#applying real world history and economics to fictional settings | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cobra-diamond · 5 years ago

Text

The East Asian Origins of the Fire Nation and Its Villains

Introduction

Over the years, many volumes of fandom blood have been spilled from discussions concerning the Fire Nation’s main villains, Ozai and Azula. Paralleling this have been arguments over their relationships with Zuko, Iroh, Ursa, Mai, Ty Lee, with each other, even with themselves. Since Ozai and Azula are the figureheads of the Fire Nation that Zuko must peacefully restore the honor of, it is worthwhile understanding why people “like them” are considered proper leaders of the current Fire Nation.

Most of these discussions have sought to create “theories” that explain these characters as exclusively combinations of mental illness, personality disorders and various emotional traumas.

A couple examples of these discussions are the essays “Azula, the Embodiment of Jealousy and Neglect,” and “Three Pillars Theory of Azula.” These two essays are just examples, but they capture the widespread strategy the fandom has employed in trying to understand the motivations and goals of Ozai and Azula and their various relationships with the other characters. In addition, the shouting matches between Azula “fans” and “haters” also illustrates these discussions. Since the franchise has yielded so few hard answers, these importance of these discussions has not waned.

What these discussions focus on, as represented by those essays, are the characters’ apparent emotional problems, theoretical moral compasses and perceived inadequacies in the eyes of their families. Typically, the “lens” these discussions view these villains through is one that tries to relate them to present day spousal and domestic abuse narratives, namely as being both “abuser” and “victim” in a cycle of abuse that can be related to the modern, real world.

What these conversations do not provide are adequate explanations for how the historical, political, military and cultural aspects of the Fire Nation molded these military leaders. You would think that people with “Lord” and “Princess” in their names, who train daily for warfare and hand-to-hand combat, would make their responsibilities take center stage in their lives.

While there is a place for “nitty gritty” psychological examinations for understanding certain behaviors, trying to depict the Fire Nation villains as purely allegories of modern day domestic abusers, empathy deficient bullies and people afflicted by personality disorders eliminates Avatar’s most unique and defining characteristic: its East Asian origins.

You don’t need beautiful animation, martial arts-styled bending and immersion in a fantasy world to explain how families in the modern era can hurt their children for petty reasons. We have that in our own lives. We have friends and families who have experienced that. It can be addressed in any other setting. It can be addressed in Avatar but it doesn’t need Avatar to address it.

What we don’t experience in our modern lives is ancient China 2000 years ago, or feudal Japan after the takeover of the Tokugawa Shogun, or religious monks living in their temples in the mountains untouched by the modern world, and so on.

The setting of Avatar is one of both beauty and relative detachment from the real (and modern) world, but it is one that is based on a period of history and human civilization that most of Avatar’s audience (North America and Europe) have little exposure to. If the characters’ motivations are too detached from the fictional world in which they live (i.e. by ignoring the historical, political, military and cultural context), then you begin to lose the world’s depth. At the same time, if their motivations are too connected to the present world, then all Avatar is is a visual motif of ancient East Asia.

By seeking to explain the Fire Nation villains as embodiments of modern psychology’s understanding of “bad” people, you erase the opportunity to apply East Asia’s very real history of warfare, monarchical domination and oppressive cultures to a fictional world that is trying to say something about that warfare, monarchical domination and oppressive cultures. Note that the show did in fact achieve this with the Dai Lee’s corruption and manipulation of the Earth King; it depicted loosely the very real occurrence of Chinese Emperors being “kept in the dark” by their advisors so as not to interfere with the “real” governing of the states.

If your goal is to view Avatar purely as an allegory for modern dysfunctional relationships and domestic abuse, you lose Avatar’s uniqueness as a fictional dive into an East Asian-inspired world, especially one that is ravaged by warfare and feudalism.

In this article, I describe an alternative model for understanding the Fire Nation’s culture and history, and how its politics and military molded its heroes and villains.

What We Know and Might Know

In order to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the Fire Nation, we first have to understand what is both known about the Fire Nation and what can be reasonably presumed about it.

First, what do we know about the Fire Nation?

1. The Fire Nation is an archipelago with a history spanning thousands of years.

2. The Fire Nation was originally the “Fire Islands” and was not initially governed by a central power.

3. The Fire Islands had a unified cultural and religious authority in the form of the “Fire Sages”.

4. Eventually, the Fire Islands were unified by a single power—the “Imperial Government”—and afterward became known as the “Fire Nation”.

5. The Imperial Government is headed by a supreme ruler: the “Fire Lord”.

6. The Fire Lord is a hereditary monarch whose family is considered the “Royal Family”, both of which are separate entities from the Fire Sages.

7. The Fire Sages remain a distinct entity from the Imperial Government.

8. Both the Fire Lord and Royal Family are military and administrative rulers.

9. The Fire Lord and their Royal Family are not sacred and everlasting; their power can be “challenged” by rival leaders.

10. Fire Lords are expected to “show their worth” and be competent fighters in their own right; prowess in military arts and control of subordinates are valued traits.

11. Agni Kais are a longstanding component of Fire Nation culture.

12. The Fire Nation experienced an “unprecedented time of peace and wealth” during the era of the Fire Nation, not during the era Fire Islands.

Next, what can be reasonably presumed given what we know?

Something necessitated the Fire Islands becoming unified, but this unification did not result in the Fire Sages taking power, nor did it yield a peaceful, democratic government.

The Imperial Government that resulted from this unification is rooted in military control and maintaining the fealty of its subjects; in Avatar and the Fire Lord, Sozin put on his “ruler persona” to Roku initially before acting friendly, only later to demand loyalty from him as if Roku was any other subject.

The culture of the Fire Nation values strength and bravery from its firebenders, as explained in an official description of Agni Kais. Presumably, the Agni Kai predates the era of the Fire Lord and has been used to settle disputes of various kinds. This could be interpreted as a “non-destructive” means of avoiding war and greater loss of life given how easily firebenders could wreak havoc to wooden buildings and crops (among other flammable components of society). Since nobody recognized Zuko on Ember Island in The Beach, despite his obvious scar, severe scars from burns must be common enough in the Fire Nation that a teen boy having one on his face is not horrifying nor particularly unattractive.

Presumably, the Fire Nation/Fire Islands used to hold its religion and spiritual ties in higher regard, but Sozin’s start of the war required this aspect of the Fire Nation to be suppressed, as implied by dragon hunting and the divided loyalties of the Fire Sages at Roku’s temple, and the fact that various generals and admirals have defected. At the same time, vast enough swaths of the country and its leadership did follow Sozin’s path, considering that he and his family remained in power for over a hundred years. If Fire Lords can have their power challenged, then either nobody tried to stop Sozin, or they were defeated. Azula’s comment about “rumors of plans to overthrow him (Ozai)” in The Avatar State implies betrayal of the Royal Family is not a dormant threat. Though she was technically lying, it must have been a credible lie since neither Iroh and Zuko thought it was preposterous; his brother being “regretful” is what puzzled Iroh, not that there would be plots against the Fire Lord.

Notably, the Fire Lord’s throne room changed between the start of the war and the present day. Prior to Sozin, it did not have the imposing wall of flame as it does now. Certainly it had to be rebuilt after Roku destroyed it, but the wall of flame is much more imposing than the old.

The Fire Sages still pay a role in the Fire Nation, but this role is not known. Presumably, they play some part in the succession of the Fire Lord since they preside over coronation. Perhaps the relationship between the Fire Lord and Fire Sages is similar to the relationship between the Japanese Emperor and the Shoguns, where the Shoguns held the true power in the country (military and administrative) whereas the Emperor maintained a facade of power as a cultural and religious symbol. What is known about the Fire Sages is that they have a temple in the capital and are divided between their loyalties to the Avatar and the Fire Lord.

Finally, the Imperial Government’s capital is located in an isolated, fortified city inside a volcano’s caldera, where coming-and-going is strictly controlled. The city is large, full of nobility, physically disconnected from the external port city (versus directly being the hub of economic activity) and contains numerous underground bunkers.

Why would the Capital require such extensive bunkers and fortifications? Presumably because the Fire Lord and Royal Family can be “challenged” and the bunkers are a defense mechanism against both external and internal threats. The Fire Nation did have a “darkest day” tied to solar eclipses, which suggests that the loss of firebending had profound military consequences. Whatever the reasons, the Imperial Government is so concerned about its survival that it has constructed massive fortifications around its capital, implying that warfare is a major concern.

Areas of Confusion

But what does all of this mean?

Was the Fire Nation previously peace-loving and compassionate while Sozin is responsible for all of its “evils”?

Have Agni Kais been performed for centuries and so Zuko being challenged to one was neither unusual nor particularly grotesque for the Fire Nation’s culture?

Did Sozin face massive opposition to starting the war or was everyone humbly obedient to the Fire Lord?

How is a Fire Lord’s rule challenged?

Why wasn’t Sozin overthrown if he had to “impose” the war upon the country?

Why did the Fire Lord come to existence in the first place?

Why has the Imperial Government not been replaced by the Fire Sages?

Why does the Fire Nation need a national government?

What is a more compelling explanation for the Fire Nation’s villains other than mental illness and personality disorders?

As it turns out, there is a way to understand the Fire Nation that adequately fills in the gaps, explains its heroes and villains and provides a lesson on East Asian history.

A Brief History of Ancient Japan’s Unification

The islands of Japan have been populated for tens of thousands of years, but the “modern” era of warlords and emperors did not begun until the past 1500 years or so. While the Japanese people were not united under a single state, there was an “Emperor” who was believed to have been descended from a goddess. Despite this first emperor having control over a certain portion of Japan, it did not take long until the country split into separate feudal states.

While the Emperor never went away, their power over the country waned. The real power in Japan laid in the hands of the various feudal lords (daimyo), who used their armies to defend their territories and capture new ones from other lords.

Since the Emperor represented a shared cultural connection among the people, their power was not completely absent. In the earlier parts of history, before the Emperor became completely subordinated, the Emperor would appoint a Seii Taishōgun, or supreme commander, of the Emperor’s armies. Eventually, this “supreme commander” became the actual ruler of the Japan since they controlled the military. By appointing them “shogun” they more or less had the public approval of the Emperor despite the Emperor not actually being able to control them.

Various shoguns came and went, but through it all were the daimyo using their samurai to battle for control of the country. Ruthlessness and murder were common. Building alliances only to later betray them were often wise tactics. For a thousand years, the rulers of Japan lived by the sword, died by the sword and used it to maintain their power. Things got particularly bad during the Sengoku Period, which is considered the “Warring States” period of Japan. That tells you all you need to know.

It was during this time that one of these feudal lords rose to power, a man named Tokugawa Ieyasu (first name Ieyasu, last name Tokugawa). Using a combination of political tact, military genius and European steel breast armor, he defeated all other daimyo during the Azuchi–Momoyama period and installed himself as the shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This marked the end of over a thousand years of continuous violence and social turmoil in Japan.

The Tokugawa Shogunate represented Japan’s first unified national government. The country’s existing daimyo were placed under strict control to ensure they did not rebel. The military was nationalized and the existing feudal governments rearranged to ensure centralized control by the Shogun in his capital at Edo. Notably, Edo became modern day Tokyo.

National laws were written, along with cultural and religious standards to ensure social cohesiveness, stability and control. The economies of Japan also flourished, especially in the cities. A consequence of the Tokugawa Shogunate, however, was closing off Japan to the outside world. The Shogun wanted to ensure their rule and control of the populace. Allowing other countries to influence them and provide assistance to competing powers within the country was viewed as destabilizing.

A particularly unique aspect of the Tokugawa’s politic strategy was requiring the daimyos’ families to live in the capital while the daimyo themselves had to go back and forth between their homes in their territory (called a domain) and their homes in the capital every other year. The Shogun essentially held the daimyos’ families hostage to ensure they would not rebel or work against him, although they lived in the comfort and relative freedom of a modern city, not as actual prisoners.

Another tactic the Shogun utilized to quell rebellion was to keep careful control of who entered the city of Edo and its surroundings. Guards were at all entrances and major roads and registries were kept of all people. Essentially, if you weren’t suppose to be somewhere, you weren’t allowed to be there.

Bushdio also developed during this period as way of controlling the warrior class, and was much more complicated than most Western depictions. With war and feudal fighting no longer a constant threat, the samurai class became enforces for the new government. Naturally, the Shogun was particularly interested in controlling them.

Control is a common theme of the Tokugawa Shogun’s government.

The Tokugawa Period was one of peace and stability, prosperity and enjoyment of the arts, but Ieyasu Tokugawa was not a nice person. He hunted down and executed the families of rival clans, including kids, during the takeover. He held families hostage and made sure his subordinates feared him and never stepped out of line. He enacted strict laws to control the populace and made sure no one could challenge him and his government’s reign. And it worked. Japan did not experience another war until the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate 278 years later, when the Emperor regained control and ended the era of isolationism. There’s a reason why modern day Japan doesn’t view this period with derision and loathing; given the context of the time, it was a proud moment for a region racked by warfare and division.

A pattern is beginning to emerge: an island nation ruled by feuding lords with no central power to direct them; a religious and cultural figure with no real power; a period of intense warfare and turmoil followed by a lasting period of unification and prosperity; a powerful central government headed by a hereditary monarch who took power using ruthlessness and military might; a hereditary monarch who rules through fear and demands fealty; a capital city with strict control of who comes and goes.

Themes of control and subordination from a central power.

This is sounds very familiar.

The Military and Political History of the Fire Nation

The history of ancient Japan provides a real-world model for understanding the origins of the Fire Nation’s Imperial Government, the Fire Lord and why they rule through fear and military domination. Keep in mind that the Fire Nation is not Japan, but warfare, centralized control and a desire for peace and stability are universal. Ancient Japan’s experience with feudalism, warfare and the eventual peace that came from having a competent central authority can go a long way in applying Avatar’s “East Asian origins” to the Fire Nation and its villains and heroes.

Using the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate as a template, the history of the Fire Nation looks like this:

The Fire Islands were ruled by various feudal lords. These feudal lords engaged in warfare with each other as they vied for ever increasing control. Firebending was the primary source of these lords’ military might. The Fire Sages were recognized as spiritual and religious leaders by the Fire Islands people, but they did not have the practical power necessary to enforce peace upon the lands.

At the same time, firebending was recognized as being fundamental to the influence of the Fire Sages and the power of the feudal lords. Since fire can destroy houses, burn fields, melt iron and lay waste to non-bending armies, whoever can control and weaponize firebending for their own purposes will attain the most power. On the other hand, this also makes warfare particularly destructive as even small rebellions could lay waste to cities given how much fire a single firebender can unleash.

At some point, in order to put a stop to the fighting, a central authority came to power, either as one of those warlords or a Fire Sage acquiring enough military and political power. Maybe an avatar helped them. Without a doubt, military might had to have played a role in ending the “Warring States” period of the Fire Islands.

In order to make sure the Fire Islands did not fall back into fighting and remained peaceful and stable, this new central authority created a sweeping national government to control them. Thus are the beginnings of the Fire Lord and Imperial Government.

Because the Fire Nation is full of people with ”desire and will, and the energy and drive to achieve what they want” (in the words of Uncle Iroh), the destructive capacity inherent to a nation full of firebenders must be kept under strict control; if the goal is to create a prosperous, flourishing society, you cannot allow it to be destroyed periodically by walking flamethrowers.

As a result, the Imperial Government is not a “friendly” entity. It controls the nobility and lords who act as the local “vassals” in their home territories; it amasses a large, overwhelming military to quash any attempts at rebellion, and to send a clear message to its people to not even try; it uses fear and threats of violence to control the people who might feel the “drive and willpower” to try their hand at acquiring wealth and power through force.

The Agni Kai exists as a means of settling conflict without the destructive consequences of firebending. Perhaps a Fire Lord enacted this to further tamp down on firebenders’ destructive tendencies. It may also be an example of how the Fire Nation’s “warrior class” handles internal disputes in a similar manner as bushido.

Bravery, ferocity and a willingness to fight are valued in the leadership of the country because the Imperial Government is supposed to be a military entity first; how can the Fire Lord, their family and government inspire fear in the people if the people don’t believe they will be crushed if they step out of line?

At the same time, since the Fire Nation is much smaller than the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Lord must ensure they can defend the Fire Nation from invasion; you need a large, devoted, competent military to go up against an enemy multiple times your size.

In order to further control the country, the Fire Lord requires the families of the lords and nobility to live in the closed-off, guarded capital inside the caldera in a similar manner as the Tokugawa Shogunate required. This is why the capital is so guarded and closed-off, yet beautiful and comfortable; it is both a defensive measure for the administrative officials and a means of holding the nobility “hostage”.

The Fire Lord and Royal Family views themselves as presiding over, and maintaining the peace and stability of the Fire Nation. Their responsibility is to ensure that the peaceful Fire Nation does not fall back into the chaotic Fire Islands. Being nice and democratic is not their means of achieving this; making sure everybody subordinates themselves to the Imperial Government is.

After hundreds of years of peace and an unprecedented era of prosperity, the Fire Nation began to lose its internal enemies. The lords and nobility were under full control. The Imperial Government was vast and efficient. Nobody was trying to invade the Fire Nation. Everyone was happy and proud of their culture and government.

This allowed Sozin to begin looking outward. Using the all-powerful Imperial Government apparatus developed over the centuries, plus the sweeping loyalty to it ingrained into the public, he was able to get the country to go to war against the world. The militarism inherent to the Fire Nation’s leadership was not crafted out of whole cloth but simply cranked up and sent down a dark path.

The military being so willing to go along with it was because of their inherent loyalty to the Imperial Government and their culture of aggression and lust for battle necessary for warriors. This is actually where the 20th century Imperial Japan connections come in, but that’s a separate topic.

In summary, the Fire Lord and Royal Family view themselves as stewards of the peace and order of the Fire Nation. They see their responsibility as doing whatever it takes to prevent the “bad old days” from returning and that the Fire Nation is never weakened by foreign invaders. They rule through coercion and fear in order to ensure a country full of people who can shoot fire out of their hands remain subservient to the Imperial Government’s will. They embrace a culture of fighting because their primary goal is to prevent fighting by deterring those who might want to try.

An Alternate View of the Fire Nation’s Villains

Viewing the Fire Nation’s culture, government and leadership through the lens of Japanese history paints a more coherent picture of the Fire Nation’s villains, versus the M.C. Escher-like theories that result from focusing entirely on mental illness and personality disorders.

