the eye-level cluster. "Can walk over and check, if you want." "Sun-baked freak," he sneered, after some consideration. "Bull's about right for a deer, though," she called in the direction of the retreating footsteps. "Seems more about your level, aye?" Silence. "Prick," she muttered, and went back to it. "Thinking of Fourchenault?" said another familiar voice from her left. "Am now." Cwenthryth adjusted her posture at the last second, snapping off a shot that would've struck a shade above and inside from the thigh. She rested her bow and looked over at Strix, a woman who over the course of the past years she'd come to grudgingly, then whole-heartedly, respect. A well-read, well-spoken scholar, clear enough, but one tempered with real-world knowledge and willing to slum it in the trenches. She'd seen the lalafell get her hands dirty, too; specifically, wrist-deep in Cwenthryth's opened guts, trying to force them back shut. A woman like that quickly earned your time. "Sorry to remind you, then. I figured you'd come here to escape the diplomacy." "How'd it go, then?" Cwenthryth crossed her arms - on which for a telling moment Strix's eyes lingered - and leaned back on the wall behind her. "Not well. Spectacularly unwell, actually. Any inclination to help adopt Alphinaud? We're having a whip-round." The tone was light, but there was a certain... huffiness under the tone, betraying the fact Strix felt someone ought to be strung up for this. Cwenthryth could be diplomatic when she cared to, and made no further comment on someone who could now, at least, be described as only her second least-favourite Leveilleur. Instead, she said, "I shouldn't have called him stupid." She wouldn't apologise, though. Lies never sat right with her. "Oh, believe me, I didn't come here to harangue you. Truth be told, seeing his face when you spoke to him was the only satisfaction I got from the meeting. Besides, he'd made up his mind long before he stepped into the grove. You couldn't have convinced him the sky was blue, let alone that he had to stop sitting on his hands." "Figured." Cwenthryth sighed. "I can't see what the other Scions see in Sharlayan. They left for a reason. Been holding my tongue weeks. Didn't come so natural as usual. So much blindness around." Strix cocked her head. That was practically a screed by Cwenthryth's standards, and worth prodding further. "Well, now you don't have to hold your tongue." Cwenthryth took her time to mull it over, returning her attention to sinking shots into the target. Just as Strix wondered if she'd have to make a more blatant invitation to bare her soul, she spoke. "The one thing you can trust from anyone is, above anything else, they're either going to preserve themselves or they've got one hell of a cause. Far as we know, this... thing we're dealing with will destroy them. They aren't acting like it will." Another shot sank into the target. The simple, repetitive motion of draw, nock, loose seemed to grease her internal cogs, letting the thoughts flow. "I don't think it's that they're too stupid to recognise the threat." Thunk. "So they must know, or think they know, they're safe." Thunk. "And whatever's keeping them safe, they don't want to share." Thunk. "Or else, don't trust us. In any case aren't dealing with us straight." Thunk. Thunk. "They're playing with a fifth ace. You only stick an ace up your sleeve if you don't think the other guy's got a knife in their boot. So they don't think we're a threat to 'em." Thunk. "So let's go to their place. Pretend we're still trying to convince them, nice and fair and honest. Maybe that's even what we let the Scions think we're there to do." Thunk. "Rest of us are there to find that ace." The last arrow in her quiver flew true into the centre of a bristling mass of feathers. Cwenthryth took a moment to admire her handiwork, before glancing over at the lalafell. "What d'you think?" Strix smiled tightly. "It's a deeply suspicious read, but I think it might be closer to the truth than some of our fearless leaders might be willing to accept. I can only hope Fourchenault's intransigence has helped the scales fall from their eyes." Cwenthryth blinked. "Meant the shots," she said, slowly, before striding over towards the target. She paused halfway there, her boot trailing in the gravel. "But, thanks," she added. "For caring to listen." "It's good to have you back, Cwen." Cwenthryth looked back. With an effort, for just about a second, she forced a half-smile as meaningful as a kiss.

#FFxivWrite2021 #preaching to the choir #OC: cwenthryth sadler #(she vanished to do her own shit for approximately 4.2 - 5.0)#5.5 spoilers

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schraubd · 3 years

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ACES Wild

Last we encountered the "Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies" (ACES), they were pushing fabricated evidence and wild screeds against "critical race theory" in a failed attempt to derail the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum after it was reformed in accord with tremendous efforts by a range of California Jewish (and non-Jewish) organizations.

Now they're back in action, and this time their target is California's new draft Mathematical Framework. What horrors are contained inside? Let's look!

The first draft of the California Mathematics Framework is out for review, and it includes as a resource "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction," a guide that labels teaching practices like "addressing mistakes" and "focus on the right answer" as "white supremacy culture."

This is critical race theory.

This is discrimination.

(Is this "critical race theory"? Nope, not going to get sucked into that).

Unfortunately, as was the case in the ESMC debacle, we are given only the thinnest possible citations to the primary sources for the alleged offending content. The link to the CMF draft goes to a website offering a thirteen chapter document, all in separate documents, comprised of hundreds of page, with no indication of where in the morass the "Pathway" document is included. The link to the Pathway itself, for its part, goes to a site that contains five separate documents, again totaling hundreds of pages, with nary a clue as to where this language about "addressing mistakes" might be found. All of this, I suppose, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I may not be a math expert, but I have gotten familiar enough with the strategies of ACES and its friends to know better than to accept what they say on faith. So I went in search of this resource and this language, to see if it is as scary and offensive as they say.

I want to begin with some good news: unlike the Ethnic Studies case, ACES and its allies do not appear to have completely fabricated the inclusion of the putatively offensive material. Congratulations, ACES! This is a big step forward for you as an organization, and you should give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Alas, if we ask for more than "not fabricated" and stretch all the way out to "not abjectly misleading", things get dimmer.

Start with the CMF draft. From what I can tell, the section they refer to (where the Pathway document is "included as a resource") is on page 44 of chapter two (lines 1010-13). Here, in its totality, is what's included:

Other resources for teaching mathematics with a social justice perspective include... The five strides of Equitable Math.org: https://ift.tt/3qNG3O2

That's it (The website "Equitablemath.org" is titled "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction"). It is mentioned, unadorned, in the "other resources" conclusion -- and as far as I can tell, nowhere else. Wowzers. I can feel the racial divisiveness cracking up from here.

One thing I'll observe on this is that often times one hears critics of "critical race theory" (or whatever random buzzword they're using today to connote "scary left-wing idea with a vaguely identity-politics kick") say that their problem isn't that the idea is included, but only that its indoctrinated -- it's not one perspective of many, it's the only perspective on offer. This protestation was always rather thin -- the many many bills banning "critical race theory" are decidedly not about ensuring viewpoint diversity -- and one sees just how hollow it is here. The raw, unadorned inclusion of the Equitable Math resource -- as part of a broader whole, not even quoted from directly -- is too much for these people to tolerate. This is not about ideological heterodoxy. This is about censoring ideas, full stop.

But maybe Equitable Math is such an awful or inane document that it would be wrong to include it, even as one resource among many. The way it's described, after all, makes it sound like Equitable Math is a group of hippies saying "2+2 = 4 is the white man's answer, man! Fight the power!" Is that what's happening? Is this a fever dream of post-modernism where nothing is true and everything is permitted?

Once again, I had to dig for myself to figure out where this content was so I could see it in context. The answer appears to be the first document on the site, titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics", on pages 65-68. Do they deny that there are such things as "right" answers in math? No: "Of course, most math problems have correct answers," but there are math problems (particularly word problems, but also data analysis) that can be interpreted in different ways that yield different "right" conclusions, and students and teachers should be attentive to that possibility. Do they say one should never "address mistakes"? No again, but mistakes should not simply be called out flatly but rather used as "opportunities for learning" with an emphasis on building on what the student does understand to lead them to recognize what they misapprehend.

I don't teach math, obviously, but there are many occasions where I'll say "such-and-such is the doctrinally correct answer -- but if we look at the problem from this other vantage, doesn't this other position become more plausible?" So when the Equitable Math site suggests, as an alternative to obsessive focus on the one correct answer, classroom activities like " Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions" -- well, that doesn't seem weird to me. Certainly, as someone who is also trained as a social scientist, I can say confidently that it's quite valuable to anyone who has seen how the same dataset can be deployed by different people with different priors to support different agendas.

Even more than that, the suggestions around "addressing mistakes" resonate with how I try to teach in my classrooms. Sometimes my students say something wrong. When they do so, for the most part I don't say "bzzzt" and move on, instead I try to guide them to the correct answer by having them unpack their own thinking. There's a lot of "I see what you mean by [X], but suppose ..." and ask questions which hone in on the problems or misunderstandings latent in what they're saying. And eventually they get there, hopefully without feeling like they've just been put inside an Iron Maiden for daring speak up.

Admittedly, I've never thought of what I'm doing as "dismantling White supremacy" -- I just viewed it as good pedagogy. But then again, that's kind of what I've always thought when asked about such subjects -- we act as if there's this deep magic to fostering equity and inclusion in the classroom, when really it's employing the basic strategies of being a good teacher, one of which is declining to engage in a measuring contest where you prove you know more than the student does. Obviously I know more than the student does. I don't need to prove anything. So if they say something wrong, I do not gleefully pounce on them for it, I do my best to build on what they do know to get them to a position of right. Is that so outrageous?

Finally, ACES in its tweet identifies one other area of crazy-lefty-craziness in this resource: "the incorporation of 'Ethnomathematics'". What does that mean? They don't say, correctly surmising that fevered imaginations will produce something far worse than anything they might quote. So I'll do the quoting for them (this comes from page 8):

Center Ethnomathematics:

• Recognize the ways that communities of color engage in mathematics and problem solving in their everyday lives.

• Teach that mathematics can help solve problems affecting students’ communities. Model the use of math as a solution to their immediate problems, needs, or desires.

• Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.

• Teach the value of math as both an abstract concept and as a useful everyday tool.

• Expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance. Provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.

I know, I know -- we're all going to pitch a fit about challenging "capitalist views". But apart from that, this seems ... very normal? We all know, to the point of cliche, that a barrier to getting kids interested in math is that they fail to see how it's useful to them or "in the real world". So they advise that math be taught in a way that resonates with real world experience. And likewise, sometimes, for some people "in the real world", math can feel like an enemy (think "am I just a statistic to you?"). So figure out ways to name that and challenge that. For the most part, "ethnomathematics" just reads as a particular social justice gloss on "being a good teacher", as applied to teaching in diverse communities.

Now perhaps one disagrees with these concepts as pedagogical best practice. I'm not a math teacher, I'm not going to claim direct experience here. But that goes back to the intensity of the backlash -- that these ideas need to be banned, that they are outright dangerous and unacceptable and neo-racism. Can that be right? Surely, these ideas are not so outlandish that we should pitch a fit about their being (deep breath) single elements of an 80 page document which is itself part of a five part series being incorporated as a single "see also" bullet point in the second chapter of a thirteen chapter model state framework. Seriously? That's where we're landing? That's what's going to drive us into a valley of racial division and despair?

It's wild. The people engaged in this obsessive crusade to make Everest size mountains over backyard anthills are nothing short of wild.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/39P79OA

#academia #education #math #racism

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dgcatanisiri · 4 years

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I don’t think of the Jedi as child stealers.

Thing is, I do find their approach... questionable at best.

Because here’s the thing. Jedi are mythic heroes to most people. Subject of legend and myth, and maybe not so much of anything real and tangible for the average person - does the average citizen of the Republic really expect to ever see a Jedi in person in their lives?

So you have a Jedi coming to these harried parents, dealing with a child’s earliest expressions of Force abilities, being very confused and uncertain how to handle this. They tell you that this child has power and destiny for something greater. They say they can train this child in their abilities - but at the cost of all family ties.

There is a lot of external pressure at that point - the uncertainty of the child’s safety in a home where they can telekinetically move knives, among many other hazards that a child having this power the parent does not, the idea of your child being “Chosen” and having some greater “destiny”... If we’re talking good parents who want what is best for their child, well, certainly the “right” answer is to proceed to surrender them to the Jedi. It’s what’s best for their child, right? And in surrendering their rights... They can’t get those back. So they lose all connection to the child that they’d been building up ideas and plans around the existence of. To the family left behind, that child may be meant for something greater, but in function, they’re now dead to them.

It’s not theft, and I don’t believe it is actively predatory, but... I can’t help but see these parents in a vulnerable light because of it - one of the Legends novels, Darth Maul Shadow Hunter, had a main character who had surrendered his son to the Jedi, and promptly lost his job, because he’d been a civilian worker at the Temple, and he had to cut ties to his son. And he could only see his son from afar because of that rule of no family ties.

And, y’know, let’s bring up the canon example - Qui-Gon takes Anakin from Shmi, and the Jedi take no effort to help her situation. She remains in slavery until a wandering moisture farmer buys and frees her because he is attracted to her (which, there’s another issue surrounding questionable/potentially predatory consent, but let’s stay focused on what we’re here for). No one among the Jedi decides to turn around and get her out of that situation, and Anakin is told to effectively forget about her, to the point that when he starts dreaming of her death, all Obi-Wan has to say about it is “dreams pass.” Despite knowing that the force often speaks through dreams, Obi-Wan’s perspective (and, because he is basically the example we have of what the “ideal” Jedi is supposed to do and be, we can assume that the Jedi Order’s perspective is this as well) is that Anakin should ignore the dream.

And because of those dreams being ignored, Shmi is killed by the Tusken Raiders, dying in Anakin’s arms.

The successive canon may be trying to argue that Force abilities can fade over time (which I DEFINITELY call bullshit on, given canon - no one brought this up about Anakin or Luke when they started their training, and they were both relatively older than Grogu, to say nothing of Leia, and it doesn’t matter that we’re talking Skywalkers, the people testing them would have known about the risk of Force abilities fading, and they say nothing about it - and we can still get in to Rey and her training, or the fact that Finn was written to be Force sensitive and I will fight anyone who says otherwise), but that doesn’t change the fact that the Jedi are shown to take these children from their families and indoctrinate them in the Jedi way of life and perspective of thinking.

The Jedi - and I am saying this as pure fact, not an anti-Jedi screed - want their initiates to only have their loyalty to the Jedi, ostensibly because it’s to keep them from divided loyalties to their families, but it’s because they want to control the “certain points of view” that their initiates learn until they are solidly committed to the Jedi point of view.

So, again. It’s not theft. But... It’s questionable. It’s the kind of situation that I’m sure there are lawyers - and I don’t mean the aggressive hucksters, I mean the people who work pro bono charity cases - who would be quick to jump on suing that the Jedi were coercive in their efforts to obtain these children for their religious order that could easily be classified as a cult with that kind of indoctrination.

