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anthonybialy · 9 months ago

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Self-Own the Libs

Liberals hate coping with liberalism, which you’d think might convince them something’s wrong. But blaming everyone else is too thoroughly ingrained. Those who pushed continual catastrophes on us seem even less pleased than pleasant people, which offers small comfort while dealing with what they think.

Culprits should be the least surprised. Lamentably, destructors still don’t realize just who leveled everything. Perpetrating victims really thought their ideals would spur joyous prosperity, and the fact they must suffer along with the rest of us offers little comfort.

There are ample chances to wallow in suffering during these days of voters forgetting that everything promised by Democrats is destined to turn out precisely backward. Trying the ideas on the Cold War’s losing side is unhelpful as long as there’s no consistency. You might think test tube fetishists who claim to embody science would oppose fighting conclusions, but getting things wrong is how they’re consistent. Run the experiments once more to ensure they’re peer-reviewed.

Migrants are great until they migrate. At the least, they should stop in icky conservative states on the nation’s edge. Democrats can’t stop bragging about how much they adore making America a communal workers’ paradise minus the work. Abolishing private property in every sense starts with erasing the border. This is truly the land of incentives, as seen inadvertently and perversely when the Party of Kamala encourage anyone who wants to stroll on it. Meanwhile, citizens are hassled for defending themselves or transferring a couple hundred bucks through online payment.

Your bosses thought we were all in this together, which means they inflict the same woe on everyone. You might expect the biggest flaunters might be glad to have the guests the invited in camping on their doorsteps. It’s not just Texas getting to add to their diversity mosaic. All these new neighbors create a net positive, right? The fact we don’t know permanent visitors’ backgrounds just creates opportunities to ask questions during conversations. A country they loathe must accept anyone who wants to enter. It’s just they have to live over there.

Sophisticated policy specialists tried treating guns as the villains. The devices respond indifferently. Humans holding them have no choice, according to those with an ulterior motive in diverting attention from decisions. Struggling criminals are turned into felonious monsters by diabolical shooties. It’s ironically their own spreading of poverty that leads to the crime they excuse, which is the worst of many ways they obliviously prove their point.

Allegedly enchanted implements only become dangerous when the virtuous aren’t allowed to have them. Liberals demand gun control that they already have, which is not merely a sign of ingratitude. If you think them not grasping that they successfully implemented their desired policies in numerous locales is bad, wait until you hear about the failure to stop inflation.

The body count associated with blaming guns can’t be countered by the self-righteousness of acting like one more restriction would’ve done it. Keeping the law-abiding from discouraging attacks goes against the nation’s values and rulebook. Free people are allowed to defend themselves, and every part of that offends Democrats. They don’t think of themselves as free, which means nobody else gets to see themselves in those terms, either.

As with every bit of liberalism, they always need more. There have not been enough rights unilaterally confiscated to stop a virus. We need even higher taxes to get the economy rolling. And the next round of gun control will finally be the one that halts criminals who obey every other law.

Moaning that pirates plunder their few remaining possessions is where controlling guns and the economy meet. Criminals are the only ones treated as victims as presumed innocence gets taken too far. There’s a procedure whereby those who leave evidence of committing offenses are arrested, allowed to offer a defense, then convicted if they can’t sucker jurors. But the option gets lightly used in a time where outlaws are people who don’t surrender more to the IRS, insist on cooking with natural gas, and lie about losing elections.

We’re all as rich as each other. That seems like a cruel trick played by a genie. A tremendous amount of currency shows that supply and demand are applied consistently. At least this pathetic economy has discouraged materialism. There’s no choice. Aspiring buyers take in more money than can be counted, which only makes trying to muster sufficient funds to buy a second slice of bread to officially finish building a sandwich.

Presuming their incredible notions would cure humanity’s sicknesses has made everyone ill. The pushy faction got exactly the leaders they wanted spending the entirety of seized fortunes on schemes whose preposterousness mean nobody will fund them voluntarily. That offered a pretty big clue about the ensuing results. But betting with their own money has never interested Democrats.

Those with the worst ideas naturally oppose individuality. Imposing their wretched ideology requires coercion, which is surely a reflection of desirability. An accumulation of little schemes worked so terrifically in their minds that it almost seems like we shouldn’t have spoiled it by actually trying them. Can we please stop trying them?

Blaming a robust America for other nations loathing us and toughness on crime for its existence turns out like anyone who’s good at noticing things predicted. Fans of shock hate the outcomes their policies. It’s nice to share common ground. The fact Democrats hate worthless money and their new makeshift neighbors should inspire hope as a sign they’re still capable of accurately experiencing reality. The connection is trickier, as it involves self-awareness. Fleeing to Red States then proclaiming everything about them is swell but their politics is a good and bad sign.

#big government #economy #crime #immigration #liberty #liberalism

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prankrat · 4 months ago

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Great assessment of liberals broadly, also reminds me of a great article on Fukuyama specifically.

Though most remember “The End of History?” as triumphant in tone, it was also melancholic, often sounding almost like a breakup letter. There was good reason for this: For the first decade of his career, Fukuyama was in a long-distance relationship with the Soviet Union. It was the lodestar around which he organized his life. The Soviet Union provided Fukuyama with a calling—his professional specialty was Soviet behavior in the Third World—and it also gave him ideological perspective. Whatever the Soviet Union was, the United States (and Fukuyama) was not. The Soviet Union was the Joker to Fukuyama’s Batman. When it went away, he lost far more than a worthy adversary; he lost the object against which he’d defined his own moral and political compass.

…

The End of History?” was more than just a piece of commentary; it was a diagnosis, an announcement of victory, and a lament, an explication of where Fukuyama thought the world was as well as an expression of how he felt about it. Fukuyama concluded that the US triumph in the Cold War was an epochal achievement, even as he appreciated that the future would not be as romantic without his old Soviet rival. And that’s why there’s a question mark in the title. Though “The End of History?” makes it clear that, intellectually, Fukuyama knows the answer to his question, emotionally he finds it difficult to accept.

…

In these ways, “The End of History?” was triumphalist. But it was also suffused with an intense anxiety about what might come next. While Fukuyama is often considered one of late-20th-century liberalism’s greatest advocates, he was always a bit skeptical of the ideology’s ability to satiate the innate human desire for connection and meaning. In particular, Fukuyama envied communists, because communism provided its adherents with a profound sense of community, engendering feelings of global solidarity that encouraged leftist governments to aid and make sacrifices for one another, even when doing so wasn’t in their avowed national interest. Unlike communism, Fukuyama explained in an essay from the mid-1980s, liberalism had little “explicit doctrine�� related to “international capitalist solidarity”—the latter, in fact, was almost a contradiction in terms, given liberal capitalism’s individualistic ethos. Where communist nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union offered “fraternal assistance…as a matter of principle,” cooperation between liberal governments would always “have to be arranged on an ad hoc basis, probably among states…directly affected by a common threat.” Under communism, people believed in a grand project and cooperated to bring it about; under liberalism, neither collective action nor social good will was encouraged. Though Fukuyama, of course, thought Marxist-Leninist beliefs were silly at best and destructive at worst, he nevertheless envied the kinds of solidarities they engendered. Ironically, the only time liberalism could inspire similar associations and feelings was when it was engaged in an epic battle with an existential enemy. Without such an enemy, liberalism was a bit bloodless.

This pessimistic understanding of liberalism helps explain the melancholic notes in “The End of History?” History’s end, Fukuyama predicted mournfully, “will be a very sad time,” because “the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Liberalism may work better than communism, but it couldn’t satisfy the human yearning for connection and meaning; as Fukuyama later wrote, the ideology ultimately had a “vacuum” at its center. For this reason, he prophesied that in a liberal world shorn of momentous conflict, many people would not be all that happy. He wasn’t wrong.

when liberals proclaimed the end of history in the '90s it was with a sense of smug victory. revolution had been disproven, a sustainable form of war had been discovered, and imperialism would last forever in perfect ataraxia. when they proclaim it now, very much undeniably in the middle of a lot of history happening, it is with a sense of panic and desperate self-reassurance.

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random-thought-depository · 3 years ago

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Tangent from my last post: reading over this and thinking about it, I’ve pinpointed a disagreement that I think reveals a fundamental disagreement I have with the ideas I was responding to there.

Seph’s essay talks about liberal sexual consent practices as requiring a shift toward a more Culture A style of social interaction; requiring a willingness to actively assert your own interests instead of engaging in Culture B accommodationism. And that’s true, but I immediately recognized that it’s incomplete in a way that I think fundamentally distorts what’s happening, though it took me a while to think out exactly how. Saying “no” involves a degree of Culture A type assertiveness, but respecting that “no” and pro-actively making sure your partner is enjoying things involves an attentiveness to feelings, an accommodationism, and an attentiveness to maintaining harmony that’s more Culture B.

Like, if you drew up two columns, one labeled “Macho Republican Dad Boomerpost Stuff” and one labeled “Softy SJW Stuff,” and started sorting things into those columns by which group they’re more stereotypically associated with (bacon, guns, capitalism, Christianity, complaining about “cancel culture,” and calling people sissies as an insult into the Republican Dad column, tofu, queerness, feminism, socialism, veganism, accusing people of microaggressions, and being a Wiccan into the SJW column, etc.), I think liberal sexual norms placing a high premium on explicit consent would definitely stereotypically belong in the “SJW” column. And in this context I think that’s revealing.

I think what’s happening here is fundamentally orthogonal to Culture A vs. Culture B. I think, like a lot of left vs. right divides, it fundamentally comes down to hierarchy vs. egalitarianism. Liberal sexual norms emphasizing consent are a rejection of the pecking order method of simply resolving sexual conflicts of interests in favor of the person with more power, whether that power is social status, physical strength, emotional intelligence, or just being more willing to press for their interests. Culture A vs. Culture B is fundamentally orthogonal to what’s really going on here; trying to understanding this issue through that lens is at best like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between different types of Christianity (you may get some genuine insights, but you’ve mistaken the fringes of the conflict for its core), and at worst like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Actually I think the “trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of Christian doctrine disputes” may be a good analogy, because I think this does tie back to the “the left/liberal side of the culture war is waging a war against Culture A” hypothesis in a way that reveals how that idea is not exactly wrong but misses an important dimension of what’s happening. I think what’s happening is that hierarchy is more explicit and explicitly enforced in Culture A, and therefore as society becomes less like a pecking order hierarchy tends to assume Culture B characteristics.

Culture A is where you find the human hierarchies that look the most like actual pecking orders, which are maintained by literal physical pecking. It’s where you find the openly brutal world of bosses screaming “the leads aren’t weak, you are!” into a cringing subordinate’s face, cops quietly taking an uncooperative suspect into a convenient alley and roughing him up a little to “teach him to respect our authority,” gangsters beating somebody up for being insufficiently deferential to them, some 6′3 250 pound guy in the grips of road rage punching some 5′7 150 pound guy in the face over a smashed bumper, teachers disciplining students by giving them hard blows on the palm with a ruler, a swaggering thug threatening a woman with physical violence because she had the effrontery to object to him groping her, and jocks having some fun inflicting casual physical abuse on the nerds in the locker room and on the playground. Hierarchies in Culture A are often maintained by physical violence and the threat thereof and put-downs and other explicit verbal bullying. When somebody in Culture A thinks you’ve gotten a bit above your station and wants to put your in your place, they’re likely to either actually use physical violence against you, explicitly threaten you with it, or explicitly insult you. Abuse in Culture A tends to look like our stereotypical picture of some swaggering thug openly terrorizing somebody who has some sort of vulnerability.

By contrast, hierarchies in Culture B tend to operate under more polite fictions of relative egalitarianism, cooperativeness, and non-violence. Enforcement of Culture B hierarchies tends to be less overtly violent. Culture B hierarchies are more likely to be covert and legible only to somebody with inside knowledge (e.g. you’ve ostensibly got a group of equals, but some are more equal than others because of advantages that mostly aren’t explicitly acknowledged). Culture B tends to have more of an ideal that coercive power can only be legitimately exercised for moral reasons, while Culture A tends to have more of a “master morality” culture where power is seen as worthy of respect in itself (Culture A is what gave us “Chad” and “alpha” as aspirational ideals), which is why bullying in Culture B tends to have a moralistic and fearmongering nature (see: Tumblr call-out posts) while bullying in Culture A tends to follow a more “master morality” logic of “our victim is weak and aesthetically displeasing to us, and that in itself makes them deserve punishment” - though much like “Culture A rewards strength and technical skills, Culture B rewards social skills and popularity” that’s a dichotomy that can easily be overplayed; most human hierarchies come with a hefty dose of community-minded moralism (even if the community is a pirate ship or criminal gang or something like that), and social skills and popularity are hugely important in almost any culture. Culture B is for people who wouldn’t dream of doing anything so barbaric as yelling at you or punching you because they’re mad at you; they’d complain to the human resources department who’d force you to spend a Friday evening listening to somebody lecture you about the need to “make our store a welcoming environment for our valued customers.”

An archetypal abusive Culture A authority figure is the macho thuggish “respect mah authoritay!” cop. An archetypal abusive Culture B authority figure is the gaslighty Nice Lady Therapist. The former is more-or-less open about the fact that he sees himself as above you in the pecking order and if you dispute that he’ll be delighted to enforce the pecking order in approximately the way chickens do it. The latter pretends to be your friend (and perhaps believes themselves to be that), and expends a great deal of effort tailoring their pecking order enforcement to not look like pecking order enforcement - significantly, they might like to be as openly brutal as the “respect mah authoritay!” cop is, but in strong Culture B that social strategy just doesn’t work; their social strategy represents a compromise with socially influential ideals of egalitarianism and non-violence, a tribute that vice pays to virtue (less charitably, it may simply reflect playing to different strengths and trying to minimize different weaknesses, e.g. the thuggish cop may have chosen that social strategy because he’s a physically powerful but not particularly socially intelligent Biff Tannen type, while the Nice Lady Therapist may have chosen that social strategy because she’s a socially intelligent and Machiavellian but physically feeble 4′10 woman).

In short, Culture B tends to both meaningfully soften the blows of pecking order enforcement and obfuscate them. It follows that as equalizing movements gain ground and explicit pecking order logic becomes more taboo, hierarchy will increasingly take on Culture B characteristics. In 1700, if you angered your boss in some petty interpersonal way he might have whipped you, which was his right as your master. Today, if you anger your boss in some petty interpersonal way she might think a little about how to get revenge on you in a way that doesn’t risk blowback if you take it up with the union, and then find some excuse to arrange for you to have to attend some mandatory HR remedial training that isn’t officially a punishment but let’s be real, totally is. Maybe in 2200 you won’t have a boss because you’ll work in an officially egalitarian syndicalist union, but there will be some union members who are “more equal than others” because of personal connections or charisma or some combination of both, and if you anger one of them in a petty interpersonal way they might through whisper networks arrange a quiet campaign to make sure the union votes against your requests for your favorite foods on the workplace lunch menu.

I guess I’m staking out a position as a hedging kind-of partisan of Culture B here. There’s a lot of talk about how Culture B gets an undeserved good reputation and can be just as unfair and cruel as Culture A but in a more insidious way, and I’m sympathetic to that and I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but, y’know, if I had to choose between pecking order enforcement that has to maintain a plausible veneer of being something else and just open undiluted sadistic pecking order enforcement, I think I’d prefer the former. I think even just adding in a requirement of hypocrisy improves things, because it forces pecking order enforcement to optimize for plausible deniability instead of sadism and effective tyranny. Admittedly, as somebody who finds this very relatable I have a strong personal bias here.