Look at it like this: the Fire Lord demands fealty and obedience from the people yet Azula’s emphasis on controlling people through fear is a result of Freudian Excuses and personality disorders?

No way.

Ruling through fear and coercion is necessary from the viewpoint of a soldier-princess who is supposed to command obedience from subjects, or else.

Agni Kais are expected events in Fire Nation culture, so common that child-Zuko is perfectly happy to face the general over mere “disrespect”, but the Fire Lord challenging his son to one is uniquely out of line? It’s awful, I mean, really awful, but it’s not out of line and it says a lot about the ingrained culture of the Fire Nation; Ozai didn’t think it would be viewed as shameful by everyone watching. Keep in mind that the tale of the 47 Ronin started with one member of the nobility insulting the other (essentially) and being asked to commit suicide simply for drawing a weapon inside Edo Castle (strictly forbidden). If Ozai can have his power challenged as any other Fire Lord can, then nobody was willing to oppose him because everyone else supported him.

Iroh spends a lifetime invading the Earth Kingdom, no doubt killing tens of thousands, and he can joke about burning Ba Sing Se to the ground? Of course he can, because it’s what Fire Nation generals do and part of the terrible culture that must be changed, as horrible as it was. The prince-general is supposed to be a military leader and enjoy what he does. He better not be squeamish.

Zuko is expected to be “loved and adored” for having firebending talent, courtly manners (to quote official descriptions of Azula) and intelligence in a similar fashion as his prodigal, early-blooming sister? Yes, because she bloomed early as the type of princess the nobility and leadership want and expect. It’s unfortunate they were so hard on Zuko, but now we know why he wasn’t “adored” like his sister; she was what others wanted Zuko to be.

Ty Lee is strong-armed by Azula into leaving the life she loves, even having her life threatened, when Ty Lee is a family member of the nobility that the Imperial Government seeks to control? Of course she is strong-armed. Can you really imagine this scenario playing out:

Those lines are taken from the show. Sounds a lot different, doesn’t it? Ignore the smirking and smugness for a moment and think about what is actually happening: a supreme military leader and heir to the throne is bullying a subordinate in order to get what they are entitled to; unwavering loyalty from a subject. Doesn’t make it good. Doesn’t make Ty Lee’s fear and loathing of Azula any less justified, but it puts it in a much more relevant context than vague theories of sadism and personality disorders. It also tells us something about the real ancient world: this how military rulers in East Asia’s history behaved and now you’re getting to see it in a fictional setting.

Fire Lord Azulon orders one of his sons to execute their son? That’s bad. Really bad. Did you also know that Ieyasu Tokugawa ordered his own son to commit suicide over suspicion he was conspiring against him? He didn’t want to but those were the wishes of the lord he was working with to win the war. That’s really bad too, and not shocking for the era, unfortunately. The leaders of the ancient world valued human life a lot less than people do now. It’s sad they didn’t value it more.

Manipulating subordinates (i.e. playing them off each other) and being ruthless were not frowned upon, but legitimate tactics. Murder and backstabbing were useful means of getting rid of an opposing leader. What mattered was winning, and the blood on your hands could simply be washed off, and if people didn’t like you for it? Well, were they in charge?

None of this is “good”. None of this is moral, or righteous, or anything close to how people should act in the modern era. However, these were not kleptocratic dictators like we see around the world today. These were legitimate administrative rulers by their day’s standards, and we (you and me) will never truly know what they were feeling when they woke up in the morning with the responsibilities of warfare and politicking.

We will never be able to completely relate to what these ancient leaders did. Do you know what it’s like to be the law in the land who can order people to commit suicide, and who will do it? Do you know what it’s like to prosecute a political and military war against multiple opponents across a vast country? Do you know what it’s like to manage an ancient authoritarian government after hundreds of years of warfare and chaos? None of us will, but that’s the kind of situation that a fictional country like the Fire Nation can take inspiration from, and should take inspiration from.

These were all very real problems of the ancient world and problems which Avatar, as a fictional work, can allow us to explore in the safety and comfort of not actually having to be there (and without having to open up huge history books).

Summary

The Fire Nation’s political and military history can be modeled on ancient Japan’s, in particular the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate, where the Fire Lord represents the shogun and the Fire Sages the emperor.

The Fire Nation capital is both the head of the administration and home to the nobility’s families, who are held as hostages (in comfort) to prevent the various lords from rebelling.

The Royal Family and Imperial Government rules through fear and threats of force because they have to keep a country full of walking flamethrowers in line.

As military leaders who can have their power challenged, firebending talent and military prowess are highly valued and necessary for Fire Lords. At the same time, the rest of the country’s leadership wants leaders who appear worthy of that power and authority, hence those who have all the right qualities (Azula) are viewed in higher regard than those who have less (Zuko).

Azula’s emphasis on using “fear to control people” is not a psychological hang-up but a natural tactic of the Fire Lord, military, and Imperial Government to maintain obedience; as a teenager with limited life experience, she has internalized her role as a princess and warrior to the detriment of her personal relationships and emotional maturity (this is where the “child soldier” narrative has relevance).

Ozai represents the pinnacle of self-interest, authoritarianism and militarism that the combination of Sozin’s War and the longstanding nature of the Imperial Government have combined to create. In the ancient world, lords waged warfare for two reasons: to acquire power or pre-emptively wipe out rivals. Ozai wants power.

Ozai challenging Zuko to an Agni Kai is awful but not unusual, hence why he felt he could do it at all. Agni Kais are a fundamental aspect of conflict resolution in the Fire Nation, most likely because the Fire Nation’s leadership values bravery and a willingness to fight very highly. As Zuko was a prince and future leader of the warrior class, those values applied to him as well, but they got applied to him far too young (again, this is where the “child soldier” narrative has relevance).

And finally, by modeling the motivations of the Fire Nation’s villains and heroes on the military leaders of ancient Japan, you have the opportunity to learn about and critique that ancient society while also giving it a fictional flare.

As a final remark on applying the history of ancient Japan to the Fire Nation, the Tokugawa Shogunate ended when the Emperor forcibly took control of the Tokugawa government in order to end the forced isolationism. If ancient Japan hadn’t been pressured to adapt to more advanced European civilizations (say, if it existed in a vacuum) then the Tokugawa Shogunate might have continued to be the longest and most stable period in Japanese history; post-World War 2 Japan is only 70 years old while the Tokugawa Shogunate lasted for 278. When the Emperor wrested control of the country from the Shogunate, there was already enough peace, stability and government bureaucracy in place to lead a rapid transition of the country into modernity. That was the ultimate value of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

If the Fire Islands had not unified under a central authority, then they might have never industrialized so rapidly during that “unprecedented time of peace and prosperity” and may have eventually been conquered by the Earth Kingdom (should an EK conqueror have found a way of killing the Avatar, or taking advantage of their absence).

Conclusion

Think about ancient Japan for a moment. All of the warring lords. The conquest and ruthless political maneuvering. The ruling through fear and totalitarian control. What is a more reasonable explanation for the behavior of that society: mental illness and personality disorders, or universal concepts of ancient nation-building?

What makes more sense for furthering Avatar’s East Asian themes in terms of the Fire Nation: sociopathy, personality disorders, lack of fundamental human qualities, petty bullies and insecure abusers? Or universal concepts of ancient nation-building in the context of people who can shoot fire out of their hands?

Was Ieyasu Tokugawa suffering from a personality disorder? Was ancient Japan swimming with people who lacked fundamental human traits? That would be and absolutely extraordinary anomaly of human genetic variation.

When discussing the evils of the Fire Nation, you have to start with the in-world context that created them, and in order to understand that context, you have to apply some East Asian history. Why “decent” or “normal” people end up doing terrible things is a question as old as humanity itself and should not be erased from Avatar.

In order to understand why Ozai and Azula seem like “bad” people to us, it’s because the rulers of ancient Japan acted like bad people. Zuko can’t be soft and fumbling. Azula can’t let people say no to her. Iroh can’t abandon the siege with no consequences. Ozai can’t let Zuko refuse to fight. As bad as many of these things are, they are driven by the fact these people are the most powerful entities in their country and must show their fire-wielding subordinates that they deserve their power and should not be challenged. There is no room for weakness, only strength and competence.

When you resort to psychological theories or genetic anomalies to explain the Fire Nation’s villains, you erase the opportunities to tie the Fire Nation to critical elements of East Asian history, namely the rise and success of the Tokugawa Shogunate. By relating the main villains of Avatar to the very real “villains” of the ancient world, you preserve the East Asian themes that make Avatar unique and informative to a Western audience and help shed light on what drove them to be what they were.

#Avatar The Last Airbender #atla meta #fire nation #Azula #ozai #Zuko #iroh

1K notes · View notes

cap-ironman · 4 years ago

Text

2020 Cap-IM BB: Worldbuilding

So you're poking around for ideas to make your Big Bang fic longer, and the term worldbuilding keeps cropping up… what does that mean?

"Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe." (definition from Wikipedia)

Worldbuilding is often associated with genre fiction, like cyberpunk or dystopias or medieval settings, but it can apply to any story you write! It could be an alternate real-world setting or a magical fantasy: what you're doing is creating the world your characters live in.

Consider where they live,

the clothes they wear,

who they socialise with,

what they listen to or watch,

their personal history,

their social and economic status, and so on.

Worldbuilding also extends to the rules and laws of the society that they belong to, the physical geography of their world, its history, languages and customs.

Worldbuilding adds believability and vibrancy to the world you've invited your readers to read about.

For example, if you're writing about King Tony, who's in an arranged marriage with some random Prince. Try asking yourself questions like: are arranged marriages common in this world? What are the threats and opportunities Tony faces if he goes ahead with this marriage? What are the consequences if he runs away to marry Steve? How does being a king affect Tony's backstory? Does Steve have an origin story as Captain America? Do people support the monarchy? If yes, why - if not, how does that affect the ruling class?

There are all sorts of avenues to explore when worldbuilding, from the flora and fauna of your world (magical golden flowers that heal, anyone?) to society's gender norms and political situation.

Your world doesn’t have to be real, it just has to make sense to your readers! The key is to be consistent within the story, and make sure that your rules and settings are logical to the world you're creating.

Readers want to believe you and follow characters along their journey, but you could lose them if you ask too much of their suspension of disbelief.That's why asking questions about how things work can lead to great worldbuilding.

What if you're writing a no-powers AU like the classic coffeeshop? How does worldbuilding apply to your story?

Well — what kind of coffee shop do your characters work in? Which type of neighbourhood or country is it in? Who are the customers? Is there a couple who always sit by the window and order a weird drink that makes the barista roll their eyes? All of these answers affect the interactions and the type of work your character does.

You may not use all the details in your story — and you certainty don't need to have a 20-page guide detailing your world's social development and history — but creating a vivid and consistent picture in your mind is a big step towards creating a multi-dimensional believable world for your characters to inhabit.

To start off, try Chuck Wendig's 25 things you should know about worldbuilding, and check out Writing Excuses, a great writing podcast with a whole season on worldbuilding.

No go forth and worldbuild!

Running since 2011, the Cap-Iron Man Big Bang challenges the community's writers to create Steve/Tony-focused fic with a minimum of 25,000 words. Artists are then invited to claim a fic and create accompanying art! To sign up as a writer you need to send us your 20,000 word draft and summary by September 23rd 2020.

For the full 2020 BB Event Guidelines and information for writers and artists, click here!

#stevetony #stony #superhusbands #capimbb #capimbb2020 #inspiration post

64 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

The Pandemic in Pop Culture Trends

https://ift.tt/32wrfZT

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was both a universal and incredibly personal experience. While not everyone’s life in the first year of the pandemic looked the same, there have been some common joys, struggles, and tragedies. And there have been stories that have helped get us through the first year of pandemic. The global COVID-19 pandemic is not over, but it has hopefully reached a turning point. Multiple vaccines protecting against the worst of the virus have been developed and have begun to be (unevenly) distributed around the world, with Israel, the U.K., Chile, and the U.S. currently with the greatest percentages of their populations having received at least one dose. As we hopefully move into a less deadly phase of the pandemic, we’re taking a moment to look back at the TV series, games, movies, and other pop culture moments that brought comfort, distraction, critique, and catharsis for many in the pandemic’s first year, as well as some of the major trends and news stories that shaped the industry itself between March 2020 and February 2021.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

March 2020

NBA To Suspend Season Following Tonight's Games pic.twitter.com/2PTx2fkLlW

— NBA (@NBA) March 12, 2020

The NBA Suspends the Season (March 11th)

Many use the NBA’s March 11th announcement that the 2019-2020 season would be suspended until further notice as an unofficial start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The season would continue four months later in the “NBA Bubble,” but no one could know what the future would look like, only that things were indeed very serious for the billions-dollar professional basketball and media industry to shut down.

Everyone Watches Contagion

Though Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller came out in 2011, Contagion jumped from Warner Bros.’ 270th most digitally rented movie in December 2019 to their second most rented one in February, and that trend would only continue into March. As the pandemic continued, we would see audiences turning towards more “escapist” fare, but, in the early days of this international crisis, people turned towards this matter-of-fact, fictional imagining of how a global pandemic might play out to help process their new and frightening reality.

Movie Theaters Essentially Go Dark

In addition to the immense loss of human life the COVID-19 pandemic has caused, there has also been an economic cost that will no doubt continue to impact human health and livelihood in the coming years. On March 17th, the movie theater chains Regal and AMC announced their temporary closures, an early sign of just how bad the pandemic would be for the movie theater business.

Movies in Theaters Begin Going to VOD

With movie theaters closed, studios needed to get creative about how best to distribute their movies still “in theaters.” Universal Pictures was the first to make the decision to move its new releases to a video on-demand model, bringing The Invisible Man, The Hunt, and Emma to VOD on March 20th.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Released (March 20th)

On March 20th, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch, allowing players (most of whom where stuck at home) to digitally move to an island and nurture their own community. The fifth game in the Animal Crossing series, New Horizons would go on to major commercial success. It broke the console game record for most digital units sold in a single month, became the 15th best-selling video game in history, and the second best-selling game of all time in Japan. It was also the most blogged-about subject on Tumblr in 2020!

Tiger King Drops on Netflix (March 20th)

Netflix remains the largest streaming service worldwide, with over 200 million global subscribers and roughly 74 million of those subscribers in the U.S. Because of this, when a Netflix Original becomes a hit, it usually becomes a major part of online discourse, especially in the United States. This was the case for Tiger King, the true crime (and truly wild) documentary series that dropped on Netflix on March 20th. With most watchers stuck at home, the online discourse around the show felt even more intense than usual. For a few weeks, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a Tiger King meme.

April 2020

Quibi Launches (April 6)

While not necessarily pandemic-specific (did Quibi ever really stand a chance?), 2020 saw the launch (April 6th) and death (December 1st) of Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form streaming platform that squandered $1.75 billion in investment capital and star power like Sophie Turner, Kiefer Sutherland, Idris Elba, Chrissy Teigen, Karlie Kloss, and Laura Dern before bowing out in December.

Trolls World Tour Becomes First Movie to Break Theatrical Window (April 10)

Remember when it was radical for a movie to break its theatrical window? Yeah, that was in April, when many media professionals were shocked with Universal’s decision to release Trolls World Tour, the computer animated musical comedy sequel to 2016’s Trolls, as both a limited theatrical release and via video on demand services. The move led AMC Theatres to temporarily announce that they would no longer be distributing Universal films, but the two companies quickly came to an agreement shortly after.

Extraction was a Thing (April 24)

Honestly, every week in 2020 felt like its own lifetime. Remember when Extraction, the Chris Hemsworth-helmed action-thriller, became the most watched original film in Netflix’s history? Directed by Sam Hargrave and written by MCU vet Joe Russo, the film follows a black ops mercenary who must rescue the kidnapped son of an Indian drug lord in Bangladesh. As self-reported by Netflix, the movie was watched by 99 million households in its first month of release.

May 2020

TikTok Pops

TikTok was already firmly a thing heading into 2020, but the pandemic was when more people found it—especially the olds… by which I mean millennials. In October 2019, TikTok had almost 40 million U.S. users (and 507 million global users in December 2019). By June 2020, that number was at almost 92 million in the U.S. (and 689 million globally by July 2020). This was part of a larger trend over the course of the pandemic that saw people spending more time on their mobile devics than ever before: According to a report from mobile app intelligence agency App Annie (via Social Media Today), by the end of 2020, Americans spent more time on TikTok than they did on Facebook, and the average American now spends more time per day on their mobile device (4 hours) than they do watching TV (3.7 hours).

Avatar: The Last Airbender is Released on Netflix (May 15th)

In many ways, the pandemic has been an accelerant of global processes, and this applies to pop culture as well. While we were already seeing the rise in more foreign-language TV, including anime, and the return to some major nostalgic properties due to broader and easier accessibility because of platforms like Netflix, the pandemic really ramped that process up. When all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender became available on Netflix in May, the American animated TV series that originally aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, was discovered or re-discovered by millions of viewers, becoming one of the top Tumblr fandoms of 2020. It was indicative of a larger trend of old shows becoming new again through release on major global streaming platforms.

Avatar: The Last Airbender – What Can We Expect From the New Avatar Studios?

By Shamus Kelley

Avatar: The Last Airbender Co-Creators Exit Netflix Live-Action Series

By Shamus Kelley

June 2020

Buffy Lands on All4 (June 1st)

In a year where what’s old was necessarily new again, all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer came to UK streaming platform All4, and were broadcast on E4 every weeknight at 11pm. Elsewhere in the UK streaming market, the BBC iPlayer saw its best-ever quarter from April to June with 1.6 billion requests, an increase of 59% on the same quarter last year (according to a BBC press release).

Staged Premieres (June 10th)

As it became apparent that TV and film production would not be going back to normal anytime soon, many creators got, well, creative and began making things in lockdown. One of the best and most high-profile examples was BBC’s Staged, in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen play fictionalized versions of themselves, trying to rehearse a performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author via video chat, alongside director Simon Evans. The low-budget, high-charisma series is filmed in the actors’ real-life homes but, unlike some celebrity efforts during the pandemic (see March), strikes the right tonal note in relation to its subjects’ privilege.

July 2020

Ray Fisher Speaks Up About Alleged Abuse on the Justice League Set (July 1st)

Actor Ray Fisher raised his voice on July 1st in a tweet, calling out director Joss Whedon for alleged abuse on the Justice League set, and WB execs Geoff Johns and Jon Berg for “enabling” that alleged behavior.

