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artemismoorea03 · 1 year ago

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DP x DC Prompt: The New Teacher

(So, I've seen a lot of prompts that have Danny go to Gotham and be a teacher but I don't remember seeing any with it in this direction, so on the chance that this is an original idea here we go!)

Jason was given a choice, or multiple choices. Babysit the Replacement on a mission that could last a week, go to Bludhaven and have some 'brother bonding time' with Dick who needed backup on a big case, or take a temp solo-gig in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere called Amity Park.

Well, considering he was still a bit hurt about the fact that B replaced him all those years ago and the pit loved to grab hold of that bit of frustrations towards his younger brother, that didn't seem like a smart idea. Dick wasn't an option either because he knew that would lead to 'talking about feelings' and other shit that he didn't want to do.

So he took the solo-gig.

It was supposed to be easy, at least that's what had been implied by the others he'd spoken to about the case. It seemed like most of the Justice League thought this situation was being 'exaggerated' because most of the time when somebody checked out what was going on there was nothing happening. No big take over, or kidnapping, or 'end of the world' situation, but there had been too many calls to put Bruce's mind at ease. The frequent calls mixed with the fact that the Government apparently had the area under a 'black out' made Bruce even more nervous.

Hell, if it hadn't been for the fact that Bruce was famous and that Scarecrow, Penguin and Riddler had all escaped from Arkham he would have been doing the case himself.

Which is how Jason ended up in a restraunt named 'Nasty Burger' looking at the news papers he had managed to get from a stand down the street while taking notes of things he had already seen. It wasn't just that the Government had cut them off, all of the tech in the city was easily 20 years outdated compared to the rest of the world.

Nokia phones, chunky computers, hell he'd even seen a kid with a PDA of all things. Thankfully, it looked like his tech still worked other than running slower than it should have, but thanks to modifications made by Barbara and Tim things were running better than he expected. But, they did struggle to have access to anything, specifically the news.

Hence the paper.

Ghost Boy: Friend or Fiend. A new vote cast by the city has found that the Ghost Boy - Danny Phantom - has had an astounding rise in support after the events over the Christmas Holiday. The new polls suggest that 43% of Citizens support Danny Phantom, with the majority of his support coming from the students at Casper High who insist that Phantom is a hero who has saved them countless times over the past few months. 49% of people still agree, however, that Phantom appears to be at the center of the majority of the attacks with many still claiming that he is the sole cause of the attacks. However, 8% of the population remain undecided, including many teachers, police and hospital staff. Upon seeing the new results of the pole Mayor Montez had this to say; "While I will admit that Phantom appears to favor the younger generation and frequently seems to come to their aid, we cannot forget what it has done in the past. Taken hostages, injured innocents, and caused millions in property damage. Phantom may not be a 'villain' in the typical sense of the word, but we shouldn't blindly trust him just because of a few good deeds."

So there was a... hero? Half hero - potentially villain - in Amity Park? That might have explained some of the calls they'd gotten from Amity park over the past few months. Still, he was concerned by some parts of the report.

Students at a high school were frequently coming under attack? So much that this potential-villain kept saving them? Just what was the cause? What could cause so many issues?

Jason looked up as he saw that same PDA kid talking with a girl with short black hair in a half-ponytail who was wearing a black crop-top. The girl seemed annoyed while the boy seemed worried about something.

"But it's Vlad, Sam... what if he does something?" He heard the boy whisper, "We should go back him up..."

"He doesn't need our help, besides Jazz ran away from home, remember? She got herself into this mess it's her problem to get out of it. Something that Danny should have learned a long time ago."

Jason frowned, pretending not to hear them as he hesitated then got up and walked over to the two younger teens. "Hey, excuse me."

The girl looked annoyed and suspicious while the boy looked confused.

"Uh, yeah?" Tucker asked.

"Hey, sorry to bug you both. But could you guys tell me about this... 'Danny Phantom' person?" He asked, holding the newspaper out.

The girl looked even more suspicious, "And... who are you?"

"And how haven't you heard of Phantom?" Asked the boy.

"I just moved to town." Jason admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. "So, I'm just trying to catch up on all the town drama."

"You moved to Amity Park... willingly? Psh, what do you have, a deathwish?" The girl grumbled.

"Come on, I just moved from Gotham, which is worse?"

The girl blinked as the boy laughed.

"Furries vs Ghosts, who will win~" He said as the girl elbowed him. "Ow! What?!"

"Danny Phantom is a hero." The girl explained, "He showed up in April and has been protecting the town since."

"A hero, huh? Could always use more of those in the world, but the mayor seems to have it out for him."

Tucker sighed, "No kidding, man. Somebody framed Phantom for something really bad and no matter what he does to try to fix it the city just see's that incident as the only thing he's ever done. It was the first big 'public thing' outside of the high school so it was huge but it wasn't his fault."

The girl reached for her phone suddenly, looking at it before she answered. "Hey, Danny. What's up?" She was quiet for a moment, "Yeah, we're at Nasty Burger, wanna join us? Lunch on me?"

A quiet mumble came through the speaker before she smirked.

"I'll order for you then. Double or triple?"

More mumbles.

"Triple it is. See you soon." She said, then hung up. "Come on, Tuck, Danny is on his way for lunch."

"Hell yeah, see you later, dude." The boy said, then jogged off with the girl.

"A teacher? Yeah, it looks like there's some openings but why would you want to have your cover as a teacher?" Oracle asked as Jason sat in his hotel room, looking through the paper again.

"Most of the incidents seem to surround the High School, I want to see what's going on."

Oracle hummed, typing for a moment. "Alright, well as luck will have it, it looks like teachers are sparse at Amity High, at least from what I'm able to get using your connection... which is infuriatingly slow, by the way, are you sure you did it right?"

"I've done it a million times, of course I did it right."

Oracle grumbled, "Stupid Amity black-out. Okay, so you have options. Most of the teachers have fucked off so all of the teachers in Freshmen year switch around to cover lessons or do mixed lessons. For example the English teacher also teaches Math and the normal Math teacher also teaches Science. So it looks like you could have any position you want and the school would just shuffle around the teachers."

"You said English is taken, right?"

"Yep, the teacher is named William Lancer and he- oh... wait, he's on a leave of absence due to injuries he suffered over Christmas Break. Concussion, broken arm, and bruised ribs, he'll be out for a few weeks."

Jason smirked, "Perfect. Sign me up."

". . . Jason, the English and Math teacher... never thought I'd see the day. Alright, I'll type up your application, send it in and casually push it to the front of the line. You'll be official by the time Winter Break ends in a few days. So get studying."

"Sounds like a plan, but I'll be fine, I mean our family is crazy and i deal with criminals on a nightly basis. How hard could this assignment really be?"

He would regret asking that question by the end of his first day as an Amity High School teacher.

#dp x dc prompt #dc x dp prompt #my prompts #might continue this #maybe not #we'll see

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covid-safer-hotties · 5 months ago

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The US Government Is Shutting Down A Key Covid Website

Tomorrow the US government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research, The National Institutes of Health, will shut down its Covid-19 ‘special populations’ website.

This site hosts a huge amount of information about how to treat covid and long covid in the immunocompromised and in people with HIV, cancer and similar immune supressing conditions - so-called ‘special populations.’

The site is going totally offline.

It’s a shameful dereliction of duty by the NIH which, behind Harvard, is the second largest publisher of biomedical research papers in the world. Doctors and clinicians all over the world use the NIH site for advice and treatment ideas.

And it’s going offline during a massive summer surge of covid infections in the US, a surge that is now topping 1.3 million infections per day. (One of whom was Anthony Fauci, who was infected for the third time last week). A surge killing 750 people a week in the US. Many of whom will be precisely the type of people this website is intended to help clinicians treat.

It’s a scandal.

The message it sends to vulnerable people could hardly be clearer - when it comes to covid, there’s nothing else we can do for you. Sorry. That’s it. We’re done.

It’s so terrifying.

It also sends a terrible signal to the medical community about where we are with covid

and will be materially damaging in efforts to treat vulnerable people, both in the acute stage of the disease and those with long covid.