An illustrative personal anecdote: the usual stereotype of high school is that bullied kids (or at least bullied boys) suffer a lot of casual physical abuse, but I noticed that in my school there was a lot of verbal bullying but mercifully little physical abuse; the worst that was likely to happen in terms of physical violence was somebody tripping you up or throwing a box of kleenix at you or spitting their drink at you or something like that. I suspect the reason was that blatant physical violence was pretty much the only form of bullying the school administration would reliably punish (though they’d likely punish the victim right along with the perpetrator), and that’s why it usually wasn’t done. I suspect what happened is that stereotype of chronic casual physical abuse reflects what schools were like when the baby boomers were growing up (and boomers then wrote fiction etc. that reflected that experience that shaped the pop culture stereotype), but then anti-bullying reforms came along and by the late ‘90s and early ‘00s they’d achieved one great success: mostly eliminating that schoolyard culture of casual physical violence. And that was a very incomplete fix, just addressing the tip of the iceberg of the problem and probably often redirecting bullying into psychological abuse rather than actually reducing it... but, y’know, I’m really glad my middle and high school experience didn’t conform to that pop culture stereotype of the school dweeb getting regularly beaten up by four or six bigger kids. I had an awful time in middle and high school, but judging from pop culture stereotypes it could have been so much worse, and if suspensions for kids who punched other kids is what created that difference, then I’m profoundly grateful for that reform.

I think the left is kinda-sorta waging war on Culture A as a side-effect of its war on pecking order culture, in which high-status people enjoy the advantages of Culture A while low-status people labor under the disadvantages of Culture B. It’s not an accident that Culture A is associated with men and Culture B is associated with women. Accommodation (sometimes to the point of self-harm) is a survival strategy for low-status people in a social structure that resembles a pecking order; if you’re going to lose the fight, it often makes sense to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the interests of the stronger person (often to the extent of trying to anticipate the stronger person’s wants, performing even the brain work of figuring out their preferences for them). Competitiveness is a social strategy for upward mobility in a pecking order society or defense of a place near the top of the pecking order (it also has more pro-social functions so we probably want to keep it around in some form, but social competition is very much part of its function). Women tend to be reluctant to openly advocate for their personal interests because for much of history a woman openly advocating for her personal interests was likely to provoke status-guarding retaliation from men. Men tend to be reluctant to show vulnerability and see doing so as feminine because for much of history other men were likely to perceive a vulnerable man as an opportunity to increase their own social status by lowering the vulnerable man’s social status, and as a rule of thumb to lower a man’s social status was to give him a social status more like a woman’s. In the context of a pecking order society, a lot of Culture B makes sense as social strategies for people at the bottom of the pecking order with little realistic shot of escaping its lower levels, and a lot of Culture A makes sense as social strategies for people at the top of the pecking order and people at the bottom or middle of the pecking order who have a realistic shot at using high-risk high-reward social strategies to move up in the hierarchy. I think there’s some complicating factors around reproductive dynamics that explain why this is a gendered thing instead of just a class thing, but I won’t get into that here. So it makes sense that as society becomes less like a pecking order that process will involve shifts toward Culture A in some areas and shifts toward Culture B in other areas, because those cultures are probably both somewhat maladaptive in a more egalitarian social context.

A relevant example is that for much of history vigorously advocating their own sexual interests was often very risky for women, so Culture B primes women to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the man’s sexual interests, so liberal consent norms work better if women develop more assertiveness about their own interests, which looks kind of Culture A-ish. At the same time, women now have more leverage to effectively demand that men perform pro-social Culture B behaviors of accommodation, empathy, and consideration for the feelings and interests of others in the context of heterosexual sex.

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Tangential aside: I think thinking of hierarchy as the fundamental tension point of the left vs. right conflict illustrates a way that post I was responding to might be kind of too meta and you might get an illuminating perspective by stepping back from all that meta-level theorizing about fundamental epistemological differences and looking at the object level.

If you analyze left-wing “cancel culture” at the object level, what does it look like it’s trying to do? It seems to me that it’s trying to lower the social acceptability of what leftists perceive as defenses of hierarchy. Who are the stereotypical targets of campus “cancel culture”? They might be a “race realist” who’s very eager to tell you about how he thinks certain human groups have lower IQs or other congenital traits maladaptive to modern society and darkly hint about political implications. They might be a business libertarian economist who wants to stump for the gospel of the free market. They might be somebody who has a habit of delivering the academic equivalent of boomerposts about kids these days with their coddling and their trigger warnings and their genders. They might be some principled “free speech” type who seems to spend a lot of their energy white knighting for neo-Nazis and other far-right types. They might be somebody who you’d think would be relatively unobjectionable to leftists but who’s said something that can be uncharitably interpreted as bigoted at some point. Besides raw factionalism, the obvious common point is something that can be reasonably interpreted as a defense of hierarchy. The “race realist” at least implicitly says “some groups are smarter or otherwise better than others and may therefore be rightfully deserving of privilege.” The business libertarian economist at least implicitly says “if you’re poor because you can’t get a job or can’t get a job that pays well, that’s basically your problem and the system working as intended; a society with great inequalities of wealth and status may not be ideal but it’s at least better than all the realistic alternatives.” The academic boomerposter at least implicitly says “some people struggle in our education system because of personal emotional sensitivities; their weakness is their own problem and us more functional people have no obligation to accommodate it, if that harms them it may be regrettable but it’s basically the system working as it should to weed out those unfit for it.” The principled free speech proponent at least implicitly says “wanting to kill the Jews and re-enslave the blacks and have white Sharia should be a tolerated opinion in our society, at least insofar as it should not be legally persecuted, and I am willing to devote considerable efforts to defending that principle.” The basically unobjectionable liberal who happens to have a dodgy comment or three in their social media record at least implicitly says “I don’t think I should get too much blowback for once implying that [insert group of concern here] maybe deserves the jackboot to the face.”

And sure, you can dispute the fairness of such judgements, but the over-arching project outlined by these targets seems fairly obvious: to raise the social costs of what leftists perceive as defending pecking orders.

And, like, yeah, there’s some meta-level differences about the role of tolerance and debate too, but I suspect a lot of the disagreement is really more object-level, over how objectionable certain opinions actually are, e.g. a lot of the dispute over “cancelling” the business libertarian guy is probably going to be over 1) how objectionable defense of hierarchy actually is, 2) whether libertarian beliefs are actually defenses of hierarchy.

#people are complicated #my big ideas #leftism #culture #warning: long #cw: bullying #cw: violence #cw: rape #cw: bigotry #politics

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terubakudan · 3 years ago

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My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi - Book Review and Impressions

(light reflection) Perfect :D Hoping Tumblr doesn't flag me for this xD

Ok, I'm going to start this off with 'this is probably the first and only book review I'm going to do' xD Because I rarely do read books now, and just as rarely buy them. Also, I would have preferred to buy the English version but alas they only had the Chinese version in stock ^^"

Stumbling upon this on the Internet, I was immediately compelled to buy this, as if I knew I would love it and that Nagata's story would resonate with me.

【Short Version】 I can't recommend this book enough, it doesn't matter what sexuality you are or from what culture are you. Nagata makes sure to tell an honest and 'naked' (without embellishments) portrait of her own personal experiences. How she herself is a college drop-out (having only graduated from high school), pushed herself to live/work while struggling with depression and eating disorders, not being sure of what she wants and feeling that she doesn't 'deserve' things, realizing her own sexuality in that she likes girls, and just not feeling 'good enough'...all through her cutesy and unassuming art style.

I will say again though, cutesy art style aside, the book deals with some very heavy topics. Nagata is very honest and doesn't shy away from the gritty details, and I admire her all the more for doing so. Many yaoi and yuri comics often portray an unrealistic and fetishistic view of the LGBTQ+ community whereas Nagata's story is much more grounded and sincere. This is not an easy read, but it's not an overly depressive one either. Nagata literally struggled for years with her mental health, but ultimately found light on the other side. Not mainly through the help of others, but through her own choice to forgive and love herself.

5/5⭐ Definitely recommend and would read again. And if I could, I'd give Nagata a big hug and a heartfelt 'thank you' for sharing her story.

【Long Version】 While it's written primarily from an Asian (particularly Japanese) perspective, Nagata's experiences are ones that should resonate with anyone who has been through the same or similar things, regardless of one's personal background. And I myself, while being fortunate enough to not have gone through eating disorders or self harm, am no exception.

I grew up in an Asian (Taiwanese/Chinese Filipino) household, while my parents weren't Tiger Parents (no offense but fuck Amy Chua for thinking that's a proper way of raising your children), they still had certain expectations on their children: to find a good husband/wife, have a good education, have a 'stable' career, etc. And while I love my parents very much, I'd be lying if I said there weren't any times where I felt they were smothering me, there weren't any times where they kept on nagging and bugging me for very trivial details. My biggest pet peeve: guilt-tripping me just for wanting to spend time alone.

"For me, my parents' opinion of me is absolute." (NOTE: While I won't be providing exact translations of the excerpts I used here, I'll do my best to summarize the gist of them.)

At the same time, I cared very much about their opinion of me. I made it a point to do well in school, to do things according to their wishes, and just like Nagata, I didn't know what I wanted. This even extended to caring about others' opinion of me, more than my own. In my freshman year of college, I 'went along' with being friends with someone, who while was nice to me, turned out to be a manipulative bitch skilled in passive-aggressiveness xD Being half-Taiwanese/half-Filipino, it was hard to fit in since people always treated me differently, it didn't occur to me I could be choosy with friends, I thought as long as they were 'nice' to me, that would do.

Asian culture is largely a collective one, where we define ourselves by our relationships with others, compared with Western culture (primarily America, I'll be using America as a reference point) where individualism is absolute, where you define yourself as you like. In Asia, it's also normal for children to still live in the same house as their parents well into adulthood, compared with Americans who are expected to move out the house once they finish high school or start college, and they're quite literally 'on their own', having to pay their own tuition, rent, etc. Where I live (Taiwan), it's normal for adults to continue relying on their parents financially well until college. Nagata for instance, while saying her parents really make her feel so pressured, is grateful that she still had a home to stay in (and she's 28!).

If you ask me though, neither a collectivist culture or an individualist culture is absolutely good nor bad. Each have their own pros and cons, and both Asian culture and Western culture could learn a thing or two from each other.

After going through quite a few job applications, one of the interviewers tells her "Ganbatte!" (You can do it!) after Nagata tells her what she really wants is to be a manga artist.

And sometimes that's all we need really, a small gesture or kind remark can do wonders. Even if there's no base or reason for it, it's something worth believing in.

I often have doubts if I'm doing what I really want, if I chose the right major for college, if I'm doing the right thing, if I'm 'good enough'. I didn't grow up with much self-esteem as a kid, and often derived my value from others. But even at my lowest times, a 'you're doing ok' was very reassuring to me, be it from family, strangers, or people I care about. Sometimes that's exactly what we need, it may be small but it could be the difference between continuing to wallow in depression or re-evaluating and choosing to be better to oneself.

I find it's really important to know, that however alone you may feel sometimes, there are other people out there going through the exact same thing. It's something universal, and while a lot of things are really unfair in life, each person has their own lot or burden to deal with. I have a Taiwanese friend who, while being more financially well-off than me, has terrible parents. And I mean parents who are quite so literally toxic, unsupportive of her, and would outright say the worst things to their own daughter.

How depression and anxiety can feel sometimes, we can literally feel like it's impossible to breathe and be in a state of disconnection from the world.

"The sounds that invaded my ears occupied my empty brain, making me unable to think at all."

If you only did what your parents asked you to do, wouldn't days like those be very painful? In the end, only you can understand what you really want.

Nagata's art style is one I would describe as simple, cute, and effective. I personally think had her story been drawn in a more serious style, it would have been even harder to read, much less finish. It's also a choice that has artistic appeal to me, serious subject matter juxtaposed with a 'kawaii' art style.

Nagata also depicts very well her mental state and thoughts throughout her struggle and journey to self-actualization. Depression is a really tough thing to deal with, and sometimes we don't even realize that we have it or if we do, refuse to acknowledge it. In Asian cultures especially, mental health has always been something of a taboo subject and there is a very heavy social stigma associated with it. Nagata herself even said that her parents seemingly refused to acknowledge that their daughter's mental health was in a state of distress. In Japan, there is a concept called gaman (我慢), which is described as 'enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity', and while it is portrayed as an ideal virtue that inspires perseverance, it can be a source of heavy pressure for others. Gaman also means that you are expected to suppress whatever emotion or negative feelings you have, often for the sake of others and no matter how tough the situation becomes for you. And while I agree that through gaman you can become more selfless for others, it shouldn't have to come at the expense of your own well-being.

I was quite fortunate to have grown up in a more liberal Asian household, but even when it came to mental health, our family also adopted the same kind of attitude towards it, by carrying on as if nothing was wrong, or just not talking about it. And to be honest, there were numerous times I wished we had been more open about what was bothering ourselves at that time. Talking and being open about your feelings is not a 'weakness' but something incredibly brave to do, and it's my wish for that to slowly become more acceptable in Asian cultures, which I know is kind of a stretch, but it doesn't hurt to hope.

Nagata makes the decision to clean herself up, by taking a bath everyday, habitually exercising, and no longer wearing worn-out clothes.

Depression especially can be a bitch. It deprives you even of your physiological needs, like your need for food. Nagata had to struggle with that on top of eating disorders for a long ten years. She ate so little and even felt that she didn't 'deserve' to eat, and at one point, anorexia became hyperphagia, and she would feel so guilty for eating almost expired/expired food. Things that would otherwise be simple to do also end up becoming difficult/impossible to do, like taking care of your personal hygiene, getting up from bed, doing simple tasks etc.

Thankfully, after Nagata realizes that she never truly 'valued herself', she starts to turn over a new leaf. Even just starting with cleaning herself up, she takes this as a form of 'valuing oneself' and her mood starts to improve, which her family also points out. In the end, taking care of yourself is not a selfish thing to do, it can even make you a better person who is there for others.

Nagata meets up with the female escort she hired, as a means to experience human sexuality, which she had always repressed her curiosity for and treated as a taboo subject. (NOTE: And I'm glad that she met a really nice girl for her first time too!)

Sex and sexuality is also a subject that I feel is hard to talk about sometimes, which I think also owes itself to most Asian cultures being relatively conservative about it. I myself have only recently identified as bisexual, which I attribute to internalized homophobia, not wanting to admit I was into girls too. And to be honest, 'coming out' is something I'm still uncomfortable about, because I don't want to risk my relationship with my family and it's still something I would choose to be selective about with colleagues and friends. I'm grateful though that as crazy the Internet can be sometimes, it can be quite accepting and tolerant towards things that we wouldn't otherwise discuss with even the closest people in our circle. Nagata's memoir ended up capturing the hearts of many readers ever since she first published it on Pixiv.

Exploring your sexuality doesn't have to be scary, it should be something exciting and liberating. Nagata decided to take matters into her own hands, and while the days leading up to the encounter made her really nervous and she even considered not going through with it at all, she willed herself to continue, because she wanted to do this for herself, it would be pointless if she gave up after coming so far in her decision to value herself.

And it's these series of actions that she decided to do that ultimately led to her life turning out for the better, it gave her the courage to do what she always wanted: to be a manga artist, which lead to the publishing of this autobiographical memoir, something she wanted to create that would 'make people want to buy this book' and from her own preference for reading stories that 'speak of secrets people wouldn't want to tell others'.

Nagata mentions what she calls 'honey': something that varies from person to person. It could be your reason for living, that thing that drives/pushes you, or even your sense of belonging. It may not be something permanent, but you can always find yourself a new one. (she mentions the last time she had her 'honey' was during her high school days, and while she has grown apart from the friends she made, she has found her new 'honey' in the form of being a full-time manga artist.)

Nagata stumbles and trips a lot on her way to being a better version of herself, but who doesn't? She admits to things not necessarily being smooth, but at least she's doing better than before. And it's that decision to at least try that counts. We don't have to be perfect, we're all human after all.

TL;DR My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness is a honest, down-to-earth, and ultimately hopeful memoir about the struggles of mental health and learning about one's sexuality. It's an amazing book, and very much worth the buy.

A big thank you if you read through all of this too. I know it's a mess and writing isn't exactly my strong point, but hopefully I've convinced some people out there to give this book a read! Please feel free to share your thoughts and I'd appreciate it very much too if you reblog/like this post.