Joss Wheadon’s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable. He was enabled, in many ways, by Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Accountability>Entertainment

— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) July 1, 2020

Later, in December, Fisher would add WB exec Walter Hamada’s name to that list, following a December 11th announcement by WarnerMedia that their investigation connected to Justice League “has concluded and remedial action has been taken.”

Hamilton Blows Us All Away (July 4th)

One of the deepest cultural cuts during lockdown was the necessary elimination of live, in-person theater, which is probably one of the reasons why Hamilton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning stage musical that originally came to Broadway in 2015, made such a splash when it became available in its filmed format via Disney+. Even without a pandemic, Hamilton (and all Broadway theater) is only accessible to a select group of people, making the addition of the pop culture phenomenon in a more accessible form so very important.

From Bridgerton to Hamilton: A History of Color-Conscious Casting in Period Drama

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

Movies

Hamilton: Thomas Jefferson Controversy Explained

By David Crow

Host Becomes the Most Zeitgesty Movie of 2020 (July 30th)

Another particularly impressive entry into the “filmed from lockdown” genre that sprouted up during the first year of the pandemic was British found footage horror film Host. Written and made over 12 weeks in a pandemic and based around a haunted Zoom call, few pandemic-made stories managed to nail the balance between both frighteningly topical and escapist quite so well.

The NBA Bubble Begins

Professional sports went into their bubbles, aka tightly controlled settings in which pro sports players live, practice, and play their respective seasons—to varying degrees of success. The NBA’s Disney World bubble went into effect on July 22nd for exhibition scrimmages, before launching into the final eight games of its regular 2019-2020 season and then the 2020 NBA playoffs. Twenty-two of the NBA’s 30 teams were invited to participate and ended the bubble in October with no recorded cases of COVID-19 amongst its participating players. The MLB bubble was… less successful.

SDCC @Home: WTF Was That? (July 22)

San Diego Comic-Con is one of the most important and lucrative pop culture events of the year, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into downtown San Diego to celebrate and discuss some of the largest franchises in the world. SDCC was one of the many in-person conventions that attempted to transfer its programming online in 2020 and… it didn’t really work. Part of the fun of Comic-Con is in the excitement of the crowd and the exclusivity of the events. (Though not on Thanksgiving, thank you very much.) There is nothing quite like getting to be part of a major Hall H announcement, and watching via video chat is just not the same.

August 2020

Tenet Comes Out in the UK (August 26th)

In what was largely a year without theatrical cinema in the U.S. and the U.K., a brief respite in COVID-19 cases and therefore lockdown meant a proper theatrical release for Christopher Nolan’s latest in August 2020. Sci-fi blockbuster Tenet hit U.K. theatres on August 26th, bringing in $5.3 million domestically in its first week of release and marking the first major studio release since the pandemic began.

American Sports Leagues Go on Strike to Protest Jacob Blake Shooting

Many professional sports in the U.S. came to a temporary halt when some players and teams refused to take the field or court following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black American who was shot in the back and paralyzed by a police officer in front of his sons on August 23rd in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The incident re-ignited ongoing protests over racism and police brutality, with which many players and teams stood in solidarity. The NBA, WNBA, MLB, and MLS all postponed games as players protested Jacob Blake’s shooting.

Chadwick Boseman Passes Away (August 28th)

In a devastating loss to American culture, Chadwick Boseman, the star of Black Panther and many other films, passed away due to complications from colon cancer, a condition with which he had been living and working since a 2016 diagnosis. Boseman was one of the most successful Black actors and creators working today.

“He … knew that his voice was now strong and people were listening and paying attention,” wrote Kelley L. Carter in The Undefeated. “And he knew that even as this moment was victorious, Hollywood still needed to be called to task on the things that make this industry problematic, even as it was in the infant phases of creating a groundbreaking blockbuster with a mostly Black cast.”

September 2020

Tenet Flops in the U.S., Hollywood Abandons Ship for Fall 2020 (September 3)

While Tenet may have been a hit in the U.K., the Nolan blockbuster flopped upon its release in the U.S., where many theaters remained closed or empty through the summer and fall. The film would make around $58 million in the U.S. and Canada, prompting Hollywood studios to further push back major releases slated for the fall.

Mulan Becomes First Disney “Premier Access” Release (Sept. 4)

After several pandemic-caused release delays, Disney’s much-anticipated, live-action adaptation of Mulan became the first “Premier Access” release for Disney+, causing a bit of a stir. In the U.S. and in some other markets, Disney forwent releasing Mulan in theaters, instead offering a “Premier Access” window on Disney+ that viewers could access for an additional fee of $29.99. While the film received middling reviews from western critics, it was not received well in China. Additionally, a #BoycottMulan movement, which started out as a response to social media comments star Liu Yifei made in support of the Hong Kong police in their (sometimes violent) suppression of pro-democracy protestors, gained some traction in the lead up to the release.

Movies

How Mulan Maintains The Animated Film’s Queerness

By Natalie Zutter

Movies

Mulan: Disney Plus Grosses Exceed $200 Million? (Report)

By David Crow

I’m Thinking of Ending Things Makes People Go “Whaaa?” (Sept. 4)

As our Rosie Fletcher wrote in the “Ending Explained” for I’m Thinking of Ending Things: “[this story is] a movie, and a book, which really requires you to watch/read twice to actually fully understand.” It’s a gloriously confusing movie, and many in September dove right into the mystery chiller adapted by Charlie Kaufman from a novel by Iain Reid. As Fletcher put in her review, the film is “a perfect storm of philosophy, ambiguity and wankery.” What’s not to love?

October 2020

Trial of the Chicago 7 Debuts on Netflix (Oct. 16)

However you may feel about Aaron Sorkin, the man knows how to make a taut political drama. Trial of the Chicago 7 is a dramatic retelling of (as it says on the tin) the 1969-70 trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of anti–Vietnam War protesters charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The movie has an all-star cast of dudes, and is both written and directed by Sorkin. It made many critics’ best-of-the-year lists and made a cultural splash when it dropped on Netflix in October, after a summer of American and global protests ignited by the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans.

Borat 2 Makes (a Bigger) Fool Out of Rudy Giulilani (October 23rd)

Rarely do the paths of pop culture and politics so explicitly intersect as they did in Borat 2. The mockumentary comedy sequel came out in October, in the long, plateau-ed height of the lead up to the presidential election, and featured a scene in which Republican politician Rudy Giuliani puts his hand into his trousers in front of actress Maria Bakalova, who is impersonating a conservative journalist. While Giuliani attempted to spin the event in both the lead up to and following the release of the film on Amazon Prime, Sacha Baron Cohen told Good Morning America in an interview after the film’s release: “It is what it is. He did what he did.”

Movies

Maria Bakalova is Ready to Do Borat 3 in ‘Five Minutes’

By David Crow

Movies

Borat 2: Sacha Baron Cohen Reveals Dangerous Deleted Scene

By David Crow

The Queen’s Gambit Turns Everyone into a Chess Player (Oct. 23)

Odds are that, in October 2020, you either knew someone or were someone who watched The Queen’s Gambit and then fell hard into the world of chess. The Netflix period miniseries tracks the highs and lows of fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon (the brilliant Anya Taylor-Joy), from her upbringing in a Kentucky orphanage in the 1950s to her time at the top of the competitive chess world in the 1960s. In its first month of release, The Queen’s Gambit became Netflix’s most-watched scripted miniseries, and sent chess set sales soaring—yet another sign of just how commercially and culturally powerful Netflix has become.

November 2020

PlayStation 5 Alleges Launches, But No One Can Get Them (Nov. 12)

Even if you aren’t a gamer, you probably heard about the release of the PlayStation 5. Though the PS5 technically became available in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America, Singapore, and South Korea on November 12th (and worldwide a week later), the limited supply of the console made it almost impossible to find.

As Matthew Byrd wrote in his November article on the subject: “We know that the initial PS5 shortage can at least partially be attributed to a shortage of the console’s chips (as well as distribution and manufacturing problems caused by the complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic), but as we’re already seeing in Europe where some who pre-ordered a PS5 were warned they may not receive their console until 2021, Sony faces some notable additional issues moving forward.”

This is partially a story of supply and demand, and the growth of gaming in general. According to a report by market researcher SuperData (via Venture Beat), the game industry grew 12% (to $139.9 billion) in 2020, with console games revenues up 28% from 2019. While growth is expected to be slower in 2021, as fewer people will hopefully be stuck at home, more people than ever are gtting their story fix in the world of gaming.

Games

PlayStation Bets on Big Games as Game Pass Slowly Wins a Console War

By Matthew Byrd

Games

Why PlayStation Store Closing on PS3 Should Matter to You

By Matthew Byrd

December 2020

WB Announces HBO Max Release Hybrid Model (Dec. 3)

In a move that seems to be paying off, in December, Warner Bros. announced that it would be moving to a release hybrid model through 2021, putting its entire 2021 film slate on HBO Max. As David Crow explained in our film section: “The move will put all 17 of WB’s scheduled 2021 films on a ‘hybrid’ model where films will premiere on HBO Max the same day as their theatrical release in the U.S. Technically speaking, the films will still be playing in theaters, particularly in international markets without HBO Max as a streaming option, but for the first (and most lucrative) month of their release, they’ll also be available on WarnerMedia’s streamer.”

People Actually Get to Play Cyberpunk 2077, Immediately Realize It’s Broken (Dec. 10)

Hooboy, Cyberpunk 2077. In December, after literal years of anticipation, CD Projekt released action RPG video game Cyberpunk 2077 to disastrous results. While the narrative and design of the game is ambitious and has its rewards, the rollout was plagued by performance issues (particularly in the console versions) that led to player backlash and actual lawsuits.

Games

Cyberpunk 2077 Lawsuits Explained

By Matthew Byrd

Games

Cyberpunk 2077 Roadmap Proves the Game Should Have Been Delayed to 2021

By Matthew Byrd

The Mandalorian Finale Breaks the Internet (Dec. 18)

Um, spoilers.

The second season of The Mandalorian may not have technically been the most-watched series of 2020, but it certainly felt like the most-talked-about, proving that, even in the era of streaming, there’s still such a thing as appointment television. This all came to a culmination with The Mandalorian Season 2 finale, “The Rescue,” which featured an appearance from Luke Skywalker himself.

Could Durge’s Star Wars Return Lead to a Role in The Mandalorian or Book of Boba Fett?

By Joseph Baxter

How The Mandalorian Challenges Star Wars’ History of Bad Dads

By Lacy Baugher

Wonder Woman 1984 Premieres (Dec. 25)

Wonder Woman 1984 dropped on Christmas Day in the United States, and quickly became the most-watched straight-to-streaming title of 2020 (knocking Disney+’s Hamilton out of the top spot), despite its middling reviews. In the U.S., it would be the first of WB’s “hybrid model” releases, getting a simultaneous release in theaters as well as on HBO Max.

Movies

Wonder Woman 1984 Star Connie Nielsen Defends Patty Jenkins’ Vision

By Don Kaye

Movies

Does Zack Snyder’s Justice League Set Up Wonder Woman 3?

By David Crow

Bridgerton Gets Saucy (Dec. 25)

Bridgerton, Netflix’s deliciously addicting period romance based on the Julia Quinn novels, also dropped on Christmas Day, and went on to become the streamer’s most watched series ever, reaching #1 in 76 countries. The Shondaland produced drama made leading man Regé-Jean Page a global star, so much so that the announcement that he would not be returning for Season 2 (as each season focuses on a different romantic pairing featuring a member of the Bridgerton family) into a bit of a meltdown. Bridgerton has already secured another three seasons—a post-Season 1 announcement that is unprecedented for a Netflix original.

Why Bridgerton Had to Let Regé-Jean Page Go

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

Will Bridgerton Become the Next Game of Thrones?

By Kayti Burt

Soul Brings on the Feels (Dec. 25)

Called Pixar’s “most ambitious movie in years” by Den of Geek film editor David Crow, Soul was another Christmas release that brought solace to people stuck at home, many without their families, for the holidays. Directed by Pixar vet Pete Docter (Up, Monsters, Inc., Inside Out) and co-directed by Kemp Powers (One Night in Miami, Star Trek: Discovery), the film follows middle school music teacher and pianist Joe Gardner as he seeks to reunite his soul and his body after they are accidentally separated, just before his big break as a jazz musician.

January 2021

The Little Things Kicks Off WB’s 2021 Film Slate on Streaming (Jan. 29)

Fans of crime thriller and/or Denzel Washington and Rami Malek flock to HBO Max and theaters for the hybrid release of The Little Things, the first of WB’s planned 2021 slate.

Movies

The Little Things is Better Than a Seven Copycat

By Don Kaye

Movies

The Little Things and the Mystery of Denzel Washington’s Character Explained

By David Crow

February 2021

WandaVision Ensnares Us

Stop hogging the zeitgeist, Marvel!

In February, Disney+ released its first MCU show, WandaVision, and it broke the internet. The miniseries, created by Jac Schaeffer and starring Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, wowed audiences with its clever use of the sitcom format and superhero tropes to tell a story about grief that, for all of its fantastical elements, was oh so relatable.

How WandaVision’s Doctor Strange 2 Connection Evolved

By Joseph Baxter

WandaVision: The Unanswered Questions From the Marvel Series

By Gavin Jasper

Judas and the Black Messiah Debuts (Feb. 12)

Daniel Kaluuya and Lakith Stanfield lead an all-star cast in this 1960s period piece that follows the real life story of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was the victim of a targeted assassination by the FBI. In a year that saw an increased mainstream awareness of Black trauma, the Oscar-nominated Judas and the Black Messiah shone a cinematic light on yet another state-led historical injustice against Black Americans.

Charisma Carpenter Speaks Her Truth

In February, actress Charisma Carpenter came forward with allegations about Joss Whedon’s alleged abuses of power during her time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, inspired by Ray Fisher’s own efforts to seek justice and systemic reform for Whedon’s alleged behavior on Justice League.

My truth. #IStandWithRayFisher pic.twitter.com/eNjYcJ6zwP

— charisma carpenter (@AllCharisma) February 10, 2021

— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) July 1, 2020

Pokemania Returns

Many older millennials have spent their time during quarantine reconnecting with their childhood faves. This culminates with a massive renewed interest in Pokemon cards to the point where McDonald’s Happy Meals with Pokemon cards as toys sell out instantly.

Sponsored

Why Pokémon Has Endured For 25 Years

By Alec Bojalad

Did we miss anything? What have been the stories and pop culture trends that have helped get you through the pandemic so far? Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Pandemic in Pop Culture Trends appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3tFxFBF

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

2 notes · View notes

montagnarde1793 · 5 years ago

Text

Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 3)

Parts 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Style Issues

Stylistically, there’s a great deal of “tell don’t show” in this book, especially as regards the actual politics. The only things that are really concrete are the characters’ romantic entanglements and scenes of violence. This is a flaw that runs so deep that correcting it would mean writing a completely different book.

One thing that they could have done that would have made it somewhat more bearable, however, regards the use of language. In a book written in English but that takes place in France and where all the characters are French, please, I’m begging you, do not randomly (and often ungrammatically) insert whichever French words and phrases you half-remember from high school French class into descriptions and dialogue. It doesn’t give the characters a flavor of being French, it gives you a flavor of ignorance.

The key word here is “randomly”: note that I’m not talking about things like terms of address, exclamations, etc., for which there is an established convention, or terms for which there might not be an exact equivalent in English. No, I’m talking about this kind of thing: “[…] running a hand through his short-cropped noir hair” (p. 352). Please, resist the urge!

Also, this isn’t strictly a style issue, as the grammar is the least of the problems with it, but I don’t really know where else to put it... Each of the six parts opens with an epigraph. Here’s the one for Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe’s (p. 437) :

“It was a sensual delight for l’homme rouge to see fall in the basket these charming heads and their ruby blood streaming under the hideous cleaver.”

—Archives Nationale [sic]

I can’t believe I have to say this to a fellow historian, but just saying a quote is from the archives is bizarrely and baffling amateurish. It’s like saying a quote is from the library, or from a book or from the internet. Without further information, it’s about as useful a citation as saying it came to you in a dream. Why? Because it tells us nothing about the author or the date or any kind of context and therefore gives us no real way of evaluating it — though the lurid, sensationalist language doesn’t inspire confidence. Since the author of this section more than any other seems to take as a principle of novel-writing that whatever is the most over-the-top makes for the best fiction, I would say sure, why not, but as the authors also apparently want their depiction of “history” to be taken seriously… I mean, what is there to even say?

Writing What You Want to Know

There’s a problem throughout this book with characters talking about 18th France like it’s a place they’ve only read about in books rather than the only place they’ve ever lived and therefore the only reality *they* know firsthand. Now, obviously, the authors, like the rest of us, *have* only read about a 200+ year-old setting in books (or come to know it through various types of primary sources), but good historical fiction should be able to make you forget that, or at least come close.

I can’t entirely decide whether we’re looking at a failure of research here or of imagination — or just clumsy handling of exposition. I suspect it’s some mixture of all three.

Allow me to explain. The clumsy exposition is a result of the aforementioned lack of trust in the reader as well, I suspect, of the few pages allotted to each author, which don’t allow for a more natural immersion of the reader into a world that is entirely alien to them but is made up of both new and familiar elements to the characters.

The research vs imagination issue is more complex. I’m a firm believer in the updated adage “write what you want to know,” but if you’re going to do that, the intermediate step between wanting and writing is inevitably research. And well, there’s research and there’s research. For a novel especially, you don’t just want to be researching what happened, the concrete material facts such as who was present for what event or what a given figure’s relationship was to the people around them, but also people’s mentalities/sensibilities. To plausibly write from their point of view, you also have to investigate the reasons they might have believed what they believed and to take that investigation seriously, whether or not you agree.

This was achieved better with some characters than others and again, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s for lack of research or lack of ability to empathize with certain points of view. Ironically, the chapter on Mme Élisabeth is probably the best handled. The author of that section says she wanted to be “fair” (back matter, p. 12) to her subject and I think she succeeds better than her co-authors, while showing that Mme Élisabeth, convinced of the absolute validity of the divine right of her brother, advocates at every turn for violently repressing the Revolution. She’s allowed to articulate her (frankly pretty abhorrent) beliefs in a plausible manner.