It’s... sketchy. And it’s uncomfortable. And looking at it critically honestly seems like something that a lot of people just... don’t want to do. We, the audience know that the Jedi are “the heroes.” So it must meant that what they’re doing must be right. Which... I just think that’s such a narrow and restrictive view, especially when the prequels showed the Jedi having more loyalty to the organization - of both the Order AND the Republic - than to the people. Surely that alone says that there’s almost a NEED for these critical examinations?

#dg rambles

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

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Justice League International #8 (1987)

Is it weird that I have a newsstand copy of a comic book when I definitely was shopping at my local comic shop in 1987?

This cover has so many jokes to talk about that I probably won't have time to review the entire issue. My stomach is already sore for laughing so hard! Look at how the box marked "fragile" is about to fall onto the floor thanks to the carelessness of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold! Ha ha! And they're carrying the large box upside down! According to the label on the upside down box, it's going to Paris, France so it must contain Crimson Fox who is almost certainly swearing in French because have you ever tried to masturbate while upside down in a box being jiggled by two men?! The incompetence of those guys is hilarious! But the best joke is the one where the only woman on the team doesn't lift a finger to help and also can't make up her mind about the placement of a gigantic box that hasn't been opened yet! See how funny that is? Because who cares where the box is placed?! It's not like they're moving a desk or an end table and Black Canary is coming up with a floor plan! It's just a box that will need to be opened and then broken down and then thrown out! The other funny part is that yellow spray around Beetle's head and the shape of his mouth because I think it suggests he's about to call Black Canary a bitch! Ha ha! I probably left out the joke about the hernia although that one might just be implied. Also, it'll probably be a blatant joke later in the story. The issue begins with Jack Ryder on his right-wing radio call-in television "news" program fiasco of a show Hot Seat trying to get the masses to shit blood over the Justice League. It'll work because the masses in comic books (as well as the masses not in comic books because we've all seen how people who listen to and watch right-wing radio call-in television "news" programs easily believe the alternate reality fed to them because it speaks to their inherent biases and selfishness) are idiots. (That might be my favorite interruption by parenthetical reference I've ever written.) I also know that it will work because Glorious Godfrey only recently did the same thing a year or two ago and it worked. But comic books don't recognize time and space in the same way that we more logical and real readers do so the masses won't remember that they were fooled just a year ago by idiotic television pundits who don't mind seeing the world burn as long as they can cash a fat check over it. I doubly also know it will work because Millennium is coming up and I think that might be proof that maybe Jack Ryder was sort of right because aliens have infiltrated Earth and are pretending to be heroes and possibly even right-wing radio call-in television "news" hosts. I don't really remember much about Millennium except that it was weekly and there were Manhunters in it.

My favorite comic book characters when I was a kid were Blue Falcon and Dynomutt. I bet Jack Ryder was Sean Hannity's favorite. Tucker Carlson's favorite was probably Hitler.

This issue begins the long running joke that Martian Manhunter is addicted to Oreos. I fucking get it, man. Have you ever tried to melt an Oreo into a spoon, fill a needle with the liquid contents, and inject it straight into your bloodstream? Me neither because that's stupid, you dumb idiot. Why would you even suggest it? You need to inject them straight into your taste buds. J'onn, Mister Miracle, and Captain Atom are setting up the New York Embassy which leads to lots of jokes about shoddy construction and terrible wiring and lazy movers. At one point Captain Atom electrocutes himself and then destroys all of the wiring because he's the guy the United States wanted to represent them on the new international team. I'd say his penchant to escalate a situation straight to violence proves the United States made the right decision. Batman and Guy Gardner oversee the outfitting of the Russian Embassy with a little help from Rocket Manhunter #7.

Even Rocket Red has heard about Guy's serious brain trauma and yet nobody has even discussed getting him a medical check-up. What a bunch of bastards!

This is also the issue that begins the "Bwa-ha-ha-ha" gag (I think. Did it happen in an issue previously? Maybe?! Anyway, it really gets going here). That's the gag where somebody laughs when something terrible happens to somebody else. It's a great team building exercise, to laugh at a co-worker's pain! Or if it isn't, it, at the very least, helps develop personal morale. Nothing better than laughing at your manager after her credit card was stolen by a prospective new employee while the entire company was in a meeting, especially after learning that said card was pretty much just used at The Honey Baked Ham. Does that make if funnier? Or is this one of those dark humor things like when the same manager was super pissed at an employee I was training for not showing up for work the day before Thanksgiving only to learn later that she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning the previous night which caused her to erupt into crying jags for the rest of the day which I'm positive weren't for my poor co-worker but for her guilty feelings of being so angry at her. That's dark humor, right? The "Bwa-ha-ha-ha" gag begins when Booster tries to hit on a Parisian woman and gets shot down. Later, she winds up being the League's Paris Bureau Chief. And also maybe Crimson Fox?

This scene is well done in a book that often tries too hard for stupidly silly humor.

I'd say that these three pages (the scanned page being the third of the three) of interaction between Blue Beetle and Booster Gold is ground zero for what would become a great best friend relationship. Any interaction before this was just of the generic Blue Beetle making a stupid class clown comment to the group. But this foundational scene in Paris already feels like these two at their closest which, admittedly, is mostly Blue Beetle laughing at something dumb Booster Gold did. But I like to view this entire relationship through the lens of a Booster Gold mostly driven mad and insane from having to live through so many alternate timelines. Sure, the reader doesn't know about that aspect of Booster Gold yet (and won't for more than a decade). But I can't help but understand Booster Gold through that lens now. And his need for some kind of consistency and whimsy and, almost certainly, a need to be able to laugh at himself must be expressed through this relationship as a kind of therapy. In a universe where not even the timeline lacks consistency, Booster Gold finds solace in getting his balls busted by Blue Beetle.

Maybe I'm a dick who doesn't understand true friendship but this is totally what it looks like, right?

The issue ends with a Keith Giffen drawn story about the end of the Global Guardians, or at least the end of their United Nations backing. I'm sure it's a set-up for a future story but even if it were just a couple page story acknowledging the Global Guardians and how they're affected by a new United Nations backed team, it would remain an interesting moment. I don't need iron clad continuity in my comic book universe but I am entertained when writers acknowledge the waves their stories are making in that continuity. Plus it's drawn by Giffen which always makes it seem like I'm reading a story from the perspective of a madman. Justice League International #8 Rating: B+. How come when I publish a manifesto, people refer to it as a 'zine?! How do you get the fucking power to have your photo-copied screed with "art" considered a manifesto?! How many people do I have to rant at to get some Goddamned recognition?! "The Truth About Star Trek Transporters" is not a fucking fanzine, people! It's a manifesto of the alternate reality we're being asked to accept! The alternate reality of an alternate reality where people are being sent to their deaths every fucking mission only to be replaced by clones of themselves and nobody fucking cares! Probably because they're all clones of clones of clones and their ability to think rationally has diminished to the point of dogmatic stupidity! Am I the only one witnessing this while others simply think its some kind of retrograde perspective?! Does my antediluvian intellect subquester the means of proliferating the parallax of reality?! Does the inclusion of three hilarious dick jokes deny me the mantle of manifesto writer, oublietting my ego into an infinite mirror trick of endless zineian declarations?! Fuck this shit! And fuck that satellite that's been following me throughout this meandering conclusion!

#Justice League #Justice League International #Kevin Maguire #Keith Giffen #J.M. DeMatteis #DC #DC Comics

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aaronsmithtumbler · 4 years

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Completed Chapter 14 Rewrite

I was awake and something was horribly wrong.

I was in a jail cell, but that wasn't what was horribly wrong. That was just a sort of encrustation of legible wrongness on top of a deeper wrongness still unplumbed, like a tiny black spot that reveals a man dying of melanoma. The wrongness was deeper and more spiritual. It surrounded and confounded me.

Hasidic legend describes a time Rabbis Zusya and Elimelech were thrown in jail. There was a disgusting bucket full of waste, and the whole cell stank. Rabbi Elimelech started crying. Rabbi Zusya asked what was wrong. Rabbi Elimelech explained that Jewish law prohibits prayer in a disgusting place, and so he could not follow the commandment to pray every morning. Rabbi Zusya pointed out that he was still following the commandment not to pray in a disgusting place, so overall he was coming out even in number-of-commandments-followed. In fact he was getting to follow a new commandment he had never followed before, and surely this brought him even closer to God. Rabbi Elimelech was delighted, and began singing and dancing in joy. Rabbi Zusya joined in, and soon all the prisoners were singing and dancing. The warden came and asked what was going on, and the inmates weren't totally sure except that the rabbis seemed very happy about the bucket of disgusting waste. The spiteful warden said that fine, then they couldn't have the wastebucket, and took it away.

"There!" Zusya told Elimelech. "Now you can pray!"

There was something terribly wrong, worse than the stench the rabbis dealt with. I didn't feel like it was inappropriate to pray; I felt like prayer <i>wouldn't work</i>, like God was somehow very far away and beyond my reach and neither praying or not-praying would bring me closer to Him. I felt hopeless, not because I was without hope, but because something was actively pumping hopelessness into me.

I was dressed in my normal clothes, but I was wearing a ball gag. A reasonable precaution; otherwise I would have spoken the Vanishing Name and been out of there. I lay on a bare cot. My cell had no bars. It had a door, locked, with a small window in it. I went to the window, looked out, saw a hallway. Turned the knob, not expecting anything, didn't get anything, lay back down.

[Ana, are you there? Where are you?]

There was nothing. Either Ana was far away, or distracted, or asleep, or – I couldn’t make myself think “dead”. I would have felt it if she died. That, I told myself, is definitely how kabbalistic marriages work.

So I knocked on the door to my cell. A few seconds later, the doorknob turned and an armed guard looked me over.

"Mr. Smith-Teller," said one of them. I winced internally. I mean, I suppose if they didn’t know my name now it wouldn’t have taken them too much longer to find it out, but it still hurt. Kabbalists are notoriously fussy about who knows their true name, it's a sort of placebomantic disadvantage, a vague way of letting someone else have power over you. "We're sorry about the gag, but we're sure you understand."

I made some hand motions. I was trying to convey something like "WHY IS EVERYTHING HORRIBLY WRONG?", but I was used to dealing with Ana, where I have telepathy to help me. In this case, I had nothing but context. Luckily, it seemed like context was enough.

"Director Bentham wants to speak to you," he finally said. "His presence...makes people uncomfortable."

Even if you're nowhere near him? Uncomfortable like you're surrounded by an impenetrable field of hopelessness? The moment this gag was off, I was going to have so many questions.

The guard cuffed me and escorted me down the corridor. I didn't know where I was, but it seemed big. Hard to hide. I knew UNSONG arrested people, I knew that they put you in prison for a long time if you used Names without a license, but I’d always heard they used the normal federal prisons. The idea of a secret UNSONG black site somewhere sounded like it was out of Valerie’s paranoid anti-government screeds. If no one had ever revealed the existence of this place before, that meant either that they were very good with the Amnestic Name, or else no one had ever gotten out of here before. I tried to remember exactly how effective the Amnestic Name was and ironically came up blank. And what about the Confounding Name? I couldn’t remember.

The facility wasn’t small, either. We walked through poorly-lit corridor after poorly-lit corridor. I tried to look for other prisoners, references to the location, even doors with signs on them, but all I spotted were a couple of locked rooms with the UNSONG seal on the front. An aleph superimposed on the United Nations globe, and around it, the name “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” and the motto “I TEGO ARCANA DEI”. Begone, I hide the secrets of God. There were deep kabbalistic depths in that phrase, but I didn’t have the energy to think about them, because something was horribly wrong.

We came to a room. A conference room, it looked like. The guard motioned me to sit down, then cuffed me to the chair. The sense that something was horribly wrong got stronger. The guard could feel it too. I could tell. The dissonance reached a crescendo, like some sort of reverse symphony.

The door swung open.

How can I describe Asher Bentham?

He was both very beautiful and very ugly. Every detail of his face was perfectly sculpted and the gestalt still looked hideous. His voice had a bizarre effect like a thirty-foot-tall ogre trying to speak reassuringly without realizing that this conflicted with his choice to be a thirty-foot-tall ogre. I am a master of several languages, renowned for my skill with words. The only one I can cough up to accurately describe Asher Bentham is "bad". The most reassuring thought I could muster was that my hands were cuffed to the chair so there was no way for him to offer me a handshake and I wasn't going to have to touch him.

When the President, Secretary-General, and Comet King had come together to found UNSONG, leadership of the fledgling bureaucracy had gone to a elderly Brazilian politician with a hands-off approach. He’d gone after the biggest gangs and most blatant serial abusers of Names, talking about “decapitation strikes” against networks of large-scale pirates. The policy was very popular – everyone agreed that having the Mafia in on the Name business was a bad idea – and very worthless, because most unauthorized Name use was by ordinary non-Mafia people who talked to each other online.

He had died in 2002; Bentham had succeeded him. After the fall of the Presidency, Bentham had somehow manipulated the warring states' committments to abide by UNSONG regulations into a de facto replacement of the executive branch of the Untied States. A thousand conspiracy theories about the United Nations taking over the US had been suddenly vindicated.

Since the sky cracked, we have lived in a world of inhuman powers. The Lady of Los Angeles is a Watcher. The Comet King was the Messiah. The Other King is a necromancer. Various angels and demons have intruded into our history, left their mark, and returned beyond the veil. Now I had learned that the arch-manipulative head of UNSONG was something other than human. I was less surprised by the revelation than dumbfounded at the sheer magnitude of the non-humanity confronting me.

"Mr. Smith-Teller," he said. Fuck people knowing my true name, fuck it so much. Any hope that they were just annoyed at Valerie’s secret meetings was gone. This was the Director-General. The head of UNSONG. If he was involved, they thought this was the most important thing happening in the world at this moment. Which of course it was. They knew all about the Vital Name and everything it could do, and it had gone straight to the top. Okay. So I was really, really doomed.

“I’m sorry you’re in this situation.” He really did sound sorry. I changed my assessment of Bentham from "trying to intimidate me" to "trying as hard as he could not to intimidate me, and it just wasn't enough", and shuddered. “I understand you are associated with Singer groups who have a dim view of UNSONG. You’re probably laboring under the misapprehension that I am here to hurt you. As difficult as this may be to believe, we’re on the same side. I’m going to take your gag out. If you start speaking a Name, I’m afraid we’ll have you unconscious before you finish the second syllable, and the gag will go back in. I’m sure you can imagine the reasons we have these precautions. Nod if you understand.”

I nodded.

His face, I decided, was actually quite beautiful, except for the eyes. The eyes looked like they came from one of those weird nightjar birds whose eyes are in the wrong place and don’t even look real.

"As you can tell," he said, "we're taking this situation very seriously. The Keller-Stern Act of 1988 states that anyone who discovers a Divine Name of potential military value is legally obligated to report it to UNSONG in exchange for fair monetary compensation. Most people aren’t aware of the Act, and we have no interest in punishing them for refusing to follow a law they never heard of. But now you know. So, Mr. Smith-Teller, and please tell me the truth, do you know any Names that might be covered under the law?"