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maxwell-grant · 3 years ago

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Downfall of a Dark Avenger Part 2: Shadows of Manhattan

Having finished reading Al Ewing’s El Sombra trilogy and having had enough time to digest it, I’d like to talk about the trajectory of it’s titular protagonist, the character and series’s relationship with it’s influences. Relating to The Shadow and Zorro and general pulp archetypes, and also the way it incorporates Astro Boy’s Pluto into the mix.

This part is focused on Gods of Manhattan and El Sombra’s first appearences in Pax Omega and the ways in which the urban vigilante manifests itself in the books.

In Gods of Manhattan, El Sombra takes a backseat to it’s central players, Doc Thunder and The Blood-Spider. I’ve mentioned how Thunder, while ostensibly a Doc Savage/Superman amalgam, also combines aspects that allow the character to condense the entire history of the superman into a single being, but to a character very much centered on the future and in progressive ideals, described in the book as someone considered both the city’s ultimate savior as well as viewed as "a faggot, a liberal and a miscegenationist”. In that regard, the Blood-Spider becomes his opposite. Perhaps the most comprehensive savaging of the dark detective/The Shadow ever put on paper, that has a larger point behind the questions and criticisms it brings up to what this kind of figure can be.

"You can hardly have a war on crime unless you are the one defining what a crime is. First rule of the war on crime: everyone is guilty or something"

Us am vigilantes! Am us not men? Us use violence to effect social change! Am us not men? Us bring terror to underclass, make streets safer for overclass! Am us not men? Am us not men?

Making them loved rather than feared. Having them fight crime, or the right kind of crime, at least. Created a persona designed to appeal to the worst in people, to bring the citizens of New York around to his cause, his war on crime, which would, of course, then become a war against ‘urban crime’. Or some other little euphemism. ‘Inhuman’, for example. Sounds a lot more relatable than subhuman, doesn’t it? Comes to the same thing, though.

Although The Blood-Spider is an evil take on The Shadow, most of his character traits are taken from characters that followed him. He’s got the moniker, savagery, fright tactics and branded murders of The Spider, he climbs buildings and has a civilian identity akin to Spider-Man’s, with constant name references to characters like Stacey, Jonah and a redhead named Mary Watson, with him sharing a name with Peter Parker as well as Batman villain Jonathan Crane, he’s got Rorschach monologues that are echoed by his associates past his demise in white supremacist organizations dedicated to carrying off Spider’s legacy, predating HBO Watchmen’s take on Rorschach legacy. If Doc Thunder is all about taking the superhero’s past to create a better future with it, Blood-Spider takes the future of the urban vigilante and uses it as a conduit to enact a barbaric and reactionary agenda in service of undoing everything Thunder stands for, even before he’s revealed to be a Nazi agent.

Blood-Spider is what happens when the absolute worst aspects of said characters are brought to the forefront and twisted by a dose of reality. He’s to The Shadow what Plutonian is to Superman, the most sour way said character and legend can be twisted into something horrendous. He’s the Doutrinador in a fedora, everything I vehemently argue that The Shadow wasn’t, and yet seems sadly ever closer to as more and more comics dehumanize the character. He’s Howard Chaykin’s Shadow, naked and raw and exposed for what it ultimately is. An insult and a wake-up call, if a necessary one.

In fact, said poisoning of a legend is explicitly a plot point in the book, because the book establishes that, before The Blood-Spider, the city’s main vigilante used to be a man by the name of Blue Ghost, friend of Doc Thunder and, although a mysterious public figure, still firmly on the side of good. Unfortunately, moral victories aside, “good” alone doesn’t cut it in the world of El Sombra.

You took a look at the Blue Ghost - mysterious masked avenger, operatives all over the place, big fan-following with the working classes, and you figured...we need one of those. Just take away the Japanese orphan kid and replace him with a foxy Aryan chick.

Blue Ghost is almost a textbook Spirit analogue, even defined as being beat up a lot as his main asset, except here, he’s placed as Doc’s counterpart that died before the story began and is now replaced by a darker and more horrendous counterpart, and because The Spirit was influenced by The Shadow, it opens a roundabout connection. You can read this as a comparison between the shift from Adam West’s Batman to Frank Miller’s Batman, or a comparison between The Shadow and earlier more straightforward pulp vigilantes like Jimmie Dale, or a comparison between the pulp/radio Shadow and later iterations of him or analogues to his archetype that upped the nastier aspects. Again, nothing in El Sombra is ever quite just one thing.

And at last we come to El Sombra, who spends much of the book caught in between the duels of Doc, Untergang and players in between. And it’s interesting that here, while El Sombra’s final victories over the story’s major conflict lie in his willingness to team up with Doc, despite knowing of his origins as a Nazi weapon, his victories over Blood-Spider instead come from turning tricks of The Shadow against him. First, when he discovers Spider’s true nature, spying on him by pulling a Fritz the Janitor. And then in the finale, when he schools Spider on what a real shadowy avenger looks like.

"Amigo...that's my sword"

The voice came from the darkness above them, where the gaslight did not reach. The Spider's blood ran cold for a long moment, and then he grabbed hold of his other gun, tearing it from its holster and raising it to fire a volley of bullets into the darkness. "Where are you? Show yourself!" he hissed, turning in place, the gun raised to fire at the slightest sound or movement.

"You're not the only one who can hide in the shadows, my friend. I've got very good at it, over the years."

"Show yourself!" Another volley of shots, with no result. Was he throwing his voice? Was he everywhere at once? Was he a shadow himself? A ghost?

The voice echoed from another place now, continuing his speech exactly where he had left off. And still that mocking voice echoed from the shadows above.

"See, I didn't know if you were a good guy or a bad guy. I mean, sure, you killed people, and you were kind of a dick about it, you know? But I didn't know if you were one of the bastards. I didn't know if you needed to die or not, amigo."

The gun clicked empty. He was out of bullets. He turned again, and there was the man in the red mask. Just standing there, in the middle of the concourse. His smile didn't look human. And his eyes. Oh, his terrible eyes...

"Stay back." The Spider whispered, and his voice sounded in his ears like a frightened, animal thing, waiting to curl up and die in its hole.

The man in the red mask only laughed. A rich, deep, joyous laugh, a laugh that echoed and filled the whole station, bouncing from pillar to pillar, careening through the great vaulted arches. Such a laugh!

Then the laughter stopped, and he fixed the Blood-Spider with a look that would freeze the fires of Hell.

And suddenly - quite suddenly - there was no Blood-Spider. There was only Parker Crane, the Nazi. Parker Crane, the traitor. Who thought he could destroy America, and only managed to destroy himself. Parker Crane. Just a man wearing a mask. He ran, and left the sword behind him.

"Nice trick," Doc murmured, turning to the masked man. "Throwing your sword from up on the balcony - good aim, by the way - then throwing your voice and a little mental suggestion to make him think you were up in the arches where he'd been. Where did you learn that?"

The masked man shrugged, lifting up his weapon. "In the desert. You can learn a lot in the desert, if you put your mind to it."

By the story’s end, once Lars Lomax, Thunder’s arch-enemy and Lex Luthor, takes center stage as it’s ultimate threat, Parker Crane is left a traumatized, broken shell unable to even move, utterly stripped of any mystique or power that his mask and guns may have brought him. And in the end, El Sombra finds him, neutralized and no longer a threat to anyone. And he makes his choice.

El Sombra knew what it was to hate, to hate so hard and so long that you knew nothing else, to hate so strongly that it crossed that line into something beyond reason.

He lifted his sword, resting the blade in his palm for a moment, considering. Crane only stared, weeping and making his soft, mad noises. El Sombra sighed, shaking his head. "You know, I don't know if I can kill a guy who's already dead. Even if he is one of the bastards."

"Don't let him in here." Murmured Crane, his eyes wide.

"Shhh, I won't let him in," smiled El Sombra in response, trying to be reassuring. "You'll never have to face him again. I promise. It's okay, amigo. It's okay."

It was strange. He knew he should feel hate for Parker Crane. It was Djego's job to bear things like pity and doubt, to feel sorrow and shame. That was Djego's role in their team of one. El Sombra was there to take never-ending revenge and to laugh and to never look back. But to know that his murder of Heinrich Donner - his righteous kill - had resulted in so much harm coming to so many... and now to see the leader of Undergang, the man he'd come to New York to kill, just an empty, broken madman, a shell of a person... El Sombra wondered if he was changing.

"Don't," whispered Crane, a tear rolling down his cheek. "Don't let him back in."

El Sombra smiled, placing a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, amigo. I'm going to go and make sure nobody ever needs to see him again. And I couldn't have done it without you." He squeezed lightly. "You didn't mean to, but you did some good. Remember that."

Then, gently, he pushed the tip of the sword through the front of Crane's skull and into his brain.

He was not incapable of pity. But he was who he was, and he did what he did.

And broken or not, the bastards had to die.

We’ve seen El Sombra struggle and be faced with choices, choices between Djego and El Sombra, choices between kindness and violence, between peace and conflict. We’ve seen the conflict in his soul between things that he knows are right, because Djego is a good man with a good soul who wants good things for himself and others, and things he knows he must do, because he is El Sombra and El Sombra was created to kill the bastards that brought his world to ruin and therefore it’s what he must always do. And in the end, El Sombra is simply stronger. He has to be. But strength and violence and hatred can only get one so far.

Gods of Manhattan is the trilogy’s moral compass, the book that most clearly defines the morality the series operates on. And in between the spectrums of justice embodied by Doc and Crane’s approach, between the two urban avengers in The Blue Ghost and Blood-Spider, El Sombra made his choice. And it’s the first choice that dooms him.

Enter Pax Omega, and we learn that, 4 years since the previous book's events, El Sombra joined a squad of agents called Yankee Bravo Seven, who work for an organization named STEAM, who enact missions against Nazis to turn the tides of war. He is joined by several other types of characters, including The Blood Widow, Crane’s former assistant Marlene Lang now having taken up the moniker (just as Nita van Sloan did for The Spider, even with the “Widow” prefix). We see that El Sombra has joined a team of bantering heroes and even formed a friendly rivalry with a man named Savate, modeled after Batroc the Leaper.

But we see that the hunger for vengeance still burns, still burns beyond reason, restless because it’s been 4 years and the war still isn’t over and Hitler still isn’t dead by his sword. And it’s that restlessness that again dooms him, when he once again makes the wrong choice and betrays leader Jack Scorpio, Scorpio who had personally brought him on board and gave him the best shot he ever had at getting to Hitler.

El Sombra frowned. "We need to make our move now."

Scorpio shook his head. "Not yet."

"What?" El Sombra looked incredulous.

"Wait for my signal, I said! Damn it, I need you to trust me!" Jack Scorpio reached up to brush the back of his finger across his forehead, and realised he was sweating.

Through his special glasses, El Sombra's aura was glowing an angry, pulsing red, like a throbbing vein. "Just...trust me. I'm asking you to hold back for just five minutes. There's more going on here than you know."

El Sombra just stared at him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a cold snarl.

"Trust me. That's all I ask." Jack Scorpio looked into the blazing eyes behind the bloodstained mask, and spoke softly, soothingly, almost desperately. "Can you just hold back for one minute?"

The eyes behind the mask narrowed.

"Can you?"

PERSONNEL FILE: DJEGO "EL SOMBRA". TO EYES ONLY: THIS INDIVIDUAL IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS. IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED HE NOT BE INCLUDED IN ANY OPERATIONS CLASSIFIED ABOVE TOP SECRET OR HIGHER. (I'll take the risk - J.S)

El Sombra spat in Scorpio's face.

"Chinga tu madre."

Then he drew his sword and leaped down into the fray.

After the mission is over, with the base destroyed and a major victory secured, although with Jack Scorpio having been killed, the team disbands. El Sombra continues to wander the forests near the Luftwaffe base for about two weeks, killing as many Nazis as he can, until an explosion blast hits near him, knocking away his mask and portions of his leg and arm, and rendering him unconscious for 8 months. By the time he wakes up, the war has ended, and so has El Sombra for the past 7 years.

Djego was afforded the best of medical care at the hospital in Venice. El Sombra was nowhere to be found.

His mask had been torn off in the explosion, along with some of the meat of his leg and arm. He walked stiffly, now, with a pronounced limp, and his left arm was all but useless, hanging limply at his side. The Wildcat crew had salvaged his sword, but Djego had little interest in using it.

Gradually, he regained his mobility. The back of his head itched constantly, and he suffered from horrendous mood swings, when he would rage against the Fuhrer and the bastards, or weep helplessly, like a child. But gradually, he found his personality stabilising in the gentle, antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. He found that Djego - so long despised as a weakling, a coward and a fool - was capable of a kind of gentle, melancholic wit that made him popular.

Djego healed and grew, and the itch in the back of his skull began to subside, as El Sombra relinquished his grip.

Djego felt his heart seize in his chest. The cloth was missing a scrap at the end, and there was mud ground into the fabric along with the old bloodstains; but it had two evenly-spaced holes in it, and was unmistakably a mask. It seemed to be looking at him.

He takes up gardening and establishes himself in the city of Brandenberg, he becomes a fixture of the city and a friend of it, he enters a relationship, and El Sombra never appears again.

Until a mysterious stranger named Leonard Lorraine, walks through his door one day, saying he’s got a mission to fulfill, and hands him his mask. And, once again, El Sombra is simply stronger, and he makes the wrong choice again.

Djego shook his head and tried to step back from it, but his legs wouldn't move.

"No," he whispered. "No. Please"

"I was happy," pleaded Djego. "Doesn't that matter to you?" He picked up the cloth in trembling fingers, looking into the empty eyeholds. "Doesn't that mean anything?"

There was no answer. The patrons of the bierkeller did not even notice anything was happening.

"I was happy," Djego choked, and then, in one spasmodic motion, he pulled the mask onto his face, and secured it tightly, so that the knot once again rested in the back of his head, where it belonged: so tightly that it might never come off again.

El Sombra looked at his hands.

He prodded his belly, amused at the rounded shape of it, and took a couple of steps back from the bar. The limp was gone.

He laughed, very softly, so as not to disturb the patrons.

Djego and Lorraine walk through the desolate streets of Berlin, which in the years since has completely sealed itself from the outside world through an impossibly thick dome, and Djego discovers the city completely bereft of life, with only a few lobotomized robotic citizens aimlessly wandering and chewing on the mountains of corpses in the city, as their Nazi ideology reached it’s inevitable outcome of total annihilation of any and all that the party could find an excuse to slaughter in the name of purity, which eventually included it’s few remaining members. In this world, Hitler has been a brain inside a robotic contraption ever since 1945, and it’s amidst this scenario that El Sombra, while thinking about how his final confrontation with Hitler would play out, eventually finds what’s left of Hitler.

All around them, there were the sounds of machinery, but the Mecha-Fuhrer was completely silent, utterly motionless. In the centre of its chest rested a tank of toxic green fluid, and on the surface of the fluid, a human brain floated, like the corpse of a goldfish.

It was quite dead.

El Sombra stared at the Fuhrer for a long moment. Eventually, he spoke, and his voice was cracked and raw, and choked with rage. "Is...is this a joke?"

De Lareine smiled his terrible smile. "The Fuhrer's body needed a great deal of maintenance and repair, you know. After two years, one of the processes delivering oxygen to his brain failed...and there was nobody left to repair it. He died, slowly." There would have been some pain, at the end".

El Sombra slammed his fist into the great iron throne on which the massive body sat, shattering his knuckles and tearing the skin from them. He didn't seem to notice. "Some pain," he choked, through gritted teeth."

El Sombra was still staring into the empty, dead eyes of the Fuhrer.

El Sombra again chooses poorly. It’s this moment, above all else, that truly damns him to his fate, as we come to see what is it exactly that a persona created for the purpose of vengeance has, when said vengeance is robbed from it. Like Parker Crane, his persona crumbles completely to expose the petty, ugly little feelings that drove it to such grandstanding antics in the first place, and the allmighty El Sombra is exposed for the all-too human failings that damned him once and for all.