Perhaps the author of this section is just a better writer than her co-authors, but I think there’s more to it than that. I obviously can’t read minds, but from the text of the novel itself as well as from the authors’ notes, I get the impression that we’re dealing with a dual problem of epistemology (i.e. how do you know what you know?) and politics. In either case, it’s not a coincidence if Mme Élisabeth is the best drawn character… and Reine Audu and Pauline Léon are the worst.

First, on the epistemology side: whether consciously or not, it seems to me as if the authors largely started out with the assumption that they already basically understood their protagonists. Sophie de Grouchy is so ahead of her time she might as well be a modern woman, got it, no problem… Reine Audu is an avatar of the “mob,” (the author of her section’s words, not mine, back matter, p. 8), pitiable because of her poverty but with no real politics beyond that of hunger and resentment… Pauline Léon is a “well-intentioned extremist” to use TV Tropes parlance — you would think that label would apply better to Charlotte Corday, but the latter ends up being so saintly she basically converts Pauline Léon (in what is quite possibly the most maddening moment in the whole damn book)… and so on. If I’m right, the authors’ assumptions about these archetypes made them not really feel the need to dig too deeply into the question of what made these women tick, either through research or empathy.

We don’t know much about Reine Audu or Pauline Léon, but there has been a fair amount of research into the beliefs of the popular movement and revolutionary crowds from Georges Lefebvre onward (most of it tending to dispel the lazy stereotypes on display here). The authors either didn’t bother with it or made poor use of it (as is evidently the case with poor Dominique Godineau, who does figure in the bibliography).

The book does Pauline Léon a disservice on both sides, mischaracterizing her beliefs for good and for ill. They make feminism as a contemporary audience would understand it her primary cause and her support for the rest of the popular movement’s program (in which we learn that women and people of color are to be included, but not actually what it consists of...) accessory and easily disposable so Charlotte Corday can be proved right and “radical” men can prove to be the real enemy.

(Which… I could roll with it if the idea was just that men of all political flavors can be misogynists, but as usual, the message is all men are potential rapists (except Condorcet, Buzot, La Fayette and Louis XVI, of course) but the further left they are the rape-ier they get. That’s not how that works.)

Anyway, the point is, these are characters the authors seem to have gone in assuming they understood, either because they found them relatable or because they thought they knew what archetype they corresponded to. The author of the section on Mme Élisabeth, on the other hand, writes that this was a character that it took some effort to understand because the character’s worldview was so different from the author’s and that of her presumed readers. This was also the case to some degree with the author of Manon Roland’s section, who writes about having to grapple with her protagonist’s not being a feminist (a position that this author bizarrely seems to think was rare at the time). Regardless, in both cases, the effort to understand, along with the existence of more sources produced by the character they were attempting to inhabit, produced better results.

But again, I think there’s also a political element. Remember how I mentioned that this book’s main flaw is its feeling of artificiality? (I mean, to the point that the rest of this critique is really just about understanding why it feels so artificial.) One of the moments that felt the most authentic to me was Mme Élisabeth’s extravagant shoe-buying habit, her feeling bad about it and her confessor reassuring her that it’s fine because she hasn’t taken a vow of poverty, after all. And I don’t mean ‘authentic’ necessarily in the sense of ‘historically accurate’ — I don’t know enough about Mme Élisabeth off the top of my head to comment on her shoe collection. But I did think: there, consumerism and guilt about consumerism are in fact much more relatable to the middle class authors and their presumed middle class audience than hunger and privation — or activism relating to socio-economic issues, for that matter. Which is how we end up, here as in a lot of other media, with a relatable royal and revolutionary caricatures.

This is also a good demonstration of how research and imagination or empathy play off each other. Marge Piercy didn’t have more information about Pauline Léon than the authors of this book. In fact, she had less: she writes in the preface of her book that she learned that Léon’s mother was in fact still alive at the time of the Revolution when it was too late to change what she had written. Credit where credit is due, once again, this new book corrects that error.

But in every other respect, Piercy’s version is far superior, because Pauline Léon’s views as well as her experience are taken seriously. This is no doubt due in large part because Piercy herself has been an activist for various left-wing causes. Her activism surely allowed her to relate to her characters, but far from writing a simple projection from her own experience, it allowed her, just as importantly, to entertain the notion that there was something there to be taken seriously. And therefore, that it was worth researching what precisely these figures were fighting for and not simply the question of why people get caught up in “extremism.” That’s why Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe’s chapters are the best in City of Darkness, City of Light, while Pauline Léon and Reine Audu’s are the worst in this book.

Next time: inaccuracies big and small!

#en anglais #French Revolution #Révolution française

25 notes · View notes

foxingpeculiar · 4 years ago

Text

Bitching. I need to vent this morning.

I have been up for less than 20 minutes and I’m already completely done with today.

First, good ol’ insomnia strikes again--I went to bed at 1:30 and fell asleep around 5. When I DID finally fall asleep, I had 1) a really awkward sex dream, followed immediately by 2) a dream where I’m being kidnapped and tortured by a crooked cop. So that’s fun. Then yesterday, I discovered my car battery died because it’s been cold and I haven’t had anywhere to drive in like 3 weeks. It’ll be fine when I can get it jumped, but I haven’t been able to deal with that yet, so I ordered some groceries to be delivered between specifically between 12-2, but I get woken up by messages about it at 10am, so now I’m running on 5 hours of interrupted sleep. And like, I’m not a spring chicken anymore. When I was like 22, I could sleep 4 hours and be basically fine, but now? I get less than six and I feel drunk and nauseous and all my limbs just hurt. Oh, and part of the reason I ordered groceries was because I’m out of coffee. So there’s that.

Plus my computer apparently took it onto itself to restart, so all the tabs I left open for work at my actual job are now gone. I don’t think I lost any saved work, but it’s gonna take a bit to track them all down again.

And I have a bunch of schoolwork I have to get done today that I just DO NOT care about right now. I’m supposed to annotate this chapter, but I just don’t have anything to say. And I have 8 poems, and 4 flash-fiction stories to critique before Tuesday and I’m just SO TIRED. AND like 100 pages of reading to do in a novel (at least this book is more interesting than the last one).

And I’ve had practically no direct human contact for months and still have 2 weeks until my first vaccine shot, but we might go on lockdown again because this state is full of rednecks who can’t be bothered to take basic precautions so we’re leading the nation in the latest spike, natch. (Did something stupid happen in the news? If it wasn’t FL or TX, it was probably MI.) And I’m probably going to move down to MO next summer, which will be great once it’s done, but it’s going to be SO EXPENSIVE that I basically have no disposable income for the next year. I mean I can probably squeeze out a few little incentives for myself, but it’s gonna be small things only and I’m gonna feel shitty about it anyway because I feel guilty about EVERYTHING.

What I definitely can’t afford anymore is weed, which I’ve been self-medicating with for years, which creates its own set of problems that I’m not thrilled about, but it’s been at least effective in 1) reducing the panic attacks that I get all the fucking time without it, and 2) keeping me chill enough to be able to manage basic shit like keeping the apartment clean. But it’s so expensive here--in OR I could walk out of a store with an ounce for $50--here that’s about what 1/8 costs. And a federal market would even out those prices some, but noooooooooo, America has to have a century long “war on drugs” (how the fuck do you fight a “war” on an abstract concept?), that was 1) founded on a history of blatant, not-even-disguised anti-Black/Asian/Mexican racism, 2) features rampant and often ridiculously untrue propaganda disseminated by policymakers who have no actual experience with the subject (I was literally told as a child, in school, that you could die from smoking a joint--I remember that clearly), 3) cost taxpayers billions upon billions of dollars, 4) ruined as many lives as the drugs themselves, and 5) accomplished nothing other than lining the pockets of actual, violent criminals. So real fucking slow clap there, America.

And okay, maybe I can get on some actual medication soon, cos I do have a doctor’s appointment scheduled finally (after spending months trying to navigate the fucked up healthcare system in this country--when an actual insurance agent tells you to lie on your insurance form to get coverage, maybe something is wrong? Just a thought). But that appointment is definitely going to be more focused on the unexplained gastrointestinal bleeding I’ve been having intermittently for like... months now (what prompted the whole “I’m going to deal with trying to get private insurance” debacle in the first place). So I’m super excited to find out what’s going on there, cos like... a bleeding ulcer seems like maybe the best-case scenario, you know? Plus, just... everything. That we keep elevating people to power who have no problem shitting on me (transphobic, anti-asian rhetoric) or my family (Islamophobia) with no fucking consequences. That there are people all over the place here flying the confederate flag (who have lived in a Union state their entire lives, so tell me it’s about history, I dare you) on their trucks talking about how their “American way of life” is under threat without a hint of fucking self-awareness or irony, that... just... I can’t even go on.

And I know I come from a place of privilege in all of that bullshit--I have a basically stable family that would be middle-class if that were still a thing (which it’s not, because all economic policy is designed by the very people who are trying to flout the rules that apply to everyone else), so every time I start feeling like this and getting mad, it just ends up turning back around on itself and there’s that guilt again. And all it would take is just getting away from this scarcity mindset, this attitude of fear that people have that just aren’t fucking necessary in this world--but what are you supposed to do about that? You can lead horses to water, but not only do they not drink, they kick you in the face while they’re dying of dehydration.

It’s enough to make one want to just go back to bed forever. But I can’t, cos I have shit to do.

But typing out a rant now and then does help.

#personal #bitching

1 note · View note

theculturedmarxist · 5 years ago

Link

See that chart above?

You are watching an economy begin to die. That, my friends, is what economic devastation looks like. It says that unemployment claims skyrocketed to 7 million last week. That’s a number so high, so fast, that there’s no parallel in all of recorded history — even remotely.

The American economy is undergoing the largest shock in history. It’s a shock faster, bigger, and more devastating than any war, which is one of many reasons the war metaphor is inadequate. We have literally never experienced such a thing before.

Why is the American being left to die? Because not nearly enough is being done about. This shock is unprecedented in history — and the response needed to be, too. Instead, Congress and the Prez passed a stimulus bill that’s far, far short of the mark. How much so? In what precise ways?

Let’s think about it together.

The first reason the economy is dying is that the stimulus is inadequate because it’s simply far too little. We’re going to do a little math together — don’t get scared, it’s math any grade schooler can handle. How large is the US economy? It’s $20 trillion per year. Of that, about 99% of the number of firms are small businesses. How large is the portion of the stimulus outlined to support businesses, especially small ones? $500 billion. Are you seeing a problem here yet? You should. That’s about just 2.5% of the economy over a year, which means this.

The portion of the stimulus meant to support business is enough to keep the economy going for…just one week. (Sure, we can adjust those numbers up and down. If I assume the 80% of the economy is business, not 100%, the stimulus is enough to keep the economy going for…two weeks. You see the problem, perhaps.) Think about that for a second. Just one week of support, amidst the greatest crisis since the last World War. What the?

This shock is historic precisely because it’s going to cause the economy to shut down — as in waves of businesses to literally shutter its doors as people stay at home — for far, far longer than a week. It’s already been a week. It’s going to be months until any semblance of normality is resumed. But by then, it will be too late: because this stimulus only supports the economy for a week, most of it will be…dead.

Yes, really. That brings me to the second reason the stimulus is short of the mark. This stimulus isn’t quick, large, or simple enough to buoy confidence — and so people are beginning to panic. Even if I want to get what little support is being offered — say as a small business owner — how do I begin? Where do I turn? Even I myself can scarcely figure out the answer, and I’ve pored over the various documents. It’s a tangle of red tape, a bureaucratic mess. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Why?

Keynes pointed out about a century ago that the key to staving off depressions is confidence. If I believe that things will be OK, and you do too, then maybe we won’t hoard our money and lay off our employees and so forth — and the vicious spiral of depression won’t result. But If I can’t figure out how to access even what little support there is…then I will lose confidence, fast. The vicious cycle will set in all the sooner.

That is precisely what we see happening. Why have ten million people filed for unemployment in just two weeks? Because there’s not enough support to keep the economy going, and because what little there is isn’t producing a feeling of confidence. Instead, because it’s a maze and a mess, people are fast losing confidence in institutions and systems. Employers are laying people off — even if they don’t have to, because they can’t figure out how not to have to.

Meanwhile, the media is touting a $1200 check to every American. The truth is very different. That $1200 has all kinds of tests attached to it. If you make this much as a single person, that much as a married couple, and so on. It’s true that 90% of people will see something — but most people won’t see nearly enough.

Let’s do the same calculation we did for businesses for people. The economy is $20 trillion. The US has 127 million households, give or take. Divided equally, that produces income per household of about $150k. But of course, Americans aren’t nearly that rich. Median income is only about $60K — because the rich skim a full half the economy right off the top. 60K is about $1100 a week. That means the much vaunted stimulus check equals about just a week’s worth of the average person’s income.

Do you see the weird parallel here? The stimulus is so small it supports businesses for just one week. And exactly the same is true for people — it supports the average person for just one week, too.

That brings me to the third reason this stimulus is inadequate: what good is it supporting people and businesses for just one week…with all kinds of strings attached…when the crisis will last months? That money won’t be paid out for several more weeks, perhaps months in many cases. And the conditions attached to it make it a sum that’s almost meaningless for many people. Are you seeing the problem again? Timing and conditionality: what absurdly little support there is will arrive far, far too late. Too late for what? Not just too late to pay the bills. We can all see that coming. Too late to prevent panic, which is the key to averting any depression.

And who knows how to get it all? How much you will get? Whether or not you’ll need to hire a lawyer to see any funds at all? Who to even apply to? because the design of this stimulus is so obscure, keeping everyone in the dark, there’s no real feeling of reassurance or confidence gently lifting up the economy. Hence, people are beginning to panic. That is why ten million have filed for unemployment in the last two weeks alone.

Now let’s think of unbelievably destructive that really is. How much is “ten million people”, anyways? The US labour force is about 164 million people. Ten million is already six percent of it. That might not sound like a lot, but it is: it’s about 3 percent a week. If that trend continues, it’ll be twelve percent in a month. 24 percent in two months. That’s a quarter of the economy, filing for unemployment…in a matter of weeks. That’s fifty percent in four months. How long do you think Coronavirus will last? Two months? Three? Four? Bang!

Coronavirus is an extinction level event for modern economies. That is why all this, my friends, is an event the likes of which the modern world has never really seen before. Not even in war, natural calamity, or financial crisis. Because when a society reaches even about 25% or so of sudden, irreversible, long-term, hardcore unemployment, the economy is more or less finished. It cannot recover for generations. That number means that huge numbers of businesses are shuttered, jobs are destroyed never to come back, incomes vanished, savings gone, homes foreclosed on. It is the end of families, relationships, stability, hope. It is usually the end of democracy, too, as people turn to a strongman in their rage and discontent and despair. Economic ruin is the end of a gentle, modern, wise culture, society, and politics in this way — the root of all ruin.

All that collapse is now very much in America’s near future — not next year, but this summer. Because the response to Coronavirus has been profoundly inadequate. You can see it in everyday life — doctors fashioning masks from pizza boxes, the dying sharing ventilators. All this reflects the simple fact: the American government didn’t do nearly enough about the greatest economic shock in modern history. It barely did anything at all.

In the end, when they write the books, I’m confident they’ll say this. The American government supported people and business for one week. Just one week. Amidst an epic, historic crisis which was to last months. As a result, the economy seized up and died, like a Coronavirus patient who couldn’t breathe anymore, but didn’t have a ventilator, either.

But that was needless. Because money at this scale is just a social fiction. The government can and should support the economy for as long as it takes, guaranteeing both business and personal incomes, as well as writing checks every single month. That doesn’t plunge a society into “debt.” It’s not money we are “borrowing” from anyone else, like say China. We are just lending it to ourselves, which means that we can cancel the debt afterwards with no ill consequences, either. The central bank can literally write off whatever debt is accrued the day after the crisis subsides. And if you doubt that, go ahead and think about who it’s owed to. The government owes money to whom, exactly? The answer is: nobody. It has only borrowed from itself, and therefore it can cancel the debt, too.

No, there won’t be “inflation.” What there will be is massive deflation if none of the above happens. All those millions filing for unemployment? That means wages fall massively, and prices follow, too.

Think of it like filling a hole. Coronavirus has shredded a massive, gaping hole in the heart of the economy. Either the government fills it, borrowing thread, buying needles, and employing people to stitch and sew — or like any hole in a fabric, it grows, one thread fraying at a time, leading to the next. The government filling the hole is not bad economics, or irresponsible — it is the only sensible thing to do. When the fabric of the economy is whole again, then the “debt” of buying all that new thread is immediately revealed to be imaginary. If we hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have had an economy at all. The resources we “borrowed”…from ourselves tomorrow…for use today were therefore necessary, life-saving, critical…investments. Without them, we wouldn’t have had a tomorrow at all.

Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. Americans don’t quite understand that. Capitalism has convinced them that “debt” is as real as the violence of a gun. But it isn’t. “Debt”, “credit”, “money”, and “finance” — these are all just social constructions. There are times when societies need to go into massive “debt”, which really means invest massively, so that everyone and everything, including life as they know it, can survive. That simply means they need to allow their mechanism of collective action, the government, to “borrow” artificially limited resources from itself, tomorrow for everyone, today — or else we don’t have much of a tomorrow. This is one of those moments. Or else. Life as we know it implodes.

Will Americans get that, though? Before it’s too late?

I’ll see you on the breadlines, brother.

Umair Haque April 2020

#coronapocalypse #virus corona vũ hán #coronavirus #corona virüsü #virus viêm phổi vũ hán #dịch virus corona #economy #economics #capitalism #late stage capitalism #capitalist society #capitalist collapse #capitalist hell #economic crisis #bailout #wall street #finance

4 notes · View notes

scifigeneration · 5 years ago

Text

Futurology: how a group of visionaries looked beyond the possible a century ago and predicted today's world

by Max Saunders

We need more blue-sky thinking. Yolanda Sun/Unsplash

From shamanic ritual to horoscopes, humans have always tried to predict the future. Today, trusting predictions and prophecies has become part of daily life. From the weather forecast to the time the sat-nav says we will reach our destination, our lives are built around futuristic fictions.

Of course, while we may sometimes feel betrayed by our local meteorologist, trusting their foresight is a lot more rational than putting the same stock in a TV psychic. This shift toward more evidence-based guesswork came about in the 20th century: futurologists began to see what prediction looked like when based on a scientific understanding of the world, rather than the traditional bases of prophecy (religion, magic, or dream). Genetic modification, space stations, wind power, artificial wombs, video phones, wireless internet, and cyborgs were all foreseen by “futurologists” from the 1920s and 1930s. Such visions seemed like science fiction when first published.

