#but as a social movement i cannot imagine that it is actually effective | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

libertineangel · 9 months ago

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I wanted to sleep fucking hours ago, a guy's coming this afternoon to PAT test the kitchen appliances, yet here I fucking am awake, and I'm still thinking about the potential of joining the Revolutionary Communist Party so maybe typing it all out and posting it here will get it out of my head for now, this will likely not be the most eloquent because I am tired as all fuck shit but whatever.

Right so I do want to actually do something to help change the shit we're currently living in, I can sit and read the books all I like but part of me is frustrated and feels like it's pointless if that's all I'm doing when the whole point of all this theory is to put it into practice, especially as an admirer of the Situationists whose revolutionary concepts so valued going out and living and experiencing rather than letting this all reside in the mind a pseudo-world apart, and it is encouraging that they seem proactive and dedicated and serious about the task of building a movement, but:

...selling a fucking paper, really? I've partially read their new recruits' handbook and there's a whole section dedicated to the importance of the paper and of selling the paper, quoting Lenin to that effect, but the simple fact is that the material conditions that made Pravda instrumental are inordinately different to those of 21st century Britain. The Bolsheviks used a paper to summarise goings-on in the workers' movement across the Russian Empire and easily disseminate their message because that was pretty much the only way to do it, nobody these days buys a fucking paper and getting news & organisation from one end of this tiny little country to the other can be done instantaneously a million different ways.

I asked at the meeting what the general activities of membership entailed, they talked about weekly branch meetings plus another weekly reading group (with occasional social afterward), as well as other activities like selling the bloody paper, and to be blunt - in the words of Johnny Rotten - I'm a lazy sod. More specifically, and more accurately, I have a deep instinctive aversion to any regular commitment that poses a disruption to the blank routine of normalcy, I have the strong feeling that two nights a week is a lot for me to give up even for something I might want to do; I do know, however, that I felt exactly the same when I was about to start escrima, and that concern was completely unfounded (some days I might be reticent to bother, sure, but on other days frankly having a reliable couple of hours to do something that's usually fun out of the flat just for me has helped keep my brain from snapping like an elastic band). I actually got to go to a trial class for escrima though, and there's no free entry to branch meetings, and the organisation emphasises getting everyone out and active as quickly as possible (I believe Trotsky was quoted as regards training revolutionaries on the job) so it'd likely be more, which honestly sounds exhausting considering I already feel like I have so little time, and like obviously building a revolution isn't easy but as mentioned I am a lazy sod and simply do not like work, especially since that work will likely be selling a fucking paper. Honestly I cannot currently remember any activities mentioned other than selling the paper right now, there was also talk of going to protests and suchlike and spreading communism there, but as ever a significant vehicle of that was expected to be...god do I have to type it again, the stereotype about Trots really is true isn't it, but anyway yeah can you really imagine the girl who can't directly look at people for more than a few seconds working a paper stand

I'm also not convinced by the international to which they belong, nor its leader. They came out of the Militant Tendency split when that left Labour to form the Socialist Party in '92, with Alan Woods and the late Ted Grant insisting entryism totally wasn't doomed and forming Socialist Appeal and the International Marxist Tendency; they've now rebranded as the RCP and the Revolutionary Communist International, the guy I met said it's because they grew enough as entryists and now is the time to really make a bold move with many people disillusioned with "socialism" after Corbyn & Sanders' failures but frankly I think it's because they've finally recognised Labour's irrelevant and there's no point being entryists in a neoliberal centrist party. Anyway yeah Alan Woods is still the leader of the IMT/RCI and from what I can see he hates every government & leader that's claimed to be communist since Lenin except for Hugo Chávez whom he was friends with, and I did not think much of his writing in the issue of the paper I got. The guy I met also explicitly mentioned that the Swiss & Canadian branches of the IMT are remarkably strong and rapidly-growing, but uhhh my prior research found that the Canadian IMT really dragged its heels investigating sexual assault allegations by the leadership, and my previous thought was that Canada is not Britain so it might be better here but considering we explicitly talked about how other parties here have such problems and he was like "yeah I'm not gonna deny it's a potential in any organisation but it also shows a lack of true commitment to Marxist principles at every level like ours", like...yeah you can see my scepticism. I've also seen some comments saying they're really great and active and others saying they're basically a very insistent reading group that just wants your money and paper-selling capability, both of which I'm prepared to believe.