Jewish law permits lying for the greater good. According to the Talmud, even Heaven is not always truthful. Rabbi Gamliel kept his classes small. Later Rabbi Elazar took over the academy and expanded classes; hundreds of new students flooded in. Rabbi Gamliel felt guilty that he had kept out so many bright scholars, but God sent him a vision of beautiful barrels full of ashes, indicating that the new students were no good anyway. The Talmud explains that the new students were actually fine; God was just trying to cheer up Rabbi Gamliel. I had no moral qualms about lying to Asher Bentham. I just wasn't sure it was possible.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know any such Name.”

And it was the honest truth. Because I had forgotten the Name. Because I was a moron. I could have told him more, but he terrified me, and the truth – that I’d known the Vital Name and forgotten it – would be neither believable nor welcome. And part of me was desperately hoping that if I said nothing, he would go away, the wrongness would end, and I would just be in a perfectly normal government black site and everything would be fine.

“Did you speak a Name that allowed you to find the location of the Moon?”

“I did,” I said.

“How did you learn that Name?”

Every fiber of my body tensed at her oppressive closeness. It was a fair question. I had no way out this time. Either tell her what had happened, or lie like a rug and see exactly what those nightjar eyes could do.

I ran through a host of scenarios. I tell the Director-General that I knew the Name and forgot it. He doesn’t believe me and tries to torture it out of me. He doesn’t believe me and tries to torture the Name out of Ana. He does believe me and tries to dissect my brain to get it. He goes to an error correction specialist, fixes the Name, and takes over the world, and I’m still alive to see it.

I am not a hero. I’ve been in one fight, but only because I was drunk, and I ended up with two black eyes. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is studying things and comparing them and trying to understand them.

But the sages of old weren’t typical heroes either, and they were constantly breaking out of prison by one miracle or another. Rabbi Meir convinced a Roman prison guard to free his friend by reassuring him that if anyone tried to punish his disobedience, he could say “God of Meir, help me!” and God would keep him from harm; when his commander tried to hang him for his role in the escape, the guard cried “God of Meir, help me!”, the rope broke, and he managed to run away to safety. When a whole Roman legion arrived to arrest the great translator Onkelos, he preached to them in Latin about the symbolism of the mezuzah, and the whole legion converted to Judaism on the spot. And when the Romans arrested Rabbi Eleazar ben Perata on five charges, God helped him craft a plausible alibi for each; when the plausible alibis didn’t work, the prophet Elijah appeared at the end of the trial, lifted up the prosecutor, and threw him out of the courtroom so hard that he landed five hundred miles away. I think I mentioned that the Talmud is kind of crazy.

So miraculously breaking out of prison is the sort of thing kabbalists are expected to be able to do, and I daydream a lot, and a long time ago I had come up with a fantasy about the sort of thing I would do if I were ever trapped in a prison, and this was by far the stupidest thing I had ever done, but something was terribly wrong and I needed to get out of here.

"I was on drugs and I had a prophetic vision," I said.

Ever since the sky cracked, drugs had gotten really weird. The ones whose names were also Hebrew words were the weirdest. MDA and its cousin MDMA gave mystical knowledge, probably because mem-dalet-ayin was madda, "knowledge", (see 2 Chronicles 1:10). The effects of LSD were more blatantly divine, since lamed-shin-dalet was leshadi, "strength" (see Psalms 32:4), and the pronounced consonants in El Shaddai ("God Almighty") to boot. The ones without three letter names were less predictable, with peyote being a demonic conduit and the rest having variable effects. I decided to go with LSD as the most likely source of divine revelation.

"Drugs always attracted me," I said. I thought for a second, and continued. "So I got some LSD from a friend and tried it out. That was a bad idea, I admit."

I suspected Asher knew I was lying. I was banking on him waiting to see exactly what lie I was going to tell, hoping that I would slip up somewhere in my story. If he would just let me keep going for twenty-seven more sentences, I was in the clear.

"Zelda was the name of the friend who sold it to me," I said, awkwardly, because I couldn't think of any other way to start a sentence with Z. "My hope was we would do it together, but she bailed out at the last second."

That was DST and ZM. Twenty-five consonants to go. I was afraid, which was good, because it let me pretend that my fear was making it hard to talk, whereas in fact I was working out how to start my sentences with the right letter.

"Regular LSD is supposed to just give you a taste of divinity. She gave me something else, I'm not sure. She didn't tell me, but it must be true. No way to know now."

DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN.

"So I had taken the drug, when I started feeling weird. Very weird. Regular LSD doesn't do that. LSD is supposed to be gentle. Some kind of angelic entity was standing in front of me. Questionably angelic. Not human. Deep-voiced. Like you would expect an angel to be."

Asher Bentham must have thought I was the least fluent, worst storyteller in the country. I couldn't read his face at all. Was he confused? Was he suspicious. No time to think about that. I'd gotten DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN-SEVER-LAS-KYON-DAL. Next letter was aleph.

"All of the things you hear about angels, the beautiful wings and the golden eyes. They don't prepare you. Not a bit. To see something like that. Right away I knew it had a message for me. You couldn't imagine what it was like."

DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN-SEVER-LAS-KYON-DAL-ATHEN-TRY. All I needed was KOPHU-LI-MAR-TAG. How was I going to bring a K in?

"Kind of quietly, it spoke to me. Phenomenal voice. 'Listen', it told me. Revealed secret names. To grant me power over the heavens and earth."

Bentham was getting impatient. "What names?" he asked. "The one you used to find the moon?"

I didn't know how to answer, but it didn't matter. He thought I had been telling him a story, but I hadn't been. I'd been forging a notarikon. The same way the kabbalists had expanded AGLA into "atah gibor le'olam A-----". Any notarikon for a divine Name is itself equivalent to that Name. A sentence-by-sentence notarikon was completely valid. There was even one in Proverbs 31:10-31, for the Hebrew alphabet as a whole. But nobody had taken the obvious next step and used it to speak a Name covertly. Well, I was going to do it. I only had one letter left: a gimel.

I realized that God had delivered Asher into my hands. The rest had been my artifice; this part was pure divine inspiration.

"Goodbye, Asher Bentham," I said, and finished the notarikon.

Don’t use the Vanishing Name, I had said during choir practice, unless you are in a situation where it is absolutely vital to your well-being and continued survival that you be accosted by a different band of hooligans than the ones who are currently accosting you. Right now, being accosted by a different band of hooligans was my heart’s fondest and most desperate desire.

As Director-General Asher Bentham strained to make sense of my poorly-narrated story, I disappeared from right in front of his face.

#editing unsong

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tricktster · 5 years

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You’re an icon and I followed you like a few days ago and you’re on my list of role models?? So like. Yeah. You’re kind of epic and keep doing whatever the hell it is you’re doing because it seems to work. Also idk if this is at all relevant to your career but u seem to be successful and functional and shit SO any general advice for an ambitious person or specifically for someone going into law/politics

1) Choose better role models.

No, I kid, that is a very sweet thing to say. As far as advice goes, I can give you a basic principle that will be very easy for me to tell you, very hard to actually adopt, but I swear to god, once you have it, you will immediately see the impact. This advice applies only in a general sense to the American business world, but feel free to dm me if you want more specific advice and I can probably hook you up.

If you’re interested in law/politics, you’re talking going to grad school, where there is a very small pool of people in charge of your destiny and then a lot of people fighting to be recognized by them. Then, after that, there’s the work world, where there is... a very small pool of people in charge of your destiny and a lot of people fighting to be recognized by them. These people in charge of your destiny will generally be very impressive, with the kind of resume and experience that will make you feel pants-on-head stupid. They will be intimidating. They will make you extremely nervous. They might be unfriendly. You will not want to ask them questions or engage with them, because they are Very Important and You Do Not Want To Bother Them.

You know who doesn’t have that problem? The mediocre, rich white dude from Greenwich, Connecticut who sits in the center of the front row and always raises his hand, even when he has absolutely nothing of merit to say. He was born knowing Very Important People. They don’t make him nervous. He genuinely believes that he is entitled to their time and expertise, because nobody has ever taught him otherwise. So he raises his hand, and even if he’s spewing absolute nonsense every time he gets to speak, that Very Important Person knows his name, and in the end, he will be in a better position with his B- and name recognition than you will be with your A- and a face the Important Person couldn’t pick out of a lineup of two. People help people they feel comfortable with. People don’t feel comfortable with people who are nervous around them.

Understanding this puts you at an enormous tactical advantage. Jeff Connecticut is where he is because he knows somebody. You’re there too, because you’re smart and you’ve worked hard. If you can be as confident as Jeff Connecticut, and hang on to those brains and that work ethic, the Very Important People will not just remember you, they will go to bat for you. They will see themselves in you, and they will want you to succeed. So, start by practicing making yourself uncomfortable in low-stakes situations. Go to a party by yourself and meet everyone in the room. Eat dinner by yourself, and win over the bartender. Take an improv class, and then go back a second time, even if you flopped. Laugh off your little mistakes and minor embarrassments, and tell other people funny stories about them later, like they didn’t hurt you even a little. Eventually, those little embarrassments will be just as funny to you as they are to everyone else. Insecure people are too proud to laugh at themselves, but you’re comfortable with you, you can show some flaws - people are drawn to folks who are confident enough in their own skin to admit that they’re a little flawed. I mean, don’t go overboard, don’t ONLY self depreciate, but it’s good to be humble. So go to a meet and greet with your favorite author, the person who wrote the book that means so much to you that it’s basically tattooed on your soul, and make it your goal to be calm and relaxed and charming, without trying too hard, and if you fuck it up? Who cares! If you flop, tell the story about how you made an ass of yourself when you were talking to, I dunno, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, to another Important Person, and then the two of you can laugh about it together.

You need to believe that you are worth knowing, and that takes practice if you’re not Jeff Connecticut. I know that sounds fake, but I swear to god, once you genuinely believe you’re the type of person other people want to be around, you become that person. And while you’re being that person that everyone likes to be around? Bust your ass. Work harder than everyone else, and show initiative by being the one to volunteer for the uncomfortable gigs, the public speaking events, the things you’ve never done before and you don’t know if you’ll be able to do. You can do it. People dumber than you do it all the time, they’ve just had more practice, and they only got that practice because they asked for it even it was scary. Fuck it up? Try again.

Oh, and don’t forget who you are at the core. You’re stealing Jeff Connecticut’s confidence, but you’re not Jeff. You’re better. So be kind and respectful and genuinely interested in the people who work under you, who have jobs that society deems less important, who have different values and drives than you do. You’re not better than them, no matter how far you go or how Important you get. And someday, when you’re in front of the room as a Very Important Person in your own right, make sure you call on the kid in the back who’s tentatively raising her hand and looking unsure of herself. Recognize that the loudest voices aren’t always the smartest, and that a diverse workplace with diverse ideas will generally be more valuable that twenty people who were in the same frat together and who always arrive at the same conclusions because they’ve got identical perspectives. Look out for the people just starting out. Don’t be a dick.

I hate to end this screed on a downer, but I can’t leave this out. Even though it’s 2019 and equality is here etc etc etc, let’s recognize that most of corporate america is still polluted at the top by really retrograde gender shit/race shit/everything shit, so if you’re not a cis straight white man, do NOT volunteer to do things like cleaning the office microwaves or making the coffee, even if you were raised to want to be helpful and it’s in your nature to just do a task that needs doing. If someone asks you to do that shit, and it genuinely isn’t your job, don’t be shy about telling them that you need to do your actual job, not coffee fetching, but prepare for a backlash anyway. This sucks ass, it shouldn’t be this way, I hope this is different for your generation, but as it currently stands the old farts in charge will think less of you if they catch you doing what they consider Women things (like dishes), and will like you more if you do Old Man things (like scotch and adultery).

Oh, and this part really, really, really, really, really, REALLY sucks, but you will need to learn how to golf.

#Anonymous

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spiders-hth-is-an-outlier · 4 years

Text

Four Reasons You Can Pry Cass Out of My Cold Dead Hands

Look, I kept my mouth shut for like three goddamn years of Tumblr. That’s a lot, for me. I’m not famous for keeping my mouth shut, so, you know. Accept that I tried, and even though I failed, An Effort Was Made. Take that for whatever it’s worth.

Cass is the better spelling. It’s not just the correct spelling (though it is the correct spelling), it’s the superior choice of spelling, and here is why.

1. The Phonetics Are Good, Not Bad

You may see people point out that in English, single-syllable words with an A in the middle are typically pronounced with a short A sound. Bat, rad, van, pal. Cool, true! This would be a point, except that--

It’s typically NOT true of words that rhyme with, uh, Cass.

Now, there aren’t a ton of those words in English. One-syllable words with a short A sound and an S at the end are relatively rare! Which is cool, because we can pretty much look at all of them, ready, here we go:

ass -- bass -- brass -- class -- crass -- gas -- glass -- grass -- lass -- mass -- pass -- sass

What do you notice?

Sure, I’ll give you “gas.” It’s short for gasoline, and nobody ever bothered to add an extra S to make it match the pattern. So there you go.

But now take the second S off of every other one of those words. Usually you get a word that doesn’t exist in English, with the exception of “as” and “bras” (if you’re allowing plurals into the conversation). But of those two exceptions, now *neither one* rhymes with Cass anymore -- either the consonant sound changes to a Z sound, or the vowel becomes that soft ah instead of a short A. That’s what Kripke was trying to say when he says he picked the spelling because “Cas might sound like Caz.” He meant that, reasonably enough, people might be prompted to think of the only other one-syllable word in common use English that matches this pattern, which is ass/as.

But what about the other words? If you drop the second S and allow people to *guess* how they think the word might be pronounced -- well, who’s to say. Would you automatically rhyme bas, clas, glas, las, and mas with gas? Maybe you would. More likely, in my opinion, your best guess would be to either rhyme them with as, or to pronounce them as the non-English words they are -- bas relief is from a French loan, glas is Irish, las and mas are common Spanish words. None of them are pronounced with a short A.

So yeah, if you were randomly reading a fantasy novel, as a native English speaker, these are the calculations you’d make about how to pronounce a name: Das would sound more like dahz, I bet, while Dass is definitely dass. Vas and Vass. Ras and Rass. Shas and Shass. You don’t look at those and pronounce them the same way in your head; not if you’re an English speaker. You just don’t. And without the cue of knowing the full name, you wouldn’t for Cas and Cass, either.

2. Cass Is a Human Name, and We Call That Themes

Cass is a real, live name. People have it. The majority of them are women, and it’s short for Cassandra, sure, but it’s also a real, live, human male name. Really! Here’s a list of people who have that name in real life and fiction alike. For some of them, it’s a diminutive of single-S names like Caspar and Casimir. That’s a thing! Sometimes it’s just a freestanding name; Cass Ballenger the politician just had it as his middle name. Sometimes it does come from double-S names like Cassian and Cassius. Regardless, it’s just -- a name that exists.