The move to shut the page down is premised on an entirely false assumption: that we already know everything we’ll ever know about how to manage covid so there’s no point keeping a live web resource because they’ll never be anything to update it with ever again.

This is simply not true. While we know a lot about treating covid four years in, we absolutely do not know everything, not by a long stretch. As evidenced by the hundreds still dying every week in summer 2024. And as for long covid, we know very little about how to treat it. For a start, there is no agreed treatment plan. Absolutely none. But apparently we also know so much about this disease we can start shutting down online resources dedicated to it.

Please imagine for a second if a Trump administration rather than a Biden-Harris administration was doing this.

There would be an outcry.

But this move has so far been greeted by media silence.

It is left to a few disability activists and the covid aware to shout into the social media void.

Not that this is a surprise. This is how it has been for the last two years at least, guided by the business as usual, vax-and-forget strategy. More people have died of covid under the Biden-Harris administration than died under Trump. Despite having vaccines since 2021. You’d never know it by mainstream media coverage.

Some people have written to the director of the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, and asked them to keep the advice live and up-to-date. If you want to do this her email address is:

[email protected]

Long Covid Action has archived the site here

Maybe if enough people write to her and enough noise is made the decision will be reversed. Worth a try.

Overall it’s just another grim episode in the handling of the pandemic by the current US administration, an administration who, we should never forget, won power in large part due to the outrage at Trump’s handling of the first nine months of covid.

Solidarity to everyone still trying to protect themselves and their communities from covid against all the odds.

At least we can keep fighting for each other.

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #public health #wear a respirator

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a-very-tired-jew · 1 month ago

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Hot Take Incoming The more I read about Neo/New Bundism, the more I'm convinced that it's an ideology that is based on a weird mix of Ashkenazic white guilt, "yearning for the shtetl", and identifying with Yiddish culture over Jewish culture because the former emphasizes secularism while the latter does not (which belies that fact that Judaism has multiple ways to engage with it and you don't need to be religious).

This last part is especially important to understand as in the West, Judaism is emphasized as one of the Big Three religions even though it's one of the smallest in the world. Many of us are taught that Judaism is just proto Xtianity or Islam, and depending on where you live and your community you absorb that. Especially if your family is non-practicing and there isn't much of a Jewish community and culture for you to interact with growing up. Many of our holidays, cultural norms, and so on are associated with Xtianity and framed in regards to a Cultural Xtian society. Hence why I think so many young secular Jews feel that they can't actually connect with Judaism because the narrative they have from Xtian society plus their disconnect from Jewish society means they perceive Judaism through the Xtian religious perspective.

If Cultural, religious, and lax Xtians are this way, then sure Judaism is as well since Xtianity is based on it, right?

That's the mindset I've seen over and over.

This is further exacerbated by the immigrant communities in the North Eastern USA (NY, PA, NJ) that had massive moments of cultural exchange and assimilation. Deli culture in the North East is a mix of Italian and Jewish cultures. Historically, Italian and Jewish communities allied and mixed in the early 20th to the point where it's a stereotype. And if you don't believe me then let me point to Harley Quinn in pop media, any of the organized crime families and the start of Las Vegas, or the fact that you can get a cheesesteak in a Jewish deli in PA.

So it makes sense that Bundism is having a revival of sorts into it's Neo era. It's a socialist ideology that emphasizes progressive ideals that man of us agree with. But Bundism also emphasized secular Judaism by putting Yiddish culture at the forefront. It was a way to be Jewish without being religious, and if you have any hang ups on religious practice then it makes sense as to why this ideology might be attractive. However, there is a failure to acknowledge that the largest Bund, and successor populations/groups, had to give a pound of flesh repeatedly to "prove" that they were loyal because of the old dual loyalty antisemitic conspiracy. And that was never enough as these groups were wiped out after their governments were done with them.

(Note: some of the most ardent anti-communist Jews were ex-Soviet citizens who managed to escape and witnessed all of this firsthand)

Neo/New Bundism comes across, especially since Oct 7th, as an aggressive "yearning for the shtetl" that rehashes the compromises the Old Bund was willing to give the USSR regarding its Judaism by embracing and emphasizing Yiddish culture instead.

For example; look at all the literature and examples regarding JVP. They had the seder plate incident back in the Spring, have had literature that told Jews not to pray and/or speak in Hebrew but in English or Arabic, and have rabbis that denigrate and dismiss Jewish culture and history (as well as so many other incidents and issues). All they need to do is tell Jews that they should actually be secular socialists and speak Yiddish instead and you'd have one of the cornerstones of Bundism.

It didn't work during the early to mid 20th century, and it won't work now.

But nostalgia is a helluva thing.

And so it comes across as this highly aggressive rejection of Israel and everything it stands for, whether true or falsely attributed to it, because it's not about the Jewish connection to Israel but the Jewish connection to a more immediate loss: Yiddish culture, which was decimated and destroyed in the 20th century. This is especially true when talking to Ashkenazic Neo Bundists as their family histories, like mine, start and stop with the Shoah.

Consider that the Bund were one of the largest Jewish organizations in the Pale, the resulting Yiddish community in said region were the largest in the world, and they organized and fought the Nazis, then it makes sense as to why the loss would be so poignant for many and grabbing ahold of the ideology to create a connection makes sense. I know for me that if I were to dive into everything Yiddish I would develop a greater appreciation for my family and where I come from even with the loss of knowledge caused by the Shoah.

If you further consider that it's a secular ideology that puts socialism first, then Yiddish, and then Judaism last, then it makes sense as to why you see so many anti-Zionists emphasize the "Israel killed Yiddish" talking point (which I haven't seen in months, but I remember it being a thing up until the Spring). The ideology does not emphasize identifying with Judaism and Israel, but with Yiddish culture and institutions.

There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it isolates an aspect of the Jewish community and says "you're different from the rest of them" while at the same time emphasizing that they should assimilate into the rest of the world. And let's be honest, because it is a European based ideology it was emphasizing assimilation into Western civilizations of European descent.

It therefore makes sense as to why Neo Bundists don't identify with Israel and/or refuse to identify with it. They identify with the European aspect of their history and not with the Middle Eastern. The European connection is immediate and direct, the Middle Eastern is distant and cultural. I understand this position as its Biological Altruism theory in practice, but it does fail to take in the larger "ecological" community that is being Jewish.

Part of the ideology and its adherents also blame Israel for not reviving or reconstituting the Yiddish community and culture, which is ironic because that would be focusing on a very European subculture of Judaism (and anti-Israel activists continuously yell that the country is a White European Colony). Ironically, this "Israel killed Yiddish" point either fails to take into account or lies through omission that the Nazis and USSR killed the largest Yiddish cultural centers and populations in the 20th century and that Yiddish culture in the USA has faded away over time as more and more ethnicities and cultures have assimilated and torn down their metaphorical, and sometimes very real, isolationist walls.

Unfortunately Neo Bundism focuses on the pre-WWII aspects of Bundism. I've personally talked to a bunch of Neo Bundists, and witnessed/read on social media their writings and interactions, and in each instance they emphasize that Bundism has been around since before WWII, was a widely supported ideology, and it stood opposed to Israel and Zionism.

Except they rarely talk about Bundism post WWII. After WWII and with the establishment of Israel it dropped the opposition position. Israel became an extant country and opposition to its existence didn't make sense anymore. It dropped the anti-Zionism, but still emphasized doikayt. It emphasized that Israel should adhere to the progressive Bundist ideologies of economic, social, racial, and political equality and equity. Hell, there was even an Israeli Bundist organization.