Additionally, another early part of the handbook was about conduct - I'm probably not phrasing this quite right 'cause I read it like 4 hours ago, I'm tired as shit and can't be arsed to go get it, but basically it expects us all to behave like good proper revolutionaries, represent the Party well both in person and online, always be at the meetings and apologise & ask what happened ASAP for any we miss; now obviously that hits my natural punk Fuck Off instinct, but couple it with the above and I have a certain degree of actual concern: emphasis on good conduct and regular attendance, immediate expectation of high activity levels, heavy focus on recruitment tactics, immediate financial contributions to support the full-time higher-ups (which honestly surprised me at the time, isn't that the sort of bureaucracy Trots don't like?), led by a single unchanging leader who's been at it for decades, opinions seem divided between people in it who think it's great and people who briefly checked it out and left unimpressed...like this is ticking some boxes of a High-Control Group. I could well be wrong, in fact I hope I'm wrong, it's not like the vague and casual approaches of other far-left groups have accomplished shit fuck and building a revolution is a serious endeavour, and it could well just be me finding excuses to be an aforementioned lazy sod, and admittedly this interpretation is coloured by one obscure blog I found on page 7 of Google claiming as much (from a self-confessed former commie turned reactionary monarchist Tory Christian who first felt unwelcome in the IMT after calling drugs degenerate, so I am not putting much stock in their words), but like...I know some shit about cults, and the potential is there.

This all does sound very negative, but to be honest that's because the positive side basically boils down to "they seem to actively be trying, they're not transphobic and I want to do something". I have no idea what form an organisation would ideally take for me to be genuinely enthusiastic, I have no idea what specifically I would want to be doing in one considering I have no real revolution-building skills (not personable enough to recruit people, not well-read enough to be a theoretician, maybe I could just spew polemic (though that would need a vehicle to be read...perhaps some kind of regularly-published print outlet?)), the sensible thing to do in order to get anything done is to just go with the one that seems best and right now this is it, but...nevertheless I remain hesitant.

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whitehotharlots · 2 years ago

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Sophie Lewis is a revolting dunce

It’s 2023, and in spite of a near-constant barrage of catastrophizing about the supposedly imminent reemergence of fascism, the American left cannot stop themselves from providing ammunition to the right. To put it more bluntly, they somehow cannot grasp that conservatives would be less likely to believe paranoid conspiracies about liberals wanting to take their kids away if liberals would be less open in saying that they do, indeed, want to take people’s kids away.

What’s this? Has Ol’ Man Harlots finally lost his marbles and succumbed to the evils of right wing disinformation? I’m afraid not. My conclusions have been drawn by Just Listening to left itself without receiving the slightest input from conservatives--in this case, an execrable piece by Sophie Lewis recently published by Tank Magazine. This essay is so extreme in its conclusions, so dishonest in its argumentation, that I challenge even the most ardent of lefties to read it all the way through and not see how it makes Ron Desantis-style conspiratorialism appear downright plausible.

I hesitate to paraphrase Lewis’ piece--doing so without the liberal use of direct citations could easily come across as me making stuff or otherwise reading it dishonestly. I strongly encourage you read through it yourself (here’s the link once again), but I will still include somewhat lengthy passages so as to confirm that this is an actual essay by a living, lauded writer, and not something I hallucinated after drinking a whole bottle of Benadryl.

Before we get to the essay’s primary assertions, it’s worth recapitulating Lewis’ foundational beliefs (in doing so, we’ll also get a sense of her profound dishonesty--although fully capturing as much would require a nearly book-length work. Angela Nagle has a digestible and effective piece here, and I have touched on in briefly about a year ago).

Lewis is one of the loudest and most repulsive advocates of the “Family Abolition” movement, which has earned her a manuscript published by Verso, bylines at Lit Hub and The London Review of Books, and a fawning personal profile at Vice. Family abolition is an ostensibly left-wing project that is pretty well defined by its name: its advocates believe that family structures (particularly heterosexual, two-parent families, but others are still problematic) are the driving force behind nearly all of the world’s problems, and that social progress cannot be achieved until we replace natal homes with weird poly communes.

Here’s Lewis in her new piece:

We are seeking (in the immediate term) to make the private nuclear house- hold visible as an institution of the market and of the state: a structure held together by violence and coercion, both internal and external. As such, perhaps our most pressing challenge is linking ours and other present-day abolition- isms. In conjunction with police-, border- and prison-abolitionist movements, for example, a movement to deprivatise care must prioritise the undermining of the racist “family policing” system, colonial child-removal apparatuses, and the kinship violence of immigration officers. In conjunction with youth-led climate-justice campaigns trying to halt the desecration of humanity’s collective planetary household, those who aspire to the deprivatisation of care must articulate the centrality of youth liberation (child suffrage, gender autonomy, all-ages universal basic income, for example) to the future care-centric society that is now widely linked, in the popular imagination, to a “green transition”. Private households are both labour-intensive and ecocidal, after all. They are incubators of sexual and patriarchal violence. It is time to denaturalise them.

Families are unnatural, evil incubators of inequality and inequity, and also they cause direct harm to vulnerable folx. Why? Because it is the family--and only the family--that prevents kids from being “queer:”

Of course, the fact that child sexual abuse still now occurs overwhelmingly within cisheteropatriarchal family structures does not result in similar scrutiny on the family- form. In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged: this is what is referred to as a decent upbringing, a.k.a. the invisible transmission of the “right” kinds of re/productive desire, which many of us seem to sense is coming unstuck.