When you name a fictional character, sometimes you just pick one randomly, but sometimes the name reflects on or points up something thematically. I have no idea if that was the intention in this case, but even if it was accidentally, something pretty cool happened. The made-up fantasy-faux-angelic name “Castiel” tends to be used by other angels, particularly ones like Raphael and Naomi who are speaking to him as real or presumptive superiors in a hierarchy. “Castiel” is the designation he was given out of the gate, when he was made to be God’s enforcer. “Cass” is the name Dean gave him. Cass is what his friends call him, and it’s symbolic of his relationship to humanity, which he consistently chooses over his relationship with angels. When he fell, or jumped ship, or however you’d like to think about it, he was given a human name, which everyone who regards him with even the slightest affection at all now uses. It’s good! That’s good! It’s a good use of a small thing to point up how differently different characters see him, and whether they emphasize his familiarity or his alienness. You lose that if you insist that his name is only an abbreviated form of his given name. You lose something from the text if you imagine he’s being called Castiel-only-shorter, instead of becoming a real person named Cass.

3. Just Don’t Be A Jerk, People Are Named What They’re Named

This is just, like -- decency? I know he’s not a real person, but it’s -- rude, right? You don’t correct the spelling of someone else’s name. Who does that? Do you have beef with parents who call their daughter Catherine Katie, because only Catie is acceptable to you? People are allowed to just do, like, whatever with names, it’s literally fine. You know what’s not typically a nickname for Dimitri? MISHA. But that’s his name, because it just is.

Yeah, it’s fandom. You can change whatever you like. You can have whatever opinions you want about how you would have spelled it, if you were Eric Kripke, or Chuck Shurley, or Metatron, or Dean Winchester. I have opinions about Isaac Lahey’s name in Teen Wolf, because it’s spelled Lahey and pronounced Leahy, and that’s bonkers! But that is how it’s spelled, and I just -- go on with my life, unharmed. Castiel isn’t a real person who will have real feelings about however you prefer to spell his name.

But the standard rule for polite society in re: how to spell someone’s name is however they want you to spell it. Normally not obeying that rule reads as passive-aggressive at best. Which is how we come to....

4. Fandom Gatekeeping Is Shitty, Actually

The reality behind the fervor with which Cas-people not just defend their choice to use the non-canonical spelling, but regularly flood my goddamn dash with weird, angry screeds about the fact that 100% of the world doesn’t use the non-canonical spelling, is that they are using it as a shibboleth, a marker of who counts and who doesn’t. Who belongs here and who doesn’t. I’ve always known this, because I’m clever like that, but recently I’ve seen versions of the Weird, Angry Screed that spell it out directly: people who spell it Cass are either new around here and haven’t learned How We Do It yet, or by choosing not to do it How We Do It, they are signaling their contempt for pro-Castiel fandom.

And honestly I understand that my reaction to this isn’t the typical one. I know that most people find those little signs and signifiers of who’s Team Us and who’s Team Them Over There to be comforting. There’s something that people just like about wearing the jersey; it makes them feel safe among others like them. I get it.

But much as I love fandom, there’s something I have always hated, and always will hate, about that kind of expectation of groupthink within fandom. I know, rationally, that part of the socialization is that you’re supposed to learn lingo and references and in-jokes -- you’re supposed to join the fandom by speaking like the fandom speaks. But there’s something, I dunno, almost threatening? There’s something crazy-making about taking this random, essentially irrelevant detail, and turning it into something that proves if you belong here or not. At best, maybe you’re “new around here” (which is okay? It’s fine, actually, to be new in a fandom and not yet realize that you’re supposed to be ignoring eleven seasons of subtitles? Why are you yelling at newbies, please don’t?), but at worst, we know because you won’t make this mental change that we’ve all agreed to make, that actually you’re not just an outsider, but an opponent. If you weren’t, you’d do what we all do.

It’s the most literal, direct example of fandom gatekeeping. If you know the secrets of how we speak and what we accept as real and important, then you’re cool and you can stay. If you don’t know, or you disagree with what we all got together and accepted as real and important, based on -- watching the show? -- then we know to stay away from you because you’re the wrong kind of fan. Not our kind. Wearing the bad jersey.

It’s shitty. It’s mean-spirited. It’s the worst kind of cliquish fan posturing, casting people with legitimately different approaches to how and why to use, change, or discard canon in their art and conversation as opponents in a dumb, made-up turf war, and it serves to intentionally carve the fan community into narrower slices of self-siloed echo chambers of agreement and validation, rather than requiring people to just -- get cool with the fact that different opinions exist.

Sure, not all people who spell it Cas are like that. Some of you seem nice. But man, I see the knives come out all over every time the Cass spelling pops up in canon, because a lot of y’all really take this seriously, beyond just habit and aesthetic preference. And even when it’s not said out loud, it’s clear to me that it’s not an argument about how the word looks on the page. It’s clear to me that those who won’t conform don’t belong and aren’t wanted, and people are afraid someone somewhere might not realize they don’t belong and aren’t wanted until they conform.

There was a time in my life when I’d find that really hurtful, honestly. That time is not now, because I have real problems, and what Supernatural fandom thinks of me really, truly, deeply does not matter to my life.

But it does bother me enough to write all this out, I guess, and I know that’s because I remember a time when I was younger and more isolated and fandom was really a social and emotional home for me, and I still have an idealistic fondness for the idea of a big-tent, non-gatekeepy version of fandom where people can just, like, be cool to each other about things, even things they disagree intensely about. There are still people in the world who need and deserve that, and it always angries me up a little when I see people deliberately wrecking that version and replacing it with one where fans have to performatively prove that they aren’t on the wrong team through weird little random tics that have to be repeated just-so, just the way you learned them. So I don’t do that, out of love for my imaginary version of fandom where no one’s asked to do that.

So yeah, the combination of those four factors means that I am never, ever, ever going to mend my ways on this topic, which is a privilege I have, as a person with basically nothing invested in anyone in Supernatural fandom. (I mean, some of y’all seem really nice, but none of my actual friends live here.) That lack of being invested in the fandom also, I realize, means that I have no social capital to spend, and people are unlikely to give a fuck what I do or why I do it, so all of this has really been -- basically meaningless. Still, I’m not really good at thinking things and not saying them, although I’m getting slightly better. Really! In general!

#apparently i have opinions

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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There’s no nice way to say this: a certain subset of (mostly) white people have lost their minds online. These people wake up to a vast insurrection crossing all racial and national boundaries – and contrive to make this all about themselves. Their affects, their unconsciouses, their moral worthiness. How can I be Not Complicit? How can I be a Better Ally? How do I stop benefiting from white supremacy in my daily life? How do I rid myself of all the bad affects and attitudes? Can I purify my soul in the smelter of a burning police precinct? Occasional ratissages out into mainstream culture (we’re decolonising the Bon Appétit test kitchen!), but mostly what this uprising calls for is an extended bout of navel-gazing. Really get in there, get deep in that clammy lint-filled hole, push one finger into the wound of your separation from the primordial world, and never stop wriggling. Maybe there’s a switch, buried just below the knot, and if you trip it your body will open up like a David Cronenberg nightmare to reveal all its greasy secrets to your eyes. Interrogate yourself! Always yourself, swim deep in the filth of yourself. The world is on fire – but are my hands clean? People are dying – but how can I scrub this ghastly whiteness off my skin?

You could set aside the psychosexual madness of this stuff, maybe, if it actually worked. It does not work. It achieves nothing and helps nobody. Karen and Barbara Fields: ‘Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy pursuing other purposes. Racism is first and foremost a social practice.’ Social practices must be confronted on the level of the social. But for people who don’t want to change anything on the level of the social, there’s the Implicit Associations Test. This is the great technological triumph of what passes for anti-racist ideology: sit in front of your computer for a few minutes, click on some buttons, and you can get a number value on exactly how racist you are. Educators and politicians love this thing. Wheel it into offices. Listen up, guys, your boss just wants to take a quick peek into your unconscious mind, just to see how racist you are. How could anyone object to something like that?

…

See, for instance, the form letters: How To Talk To Your Black Friends Right Now. Because I refuse to be told I can’t ever empathise with a black person, I try to imagine what it would be like to receive one of these. Say there’s been a synagogue shooting, or a bunch of swastikas spraypainted in Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Say someone set off a bomb inside Panzer’s in St John’s Wood – and then one of my goy friends sends me something like this:

Hey Sam – I can never understand how you feel right now, but I’m committed to doing the work both personally and in my community to make this world safer for you and for Jewish people everywhere. From the Babylonian Captivity to the Holocaust to today, my people have done reprehensible things to yours – and while my privilege will never let me share your experience, I want you to know that you’re supported right now. I see you. I hear you. I stand with the Jewish community, because you matter. Please give me your PayPal so I can buy you a bagel or some schamltz herring, or some of those little twisty pastries you people like.

How would I respond? I think I would never want to see or hear from this person again. If I saw them in the street, I would spit in their face, covid be damned. I would curse their descendants with an ancient cackling Yiddish curse. These days, I try to choose my actual friends wisely. Most of them tend to engage me with a constant low level of jocular antisemitic micoaggressions, because these things are funny and not particularly serious. But if one of my friends genuinely couldn’t see me past the Jew, and couldn’t see our friendship past the Jewish Question, I would be mortified. Of course, it’s possible that the comparison doesn’t hold. Maybe there are millions of black people I don’t know who love being essentialised and condescended to, who are thrilled by the thought of being nothing more than a shuddering expendable rack for holding up their own skin. But I doubt it. Unless you want me to believe that black people inherently have less dignity than I do, this is an insult.

…

If you want to find the real secret of this stuff, look for the rules, the dos and don’ts, the Guides To Being A Better Ally that blob up everywhere like mushrooms on a rotting bough. You’ve seen them. And you’ve noticed, even if you don’t want to admit it, that these things are always contradictory:

DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt – this isn’t about you! DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches – it’s time for you to take a back seat. DO speak out against racism – never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice – shut up, stay in your lane, and stick to signal boosting melanated voices. DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest – our struggle isn’t a photo-op for riot tourists.

Žižek points out that the language of proverbial wisdom has no content. ‘If one says, “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air – think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep.’ The same goes here. Whatever you say, it can still sound woke. Why?

…

This stuff is masochism, pleasure-seeking, full of erotic charge – and as Freud saw, the masochist’s desire is always primary and prior; it’s always the submissive partner who’s in charge of any relationship. Masochism is a technology of power. Setting the limits, defining the punishments they’d like to receive, dehumanising and instrumentalising the sadistic partner throughout. The sadist works to humiliate and degrade their partner, to make them feel something – everything for the other! And meanwhile, the masochist luxuriates in their own degradation – everything for myself! You’re just the robotic hand that hits me. When non-white people get involved in these discourses, they’re always at the mercy of their white audiences, the ones for whom they perform, the ones they titillate and entertain. A system for subjecting liberation movements to the fickle desires of the white bourgeoisie. Call it what it is. This is white supremacy; these scolding lists are white supremacist screeds.

But systems of white supremacy have never been in the interests of most whites (‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded’), and they have never really fostered any solidarity between whites. Look at the stories. I had a run-in with the police, you announce, and a black person might have died, but I’m fine, because I’m white. No – you’re fine because you’re white and rich. You’re fine because you look like someone who reviews cartoons for a dying online publication called The Daily Muffin, which is exactly what you are. Bald and covered in cat hair. Frameless glasses cutting a red wedge into the bridge of your nose. The white people who get gunned down by police don’t look like you. Their class position is stamped visibly on their face, and so is yours. And you’ve trained yourself to see any suffering they experience as nothing more than ugly Trump voters getting what they deserve.

Why aren’t there protests when a white person is murdered by police? Answer 1: because, as John Berger points out, ‘demonstrations are essentially urban in character.’ Native Americans are killed by cops at an even higher rate than black people, but this too tends to happen very far away from the cities and the cameras; it becomes invisible. Answer 2: because nobody cares about them. Not the right wing, who only pretend to care as a discursive gotcha when there’s a BLM protest. And definitely not you. Sectors of the white intelligentsia have spent the last decade trying to train you out of fellow-feeling. Cooley et al., 2019: learning about white privilege has no positive effect on empathy towards black people, but it is ‘associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor white person’s plight.’ A machine for turning nice socially-conscious liberals into callous free-market conservatives.

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things. A few years ago, I was once told that I could only think that the film Black Panther isn’t very good because of my white privilege. Apparently, black people are incapable of aesthetic discernment or critical thought. (Do I need to mention that the person who told me this was white as sin?) This framing is as racist as anything in Carlyle. It could only have been invented by a rich white person.

Give them their due; rich white people are great at inventing terrible new concepts. Look at what’s happening right now: they’re telling each other to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. You should never tell people to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo – but we live in an evil world, and it’s stormed to the top of the Amazon bestsellers list. You maniacs, you psychopaths, look what you’ve done. I’m not saying people shouldn’t read the book – I read it, and I don’t get any special dispensations – but you should read it like Dianetics, like the doctrine of a strange and stupid cult.

…

The book is a thrill-ride along a well-paved highway – ‘powerful institutions are controlled by white people;’ true, accurate, well-observed – that quickly takes a dive off the nearest cliff – ‘therefore white people as a whole are in control of powerful institutions.’ Speak for yourself, lady! All a are b, DiAngelo brightly informs us, therefore all b must also be a. She doesn’t advocate for her understanding of the world, she simply assumes it. So it’s not a surprise that the real takeaway from White Fragility is that Robin DiAngelo is not very good at her job.

…

Imagine a devoted cultist of Tengrism, who sometimes gets invited by company bosses to harangue the workforce on how the universe is created by a pure snow-white goose flying over an endless ocean, and how if you don’t make the appropriate ritual honks to this cosmic goose you’re failing in your moral duty. But every time she gives this spiel, she always gets the same questions. Exactly how big is this goose? Surely the goose must have to land sometimes? Geese hatch in litters – what happened to the other goslings? Something must be wrong with these people. Why don’t they just accept the doctrine? Why do they hate the goose? We need a name for their sickness. Call it Goose Reluctance, and next time someone doesn’t jump to attention whenever you speak, you’ll know why. Of course, the comparison is unfair; ideas about eternal geese are beautiful, and DiAngelo’s are not. But the structure is the same. Could it be that Robin DiAngelo is a poor communicator selling a heap of worthless abstractions? No, it’s the workers who are wrong.

(By the way, how did you feel about that phrase, racial humility? I didn’t like it, but her book is full of similar formulations – she also wants us to ‘build our racial stamina’ and ‘attain racial knowledge.’ Now, maybe I’m an oversensitive kike, but I can’t encounter phrases like these and not hear others in the background. Racial spirit. Racial consciousness. Racial hygiene. And somewhere, not close but coming closer, the sound of goosestepping feet.)