Hence why the last extant Old Bundist organization in the world, Melbourne's Jewish Labour Bund, has an issue with New/Neo Bundism. The Melborune JLB is the last existing Old Bund group in the world with all others have closed down in prior years or decades. MJLB acknowledges the October 7th attack by Hamas and the violence imposed on Palestinians by Israel. It acknowledges suffering on both sides. New/Neo Bundist organizations rarely, if ever, do this and instead commit to a Holocaust Universalization like position regarding Gaza while omitting the terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, the Neo/New Bundist organizations do not discuss the issues that define Bundist ideology, such as economic and social issues, but instead emphasizes the anti-Zionist position. This reduces it to a one trick pony that misses the point entirely (paraphrasing Dr. Ringelbaum who is President of JLB here). The focus on pre-WWII Bundist ideology echoes the sentiments of Bundist groups that did not want to change their ideals and positions afterwards, which led to them becoming defunct. The Neo/New movement is repeating the same mistakes that led to the dissolution of the movement at large and resulted in the ideology being relegated to the wings with no real voice.

It is also important to note that the majority of the Neo/New Bundist movement is under 30, with a lot of them being undergrad age. As someone who teaches this age bracket I will say that they're passionate but overconfident. They're informed but also ignorant. They're sympathetic and empathetic, but easily misled. I was too at that age.

And like any movement, Neo/New Bundism is going to have its growing pains. I think if it is to continue past this conflict and does not fizzle out then the movement and associated organizations need to reflect on what they actually mean outside of anti-Zionism. Because as of right now and for the past few years of its inception, and the brand new groups, that is all they've been. That's not fighting for labor, social, racial, political, and economic rights. That's repeating the same mistakes as the Bund in the early 20th century did. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

At this point in time myself and others don't trust Neo/New Bundists because why would we? The movement has shown that it's anti-Israel positioning is more important to them than anything else. This means they ally, like the Old Bund did, with antisemites who want to harm all of us. The movement just happens to give them permission to be extremely and violent antisemitic by using "as an anti-Zionist Jew" as a permissible framework. Just like the Old Bund did pre-WWII.

You're not doing anything new or innovative or helping the diaspora. You're following in the footsteps that led to more deaths of our people.

Please re-examine where you stand and what you stand for. It's been done before and we need to learn from history. Not repeat it.

#jumblr #antisemitism #Neo Bundism #New Bundism #Neo/New Bundism has problems and Old Bundism agrees #Long post #Hot take #AVTJ's very tired thoughts #Brain rambles

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grison-in-space · 2 months ago

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Hi fellow neuroscientist and animal behavior observer! What's up? It's a weird ass time to be a scientist in the US right now. Like there's the doom and despair taking up most of my brain but also I have a lab presentation in 1.5 weeks and my committee meeting two weeks after that. How do you make yourself focus on lab/science stuff?

I'm so sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you; I've been rotating this ask in my mind for over a week now. I hope your lab presentation went well, and I hope your committee meeting does, too. Bear in mind that I am reeling as much as anyone else, but... well, I have had a lot of things happen during my academic career, and I have had some practice with this by now. I was displaced from my home three or four times during grad school, and all but once that was because of climate change related flooding. (I actually cannot remember offhand. That kind of thing fucks with your ability to reckon in chronological time, which is why no one has been able to work out how years work since 2020 at latest.) I did my PhD in Texas, too, which gave me some exciting experiences around campus violence and guns.

But maybe the biggest thing for me is that I started grad school in 2012, right in time for the government sequester of 2013. That was the year Patty Brennan (of corkscrew duck penis fame) published an article in Animal Behaviour laying out helpful tips in case your research is targeted as "wasteful spending" by members of Congress seeking to reduce scientific funding. Brennan's work legitimately is groundbreaking--I started out close enough to her field to be able to say that almost no one was looking at vaginal anatomy when she started and she's really driven the field of reproductive conflict forward by systematically looking at methods by which females exert "cryptic choice" to control their own reproductive futures. But it sounds silly at first blush in a sound bite, so she immediately became a target when her work went viral. And that paper came out a decade ago, and we are no better than when we started.

I've gotten pretty good at working through grief and fear, and I've tangled with burnout more than once. So how do you handle it when everything is overwhelming and frightening?

You sketch out the work you can do, and you do it as best you can. Same as anyone else.

Here's the thing. You're a budding scholar. Whatever your field is, you probably know more about it than anyone who isn't a scholar in your field already, and you care about broader justice or you wouldn't be asking me this. This makes you a precious potential resource for whatever activist cause is nearest and dearest to your heart. You are placed, as a person whose career is focused on the pursuit of knowledge, in a position of great authority. Yes, even as a PhD student, although I do agree that having the PhD makes the things you say even more impactful. But you'd be surprised how far even just "PhD student" can go when you're making a stand.

You are a valuable voice when it comes to the intersection of your expertise and your community--and by that, I don't just mean your discipline and your geographical location; I mean your lived experiences and your identities too. If you burn out, your voice and effort may be completely irreplaceable. So make sure you don't burn out, but don't waste your potential to speak out, either. You can do that by working out what your "beat" is: pick one to two things you care really deeply about working on in the world, that you want to make better, and focus on those. Use your authority to make changes.

Currently, my "beat" is focused on disability justice (especially in terms of neurodivergence) and sex/gender, because those are communities I am part of and that I think deeply about. My work there can take a lot of forms: shoving hard on the pernicious medical thought process that tends to conceptualize disorder and disease as a deviation from a uniform functional population; pointing out the complexity inherent in sex differences and sex itself; building relationships with disabled academics to make networks for one another so that we can better support trainees as well as ourselves building alliances between disability justice scholars and researchers tackling these topics with an eye towards integrating the comments and interests of disabled people into the field of study that theoretically focuses on us. These are topics that tie into my research interests (context dependence, decisionmaking, strategy, developmental plasticity, etc) but also into my sense of justice and the communities in which I spend my life as an autistic queer butch.

Think about the things you care most about making better, and think about how those things intersect with your research interests. Is there a bathroom bill you could write a deposition for explaining how complicated sex actually is? A local news reporter who could use a scientist talking about the long term climate impacts of the new fracking project up the road? A new policy on immigrant familial separation that is going to lead to kids with major attachment issues down the line and increase the odds of terrible outcomes? Creative ways to send promising undergrads from underrepresented backgrounds on for new opportunities if you live in a state where DEI initiatives have been banned? (Man, that was an exhausting conversation to have with the North Carolina folks at my last conference. And the Floridians.) Where will your voice carry the most weight for the amount of energy you allocate to it?

Here's my best stab at practical advice for junior trainees:

Figure out what your limit for practical engagement is and defend it viciously. The thing about being in academia, and about having the PhD for that matter, is that it gives you a lot of leverage for speaking authoritatively about problems in your field and in your community. This, too, can be a form of activism and shaping the world. But if that's the weapon you are making out of your career, you can't also be an effective organizer on the ground for eight different local causes. You can't do everything at once, so pick a limited subset of things to focus on and work on those. Like academia, public impact will suck you dry if you let it, so you have to set boundaries and you have to be clear with yourself about that.

As always with research, your topic should be something you're interested in. Apply your priorities as a human being to your research. Move your project in directions you really care about and which are aligned with your values. Talk with your mentors about how you pitch that to other scientists in your field, of course, but if you're really shaken and scared by the political climate... well, better to apply that to your work than to not be able or interested in focusing on the work at all.

Look for things to celebrate and militantly celebrate them, even if it feels silly. You submitted a manuscript? Make a special dinner. You survived your committee meeting? Meet up with a couple of friends for coffee and cheering. You need things to cheer about, and your job is not going to naturally provide them, so lay out things you can celebrate and celebrate them even if you don't feel like you really achieved anything. (Your PI should help with this, but a lot of them don't. If your PI is absentee, try to find labmates or colleagues to celebrate when you can.) Joy and pride fuel us to keep going; make sure you are feeding them. You do not need money to make this happen, either: there are inexpensive ways to make things feel special, even if your stipend doesn't stretch nearly far enough.

Especially if your lab isn't full of people in your corner, make some friends who feel the same way you do about your "beat". Fellow activists (or just people who care) about your biggest priority are a great choice. Back in the day, I would have exhorted you to join Twitter to build that network; these days, I think most everyone is on Bluesky or Mastodon. You need people who get you and who are in your corner, and you need people who don't have power over your career to help you weather it when the storms rise.