It’s easy to find yourself so overwhelmed by Lewis’ schizophrenic prose style that you gloss over the profound number of falsehoods in her claims. Let’s start just with that last passage, which can most charitably be understood as a midwit recapitulation of first wave feminism. Lewis is technically correct in that most domestic abuse occurs in “cisheteropatriarchal” (AKA “normal”) families, but this is for very much the same reason that most violent crime is intra-racial and most car accidents occur within a few miles of the driver’s home: the more commonplace an event, the more frequently it occurs. On the whole, there are (probably) fewer abuse incidents in multi-parent trans polycule households than there are in regular households--but that’s just because there are far, far more regular households. The fact says nothing about the relative frequency of abuse, nor does it come close to establishing that there’s something inherent about not being a gross freak that makes domestic violence more likely.

Because, oh no, I got some bad news for you: Lesbian and trans couples have significantly higher rates of intimate partner violence than regular hetero couples. And the numbers are much, much worse for children. Kids who live in foster care or with adoptive parents are TWENTY EIGHT TIMES more likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse than kids who live with their natal parents. Not 28 percent more likely. 28 times. 2,800% percent. This figure is so staggering that its absence from Lewis’ analysis should be understood much more as an outright lie than as a careless omission.

So, okay, Lewis’ political project is to make it so way more kids get raped and abused. Cool. That fact alone--which, again, she never comes close to acknowledging, let alone addressing--should be enough to invalidate her work to anyone who hasn’t been completely poisoned by indentitarianism. But, ohh, ohhh we’ve only barely breached the weirdness.

Contrary to the dominant narrative among Trans Rights Advocates, Lewis argues that social contagion does exist and that it can influence a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation--only it just goes one way. Straight, non-trans people are obviously molded by repressive social structures. The pronoun folx, meanwhile, exist gloriously unaffected by the malignant influence of anything other than their internal gender identity, which is basically a soul and exists independent of everything else.

I hate to repeat myself, but this claim is so bizarre and self-contradictory it really must be stressed: Lewis believes that what most people consider the default status in regards to gender--the belief that you weren’t born in the wrong body and therefore do not require medicalization--is the result of a social construction. Literally, she says it’s due to “grooming.” While making this claim, she also states that believing oneself to require medicalization to achieve equanimity between your body and your inherent gender identity is the actual default that would exist if there were no social pressures imploring children to believe otherwise.

In other words, children are indeed groomed, only the groomers are inherently evil “cissexual” people, and their grooming ways are perpetuated by oppressive social structures (”In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged”). This, Lewis contends, is why some people don’t react kindly when she and her rainbow pals in the publishing industry tell strangers they want to take their kids away: those strangers are themselves evil (cis, hetereo, and sometimes.... sometimes even white!), which means they are fragile and stupid and their response is a fascist reaction to social progress:

In light of this, today’s trans “groomer” panic begins to look like a reaction to, and appropriation of, #MeToo. Notice that within the framework of the 21st century’s save-our-children-ists, the existence of self-declaring trans children is a sign of sexual violation in and of itself: an outside corruption of cis girlhood, or a “forced feminisation” of boys, if you will.

These reactions--the very definition of fascism--are themselves only possible because of the evil existence of families:

If the patriarchal institutions of mum and dad – which manufactured us all! – are to survive, then private parents must retain control of the prerogative to inseminate the minds of kids with things like pronouns, proper nouns and other sexual spells. And none of us knows what deprivatising father-care or mothering-labour feels or looks like. Family abolition, as such, is hard (perhaps impossible, for now) to desire fully. But an inconvenient obstacle to the revanchist re-entrenchment of cissexualist right-reproduction exists, in the form of parents who affirm, support and care for transgender flourishing in kids. Regardless of the stubborn reality of trans parents, the task of anti-trans educators and propagandists is framed in terms of “parental rights”: how can politicians, along with suitably cissexist moms and dads, defend families, while also breaking them, in the quest to Make Kids Cis Again?

Now, you might assume that most people are heterosexual for the same reason that almost every other dimorphic animal species is predominately heterosexual: an innate drive to procreate, something that requires a male and female. You may likewise assume that the majority of people aren’t trans because transness by definition requires medicalization, the mechanisms of which were not available until quite recently, and that in the past the vast majority of butch girls and faggy boys would have simply been regarded as gender non-conforming (and then either ostracized or tolerated or praised, or some combination thereof, according to the particular contexts of the time and place in which they lived). Well, guess what buddy, that’s exactly what Hitler also thought. It turns out these default states are actually a social construct--the only social construct that effects gender and sexuality--and that the only reason nearly everyone doesn’t have a septum piercing and mastectomy scars is because their horrible families forced them to not be their natural, immutable, Edenic selves (the identity markers and beliefs of whom just so happen to line up perfectly with the aesthetic preferences of Lewis and her cohort).

Once again, if you think I am misreading Lewis’ work or otherwise being unduly dismissive, I implore you to read it for yourself. If you approach it with an honest and open mind, rather than a predisposition to believe and support anything you imagine upsetting conservatives, you will find I have described her general worldview accurately, and without undue prejudice.