"This isn't right," he said, eventually, in a strangled voice. "How...how can it end like this?"

"Why shouldn't it?" De Lareine shrugged. "Here's a thought. Maybe, despite his twenty-year tantrum and all his dressing up, spoilt little Djego is not the centre of the universe -"

El Sombra turned, face red, tears streaming from his eyes, and charged at De Lareine, slashing his sword. El Sombra crashed down onto the floor, into the soot scattered about, as De Lareine walked around him.

"Did you really believe Adolf Hitler would wait around for your sword? Did you not imagine that it might be better for him to seal himself off in a hole to die, instead of murdering and enslaving continents until you finally got around to him? Did you think you were the hero of your own little story, El Sombra, with your mask and your laugh and your-"

"Shut up!" El Sombra cried out, scrambling to his feet, the sword shaking in his hand, tears and snot running down his face. "He was mine! He was mine to kill!" He lifted the sword, the tip trembling. "Bring him back," he screamed, "do you hear me? Bring him back to life!"

De Lareine had to laugh at that.

And in the end, El Sombra is crushed, spiritually and physically as his spine is shattered by Lareine, who begins to experiment on him as he lays dying, ready to fulfill fate’s greater purpose for El Sombra. Ready to become not just the perfect machine Pasito’s conquerors intended, but a superior design. Ready to abandon his former life, ready to abandon everything that defined him, ready to shed any and all traces of Zorro and Shadow and pulp hero in his system, because the age of pulp heroes and superheroes has passed.

The metal man emerged from his hole, dragging the corpse of the Fuhrer behind him.

The brain in the metal man's chest would, perhaps, live for thousands of years. He wondered how he would spend the time.

He remembered little of his former life; he had been a man named El Sombra, or perhaps Djego. He had been stupid - he realised that now - but that was something he would never be again.

Apart from that, there was only a succession of faces, the memory of laughter and of a final, awful betrayal that had destroyed him. But there was also the sense that a great and terrible mission had ended at last, and it was time for a new life to begin.

The metal man took a last look back at the great dome of Fortress Berlin. Somewhere in there, the Leopard Man was hunting, freed from his own mission. And in the Fuhrer's old office, the empty, lifeless clay of El Sombra - or was it Djego? - lay, discarded, like a butterfly's cocoon.

The metal man thought on this, as the Fuhrer rusted at his feet and the tanks began to approach from over the hills ahead.

He would need a new name.

It’s now the age of Pluto.

#replies tag #pulp heroes #al ewing #el sombra #pluto

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whitehotharlots · 4 years ago

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Previewing the 2024 Democrat Primary

Within a couple weeks of his being sworn in, just about every person on earth will wish Joe Biden was no longer president. Sure, the few surviving John B. Anderson voters will be thrilled to see 4 years of crushing austerity and half-assed attempts at Keynesian stimulus. But most people will begin dreaming about a brighter future.

Good news! The 2024 Democratic primary field is going to contain dozens of options. Bad news! They are all going to be disgusting piles of shit.

The “top tier”

While it’s too early to do any handicapping, these are the candidates the media will treat as having the most realistic chances of securing the nomination.

Kamala Harris

Kamala did not win a single primary delegate in 2020. This is because she dropped out before the first primary, and that was because no one likes her. She has no base beyond a few thousand of twitter’s most violent psychos. Her disingenuousness approaches John Edwards levels: any halfway incredulous person can see immediately beyond her bullshit. She has no principles whatsoever, and while that may be par for the course for Democrats, she lacks even the basic politician’s ability to intuit anything that might, hypothetically, constitute a principle.

Even better: she is an awful public speaker. She sounds like how a talking dog would speak if he were just caught stealing people food off the kitchen table. She communicates in weird grunts and faux sassy squeaks, which is how she imagines real black women sound like, but something about her is unable to sell the bit. She begins her sentences in halfhearted AAVE, stops and panics halfway through as she realizes that maybe this sounds fake and offensive, and then reminds herself oh wait, no, this is okay since I’m black. This doesn’t happen once or twice per speech. This is how every single sentence sounds.

Kamala is like Nancy Pelosi in that no sketch show will ever impersonate her correctly, because anything that came close to authenticity would be considered far too cruel. This might benefit her in the primaries, as she exists in the minds of Democrats as someone and something she absolutely is not in reality. Nominating her would be like allowing your child’s imaginary friend to attempt to drive you to the store.

Andrew Cuomo

Easily one of the 50 worst people alive, Cuomo has a solid chance because Democrats, same as Republicans, are unable to differentiate between electability and self-serving ruthlessness. Cuomo used the deadliest public health crisis in American history as a pretext for cutting Medicaid and firing 5,000 MTA workers, and his approval rating increased. New York Dems are little piggies who love eating shit. If we assume that the political media will continue their habit of refusing to discuss the legislative history of right wing Democrats, Cuomo might well cruise to the nomination and then lose to literally any human being the GOP nominates by an historic margin.

Joe Biden

The party loves him because he is a right wing racist. “Progressives” tolerate him because black primary voters over 40 supported him, and their opinion is supposedly a magic window into god’s truth. Everyone else can tell he is manifestly senile. I don’t put it above the DNC to pick a candidate who is in horrible health, dying, or even dead--whatever the financial sector wants, they’ll get. But I would be shocked if his approval rating is above 39% by mid-2023, and by that point deep fake technology will be advanced enough they’ll put out a very lifelike video in which the Max Headroom version of Joe explains he’s proud of his accomplishments--that budget’s almost balanced already--but, man, I gotta abd--I gotta abdica--, uhh, I gotta, I, uhh, I gotta move down, man.

Wild Cards

These candidates would have all have a chance if they ran, but they could all much more easily retire to Little Saint James off of kickbacks they’ve gotten from Citibank and I.G. Farben.

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm is going to receive some hugely influential post in the Biden administration. Let’s say he becomes Secretary of Education. His signature achievement will be replacing all elementary school teachers with Amazon’s Alexa, which saved the taxpayers so much money we were able to quadruple the number of armed police officers we put into high schools. This will give him several thousand positive profiles on network news programs and the near-universal support of the Silicon Valley vampires who will own 99% of the country by the time Biden’s term ends. They will use their fancy mind control devices to convince geriatic primary voters that Rahm’s the one who will bring Decency back to the white house. His candidacy will be the paragon of wokeness, as expressing concern toward the fact that he covered up the police murder of a black guy will get you called a racist.

Rahm has a bonus in that Jewish men are now Schrodeniger’s PoC. When they are decent human beings, they are basic, cis white men who are stealing attention from disabled trans candidates of color. When they love austerity and apartheid, they become the most vulnerable people of color on earth and criticizing them in any way is genocide. No one will be able to mention a single thing Rahm has ever done or said without opening themselves to accusations of antisemitism, and that gives him a strong edge against the rest of the field. The good news is that an Emmanuel candidacy would result in over 50% of black voters choosing the GOP candidate--which, I guess that’s not really good but it would certainly be funny.

Gavin Newsom

Newsom is every bit as feckless as Cuomo, but he doesn’t put off the same “bad guy in an early Steven Segal movie” vibes. He will mention climate change 50 times per speech and no one will bother to mention how he keeps signing fracking contracts even though his state is now on fire 11 months of the year. If anything, this will be spun into an argument about how he’s actually the candidate best suited to handle all the water refugees gathering on the southern border. Look for his plan to curb emissions by 10% by the year 2150 to get high marks from Sierra Club nerds. He’s also a celebate librarian’s idea of what constitutes a handsome man, so he’ll have some support from the type of women who claim to hate all men.

Larry Summers

I mean, why not? Larry, like most members of the Obama administration, has politics that are eerily similar to those of Jordan Peterson. In normal circumstances, this makes a person a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed. But if that person has a D next to their name this makes them a realistic pragmatist who has what it takes to bring suburban bankers into our tent. If current trends in Woke Phrenology continue apace, Larry’s belief that women are inherently bad at STEM will be liberal orthodoxy by 2023, and his dedication to the Laffer Curve could see him rake in massive donations. Seriously, I’m not kidding: cultural liberalism is now fully dedicated to identity essentialism and balanced budgets. Larry is their ideal candidate. If he were black and/or a woman, I’d put him in the very top tier.

Jay Inslee

Unlike Newsom, Inslee’s attempt to crown himself the King of Global Warming won’t be immediately derailed, since his state is only on fire because of protestors. This, however, poses a different problem. He’s going to be a good test case for the Democrat’s uneasy peace with the ever increasing share of the electorate who become catatonic upon hearing a pronoun. On the one hand, you need to take their votes for granted. On the other hand, they’re not like black people or regular gays: most voters actively, consciously despise wokies, and associating yourself with them will ruin a campaign even in deep blue areas. There’s still gonna be riots in a year. Biden’s gonna announce the sale of all our nation’s potable water to the good folks at Nestle and some trans freak named Sasha-Malia DeBalzac is going to use that as an opportunity to sell their new pamphlet about how it’s fascist to not burn down small businesses. No matter what Inslee does in response, it’ll end his career.

AOC

I’m not one of those “AOC is a secret conservative” weirdos, but I am aware enough of basic reality to know she has zero chance of coming close to the nomination. The right and the center both regard her as a literal demon. The party is already blaming her for the fact that a handful of faceless Reagan acolytes failed to flip their suburban districts even though they ran on sensible pragmatic proposals like euthanizing the homeless. The recriminations will only get more unhinged when the Dems eat shit in the 2022 midterms. She will be a Russian, she will be white male, she will be a communist, she will be a homophobe: any insult or conspiracy theory you can name, MSNBC will spend hours discussing. Her house seat challenger will receive a record amount of support from the DNC in 2024 and it’ll be all she can do to remain in congress.

Larry Hogan

Don’t be dissuaded by the fact that he’s a Republican. Larry is the DNC’s ideal candidate: a physically repulsive conservative who owes his entire career to appealing to the most spiteful desires of suburban white people. He’s an open racist in a material sense--if you’re old-school enough to think racism is a matter of beliefs and actions, rather than the presence of cultural signifiers--but his is the beloved “never Trump” style of racism that Dems covet. He’s also a Proven Leader who thinks the role of government should be to finance the construction of investment property and give police the resources they need to run successful drug trafficking operations. Few people embody the Democrat worldview more than Larry.

The Losers Bracket

These people will have at least a small chance due solely to the fact that the Democrats love losing. They have lost in the past, and in the Democrat Mind that makes them especially qualified.

Joe Kennedy

The man looks like a mushroom-human hybrid from a JRPG. Trump proved that physical hideousness need not doom a presidential bid, but a candidate still needs some kind of charm or oratorical abilities or, god forbid, a decent platform. Joe aggressively lacks all of these things. A vanity campaign would be a good way to raise money and perhaps secure an MSNBC gig, so Joe might still run.

Mayor Pete

I am 100% convinced that Pete’s 2020 run was a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. I am also 100% aware that Democrats are dumb enough to enthusiastically support a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. If we have some sort of military or terror disaster between now and 2023 the Dems are sure to want a TROOP, and wait wait wait you’re telling me this one is a gay troop? Holy hell there’s no way that could lose!

Stacy Abrams

Never underestimate the power of white guilt. She lost the gubernatorial race to Gomer Pyle’s grandson, and her spiritual guidance of the Dems saw the party lose black voters in Georgia in 2020. Nonetheless, she is regarded as a magic font of fierceness within the DNC. She might stand a chance if she can establish herself as the most conservative non-white candidate in the field, but there’s going to be stiff competition for that honor.

Elizabeth Warren

Liz is probably angry that the party so shamelessly sold her out even after she was a good little girl and sabatoged Bernie’s campaign for them--yet another example of high ranking US government officials reneging on their promises to the Native American community. Smdh. The fact that this woman hasn’t been bankrupted a dozen times over by various Wallet Inspectors genuinely astounds me. So Liz is probably going to run again, and her campaign will be even sadder the second time around.

It might surprise you to hear this if you don’t work at a college or NGO, but Liz diehards actually do exist. She’ll get even less support this time because there will be no viable leftist in the field for her to spoil, but she’ll still hang in long enough to make sure the very worst possible candidate beats out the second worst possible candidate. Maybe she’ll fabricate a rape accusation against Sherrod Brown. Maybe she’ll spend her entire allotted debate time doing a land acknowledgment. With Liz, anything is possible--so long as it ends in failure.

Amy Klobuchar

Amy was the most bloodthirsty of the 2020 also rans. She will double down on the unpopular failures of the Biden administration, explaining that if you weren’t such a selfish idiot you’d love the higher social security retirement age and oh my god are so such a moron you think you shouldn’t go bankrupt to get a COVID vaccine? There’s a non-unsubstantial segment of the Democratic base that’s self-hating enough to find this appealing, but it won’t be enough to make her viable.

Martha Coakley

She lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a retarded man who was pretending to be even more retarded than he actually was. Then she lost a gubernatorial race to a guy who openly promised Massachusetts voters that he would punish them for electing him. Her record of failure is unparalleled, making her perhaps the ideal Democrat standard bearer for the twenty twenties.

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skeletorific · 5 years ago

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DUUUUUUUDE I'd love to see your classpects for the boys, n compare them to my own personal hc!! I love godtier stuff, and imagining them in bright silly outfits is just👌

This was so fucking PEACEFUL to work on it was a delight to do so let’s do this. I’m doing extended zodiac signs too because i CAN. Also, putting this under a cut cause it got LONG

CLASSPECTING THE SKELEBROS

UT!Sans: True sign is Scormino, Sign of the Fatalist

So, a point by point breakdown

-Cerulean: something that immediately woke me up to Sans as a Cerulean was the idea of a “mask for every occasion”. Sans is not one thing to all people. He flips between personas, adjusting it a little for each encounter. This isn’t because he’s manipulative per se, but because he genuinely thinks it’ll just make things easier for everyone

-Prospit: Prospit repression yo. Not to mention he’s more go with the flow than he is “fuck the system”.

-Doom: Rather than explain this connection, I’m just gonna paste the description for Doombound, since its practically a textbook description of Sans himself

Those bound to the aspect of Doom are fate’s chosen sufferers. It may not sound like an overly pleasant aspect to be aligned with, but it does come along with great wisdom and empathy. The Doom-bound understand that misery loves company, and they are ready and willing to provide said company. The Doom-bound won’t fix you; they aren’t healers. They are commiserators, aware that sometimes the only thing you can do for a person is let them know that they are not alone in their suffering. They are not the advice friend-they’re the friend you go to when you need to vent about a rough day at work. They are not necessarily noble martyrs, either-the Doom-bound can become quite irate about their lot. At their best they are wise, kind, and non-judgemental. At their worst, bitter, resentful, and fatalistic.

This is a summary of Genocide route Sans so succinct it could’ve been written about him intentionally. I did consider time for him, but ultimately Time is an aspect defined by a struggle. Sans does not struggle against the oncoming fate. He buys it a drink and hopes it leaves as little damage as possible in its wake.

As far as class goes, I classpect him as a Mage of Doom. One who understands or understands through their aspect, and no one understands the coming storm quite like Sans does. Mages are also traditionally understood as suffering as a result of their knowledge of their aspect whether too much or too little. In a sense, Sans’ relationship with the Anomaly encompasses both.

UT!Papyrus: True sign is Aquius, sign of the Whimsical

-Violet: Violet signs are noted for their eccentricity and individuality. I have a harder time coming up with two adjectives more fitting than that for Papyrus. Additionally, they have a reputation for craving social interaction to the point of being clingy, which is also extremely fitting

-Prospit. Not much to add to this one beyond going with the flow and an aversion to going off the beaten path.

-Breath:The aspect of freedom, confidence, imagination, and fun. Something notable about Breath players is that they’re at their best when they let loose and be themselves. Papyrus can’t really be who he wants to be when he’s trying to play a role, of guard captain or human hunter. When he’s being authentic Papyrus though, he’s capable of inspiring hearts and minds.