People in the midst of despair don't know the future, either. There will be victories to come moving forward. It will be impossible to imagine them as you are today. The future is murky and uncertain, and you never know what battles you can win until you pitch them. Don't let anyone tell you a battle has been lost until you fight it, and don't make the mistake of thinking that what you do today doesn't matter intensely.

Life is iterative: it always starts from what you do today, and small aggregate decisions have a lot more power over the whole than any individual large one. If you don't like the direction you're going, you can always change direction for a while and see where you go. The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second best time is now.

Find ways to take breaks completely from the political situation. Currently, I have just gotten into Minecraft for the first time, and I am playing a lot of stupid pixelated escapism games. You have to have time to recharge yourself away from all of it. Whatever that looks like to you is good enough. I need, personally, to get back into going for long walks in the woods; that one is one of my old reliable helpful ways to think without getting overwhelmed about it.

So. I don't know if anything has gotten better or worse for you over the last couple of weeks, but I hope for better for you. As for me... well, it's probably time to go back to my grant. We're short on funding going into this mess and who knows if the grant I'm writing for an explicitly DEI-oriented program will survive the coming hammer blows long enough to get it in. Even if it doesn't, I have a couple of book pitches I'll write up and a couple of suggestions for jobs along the way I can take. I can always redirect my effort to a new direction.

Take care of yourselves, friends.

#day job #science #about me #philosophy #what do you do when everything is terrifying

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luckybyler · 1 year ago

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This was a reply to someone else, but I'm making this its own post because so many people are being so evil right now re: Noah Schnapp.

You can find other, longer explanations with history and all, but all the places I've seen more or less agree with this:

So you're all calling people to cancel Noah because he's in favor of a Jewish nation in what is today Israel. Which is a perfectly reasonable, decent and educated opinion to have, especially when you, to use a trendy term, "educate yourself" and find out why the state of Israel was created.

11000 dead Palestinians, half of them children

According to Hamas. Don't forget that, ever. They're the current, official government of Gaza, thus they're the ones who give numbers. This means that the real number could be 10, 1 million, anything in between. What I've read is that they probably give more of less accurate total numbers. What they fail to do, however, is distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians, and beteween civilians killed by IDF strikes, civilians killed by failed Hamas or Palestininan Islamic Jihad's rockets (which happens a lot), and Palestinians murdered by Hamas/PIJ (which also happens, a whole damn lot). They also don't specify how many civilians they have prevented or tried to prevent from evacuating or receiving aid.

11k dead people is a horrible number. Even 1 dead person is a horrible number. However, urban warfare in such a densely populated area is its own kind of hell, especially when the other side is fond of using civilians as human shields in every way possible. The fact that the number is 11k and not 50k, 100k, and so on, indicates that the IDF have indeed done a lot to minimize deaths. You don't genocide people by doing roof knocks, opening evacuation lines, dropping guided bombs, putting up an Iron Dome to deal with rockets while avoiding escalation, etc. simply because actual genocide, while a lot worse, is also cheaper, easier and faster than what they're doing. This is important because caling every act of war genocide dilutes the word, and there are actual genocides happening around the world. Also, there is a difference between striking military targets and causing civilian deaths as a side effect (what the IDF is doing) and planning and carrying out a massacre deliberately targeting civilians and inflicting as much pain and humilliation as possible on them. And there is a difference between doing so by breaking a ceasefire (which is what Hamas did), and defending your country because if you don't do that a terrorist group will anhilate you (which is what the IDF is doing).

Back to Noah. So far, these are the things that people have tried to cancel him for:

Traveling to Israel (a completely normal thing)

Having Israeli friends (another completely normal thing)

Condemning Hamas' horrible attack on October 7th (the decent thing to do)

Posting a statement saying he feels unsafe as a Jewish person in the US (which, given the rise of antisemitic acts in the world, including the US, including where he lives and where he studies, is a valid feeling to have)

Signing a letter, along with Shawn Levy, Brett Gelman, Ross Duffer and I think Cara Buono, asking Biden to press for the liberation of every hostage by Hamas. This especially shows the utter ignorance of the cancellers because, as it turns out, caring about every hostage implies a slowdown of IDF's actions (and, at the time, a delay of a ground invasion).

Supporting the existence and preservation of the state of Israel (once again, a completely normal thing). The fact that people are turning against him for these things says to me that the real reason you are all hating Noah is beacuse:

He's Jewish. Like, really really Jewish.

And the fact that this all comes from a place of antisemitism isn't hidden at all: I've seen y'all on here, on Twitter, Reddit, every other social media calling him slurs (such as "cunt"), censoring his name, pretending he's not part of the cast, asking the Duffers/Netflix to fire him, wishing him failure, doxxing him, calling on his classmates to physically assault him, etc. He doesn't need to educate himself: you guys are already teaching him a great lesson on why a Jewish state is necessary. If that's the treament he gets from his own "fans", what can he expect from the world at large?

#byler #noah schnapp #antisemitism #jumblr #stranger things #i know many people here are actual children or college students #who have never lived war or armed conflict #and this is baby's first social justice fight #but the way you're acting towards Noah is disgusting and evil #I'm not even jewish but I know what terrorism is like #and I know what it's like to have idiot 1st worlders be on the terrorists' side because they think they're “liberators” or something #harming the very people you think they help

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f-15-h · 2 months ago

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This only time I will tried to write a AU out because my friend and I wanna see horrible stuff happen to D16 in a shrine maiden story that’s kinda fatal frame inspired

Warning for some blood and gore

Also I’m not really good at this

I’m going to base cybertron’s official religion on worship Primus and the 13 Primes

Orion come from a village far from Iacon that only worship primus and in their tales primus is quite malevolent and all transformers life it’s an exchange. Because of that village have a tradition of live sacrifice of every 50 cycles they will sacrifice a cogless shrine maiden by using the impalement ritual to Primus. D16 comes online without a cog and was taken away and raised to be the next shrine maiden. The cogless shrine maiden are free of earthly attachments and when they are out in the public during celebrations they masked their faces so people wouldn’t know what they look like.

Orion was the village troublemaker before his family moved to Iacon for better opportunities prior to this decade’s ritual, accidentally broken into the temple’s back yard in fall on top of the shrine maiden. Those two became friends somehow. And occasionally Orion will try to sneak D out of the shrine at night. Orion got beaten up few times for seeing D’s face, almost every time they get caught (which is only 2time ) D would cover for him “I got loss while wondering around in backyard and didn’t realize I’m in the forest.” Is a common excuse d used.

The priests and guardians would subject D16 to painful and humiliating punishments when she step out of the line, D16 followed a strict schedule everyday and the Priests and guardians are very strict and almost psychologically abusive to the cogless Shrine maiden. Even she is out at the courtyard she wear her mask and don’t talk to anyone.

Then their final meeting up before Orion moved D gives her bell bracelet to Orion as a reminder of her, Orion went to Iacon with his family . Few months later it’s the day of the ritual which D was deemed as corrupted by the earthly attachments because her longing to see her lover(very one sided just coming from D) Orion once more and was punished by the a 2rd ritual of gutting her body while she was still conscious. Her body parts were stored in different jars in boxes around the shrine, after 7 days her ghost returned and brutally killed the inhabitants of the temple in same way she was then cursed the mountain the village was located.

D in her ritual outfit

Over the years the village population dropped, younger generations either moved away or dead from strange causes, only the few older people around. The government tried to boost the economy by opening a tunnel which for some reason a horrible accident occurred during it’s construction the workers bodies was somehow either impaled or gutted empty and amputated unlike the usual tunnel collapsing. There was a vacation villa opened once and it was a sight of a mess shooting, the shooter in their confession said “the pale lady , Megatron, made me do it”. (Due to allegedly the pale bot looks like Megatronus Prime, in urban legends she was dub as Megatron).