And now we have an obvious question: to what end is this social project aimed, other than a desire for more kids to get raped and beaten and to send most normal people running away from the left as if we were a superfund site? Here’s where Lewis turns the Schizo Scale up to 11. The result is simply that children will be “liberated” once they are freed from the presence of their parents and granted full legal agency from birth (the age of consent isn’t mentioned specifically, but, uhh... I think you can infer what she wants out of this):

Unfortunately, it is only on the fringes of the left today that one hears any mention at all of child sovereignty, juvenile body-autonomy, or youth liberation – let alone calls to imagine abolishing the family for, and with, kids. In my experience, it has usually been in the skilful domains of anti-authoritarian or anti-state communist mutual-aid networks, social centres and grief circles, that problems of “adultism” and “adult supremacy” are taken seriously, rather than mocked (the same, by the way, goes for disability-liberation concerns). It is among anarchists that I have generally encountered conversations about trusting kids; believing kids about who they are; listening to them; supporting their self-organisation; and yes, learning both with and from them, practising, for instance, the arts of coexisting with others and their wants.

The segregation of the generations is both epistemic and material, as “kids’ libbers” in the late 1960s and early 1970s used to emphasise. Still today, children are not only the most disenfranchised, but also the poorest people in our societies. Their segregation, and also the omni-pervasive theory of education our institutions apply, whereby knowledge flows unidirectionally, downward, from “us” to “them”, stems from an “unspoken truth” that Lane-McKinley identifies: “while many children fear adults, many adults also fear children.” To conquer this fear, it may be necessary for leftists in the 21st century to first give up apologising for the production (and self-fashioning) of non-innocent young people, and practice vindicating it. Only then are we likely to move beyond the “defence” of trans childhoods, towards their celebration. In the final lines of her 2018 study Histories of the Transgender Child, scholar Jules Gill-Peterson writes: “If we adults really desire to learn to care for the many transgender children in our midst, we need to learn what it means to wish that there be trans children.” Let us, as a matter of urgency, set to training ourselves and each other in this wish.

As is typical of identitarian writing of all stripes, Lewis is pretty vague as the material specifics of her grand ideal. Same as conservatives, these people understand power purely in terms of the presence or absence of certain people in certain spaces: social justice, or Democracy, or Freedom, or whatever the goal may be--these are achieved by making sure the good people simply exist among one another, free from the contaminating presence of bad people. The material realities faced by those who enter into these vastly reimagined societies are of no concern, nor is there any reason to wonder about the beliefs and actions of the citizens of these utopias. If everyone is Pronoun Person, and kids are trained to be pronoun people from birth (only they’re totally not trained because only cishetero people are capable of that), victory shall simply manifest itself; equity shall have been achieved.

In her older works, Lewis did make some reference to the creation of anarcho-syndicalist-style “autonomous zones,” a concept adapted from the work of theorist Hakim Bay. You might have thought that the “CHAZ” that was built up in Seattle during the protests of 2020 was a spontaneous creation, but such efforts were actually fairly thoroughly theorized. And, well, if you were paying any attention to CHAZ as it unfolded, you’d understand why Lewis no longer leans on this concept: what was proposed a zone of “radical safety” and immediate equity quickly devolved into a sea of filth and unhinged violence, with CHAZ “security” managing to murder at least 2 black children in a span of a few weeks (and shoot at least one more). That, I’m afraid, is Lewis’ ideal world--even if she’s too much of a coward to articulate it, there’s no other way forward within her narrow, birdbrained worldview. And, even more sadly, that is what a lot of very stupid publishers are trying to establish as the brand of the post-Bernie left.

Maybe I’m being too harsh? Lefties love few things more than apologia for their dumbest ideas, and I’m sure we will encounter some version of “a true CHAZ has never been attempted.” Fine. But please ask yourself: what do you honestly believe will be result of handing everyone’s bodily autonomy and the very agency of children over to the people who presently dominate the left? What will happen when the people who already revel in ruining the lives of strangers over minor semantic indelicacies are given control of state violence, in the absence of an actual state? Will empowerment suddenly make these people less paranoid, more forgiving, less convinced that everyone who disagrees with them is a fascist who wants to kill them and therefore should be met with violent resistance? What gives you faith in these people to believe they are anything but who they have repeatedly, doggedly demonstrated themselves to be?

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neurathsboat · 8 months ago

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Collaborator Sociality

A friend recently asked me if I could recommend any scholar in memory studies for a conference she is organizing for next year, since she knows this is one of my fields. I honestly cannot. Having been through the past 8 months and witnessed the culture of obedience in the academe, I do not know any career academic that I truly respect and trust politically at this point. Against this backdrop, I was working on a project on the politics of divestment campaigns in the imperial core and trying to think through the affective dimension of things. I picked up some of the articles in the recently published issue of Parallax on “feeling implicated” as a political affect. Michael Rothberg wrote an interesting introduction to the issue, elaborating his thoughts on how affect theory can contribute to an understanding of the implicated Subject’s entanglement with violent institutions, systems, and structures. I searched him up, thinking that there’s no way a scholar of the memory of the Holocaust can be pro-resistance, and here we go, I found an open solidarity letter he wrote for someone (see below). A boring and typical liberal Zionist anti-fascist approach to “pro-Palestine” solidarity. Meanwhile, he’s also one of those FJP members at UCLA who signed on to their department letter against the university admin’s use of police force against student protestors in the past months. A part of me feels like it would be interesting to put his intellectual project in perspective of his (classic FJP) political positionality.