I classpect Papyrus as a Sylph of Breath. Papyrus does both literal and metaphorical healing. If you get knocked out during your fight with him, he carries you back to his shed and nurses you back to health. Additionally, Papyrus reminds people that they are free to chase their dreams and their own potential. He tries to make the Player recall their better intentions. He pumps up Alphys, restoring her confidence that she’s lost over the years. He heals the relationship between the player and Undyne in order to liberate Undyne to be her more authentic self: a woman who just wants to help her people. Additionally, he is a key facet in liberating the Underground, restoring the sky to people who have been denied it for so long.

UF!Sans: True sign is Tauriborn, sign of the Covetous

-Bronze: Bronze just has that earthy quality I eat with a SPOON for Red. Additionally, they navigate that space between a genuine desire for stability and a tendency to stubbornly commit even when it hurts you. Additionally, there’s a hedonism associated with Bronze signs that feels very fitting.

-Derse: restless skepticism, a tendency to mistrust, and rebellion in the blood? Sounds like a skeleton who’s been living rent free in my head for long enough.

-Rage: There’s of course a very literal level to this. Red’s one of the angrier of the skelebros. Additionally, though, there’s a resentment of lies and false civilities. Red hates liars, hates convenient likes. He tends to play his own cards close to the chest, but resents it in other people. Additionally, there’s a burn it all down impulse that’s very present in him that resonates with this aspect.

I classpect Red as an Heir of Rage. I tend to understand Heir as one who is surrounded by their aspect, or surrounds other with their aspect. Red surrounds himself in a field of rage, and those who are the target of his wrath are too. Additionally, though, he inherits the positive aspects of wrath, the bullshit detector and the impulse towards seeking out the truth. Additionally heirs tend not to take a very intellectual approach to their aspect, because they don’t have to. They embody it unconsciously.

UF!Papyrus: I kind of went over this but for the sake of coherency: True sign is Saginius

-Indigos: in addition to having a rep for being the bastions of order, indigos tend to devote themselves entirely to their interest. They can be sociable, but have a tendency to not really consider other people’s emotions, leading to a lot of unintentional hurts. Edge has a cold abrasive personality at many points, but it’s rare that he intends to hurt the people closest to him. It just sort of happens to him.

-Prospit: Again, Edge doesn’t rebel. He works with the society cards he’s been dealt. His prospit associations are where he’s closest to his Tale self.

-Hope: Hope is the aspect, not just of optimism, but of order. Hope players have a very black and white approach to the world, and dedication to ideals that they see as higher than themselves. Both of these are to me very Edge qualities, even if he’s not the most sunshiney person. He has things he believes in strongly, and he doesn’t wave.

I classpect Edge as a Knight of Hope. He defends his aspect, defending his ideals and the things he chooses to dedicate himself, and defends with his aspect, using his internal compass as a bastion against doubt and misgivings. Additionally, Edge has an inherent lean towards protecting and working for others, even if at his most unhealthy point his ego can make him bossy.

US!Sans: Blue’s true sign is Arcer, sign of the Officer

-Burgundy: Rust signs tend to be characterized by an unbending determination. Its not that they’re immune to the bad things in the world, its simply that they tend to roll with the punches and try to make things work regardless. Blue is quick to trust and overly excitable, but a loyal friend and an imaginative companion. All of these are Rust characteristics.

-Prospit: Again, unwavering optimism and a loyal temperament.

-Blood: Blood is the aspect of relationships and mutual support. Blue is an extremely social creature, prone to doing his best work via inspiration. He invests strongly in the people around him, and has a hard time giving up on others. Blood can also be the aspect of sinking ships. They tend to latch on to things and people other’s might consider to be “lost causes” and stubbornly refuse to leave them behind. I tend to characterize Blue with a low level of anxiety, constantly afraid that the people around him are going to leave him behind if he’s not good enough. Peak Blood player.

I classpect Blue as a Page of Blood. Like I said, Blue’s “Sans” tendencies come out in his interactions with others. Like most pages, he has a very shakey grasp of his aspect. He genuinely has the ability to make people feel cared for and comfortable. He even has great potential to inspire others to do better. However, he’s still in the process of learning how to command his aspect effectively, sometimes vacillating between overloading people with interaction and at other times barely confiding his emotions in even the people he should be close with. As this potential unlocks, though, there’s no ceiling to all he might achieve.

US!Papyrus: Stretch’s true sign is Gemza, sign of the Shrewd

-Gold: Gold signs command intellectual prowess, quick wit, and reserved tendencies in a way Stretch has done his entire life. Something notable about goldbloods is they have a tendency to refuse to live up to their full potential. They find their niche and carve out their mark within it while letting the rest of their life functionally fade to the background as “unimportant”. Stretch is adept and knowledgeable in his areas of interest and finds it hard to give a shit about the rest. Despite this, he still hangs on to the goldblood’s usually innate likeability, albeit without much emotional vulnerability.

-Derse: While Stretch isn’t exactly a rebel, Derse has an association with skepticism and a desire for rationality that inherently resonates with him. One thing that also stood out to me is a tendency to develop a very self-effacing sense of humor as a cover, which is a VERY Stretch quality. He doesn’t quite have the repression for Prospit, nor will he let himself be put into boxes that don’t suit him.

-Mind: Mind players (and Stretch) are defined by a certain sense of fluidity. They don’t really feel compelled to develop a strong sense of self, preferring instead to react organically to how they think is best and most logical to the moment. Stretch is a creative and quick thinker, which combines with a very nasty FOMO and an aversion to simplicity. Absolute Mind Player Core.

His classpect is tricky, but I feel Witch of Mind is the most fitting for him. Witches are often characterized by having a more lackadaisical relationship with their aspect. They understand it intimately enough to know how to break it when it suits them. In addition to reason and choice, Mind is also the aspect of systems and rules (think Terezi’s justice core). Stretch is a quick study about systems, but doesn’t necessarily adhere himself to them. Whether its a game he’s playing, a puzzle he’s solving, or a person he’s interacting with, sometimes the best thing in the world is to dig in and study until you find the point that breaks the whole thing open.

SF!Sans: Black’s true sign is Cancen, sign of the Translucent

-Lime: Lime signs tends to be characterized by forceful and intense personalities, with intense emotions and a tendency to fixate on improvement. They can often be effective at inspiring people to follow their lead, but have difficult personalities to work with. All of this is extremely Black, with the proviso that I tend to characterize him as often needing to repress those intense emotions. He leans hard into his own anger, but often covers up his other extremes for the sake of their own safety.

-Derse: while Black has learned to cooperate with the world around him, he’s never not going to be looking for ways to get around it. He’s often sardonic, and is usually extremely slow to trust those around him. He may put on a front of being the Queen’s man through and through, but there’s a lot of Irons in the fire that he doesn’t feel the need to make public.

-Heart: As I said, I tend to characterize Black as struggling against strong emotions that even he barely understands. He has a very distinct and strong personality, as well as intensive emotions. In moments of stress, he’s prone to intense self-reflection. Where did he go wrong, where can he improve. Additionally Heart players have an association with identity constructing, frequently diffusing their personality into a variety of splinter selves in a form of elaborate “roleplaying”, which to me clicks nicely with Black’s bossy and aggro Royal Guard posturing.

Its because of this struggle against his own aspect that I classpect Black as a Rogue of Heart. Rogues often struggle to cope with their aspect, and may even begin to crave the opposite. Black at his core craves the rational thought and pure justice of the Mind aspect. However, the more they embrace their aspect, especially in service to others (being a passive class), the healthier they often end up being. If you’ve read my “Tyrant” fic, Black steals his and Rus’s performance of self to allow them the freedom to act and pass unnoticed by the guard. He represses his own emotions to give space to other people’s, and at his best can redistribute his own assurance with his purposes to the people around him, making him potentially an inspiring presence.

SF!Papyrus: Rus’ true sign is Capries, sign of the Bold

-Purple: purples have a tendency to dedicate themselves to causes or people they care about and work until they are either stopped or made incapable or working more, much as Rus works for his brother’s well-being. Additional points of resonance were a macabre sense of humor, a tendency to withdraw when upset, a sense of fatalism, and a tendency to dig in his heels even if its against his own best interest. Plus….Clown Rus sexy what can I say.

-Derse: like his brother, Rus is inherently skeptical of easy outs. Like many Derse dreamers, he’s a problem solver, even if it comes at great personal cost. Rus’s Derseness is also exemplified in his tendency to develop strong bonds of loyalty to other people….without ever really allowing himself to be vulnerable with those people. He has the perspective that his emotions don’t truly matter.

-Time: Honestly kind of surprised it took me this long to make one of the Lazybones a time player, but I think making Rus it was the right choice. Time players are often defined by a sense of struggle. Time players are seemingly incapable of taking things lying down. Even if they won’t fight for themselves (and Rus rarely ever will) they often have an internal moral code that makes them unable to be a bystander. Rus is lazy, he’s a fatalist, he has a hard time taking care of himself. But he’s unable to stop himself from acting, especially when it involves someone he cares about. Additionally, Rus has associations with death in his judge role, which he takes extremely seriously.

I debated making Rus another knight, but ultimately I feel Seer of Time fits him better. All the Sans derivatives are prone to a sort of restless curiosity about the world around them, and in Homestuck terms I see that as a desire to in some way sync up with their aspects. A Seer is one who invites understanding. Rus seeks to reckon with both the cycle of life and death and the wide variety of timestreams that are causing havoc in his world. Unlike the mage, he has a hard time accepting what he understands: Seers are in many cases notorious for resenting the idea of someone else controlling them. Still, he’s practically unable to stop himself from exploring further, continuing to pick and pick at the scab of his reality no matter how much it hurts.

#yes-virtualcollectorofpeace #undertale #underfell #underswap #swapfell #sans #papyrus #uf!sans #uf!papyrus #us!sans #us!papyrus #sf!sans #sf!papyrus #classpecting #extended zodiac #headcanon #long post

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keerahechoes · 5 years ago

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My Truth - An Open Letter from a Mirror

Hurt hurts. Fear hurts. We may not be scared to run naked through the streets or rough somebody up if need be, we may not even be scared to jump out of a plane. But the real things we are scared of, the real things of substance that we cannot face, they expose our wounds. We must face one another and uncover truth, even if it produces hurt because hurt will occur regardless but hurt paired with incongruent understanding is additive pain.

People say they want growth but surely they do not always. People, we want growth as far as our effort and comfort are extended. Healing and growing are very hard, that’s why many people are unhealed and immature/un-evolved. It takes sacrifice and dedication to grow. People want to grow as far as they don’t have to morph their toxic behaviors that are most in need of healing and correction. The idea that “we are all toxic to someone” is a complete falsehood. That is a toxic person’s platitude, bred purely out of lack of accountability. Not everyone is perceptively toxic to “somebody”, some people ARE just toxic and they try to conceal it from some people but cannot hide it from others. And some people have toxic tendencies that are exposed predominantly in certain situations and circumstances and thus more prevalently seen with certain people, but overall that person is still toxic or has toxic tendencies. It is our duty to combat this in ourselves. We are capable and WORTHY.

Growing and evolving has been some of the worst pain of my life. I genuinely thought to myself at times “at this point I’d rather remain un-evolved than to face my truth head on and feel this deep, lingering pain”. I feel like people sometimes say “eh I don’t want to hurt them by telling them the truth”. But that’s cowardly and immature because sometimes we hurt people when what we want doesn’t align with what they want and that’s unavoidable. So avoiding saying it makes no sense because the person is hurt regardless but now they are also feeling disregarded and disrespected as well as looking at you differently. And that’s completely unecessary when we could just be straight up. I’ve done this to others in the past and I completely recognize how inconsiderate and hurtful that can be, and so I apologized and addressed and changed that behavior because I don’t want to be anyone’s villain. I’m WORTHY of healing and reconciliation, we are multifaceted beings with flaws but also the capacity to correct them. I will not disrespect myself by hurting other people carelessly.

So often we do not want confrontation. Not really. People want the confrontation they know they can control. This control is so insidious and quiet at times, yet just as dominating as a loud and outward control. I’ve found that stoicism is greatly of use to me. Letting things go, not holding on when things are outside of my control. But also recognizing when things ARE within my realm of accountability so that I can grow and be forward and upright. We cannot control something without also being controlled by it. And so I do not try and control things because I don’t seek to be controlled. In that same vein however, humans are beings of exchange, so not giving effort and accountability equates to a lapse in natural exchange and thus a deficit in connectivity and relationships. It just requires a desire for change, but for some people our core wounds inhibit us from the beauty we can create.

I actually understand when people talk about change but take actions that are counterintuitive to it. People often rather sit in their toxic traits for as long as possible until it breaks them, because it seems easier to keep on living as we have been. What that says to me is, “I seek an early grave and a life of control and domination”, even if that’s exactly the thing we think we are counteracting. By avoiding we are allowing ourselves to be controlled and divorcing ourselves from total freedom. It’s not easy to relinquish, but it’s worth our lives... I don’t want to live my life in perpetual toxicity because it’s “what I know” and “easier”. Forget easiness, I want the difficulty, I want to invest in rituals that are fulfilling and nurturing and most importantly TRULY liberating. I don’t want to just reach the tipping point of breaking free then allow the toxicity to envelope me again. I will fight until it kills me, kills my ego. Get out of your comfort zone. New experiences, profound experiences, require new perspectives and a new you. We cannot run away when people demand accountability from us. We are perpetuating a cycle. I have been guilty of this in the past and it would always come back to bite me when I thought I had evaded it and “wiped the slate”. I was just avoiding my self. It wasn’t about anyone else. We must break that cycle. Set ourselves free. Do we even want true liberation? Who are we without our traumas to define us? Are we afraid to stand tall aside from the things that broke us? Are we afraid we won’t recognize ourselves anymore? There isn’t security in toxic avoidance, only perpetual hurt of ourselves and others. We must rebirth and rebuild ourselves.

It seems like people only want a facade of freedom. A kind of freedom they feel that they deserve, that they feel they are good enough for. Freedom they feel they can attain. We lie to ourselves and say we want a perfect mate. We want someone who will perfectly permit our toxicities and who will share in their regressive nature. True liberation has no bondage or association to trauma, liberation is Love so it is inhospitable with trauma. Our perfect mate stands as a mirror and exposes who we are and what we avoid showing. They demand reformation of the things that damage us and uplift and accentuate the things that REALLY make us. True liberation isn’t limited by our perceptions. Comfort breeds avoidance and tolerance. Freedom is absolute and unconditional. It is bold and uncomforting. It demands we create ecstasy is this wake of freeness and we hand it off to everyone we love. In our idealisms of freedom, what are we free from? What does this “freedom” embody for us? Does this freedom have longevity? Is it true? Is it perpetual? Often it is not. It’s framed so integrally in toxic perceptions. We cannot have freedom without absolving our traumas and bondage FIRST. Otherwise we are building on polluted ground, and thus polluting whatever is grown or built there.

I could have SWORN I was already incredibly free. But then my deepest core fear happened, I was subjectively “abandoned and rejected” after bearing my “truth” or what I thought it to be. It was an incomplete realization that needed isolation to be fully realized. It needed to happen. I needed to face it. It hurt bad. So bad. I had to review everything I thought I had built and corrected about myself and realized I had built an image of me on unstable ground. I just built over and around the things that hurt me in the past and so when my foundation was rocked it crumbled. I thought I addressed those things... but growth is continuous and new things may reveal breaks in the structure you have formed. I had to find who I was among my wreckage. It was a quiet and at times loud hurt. But I had to be fully alone.

My fear was aloneness. I covered and covered it, constantly just reimplementing myself with new people when situations with old would fall through, not healing, just “moving on”. I needed true isolation. Not solitude, but isolation. Craving dependency and denying it to myself. I was grasping at and trying to maintain control and just do what felt good to subdue the pain. We run and we run and finally “it” catches up with us and we can either go willingly or be dragged along. But it’s happening and once it starts we cannot cease it. I suppose that’s what true and chasmic awakening is. Cracked open like an egg. We can never revert back to prior form thereafter.