Megatron aka the pale lady(D16’s ghost)

In Iacon city, Orion was on his last year of his master program, his best friends Bee and Elita 1 were planning a summer trip. Bee who comes from a sheltered religious family who just found freedom from his family during his university years is crazy about everything supernatural suggested to go to that mountain because he heard there was a temple that had live sacrifices which Orion try to brush it off as “Oh it’s just a fairy tale to scare sparklings”

The mountain now is more or less a common suicide forest and the road that leads to the village is the road has the most freak accidents. Bee wants do some ghost hunting and a road trip with the gang for the summer. Orion who has some distance memories from his childhood which his family don’t like to talk about agreed to go.

Before they depart, Orion receives a letter from his childhood village and it was from D-16, his childhood friend. Which he thought Dee is still alive when he got the letter, he just thought because her job as the shine maiden she don’t really have time to reconnect with him.

Notes

The sacrifice of the last 50 cycle before D was Starscream, a daughter from a high guard family. Her family seen one of their 4 daughters was a candidate as a great honor.Even as a somewhat willing sacrifice her ghost still haunts the shrine with the strong desire to see the night sky again.

D-16 was the only daughter and family of Terminus, a miner, Who committed suicide in the forest after d was taken from him. D’s spider lily head dress was given by him.

Bonus:

Ghost Starscream the grinning maiden

#my art #maccadam #doodle #transformer au #tf one #megatron #starscream #orion pax #d 16 #the rare occasion fish writes #shrine maiden d16 #transformers one au #fishy rambling #transformers d16 #d 16 TFone

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familyabolisher · 1 year ago

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If it seems odd, by contrast, to take the time to define what a child is, there is good reason to be equally critical and careful. Rather than taking for granted the existence of children as a demographic group defined somehow by age, this book takes a fairly simple approach to defining who is a trans child. Anyone under the medical age of consent during the twentieth century—typically twenty-one, but sometimes eighteen—is a child in the pages that follows. I draw on the medical age of consent not because it refers to a meaningful distinction but precisely because its arbitrariness and obvious construction illuminate how the figure of “the child” and actual living “children” are entangled products of historical processes of Western subjectification, rather than representing a natural category of human life. While there are infants, toddlers, five-year-olds, teenagers, and even twenty-year-olds throughout this book, I refer to all of them as children because they were subject to a specifically infantilizing form of governance (this is also why the category “adolescent” did not meaningfully come into play in trans medicine during this period). The medical age of consent, which deprived children of the ability to make medical decisions for themselves, proved to be a deciding factor in shaping their experiences and limiting their ability to act. Drawing on Paul Amar’s critical reading of the field of childhood studies, I agree that the child is a dehumanized social form, the product of historical and political processes of infantilization “designed to control various populations” through sexual and racial difference, rather than to index meaningful age differences. As Amar points out, one of the most pernicious effects of the production of children through infantilization is “a failure to recognize children as agents,” to render their lives politically informal—effectively unintelligible to adults. The Western form of the child and childhood is a powerful obstacle to seeing “the mechanism and practices by which social actors branded as children challenge the regime of infantilization,” whether through collective organization or individual itineraries that stray from developmentalism. For that reason, this book names the trans child not as a distinct subgroup within the trans community but as a politically disenfranchised person subject to a regime of racially and gender normative governance by medicine and other social institutions, including the family.

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

#currently reading

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grits-galraisedinthesouth · 1 year ago

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History Repeating Itself 💔

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

Joe Biden had his first meeting with an Israeli leader, Golda Meir, on the eve of the Yom Kippur war, right after meeting with officials in Cairo. During the then junior senator’s meeting with Meir, Biden suggested that Israel make a unilateral withdrawal from settlements for peace, criticizing the settlement policies of the Labor Party, and suggesting they represent a form of “creeping annexation.” Though Biden assured Meir that Egyptian officials were convinced of Israel’s military superiority, 40 days later, Sadat initiated a surprise attack against Israel.

This is the gist of a bombshell tweet from Israel’s Channel 13 reporter Nadav Eyal containing excerpts from a classified memo from an Israeli official who attended that fateful meeting. While it may have been the first meeting between Biden and an Israeli prime minister, it was certainly not the last. In subsequent meetings with Israeli prime ministers, Biden threatened Menachem Begin with withholding U.S. aid, and publicly upbraided Benyamin Netanyahu because it had been announced in a town council meeting that 1600 homes were to be built in future in the Jewish Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (more about this here).

Joe Biden paints that early meeting with Golda as something precious that cemented in his mind how important Israel is to the Jewish people. It is clear, however, that Joe Biden has always been against the Jewish people settling their indigenous territory. The very thought of Jews planning to build homes in Jerusalem makes him furious. Therefore, contrary to the love fest with Golda he has often described, Biden used the first chance he had to meet with an Israeli prime minister to broach the subject of unilateral concessions.

One wonders how much clout the young senator wielded at that time. Not to mention the timing of subsequent events, with the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt occurring just 40 days after Biden’s meeting with Meir. Is it possible that Golda Meir incurred wider U.S. displeasure by refusing to entertain Biden’s suggestion of unilateral concessions? Was Egypt perhaps emboldened by this state of affairs to attack Israel without fear of American intervention?

During its years in office, Israel fought the 1956 Sinai War, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Labor agreed to UN Resolution 242 and the notion of trading land for peace. Nevertheless, successive Labor governments established settlements in the disputed territories and refrained from dismantling illegal settlements, such as those established in 1968 at Qiryat Arba in Hebron by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and others set up by Gush Emunim. By 1976, more than thirty settlements had been established on the West Bank; however, their population was fewer than 10,000.

"TODAY’S BLOG:

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

In January 1973, Joe Biden was sworn in as Senator from Delaware.

September of that year found him in the Middle East on a trip to Egypt. Shortly thereafter, Biden was in Israel in a meeting with Israeli PM Golda Meir.

In that meeting, Biden convinced Meir that Egypt would not attack Israel by convincing her that Egypt thought that Israel had absolute military superiority.

The meeting was documented on October 2, 1973 in a secret letter (below) written by Israel Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan. Four days later Egypt attacked Israel.

Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan summed up Biden’s words as follows: “Of all the personalities (in Egypt) he (Biden) met, he heard that there was not one of them who disbelieved in Israel’s perfect military superiority and therefore stated that it is not possible for Egypt to go to war against Israel now. According to the people he spoke to Egyptians, time will take its course and when God wills, he will find the solution.”

What this letter calls into question is Joe Biden’s extreme misreading of Arab “personalities” and their intentions. His misreading–and that of Israeli intelligence–had disastrous consequences in the Yom Kippur War. One cannot help but think of similar Biden misreadings when it comes to Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Gideon Jordan later notes in the secret document that Biden was interested in more than Egypt: “The senator repeatedly said that Israel should do a unilateral act, that is to withdraw from some territories, of course not from those territories of strategic importance such as the Golan Heights, Sharm el-Sheikh and the Gaza Strip–but to withdraw without even any negotiations or an agreement with the Arabs.”

Jordan remarks that Meir immediately disagreed with Biden about unilateral withdrawals without achieving true peace. Again, one cannot help but think about the disastrous Biden unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the unilateral concessions that the U.S. has demanded from Israel in the current Lebanon “agreement” talks.