I didn’t seek out any of the material I talk about here. It came to me. And it’s making me feel insane. The only social media I use these days is Instagram – because if I’m going to be hand-shaping orecchiette all night, and serving it with salsiccia, rapini, and my own home-pickled fennel, it’s not for my own pleasure, and I demand to receive a decent 12 to 15 likes for my efforts. (I will not be accepting your follow request.) A week ago, on the 2nd of June, my feed was suddenly swarming with white people posting blank black squares. People I’d never known to be remotely political, people whose introduction to politics was clearly coming through the deranged machine of social media. Apparently, that was ‘Blackout Tuesday.’ I don’t know whose clever idea this was, and I don’t want to know, but it came with a threat. If all your friends are posting the square, and you’re not, does it mean you simply don’t care enough about black lives? Around the same time, I was helpfully made aware of a viral Instagram album titled Why The Refusal To Post Online Is Often Inherently Racist. I honestly can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to live like this – always on edge, always trying to be Good, always trying to have your Goodness recognised by other people, in a game where the scores are tracked by what you post on the internet, and the rules are always changing.

#sam kriss #read the whole thing

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gwinforth · 5 years

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I’m so sorry for this. But here’s the first part of “Let Please” (Charkov and Boris), which is interlaced with part two of the thing I had [started here] which morphed into a fix-it fic that actually [follows from this snippet] which is reproduced here, for something like convenience. So it’s a double bill, the first part of “Let Please” and the second part of “Give Me Something I Believe”

notes: only incidental relation to any persons living or dead; same for any kind of documented chronology. Kryukov is not exactly Kryuchkov, the same way that Charkov is not exactly Chebrikov.

2nd note: headcanon-adjacent to @pottedmusic’s magnificent young [Charkov/Boris fics], but distinct (if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and go read those, definitely more worth your time)

and as for “Give Me Something I Believe” - explicit, Valoris, possible trigger warnings for mental health stuff, go carefully I guess

as always, unbeta’d. all mistakes are mine.

"Let Please” | 1

FEBRUARY, 1987

There sits, in the hills overlooking Moscow and not far from the university, a KGB health center, where the security organs keep themselves in trim fit. It is terra incognita to ministers of the Presidium, excepting a few particular cases, among whom Boris Shcherbina is counted. These special cases occasionally receive a special pass, and arrive for a late afternoon workout and the kind of high-level talk that is easier to hold amid the slapping of hard springy balls.

Boris could assure you that wasn’t a euphemism. He could describe to you the place. His unimaginative vocabulary was a good fit for how nondescript it was, outside and in: a low building that took in a lot of sun from the north and east sides, wide gray-carpeted hallways that smelled more and more strongly of chlorine the closer you got to the half-Olympic sized swimming pool, and strong soap to mask the ever-present undercurrent of a boys’ locker room stuffed full of sweaty gym kits. Sauna, massage, communications room.

Sometimes, of course, it wasn’t high-level discussion that called him here; where Boris was concerned, it was often the case that Charkov merely wanted to play. He and Boris would change into white shirts and shorts, take one of the neatly boxed squash courts, and volley the ball off the walls and floor, turning the room into something between an old pals’ game and a shooting gallery. Boris usually won. He had reach, Charkov had terrible eyesight and arthritic knees, while preserving a hell of a drive shot.

Then to the showers. The steam billowed from Charkov’s showerhead and filled the tiled room as he wrenched the tap to boiling and turned red, sponging his exertion away.

Boris stood under a lukewarm jet and rinsed the sweat off his balls. He coughed again, spat, and watched the pink-tinged mucus slide toward the drain with a frown. Then banished the thought as unhelpful. He doused his hair, the nape of his neck, turned the water off. He glanced at Charkov, focused on soaping himself up, and stepped to the bench at the far end of the room for his towel. He wrapped it around his waist, sat, then flipped it back open to air dry. He rested his heels on the tile and spread his toes to let the air flow between them.

“Just a game today?” Boris asked, voice low enough that it was obscured by the hiss of the pipes.

“Just a game,” Charkov replied. He rinsed off the soap suds, made one last turn under the water, tossed his sponge into the receptacle, and joined Boris on the bench. He sat heavily and began the slow process of toweling off.

A drenched cat: that was Charkov, with a rivulet of damp, dark chest hair down his sternum, blue veins bulging on the backs of his hands and tops of his feet, and sagging skin under his arms. He was still breathing in deep bursts from their game. His knees were swollen.

“Good game,” Boris said, then. No need to mention the score. “Always a pleasure.”

Charkov grunted. The towelling moved on from his chest and shoulders to his legs.

They had played this game for the past three decades, once a month, as clockwork as they could manage. Charkov always knew when he was in town - more and more, now that the containment structure was up, and had survived the winter. Boris wasn’t surprised when he received the bright white clearance card with Charkov’s dark, neat signature. Perhaps he had missed their games, too.

Not that he gave any sign of it. When Boris arrived, he had received the same nod as always.

It was a cool welcome for such an old friend. After all, Boris had come up alongside him in the world. Their paths had crossed at sometimes the most impossible, sometimes the most sublime moments. And out of the intercourse of years, Boris had learned - he flattered himself - a few of the man’s tells. The way his body held its tensions, the pauses that meant no and the silences that meant yes, or more often, convince me. A foggy biography that might have been more composed than lived, the only verifiable moments the ones that Boris had witnessed himself. (Which forced Boris to consider the obverse: Charkov inexplicably present, at socially deft moments: at a makeshift reception after his municipal-hall marriage, at his mother’s burial, at the ribbon-cutting of a new pipeline six months ahead of schedule. (The parentheticals multiplied as one suspicion sparked another sparked another - his nephew’s baptism, handing over his brother’s firstborn, watching Charkov’s sure handling of the scrunched, terribly small thing. (Hands dirty under the immaculate nails.) The idea of a family life lurking behind that death mask.))

Flipping the page back over, Boris would be the first to concede that what little he had learned of Charkov could, possibly, maybe, perhaps be a trail of breadcrumbs left in his path, yes, even after this many years. A cipher of a man. His phone calls were more about the time and the place, his letters more about the paper and the ink, the artifact rather than the words. His moods were seldom genuine.

Reading him from a distance was doomed, and trying to read him up close was equally hopeless. The instrument hadn’t been invented yet that could sound Maxim’s mind.

Today, Charkov seemed content enough. They hadn’t played to eleven points. They called the game in Boris’s favor at five; he was having trouble catching his breath, and Charkov had just missed two returns in a row. Just now, having mopped off his hips, he was rubbing the sorer of his knees, under the pretense that it needed to be extra dry.

There was something honest about getting old together, anyway.

Speaking of inescapable human conditions: “He’s going to have questions,” Boris said.

“Of course he will,” Charkov said, as if the thought were extremely dull. He had reached his toes with the thick towel. “We aren’t going to discuss Legasov. He knows what he needs to do. You know what you need to do.”

And that was final. Boris looked away, and caught the door opening.

A short man with calves like drumsticks entered, glistening with sweat. His shirt was already balled in his hand. He saw the Deputy Chairman and Charkov, side by side on the bench, and - snorted a laugh.

Charkov’s head raised to meet the interloper.

“I’ll come back,” the man said, still amused at some private joke.

The door swung shut behind him.

“What was that about?” Boris asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Charkov said primly, folding his towel.

And he would have liked to leave it at that, but Boris had recognized the man. Kryukov. Tongue firmly up Gorbachev’s asshole, whispering sweet nothings about out-reforming the reformers. Sweet words, sharp knives, politics as she is played. Boris glanced sidelong at Charkov, at his pale, age-softened underbelly, and rose to get dressed.

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“Give Me Something I Believe” | 2

(insert long screed about my very own recognition that this is verging too close to Real Historical Events for comfort, especially when it’s wrapped in something that’s so obviously fannish. my intention was to lay the groundwork for the end of Valery’s journey that we see, in the HBO series, and not comment or speculate on the historical Legasov.)

Ten p.m. A hunched man bundled in three layers, taking his little collection of cigarette butts, oozing apple cores, litter, and an unholy matte of hair, cat and man, to the bins in the alley.

It was a particular kind of indignity to shed more than your cat. Yesterday evening, the cat had looked at him balefully, shaking a strand of his hair off his paw.

Now we’re even, Valery had announced. For all the years of fur in his breakfasts and the territorial skirmishes over freshly dry-cleaned trousers.

The brick was glistening and the recent rain had stirred up a perfume of urine and sick. Valery emptied his bucket into the collection bin, felt his lungs surge at the unexpectedly sharp bouquet that rose with the sudden agitation of matter, and reached for his handkerchief.

What happened next was almost a parody. It was something that might happen to Stierlitz if Hollywood got their hands on him. He coughed, recognized from the ticklish ache in his chest that this might be the start of a proper fit and not just a few lung-clearing heaves, and closed his eyes.

Then snapped them open.

Deliberately, now, even as he hacked, he scanned the brick wall above the bins. He thumbed his glasses back up clumsily, leaving a thumbprint on the right lens. Two white chalk marks - the first one perpendicular, the second with a slant, forward. A finger long, about a knuckle apart, below eye line. The rain had done its best to wash them away but to Valery’s watering eyes, they glowed.

First: Need to talk. Then the forward slant: Stand by.

And that peculiarly Boris sign-off, jagging the chalk - and the pen, when they had done this at the work site - in a second stroke, that didn’t quite cover the first. It didn’t mean anything. It was just Boris, making sure Valery would note it, the way he would snarl at Valery to straighten his tie or zip up his fly.

Valery’s lungs had stopped trying to strangle him but he labored the recovery, in case his watchers were feeling like overachievers tonight. He kept his handkerchief wadded to his mouth and glanced around. He listened. Singing - irony in a meandering key - from the next street, cars rumbling, his own strained, whistling breath. No helpful narrator to answer a most basic, but most pressing question - when. How long.

He didn’t expect Boris to loom from the shadows then and there, of course, but the gooseflesh raised on his arms, the back of his neck. Boris had been here. Right where he was standing. How long ago? He hadn’t visited the bins in over a week. But the rain, the weather, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of days. Boris had been here. Perhaps he had seen the light in Valery’s window. Undoubtedly he had seen the car parked across the street.

Valery’s thoughts were suddenly ringing in his skull, redoubling back on themselves. He could get a message out, surely - now that Boris had broken radio silence, now that he had sent one faint flickering staticky burst across the bombed-out ruins of their lives - it was enough. Valery was full of animation. Energy. Breath. He carefully folded his handkerchief, checked inside his bucket. Opened the bin and shook it in again. His elbow rubbed against the bricks, buffing the chalk into non-recognition, a non-incriminating smudge.

Stand by. What an asshole, Valery thought. No.

* * *

SIX MONTHS AGO

He had enjoyed his two weeks in hospital so far, being treated for anemia and a psychological fracture. He didn’t feel fractured… a light sprain, maybe, but it was difficult to sleep, knowing what he knew. Possibly he had over-strained himself, a little. A disastrous meeting at the Institute and - well, here he was.

There were perks. They always brought him a tablet after the transfusions, and he had stowed up a little war chest: morphine, phenazepam, a nightly sleeping pill, and a small bottle gifted to him for luck. Emancipatory provisions, if and when they were needed. So far, everyone had treated him kindly. So far, no news had come of the reactors.

And perhaps that’s what had precipitated this entire - anemic attack - this blow-up brought on no doubt by hypoxia of the lobes (the soul, should such a thing exist, was not a candidate for diagnosis, the heart, only insofar as fibrillation might cause manifest a sensation of something not unlike despair) -

Valery exhaled. He sat with his elbow on the too-high sill, smoking at the open window. He supposed he was grateful they hadn’t diagnosed a case of slow schizophrenia. The rain had stopped; it was a few minutes before eleven in the morning. He had full account of his faculties, which extended to telling the time.

Just a strain. A stress fracture. And now he was being discharged. He was in his suit and tie and trousers, which hadn’t been laundered, so he smelled like the coffee he had spilled on himself and very stale sweat.

He wondered if Boris had called.

The phone calls with Boris had grown further and further apart. At first, back in Moscow, they kept to the briefing schedule that had given tempo to their days in Pripyat - dawn, noon, dusk, often midnight, around the table, the center of the innermost circle - there was a lot to keep up on, those first couple of weeks home from the front. The containment structure’s progress, clean-up on-going, ne-ver-end-ing, but the return to Moscow had signaled the turning of a corner.

They had returned to civilization, and so. Faces Valery had never seen on the ground in Pripyat, suddenly sitting among them as equals. Total strangers sending over their own briefs, sneaking a few small coins of their successes, and happy to leave their failures on their own heads. Valery hated them, and hated the way Boris was resigned to them.

Politics steered the paperwork. There would be criminal charges, but before charges could be brought, a full picture of the disaster had to be wrestled into focus from the mosaic of data. Statements, facts, figures had to be compiled, Boris as chair was umpiring five or six competing drafts of the commission’s report (“And mine doesn’t get top bill?” “Who are you, John Wayne?”), and he was still flying out weekly to stare at the containment structure. So it was only natural, Valery supposed, as his own role faded into the larger chorus of technical and legal niceties, that Boris should have less time to sit up with him til midnight, musing quietly as Valery calculated and smoked. Long dinners turned to hurried lunches turned to a quick chat before a meeting, a phone call to discuss a revision, and the weather. Boris didn’t need his expertise as urgently now. But he kept track of his people. He was kind that way. The last call - “Going home for a couple of weeks, to relax; going to read something that isn’t asterisked to hell and back!” - and Valery wishing him well.

The holiday in Kiev turned into two months, then three. Silence the entire while. Sometimes Valery moved to pick up the phone, or a pen, but the thought of disturbing Boris’s rest - or the thought of receiving no reply - conveniently, one or the other was always on hand to strangle the impulse.

Valery went back to his office, the office politics and knife-smiles of the Kurchatov Institute. He was still loved, he knew, and respected, he knew, but not universally - and he had left his borders undefended.

That was the backdrop to his slight, small, hardly-worth-mentioning breakdown. The KGB hadn’t kept their side of the bargain, yet. And far from the laurels he was expecting on his homecoming, he was meeting resistance. He was angry about what that signalled. (He was terrified of what that signalled.) And he didn’t have the stamina he once had; hell, even climbing a couple flights of stairs could leave him winded. He felt utterly exposed and at everybody’s mercy.

The door opened behind him, sending a harsh wave of sound through the room as the hinges squealed. His body jumped from the chair.

“Dressed, Comrade Legasov? Time to go.”

One of the nurses. Valery stubbed out his cigarette and nodded. He patted his pockets down to make sure he had everything, staring at the floor.