People want the best for those they care about. Such a simple line but so much depth when you say it over and over. People that do not care will not demand you excel, they will tolerate and allow you to sit in the things that inhibit you. People that care require mutuality because mutuality demands a respect for yourself and thus the other person that ventures beyond the surface. You do not truly respect yourself if you will settle for being “toxic” with no attempt at transformation. You are deifying your idealisms and toxic beliefs. Making them feel true so you have something to hold onto that feels and resembles sturdiness, even if it is clearly broken. That is a fear driven move. A broken person’s method of operation.

We must demand for ourselves to no longer be broken people. It’s so hard and arduous but so worth it because the truth of liberation comes via the sacrifice we make for ourselves. Growth is never without relinquishing. We must throw away so much to be clear and open for new seeds to take root. Roots. Roots. Roots. Which do we snip and which do we nurture? We can only avoid for so long. And then it catches up. I don’t need to be in your life to want you to be healed and full. I don’t need to know you anymore to love and care about you. But with that love and care I still give fully yet with established boundary, even from afar I want you to be your greatest. I told you I’d care forever even if I do not know you for that time. I told you my truth. I’m sure with time you will really see it. Really hear it. And I hope it makes a difference.

Do not run from what darkens your path. Inhabit it. Allow yourself to submit. LIVE in it and beyond it. Embody Life Always. You will fall so deep that the world will flip. Your world will be upside down and you holding dear. But when you cut the final string you will find that you have fallen upwards, ascended, and are now fully coated in Light.

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bimboficationblues · 5 years ago

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Finished reading Concept of the Political.

Schmitt’s partly right, and often in important ways. His positing of the friend/enemy distinction as the defining antithesis of the political is, I think, pretty much right, as is the claim that the political is non-reducible to ethics, religion, economics, etc. [And this is, I think, perfectly consistent with histomat - not that such consistency makes something more right or wrong, but it’s beneficial as someone who thinks histomat is useful. Some of the most interesting points are the moments where Schmitt sounds a lot like Benjamin in “Critique of Violence,” just approaching the matter from an opposing normative perspective.] I’m not persuaded that the antithesis has to be existential in nature, though.

Most of Schmitt’s ire is directed towards liberalism as something which has an immanent tendency towards depoliticization, self-contradiction, and self-destruction, and on that front I think most of his critiques [excepting his skepticism towards the concept of “freedom” as a whole] are on point. See some choice cuts here:

“Liberalism in one of its typical dilemmas…of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary. In the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating adversaries.” (Section 3)

“The individual may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualist liberal society, a thoroughly private matter – decided upon freely. The economically functioning society possesses sufficient means to neutralize nonviolently, in a ‘peaceful’ fashion, those economic competitors who are inferior, unsuccessful or mere ‘perturbers.’ Concretely speaking, this implies that this competitor will be left to starve if he does not voluntarily accommodate himself.” (Section 5)

“Bourgeois liberalism was never radical in a political sense. Yet it remains self-evident that liberalism's negation of state and the political, its neutralizations, depoliticalizations, and declarations of freedom have likewise a certain political meaning, and in a concrete situation these are polemically directed against a specific state and its political power.” (Section 7)

“The connection of politics with thievery, force, and repression is, in the final analysis, no more precise than is the connection of economics with cunning and deception. Exchange and deception are often not far apart. A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility. Exchange by no means precludes the possibility that one of the contractors experiences a disadvantage and that a system of mutual contracts finally deteriorates into a system of the worst exploitation and repression. When the exploited and the repressed attempt to defend themselves in such a situation, they cannot do so by economic means. Evidently, the possessor of economic power would consider every attempt to change its power position by extra-economic means as violence and crime, and will seek methods to hinder this. That ideal construction of a society based on exchange and mutual contracts and, eo ipso, peaceful and just, is thereby eliminated.” (Section 8)

There are also some really strong critiques of liberal humanism scattered throughout, on the grounds that it justifies all sorts of brutality and violence. Though I’m not exactly sure where he gets off making that complaint...

But it’s worth noting that, insofar as communism and anarchism are “post-liberal” political philosophies* - which contain important points of both rupture and continuity - Schmitt presents issues worth wrestling with, like what it looks like to do away with the political altogether, and what our “anthropological ethics” and political theology might look like (Schmitt is entirely unfair to the anarchists on this point, but still worth noting).

[*The recognition of a relationship with liberalism, I think, does not require claiming that anarchism and communism should be geared towards fulfilling liberal promises, e.g. a “genuine” social contract or an assurance that labor receives the value it creates. If they were I would probably not be on board.]

The big issues for me are when he 1) makes a universal claim that would be better served as a conditional claim, which is a common problem of the “realist” school - the conflation of things-as-they-are with things-how-they-must-be. [See Finlayson’s piece about political realism as a school for a great critique of this tendency.]

Or 2) he goes absolutely bugnuts with the nationalism. The collectivities, unions, and associations drawing up friend-enemy distinctions based on existential threats, which are the focus of the essay’s beginning, basically vanish and are replaced with the “nation” as the only collectivity worth considering. Schmitt states openly that the state and politics will never disappear but it’s only left implied that he also thinks the nation as the basic unit of politics never will either. Much like Spengler, Schmitt (against his own disdain for mixing up the ethical and the political) likes to talk about the courage and heroism of combat. It’s an interesting text precisely because it constantly flits between clearheaded, “realist” thinking, and shallow, popular German nationalist talking points.

And of course, with knowledge of Schmitt and his cowardly, conservative-cum-Nazi life, moments where he talks about “the enemy” of “the people,” or the “imperialism” of Versailles, raise an eyebrow - there’s an undercurrent of anti-Semitism that runs through a good deal of the text despite never identifying Jews as German enemies as such.

Anyway, it’s worth a read. But fuck Carl Schmitt.

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years ago

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St. Helena Demonstrates How to Seek (and Do) God’s Will

However severe God’s guidance may seem to us at times, it’s always the guidance of a Father who is infinitely good, wise and kind. He leads us to our goal by different paths. - St. Julie Billiart

Disconcerting Circumstances

With ourselves and in our families, our workplaces, and even our parishes, we all face struggles that come with being part of the human family. The unsavory circumstances we find ourselves in might be the result of our own sins or of our association with someone else (often a relative) and of which we are completely blameless.

It’s tempting to let these situations derail us from our mission — especially if they are embarrassing, stain our reputation, or make us feel contaminated. But in such cases, it is important to persevere in the spiritual life. God has a plan.

Saint Helena during the Roman Persecution

As a young woman, Helena looked forward to a promising future. She was the wife of Governor Constantius Chlorus. Together they had a son named Constantine. Constantius Chlorus was a military tribune in one of Rome’s smaller provinces, but he was ambitious, and when the opportunity presented itself, he cast Helena off to marry the stepdaughter of Maximian, the Western Augustus. This was no doubt a political move, as it resulted in his appointment as Maximian’s Caesar.

It is likely that during this time Helena became a Christian. Rome was a dangerous place for a Christian to live. Labeled the scapegoat for Roman misfortunes, plagues, and financial woes, Christians suffered barbaric cruelties. If members of the minority Faith were found practicing their beliefs, they might be fed to starved wild animals as entertainment for the masses, or their bodies might be used as human torches to light the famous Appian Way.

The late third century and the early fourth century, during Helena’s middle years, produced the worst of Christian persecutions under the Roman emperors Galerius and Diocletian. Public sacrifices to the imperial cult were mandatory. If Christians refused, they paid with their lives, often in the most excruciating and painful ways imaginable.

The Victory of the Cross

The Roman Empire was a divided kingdom governed by co-emperors, one of whom was Constantius Chlorus, who ruled the Western Kingdom. Upon his father’s death, Constantine was proclaimed emperor of the West. His plan was to unify the empire under his reign. The first step was to take Rome and with it the Eastern Empire, ruled by Maxentius, but Constantine was greatly outmatched by Maxentius’s forces.

On the eve of what was his most decisive engagement at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine was encamped with his men. Here the city of Rome, and with it the rule of the Eastern Empire, would be won or lost. Suddenly an unearthly sign appeared in the sky: a cross and on it the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name, the Chi-Rho.

Seeing the sign, perhaps Constantine thought of his Christian mother, Helena. He must have recognized her teaching about Christianity in the image. Could there be something to that belief of hers? That night, Constantine had a dream in which Jesus Christ instructed him to put the Christian symbol on the helmets and shields of his soldiers. Without hesitation Constantine declared the Chi-Rho his new battle standard.

At the Milvian Bridge, Constantine drove Maxentius and his men into the Tiber River, where Maxentius, weighed down by his armor, drowned.

A New Era

As the new emperor, Constantine did what his citizens must have thought madness: he gave Christianity the full protection of Roman law. The mighty Roman Empire — Christian? It was inconceivable to any early-fourth-century Roman citizen. And yet a new era was dawning: not only was Christianity legal, but the emperor’s mother was also a professed believer. Constantine had declared his mother “Augusta”; Helena was thereby venerated as empress and enjoyed a share of influence in Roman government, which she no doubt used for the propagation of her Christian Faith.

A Crisis for Helena

Constantine had four sons. Like his father, he put his first wife aside to marry a younger woman, Fausta. Through this union, three sons were born. But Constantine’s eldest son, from his first marriage, Crispus, demonstrated the same military talent and leadership qualities as his father. Crispus was well loved by all, especially by his grandmother Helena. So it was surprising that Constantine one day had Crispus thrown into prison. Shortly afterward, and without a trial, he ordered the execution of Crispus.

Why this sudden and outrageous behavior? There are different stories about Fausta and Crispus. The most accepted explanation is that Fausta, rightly or wrongly, accused Crispus of raping her or doing something equally horrific.

Some historians assume that Helena pleaded Crispus’s innocence to Constantine. Could it be that Fausta wanted Crispus dead so her own sons would have primacy in the empire? How could Fausta’s sons ascend to power if Crispus was in the way? In any case, Constantine promptly rescinded his deadly order, but it was too late. Crispus had already been executed in his prison cell.

His next move was to deal with Fausta. Constantine ordered his wife’s execution. She was put in a bath that was heated until she was dead. By imperial decree, Crispus’s and Fausta’s names were removed from all histories and public records — as if these two people had never existed and these horrible events had never happened. Even to speak their names was strictly prohibited.

Given human nature, we can imagine that people must have shared the tantalizing information all the more, simply because it was forbidden. The news must have buzzed throughout the empire.

On a personal level, Helena’s heart must have been broken. Not only did she lose her beloved grandson, but she also saw her only son commit murder twice, putting his soul in mortal danger. However, there was something else to consider, something more weighty for Helena to grieve over — the potential loss of Roman souls. The ruling family was in a particularly influential position regarding the propagation of the Faith, and this was their example. The elderly Helena did the only reasonable thing she could do — she sought the will of God.

The True Cross

Helena realized that if Christianity were to flourish, the people would need something substantial to rally behind. Indeed, the most significant relic in all of early Christendom — the True Cross of Christ — would certainly unite the people of the expansive Roman Empire through their common faith in Jesus Christ and fidelity to His Church. And so, with the full backing of Emperor Constantine, she set out on a royal pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of the True Cross. This grand undertaking would two to four years to complete and would consume the last few years of the elderly Helena’s life. She was in her late seventies, possibly in her early eighties — absolutely ancient for that era.

We know from Eusebius of Caesarea, a Roman bishop, historian, and theologian who died about A.D. 340, that the powerful Empress Helena Augusta was generous. He writes about Helena’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land:

Especially abundant were the gifts she bestowed upon the naked and unprotected poor. To some she gave money, to others an ample supply of clothing; she liberated some from imprisonment, or from the bitter servitude of the mines; others she delivered from unjust oppression, and others again, she restored from exile.

Using the credible writings of Eusebius about the location of our Lord’s Crucifixion in conjunction with the oral traditions maintained by the faithful, Helena located Golgotha. The holy relic, the true Cross of Christ, was recovered. Portions of it were dispatched throughout the Roman Empire, but the majority of it remained in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Helena traveled back to Rome in time to die; her son Constantine was at her bedside.

Who would have imagined things would turn out the way they did? Helena, born a commoner, ended up becoming the most powerful woman in the world. It was through her less-than-ideal motherhood that she became Empress Helena Augusta. She had been a Christian during the great persecution, only to be later instrumental in Christianizing the entire Roman Empire. And, as a very old woman enduring the worst kind of personal tragedy and public humiliation, she suffered a blow that would have left most people broken and bitter. Saint Helena responded to the situation by turning to the Lord and embracing her unique mission.

Sometimes the dysfunctional aspects of our lives, whether our own past or the behaviors of our close family members or associates, derail us from carrying out the mission God has for us. Saint Helena demonstrates that at every stage of life — no matter what our past, what happens, or how private or public the circumstances — the best course of action is to seek God’s will and do it anyway.

BY: JULIE ONDERKO

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

#st helena and god's will

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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You have lived in the U.S. for 30 years. You’re speeding a little to get to work when you’re pulled over. First they realize you have no license. Then they realize you have no papers. You get thrown in jail. You need your wife, a U.S. citizen, to gather documents for you. But she is undergoing chemotherapy and her memory isn’t working right. After a few weeks, her phone number goes dead. Is she in intensive care? Was she evicted? You don’t know. You are trapped in prison and have no one else to call. You explain the situation to the judge and he gives you a few extensions. Then, finally, he says his hands are tied. You’ve presented him with no evidence. You are deported back to a country you haven’t seen since you were 10. You still don’t know if your wife is alive or dead.

You work in a factory where the boss won’t turn on the heat in the wintertime, where you aren’t allowed to use the bathroom, where you get paid less than the documented workers for the same labor. You and your colleagues take a list of complaints to your boss’s office one day. He greets you with a loaded gun. You are afraid to complain again after that. Then a SWAT team raids the factory and rounds you all up. You have young U.S. citizen children, so they don’t want to deport you immediately, because your children would become burdens on the state. But every day from now on, immigration is watching you. When they call you on the phone, you must answer. When they summon you to see them, you must go. Every few years, they slap an ankle monitor on you, and then take it off again, and then put it back on you, without explanation. Every so often, they threaten to make you buy plane tickets. They tell you they can deport you whenever they want. They have already deported several of your former coworkers who are in the same situation. You are always one slip-up away from being ripped away from your family. You can’t sleep at night. When you try to picture your future, all you see is a blind fog.

When we talk about enforcing immigration laws, it’s important to be quite specific about what we mean. Immigration enforcement is not words on paper. It is a constant, daily sequence of concrete acts. It is kicking down people’s doors, it is putting people in handcuffs, it is taking people’s photographs and fingerprints, it is locking people in cages, it is forcing people into cars and buses and planes. Some of these acts happen at the border, when the government tries to block people from entering. Some of them happen inside the country, when the government hunts down those with irregular status. Sometimes, this immigration enforcement is explicitly violent, like when Border Patrol officials unleash teargas (a chemical weapon banned in warfare) on toddlers, when they rip children from their mothers’ arms, when they kick women huddled on the concrete floors of border cells and scream at them that they are animals. Other times it’s something humdrum and largely invisible: the border guard who calmly tells an asylum seeker at a port of entry that there is “no more room” in the U.S., the judge who silently decides that the terrified person in front of them hasn’t done quite enough to deserve a favorable exercise of discretion, the police officer who has a funny habit of always stopping cars with Hispanic-looking drivers, the countless bureaucrats who review immigration applications and deny them without explanation. All of these acts, from the monstrous to the mundane, have real-world effects on individual people. They mean families separated, whether by deportation or by the hard border that keeps an undocumented breadwinner from ever again visiting the children he had to leave behind. They mean people dying horribly, because they are forced to return to life-threatening danger, or because they become ill in the U.S. and are scared to go the hospital for fear their lack of status will be discovered. They mean workers exploited, because the threat of deportation keeps them under the thumb of their boss, or because arbitrary territorial lines prevent them from seeking better employment conditions in another place.