The secret letter is below for those of you who read Hebrew:

When Biden met Meir: Joe Biden advised Jewish PM to trade land for peace - The Jerusalem Post

Biden meeting between Joe Biden and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, described in a memo published by Israeli reporter Nadav Eyal, sheds light on the former Vice President's thought process at that time, and what he believed Israel should do shortly before the Yom Kippur war broke out. The meeting took place following his return from Egypt where he discussed with Saadat several things, roughly 40 days before the surprise attack that would turn into the Yom Kippur war.

https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/when-biden-met-meir-joe-biden-advised-jewish-pm-to-trade-land-for-peace-646732

#Joe Biden #israel #elections have consequences #heartbreaking 💔

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reality-detective · 1 year ago

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Patriots in the Netherlands are walking the streets dropping flyers at the homes of citizens in hopes of awakening the people. According to Rem64 it is having great success. He sent me the flyer and I translated it to English so everyone can read it. 👇

Message to the population The information below is distributed worldwide by hundreds of scientific, legal and political organizations to inform humanity. Evidence for the stated facts can be found in the detailed evidence reports on StopWorldControl.com

The World Economic Forum wants to shape your life The world's richest come together at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, is known for statements such as: We determine the future and We infiltrate governments. The WEF trains Young Global Leaders who are positioned in governments around the world. French President Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and German Chancellor Merkel are Young Global Leaders of the WEF. The Netherlands and Belgium also work closely with the WEF and serve their agenda. Part of this agenda is to replace privacy with transparency. They want every detail of your life to be known soon: what you do, who you meet with, what you eat, what you buy... The WEF announces that new technologies will record everyone's thoughts, feelings and dreams in the cloud , where governments have access to this intimate data. To combat climate change, the WEF wants to abolish all private property. You will have to rent everything: houses, cars, work tools, etc. The WEF calls for blocking sunlight by massively releasing chemicals into the air. The WEF encourages the normalization of pedophilia, while the UN and WHO instruct all schools to teach sexual techniques to small children in kindergarten, so that they start having sex as young as possible, with people of any age or gender. As absurd as these plans sound, they are promoted by the WEF, the UN, the EU, the WHO and companies such as. Google and Facebook. They are part of the sustainability goals of Agenda 2030, which are supported by governments worldwide. All evidence of this can be found on StopWorldControl.com

The World Health Organization wants to rule the world The World Health Organization is being legally restructured as an effective global dictatorship, able to impose binding mandates on all countries whenever they declare a pandemic. However, the WHO is a private organization that operates outside any democratic process. One of the WHO's main backers is Bill Gates, who has no medical training whatsoever, yet is promoted as the medical authority around the world. As the world's largest vaccine dealer, his health advice is to inject everyone all the time, making him billions of dollars. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus also has no medical training. Yet Gates and Tedros dictate to all the millions of medical experts worldwide what they can and cannot do. Article 18 of the proposed Pandemic Treaty allows the WHO to shut down any source of information that does not align with what they want all of humanity to believe. This means censoring millions of experts in every field. Only what the WHO and Bill Gates say should be heard. Do you want undemocratic organizations to become dictators over your life and over all humanity? Do you want all objective scientific and medical information to be hidden so that you only hear what a single private institution wants you to believe? Do you want to be forced to receive dangerous injections for the rest of your life, without being informed about the risks? If you do not agree with this course of action, we invite you to inform yourself carefully at StopWorldControl.com

The news is determined by investors Many people do not know that all major news agencies are owned by a small group of investors, who determine what can be said in the news. In addition, billionaires such as Bill Gates and George Soros donate hundreds of millions of euros to news organizations around the world, to determine what they broadcast Udo Ulfkotte, an editor at one of the largest newspapers in the world, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung which is published in 148 countries well-known I have been a journalist for 25 years and I have been trained to lie, betray and never tell the public the truth, journalists) are being bribed worldwide by the CIA, billionaires and governments to manipulate the public The world's best-known political commentator, Tucker Carlson, she The news you consume is a lie of the most insidious kind CNN technical director Charlie Chester said: There is no such thing as objective news. All newsreaders are told what to say. He admitted that CNN deliberately creates fear to manipulate their viewers, whether it is about a pandemic or climate change. Texts from Matt Hancock, British Health Secretary, read: We are making everyone scared? The World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the European Union, which are owned by the same financial entities that control the news, are calling on governments worldwide to censor any information that does not follow their narrative. Any investigation that exposes their criminal operations should be labeled conspiracy theory or disinformation.

Vital information is hidden Thousands of scientists, doctors and medical organizations are sounding the alarm as millions of people have died and hundreds of millions of people have been disabled after being injected with the experimental vaccines for COVID-19. Data from the US CDC shows that in the US alone, one and a half million people suffered from side effects including death, stroke, heart failure, brain disorders, convulsions, life-threatening allergic reactions, autoimmune diseases, arthritis, miscarriage, infertility, rapid onset muscle weakness, deafness, blindness, etc. Worldwide there is an explosion of turbo cancer and sudden death. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care's famous Lazarus report revealed that overall, only 19% of vaccine side effects are reported. According to this study, the number of adverse events and deaths must be multiplied by a factor of 100 to understand the true prevalence of serious vaccine injuries. COVID-19 has a 99.7% survival rate, comparable to the seasonal flu, and there are many effective medications, such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, budesonide, chlorine dioxide and many more. These have hardly any side effects, are completely safe and available everywhere in the world. This means that no vaccine is needed. However, the WHO instructed governments worldwide to ban these drugs for the treatment of corona and to censor any doctor who spoke about it, that vaccines are the only answer.

What's going on in the world? Why are governments controlled by private institutions like the WEF and WHO? Why is vital information hidden? These are not conspiracy theories as claimed, but facts that can be verified on the international website StopWorldControl.com. We work with world leaders in the fields of law, science, medical care, journalism and politics. Our network consists of more than 100 organizations that jointly inform humanity. They include Nobel laureates, presidents and presidential candidates, former generals of the US army, organizations of police officers and investigators, as well as top officials of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the European Union. We encourage every right-thinking person to inform themselves carefully Visit the website StopWorldControl.com Pass this flyer on to others.

Stand Strong! Stand United! Be Prepared!

✨ 🛡️ 🇳🇱 WWG1WGA 🇺🇸 ⚔️ ✨

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #do your own research #do some research #ask yourself questions #question everything #netherlands

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microtheory · 2 months ago

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So imagine you’re at a dinner party. Nice enough person comes up to you, starts talking to you. Let’s say the conversation starts to go in the direction of politics. You talk for a while. At some point in the conversation you decide to ask this person, “So what are your particular feelings about politics? I mean, where do you land on the whole political spectrum?” Imagine the person replies with, “Well, actually, I’m a communist. Communism is the solution to all of our political problems.” Now, to us, being people living in the 21st century that have seen history play out the way that it has, no matter what you think about communism, we would instantly have a lot of thoughts about this person and probably a few questions we wanted to ask them. See, because the word “communism” carries with it an enormous amount of baggage to us in the 21st century, baggage, it’s important to note, that just didn’t exist when people were having political discussions at the beginning of the 20th century.

That’s what I want us to consider here at the beginning of this episode, just how much has changed, just how much has transpired since philosophers were having these political discussions at the beginning of the 20th century. What I want to do is try to take a step outside of our 21st-century biases and try to do our best to put ourselves in the shoes of someone viewing the political landscape back when communism was first being proposed as a potential solution. See, because when you do that, you can start to see the political philosophy of the time within its proper context. You can start to see how, in many ways, the goals of the reformed democracy that we talked about last time and the goals of the communism that was being proposed back then were actually incredibly similar.

Remember, at this point in the timeline of discussion about political philosophy there were three major conversations that were going on that were all trying to solve the same general problems that existed in political philosophy of the time. One was democracy; one was communism. And the general problem they were both trying to solve was “How do we ensure that in the future society doesn’t evolve into a situation where a relative handful of people have an inordinate amount of control over the lives of the majority of the population?” This had been a serious problem in the past. Democracies of the past had produced this situation time and time again, which was why there was such a serious discussion about a reformation of democracy that would preserve the true essence of a democracy, which was a government by the many, not a handful of people.

Well, communism was very similar in terms of what it was aiming to do at the time. Like we talked about when we did the series on the Frankfurt School, for neo-Marxist thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a short period of confusion when it came to what exactly was going on in the world. See, Marx prophesies that very soon the proletariat would realize that all they had to lose were their chains, and that, inevitably, they would rise up; they would overthrow the bourgeoisie, and they would implement a new system of economic order. Let anyone who agrees with Marx at the time cross their fingers and hope that it ends up being communism. But this communist revolution just wasn’t happening in the West in almost every case. So what exactly was going on?

Neo-Marxist thinkers went back to the drawing board. Why does it make any sense at all that people living in these abject conditions, working jobs that were in many cases completely brutal, why would those people stand for it? Why didn’t Marx’s prophecy come true? Well, very quickly the trend that emerged in neo-Marxist thought at the time was that control over a population of people extends far beyond the halls of Congress or the ballot box. Political control is almost always dictated by cultural control.