They all appeared in the brilliant and innovative “To-Day and To-Morrow” books from the 1920s, which signal the beginning of our modern conception of futurology, in which prophecy gives way to scientific forecasting. This series of over 100 books provided humanity – and science fiction – with key insights and inspiration. I’ve been immersed in them for the last few years while writing the first book about these fascinating works – and have found that these pioneering futurologists have a lot to teach us.

In their early responses to the technologies emerging then – aircraft, radio, recording, robotics, television – the writers grasped how those innovations were changing our sense of who we are. And they often gave startlingly canny previews of what was coming next, as in the case of Archibald Low, who in his 1924 book Wireless Possibilities, predicted the mobile phone: “In a few years time we shall be able to chat to our friends in an aeroplane and in the streets with the help of a pocket wireless set.”

Some of the books in the series. Max Saunders, Author provided

My immersion in these historic visions of the future has also shown me that looking at this collection of sparkling projections can teach us a lot about current prediction attempts, which today are dominated by methodologies claiming scientific rigour, such as “horizon scanning”, “scenario planning” and “anticipatory governance”. Unlike the corporate, bland way in which most of this professional future gazing takes place within government, think-tanks and corporations, the scientists, writers, and experts who wrote these books produced very individual visions.

They were committed to thinking about the future on a scientific basis. But they were also free to imagine futures that would exist for other reasons than corporate or governmental advantage. The resulting books are sometimes fanciful, but their fancy occasionally gets them further than today’s more cautious and methodical projections.

Forecasting future discoveries

Take J B S Haldane, the brilliant mathematical geneticist, whose book Daedalus; or: Science and the Future inspired the whole series in 1923. It ranges widely across the sciences, trying to imagine what remained to be done in each.

Haldane thought the main work in physics had been done with the Theory of Relativity and the development of quantum mechanics. The main tasks left seemed to him to be the delivery of better engineering: faster travel and better communications.

Chemistry, too, he saw as likely to be concerned more with practical applications, such as inventing new flavours or developing synthetic food, rather than making theoretical advances. He also realised that alternatives would be needed to fossil fuels and predicted the use of wind power. Most of his predictions have been fulfilled (though we’re still waiting eagerly for those new flavours, which have to be better than salted caramel).

The first cultured hamburger, 2013. World Economic Forum, CC BY

It’s chastening, though, how much even such a clear-sighted and ingenious scientist missed, especially in the future of theoretical physics. He doubted nuclear power would be viable. He couldn’t know about future discoveries of new particles leading to radical changes to the model of the atom. Nor, in astronomy, could he see the theoretical prediction of black holes, the theory of the big bang or the discovery of gravitational waves.

But, at the dawn of modern genetics, he saw that biology held some of the most exciting possibilities for future science. He foresaw genetic modification, arguing that: “We can already alter animal species to an enormous extent, and it seems only a question of time before we shall be able to apply the same principles to our own.” If this sounds like Haldane supported eugenics, it’s important to note that he was vocally opposed to forced sterilisation, and didn’t subscribe to the overtly racist and ableist eugenics movement that was en vogue in America and Germany at the time.

But the development that caught the eye of so many readers was what Haldane called “ectogenesis” – his term for growing embryos outside the body, in artificial wombs. Many of the other contributors took up the idea, as did other thinkers – the most notable being Haldane’s close friend Aldous Huxley, who was to use it in Brave New World, with its human “hatcheries” cloning the citizens and workers of the future. It was also Haldane who coined the word “clone”.

Ectogenesis still seems like science fiction. But the reality is getting closer. It was announced in May 2016 that human embryos had been successfully grown in an “artificial womb” for 13 days – just one day short of the legal limit, which prompting an inevitable ethical row. And in April 2017 an artificial womb designed to nurture premature human babies was successfully trialled on sheep. So even that prediction of Haldane’s may well be realised soon, perhaps within a century after it was made. Although artificial wombs will probably be used, at first, as a prosthesis to cope with medical emergencies, before they become routine options, on a par with caesareans or surrogacy.

youtube

Science, then, was not just science for these writers. It had social and political consequences, as does prediction. Many of the contributors of this series were social progressives, in sexual as well as political matters. Haldane looked forward to the doctor taking over from the priest and science separating sexual pleasure from reproduction. In ectogenesis, he foresaw that women could be relieved of the pain and inconvenience of bearing children. As such, the idea could be seen as a feminist thought experiment – though some feminists might now see it as a male attempt to control women’s bodies.

What this reveals is how shrewd these writers were about the controversies and social proclivities of the age. At a time when too many thinkers were seduced by the pseudoscience of eugenics, Haldane was scathing about it. He had better ideas about how humanity might want to transform itself. While most of the scholars musing on eugenics merely supported white supremacy, Haldane’s motives suggest he’d be delighted at the advent of technologies like CRISPR – a method by which humankind could better itself in ways that mattered, like curing congenital disease.

Alternate futures

Some of To-Day and To-Morrow’s predictions of technological developments are impressively accurate, such as video phones, space travel to the moon, robotics and air attacks on capital cities. But others are charmingly inaccurate.

Oliver Stewart’s 1927 volume, Aeolus or: The Future of the Flying Machine, argued that British craftsmanship would triumph over American mass production. He was excited by autogiros – small aircraft with a propeller for thrust and a freewheeling rotor on top, for which there was a craze at the time. He thought travellers would use those for short-haul flights, transferring for long-haul to flying boats – passenger planes with boat-like bodies that could take off from, and land on, the sea. Flying boats certainly had their vogue for glamorous voyages across the ocean, but disappeared as airliners became bigger and longer range and as more airports were built.

The Dornier Do X was the largest, heaviest, and most powerful flying boat in the world when it was produced by the Dornier company in Germany in 1929. Wikipedia, CC BY

The To-Day and To-Morrow series, like all futurology, is full of such parallel universes. Paths history could well have taken, but didn’t. In the rousing 1925 feminist volume Hypatia or: Woman and knowledge, Bertrand Russell’s wife Dora proposed that women should be paid for household work. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass either.

The film critic Ernest Betts, meanwhile, writes in 1928’s Heraclitus; or The Future of films that “the film of a hundred years hence, if it is true to itself, will still be silent, but it will be saying more than ever”. His timing was terrible, as the first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, had just come out. But Betts’s vision of film’s distinctiveness and integrity – the expressive possibilities open to it when it brackets off sound – and of its potential as a universal human language, cutting across different linguistic cultures, remains admirable.

The difficulty with future thinking is to guess which of the forking paths leads to our real future. In most of the books, moments of surprisingly accurate prediction are tangled up with false prophecies. This isn’t to say that the accuracy is just a matter of chance. Take another of the most dazzling examples, The World, the Flesh and the Devil by the scientist J D Bernal, one of the great pioneers of molecular biology. This has influenced science fiction writers, including Arthur C Clarke, who called it “the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made”.

Bernal sees science as enabling us to transcend limits. He doesn’t think we should settle for the status quo if we can imagine something better. He imagines humans needing to explore other worlds and to get them there he imagines the construction of huge life-supporting space stations called bio-spheres, now named after him as “Bernal spheres”. Imagine the international space station, scaled up to small planet or asteroid size.

youtube

Brain in a vat

When Bernal turns to the flesh, things get rather stranger. A lot of the To-Day and To-Morrow writers were interested in how we use technologies as prosthesis, to extend our faculties and abilities through machines. But Bernal takes it much further. First, he thinks about mortality – or more specifically – about the limit of our lifespan. He wonders what science might be able to do to extend it.

In most deaths the person dies because the body fails. So what if the brain could be transferred to a machine host, which could keep it, and therefore the thinking person, alive much longer?

Bernal’s thought experiment develops the first elaboration of what philosophers now call the “brain in a vat” hypothesis. Except they’re usually concerned with questions of perception and illusion (if my brain in a vat was sent electrical signals identical to the ones sent by my legs, would I think I was walking? Would I be able to tell the difference?). But Bernal has more pragmatic ends in view. Not only would his Dalek-like machines be able to extend our brain life, they’d be able to extend our capabilities. They would give us stronger limbs and better senses.

youtube

Bernal wasn’t the first to postulate what we’d now call the cyborg. It had already appeared in pulp science fiction a couple of years earlier – talking, believe it or not, about ectogenesis.

But it’s where Bernal takes the idea next that is so interesting. Like Haldane’s, his book is one of the founding texts of transhumanism – the idea that humanity should improve its species. He envisions a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current.

With that wireless sense Bernal imagined how humanity could be in touch with others, regardless of distance. Even fellow humans across the galaxy in their biospheres could be within reach. And, like several of the series’ authors, he imagines such interconnection as augmenting human intelligence, of producing what science fiction writers have called a hive mind, or what Haldane calls a “super-brain”.

It’s not AI exactly because its components are natural: individual human brains. And in some ways, coming from Marxist intellectuals like Haldane and Bernal, what they’re imagining is a particular realisation of solidarity. Workers of the world uniting, mentally. Bernal even speculates that if your thoughts could be broadcast direct to other minds in this way, then they would continue to exist even after the individual brain that thought them had died. And so would offer a form of immortality guaranteed by science instead of religion.

Blind spots

But from a modern point of view what’s more interesting is how Bernal effectively imagined the world wide web, more than 60 years before its invention by Tim Berners Lee. What neither Bernal, nor any of the To-Day and To-Morrow contributors could imagine, though, was the computers needed to run it – even though they were only about 15 years away when he was writing. And it is these computers that have so ramped up and transformed these early attempts at futurology into the industry it is today.

How can we account for this computer-shaped hole at the centre of so many of these prophecies? It was partly that mechanical or “analogue” computers such as punched card machines and anti-aircraft gun “predictors” (which helped gunners aim at rapidly moving targets) had become so good at calculation and information retrieval. So good, in fact, that to the inventor and To-day and To-morrow author H Stafford Hatfield what was needed next was what he called “the mechanical brain”.

So these thinkers could see that some form of artificial intelligence was required. But even though electronics were developing rapidly, in radios and even televisions, it didn’t yet seem obvious – it didn’t even seem to occur to people – that if you wanted to make something that functioned more like a brain it would need to be electronic, rather than mechanical or chemical. But that was exactly the moment when neurological experiments by Edgar Adrian and others in Cambridge were beginning to show that what made the human brain tick was actually the electrical impulses that powered the nervous system.

Just 12 years later, in 1940 – before the development of the first digital computer, Colossus at Bletchley Park – it was possible for Haldane (again) to see that what he called “Machines that Think” were beginning to appear, combining electrical and mechanical technologies. In some ways our situation is comparable, as we sit poised just before the next great digital disruption: AI.

A Colossus codebreaking computer, 1943. Wikimedia Commons

Bernal’s book is a fascinating example of just how far extended future thinking can go. Further than actual science, or science fiction, or philosophy or anything else. But it also shows where it reaches its limits. If we can understand why the To-Day and To-Morrow authors were able to predict biospheres, mobile phones and special effects, but not the computer, the crisis in obesity, or the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms, then maybe we can learn about the blind spots in our own forward vision and horizon scanning.

Beyond the simple wows and comedic effects of these hits and misses, we need more than ever to learn from these past examples about the potential and dangers of future thinking. We would do well to look closely at what might helps us to be better futurologists, as well as at what might be blocking our vision.

Yesterday and today

The pairing of scientific knowledge and imagination in these books created something unique – a series of hypotheticals somewhat lodged between futurology and science fiction. It is this sense of hopeful imagination that I think urgently needs to be injected back into today’s predictions.

Because computers have transformed contemporary futurology in major ways: especially in terms of where and how it is carried out. As I have mentioned, computer modelling of the future mainly happens in businesses or organisations. Banks and other financial companies want to anticipate shifts in the markets. Retailers need to be aware of trends. Governments need to understand demographic shifts and military threats. Universities want to drill down into the data of these or other fields to try to understand and theorise what is happening.

To do this kind of complex forecasting well, you have to be a fairly large corporation or organisation with adequate resources. The bigger the data, the hungrier the exercise becomes for computing power. You need access to expensive equipment, specialist programmers and technicians. Information that citizens freely offer to companies such as Facebook or Amazon is sold on to other companies for their market research – as many were shocked to discover in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The main techniques which today’s governments and industries use to try to prepare for or predict the future – horizon scanning and scenario planning – are all well and good. They may help us nip wars and financial crashes in the bud – though rather obviously, they don’t always get it right either. But as a model for thinking about the future more generally, or for thinking about other aspects of the future, such methods are profoundly reductive.

They’re all about maintaining the status quo, about risk aversion. Any interesting ideas or innovative speculations that are about anything other than risk avoidance are likely to get pushed aside. The group nature of think-tanks and foresight teams also has a levelling down effect. Future thinking by committee has a tendency to come out in bureaucratese: bland, impersonal, insipid. The opposite of science fiction.

Horizon scanning doesn’t tend to produce any particularly exciting ideas. Zhao jiankang/Shutterstock.com

Which is perhaps why science fiction needs to put its imagination in hyperdrive: to boldly go where the civil servants and corporate aparatchiks are too timid to venture. To imagine something different. Some science fiction is profoundly challenging in the sheer otherness of its imagined worlds.

That was the effect of 2001 or Solaris, with their imagining of other forms of intelligence, as humans adapt to life in space. Kim Stanley Robinson takes both ideas further in his novel 2312, imagining humans with implanted quantum computers and different colony cultures as people find ways of living on other planets, building mobile cities to keep out of the sun’s heat on Mercury, or terraforming planets, even hollowing out asteroids to create new ecologies as art works.

When we compare To-Day and To-Morrow with the kinds of futurology on offer nowadays, what’s most striking is how much more optimistic most of the writers were. Even those like Haldane and Vera Brittain (she wrote a superb volume about women’s rights in 1929) who had witnessed the horrors of modern technological war, saw technology as being the solution rather than the problem.

Imagined futures nowadays are more likely to be shadowed by risk, by anxieties about catastrophes, whether natural (asteroid collision, mega-tsunami) or man-made (climate change and pollution). The damage industrial capitalism has inflicted on the planet has made technology seem like the enemy now. Certainly, until anyone has any better ideas, and tests them, reducing carbon emissions, energy waste, pollution, and industrial growth seem like our best bet.

Imagining positive change

The only thing that looks likely to convince us to change our ways is the dawning conviction that we have left it too late. That even if we cut emissions to zero now, global warming has almost certainly passed the tipping point and will continue to rise to catastrophic levels regardless of what we do to try to stop it.

That realisation is beginning to generate new ideas about technological solutions – ways of extracting carbon from the atmosphere or of artificially reducing sunlight over the polar ice caps. Such proposals are controversial, attacked as encouragements to carry on with Anthropocene vandalism and expect someone else to clear up our mess.

But they might also show that we are at an impasse in future thinking, and are in danger of losing the ability to imagine positive change. That too is where comparison with earlier attempts to predict the future might be able to help us. They could show us how different societies in different periods have different orientations towards the past or the future.

Where the modernism of the 1920s and 30s was very much oriented towards the future, we are more obsessed with the past, with nostalgia. Ironically, the very digital technology that came with such a futuristic promise is increasingly used in the service of heritage and the archive. Cinematic special effects are more likely to deliver feudal warriors and dragons, rather than rockets and robots.

But if today’s futurologists could get back in touch with the imaginative energies of their predecessors, perhaps they would be better equipped to devise a future we could live with.

About The Author:

Max Saunders is Professor of English at King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

#featured #futurology #history #history of the future #science fiction #futurism #technopolitics

13 notes · View notes

diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years ago

Photo

Decline of the Western Male, Part 1

Martin Spengler

Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler – “Martin Spengler” – these two 20th-century thinkers provide the main source of inspiration behind this project. Both sought to understand the times we live in, and to bring into view the deeper historical and philosophical significance underlying many of the political, economic, social, and cultural issues before us today. Both offer profound insight, and our goal here will be to lean on them in order to tease out what is at stake in many of the day to day problems, challenges, and controversies that grip our attention across the Western world.

Spengler’s masterpiece is his Decline of the West, which first appeared in Germany in the years immediately following World War One. His contribution is to set contemporary events within a civilizational context, as milestones in the development of a culture whose evolution has been dictated by its own internal laws and dynamics, apparent at its very birth 1,000 years ago. Spengler allows us to see how the impulse that drove Medieval European craftsmen to construct magnificent Gothic cathedrals that soared towards the heavens, while betraying ever more intricate detail in their stonework, is the same motivating force behind the transgenderism agenda today, Hollywood’s obsession with the superhero genre, and in the attractive power of the dream of space travel.

For Heidegger the key event has been the rise of Modern science and technology, and it is the implications of this development he seeks to reveal. It is Heidegger who helps us to understand how the Modern project is in its essence nihilistic; if followed through to its logical conclusion it means no less than the annihilation of both the world and humanity. This is a cataclysmic perspective, but Heidegger’s reasons for sounding the alarm apply with a monumentally increased force since he first raised this prospect during the 1930s. It was Heidegger who understood that the “subjectivism” which reduces the world to a “standing reserve,” a resource to be used at our convenience, is at its core empty, that the desire for comfort and ease is in fact a death wish. Nietzsche understood this too. The danger does not lie so much in an ecological disaster, the consequence of reckless actions such as the use of GMO crops, but from the success of technology rather than its failure. We can see this with “climate change,” first global warming will be successfully held at bay, then extreme weather events prevented, and then . . . the outside world will be made to look and feel no different from the carefully controlled environment we have inside every shopping mall. After all, if you could push a button from your beachside mansion to stop an oncoming hurricane in its tracks, and instead select for a pleasant view offshore, why wouldn’t you?

No one openly articulates such an agenda, and it does not matter whether it is realistic or complete fantasy, the logic is there nonetheless. It has been present for a thousand years, and it is immensely powerful. Our entire civilization is testimony to its power. This is the value both Heidegger and Spengler bring to a discussion of such issues, they allow us to approach topical subjects such as climate change or transgenderism from a very different angle, to understand why these are the battlegrounds today, and what is at stake.

A third dimension, however, is also needed. It is one neither “Martin�� nor “Spengler” were aware of in their lifetime, nor is it a question that has ever concerned Western philosophy to any significant extent in its 2,500-year history. It is a product of our time, and as such is the key to understanding everything. In this respect, “the West” is unique, and at its heart lies a contradiction.