Immigration policy in the United States cannot be discussed in the abstract. Unless we talk about what our immigration laws actually mean for people’s lives, we’ll have no way to sensibly evaluate them. There are about 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, and several hundred thousand arrested and deported annually. Beneath the statistics, there is fear and pain. Every choice of what laws to have and how to enforce them produces consequences: workplaces raided, kids pulled out of school, women being turned back to face domestic violence.

This context is important when we turn to Angela Nagle’s “The Left Case Against Open Borders,” recently published in American Affairs (formerly the explicitly pro-Trump Journal of American Greatness). Nagle confidently informs us that all mass migration is inherently tragic, and that incentivizing it with overly liberal immigration policies, although it seems kind, is actually cruel. The “open borders left,” Nagle declares, by embracing unrestricted immigration, is hurting the very people they are trying to help, and undermining the prospects for successful labor organizing and a restructuring of the global economic system. She goes so far as to argue that advocates of unrestricted free movement are the “useful idiots of big business,” because they are sanctioning the exploitation of imported laborers. Instead of addressing the root causes of economic migration, they have allied with the Koch Brothers in advocating “open borders.” This “open borders left” has a radically ignorant set of priorities, reacting to Trumpism by embracing Koch-ism, and ignoring the way that unrestricted migration serves the interests of the capitalist class by dividing workers and depressing wages.

ABOVE PHOTO: A U.S. Border Patrol agent patrols along a section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 16, 2018 in San Diego, California. Getty Images/Mario Tama MAIN PHOTO: Government agents apprehend a landscaper during an immigration sting at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. Associated Press/John Minchillo

Now, because Nagle (supposedly) cares about immigrants, she doesn’t want to see them teargassed at the border or hunted down by immigration police. What she doeswant to see is employers who employ undocumented workers being punished by the state, so that they don’t hire undocumented workers anymore. This is the only concrete policy proposal in Nagle’s entire piece, and at no point does she discuss what its enforcement would actually look like. That’s because the enforcement of this policy proposal would look pretty fucking monstrous. In fact, the “E-Verify” system Nagle touts as a humane alternative to ICE is a system that people like Ann Coulterand Kris Kobach have long been putting forward as the ideal immigration restrictionist policy. (Given such political bedfellows, by Angela Nagle’s logic we might accuse her of being the useful idiot of white nationalism. Then again, Angela Nagle’s logic is terrible.) E-Verify is the central piece of a slate of an anti-immigrant policies designed to encourage “self-deportation”: that is, making life so miserable for undocumented people in the U.S., making them so poor and desperate and demoralized and afraid, that they decide to leave the country of their own accord. As the anti-immigrant Center for Immigrant Studies describes, the goal of self-deportation is to “create ‘virtual choke points’—events that are necessary for life in a modern society but are infrequent enough not to bog down everyone’s daily business. Another analogy for this concept to firewalls in computer systems, that people could pass through only if their legal status is verified. The objective is not mainly to identify illegal aliens for arrest (though that will always be a possibility) but rather to make it as difficult as possible for illegal aliens to live a normal life here.”

The fact that a self-described leftist like Nagle would openly support E-Verify shows that she is, at best, so grossly uninformed about immigration policy that it was irresponsible for her to commentate on it. At worst, it might be that she genuinely does not give a shit about the suffering of immigrants and is perfectly happy to sacrifice them to political expediency. Either way, she is not a credible exponent of what “the left” ought to think about anything.

However, ideas like Nagle’s have proven persuasive to a number of people over the years, so it’s worth going through her essay and dissecting each of her claims. First, Nagle argues that “the left” has historically (and wisely) opposed mass immigration as detrimental to worker interests. Secondly, she argues that there are no compelling arguments in favor of open borders or free movement other than those put forward by “big business,” whose only desire to exploit cheap labor. Thirdly, she argues that using the E-verify system to target employers of undocumented workers, rather than the workers themselves, is a humane way to keep undocumented people out of the workforce. Finally, she argues that immigrants don’t truly want to migrate anyway, so we should block them from doing so, and in the meantime just go about fixing all the problems that caused them to feel they needed to migrate in the first place.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #immigration #immigrant rights #immigration reform #progressive #progressive movement

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badmuslim-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Do as the Romans Do… Unless the Romans happen to be be Misogynist Pigs

Oct 11

Today I attempted to leave “the grounds” to go to the corner store thats 10 steps away for some ice cream and maybe some chips or treats. My “family” here stood at the door holding me back, one auntie holding the door latch, the other holding my arm trying to persuade me not to go. I say persuade but they were not about to let me leave no matter how I insisted. Even as I told them I had permission from my parents who weren’t present at that time, they insisted that it’s not allowed. “It’s not allowed, it’s not allowed”. I couldn’t tell at first if they meant the men of the house, my uncle and their sons, didn’t allow it or if the PEOPLE didn’t allow it. Although I’m quite sure those are one and the same. The elderly women, my uncle's wife, the lady of the house stood there telling me she’d get in trouble if she let me go. “Take Abudy with you and go, just wait and we’ll call him, you can go to the mall”. The mall is a medium-sized general store that is family and woman approved. Unlike the convenient stores around the corner which apparently only men can enter due to the people working there. She went as far as to whisper in my ear that they were “bad” men using creative descriptors that were meant to deliver a point I suppose.

Probably that they’re sleazy or street kids that don’t know how to behave well in front of a lady. The thing is that’s pretty much every man in this country. So I don’t see the issue. Her sons, my cousins, mean well enough. They grew up in the same decade as me, they’ve been exposed to roughly the same international modern ideals and values, they’re educated and they get the whole freedom for women thing, however, they’re not exactly lining up to liberate the women of Iraq from their barred kitchens and suffocating limiting circumstances. Hell, they participate, not like the worst of them, but they participate complacently in the messed up, corrupt, oppressive, inequitable social muddle that is the Iraqi social structure. Their codes of conduct, their mannerisms, and common laws, perpetuating their unjust systems. The younger one Abdulla I often find trying to persuade me they’re not that bad and they’re more progressive and fair a society than other places than other parts of Iraq. It’s a sweet gesture but he always falls short and ends up laughing awkwardly and looking away. It’s refreshing talking to someone who isn’t completely OBLIVIOUS as to why I’m not impressed or satisfied with the way things are here.

Let’s be real for a second, put the situation into perspective. It’s not like I’m seriously about to leave the house to walk around these streets that I don’t know and I’m not familiar with. I’m not that reckless and irresponsible, I’d want to be shown around first, get a tour, a rundown of the area. The issue is the people here don’t seem to trust me to have the sense to not do so. To know better. They think it’s necessary to supervise every move of a grown, stable, educated woman not because she’s new to the area and may get lost or run into some rowdy people, but because she’s a woman, meaning she may accidentally walk through the door that leads to outside instead of the bathroom. Then she may accidentally run into the street and get hit by a car, or she may attract kidnappers in the middle of the day, In the middle of a populated street.

Incidentally, I know this environment all too well, I grew up in this very same house, only it was surrounded by a whole lot less desert and like-minded Arabs. A household where the 5-year-old son is sent to check who’s at the door before the 14-year-old daughter. A household where if the outside world got bad enough, and the situation dire, the son would be taught to ride a bike or a motorcycle to school and back safely while the daughter would drop out. A household where a son getting married means gaining a helping hand around the house, someone to serve the family and the son, during the day and the night. However the daughter getting married means selling her future, and her body to another to do with it what they want with no way out in sight short of a black eye and broken bone.

Some families grow out of the bad habits they learn back home and only chose to keep the good, the loving caring qualities and traits they inherit, while others don’t shake it off. Mistaking learned, conditioned prejudice and oppressive behaviors as culture, religion, and tradition. That mixture happens to be a deadly one when associated with desperate, possessive, controlling parenting. When you have that formula set up, all that’s left is to classify a degree. How bad is the burn, how far is one willing to go when they think they need to save their children even if they have to hurt them first. And voila, you have extreme circumstances such as honor killings.

Now all that’s left is me sitting here in a puddle of disdain, bubbling fury, anger over the fact that people want to force their way of life onto me when this is not the life I’ve been dealt. I’ve been gifted the opportunity to live a different kind of life. One far from this one in all the ways that matter, I’d be so very stupid to give up a life of freedom to chose and live as I want for the very one my grandparents escaped decades ago when fleeing war. Now they think I’d be willing to come here and live an ordinary Iraqi woman’s life, an Iraqi’s wife. Why would I? You know how they say we all have a fight or flight instinct when faced with extenuating or high anxiety circumstances? I used to pretend I was the former because it sounded more powerful but I’m definitely the latter. It’s why I had planned to leave for Mexico in August, leave my family for a year and move out afterward, permanently. It’s why I’ve been formulating a plan to sneak away in the night, run away to Baghdad, seek out the British embassy and plea my case, hoping they’d give me an out. Because running away is my method of self-preservation. As humans we all have an innate instinct to want to self-preserve. Especially when we feel our free will at risk, our freedom, and hence a need to survive. It’s a beautiful thing, this instinct need to be what comes natural, to live with a free body and mind.

#immigrants #arab #arab household #helicopter parents #suffocating parenting

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romancatholicreflections · 6 years ago

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2nd September >> Sunday Homilies and Reflections for Roman Catholics on the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel reading: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

vs.1 The Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered round Jesus,vs.2 and they noticed that some of the disciples were eating with unclean hands, that is without washing them.vs.3 For the Pharisees, and the Jews in general, follow the tradition of the elders and never eatwithout washing their arms as far as the elbow;vs.4 and on returning from the market place they never eat without first sprinkling themselves.There are also many other observances which have been handed down to them concerning thewashing of cups and pots and bronze dishes.vs.5 So these Pharisees and scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not respect the tradition of the elders but eat their food with unclean hands?”

vs.6 He answered, “It was of you hypocrites that Isaiah so rightly prophesied in this passage of scripture: ‘The people honour me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me.vs.7 The worship they offer me is worthless, the doctrines they teach are only human regulations.’vs.8 You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.”vs.14 He called the people to him again and said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand.vs.15 Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean.vs.21 For it is from within, from men’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft,murder, adultery,vs.22 avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly,vs.23 All these evil things come from within and make a man unclean.”

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We have four commentators available from whom you may wish to choose .

Michel DeVerteuil :A Trinidadian Holy Ghost Priest, director of the Centre of Biblical renewal . Thomas O’Loughlin:Prof, MRIA, FRHistS, FSA President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain,Director Studia Traditionis Theologiae, Professor of Historical Theology University of Nottingham NG7 2RD Sean Goan:Studied scripture in Rome, Jerusalem and Chicago and teaches at Blackrock College and works with Le Chéile Donal Neary SJ:Editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger and National Director of The Apostlship of Prayer.

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Michel DeVerteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels www.columba.ie

Textual Comments

Today’s passage contains several sayings of Jesus which are very well known; we must therefore make an effort to read the passage not as an abstract teaching but as a story, letting the message emerge from the interplay of characters.

There are three characters, all representing roles in a human community. 1. Jesus’ disciples are humble people. They are not “respectable” or refined. They do not conform to social norms (“the traditions of the elders”) in how they speak, dress or, in this case, “eat with unclean hands”. In the gospels they are classified as “sinners”, those who “break the law”. To judge from Jesus’ remarks in this passage, they are not malicious, their hearts are not unclean.

2. The “Pharisees and scribes” are those who set the norms, in words and in practice. They observe and teach the rules of respectability, their etiquette is beyond reproach. But they are judgemental of those who do not conform; they do not take time to understand them and in the process they are blind to the fact that they go against basic virtues such as humanity and compassion. Very significantly, the text says that they have “come from Jerusalem”. The company of Jesus and his disciples is not their home territory; they are out of place among these new people.

3. Jesus as always is the protector of the poor. He sees the greatness and beauty that lie beneath their rough externals, defends them passionately against their oppressors. He is harsh with the scribes and Pharisees, but his harshness (as God’s harshness in the Bible) is because of his concern for the poor.

The movement of the story shows the process by which the Church, and every human community dedicated to noble ideals, gradually becomes set in its ways and ends up accepting the false values of the surrounding culture. The Bible always gives a simple criterion for recognizing when this happens – the poor and the marginalized in a country end up being poor and marginalized in the Christian community as well.

The root problem lies with laws which exist originally to protect the weak but end up on the side of the powerful. Someone like Jesus must come on the scene and expose the “hypocrisy” of the community by standing up for the lowly. The community is then forced to revisit its laws in order to distinguish the true ideals of the community (“God’s commandment”) from the “human regulations” which maintain the status quo.

Every community and movement needs laws and customs, as Jesus always taught; but they must be constantly re-examined to see of they conform to God’s laws.

The passage invites us to recognize God-in-Jesus at work in this way in our Church communities and in the world. We will recognize him at work within our individual selves too. Often we allow ourselves to be oppressed by so-called “laws” that are not from God but are social taboos (gender or ethnic stereotypes, for example). Now they simply block our true selves (“the heart”). One day Jesus comes into our lives – through a friend, a spiritual guide or a moment of prayer – and rescues us from oppression.

Being God’s instrument of liberation is often the principal role of the counsellor or spiritual guide. It is also the lofty vocation of the moral theologian in the Church.

Prayer Reflection

Lord, we remember times when we felt out of place, – among people wealthier or better educated than ourselves; – when we returned to church after staying away for many years; – because we were not as successful as our brothers and sisters; – in a strange country where no one understood what we said. It was like when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come to Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and noticed that his disciples were eating without first washing their hands. We too were made to feel that we were unclean because we did not respect the traditions of the elders. We thank you that you sent someone like Jesus who protected us – one of our parents, an uncle, an aunt or a grandparent, – a teacher or community leader, – a friend who understood what we were going through, – a book that touched us. They taught us that what counts in life are the things that come from within, these are the things that make us unclean. We were able then to recognize what is merely custom and in fact keeps people far from the truth of themselves.

Lord, forgive us members of your Church that we focus on being loyal members of your Church and keeping its laws, while we put aside your first and only commandment of universal love and compassion, ignoring sexism, racism, elitism, cultural imperialism and religious intolerance, all these evil things which come from within the worst of the human heart and make humanity unclean.

Lord, we thank you for sending us Bernard Haring and other great moral theologians of our time. Church discipline had become set in its ways and was reinforcing the false values of our culture – laws on divorce and remarriage were weighted against deprived families; – liturgical rules reinforced the superiority of Western culture; – seminary studies did not reverence traditional religions of Africa and Asia; – sexual morality favoured men; – the laity were deprived of our teachings on mysticism. Bernard Haring and other prophetic figures were the presence of Jesus among us, showing that judgements were being passed by an elite, isolated from the reality of people’s experiences like the Pharisees and scribes coming down from Jerusalem. What were called the customs of the elders were rules concerned with external cleanliness which the humble could not live up to. Doctrines were put forward as if they came from you when in fact they were only human regulations; your commandment of universal love was put aside so that traditions could be upheld. We thank you that Jesus was in them, calling your Church to listen – all of us – and understand that nothing which comes to us from outside can make us unclean; only the things that come from our hearts make us unclean.

Lord, we pray that in our parish liturgies we will give every opportunity to the marginalized, – allow those without much education to read – arrange processions in which the disabled can take part – ensure that foreigners can understand the homily – give special welcome to those who cannot receive communion. In this way we will not honour you only with lip service but our hearts will be close to you, our worship will be precious to you, and we will be following your teachings, not mere human regulations.

Lord, your will is that we should live with people very different from us – those of other religions – ancestral cultures of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, – different ethnic groups – the world of high technology – the youth culture of today. Help us not to become like Pharisees and scribes coming to Galilee from Jerusalem, noticing how others do things differently from us. Help us to discern what in our culture is merely human regulations which do not make anyone clean or unclean, so that we will repent of paying only lip service to the lofty principles we proclaim and recognise that so much of what we call holy is worthless and that many of what we call doctrines are only human regulations.

Lord, we thank you that in our time the Bible has become once more the soul of your Church’s theology, enabling us to recognise that many of what we called biblical doctrines were no more than human regulations.