Someone helped him into his coat. Valery grabbed his collar back, turned, and saw the nurse still at the door, blank-faced. He looked to his left, at the body next to his.

The knotted tie sitting just so, the jawline, shoulders spanning his vision - Valery looked up into Boris’s face. Valery stuttered out his name.

Boris was severe, like a statue of himself. He didn’t smile. He nodded to the door.

Valery fell in behind him, silently. The nurse didn’t dare follow them.

The car was waiting out front. And finally, as the car swung out and joined traffic, Valery got the courage to ask: “What are you doing here?”

Boris stared straight ahead. “Taking you home.”

* * *

The garbage had been mouldering for two weeks. Apparently the cleaning lady had been warned off. If they had searched the flat, though, they didn’t see fit to take out the trash.

The cat had been allowed to slip out, which caused Valery some distress when the helpful geriatric next door mentioned seeing it - him? - haunting the stairwells. Boris left Valery perched on a chair and did a brief check of his other rooms, opening windows as he went. He assumed the rooms hadn’t been ransacked. It probably always looked like this. The bedding was musty.

The cat came creeping along the balcony railing as Boris was flapping the bedsheets into the fresh air.

Boris opened the door into the apartment and stood back. The furry thing leapt off the railing and bolted past him into the flat.

Valery was holding it against his chest and looking teary when Boris returned with the sheets. Boris decided to ignore this. He dumped the sheets on the bed, returned to the kitchen, and made a clattering show of putting on the kettle and raiding the cupboards.

Some minutes later they sat at the kitchen table, cups of coffee steaming in front of them. Silence except for Boris’s spoon, with a small helping of sugar, knocking around his cup. Valery picked at a cat hair on his sleeve.

Boris dropped his spoon heavily. He saw Valery flinch. Valery was expecting fury, but even Boris wasn’t prepared for the rough, uneven huskiness of his voice when he asked, “Was it about the reactors?”

Valery shook his head. “They aren’t fixed.”

“They will be,” Boris said.

“We’ve been waiting for months.” Valery touched a drop of coffee that had landed on the formica top.

“Trust me,” Boris said. “For a little longer.”

Valery’s head listed to the side. His eyes swept Boris, then the table, then his hands, then darted to some sound Boris didn’t hear. He nodded, agitated. Nodded again. Boris felt the table jostle as he bounced his leg.

“Valera -”

“I want to come with you.” Valery’s hand suddenly lunged across the table. “When you fix the reactors, when you re-fit them. Take me with you.”

His fingers dug on Boris’s knuckles. There was a febrile glint in his eyes, out of the shadow cast on them by the single bulb. Some of his strange energy flowered through his skin. Boris felt the blaze of Valery’s hand on top of his and thought, careful, Valera, you’re becoming a fanatic.

The strength of Valery’s stare demanded an answer. He had stopped fidgeting. He was oddly still. “Take me with you,” he repeated.

Boris turned his palm, and captured Valery’s warm hand. “I will.”

And another thought, one that Boris had to dismiss by force, was this: he had sat with men who were cracking up before. They cut one of two ways: loud, or quiet. Hot, or cold.

* * *

KIEV

Boris watched the needle slide into his vein, then followed the rising tide of blood in the vial as it filled. When it was finished, a sleight of hand to yank the needle out and press a cotton ball. He folded his elbow to keep it tucked tight. He had already given them urine, hair, saliva, had his heart and lungs sounded out with stethoscopes and scans, his pulse measured, and his dignity forever reduced. His blood, presumably, would tell them the rest of his mortal secrets. Not today; today he was on his own recognizance, walking alongside and bargaining with the pessimism that had anchored itself to him. It was a beautiful day. As yet, he reminded his gloomy shadow, nothing was certain.

Three doctors packed into one office when Boris arrived for his follow-up appointment. Boris put on his most charming, his most indulgent smile. He didn’t envy them. They were just the messengers.

“Good news, I hope?” he asked. You’re dead, Boris Yevdokimovich.

They told him it was a case of “wait and see”, out of the goodness of their hearts. It would be a long illness - though they didn’t give him much in the way of comparison. “Long” compared to old age? Compared to stepping on a landmine?

No mention of radiation, no mention of Chernobyl, which Boris approved of, the small part of him considering history beyond his own.

Boris nodded along as they took it in turns to explain. They kept it very simple. Blood, bones, lungs. He hoped he looked placid. He hoped he looked brave. He couldn’t feel his legs.

At the end, he thanked them for their service.

* * *

It was past midnight. Neither of them had said a word in hours. (Why don’t you sleep? Counterpoint, why don’t you go home?) Boris was slouched on the settee, hands clasped on his middle, legs stretched out in front of him. His collar was loosened. Valery had changed into pajamas after a bath, a white vest and satin pants, and was curled on the chair, blanket and cat on his lap.

He stared at Boris. He wasn’t asleep. He was in repose, a quiet and heavy state that Valery had seen him lapse into back at the plant, after a very long day. It wasn’t a thoughtful quiet. It was empty-minded - so Boris claimed. Valery wasn’t so sure.

Valery, for his part, was trying to decide if he was imagining this. The last two weeks were a film reel with half the frames chopped out - thanks to pharmacological nudging and nerves scribbling up and down the agitation scale like a seismograph. Maybe as he taped the reel back together, he was inserting a few wishful scenes.

The wishful thinking might extend further back than that - all the way back to that morning, when the phone woke him from a dream about a presence. The presence was no one in particular, just a warmth that wasn’t the cat or the radiator, a hand that wasn’t his own. He was starting to enjoy the feeling when the phone rang, and the smell of cat shit fresh in the pan wound into his nose.

Once they got to the reactor, sleep was nobody’s priority. It was its own world. He must have slept, and he might even have dreamed. He stared at Boris in the flesh, the rise and fall of his chest.

Could he have imagined all that? Boris being with him, letting Valery touch him, hold him, use him, giving himself as a cup of comfort. Boris’s silvered head bent over him, the powerful bunch of his shoulders under his dress shirt, his forearms with their salt and pepper hair holding him down. Wrapped around him. His fingers in Boris’s hair, or those strong fingers in his hair. The shiver started at his scalp in a phantom grasp and rolled down across his shoulders. His cock, quietly stirring in the confines of his pajama pants, rallied.

Sasha levitated to his feet indignantly.

Boris opened his eyes at the sound of Sasha landing on the floor. He rolled his head to the side to look at Valery.

Valery felt stricken to the fucking core. He clutched the blanket on his lap a bit tighter.

A second ticked by.

Maybe Boris could smell it on him, or maybe he remembered some of those same fantasies. He sat up, stretched his neck, rolled his shoulders. For God’s sake, Valery thought.

“Will it help you sleep?” Boris asked.

“Yes.” Valery swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Boris nodded seriously. He rose, took a few steps towards him, and held out his hand. Valery let the blanket fall away and shifted himself, jutting absurdly, to the edge of the chair. Boris pulled him to his feet.

* * *

The change in scenery made conversation possible. (Also, maybe, Valery’s insistent erection, and Boris’s stupid all-encompassing kindness. The way Boris was sitting at the edge of the unmade bed, with his hands around the back of Valery’s legs.)

“Why did they send you?” Valery asked. He squeezed Boris’s shoulders.

Boris shook his head. “Nobody sent me. I got back, and heard what happened.”

(Valery didn’t want to ask what, precisely, had happened. He remembered storming out of the meeting. Then, God knew why, walking back in. After that it was all, graciously, a blur.)

“I lied in Vienna,” Valery said.

An odd pivot, but Boris followed him, even if he didn’t quite follow. “You told the truth. Responsibly. That’s all you could have done.” Boris caressed the back of his thighs, the tendons right above his knees, and up to cup his ass. He leaned in to press his nose alongside Valery through the silky smoothness of his pants, snugged his pelvis closer with both hands. “I was so proud of you.”

Valery clasped his hands around the back of Boris’s neck and swayed. Shaking his head again.

Boris looked up at him, smiled comfortingly. He hooked his fingertips in the waistband of his pants and pulled them down his thighs.

He felt the heat coming off of Valery. It beat on his face, and Boris cocked his head to admire him. Heat and that smell that Boris never got tired of. Slightly damp, a little sour, a little savory. (How to explain: the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers was an inveterate dick-sniffer. Note that detail in the starkest typeface, and the most prosaic language.) And while Valery wasn’t a large man, he was gorgeous.

“Beautiful little Valera,” Boris murmured, staring down at him, and Valery twitched.

Ah. Boris hid his smile by brushing up the hem of Valery’s vest. He kissed Valery’s lower belly, the crease of his thigh. Blond hair tickled his lips and skin that was soft, pale, pillowy, yielded as he used the edge of his teeth and one incisor to nip at Valery’s hip.

Boris nosed under him and kissed his balls, too. Furry. Boris ran his tongue up the side, wrapped it around the head like a scarf, sucked the tip into his mouth. Popped it out again. Clenched his fingers in Valery’s cheeks, kneaded, hugged him when Valery shifted on his feet, widened his stance, and rooted himself to the floor. (“Yes. Please.”) Boris pressed a kiss to the shaft, licked it back off, dragged one finger in and out of his mouth, and pressed his face against Valery’s stomach. Relax; he reached around and started working it up inside him. He curled and wormed as he went, taking up space, careful not to hurt.

Valery’s hands around his neck got tighter to steady himself. Boris felt him rock his hips, circle them just a little, for more of that solid sensation.

Boris worked gently. No need to catalog how much of his technique was learned through solitary exploration, or how much he had learned from shower room talk, women who did such things for a living, and the occasional shy, stuttery type who burst into a carnal butterfly behind closed doors. Even a honeypot or two - he couldn’t be sure - with a certain impression of antiseptic, more spiritual than physical, that clung to those astonishing strokes of luck. He curled his finger again and rubbed hard against the close-clinging wall.

He was rewarded by a sound, a gorgeous deep one, and the delightfully pink head beading up, a drop or two of pre-cum falling in slow motion.

Boris sat back. Valery always stood lopsided, and yes, it was funny. It was … cute. It made Boris want to -

Well, he could, couldn’t he? He dragged Valera toward him, using the finger inside him and his arm looped around Valery’s legs, and sucked him. Valery’s hand grabbed at his hair to catch himself, and Boris hummed his approval at the helpless thrust that sent Valery skidding over his palate. Slow down. How’s that?

Valery started sounding like his old self, then: more of this. Less of that. Pants fallen around his ankles, voice clipped as he fed orders and profanity and moans back to Boris’s hands and Boris’s mouth and Boris’s tongue. Then it was only a matter of pressure, of rhythm keyed to every twitch and groan; it was a matter of giving Valery what he wanted.

Almost perfect. Until Boris twisted his neck to get Valera out of his mouth. Coughed with his lips pressed together, once, twice, hoping Valery wouldn’t notice because Boris’s hand was suddenly squeezing him and stroking upwards, quick and sure like feeding rope, and Valery’s balls were cinching themselves up for their finale.

* * *

He took a staggered step toward Boris, felt the burn of Boris wrenching out of his body; Boris caught him as Valery slumped onto his lap.

Valery shifted to keep from slipping off Boris’s knee. He pushed Boris back; flat on the mattress, following the pressure of Valery’s hand, and Valery tipped over on top of him.

Quiet, while Valery’s erection throbbed out slowly. Boris staring at the ceiling, looking dark-eyed and gentle in profile. Valery noticed the splatter on his collar, and smiled to himself. He shifted onto his elbow and looked down at Boris.

“Feeling better?” Boris asked.

“Yes.” Valery was, in fact, feeling like he’d smashed out of something; like he’d been encased, history cooling around him, setting like cement. But now he noticed the orange glow of the lamplight, the softness of the mattress, the lay of Boris’s body next to his. The world was more than empty paper shapes, puppets and strings and the hollow space between atoms. His mind was in it again, in the smells and weights and heat.

Valery got his hand on Boris’s crotch and leaned in to kiss him.

Boris’s hand met his face to stop him. The edge of his fingers caught his chin, settled against the sag under Valery’s jaw. Valery felt the wide pad of Boris’s thumb trace the cleft of his chin and then press to his lips. Like a kiss, but not. In lieu, Valery supposed. Valery flicked the tip of his tongue against Boris’s rough thumbprint. He grinned.

Boris couldn’t bring himself to smile back; the corner of his mouth tightened, then the expression faded.

“What’s wrong?” Valery asked.

Boris coughed, down in his chest. His hand fell away from Valery to stifle it. He seemed undecided, measuring Valery up with his mouth pressed shut.

“Tell me,” Valery insisted. I’m all better, you’ve cured me. I’m not fragile.

Boris’s hand clasped his arm. “They’ve seen enough of the report. They’re going to charge Dyatlov. Fomin and Bryukhanov, too.” His grip tightened, as if to steady Valery.

“What?” Valery’s head craned. “What?” His head tilted more. “The report isn’t - it doesn’t even say -”

“They’ve seen enough,” Boris interrupted. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, then sat up, shrugging off Valery’s hand. “We’re testifying. Khomyuk. You. Once it’s done, we’ll fix the reactors.”

Valery stared.

“Say just what you said in Vienna,” Boris said, as if any of this made sense. “Bad decisions. Operator error.”

“I still have my notes,” Valery said coldly. The mattress had lost its form, his heart had lost its shape, Boris had lost his substance. They were living in a Charkovian diorama after all.

“That’s all you have to do,” Boris said, and he had the nerve to try to sound reassuring, to cradle Valery’s hand as if being touched meant anything here. “We only have to get through the trial. Then it’s over.”

* * *

Idiotic choice of words. Valery was on his heels - back in his pants, thankfully, accomplished while Boris was putting on his coat to hide the dribble of cum on his collar; Valery roared at him down the hallway, across the living room. Boris reached the front door, and Valery seemed ready to follow him out to the car Boris hadn’t called.

Boris refused to have a row in public, and that included the neighbors: so Boris planted himself on the doorstep, finally threw a little of his anger that wasn’t really anger back at Valera, hid behind his size, his position, and took long poisoned rakes from Valery’s harpy-taloned fury. He got the worst of it, because he wouldn’t raise a hand or a word against Valery anymore. Not anymore. He was a fucking rat; it was true, he was Charkov’s bum-boy; guilty, if he had an ounce of courage; but he didn’t: he was dying.

And don’t come back here, Valery finished. The door slammed, the lock turned.

Boris found himself being eyed by a skinny youth at the end of the hallway, sitting on the carpeted steps. Boris caught a whiff of antiseptic along with the boy’s Belomor. He tossed his head like a bull, huffed and straightened his coat. He plunged down the stairs and out to the street.