I remember bro Diallo said something like this: under a system of oppression, there are only three types of people among the oppressed, those who resist, those who submit, and those who collaborate. You side with the resistors, educate and help the submitted, and the collaborators are your enemies. Approaching this with the intentionality of collective study, however, I wonder what else is to be said and thought about when it comes to things like divestment. It is probably time for a conversation about whether or not divestment is collaborative with the colonizer. And my whole point is that it is. To produce critical knowledge that examines the movement with a certain kind of sobriety, I look to models like classist safety (formerly firstgensafety) on Instagram. I really hate the wishy-washy academic type who talks about accountability theoretically but when it comes down to actual politics, their liberal upper class positionality will be exposed in a second. And divestment is kind of the litmus test to colonial politics, just as Palestine is to transitional justice. The hyper-excitement around and mobilizable-ness of divestment, with the majority middle class base supporting it, does not offer me any confidence.

We are situated in a very weird moment, filled with the fantasies, learned helplessness, and melancholia of post-coloniality, while ongoing colonizations are happening. And so the majority of social justice discourses and their advocates look at Palestine from the standpoint of time travel, of anachronism. The rhetoric of anti-colonialism in the post-colonial present is just that, rhetoric. This is why anti-colonialism becomes absurd in the public imagination, and Palestine becomes something wildly disturbing, not merely due to the live streamed atrocities, but also its disruptive effect on the post-colonial mind that deems resistance as undesirable, impossible, or at least complicated. I am not even talking about the mass that are inculcated by settlerism as an ideology, btw I don’t even think if we can have a communism without settler colonialism, in response to J. Moufawad-Paul’s position**.** I find it disturbing that settlers who benefit from the system move to innocence so quickly by reducing settler colonialism to garrisons, a fundamentally militarized structure of conquest, thus bypassing other forms of settler colonialism in the ontology of the state, the metaphysics of historical progress, the civilizational missions of education, governance, and economy, etc., that they themselves are more deeply involved in.

#organizing #academia

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nochd · 3 months ago

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But there's another and deeper reason why the Left fails at electoral politics, and maybe it's a good thing nobody reads my blog because this is going to be uncomfortable for leftists to hear.

I'm going to put the conclusion up front, something I've been saying in tags a few times lately:

The Left needs to get past Karl Marx.

In my 20s I was involved in student politics a lot, both as a student myself and working for a students' association. I worked alongside several staunch Marxists whom I still consider friends.

Now my friends would never go around telling people to waste their votes. But they would come out, every election time, with weird mixed messages like "Hey, everyone! 😊 Get out and vote! ✔️ Labour and the Greens are the best choices this time around! 😃 Remember both sides are actually the same though! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

And every time I would try to reason with them, they would say things like "I would never tell people not to vote for the least bad option! It's just important to know that both sides are the same and voting won't change that!"

And it's true, they weren't telling people not to vote. They were just undermining any sensible reason why it would be worth voting.

The intended effect is summed up in the slogan "One Solution: Revolution!"

Yeah.

The actual effect I think can be seen in Aotearoa's youth voting statistics of the time, which were as abysmal as the rest of the Western world. Not that this was the sole reason but I'm certain it contributed.

Lately, on this website, the phrase "The Revolution is the Rapture for leftists" has become a recognised refrain, because it's true. This idea that the world must get worse and worse until it reaches a cataclysmic turning point, after which all evils will be purged and we will have paradise for ever and ever, is one of many uncomfortable parallels between revolutionary socialism and Evangelical Christianity.

What's not so well-recognised is that this catastrophism goes right back to the roots of leftism, to Karl Marx and the Hegelian philosophy which inspired him.

Marx was, in today's terms, an accelerationist; he voted for free trade on the basis that it would hurt the working class and thus bring the Revolution closer.

And he really didn't have much of a plan for how to build a functioning society after the Revolution. His mate Engels openly argued that you didn't need a plan because once the Revolution was done the perfect communist society would build itself.

That claim, at least, has been put to the experimental test many times.

These beliefs of Marx's were not random brain-farts. They come from the philosophy of Hegel and his concept of dialectic.

Now to give credit where it's due, Hegel's idea was at least a step forward from older Western philosophy, which was founded in essentialism -- the idea that everything has a fixed, unchangeable essence, and nothing can change its true nature. By extension, society and culture can never truly change or improve. We are stuck with existing social forms.