Lord, we thank you for moments of deep prayer when you showed us clearly that the laws we were breaking did not make us unclean because they were only human regulations, that we could go beyond them and find our purity of heart.

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Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew www.columba.ie

Introduction to the Celebration

We gather here because Jesus has made us welcome. He has called us, he has chosen us, he desires that we love one another around his table.

This is our great religious gathering: we affirm who we are, what we believe, we ask the Father for our needs, and we thank him for our lives and all our blessings.

So what are the characteristic human qualities with which we should approach God? For many, it is some notion of being ‘clean’, or having observed all the minute rules, having done and said all the correct things connected with religion. Today, Jesus lifts us completely out of that view. In order to be able to stand here in the presence of the Father, we must be people whose lives bring forth good for others, who do not injure others, and who seek to care for others.

Homily Notes

1. This gospel’s message can seem trite to the point of irrelevance. Our society takes three things for granted — indeed, it makes them the basis for much of its thinking about religion in general and about Christian observance in particular. First, active morality is more important than religious ritual. Second, intention is more important than following prescriptions about details: following conscience is the high road to moral integrity. Third, what’s really important in what religious leaders, such as Jesus, have taught is basic human morality: so avoiding murder, theft, and avarice are more important in living a good life than regular prayers or obeying rules on ‘observances’. All that ‘mere ritual’ can be put to one side, so long as we behave morally towards others. There is much truth in all of this — so is today’s gospel simply Jesus’s affirmation of this position?

2. If this is so, then this piece of gospel, good news, is not really good news at all! Moreover, in the early communities where this was preached they were careful about regular prayer, gathering for the Eucharist, and conveying a new style of living — so is this gospel really saying that all that activity was really irrelevant, and that so long as people conscientiously followed a way of respecting others, then the ‘religious bits’ were dispensable? That is how many would read or want to read this gospel: care of others is fine, care of the planet is fine, some spirituality (as a private commodity) is fine. But ‘religion’ with its group observances, its gatherings, and its demands is just old hat! And, according to the way that many people read this gospel, it seems that Jesus agrees.

3. Therefore, this is a very good day to point out just how easy it is to hear ancient scriptures, imagine that one understands them, and then go off with totally the wrong idea. The essence of all fundamentalism is to take ancient writings from another culture, another way of thinking and understanding, and to colonise them so that they mean what we think they mean in our culture. Therefore, preaching today should have two objectives. First, to show the gathering just how easy it is to read a text and take completely the wrong message from it — and, thereby, to show them the dangers of biblical fundamentalism. The second objective is incidental: to show how this gospel still has a key message for us, and how we might get at it.

4. Showing the dangers of fundamentalism is something that has to be done in a number of steps.

Step 1: To show that a ‘simple’, so-called ‘obvious”plain’ reading of the text, leads to a contradiction. Namely: if it is the case that the ‘religious bits’ can be just sidelined in favour of being kind to one’s neighbour, why did the early Christians who first heard this gospel — and were in a far better position to understand it that we are — pay such attention to those very religious bits?

Step 2: If the ‘plain, simple’ reading leads to a contradiction (i.e. ‘it just does not add up’), then are we missing something in today’s gospel? We should note that the Pharisees do not accuse Jesus’s disciples of being bad people, nor do they accuse them of being unjust, or even of lacking in holiness. What they accuse them of being is unclean.

Step 3: We still use in everyday life the notions of being just/unjust (this is a quality of individuals); we also use the notions of being caring / uncaring (again, a quality of individuals); and we even, sometimes use the notion of being ‘holy’ — but we tend to think of it in terms of individuals so we say X or Y is a holy person, but we have difficulty nowadays in thinking of a collectivity as holy as in ‘the holy church of God.’

However, we do not use the notion of clean/ unclean as a category for people.

So to understand today’s gospel, we must first discover what the notion of clean / unclean (alien concepts in our culture) meant in a culture that is very foreign to our own.

Step 4: Clean/unclean are not individual virtues, but social qualities: the real danger of someone doing something unclean is not what it does to the person as an individual, but what it does to the whole group to which the person belongs. This is a very different way of thinking to how we think: the whole group is affected by what we think of as purely private actions. The reason that the Pharisees are worried about what the disciples are doing is not because they are concerned for the souls of the disciples, but because they are concerned for themselves! The impure actions of the disciples is making everyone — who is gathered in the same place as the disciples — unclean!

We can barely understand this type of thinking. Perhaps the nearest we come to it is when there is a flu bug about and people are asked to stay at home, not because it will make them better, but because it will stop it spreading and make the larger group unwell. Uncleanness is like a contagion: the whole group suffers because of the carelessness and lack of group awareness and group care of individuals.

Step 5: Knowing that, how are we to understand this gospel? Jesus does not dismiss the notion of uncleanness, he changes the list of actions by which an individual can damage the whole group, and its ability to stand before God as a holy people. The actions of individuals that damage the whole group, its ability to be the people of God, its ability to stand before God and ask for its needs and the needs of humanity (as we will do in the Prayers of the Faithful) and its ability to reflect God’s love to the world is the list given at the end of the gospel.

Step 6: Each hearer of the gospel gathered today (especially clergy in the aftermath of child sex-abuse scandals within the church in recent years) have to ask how his/her individual actions have not only damaged them as individuals, but have had the effect of making the whole people unclean, unholy, unfit to stand before the world as the Body of Christ.

Step 7. Discovering how easy it is to slip into fundamentalism is something that takes most people by surprise: and it is a lesson we have to learn over and over again. Discovering the ‘deeper’ meaning of the gospel — as opposed to a trite message that suits us — can also be a painful surprise: today is a case in point.

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Sean Goan Let the reader understand www.columba.ie

Gospel

As we return to Mark we find ourselves in yet another story of conflict between Jesus and his opponents. Here the Pharisees are reprimanding the followers of Jesus for not engaging in ritual washing before they eat. This is an example of a tradition handed down in Pharisee circles which had come to have the full force of the written Law. Jesus has little time for their legalism and quotes from Isaiah to make his point. This is only lip service to God who does not care about their external observances but who desires a true worship of the heart. A person cannot be made unclean by external factors, eg the failure to observe purely religious ritual; rather we are made unclean by that which comes from within, from our hearts, the source of our moral action.

Reflection

If a survey were to be conducted among churchgoers in which they were asked for a definition of religion it is unlikely that many would come up with the simple answer provided by James. Coming to the help of orphans and widows would be for many a kind of agreeable by-product of religion whereas James places it right at the centre of who we are and what we do. This is surely a message for today when so many people go to such great lengths in their search for wisdom and the knowledge of God. A religion that can be observed at a purely external level has a certain appeal. It is easy to feel we are making progress and that we are better than those who do not measure up. We imagine that by our own efforts we can come close to God. However, Jesus wants no part in such a sham. He is concerned with the heart and a faith that does justice.

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Donal Neary SJ

Gospel Reflections

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With Lips or Heart?

With some vegetables you eat the leaves and the outside. With an artichoke we get to eat the heart. It’s the best bit. The best of religion is of the heart. Jesus today talks a lot about that –contrasting with lip service and hearts far from him.

The people who were wondering about sincerity. They kept the law but then were intolerant of weakness in others. They missed often on people’s goodness and so they talked of people who didn’t wash hands, cups and God knows what else.

We say that otherwise too – Get to the heart of things – a person has great heart – put your heart into it – their hearts are miles away. The heart is the place of true religion.

The heart is a dangerous place. The head will try to be sensible –‘ let the third world look after itself, after all they are spending on war,’ but the heart will be broken by the hunger of the poorest. The head will tell you that you need sleep but your heart will get up to care for a baby or an elderly parent. So the religion of some of Jesus’ time was safe –the rules were kept but was there love?

The heart of religion is found in the heart of God. Kahlil Gibran writes in ‘The Prophet’, ‘when you love, do not say God is in my heart – say I am in the heart of God’. Or St Ignatius: ‘Love is seen in deeds not words’.

In prayer allow God touch your hopes to love well in life.

Teach me your truth O Lord, in the sincerity of my heart.

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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One Vaccine Facet Impact: World Financial Inequality LONDON — The top of the pandemic is lastly in view. So is rescue from essentially the most traumatic international financial disaster because the Nice Despair. As Covid vaccines enter the bloodstream, restoration has change into actuality. However the advantages will likely be removed from equally apportioned. Rich nations in Europe and North America have secured the majority of restricted shares of vaccines, positioning themselves for starkly improved financial fortunes. Creating nations — house to most of humanity — are left to safe their very own doses. The lopsided distribution of vaccines seems sure to worsen a defining financial actuality: The world that emerges from this terrifying chapter in historical past will likely be extra unequal than ever. Poor nations will proceed to be ravaged by the pandemic, forcing them to expend meager assets which might be already stretched by rising money owed to lenders in america, Europe and China. The worldwide financial system has lengthy been cleaved by profound disparities in wealth, schooling and entry to important components like clear water, electrical energy and the web. The pandemic has educated its loss of life and destruction of livelihood on ethnic minorities, ladies and lower-income households. The ending is probably going so as to add one other division that might form financial life for years, separating nations with entry to vaccines from these with out. “It’s clear that creating nations, and particularly poorer creating nations, are going to be excluded for a while,” stated Richard Kozul-Wright, director of the division on globalization and improvement methods on the United Nations Convention on Commerce and Growth in Geneva. “Regardless of the understanding that vaccines have to be seen as a worldwide good, the availability stays largely below management of enormous pharmaceutical firms within the superior economies.” Worldwide support organizations, philanthropists and rich nations have coalesced round a promise to make sure that all nations acquire the instruments wanted to battle the pandemic, like protecting gear for medical groups in addition to assessments, therapeutics and vaccines. However they’ve didn’t again their assurances with sufficient cash. The main initiative, the Act-Accelerator Partnership — an endeavor of the World Well being Group and the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis, amongst others — has secured lower than $5 billion of a focused $38 billion. A bunch of creating nations led by India and South Africa sought to extend the provision of vaccines by manufacturing their very own, ideally in partnership with the pharmaceutical firms which have produced the main variations. In a bid to safe leverage, the group has proposed that the World Commerce Group waive conventional protections on mental property, permitting poor nations to make reasonably priced variations of the vaccines. The W.TO. operates on consensus. The proposal has been blocked by america, Britain and the European Union, the place pharmaceutical firms wield political affect. The business argues that patent protections and the income they derive are a requirement for the innovation that yields lifesaving medicines. Proponents of suspending patents notice that many blockbuster medication are dropped at market by way of government-financed analysis, arguing that this creates an crucial to put social good on the coronary heart of coverage. “The query is admittedly, ‘Is that this a time to revenue?’” stated Mustaqeem De Gama, councilor on the South African mission to the W.T.O. in Geneva. “We have now seen governments closing down economies, limiting freedoms, but mental property is seen to be so sacrosanct that this can’t be touched.” Within the rich nations which have secured entry to vaccines, aid from the financial catastrophe introduced on by the general public well being emergency is underway. The restrictions which have shut down companies might be lifted, bringing significant financial advantages as quickly as March or April. For the second, the image is bleak. The United States, the world’s largest financial system, has suffered loss of life tolls equal to a 9/11 day-after-day, making a return to normalcy seem distant. Main economies like Britain, France and Germany are below recent lockdowns because the virus maintains momentum. However after contracting 4.2 p.c this 12 months, the worldwide financial system seems set to develop by 5.2 p.c subsequent 12 months, in accordance with Oxford Economics. That forecast assumes annual progress of 4.2 p.c in america and a 7.8 p.c enlargement in China, the world’s second-largest financial system, the place authorities motion has managed the virus. Europe will stay a laggard, given the prevalence of the virus, in accordance with IHS Markit, with the continent’s financial system not returning to its precrisis dimension for 2 years. However a deal struck between Britain and the European Union on Thursday, preserving a lot of their buying and selling relationship after Brexit, has eased the worst fears a few slowdown in regional commerce. Up to date Dec. 26, 2020, 6:29 p.m. ET However by 2025, the long-term financial injury from the pandemic will likely be twice as extreme in so-called rising markets in contrast with rich nations, in accordance with Oxford Economics. Such forecasts are notoriously inexact. A 12 months in the past, nobody was predicting a calamitous pandemic. The variables now confronting the worldwide financial system are particularly huge. The manufacturing of vaccines is fraught with challenges that might restrict provide, whereas their endurance and effectiveness aren’t totally understood. The financial restoration will likely be formed by questions of psychology. After essentially the most profound shock in reminiscence, how will societies train their freedom to maneuver about as soon as the virus is tamed? Will folks liberated from lockdowns pack collectively in film theaters and on airplanes? Any lingering disinclination towards human congregation is prone to restrict progress within the leisure and hospitality industries, that are main employers. The pandemic has accelerated the advance of e-commerce, leaving conventional brick-and-mortar retailers in an particularly weakened state. If a permanent sense of tension prompts consumers to keep away from malls, that might restrict job progress. On-line retailers like Amazon have aggressively embraced automation, that means that a rise in enterprise doesn’t essentially translate into high quality jobs. Many economists assume that because the vaccines ease concern, folks will surge towards experiences which have been off limits, thronging eating places, sporting occasions and vacation locations. 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Personal collectors have declined to participate in a debt suspension initiative championed by the Group of 20. Promised support from the World Financial institution and the Worldwide Financial Fund has proved disappointing. On the I.M.F., the Trump administration has opposed an enlargement of so-called particular drawing rights — the fundamental foreign money of the establishment — depriving poor nations of further assets. “The worldwide response to the pandemic has basically been pitiful,” stated Mr. Kozul-Wright on the U.N. commerce physique. “We’re frightened that as we transfer into the distribution of the vaccines, we’re going to see the identical once more.” One factor of the Act-Accelerator partnership, often known as Covax, is supposed to permit poor nations to purchase vaccines at reasonably priced costs, but it surely collides with the truth that manufacturing is each restricted and managed by profit-minded firms which might be answerable to shareholders. “Most individuals on the earth reside in nations the place they depend on Covax for entry to vaccines,” stated Mark Eccleston-Turner, an knowledgeable on worldwide regulation and infectious illnesses at Keele College in England. “That’s a rare market failure. Entry to vaccines will not be primarily based on want. It’s primarily based on the power to pay, and Covax doesn’t repair that drawback.” On Dec. 18, Covax leaders introduced a cope with pharmaceutical firms geared toward offering low- and middle-income nations with almost two billion doses of vaccines. The association, which facilities on vaccine candidates that haven’t but gained approval, would offer sufficient doses to vaccinate one-fifth of the populations in 190 taking part nations by the tip of subsequent 12 months. India is house to pharmaceutical producers which might be producing vaccines for multinational firms together with AstraZeneca, however its inhabitants is unlikely to be totally vaccinated earlier than 2024, in accordance with TS Lombard, an funding analysis agency in London. Its financial system is prone to stay susceptible. Even when plenty of individuals in poor nations don’t acquire entry to vaccines, their economies are prone to obtain some spillover advantages from wealthier nations’ return to regular. In a world formed by inequality, progress can coincide with inequity. As shopper energy resumes in North America, Europe and East Asia, that can drive demand for commodities, rejuvenating copper mines in Chile and Zambia, and lifting exports of soybeans harvested in Brazil and Argentina. Vacationers will ultimately return to Thailand, Indonesia and Turkey. However some argue that the ravages of the pandemic in poor nations, largely unchecked by vaccines, might restrict financial fortunes globally. If the poorest nations don’t acquire vaccines, the worldwide financial system will give up $153 billion a 12 months in output, in accordance with a latest examine from the RAND Company. “You might want to vaccinate well being care staff globally so you may reopen international markets,” stated Clare Wenham, a well being coverage knowledgeable on the London College of Economics. “If each nation on the earth can say, ‘We all know all our susceptible persons are vaccinated,’ then we are able to return to the worldwide capitalist buying and selling system a lot faster.” Supply hyperlink #Economic #effect #Global #Inequality #side #Vaccine

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