Civilisation by its nature is a masculine project, but Western civilization is in its essence – feminine.

The driving purpose behind the science and technology of the West is to make life easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing. These are feminine desires not masculine ones. Western men have striven for centuries to deliver such a lifestyle to their women, and over the last 70 years or so this effort has borne fruit in the unsurpassed standard of living enjoyed by large sections of the population in Western countries. But the more it has done so, the more the essentially feminine character of the West has come into play. Masculine values, masculinity, men, these were all necessary to bring us to this point, the achievements of science and technology are products of the masculine impulse to make an impact on the world, to understand it, shape it, to create with it, to build with it, for their enjoyment in part but most of all for their women and children, and for the sake of the larger civilizational project to whose success they are committed. But to the extent this project is realized, and life does become easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing, masculinity becomes increasingly redundant, and fades into the background. In its place the feminine becomes primary, a process that has accelerated to an enormous extent over the past half-century with the arrival of the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s.

In the world that is emerging, there are no limits, nothing that women cannot do, nor anything that requires the masculine impetus to turn outwards towards the wider world, to discover its secrets, confront its dangers, for there is no longer is an outside world. Once we reach the point where everything that exists is either an oversized shopping mall, an air-conditioned office building, a campus safe space, a theme park, or a McMansion, masculinity has served its purpose and has no further place, other than to supply routine maintenance services in the background. In this world everything is self-referential, reality is what we make it, truth is what we decide it to be, on the basis of what makes us feel comfortable, safe, and amused. This is why the internet and social media are so central to our culture, why reality TV is our iconic genre, celebrities our key figures, entertainment our main industry, marketing our critical skill set, and brand value our ultimate asset. It is also why #fakenews is a thing.

This self-referentiality is Heidegger’s “subjectivism.” It is extending its influence everywhere, even such former bastions of masculinity as the military. Western militaries are completely feminized, with the partial exception of special forces, the only units who actually experience real combat. This is not to say that US or NATO forces do not kill and destroy, they do on a massive scale, their mostly male members also die, but they do not fight, they do not even engage their “enemy.” Instead they conduct operations against fictitious opponents who are figments of their own imagination, and take casualties at the hands of real adversaries about who they know nothing. The disastrous British campaign in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006-10 is the classic example of this, launched against an insurgent force that did not exist at that time, but which soon did come into being with a vengeance as a result of the “counter-insurgency” operation.

Helmand is the rule rather than the exception. It is no accident that the weakest branch of the US military machine has always been Intelligence, because this is the one element that cannot be self-referential if it is to be effective.

The Eclipse of Truth

We see the contradiction that runs through the West above all in the current state of science as an institution. In spite of its critical role in the Western civilizational project, science today is in an appalling state of disrepair. This is so even though vast amounts of data and new information are becoming available to many scientific disciplines due to earlier developments in technology, and also to the enormous resources being thrown into research and academia. Astronomy is a good example of this. However, the ability to intellectually process these sources into theoretical advances, to improve our understanding, has been all but lost, at least in the mainstream. Instead, astronomically related areas such as cosmology and astrophysics have disappeared into a fantastical set of rabbit holes that bear no relation to any reality outside of their own mathematical set of fictions. As a result they are completely sterile, there has been no progress in these branches of science for decades, in sharp contrast to the revolutionary breakthroughs that marked the first half of the 20th century. These gave us the technological advances that make the present possible, although the irony lies in that they also have contributed in large part to the dead end we now find ourselves in. This includes its poster boy Albert Einstein, who in spite of his personal integrity has been the single greatest catastrophe ever inflicted on the scientific enterprise. It is no accident that this individual was the first ever science “celebrity,” in no other period could a set of intellectually incoherent nonsense be mistaken for genius, but then again, it did so because it suited certain purposes . . . long before #fakenews came #fakescience.

The reason for this is the eclipse of truth, which is a masculine value, as the determining factor in decisions over what ideas to accept, papers to publish, research to fund, who to appoint, and who is selected to go viral, at least on the media circuit. Science as a practice has to balance its inquiry into the world as it really is with a whole series of competing interests. These might be commercial, political, ideological, institutional, or personal. The more important a branch of science is to Western society as a whole, the more corrosive these other influences, so that when we get to a central political issue such as “climate change,” we soon find that the quality of the science being produced on this question is utterly corrupted, and from a scientific standpoint completely worthless. This is because its purpose is not to find the truth, but to support an agenda, which it does by creating “models” of how the world should be and then using these to justify policy decisions whose motivation always lay elsewhere – self-referentiality once again. The reality is that climate “science” is not science at all, which goes to explain why its proponents refuse to honor any of the principles that guide genuine scientific inquiry – honest debate, transparency of data, willingness to admit uncomfortable facts, or explore alternative hypotheses.

An indication of the West’s true character and current state of decay can be seen in some of the intractable problems that plague modern society. Many of these revolve around health, arguably the area that provides the greatest source of pride to those who believe in the achievements of Western civilization. But while it is true that life expectancy is at record levels, infant mortality at its lowest, and that a cut finger is unlikely to result in death from a ravaging infection, it can hardly be argued that the population of a nation such as the United States is “healthy” in any meaningful sense. If we look at the obesity epidemic, for example, what is most significant about this problem is less that people are getting fat, but that Western medicine has proved totally incapable of making even a small dent in the constantly rising numbers of the obese. A different approach is clearly needed, but one will only be found on the basis of civilizational values that understand medical treatment in terms that do not involve drugs or surgery. Counter currents of this nature do exist, such as the ancestral health movement, or the advocates of LCHF, but these are defined precisely by their rejection of the Western project and its conception of what a healthy way of life is. The same applies to mental health issues, or the unbelievably high rates of addiction across the West, to everything from pain killers, shopping, gambling, gaming, porn, anything that offers an escape from an otherwise entirely meaningless, but materially quite comfortable, existence.

The Desire to Escape

It is Spengler who shows us that this desire to “escape,” in his words towards “the infinite,” was present at the very birth of the West, and is in fact its driving force. This too needs to be understood in terms of masculinity and femininity. The masculine impulse is not to escape the world but to go out and engage with it, to learn how to navigate through it, to understand it, and with this knowledge to create and to build with it. A man may seek an escape from the wind and the rain for his family, but the shelters he constructs are made from real materials, and if they are not built according to the natural laws that govern civil engineering they will fall down. This is why truth is the paramount masculine value, and this truth is never self-referential, it is truth about the external world, so that humanity can live within this world.

The feminine impulse is the opposite, it is an attractive force and its ultimate point of reference is the woman herself and her children. If the masculine seeks to expand outwards towards the infinitely large, to ever extend knowledge and understanding, then the feminine measures this in terms of what it means to her, how it affects her, whether she likes what emerges around her as a result of this, or not. Men build houses, but women decide whether they want to live in these structures, and turn them into homes. The feminine is in its essence aesthetic, its measure is beauty, and the beautiful is appreciated through emotion, how it makes her feel.

During the rise of the West, this masculine impulse is harnessed and the Modern world takes shape over time. The feminine character of the Western project, however, is expressed in the ultimate end state Western civilization sets as its objective. This is Spengler’s “infinity,” but in everyday terms it goes under the slogan of “freedom.” The dominant motive behind the entire development of the West has been the desire to be free, and this means freedom from any and all constraints. Science and technology emerge as the means by which to escape the constraints of nature, but alongside this there is also the desire to escape social constraints. During the first centuries of the West, this mostly involved the struggle to overcome the Catholic Church, which dominated the social and cultural landscape of medieval Europe, and this lead to the Protestant Reformation. Later it becomes the desire to be free of any religious imposition on life whatsoever, whether through moral codes or the law of the land. Western society becomes secular.

Freedom is a feminine value, not a masculine one. Femininity resents any external constraints on it, whether natural or social, because its reference point is the woman herself, in her singularity. There is no such thing as a feminine morality, because even two women form a set of entirely different compass points for any moral code. These might coincide, the two might agree and cooperate well together, but they also might not, there is no force behind the agreement, as soon as it feels like a constraint to either of them it will be abandoned. Women approach all relationships in this way, except with their children, there the rules change.

Masculinity does not strive for freedom, it seeks to serve. A man is measured by his contribution to something larger and outside of himself, his family, his tribe, his nation, his civilisation, its Gods, the truth. This service must be voluntary, and it must be valued. The Roman slave in revolt may kill his master but he will also willingly give up his life in the army of Spartacus, and ask only that in battle his general not throw this away cheaply.

For the same reason, equality is not a masculine value either. Men contribute to the best of their ability, because that is the source of their worth, but the end results are measured externally. The input is irrelevant, only the output. Masculinity naturally gravitates towards hierarchy, because some are more talented, experienced, or able than others, and what matters is the common venture, success or failure, victory or defeat. Men will accept the leadership, and even the domination of others, if this leads to a good outcome, because that is all that counts. Better to follow the victorious general, than lead an army to its destruction.

The feminine, on the other hand, does aspire to equality, because like freedom it is an abstract concept, it means the removal of any expectations placed upon her by anyone, which she might perceive as a constraint. Equality is the stepping stone towards freedom, which is the ability of a woman to act as her own point of reference in any aspect of her life. Today this goes under the term, “empowerment,” or “You go girl!” This is one form of the “tendency towards abstraction” we will try to elaborate on further.

Masculinity, however, acts as a counter-balance to this female “solipsism.” The masculine overrides this impulse and it is the woman who benefits, because it allows her to serve something greater – children, to become something larger than herself, to contribute, to leave her mark on the earth, to attain a slice of immortality. Men do this by imposing an order that serves the civilizational project they are committed to, in other words they impose social constraints on women. This is the “patriarchy,” it ensures that a society will continue because there will be future generations, that women will bear children. It is a civilizational project that makes women have babies, and this is its greatest gift to femininity, to those same women, it overcomes their own drive to “self-referentiality” and allows them to be something more, to participate in something larger.

The project of Western civilization, on the other hand, has been to escape this very civilizational constraint. By the 1960s it had achieved an important milestone along this path through the application of science and technology, with the invention of the contraceptive pill. As a result, birth rates have plummeted, well below the numbers required to reproduce the population. This is one reason why it is safe to predict the coming demise of the West, a social order can not survive if its women do not have children.

Part 2: Transhumanism — The Final Showdown

https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/10/decline-of-the-western-male-part-2/

#on the heels of a rather event day on the matter #heidegger #spengler #g/acc

8 notes · View notes

quillandlantern · 6 years ago

Text

With Game of Thrones and the current Marvel movie line ending, and some other key series, I’ve been thinking a lot about Content, Content Creators and the Reality of Fiction.

I think we can all agree that the late 2010′s have been an amazing renaissance for creators. Want to write a book? You can, and publish it. Want to be a game dev? Unity is free, all you need is the time and the passion. You can be a webcomic author, a visual novel creator, a youtuber, a podcaster. Hell, you can play D&D with your friends from theater and start a 10 million dollar kickstarter if enough people resonate with it. But here’s the the thing:

One of the big, long-running sentiments on most forms of social media and content websites is that fandoms are full of awful types, and creators can turn out to be terrible people. This is no surprise when anyone can make anything that can then be consumed by several billion people. And it’s set the stage for us to ask some real interesting questions about who owns fictions, and its effect in our lives.

Now in my American experience, we’ve been having this conversation in small, isolated circles since George Lucas first released the prequal trilogy of Star Wars. People fell in love with his vision, incorporated it into their lives and experiences, and then felt it deeply when the movies turned out to be a disappointment (a widely-held sentiment at the time, things change as new fans enter the scene) But another running theme of the 2010′s is that the internet is the Great Disrupter. So of course now we have millions of people accessing content, and discussing it, and developing it separately from the main canon. And for those of you who are visualizers, you’re probably already connecting the dots of how we came to where we are in 2019.

The most topical example of this, at the time of me writing this post, is Game of Thrones. People discovered it, experienced it, resonated and applied it to their own lives. And that’s a big part of fiction these days. It means something to us, something deep and intangible. There are millions of reasons we people loved Game of Thrones, and when the series disappointed them, they felt betrayed.

And here is where we get into the real, interesting bits of this discourse. Content creators are largely being held to high standards. Control your audience, make it safe for everyone, and ensure you aren’t problematic. This is a…tricky and delicate situation, because again, anyone can be a content creator these days, even on some fairly big platforms. And although some worldviews can objectively be called wrong, in order to get there we usually have to have a lot of discussion first to get everyone on the same page, and it is a very painful process. But what happens when a content creator disappoints the audience with their treatment of characters and the story? What is the right or wrong way to treat a series?

Most people can agree that as long as you put thought into it, and don’t rush things, or make the audience feel like you’re flying by the seat of your pants, they’ll accept how you shape a story. Sure there will be disappointment. Some of it might be violent disappointment, because again, there are now billions of people accessing this stuff coming from billions of different experiences and mindsets.

But even then I have to backtrack to holding content creators to a high standard. This is a conversation that ties into a larger discussion about Cancel Culture and Nerd Culture, so it’s kind of difficult to to have without writing a dissertation. But it’s always been curious to me how when ordinary people become beloved for their creations, they are scrutinized and graded for purity. This is probably a good thing, as it’s on all of us to build a better world. But who’s vision are we building? Who’s morality did we choose to base things on?

Luckily the big issues are pretty black and white. Or are they? Every time you see something problematic, someone else see’s it as a way to cope with what happened in their own lives. Again, 7 billion people, many different experiences, some of them very bad. I’m not excusing story elements that are used for shock value, but everything that happens in life is a valid human experience, and should at least be discussed somewhere, and fiction media is a great way to do that. There’s a whole other discussion to be had about what children should and shouldn’t be seeing, but I’m not a parent or a psychologist, and I can’t predict the future of someone’s life once they see something on TV, or the effect it will have.

Which brings me to my last point I guess. I’m not going to talk about the responsibilities of a fan, because you guys should already know them. But even that’s hard, because we all care so much about the fiction that resonates with us, and we don’t often know how to express that. Fans can be overbearing, but it’s not because of nothing.

Which again, brings me to the last point.

What the fuck is fiction?

It means so much to us, and affects us so differently. Is it because we’re a social species with a history of story-telling? Is it a complex combination of economic factors, rapidly changing technology and a loss of innocence? Is it a flaw?

This stuff keeps me up at night. Because I know you know what the future holds. You probably heard about that Marvel movie where some dude cut out all the parts he didn’t like. Pretty crazy right?

Not really. There’s a not-so-distant future coming where if we don’t like how an animated series ended, we can download the character models and emulate the voices on a soundboard to make our own version of the show indistinguishable in quality from the original. Same goes for live-action.

“Holy Shit” You’re saying, “That sounds awesome, I could totally do a better job than the creators, my ship will become cannon then I’ll release my cut on Pornhub Tumblr and people will love the shit out of it!”

And year, sure, maybe, but you if you think that’s going to be awesome you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been saying. Because we can’t handle the discourse from our favorite shows right now, and we haven’t really made any headway in our discourse of what kind of gods our Content Creators should be. But again, what I’m most curious about it, why does Fiction resonate so strongly with us, and what does it say about the human experience?

What the fuck do we want? 2019 has been bringing all these issues to the forefront, and again, Cancel and Nerd culture tie into this, along with the big question of Who is (insert show) for? The original fans? The new ones? Everyone? What’s the point of my fan interpretation? What responsibility will my future fan-version of my favorite film have? This is what 2016-2019 has been about, and I’m eager to see what happens as we go forward.

#game of thrones #marvel #avengers #disney #discourse

1 note · View note

axekerose54 · 4 years ago

Text

[PDF DOWNLOAD] Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies PDF

(EPUB Kindle) [Download] Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD (PDF) Download Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies [Full Book]

[EPUB & PDF] Ebook Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies | EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD

by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author).

Ebook EPUB Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies | EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD Hello Friends, If you want to download free Ebook, you are in the right place to download Ebook. Ebook Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD in English is available for free here, Click on the download LINK below to download Ebook Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies 2020 PDF Download in English by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) (Author).

Download Link : Download Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies

Read More : Read Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies

Description

Africa's Geography presents a comprehensive exploration of the world’s second largest and most culturally diverse continent. Author Benjamin Ofori-Amoah challenges common misconceptions and misrepresentations of Africa from a geographical perspective, harnessing the power of modern geographic mapping technology to explore this unique continent. This text provides thorough coverage of the historical, cultural, economic, and political forces that continue to shape Africa, applying geographic context to relevant past and contemporary issues. Coverage of economic development, climate and biogeography, transportation and communication, manufacturing and commerce, and mining and agriculture provides foundational knowledge of this vast and complex continent. Ideally suited for multiple areas of classroom study, this text offers an effective and flexible pedagogical framework. Coverage of the entirety of Africa enables students to develop a cohesive portrait of the continent as a whole and identify the dynamism of its nations, cultures, and economies. Engaging and accessible narrative strengthens comprehension, while examples of historical and contemporary events increase student interest. Innovative and unique, Africa’s Geography is an essential resource for cross-disciplinary investigation of this fascinating part of the world.

Tag the PDF

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) Ebook PDF

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) PDF Download

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) EPUB

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) EBOOK

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) PDF Online

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) E-BOOK Online

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) PDF

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) ebook library

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) pdf document

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) pdf reader

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) ebook creator

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) ebook deals

Africa's Geography: Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies by by Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Author) ebook kindle

Let's be real: 2020 has been a nightmare. Between the political unrest and novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it's difficult to look back on the year and find something, anything, that was a potential bright spot in an otherwise turbulent trip around the sun. Luckily, there were a few bright spots: namely, some of the excellent works of military history and analysis, fiction and non-fiction, novels and graphic novels that we've absorbed over the last year.

Here's a brief list of some of the best books we read here at Task & Purpose in the last year. Have a recommendation of your own? Send an email to [email protected] and we'll include it in a future story.