Hegel rejected this idea. If you imagine the essentialistic view of the world as a set of rigid objects fixed immovably to an unchanging substrate, then the Hegelian view is of a set of rigid objects which move about, crash into each other, smash each other to pieces, and then re-form new rigid objects out of the pieces.

According to this view change can happen, but only in catastrophically destructive events -- like the French Revolution, which seems to have been one of Hegel's inspirations. There is no change without violence. The system cannot be improved, only destroyed.

Hegel's ideas were frankly dodgy right down to their foundations, but there isn't room to go into that here; Bertrand Russell has a lot to say about it.

There is an alternative possibility, of course: that there were never any fixed, unchangeable essences to begin with; that the world is not rigid but fluid; that anything can change at any time; that small movements add up to large ones -- as my Scottish grandmother used to say, mony a mickle maks a muckle.

Philosophically that's more radical than Hegel. Politically it argues for moderation, at least compared to catastrophic Marxism. Any step in the right direction, no matter how small, is a good thing. Enough small steps and one day we will look back and find the Revolution has already happened.

In the meantime we need to keep working; we need to keep voting; we need to support everyone who's pulling in the right direction. If proposed improvements are weaksauce we need to "yes-and" them, not reject them.

We need to get past Karl Marx.

Here's the thing, though.

If someone breaks into a night shelter to try and hurt someone there, yes, it is the fault of the person who broke in.

But the shelter also needs to have a very earnest talk with their security staff about alternative career paths.

The fact that some other person committed the actual crime does not let the security staff off the hook.

And if you are the security staff, if it was your job to stop this happening and you didn't stop it happening, what you should be asking now is not "Why is everybody being so mean to us?"

It's "What do we need to stop doing, immediately and forever?"

Especially if you appointed yourself to the task of guarding the shelter. Especially if your whole personality is built around opposing the concept of people breaking in.

#us election #the left needs to get past karl marx #political philosophy #marx #hegel #dialectic #the revolution is the rapture for leftists #meliorism

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years ago

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When Obi-Wan gets to AotC, there's also about two dozen Anakin clones on-site. They're all girls because... IDK Anakin is trans. They have a hive mind and are developmentally a few years younger than Anakin himself.

It's incredibly unsettling to Obi-Wan.

It's almost definitely a "fuck with Anakin's already fragile mental health" ploy by Palpatine, along with a "what if Jedi Black Widows, for me, a Sith Lord. Wouldn't that be neat? That would be neat."

Anakin is torn between "this freaks me out" and "GANG OF BABY SISTERS LET'S GOOOOOOO."

(I just finished reading Like Real People Do by glimmerglanger, so this is definitely inspired by that and the obligatory 'lay back in bed and daydream variations on plot points of that fic you just really enjoyed,' and also a little by Same Heart, Same Blood by loosingletters.)

They're physically like 14-16 on average, and Anakin's vibrating out of his skin with a million conflicting emotions, but when he tells Padme she's just like "oh, you have a handmaiden gang!"

I told this to @willowcrowned and she suggested:

Once Anakin decides to repress the part of him that’s weirded out and just regard them as baby sisters he gets. A little strange about it The first time one of them dies he may or may not slaughter every person he can [in response to Padme's comment] Anakin starts worrying that he needs to get them cool matching outfits

I also chatted about it with @firebirdeternal and they said:

Gang of Unsettling Smol Siblings is exactly the Karma that Anakin deserves

Do you think the Clones have a kind of Collective Name that they use at first that eventually just kind of morphs into a new last name? Skysisters or something? Like Palpatine was trying to be clever and name them like the Nightsisters.

I initially went with "functionally one person" hive-mind but I'm torn.

I think maybe they're BASICALLY one person on Kamino but drift into Separate Consciousness once they're far enough apart physically that their minds don't blend from proximity anymore.

Then they start Dating (like half of them are dating Fett clones because they grew up with these dudes, it's like childhood friends romance), and Anakin loses his mind about Protecting Them and They're Too Young.

Padme: You're nineteen and we just got married, they can date. Anakin: THEY'RE EIGHT. Padme: And the Fett clones are ten and dying for us in the field. Get them rights before you panic about their love lives.

Firebird:

it could be worse, one of them could imprint on Obi-Wan. "Anakin I promise I won't yell at you for the next five stupid things you do if you can figure out a way to stop this baby from having a crush on me" (I like the idea of Obi-wan bargaining not with "I won't be mad at you ever" because they Both Know That's Not True, and instead haggling with specific allowances. Like he's handing out Stupidity Coupons)

Please imagine Mace and Obi-Wan's personal responses to the idea of suddenly having to deal with not one, not two, but OVER TWENTY SKYWALKERS.

Plo is delighted to take one off their hands.

So is Yoda.

Willow:

Mace is like. okay suicide isn’t the Jedi way but on the other hand. i physically cannot deal with this Yoda: a skywalker, you say? one who is tall enough to reach the top shelf, you say? such a skywalker, bring me

Anakin would be given at least one because fuck you, suffer with us, but he's still a padawan so Ugh, fine, no.