* * *

The tremors started in earnest. He smoked, he paced, finally he took a sleeping pill, like an exit hatch from the thoughts that had only one end. He woke with the sun up and thought that the light through the living room curtains looked like stage lighting, and last night had been an awful little melodrama. He was ashamed. He called in to his secretary at the institute: he wouldn’t be coming back to the office yet. The voice on the other end was surprised to hear from him. So he was out, at large again; let his colleagues go into their huddles and make of that what they would.

And on and on. The trial suddenly loomed. An official summons, interviews the prosecutors, the KGB, and finally with Ulana Khomyuk, better angel of any hero’s nature, black dog to the timid and the coward.

I’ve already given my life. And nothing to show for it, but a creeping roughness in his lungs and the rewards that Charkov dangled for him, just out of reach. Time to change the tune at the Kurchatov Institute, flip old man Aleksandrov off his chair and put him on next, like changing a record. If he behaved himself. If not, no medals, no money, no...

You haven’t talked to Shcherbina? Ulana asked, skeptically.

There’s nothing to talk about.

* * *

Valery clambored down the thin metal steps onto the tarmac. He handed over his briefcase without a word, and followed his escort to the convoy.

Another organelle held the car door for him. He froze when he saw Boris, or rather Boris’s knees, already crammed into the back seat. And then, since there was no choice, he crouched and folded himself into the car.

Boris had obviously been rehearsing something - fitting. Something polite, something that wouldn’t offend the ears of their two, and well-armed, chauffeurs. Whatever it was, Valery saw it die on his lips. Boris nodded to him, once, and turned away.

Valery turned to look out the window.

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agameforgoodchristians · 4 years

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Fake news and Alternative facts (Proverbs 14:5)

When we made the The Trump Cards: "Fake News" from the Bible expansion deck [Sold Out], we composed each to display a direct quote, action, or attitude expressed by the Cheeto-in-Chief. Just like all of our other decks, each Canon Card featured a Biblical reference. However, in this deck, the cards showed how its content is always in direct contradiction with Biblical principles (making the Bible "fake news").

Our purpose was to show how his words and actions were at odds, with not only common sense and decency, but also the witness of the Bible. Thus, we included gems like:

Watching magically invisible thousands upon thousands of people cheering as the World Trade Center was coming down. (Ephesians 4:25)

Not having at least a fourth grade understanding of why the American Civil War occurred (Proverbs 17:28)

That time you said "I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, okay, better than I think almost anybody". (Proverbs 18:2), and of course,

“WRONG!” (Proverbs 18:6)

This last was always a good indicator of when he was/is lying.

But this Card Talk is NOT about the Orange Dumpster-Fire in Chief. It’s not about 45’s inability to consistently operate in a world of truth. It’s not even about his supporters (at least not directly). It’s about your mother, your friend, your cousin, your co-worker, (etc) who keeps sharing lies on the internet.

Conspiracy theories, anti-intellectual screeds, and ridiculous medical advice that is not only dangerous, but makes all who shelter under the umbrella of “Christianity” look bad.

We could spend this Card Talk explaining the various reasons why this problem even exists from a psychological and social perspective. We could pontificate on cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, social conformity, source amnesia, “the repetition effect,” “the backfire effect,” “magical thinking,” the Dunning-Krueger effect, or motivated reasoning, but others—with the appropriate letters behind their names in psychology and sociology—have already done a much better than we ever could.

Likewise, we could add our voice to the many who look for the ideological reasons within Christianity itself to explain why some of the faithful are more susceptible to believing and spreading lies. For example, we are a religious group founded on one charismatic religious professional, who was largely shunned and lambasted by His peers, who wandered the region screaming, “Hey everyone: you’re getting it all wrong! Listen to Me! I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life…!” (Deep, right?)

Instead, we want to focus on the problem and solution from a purely biblical perspective.

The Problem Biblically Stated

Each of the Trump Cards contains a Bible passage. Many are in the book of Proverbs: a book dealing with wisdom, Wisdom, truth, and Truth. Let’s look at a few of them.

Proverbs 14:5

A faithful witness does not lie, but a false witness breathes out lies.

Proverbs 17:28

Even fools who keep silent are considered wise; when they close their lips, they are deemed intelligent.

Proverbs 18:2

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.

Proverbs 18:6

A fool’s lips bring strife, and a fool’s mouth invites a flogging.

and to throw in a New Testament verse in for good measure:

Ephesians 4:25

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

Do you feel all Christians can look at there social media feeds and feel that they have not run afoul of these verses?

what happened to this standard of Truth in Christian communities?

Look: we are suspicious as anyone about everything. Probably more so. We made a game that digs into parts of the Bible most people are happy to skip: clearly we have no problem doing our homework to find truth, even if it makes us unpopular in some circles. But that’s the thing: WE DO OUR HOMEWORK. Why? Because that is what we were raised to believe good Christians do.

We were raised learning about the Bereans in Acts 17 who “searched the scriptures daily” to see if Paul was full of shit. These people fact-checked the Apostle Paul and Christians today can’t spend .02465443 seconds to check the source of the post they are about to share?

What does it say about the faith that there are people who make it clear that they haven’t opened a book, or done a half-hearted Google search on a topic, since 7th grade (and even then, they only read the back of the book/Sparknotes, and then invented the rest of the “research project,” hoping the teacher was too burnt out to notice)?

What kind of a witness to the world is that?

A Simple, Biblical Solution

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies about this, is that the people we see most often quoting 2 Timothy chapter 2, seem to be the ones in the most egregious violation of it’s message on a daily basis.

Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.

~ 2 Timothy 2:14-15 (NRSV)

Now, we know the context of this is about contemporary debates over the resurrection (because we did our homework, See vs. 16ff), but the metric discussed is salient to this discussion.

The NRSV’s rendering “do your best” is from the Greek word σπουδάζω which means to be “earnest” or “diligent,” especially in educational matters. Thus, as the ye olde King James Version states it, and we had beaten into our heads when we were growing up:

“Study to show yourself approved… “.

[Don’t believe us? You can confirm it HERE, HERE, and HERE]

The answer is right there: If you do “diligent,” “earnest” “studying,” you won’t be “wrangling over [fake news], which does no good but only ruins those who are listening.” You will be “approved” by God and all the rest of us creatures who have to listen to you, read your content, or be forced to block your nonsense.

And think about all the people who have been “ashamed” (or should have been) when whatever garbage they posted on Monday was proven to be false by Thursday. What do those people say to the “unbelievers” who they are trying to “witness” to about the wisdom and power of their Lord and Savior? A biblical mindset could have prevented all of this.

As we discussed in our Card Talk on Matthew 18:20—the famous “where two or three are gathered in His name…” passage—the Hebrew community and the early Church both put a premium on truth.

In matters of discipline, Deuteronomy 19:15 required multiple sources to bring charges against someone in the community.

One person’s wild accusation (or post, or Youtube video, or tweet) was not sufficient for the community to embrace.

So there is a simple, biblical ideal for our modern age: do your damn homework or STFU.

if you didn’t study and verify the real-world, sourced from MULTIPLE reliable places, information YOURSELF

DON’T F@#%ING POST IT.

Perhaps we can all learn something from so simple a biblical principle.

But what do we know: we made this game and you probably think we’re going to Hell.

#fake news #Faith or Bullshit #Truth #Proverbs 14:5 #2 Timothy 2:15 #d

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mrschimpf · 5 years

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So...I got this review on ff-net for "Longing" this morning. Usually I love reviews because they give me encouragement...this ain't one of them, though.

If you don't want to read through it, in summary...

"Great story, but it seems like you hate men and the direction of society. Why isn't Dean just the bland fella presented in the show? Why is he violent and a cheating asshole who's rich; that's Logan y'know? Love the story as I said and Madeline and Louise are great, but I'm done with it."

Yeah, a lot to unpack here if you're not in the GG fandom like I've been since near the beginning, along with the basic concept of fanfiction.

"It's a well-written story with good characterisation of Rory and Paris but...there's a lot of anger in it."

When I started the story in 2003, the sky was the limit, and Paris and Rory were on their way to great lives bereft of any issues with men and so much potential for women in the world. Fast-forward to 2019...where we have a lying cheat of an asshole in the White House, merely disagreeing with a man is enough to bury your Twitter mentions in hate, and LGBTQ+ rights are being attacked at every turn.

Then we have the aftermath of AYITL, which dynamited Rory's future into being completely dependent on men (aka Logan), took away her entire drive and reason for being, and left her as a homewrecker having a kid she probably never wanted. And Paris is in a loveless marriage with a completely underwritten Doyle whose character traits went from 'being a loving and supporting boyfriend to a neurotic Jewish girl with the entire world upon her shoulders' to 'wink-wink Danny Strong writes Empire and Oscar-winners; Doyle can't raise kids let's just write that Doyle's that now since we threw out the Doyle notebook in our post-S6 burning of all our character notes'.

Yeah, over sixteen years, you tend to write for your reality, and the reality right now? Totally sucks.

"Some of it seems to be directed at society, some of it at the show, with a disproportionate amount of it being taken out on mostly male characters who bear only a passing resemblance to their on screen portrayal..."

Once again...AYITL hasn't aged well. Society hates journalists. It hates driven women (see my last post taking down that asshole who hates Brie Larson). Males are pretty damned well responsible for most of it. And I haven't had the best male figures of my life and have been mostly around women. I'm probably not going to write a positive view of some men; it's bias, and I own up to it here.

And yeah, my men don't match up to how they are on screen. Because, fanfiction is...

'Fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, a particular TV series, movie, etc.'

Speaking of which...

"...Which seems to have got worse as I suspect you liked the show less and less."

You're reading my story. A Gilmore Girls fanfiction. My Twitter bio declares that I've loved it a decade and a half before the Gilmore Guys started their podcast. A show where I literally follow nearly main actor on the series into every future project they've had and watched loyally, for the most part. I buy every movie the girls have been in. Fanfiction isn't defined as 'a random person writing hate screeds against a particular TV series, movie, etc.'. You're not going to ever see me write even a drabble about how much Kevin Can Wait should be called Kevin Can Burn In Hell Because He's a Ghoulish Sexist Fuckface Who Celebrated His Wife's Death To Move On With His Former Hot Wife From Another Show.

Still love Gilmore Girls in full. But being a fan doesn't mean I have to like every single decision the writers and ASP ever made.

That is the fun of fanfiction. If I disagree with canon...I can disregard it, in part, or in full. I have never been able to find a fellow fan that agreed with every plot point the show has ever made. I hope I never will, because that's definitely not why anyone should ever be a fan of the show.

And excuse my language here...but I've written over a MILLION WORDS for this story. 27 chapters have been posted. I have an eventual endgame planned for the story that has been in my mind since the day I posted chapter one. Why the fuck would I write a million words about something I hate?!

"Dean has gone from a good first boyfriend who just wasn't right for Rory long-term to a violent thief who cheated on Rory throughout their relationship and never loved her anyway. And now, incredibly, seems to be just another entitled rich kid? It feels like you really want to bash on Logan but can't find a way to have him in the story, so you've turned Dean into him."

Oh reviewer...dear reviewer...oh, you don't know what you've gotten yourself into.

I have ALWAYS hated Dean. Always. Since January 2001 when I caught up on the backlog of episodes I missed because I only started watching during the two back-to-back night Christmas episodes, the only positive thought I've been able to spare for him was that Jared Padalecki (no attacks on him here, just the character) got a good living playing a completely underwritten bore who has nothing redeeming going on and a backstory that I would call 'existent'.

The show claims he's from the south side of Chicago in a neighborhood near the Dan Ryan that has 5% white people going by the zip code of his mail from there (the show's basic research department blew it there). Most white people from Chicago are in the Gold Coast, the northwest suburbs, or the North Shore. I have been adjacent to the Chicago market my whole life. He's from the North Shore, no question, judging from how his parents seem to have good enough wealth and how every white guy Chicago teenager story is drawn from a kid from the North Shore.

He literally punched Jess out three times!

He made Rory fear violence for merely losing a bracelet he gave her and for being near Tristan for a school function (LOL, Dristan...that burn still causes me to laugh at inappropriate times about how dumb it was, and I'm sure Tristan has it as one of his constant bon mots).

He called her home phone nearly a hundred times a day and drove her to the edge of madness with a 'must watch every day' love of Lord of the Rings that compares unfavorably to my four year-old nephew only loving Frozen, PJ Masks and Daniel Tiger. That isn't anyone any person has to tolerate in a relationship.

Dean’s only reaction to Rory trying to prove a point with her Donna Reed night was just she looked hot and he learned nothing about how women hate being confined to being solely homemakers and sexual receptacles.

He dumped her because she didn’t say “I Love You” like it was the goddamned bonus round in Wheel of Fortune and she didn’t get the solution out before the buzzer.

Dean’s shambles of a gift, that piece of shit car? It almost killed Rory and Jess. It looked like it didn’t have seatbelts. I’m surprised we didn’t get an episode where Dean ended up homeless because Richard sued his cheap ass into the fucking ground.

He decided to make her go back to him in front of the entrance of Chilton, where Rory would have looked like the biggest b***h in history if she didn’t return an ‘I love you’, and goddamned well knew it. Any good person would have done this in fucking private, like a considerate person.

He never respected the Chilton side of her life. At all. If it was up to him, he would’ve made up a bomb threat and had his friend imitate Rory’s voice to get her kicked out of the school she spent her young life trying to get into. If it was up to him, Harvard would have never even been a possibility, and if not for Jess coming in, he would have intimidated her into pushing off her dream entirely to stay in the kitchen.

His origin story was never mentioned outside 'he moved from Chicago and had a girlfriend in the past, Beth'. Fanfiction allows you to examine the holes in stories and go from there, and I just worked with them because the thing with moves to new locales? You can have a brand new image with people, and they will never know what you did in your old place. Judging by his violent/stalkerish tendencies, he has a pretty good case for having Imposter Syndrome that eventually reset itself in the Hollow.

Over time he went from a guy who seemed to like good literature to hyperfocusing on the 'it' media property of the time. Likely he started out liking fine literature, but once he fell in with the imbeciles of his friend group in the Hollow, that proved to be a lie.

He had a thing about being close to Lorelai. So much that around that time, there were so many more people shipping Lorelai/Dean than Rory/Dean as a romantic couple. If not for his later flanderization, that fangroup would still be strong.

HE CHEATED ON HIS WIFE!

**HE. CHEATED. ON. HIS. WIFE!

***HE! CHEATED! ON! HIS! WIFE!

****And outside losing his home and some stuff being damaged (rightfully fucking so) by Lindsay, both her and Rory took all the brunt of the damage his wandering dick did between all of them. Lindsay was guilted by her parents for checking out on her marriage and was never heard from again (I assume she's in a convent now because ASP's writing outside of Lorelai and Rory [or Paris, Sookie and Lane on a day she wasn't angry at the world for not pressing her hat right] for women was 'they are the enemy'). Rory had to find her way back to her old self (and she never did going by ending up with Logan). Dean? Welp, good thing "Supernatural" started at that time to save ASP the bother of having to explain what a dumbass Dean was.