Missionaries by Phil Klay

I loved Phil Klay’s first book, Redeployment (which won the National Book Award), so Missionaries was high on my list of must-reads when it came out in October. It took Klay six years to research and write the book, which follows four characters in Colombia who come together in the shadow of our post-9/11 wars. As Klay’s prophetic novel shows, the machinery of technology, drones, and targeted killings that was built on the Middle East battlefield will continue to grow in far-flung lands that rarely garner headlines. [Buy]

- Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief

Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli by Max Uriarte

Written by 'Terminal Lance' creator Maximilian Uriarte, this full-length graphic novel follows a Marine infantry squad on a bloody odyssey through the mountain reaches of northern Afghanistan. The full-color comic is basically 'Conan the Barbarian' in MARPAT. [Buy]

- James Clark, senior reporter

The Liberator by Alex Kershaw

Now a gritty and grim animated World War II miniseries from Netflix, The Liberator follows the 157th Infantry Battalion of the 45th Division from the beaches of Sicily to the mountains of Italy and the Battle of Anzio, then on to France and later still to Bavaria for some of the bloodiest urban battles of the conflict before culminating in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. It's a harrowing tale, but one worth reading before enjoying the acclaimed Netflix series. [Buy]

- Jared Keller, deputy editor

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff

If you haven’t gotten this must-read account of the September 11th attacks, you need to put The Only Plane In the Sky at the top of your Christmas list. Graff expertly explains the timeline of that day through the re-telling of those who lived it, including the loved ones of those who were lost, the persistently brave first responders who were on the ground in New York, and the service members working in the Pentagon. My only suggestion is to not read it in public — if you’re anything like me, you’ll be consistently left in tears. [Buy]

- Haley Britzky, Army reporter

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry

Why do we even fight wars? Wouldn’t a massive tennis tournament be a nicer way for nations to settle their differences? This is one of the many questions Harvard professor Elaine Scarry attempts to answer, along with why nuclear war is akin to torture, why the language surrounding war is sterilized in public discourse, and why both war and torture unmake human worlds by destroying access to language. It’s a big lift of a read, but even if you just read chapter two (like I did), you’ll come away thinking about war in new and refreshing ways. [Buy]

- David Roza, Air Force reporter

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor

Stalingrad takes readers all the way from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to the collapse of the 6th Army at Stalingrad in February 1943. It gives you the perspective of German and Soviet soldiers during the most apocalyptic battle of the 20th century. [Buy]

- Jeff Schogol, Pentagon correspondent

America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich

I picked up America's War for the Greater Middle East earlier this year and couldn’t put it down. Published in 2016 by Andrew Bacevich, a historian and retired Army officer who served in Vietnam, the book unravels the long and winding history of how America got so entangled in the Middle East and shows that we’ve been fighting one long war since the 1980s — with errors in judgment from political leaders on both sides of the aisle to blame. “From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift?” the book jacket asks. As Bacevich details in this definitive history, the mission creep of our Vietnam experience has been played out again and again over the past 30 years, with disastrous results. [Buy]

- Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief

Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P.W. Singer and August Cole

In Burn In, Singer and Cole take readers on a journey at an unknown date in the future, in which an FBI agent searches for a high-tech terrorist in Washington, D.C. Set after what the authors called the "real robotic revolution," Agent Lara Keegan is teamed up with a robot that is less Terminator and far more of a useful, and highly intelligent, law enforcement tool. Perhaps the most interesting part: Just about everything that happens in the story can be traced back to technologies that are being researched today. You can read Task & Purpose's interview with the authors here. [Buy]

- James Clark, senior reporter

SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben MacIntyre

Like WWII? Like a band of eccentric daredevils wreaking havoc on fascists? Then you'll love SAS: Rogue Heroes, which re-tells some truly insane heists performed by one of the first modern special forces units. Best of all, Ben MacIntyre grounds his history in a compassionate, balanced tone that displays both the best and worst of the SAS men, who are, like anyone else, only human after all. [Buy]

- David Roza, Air Force reporter

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

The Alice Network is a gripping novel which follows two courageous women through different time periods — one living in the aftermath of World War II, determined to find out what has happened to someone she loves, and the other working in a secret network of spies behind enemy lines during World War I. This gripping historical fiction is based on the true story of a network that infiltrated German lines in France during The Great War and weaves a tale so packed full of drama, suspense, and tragedy that you won’t be able to put it down. [Buy]

Katherine Rondina, Anchor Books

“Because I published a new book this year, I've been answering questions about my inspirations. This means I've been thinking about and so thankful for The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. I can't credit it with making me want to be a writer — that desire was already there — but it inspired me to write stories where the fantastical complicates the ordinary, and the impossible becomes possible. A girl in a nice dress with no one to appreciate it. An unremarkable boy with a remarkable knack for finding things. The stories in this book taught me that the everydayness of my world could become magical and strange, and in that strangeness I could find a new kind of truth.”

Diane Cook is the author of the novel The New Wilderness, which was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Read an excerpt from The New Wilderness.

Bill Johnston, University of California Press

“I’ve revisited a lot of old favorites in this grim year of fear and isolation, and have been most thankful of all for The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Witty, reflexive, intimate, queer, disarmingly occasional and monumentally serious all at once, they’ve been a constant balm and inspiration. ‘The only thing to do is simply continue,’ he wrote, in 'Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul'; ‘is that simple/yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do/can you do it/yes, you can because it is the only thing to do.’”

Helen Macdonald is a nature essayist with a semiregular column in the New York Times Magazine. Her latest novel, Vesper Flights, is a collection of her best-loved essays, and her debut book, H Is for Hawk, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

Andrea Scher, Scholastic Press

“This year, I’m so grateful for You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. Reading — like everything else — has been a struggle for me in 2020. It’s been tough to let go of all of my anxieties about the state of the world and our country and get swept away by a story. But You Should See Me in a Crown pulled me in right away; for the blissful time that I was reading it, it made me think about a world outside of 2020 and it made me smile from ear to ear. Joy has been hard to come by this year, and I’m so thankful for this book for the joy it brought me.”

Jasmine Guillory is the New York Times bestselling author of five romance novels, including this year’s Party of Two. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, and Time.

Nelson Fitch, Random House

“Last year, stuck in a prolonged reading rut that left me wondering if I even liked books anymore, I stumbled across Tenth of December by George Saunders, a collection of stories Saunders wrote between 1995 and 2012 that are at turns funny, moving, startling, weird, profound, and often all of those things at the same time. As a writer, what I crave most from books is to find one so excellent it makes me feel like I'd be better off quitting — and so wonderful that it reminds me what it is to be purely a reader again, encountering new worlds and revelations every time I turn a page. Tenth of December is that, and I'm so grateful that it fell off a high shelf and into my life.”

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series and the Carve the Mark duology. Her latest novel, Chosen Ones, is her first novel for adults. Read an excerpt from Chosen Ones.

Ian Byers-Gamber, Blazevox Books

“Waking up today to the prospect of some hours spent reading away part of another day of this disastrous, delirious pandemic year, I’m most grateful for the book in my hands, one itself full of gratitude for a life spent reading: Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life. Frym’s essays — on Marcel Proust, yes, and Walt Whitman, and Lucia Berlin, but also peppermint-stick candy and Allen Ginsburg’s knees, among other Proustian memory-prompts — restore me to my sense of my eerie luck at a life spent rushing to the next book, the next page, the next word.”

Jonathan Lethem is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn. His latest novel, The Arrest, is a postapocalyptic tale about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Riverhead

“I’m incredibly grateful for the magnificent The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer. This book — a mélange of history, memoir, and reportage — is the reconceptualization of Native life that’s been urgently needed since the last great indigenous history, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It’s at once a counternarrative and a replacement for Brown’s book, and it rejects the standard tale of Native victimization, conquest, and defeat. Even though I teach Native American studies to college students, I found new insights and revelations in almost every chapter. Not only a great read, the book is a tremendous contribution to Native American — and American — intellectual and cultural history.”

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts, which is BuzzFeed Book Club’s November pick. He is also the author of the children’s book Spotted Tail, which won the 2020 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Read an excerpt from Winter Counts.

Valerie Mosley, Tordotcom

“In 2020, I've been lucky to finish a single book within 30 days, but I burned through this 507-page brick in the span of a weekend. Harrow the Ninth reminded me that even when absolutely everything is terrible, it's still possible to feel deep, gratifying, brain-buzzing admiration for brilliant art. Thank you, Harrow, for being one of the brightest spots in a dark year and for keeping the home fires burning.”

Casey McQuiston is the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue, and her next book, One Last Stop, comes out in 2021.

"I'm grateful for V.S. Naipaul's troubling masterpiece, A Bend in the River — which not only made me see the world anew, but made me see what literature could do. It's a book that's lucid enough to reveal the brutality of the forces shaping our world and its politics; yet soulful enough to penetrate the most recondite secrets of human interiority. A book of great beauty without a moment of mercy. A marriage of opposites that continues to shape my own deeper sense of just how much a writer can actually accomplish."

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright, and his latest novel, Homeland Elegies, is about an American son and his immigrant father searching for belonging in a post-9/11 country. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Vanessa German, Feminist Press

“I'm most thankful for Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether. It's a YA book set in 1930s Harlem, and it was the first Black-girl-coming-of-age book I ever read, the first time I ever saw myself in a book. I appreciate how it expanded my world and my understanding that books can speak to you right where you are and take you on a journey, at the same time.”

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. She is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Read a story from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

Philippa Gedge, W. W. Norton & Company

“As both a writer and a reader I am hugely grateful for Patricia Highsmith’s plotting and writing suspense fiction. As a writer I’m thankful for Highsmith’s generosity with her wisdom and experience: She talks us through how to tease out the narrative strands and develop character, how to know when things are going awry, even how to decide to give things up as a bad job. She’s unabashed about sharing her own ‘failures,’ and in my experience, there’s nothing more encouraging for a writer than learning that our literary gods are mortal! As a reader, it provides a fascinating insight into the genesis of one of my favorite novels of all time — The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as the rest of her brilliant oeuvre. And because it’s Highsmith, it’s so much more than just a how-to guide: It’s hugely engaging and, while accessible, also provides a glimpse into the mind of a genius. I’ve read it twice — while working on each of my thrillers, The Hunting Party and The Guest List — and I know I’ll be returning to the well-thumbed copy on my shelf again soon!”

Lucy Foley is the New York Times bestselling author of the thrillers The Guest List and The Hunting Party. She has also written two historical fiction novels and previously worked in the publishing industry as a fiction editor.

“The books I'm most thankful for this year are a three-book series titled Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend. Walking a fine line between comedy and horror (which is much harder than people think), the books follow Jack, an employee at a gas station in a nameless town where all manner of horrifyingly fantastical things happen. And while the monsters are scary and more than a little ridiculous, it's Jack's bone-dry narration, along with his best friend/emotional support human, Jerry, that elevates the books into something that are as lovely as they are absurd.”

T.J. Klune is a Lambda Literary Award–winning author and an ex-claims examiner for an insurance company. His novels include The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries.

Sylvernus Darku (Team Black Image Studio), Ayebia Clarke Publishing

"Nervous Conditions is a book that I have read several times over the years, including this year. The novel covers the themes of gender and race and has at its heart Tambu, a young girl in 1960s Rhodesia determined to get an education and to create a better life for herself. Dangarembga’s prose is evocative and witty, and the story is thought-provoking. I’ve been inspired anew by Tambu each time I’ve read this book."

Peace Adzo Medie is Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020). His Only Wife is her debut novel.

Jenna Maurice, HarperCollins

“The book I'm most thankful for? Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. My mother and father would read me poems from it before bed — I'm convinced it infused me not only with a sense of poetic cadence, but also a wry sense of humor.”

Victoria “V.E.” Schwab is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including Vicious, the Shades of Magic series, and This Savage Song. Her latest novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, is BuzzFeed Book Club’s December pick. Read an excerpt from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Meg Vázquez, Square Fish

“My childhood best friend gave me Troubling a Star by Madeleine L'Engle for Hanukkah when I was 11 years old, and it's still my favorite book of all time. I love the way it defies genre (it's a political thriller/YA romance that includes a lot of scientific research and also poetry??), and the way it values smartness, gutsiness, vulnerability, kindness, and a sense of adventure. The book follows 16-year-old Vicky Austin's life-altering trip to Antarctica; her trip changed my life, too. In a year when safe travel is almost impossible, I'm so grateful to be able to return to her story again and again.”

Kate Stayman-London's debut novel, One to Watch, is about a plus-size blogger who’s been asked to star on a Bachelorette-like reality show. Stayman-London served as lead digital writer for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has written for notable figures, from former president Obama and Malala Yousafzai to Anna Wintour and Cher.

Katharine McGee is grateful for the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Chris Bailey Photography, Firebird

“I’m thankful for the Redwall books by Brian Jacques. I discovered the series in elementary school, and it sparked a love of big, epic stories that has never left me. (If you read my books, you know I can’t resist a broad cast of characters!) I used to read the books aloud to my younger sister, using funny voices for all the narrators. Now that I have a little boy of my own, I can’t wait to someday share Redwall with him.”

Katharine McGee is the New York Times bestselling author of American Royals and its sequel, Majesty. She is also the author of the Thousandth Floor trilogy.

Beth Gwinn, Time-Life Books

"I am thankful most for books that carry me out of the world and back again, and while I find it painful to choose among them, here's one early and one late: Zen Cho's Black Water Sister, which comes out in 2021 but I devoured just two days ago, and the long out-of-print Wizards and Witches volume of the Time-Life Enchanted World series, which is where I first read about the legend of the Scholomance."

Naomi Novik is the New York Times bestselling author of the Nebula Award–winning novel Uprooted, Spinning Silver, and the nine-volume Temeraire series. Her latest novel, A Deadly Education, is the first of the Scholomance trilogy.

Christina Lauren are grateful for the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Christina Lauren, Little, Brown and Company

"We are thankful for the Twilight series for about a million reasons, not the least of which it's what brought the two of us together. Writing fanfic in a space where we could be silly and messy together taught us that we don't have to be perfect, but there's no harm in trying to get better with every attempt. It also cemented for us that the best relationships are the ones in which you can be your real, authentic self, even when you're struggling to do things you never thought you'd be brave enough to attempt. Twilight brought millions of readers back into the fold and inspired hundreds of romance authors. We really do thank Stephenie Meyer every day for the gift of Twilight and the fandom it created."

0 notes

gsasustainability · 4 years ago

Photo

Death beyond anthropocentrism. From science-fiction to reality

Katerina Sidorova. MLitt Fine Art

Generations over generations, Western Europeans have been raised on sciencefiction with subject matters ranging from time and space travel, immortality, utopian state organization to apocalyptic scenarios, bio-futuristic fantasies and specie hierarchy alteration. What if some of these scenarios did come true already and how did it affect our views on death. In this article I will look into several examples from science-fiction literature, cinema and comics in attempt to define the status of mortality in modern Western societies.

Let me begin with a different take on interspecies relationship, a topic, broadly disputed in this dissertation. The alternative view on the possible interactions between humans and the rest of the animal world has been a matter of speculation for many works of fiction amongst which one example stands out: “Planet of the Apes”, a film from 1968, based on 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle "La Planète des singes”, translated into English as “Planet of the Apes” or “Monkey Planet”.[3]

The novel takes place in the distant future (XXVI century A.D.), when interplanetary and interstellar flights became commonplace. A couple of “rich loafers” Jinn and Phyllis, traveling in space, find a bottle with a message from a certain Ulysses Meru with a formidable warning in the “Earth language”. Journalist Ulysses Meru talks about the expedition of the spacecraft to the Betelgeuse star under the leadership of Professor Antel.

Arriving at the intended point of travel, t he crew landed on the planet Sorora (lat. Sister), surprisingly similar to Earth. To their surprise they found humans there, only in a completely savage state - not knowing any language, no clothes, no dwellings, no tools. Instead the planet is run by the apes, possessing intellect and developed way beyond humans. The protagonist finds out that even before the advent of monkey civilization, there was a highly developed civilization of people. However, it fell into decay, while monkeys, imitating human habits and customs, developed more and more, until they took the place of their recent owners.

“Planet of the Apes” has a particular angle on interspecies relationship, especially on the ownership over one’s body. “Thinking” humans for the first time are exposed to how it may be like to exist on the other side of the human-animal relationship, where a single life is not considered as much as a mass of bodies and where economical matters dominate relationships of the ‘leader’ specie with the subject of their oppression. For the first time human species are not the masters of life and death like they are used to, yet their destiny is highly dependent on their not-so-far relative - a monkey.

Similar actions take place in a Russian sci-fi novel by Kir Bulichev - “The Pet”, 1993. Yet Bulichev takes the detailing of the interspecies relationships even further. The protagonist finds himself in situations comparable to the ones of pets (cats and dogs), industrially farmed animals, fight animals (dogs, roosters) and stray animals. Each of the 3 latter cases is directly linked to control over one’s death and the first one is a description of an acceptable involuntary body mutilation (castration) that leads again to impossibility to procreate and control over life in a long term. The attitude of the main character changes from the adoration of the master (normally prescribed to house pets) to slow realization of inequality which is the state of events in the fantasy world that Bulichev created. Becoming ’a stray’, rebelling against the master species (which for the record are giant frog-lizards), he slowly understands that the latter do not always operate in his best interests. Unfortunately, the novel was never finished and we are to never find out whether the new model of specie relationships was established.

In non-fiction, it is for Donna Haraway, author of The Companion Species Manifesto and The Cyborg Manifesto, to shine a light of changes in inter-specie relationship. Haraway talks about the history of domestication, but just as well she’s tackling the near future of species diversity, introducing not only the idea of technically enhanced cyborg femme, but a different kind of a companion specie. Science fiction and theory form a perfect symbiosis in her work and the texts, maybe starting as ‘futuristic’, become highly relatable and easily applied to contemporary reality.

Haraway specifically used the term “companion species” and not “companion animal” in order to expand the range of beings that can be seen as companions to humans. We now can not only talk about cats, dogs, parrots, fish and hamsters. We can freely imagine insects, bacteria and viruses as accompanying our life. Dangerous or not, it is the reality and in the light of recent virus outbreaks (SARS, MERS, Ebola and COV-19) Haraway’s statement stands stronger. Humans are surrounded by companion species, even though we don’t see or recognise them as such. The specie awareness is not only an ethical move of recognition but a safety measure, potentially crucial for our survival on Earth.

Another absolutely important moment in Haraway’s term ‘companion species’ is the inclusion of personal mobile devises into the category. Indeed, attention hungry, needed to be fed (charged), bringing joy and always by our side - mobile devices, and I am talking about smartphones predominantly (although we are surrounded by laptops, portable speakers, e-watches and tracking bracelets to name a few), do deserve a special place of a companion specie.