I want to say one stays on Coruscant to hang out with the Guard, and ends up half-adopted by Padme. She keeps dressing up the Aniclone left with her in handmaiden outfits and sending selfies to Anakin.

"Hanging out with the little SiL!"

Anakin has so many issues about WHEN his genetic material was acquired.

And there's some confusion from the Fett clones about how much of a hive mind is normal for Jedi. They are confused that the answer is basically none, and "this is WHY nobody clones a Jedi"

ONE OF THEM STEALS BOBA FROM THE ARENA ON GEONOSIS.

Firebird:

"I have followed in our progenitor's footsteps and acquired a sibling." holds up a struggling Boba "He bites."

Willow:

Ooooo okay so if they have a sort of hive mind then they probably don’t have names other than their designations on Kamino right BUT When they SEPARATE The one that picks Boba up on Geonosis gets a name specifically for that. Okay what if the one Padmé picks up gets some variant on ‘pretty’ because she’s always being dressed up BELLE Maybe Yoda’s Ani has a name that means thief? Because obviously Yoda is using Anakin to steal sweets

So, to make the timeline work...

I don't think anyone would give Anakin one of his sisters until after he's knighted at least.

So obviously when they're doing initial placements none of the sisters go to him or Obi-Wan.

Once he's knighted, of course they're already all placed with someone, and Anakin instead gets Ahsoka. He loves Ahsoka. She is also a little sister. He said so.

At some point afterwards, one of the sisters is left without a place because the Master that was in charge of her died in the field battle.

That sister then gets placed with Obi-Wan, because he's already mostly-successfully raised one Skywalker, so he can do it again.

Anakin gets to hang out with her basically all the time.

Ahsoka is very very jealous of this girl stealing Anakin's attention.

Anakin is oblivious to the rivalry.

He asks Barriss to look after them while he's discussing Adult War Things with Luminara and Obi-Wan, and Barriss gets an eye into This Mess, which is quickly colored by Ahsoka growing a puppy crush on the lovely Miss Offee herself.

Firebird:

Ahsoka: Ah yes, my nemesis. Anisister: Ah yes, my new older sister whom I want to impress so bad.

"I will impress her by being Stoic and Competent" "Oh my god she must think she's so much better than me what a bitch"

Anakin is oblivious to most things to be fair Anakin: Laser focused precision fighting machine who can read the tiniest body movements and predict your moves seconds in advance, who also cannot understand even the most basic social nuance. I was originally writing this as to Dunk on Anakin but then I made myself sad, because none of those things are really his fault.

So you know that post about like, Sasuke and Brooding, specifically in the context of "Brooding" as it's used to refer to Nesting Chickens? Grouchy and protective and sitting on a tennis ball trying to hatch it because they're just. "These are my Babies." Anakin Broods. Baby sisters. Must protecc. "I'm actually fine and extremely deadly in combat." "MUST PROTECT."

Bad Guy: [catches Ahsoka in a Trap] Aniclone: Must rescue sister! Aniclone: [fights, is not winning fight, gets ouched] Ahsoka tearing her way out of Trap: I lived bitch. Also: stay the fuck away from her. [murders so hard]

Ahsoka catches the Protective Older Sib feels by the traditional method: "Hey, only I'm allowed to be mean to them."

Willow:

Oh Anakin has no clue what’s going on. He walks in on Ahsoka glaring at the Ani and is like!!! Little sisters!!! Bonding!!! When Ahsoka was about three seconds away from tossing her out of the airlock. Ahsoka mistakenly assumes that Barriss has a crush on the Ani, and gets even MORE jealous.

Obi-Wan is like oh god. I can’t take care of an Anakin going through puberty again. He’s great with periods and other stuff because he read about a billion books. He is TERRIBLE with everything else, as he was the first time.

Barriss is like???? YOU'RE BOTH CHILDREN, PLEASE CALM DOWN, I HAVE ZERO INTEREST IN DATING ANYONE, LET ALONE SOMEONE YOUR AGE.

IDK how old Obi-Wan's Aniclone is, probably physically the same age as Ahsoka?

Per @atagotiak on discord:

Also something something, similarities btw Anakin and Obi-Wan where like. "Am I a parent? That seems uncomfortable, I'm too young to be a dad to a kid this age, I mean I'm cool with being a mentor/caretaker but..."

Obi-Wan can't even sidestep parenthood this time.

"Is Anakin basically your dad?" "Uhhhhhh" [Muffled discussion] "So Obi-Wan is your dad." "Okay!" "WAIT NO I DIDN'T AGREE TO THIS"

Ahsoka: She's stealing my brother, that BITCH. Obi-Wan's Aniclone: new sister new sister new sister gotta make a good impression

Firebird:

I feel like the Sister Squad would make very effective interstellar espionage agents Even like, kind of by accident. They just get encouraged to branch out in their interests and figure out what they want to do with their lives and end up all over the dang place, and since they're all pretty dang competent they tend to gravitate towards Important Positions wherever they end up. Except for one sister who just retires to raise Space Sheep.