*****Justice for Lindsay Lister! I hope she didn't go to a convent, but flipped off her parents, squealed out of town and is killing it in a career where she's respected, with a partner who loves her deeply.

The scene where he cornered Rory into sex in her house and said he didn’t love Lindsay was sexual assault and gaslighting. ASP intended it to be romantic, but instead created a nightmare scene that would be completely passe in a Lifetime movie. Rory’s first time was her being forced to give up her sexual agency for the pleasure of only Dean. And it’s exactly why the Paris/Rory scene I wrote on the yoga mats was intended to be the exact reverse of that trash.

He hoped to get ahead in life on a hockey scholarship. That's...not a life plan. And he paid for it by being stuck doing construction.

He hated Paris. He hated that Rory had her as a friend. He wanted a life with Rory that never involved Paris.

Paris is a strong-ass lady for daring to step to him and lie through her teeth about wanting Jess to stop the Great Stars Hollow Homicide of 2002 By The Coward Dean Forrester from ever being a thing.

LOL Logan is Tristan Lite and always will be.

About ten chapters back I mentioned how the girls consider Logan terrible already from a distance based on the New York media scene. Trust me, he's in this story (he may be a little more in this story later).

"There is a lot to recommend in this, like the slow burn set-up (although you've made up for it since!)..."

#backhandedcompliment (Also, what's to recommend? Love to know what you did like, but you spent all that time saying 'I'm mean to men', so I guess you ran out of time on that)

"...and turning Madeleine and Louise into three-dimensional characters..."

You sent me a flame, but didn't expand on what you loved about this? Thanks for the lack of feedback (and for misspelling Madeline’s name).

"But there are several reasons why it's not been an easy read so I won't be hanging out for an update, I'm afraid."

You basically said that you consider me a man-hater and that because I choose to have the ladies present their views in the story, you don't like that I'm drawing real life into their motives, mores and decisions. And you said I hated the show when most of my friend circle was formed through bonding through it, and we still love it, even if we think Rory needed to do better in life and ASP's writing weakened as each season went on.

I don't need readers like you, seriously. There are many other Rory/Paris stories you can read out there. As I have said in many other flame responses;

I am not the be-all end-all of Paris/Rory fic. PLEASE, read other writers. Enjoy their stuff. But don't whine at me or them because we choose to show that even in fictional worlds, people are against LGBTQ+ issues and people. We're not going to get equality by sugar-coating or whitewashing our way past those issues, and if you can't handle what I consider light attacks against entitled men, you should probably find something else to read.

#longing #paris x rory #review #review rant #fanfiction rant #gilmore girls #longing with a cherry tomato on top

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britpop-bowie · 6 years

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I had to write a review for school last year so I figured hey why not share it

Maurice by E.M Forster - review by Alex Stevenson

Maurice is a touching tale about a man exploring his homosexuality and therefore, his place in society. It was written in 1914 by E.M Forster and is set between the years 1900 and 1910. The story follows Maurice, a middle class Cambridge student, and his platonic love affair with the illustrious Clive Durham and his consequential sexual exploits. It also tells of his profound political self discovery in a very rigid society; learning to look past class and doubting his religion. It is definitely a romance novel although it does tell a much deeper story of a man's life and self rather than a simple two dimensional love story.

I really enjoyed this book for many reasons, first and foremost due to the language; the writing was so deep and intimate with the thoughts of the characters that it stole you away into their world's. This is set off beautifully by the opening inscription “dedicated to a happier year” which immediately sets the tone for a heart wrenching story. During a very emotional part of the plot, when Clive is falling out of love (a love that was described so deeply and passionately), he shows a clear distinction between Clive's more dry emotions and Maurice's forceful and passionate love. It is very subtly done as he keeps from directly referencing their emotions and instead just using individual thoughts to paint a picture. For example, he shows Maurice's desperation by saying “Clive must love him, his whole life was dependent on love” and therefore pulling you into the characters head to then feel alongside them. My favourite part of the book was the final paragraph as it was just so beautifully written, it is Maurice speaking to Clive about everything he has learn throughout and putting it so plainly. The way Maurice speaks is beautifully developed from his earlier character and it shows such a forward thinking political and social standpoint that many people fail to see today. It was so moving, in fact, that I had to read it over and over just to fully experience it and then demanded all of my friends read it too. I was also very interested in the perceptive and stark view of the characters of Maurice and Clive, and then later on Scudder although not as much. The two main characters seem to be an alarmingly self aware telling of Edwardian society and the way Forster portrays this through their actions is almost art. Initially I didn't like Maurice, right up until the last few pages I wasn't sure how I felt about him, he was shown to be greedy and selfish and entirely in the grip of a classist society.

However it wasn't perfect. I found that although many parts were emotionally engaging and full of power even during luls in the narrative, many parts became almost boring. The first few chapters are very difficult to stick with and although they act as an appropriate introduction, they lack the vigor of the rest of the book. There are also many smaller parts of the story that are either uncomfortable to read or just a bit too slow moving. I think it is necessary and helpful to the story and characterization that we see parts of the personal lives of characters but I just feel some areas, especially dialogue, were a little lacking.

It is important to remember when reading this book that some of the language is very old fashioned and has changed meaning or now become difficult to understand and so it will require a lot of patience. Despite this the characters still remain relatable and easy to empathise with despite the time difference.Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, it was beautiful and filled with powerful emotions that were deeply moving. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys tough reading as the language is quite old fashioned. Despite that it is a story that is still relevant today and deserves to be read.

Some powerful,interesting or unknown vocabulary:

-never married and seldom died

This is referring to students from Maurice’s second school, i believe seldom died is a metaphor for either power and happiness that comes with being a bachelor or the ridiculousness of hoping to live a fine life without marriage. Either way, it is a powerful line which stands out and evokes a lot of thought.

-Old pedagogue

An old word for a teacher, especially strict or pedantic.

-similitude

The state of being similar to something

-awful screed

A tediously long speech.

-a little too smart to be straight

In this case, it is referring to straight meaning serious or honest and is saying that he is too intelligent to fall into societal roles. However it’s quite entertaining with context from a more revised definition of straight meaning heterosexual and knowing that the character being discussed is in a homosexual relationship.

-Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself, it couldn’t do things

A brilliant example of the raw power and emotion in the language used by Forster, a bleak outlook on love after a seemingly simple goodbye that also adds perfectly to the character of Maurice.

-he saw only dying light and a dead land.

Repetition has been used to emphasise the disparity of his mindset even in such a beautiful place such as Greece.

-”Maurice, quo vadis?”

Quo vadis, meaning where are you going.

-passionate sheets of despair

Used to describe a series of emotional love letters.

-never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past

Pruriency, meaning an inordinate interest in sex.

Spoken in the context of other and how lucky they are to be rid of memories of such things, emphasising the guilt that was out upon gay men in the past and how deeply they felt it.

#maurice #e.m. forster #e.m forster #durham #scudder #in all seriousness this book is hauntingky beautiful

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rebelwheels-blog · 6 years

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Little Sparrow Freed From Its Cage

September 24, 2018

Per aspera ad astra - Through adversity to the stars

Hello there everyone! I have quite a bit of news to share with all of you lovely readers, as it has been quite a while since my last update. Hopefully my writing habits will be a bit more consistent now, due to the main reason I am writing this update. So grab a cup of tea, or coffee for you Americans, and be prepared for a lengthy blog entry.

Commencement to Independence

For the longest time, it was my belief that graduation was just another event where I would only witness others experience the joy of being released from the dictatorship of homework and the school setting.

Much of my student experience has been infringed upon due to various circumstances; whether illness was to blame, being placed in classes my superiors wrongly believed I belonged, or unwillingly leaving the only place I called home, as well as exiting the lives of many I held and hold close in my heart.

Not everyone experienced the same scenario as I did, which is wonderful. Even so, for much of my life there was a common denominator.

Adversity.

Due to my disability, my experiences and memories of the school setting are extremely unconventional.

Which leads to the less self-pitying part of my screed. If it weren’t for all those obstacles, and more, throughout my existence as a student, graduation would not grant me the same satisfaction and pride as it does now to declare to you all that I am no longer a high school student. September 21, 2018 was the day I was set free.

Although there are plenty of memories I have to look back on that made my school days less dreary, so I shall not admit that every second of my years at school were terrible, as I had the good fortune of making a few friends along the way as well as learning some lessons that allowed me to grow as a person.

So I thank all of you who have stuck with me through the good times and the not so good times, because I couldn’t have made it here without you.

I’d especially like to thank my first teacher who set me on the right path to homeschooling. You know who you are, with your huge green duffel bag full of wonderful toys each day as we sat in the garden room. Thank you for always being there for me academically and as a friend. You mean the universe to me.

Every experience and every person that one encounters affects the future, individually and worldly, good or bad, long or short. Because, who knows? Maybe one day someone who experienced something they perceived as awful will change the life of another so someone else will never experience what was already lived through by another.

Celebration?

To celebrate this momentous occasion, my grandmother and I designed what would normally have been the top of my cap to go along with my gown.

Then we made a message in a bottle, with the message being the poem The Road Not Taken as it is our favorite poem.

But the most important component to all of this is the timing of everything that has unfolded over the past few weeks.

Enjoy the first ever gif I have ever created, of course it’s to do with Stephen

I managed to finish the last of my exams the day directly before my grandmother’s birthday, which was coincidentally purposefully happened to be on my cousin’s birthday. Then, on Friday, I was officially set free from my classes on the birthday of my great grandfather. Everything took place over the course of three days, and three birthdays of three people that mean the world to me.

Funnily enough, exactly one week to the day, another event unfolded spontaneously. I was granted the most amazing graduation gift. A friend, a very old friend, of tremendous significance and value to me. We had not seen each other in almost nine years, but we always kept in touch. Last Wednesday, we broke our hiatus and had lunch together with our grandparents. I felt like I was in a dream. I couldn’t believe we were even in the same room. He has seen my old self, my pathetic self, and my happy self, and he never left. He’s one of a kind and I don’t know what I would do without him. Making him laugh after taking a nervous drink of water while we were at lunch and burping due to my liquid consumption was one of the highlights of our visit together. Hopefully we won’t have such a lengthy hiatus between seeing each other again, which neither of us believe will happen. I already can’t wait to see him again.

Then on the Saturday following that Wednesday, I swam with my other best friend who happened to come home from college that weekend. I honestly don’t remember the last time we just chilled out in the pool, or anywhere, and hung out like two normal teenage girls. Granted I did complain quite a bit about school work after we got out and had lunch, but that wasn’t the entire visit. It felt so normal to just hang out with my best friend, and I can’t thank you enough (you know who you are if you’re reading this). I couldn’t have asked for a better way to finish my classes.

But graduation is supposed to be a big deal, right? A huge celebration is supposed to take place, right? Well, I honestly have no idea how else to celebrate my accomplishment. I would love to have a party and do something the way everyone else does, but many of my friends and family live far, far away. So out goes that idea... Nevertheless, if no other celebration takes place, I am forever grateful for being able to visit with my friend from New Jersey thanks to his and my grandparents.

Moving Forward

Now that I have soooo much time on my hands, I don’t know what to do with it! Well, I do, but it’s only been almost a week since I finished my classes and it’s still rather odd. I spent the weekend creating and improving a sort of sketch that puts together my Halloween costume. Yes, I’ll be 19 by then and many will say I’m too old to do Halloween, but you know what? Adults are allowed to dress up and have fun too. Halloween is not just about the candy, well not to me anyway. To me, it’s about letting yourself be free to be whatever you want to be for one day of the year. As it seems that it is only socially acceptable to dress up when one is an adult around Halloween, if one were to dress up any other day of the year you end up being labeled as a psychopath.

Okay, maybe not a psychopath, but anyone dressed up as a character or dramatic makeup is worn outside a concert, theatre club, comic convention, or Halloween, etc., side glances and glares will be made.

I decided that I will be dressing up as my own version of Sherlock, as long coats are as much of a pain to get on as a dress. I have a few components of my costume together, but I still need the hat, scarf, and maybe shoes? I may just go with a pair of short boots that I have as finding shoes in my size is an entirely different story.

I wasn’t sure if the coat I had would look Sherlockian enough, so I decided that I would put together a sketch of my outfit to see how it would look. So I put this together.

Originally, as you can see, there was no face. But I worked on it and worked on it over the past few days and this the outcome. In the beginning I did trace the undershirt, but that’s it. I figured out the rest. I’m very proud of it, as it is the first drawing I’ve done in quite a while that I haven’t gotten angry with.

Having this freedom has made me realize that after a few days of numbly looking at social media, I am suddenly craving to learn new information and I miss my math and science classes. I think that within the next week I will unconsciously start to read books again just from the slight need I’ve had to expand my knowledge again. Maybe I’ll even start writing stories again due to new knowledge, as I have written down a few ideas for short stories the past few days. In the words of a good friend, the possibilities are endless.

Spinraza News

Luckily I have school finished to get through my next injection. I was reminded that I have to go through re-approval from the insurance, making my injection date is a week later than I wanted. This week I have to get blood drawn again as well as other tests.

Speaking of tests, I had to do a strength test last week, my first one after having Spinraza. My results have to either stay the same or improve in order for the insurance company to say I can keep having Spinraza. Needless to say, I was terrified that I wasn’t going to improve due to their standards. I’ve noticed more strength in my legs than my arms, granted my right arm is noticeably stronger, but I did not anticipate the evidence the strength test would grant me.

The first test was to tear a sheet of paper. No big deal, right? Wrong. I had to try to tear a piece of paper that was folded four times. I tried and it didn’t happen. So my physical therapist unfolded it so it was in half. I believed that I was trying to tear it wrong as I was using my nail to start the tear. But I was wrong. That’s how you physically tear a sheet of paper when you pinch it. So when it cooperated and I split the paper down the middle, I was like “okay, I could totally do that before Spinraza.” Again, I was wrong. When I did the baseline test, I was able to rip the paper but only if:

it was started for me

it was a single sheet unfolded

it only ripped sideways not straight down

My physical therapist kept my old paper and showed it to me to prove that I had improved. After I saw the paper, I felt like Captain America

Go ahead, enjoy that gif because Tumblr doesn’t allow more than 10 images so that’s the last one guys

Once I completed that question of the test, the test was gravy. I was actually able to do other things as well such as:

lifting a weight I couldn’t before

completing a short maze test without stopping my pen

pressing a stupid light button and making it stay on

opening a container that was entirely too difficult when I tried six months ago

I gained 5 points in the scoring system, from 11 to 16 points. I still can’t get over it. So much has been going on the past... Well, year, honestly. Between myself and my family members, it’s been nonstop.

Well, I think I’ve written enough for this update, probably too much... But whatever, if you guys enjoy these updates you don’t mind. If you don’t enjoy them... Well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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