This is why the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci spends a considerable amount of his work exploring the concept of political control and, more specifically, the very important question of “When there is a dominant social group, or a dominant class within a society, how exactly does that group ascend to power, and then beyond that, how do they maintain that power once they’ve gotten it, especially when the social order that they promote with that position of power is oftentimes completely at odds with the well-being of the average person?” The fact is that sometimes when a leader is elected, they don’t pass policy that’s necessarily good for the majority of the population. Sometimes they support policy that really only benefits them or friends of theirs that are fellow members of a dominant social class. Gramsci wants to find out, why is it that these leaders are sometimes capable of getting massive support from the people for policies that are actually hurting the average citizen more than helping them? How is it possible that the proletariat can feel so comfortable participating in a system that keeps them in chains, in the eyes of a neo-Marxist thinker?

Gramsci begins his explanation by evoking and repurposing a word that had been thrown around all throughout human history, but it was a word that he thought in recent years was starting to take on an entirely new meaning. The thing that was responsible for allowing a particular social class to ascend to power and then maintain that privileged status was what he called “cultural hegemony.” Now, this concept of hegemony is going to end up being massively important to the political conversation of the 20th and 21st centuries overall. And by the end of this arc on the show, we’re going to have looked at it from a lot of different perspectives.

But maybe the best place to start is to talk about the origins of the word. The word “hegemony” originates in ancient Greece. The root of the word comes from the Greek word meaning “to lead.” Some translators think it’s closer to the Greek work for “to rule over.” But, either way, during antiquity there were things called hegemons. Now, in the context of ancient Greece, a hegemon was typically a state that had a significant military advantage over another state, the arrangement being that if the weaker state didn’t comply with certain demands from the hegemon, they would be annexed or dominated militarily or burned to the ground. Take your pick, I guess. In other words, the term “hegemony” implied the threat of physical dominance over a population of people. And this was the case all throughout human history.

But Gramsci’s going to say that in our modern world the definition of the word hegemony needs to evolve with the political reality we are living in. We are no longer living in a world where most political control is exercised by military dominance over a population of people. Since the advent of mass media, people in positions of power have realized that a much more effective way of controlling populations is by manipulating the cultural parameters that citizens have to navigate. The general idea is this: to be a human being, living a life in our modern world at all, you always have to be living that life immersed within a particular culture. But what is a culture other than an elaborate collection of norms, rules, structures, mores, taboos, rituals, values? These things are not exactly abstract concepts. They are acute. They are visible. This is the cultural custom of a handshake, to pay deference to somebody else. This is not talking with your mouth full. This is the sum total of every ritual we engage in on a daily basis that all come together to create a cohesive society.

But what Gramsci’s going to ask is, who exactly created all of these norms and taboos that we abide by? We can easily look to different cultures around the world presently and all throughout human history, for that matter, to see that a culture can function and flourish when things are completely different. The norms and taboos of a culture can be completely alien from the modern world that we’re living in and, yet, things still somehow manage to stay held together. So it makes Gramsci wonder, to what extent is the current set of norms and taboos serving to reinforce itself? To what extent are the citizens seeing the current set of norms and taboos not as a temporary instantiation of culture, but as just the way the world is. Once again, this is another example of this classic debate we talked about last time that’s going to become increasingly relevant. How much of the reality of the world can be explained by nature, and how much of the world can be explained by culture?

This is extremely important because, to Gramsci, if you can control the narrative and you can convince the average citizen that the current set of cultural norms is just the way the world is, then there’s not going to be much complaining. There’s not going to be much in the way of seeking justice and trying to change things. This is similar to a point we discussed from Simone de Beauvoir and The Ethics of Ambiguity. We don’t get mad at hurricanes. When a hurricane comes along and devastates multiple cities, people die; homes are destroyed, billions of dollars in damages, thousands of families displaced. And every one of those cases is a tragedy in its own right. But, as human beings, what do we do? We accept it. Why? Because there’s no sense in getting mad at a hurricane. There’s no human intent or will behind a giant storm. Nobody can be held morally culpable, so we chalk it up as an unfortunate series of events. Hurricanes are a part of nature. There’s nothing we could really do to stop it. Sometimes the world is going to be at large, and I just got to deal with that the best way I can and try to accept it.

To Gramsci, this is the old switcheroo that’s going on with cultural hegemony. Dominant social classes have the ability to dictate cultural norms. These cultural norms oftentimes serve to reinforce themselves, and people born into these cultures oftentimes view the normalized state of the world around them as nature rather than culture. Gramsci thinks this is a cultural story that’s being told. So often, citizens see it as just the way the world is and something they need to learn to accept. To Gramsci, this is why Marx’s prophecy hasn’t come true. This is why the proletariat continues to live in chains, because they’ve come to accept those chains as the natural state of the world that they need to come to terms with.

Cultural norms become to the average person what Gramsci calls the “common sense that they use to make sense of their place in the world.” When the common sense of your world serves to legitimize the dominance of a particular class of people and tells you that anything you don’t like about your socioeconomic situation, well, that’s just the natural order of things, then your very existence becomes reinforcing of cultural hegemony. You are reinforcing the political status quo simply by participating in the culture that you happen to be born into. This is why people that would otherwise never stand for being pushed around can find themselves getting worked into the ground in a factory, during the time of Gramsci, only to accept their place in the world as a necessary part of how the world works. “Parts of my life may be hard, yes. But you know what? That’s life. Life is hard sometimes.” That’s the sort of dialogue that goes on in the working class.

But, look, it’s not like -- okay, it’s not like Gramsci’s saying that life should never be hard here. The more accurate question would probably be, how hard does life need to be for a person? And how many hard aspects of life have been made into a normalized part of our modern world that we just accept, that disproportionately serve to benefit a dominant group within society? Being a neo-Marxist, you can no doubt guess what his first and most commonly used target is throughout his work, capitalism. So, to Gramsci, even people that are struggling within a capitalist system have, oftentimes, lived their entire lives immersed in a culture that promotes the merits of capitalism. This, in turn, creates a sort of economic Stockholm syndrome where, despite the fact they’re struggling, the citizens identify themselves and their place in the world in relation to capitalist ideology. When the entire way that you view the world has been given to you by a culture that benefits from maintaining capitalism, Gramsci would say, don’t be surprised if that education produces a few blind spots.

These blind spots are the point, okay? Cultural hegemony in many ways is accomplished by getting consent from the population to keep things the way that they are by making sure people are blind to other options at their disposal. Keep in mind, as we continue talking about cultural hegemony, that this isn’t always accomplished by an organized group of people that are actively trying to control things. Cultural hegemony can exist, and people can be a part of perpetuating that status quo just simply by acting out of their own self-interest. See, because their self-interest is always considered in relation to how the current system can help them, they unintentionally end up supporting things staying the same.

What Gramsci’s getting at is that for any single person or any social institution to appeal to groups that are in positions of power for the sake of your own self-interest, you must in some capacity there go along with the way that things are currently structured. So, for example, if you’re a politician or a social commentator that wants to make the world a better place, the only way you are ever going to be able to get your message across is by participating in the existing culture and using the tools at your disposal. This is an ideal situation for cultural hegemony and one of the goals of its final stages to Gramsci, to make the values of a particular culture seem so a part of nature and so in line with “common sense” that the members of that culture don’t even question them anymore; to get people completely entrenched in this world where they mistake the reality of their culture for the reality of the universe; to think the reason things are staying the way that they are is because people are weighing all their options, they’re thinking about it for a while, and then they’re making the best choice, not merely complying with the demands of a cultural hegemon that has control over them.

That said, just like the militaristic hegemon of ancient Greece, the goal of cultural hegemony is to stay in power. Now, over time, dominant social groups have realized that the most efficient way of doing this is by controlling people’s systems of values. Gramsci thinks by and large people acquire their systems of values by listening to and studying voices within a culture that he thinks are massively important, public intellectuals. Gramsci makes an important distinction here between two very different types of public intellectuals. There are “ruling intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals.”