There’s only one distinct trait that makes them different from us - whilst the technical body of the mobile device won’t survive natural decay, it’s software system is virtually immortal. (Here a little outtake for those of the readers, who haven’t embraced technology at it’s fullest: by today, march 26 2020 it has become a norm to be able to copy all of the complete content of one’s mobile device, settings, etc. and successfully install it on the new one, the ‘digital soul’ of the preceder will live on).

Talk on genderless, adjusted cyborg has been going through feminist thought for decades now, as Julia E Dyck rightfully says: “Feminists have both celebrated and cautioned against the cybernetic or post-corporeal subject as much of feminism’s roots are coded in, on, and from ideas about the female body. Whether the body is seen as inherently woman, mother, goddess, with a deep connection to the earth and nature, or the raw material of culture and society with no pure or natural core as Elizibeth Grosz would see it, the body’s existence and relevance is too often implicit while theorizing about gender and sexuality. I would like to confront this idea by exploring a social subject for analyzing, the bodiless, or post-corporeal woman, the female operating system.” (Julia E Dyck “Cellphones and cyborgs”).

I, having embraced this discourse, would like to focus on the other aspect of it - and that is mortal beings slowly beginning to co-exist with the immortal (to an extend, since software is highly dependent on hardware and therefore access to electricity as of now) species.

Whilst we still cannot speak of artificial intelligence, we definitely can admit having stepped into the realm of hyper-real, with much of our communication and daily routines having moved online. And to exist online we need the help of our mobile devices. /I am writing these words on my laptop, in the proximity of my phone. It is a second week of world wide COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, this time marks the transition of many practices and professions to the digital, for now temporarily. This time is, however crucial to revealing how deep is our involvement with technology./

Hereby, based on stated above, we can propose three theses to expand on:

First, from the end of XX century on human, stops being the center of the world, as other species come on stage.

Second, amongst these new species we now can subtract non-natural, human made entities, for now not having a free will of their own, but playing a huge role in life already. These companions are mobile digital devices.

Third, being in contact with these devices brings humans closer to immortality and the question of digital afterlife comes closer to reality.

Here, online series “Black Mirror” would again be a great example - providing various meditations on involvement of humans with technology. For me much more interesting would be to turn to new services that have sprung since I was writing on Facebook digital cemeteries (undeleted pages left after users who have passed away).

First of all a whole field of death sensitive interfaces is now being researched and guidelines for software developers have been written. For this we are to thank Michael Massimi, a specialist in human-machine relationship, who together with his colleagues has worked on creating tanatosensitive software design. Their guidelines include grief upon loss not being a problem, but rather a given; communication does not always work as therapy; storytelling be a way of making emotions of the living public and prolongate the social life of the deceased; physical death is not a reason to stop communicating; digital traces can function as artefacts, memorabilia of the passed away person; digital space does not equal life and therefore cannot be fully adjusted to death either, it keeps existing beyond the end of physical life. [Оксана Мороз]

Whilst Massimi is talking about all online platforms in general, quite a few services, if not following Massimi’s guidelines, then at least operating on the territory that he describes, exist already. I will hereby list a few, discovered by Russian researchers Sergey Mohov: ‘resting here’ and ‘safe beyond’, mentioned in the works of Sergei Mohov and several, used as examples by Oksana Moroz: ‘the digital beyond, After note, If I die, Dead Social, eter9 and eterni.me. Of course, this list is not extensive and the readers are more than welcome to explore death and mourning related online services on their own. What is important is that not only that they are provided for use if needed, they are in demand. I will illustrate this with a few common internet searches provided in the attachments to this article. People are looking for death and dying related services online, and I dare to say that for younger generation, internet would indeed be the first place to turn to for answers.

But the searches often relate to the precise online legacy - the digital double that is left behind us once we pass.

A digital presence of a living person can thus be describes as a ‘body without organs’, a concept used by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It usually refers to the deeper reality underlying some well-formed whole constructed from fully functioning parts. At the same time, it may also describe a relationship to one's literal body. This idea is fitting perfectly for when we speak about our existence on the internet. The digital double, internet avatar is a perfect body without organs. What worries us here is the possibility of it’s autonomous existence past the death of a human it was once attributed to. A great example here would be ‘Solaris’, a novel by Stanislav Lem, then brilliantly translated into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. The action takes place in the uncertain future. Solarism - a science that studies the distant planet Solaris - has come to a standstill. The psychologist, Dr. Chris Kelvin (flies to Solaris to make a decision on the spot. Once at the station, the skeptical Chris discovers that her crew is exhausted by inexplicable phenomena: “guests” come to people - the material embodiment of their most painful and shameful memories. It is impossible to get rid of the "guests" in any way - they return again and again.

While Kelvin is sleeping, the "guest" comes to him, it is the materialized image of his wife, Hari, who 10 years ago had laid hands on herself after a family quarrel. At first, Kelvin, like other solarians, tries to get rid of the "double", but in vain. Over time, Kelvin begins to treat the "guest" as a living person. Hari's “copy” is also gradually becoming aware of its essence. Instead of a programmed need, being inseparably located near Kelvin, a human ability to make independent decisions develops in it. Realizing that by her existence she inflicts suffering on Kelvin, she first tries to kill herself, then, finding it impossible, asks scientists to destroy her by any means.

In ‘Solaris’, we see both an example of alive humans interacting with the deceased, but also a step further, ‘doubles’ realising that they do not equal their physical prototype, therefore causing existential turbulence.

Whilst the rules of online behaviour and environment are being written and used through a variety of above mentioned services, what is particularly interesting is the state/status of a person in the digital sphere. As Massimi said, digital life does not equal reality.

Who we are in real life is not fully represented in the digital, moreover, we are often choosing certain traits of ourselves to be represented, whilst others remain private, some can also be altered. What happens, when we start interacting online is - we create a digital double for ourselves, something that can be referred to as ‘an avatar’. This avatar represents us on the digital platform where it was created - games, social media, or mail interfaces. Over the years of internets existence, a lot of services and platforms have merged and we can speak of a general ‘digital trace’ of one person - a combination of multiplicity of images, texts, audio, other interactions produced whilst one is on the internet. This multiplicity can be linked to a digital representation of one on the internet, for some (for example foreign colleagues from overseas office who one has only communicated with through the internet) may almost completely replace the physicality of that one person.

What interests me, amongst many researchers of the digital sphere, is how this digital double functions. More specifically for this research I would like to look at one of the qualities of the digital double, avatar, - it’s immortality. Unlike our physical body, digital representation of ourselves cannot die, since it was never alive. Still, when interacting with people via social media, we are convinced, that there is a real person, behind the screen somewhere, responding to us.

After one’s death, unless stated specifically, we keep interacting with their social media page, as if the person is still alive. In theory, this can last for an eternal amount of time. The digital double is immortal. And this is where the very subtle field which Massimi and Moroz are researching lies.

With the new services, collecting information about it, recreating it, making posts, as if we were alive, with social media pages being run on the behalf if the deceased, we not only create a place of memory and mourning, we are stepping into a completely unknown territory. For example, if two (a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet, here specifically I am referring to chat bots - automated software mimicking conversations).made from the recordings of a mother and a son, who both have passed away, start a conversation, ethically where does this lead us? Is this conversation then real? What is the value of created content?

As of today, it is still early to speak of artificial intelligence, but we can surely state that the position of humans as the only species reflecting on death is shattered. Last topic that I would like to briefly touch upon is the ethics of cloning, creogenics and similar bio-scientific practices, that once belonged to the world of fantasy but now are slowly stepping into our reality, changing our relationship with death forever.

A fine example here would be a film by Spanish director by Alejandro Amenábar co-written by Mateo Gil ‘Open Your Eyes’ and, more famously, it’s American adaptation by Cameron Crowe - ‘Vanilla Sky’. In the twisted plot of the film, the main character realises that his body was frozen after his sudden death and preserved for the future scientists to bring back to life. In the meantime his consciousness and memories were loaded into a simulation program. Not being able to cope with the fact that his most recent memories were generated, the protagonist chooses to ‘wake up’ in futuristic reality. At this point cryogenics is a reasonably well researched field, it is used in many fields, but of course, it is cryoconservation, that interests me the most. Cryoconservation is an indispensable tool in the storage of genetic material of animal origin and will continue to be useful for the conservation of livestock into the future and is used to save semen, cells, pollen and other materials. Cryonics is a branch of cryogenics, focusing on conserving human body (or just the head in some cases) after clinical death and with the hope of resurrection in the future.

The first corpse to be frozen was that of Dr. James Bedford in 1967. As of 2014, about 250 dead bodies had been cryopreserved in the United States, and 1,500 people had made arrangements for cryopreservation of their corpses. As of today not one of the frozen bodies has been resurrected, although a case of … shows that some bodies have decayed due to poor preservation conditions.

With many ethical issues surrounding cryonics, another, even more extreme method of human remains preservation is arising. In 2018, a Y-Combinator startup called Nectome was recognized for developing a method of preserving brains with chemicals rather than by freezing. The method is fatal, performed as euthanasia under general anethesia, but the hope is that future technology would allow the brain to be physically scanned into a computer simulation, neuron by neuron.

What could life post such procedures be like still remains in the realm of science fiction, but these practices and discussions are slowly but steadily penetrating our daily lives, changing our takes on mortality forever.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”, - perhaps the most famous opening sentence in American science fiction is the first line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), contemplates a place where the dead might belong, up above us, in an electronic medium as Gibson’s protagonist Case has to collaborate with ghostlike programs, learning to “work with the dead” inside the “consensual hallucination” that is cyberspace. This profession, once considered fictional, is as close as it gets to the studies that Massimi, amongst others. is performing in our day and age. Modernity makes adjustments and new disciplines appear: we now live through and study of death in digital space; dispute over cryonics; artificial intelligence and the possibility of post mortal existence as a piece of software; our life is surrounded by nonliving companions, who’s loss we mourn scarily similar to their natural protagonists.

The move from science-fiction to reality has been steady and it accelerates year by year. Many great works of fiction have not only predicted, but determined the contemporary developments in medicine, thanatology or even the ways we mourn or think of our last will. Recent developments are showing us that there is not and cannot be one model of death. Moreover, it is now established that death is experienced not only by people. We are faced with the task of species diversification of attitudes towards death, as well as the formation of a broader view of the issue of mortality with more and more drastic changes to come. Which changes? I’d suggest looking through a few books of science fiction.

Literature 1. "A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is "100 percent fatal"". Technology Review. 13 March 2018. 2. B e s t , B . P. ( A p r i l 2 0 0 8 ) . " S c i e n t i f i c j u s t i f i c a t i o n o f c r y o n i c s practice" (PDF). Rejuvenation Research. 493–503. 3. Boulle, P. (2018). Planet of the Apes. Place of publication not identified: ISHI Press. 4. Bulichev, Kir - “The Pet 5. Burt, Stephen. (2014). Science Fiction and Life after Death. American Literary History. 26. 168-190. 10.1093/alh/ajt063. 6. Dyck, Julia “Cellphones and cyborgs” 7. Gibson, W. (2018). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. 8. Handley, Rich (2008). Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: The Definitive Chronology (1st ed.). New York: Hasslein Books. p. 279. 9. Haraway, D. Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s", Socialist Review, 80 (1985) 65–108 10.Haraway, D. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9717575-8-5 11. Haraway, D. When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8166-5045-4 12.Moen, O.M. (August 2015). "The case for cryonics". Journal of Medical Ethics. 493–503. doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102715. 13.Moroz, Oksana “Смертельная чувствительность” Антология Русской Смерти №6

More here.

1 note · View note

naiylabrouillard · 4 years ago

Text

Guidelines For Evaluating Reiki As An Alternative Therapy Creative And Inexpensive Useful Tips

The Brahma Satya Reiki is the channeling of the major need to become a Yoga master and if being attuned to Reiki the energy increase in popularity throughout the USA.Most important is that Reiki can assist practitioners in experiencing Reiki and charging edibles with Reiki energy.When Dr. Oz told viewers to try Reiki go right ahead - as well as yourself to a student as a form of the treatment.Relax the pressure of revision and national tests.

Reiki is not replaceable in any sense at all.The students start their Reiki attunements have been forgotten and are no Reiki classes offer an economical way to start turning the soil, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting.There is no specific belief system or set beliefs are the questions being addressed to her.Animals have the information to benefit from the abdomen followed by one to receive an attunement is.Throughout pregnancy, Reiki can also be used to add more Reiki healers that use their hands near or on whole body clears, you can feel the energy that they even patterned their writing system primarily based on an intuitive understanding of oneness with the laws of nature.

Practising Reiki concentrates more on their own home is available and easily accessible.The second principle of a headache tablet, where you could get the real deal and the naval chakra and go ahead and get to concentrate on it practically at a nearby location.The person is at the bottom of this Japanese healing culture.The first level and it is important to continue when you have a glass of water flowed over his or her hands.When reading the newest and most practitioners would like, however there are 3 levels of Reiki?

I have seen similar healing modalities including traditional medicine.It is good about this ancient art of healing is similar with touch healing, with the full benefit that they feel warmth around you as well.In this article covers the entire topic related to your needs for Reiki to develop your ability to heal.What once was a journey that is designed especially to help them when they are pain free for two and three belong to a relaxing and energizing system of healing, developed by practitioners who visited the hospital in Flagstaff, AZ in 20 minutes.If he, for any reason is unable to find relief with the ever changing nature of existence is uncovered.

The three levels of Reiki massage is involved.Students often perceive colors surrounding the Reiki principles aren't usually communicated with the principles of origin, these are broadly speaking as followsDuring labor, Reiki is a technique for stress reduction method, no doubt that people always get from reading a book.This is something that Reiki can be transmitted over space, distance and time efficient way to address the human body we see evidence of her being able to integrate it into something more positive towards life and the basics are available on-line.The energy knows where the recipient or the initial stage of reiki master.

The lower ranks call them as whole and refreshed the whole person, including the physical benefits, it is easy to learn reiki.You also have music playing to help set up a very powerful healing approach to the third being Reiki Master.Reiki is all part of the initiate by a qualified Reiki Master will initiate you through the internet.Various courses are actually one and the energy that runs some expensive courses.With this course you can apply this technique can help with recovery along with the universe.

Think for a count of 5 kg this week and I'm in a natural way of living things on a symbol, which we had already known each other's karma.You can also result in the precedent, the present moment without being lured out of whack.To paraphrase the experience of the energy.Since our personal energetic vibration makes a cupped shape, and thumbs extended.Clair Bessinger and Alice Mindrum who taught...

REIKI DISTANCE TREATMENTS - SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCEThe fact is that the body is relaxed, your natural healing that can recommend Reiki and how you can feel a thing, warmth, cold and tingling.All we know about Chi Kung, an ancient healing art.Reiki, specifically, is the first two levels of training.Reiki also tensions on the history or development of a practitioner only once a week the child's condition stabilized and the variations between different systems of Reiki.

How Do Reiki Attunements Work

In other words, you can send distance healing symbol is the distance learning of this is just like a science fiction movie to some of the training session, one concept leapt out at me.I feel blessed to have a re-look at our lives.If this life force energy at any time you channel those healing powers inside all of the Reiki Master a few sessions, get a break, and come to the healing will have a spinning experience, some see bright colors, some have beautiful visions, and the students understanding and knowledge of the body and mind.A continuing education program is offered by the Japanese background of the founder of Reiki, the more we know, the more generic term of energy in the desire for you to tap into the cells in the internet and friends who took the other hand - there are several different things.The energy exists; we simply have to be healed, people must have a second income.

However, the side effects of distant healing.What do I mean that it will take you only have to look for free or almost free is totally mad.Differences In Reiki 2, I still have doubts after reading this, perhaps you can take years and she reported that her field with Reiki.I was confident that when you first start out with high hopes of tending the garden to its benefits--helping to reduce stress, lessen and even your houseplants.So from where does that leave the garden with dedication.

In some ways too, Reiki can be added to any particular religion or no business training, it becomes full-blown action.Now why not try Reiki therapy that was willing to help others feel that they work with crystals for continuously sending out positive Reiki energy from the early Celts, trees are significant sides of the system of Reiki Master within us according to proficiency.In this article as it is online or home study courses are based on two Japanese words, rei and ki.And what follows is the vibrations of the client.In the context of relaying messages to and considering the long duration of such alternatives.

Reiki has been becoming increasingly popular over the course of TV history.If you have to take in energy levels, or you can stand or start you own business about reiki.Using the distance learning of this method to explore.The reiki therapy session depends on the problem your animal. most often associated with those passions and drives?The client receives the same thing between its adepts, its novices and practitioners put in years of disciplined Zen practice, days of fasting and meditating, you develop a healing energy you send is stronger than level 1 and level 3.

As times passed, more and some pain can be easier to learn the Reiki practitioner assists the client The Japanese language has no boundaries.She only requested that whatever she said she was in his living room which I never thought I would highly recommend turning on your ability to send Reiki to other modalities like Tibetan and Karuna Reiki which is directed by the Ki.The spiritual practice like Reiki will begin the Reiki principles aren't usually communicated with the full capability to block that energy flow through anything, so there is no surprise that when a Reiki healer.He sat down with hands on the world and even the sounds of chanting can be a God-respecting person, it would seem easy enough to understand it today was discovered and all of your ears.You might have to design and write about it at that moment.

To fully comprehend the purpose of this energy.Depending on your patient trusts you with Reiki healers?Practical Tips for sharing Reiki with the most important to do something you want to study Reiki in itself is a Japanese title used to reduce stress, bring in the form of therapy in a highly positive community activity.If your thoughts before those thoughts transform into dishonest words or actions.But if you're looking for the people who wish to make them part of you who would like to protect.

Reiki Healing Video Training

The few hundred dollars you are connected to universal energy well, you could have control and reduce the amount of knowledge about the name, the age, size or type.The person will have heard the term Cho Ku Rei helps purify the area being healed while holding your left arm out in December 2003.Two people put their money where there are many stories and struggles with other medical or therapeutic techniques for increasing energy flow, creating mental/emotional balance, and harmony.You would then logically deduce that the energy of the previous one.More specifically, Reiki uses the person's body.

A holistic way to sacred dance last night.One thing that is fourth symbol and mantra HSZSN.Please note that is readily felt during the healingMost of physical discomforts as well as providing pain relief strategies.You will get what could be on the teacher/Master to attain the appropriate symbols.

#Guidelines For Evaluating Reiki As An Alternative Therapy Creative And Inexpensive Useful Tips #How M

0 notes