Now, the “ruling intellectuals” are going to be the sort of foot soldiers for the dominant set of cultural norms that are currently in place. These are the people whose commentary on the world is going to reinforce the status quo. Keep in mind, again, this is in no way saying that these are bad people, necessarily. Most of them may not even realize what they’re doing. But Gramsci, nonetheless, wants to shine a light on the insular and, oftentimes, self-reinforcing world that many of these intellectuals come from. So often, it’s from academia. So often, these people are completely out of touch when it comes to what life is even like for most people in a culture.

Think about the common archetype of a philosopher throughout history. Philosopher decides they’re going to resign themselves from public life, lock themselves away in a tower, and just think about stuff really, really hard. That’s the path for creating better philosophy. You know, the last thing you’d ever want to do as a philosopher is have the basic thoughts of a normal, everyday person corrupting your unparalleled genius, right? Gramsci thinks this is completely ridiculous. Not only is this elitist and making tons of value judgements about how certain human experiences of the world are inherently better and can even be corrupted by other people’s experiences of the world, but aside from all that, Gramsci thinks this approach actually prevents you from ever being able to participate in discussions about politics at all, because political discussions always begin from the starting point of self-awareness and self-reflection, while considering how that self relates to all the other people around you. And how could anybody locking themselves away in a closet, thinking about stuff, ever hope to contribute to that conversation?

But, nonetheless, these ruling intellectuals oftentimes dominate the ideas that are available to citizens of a society. I mean, so often these intellectuals are the ones that write the articles. They’re the ones published in journals. They conduct the studies. They write the textbooks. So often these intellectuals control the education of the next generation of citizens, when so much of their prominence as an intellectual was only given to them simply because their ideas corresponded with the existing social order.

Here’s what Gramsci’s saying. Cultural hegemony is established by taking control of three things: the intellectuals of a society, the education within a society, and the philosophy that drives people to political action. So, in other words, if you’re someone that came up through the education system of an advanced capitalist society, Gramsci would say, don’t be surprised if there are some pretty glaring holes in your understanding of capitalism because, just statistically, most pieces of information you’ve ever had access to have been written by people that reached that level of social influence by participating in a capitalist system that benefits them. Your high school or university wasn’t taught by unbiased monks on the top of a mountain. That most likely, once again just statistically, you have come up in a world where you are far more likely to hear about the merits of capitalism and all the good that it’s doing for people in the world.

When conversations about the downsides of capitalism come up, you’re far more likely to hear them glossed over by other people. You’re less likely to have someone call you out for glossing over them. And the conversation’s likely to go in the direction of how the good of capitalism drastically outweighs the bad. When you hear people talking about socialism, when coming up in an advanced capitalist culture, you’re far more likely to run into conversations about the horrors of socialism, how it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. And, if anyone brings up something good that socialism seems to have produced, it’s written off as a “broken clock’s right twice a day” sort of thing.

Now, here’s the really interesting part. This view of economics and how it plays out in the world may be absolutely true. Capitalism could just be a better economic system than socialism. But how would you ever know for sure? Because if you’re an intellectually honest person, you’d at least for a second have to consider that maybe your entire understanding of capitalism and socialism has been given to you by a handful of intellectuals you’ve entrusted your worldview to, that are intellectuals and gain their credibility simply because their view of the way the world is corresponds with the dominant cultural narrative that keeps the status quo going. Whether maintaining that status quo is good for a particular social group that’s pulling the puppet strings or whether it’s good for just keeping society stable, what if you’ve lived your entire life learning from a lot of really smart people that are all just telling the same side of the story?

Now, Gramsci would say that this is not just limited to capitalist societies, that it’s entirely possible to come up in a society that unfairly promotes the merits of socialism and creates the same sort of echo chamber of ideas. Gramsci’s goal was not to replace a Western world dominated by capitalist ideology with one dominated by Marxist ideology. His goal was to replace both of these narrow approaches with an ideology where the public has a general and intense level of skepticism about the status quo, no matter what the status quo looks like. The biggest mistake we can make, to Gramsci, is to see these ideologies as nature, or the way that things are. We should always be critical of the status quo. And the fact he’s so critical of capitalism is just him following his own advice about the status quo of the world he happened to live in.

To make a long story short, Gramsci thought that Marx and so many other Marxist thinkers that came after him were putting the cart before the horse, in a way. They were all so wrapped up in the possibility -- the inevitability of a communist revolution in the West. They were so wrapped up in waiting to see capitalism destroy itself that they completely missed the fact that different methods of cultural control could fragment a population to the point that a revolution could never take place.

Gramsci makes another important distinction in his work directly to these people that were calling for revolution, that for any meaningful social change to ever take place, regardless of what it is, there needs to be two wars that are fought and won: first, a war of position, then a war of maneuver. These orthodox Marxists of his time were far too focused on the war of maneuver, which was the actual communist revolution that they wanted to bring about. But Gramsci says, before that can ever happen, you need to defeat the cultural hegemon in a war of position.

Remember, a cultural hegemon will have control over three things: the intellectuals, the education, and the philosophy of a society. The goal of anyone trying to bring about any kind of social change, to Gramsci, should be to provide alternatives in all three of these areas. They should create a counter-culture, an alternative set of cultural norms and taboos, reinforced by the intellectuals whose job it is to actively challenge the status quo. He called this other type of intellectuals “organic intellectuals,” and it was their job to be skeptical of the existing order of things, to provide an alternative means of education that took cues from the counter-culture that was created, and to embolden the average citizen to take political action by giving them a philosophical outlook that changes the way they see themselves and how they fit into the world.

This is why so many attempts at revolution have failed in the past, to Gramsci. The orthodox Marxists that tried to organize it didn’t understand the “common sense” of the workers that needed to carry out the revolution. These workers saw themselves and their place in the world solely in terms of how they relate to capitalist ideology. The only way to shift their perspective enough to see the other side would be to fundamentally change the way they look at the world philosophically. See, an extremely important term in the work of Karl Marx that was used to describe the way he saw things was “historical materialism.” Gramsci was a neo-Marxist. When it came to these orthodox Marxists that we’re talking about, he distanced himself considerably from them. And a big reason why was because he thought they were paying way too much attention to the materialism part of historical materialism and not nearly enough attention to the historical part of it.

Gramsci may have supported communism, and communism may have played out in a particular way all throughout the 20th century. But Gramsci hated Stalin. He would have hated Mao. He would have hated Pol Pot. He saw people like these as opportunistic dictators, that took what could otherwise have been a revolutionary political philosophy, and they used it to create dictatorships where the population was forced to deify and worship the state. When, to Gramsci, a much more accurate reading of the work of Marx would have produced the true essence of his work, the spirit of revolution among people, the spirit of revolution among common people united under the desire to never again allow a handful of people to dominate and control the population. To those living at the time of Gramsci, communism and democracy seemed to be two extremely difference approaches to trying to solve the same general problem.

See, as we already know from earlier episodes, the feeling around this time in the world of philosophy is an intense skepticism towards reason. The Enlightenment gave us the hope that science was the answer. Science, when given enough time to develop, was capable of giving us answers to problems that throughout history have seemed completely unsolvable. When applied to the realm of political philosophy, for over a hundred years it seemed totally plausible that something like science, something as unbiased and without an agenda as science, could eventually study the way that people are, study their brains, study the way people work together within a society, and it didn’t seem crazy to think that science could eventually give us answers to some of these questions in political philosophy that seemed so difficult to answer.

But along came Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer. Because at the end of the 19th century he asked the question, “What if the very act of conducting science at all carries with it cultural values that narrow and distort its findings?” We know there are many different ways of conducting science, depending on the specific field you’re in. We know that scientific revolutions have occurred where there have been wholesale transformations of the methods and assumptions that science is conducted through. What if these limitations and the unavoidable narrow scope that categorizing the universe must be viewed through is missing out on something crucial about what it is to be a human being? What if science, useful as it is, was never the savior that everyone thought it was? More on that next episode.

Episode #131 - Transcript - Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony - Philosophize This! - Stephen West

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