I like that in this AU Palpatine is just like "I will create an army of Loyal Murderers who will obey my every whim and also be a big psychological lever on my Other Pet Murderer," and then they all just Baby Duckling imprint on the first Jedi to be nice to them instead and he has to just be like "Wait no not like that."

AND one of them Steals Boba

I want Obi-Wan's Aniclone to start dating Fives. All the sisters judge her for it, because he's a Goof. A very competent, ARC Trooper goof! But a goof.

Not as goofy as Anakin, though.

Firebird:

Who expects a clone of Anakin Skywalker to not make questionable lifelong romantic choices impulsively?

#Anakin Skywalker #Ahsoka Tano #Obi Wan Kenobi #Disaster Lineage #Sheev Palpatine #Skeevy Sheev #cloning #Yoda #Mace Windu #Skysisters AU #trans anakin skywalker #Phoenix Posts #hive mind #Padme Amidala #Anidala

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nkeigbo · 3 years ago

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No, Swahili Should Not Be the Lingua Franca of Africa

This is a horrible idea. It is really another form of colonialism.

I personally have nothing against the Swahili language (I love all languages), but this obsession with making Swahili the language of all Africa is ridiculous, to put it kindly. Even more disappointing is the fact that many people who ought to know better keep repeating this “Swahili must be our lingua franca” nonsense.

There is actually no good reason to force us all to speak Swahili.

We need a common language as Africans.

Why? Who decided this? Imagine if you went to European people and told them that in the interests of unity they all had to learn to speak French or if you went to Asian people and told them that they had to all learn Japanese. This would include peoples in places as far away from these linguistic homelands as Pakistanis and Bulgarians. I think you know that you would not have much success. So, why on Earth do we eagerly accept this “everyone must speak Swahili” nonsense being pushed by European commentators and policymakers?

English and French are colonial languages.

This main argument in favour of this movement is that an indigenous African language should be the lingua franca because colonial languages are, well, colonial.

This still does not hold much water because what its proponents are really advocating is replacing one form of colonialism with another. Swahili is a major language in many countries in East and Central Africa but not in other regions. This proposed plan will force everybody to learn a language they have no connection to and will inevitably lead to the decline and potential endangerment of other African languages which is something I can never support.

Essentially, their argument is that Africans should effectively colonise other Africans (at least in a cultural sense).

Already people have stopped speaking native languages in favour of English. If Swahili takes the place of English, this trend will continue and the fact that Swahili is African will not make it any less of a tragedy.

As to English and French, I have always believed that African states should prioritise their own languages in the spheres of politics, commerce and social life. I see no reason why Igboland cannot be run entirely in Igbo, for example.

Going back to the European example raised in the first point: English is a global language, but that does not mean that everybody in Europe can speak it. Indeed, translation is still an important industry and at a pan-European level being able to interact in multilingual settings is still necessary. You cannot get by with just one language. In this manner, there is no reason why Africans cannot be multilingual, and, when it is time to operate on an intracontinental level be able to interact with many languages (especially the major African languages since some Africans see no value in small languages).

Colonial languages will probably continue to be relevant in some way since they are lingua francas that have been in use for quite some time. I wish this were not the case, but it is.

You are just saying this because Swahili is not your own language.

If people were fighting to make Igbo the language of Africa and to force people in places as far away as Tanzania, Morocco and Madagascar to learn it, I would be the first to condemn them. Certainly, the idea would be flattering. But it would serve no real purpose and would be harmful to the cultural heritage and the societal function of these regions.

Speaking Swahili will make Africa a better place.

No.

Again, I have to ask why this ridiculous idea is only being seriously pushed in Africa. I have not seen Asians fighting for all Asians to learn Japanese; it would be unrealistic and unfair to expect everyone in India, for example, to learn Japanese to participate in economic and civic life. So, why should we be made to suffer?

Furthermore, imagine all of the money and resources which will be spent on this—just to prove a silly point.

Some Africans support these things, forgetting how diverse Africa really is. The idea that because we live in a shared continent, we must have a shared culture is both untrue and laughable. Pan-Africanism, to many people, sounds very nice on paper but individual countries in Africa cannot even function because people cannot cope with simple ethnic divisions, let alone regional and national ones.

Part of the reason I wrote this is that I hate this obsession with making Swahili the default. White people do this all of the time while knowing that they would never agree to erase their own cultures in favour of a ridiculous almost cosplay fusion. They do not do this to themselves or to non-African peoples because they have some respect or care to know about their specific cultures. But clearly Africa is relatively unimportant to many Europeans. This is the only explanation as to why they are obsessed with thinking that we all do, or should, speak Swahili. Now that Asian countries have significant economic importance, many educated Europeans know about their ethnic and linguistic composition and even have taken the time to learn their languages. Not so with us—which is why we should be wary of artificial attempts to lump us all together.

"It's high time we move from the coloniser's language."

This is not part of a rousing speech by a pan-African idealist but rather the sentence is uttered quietly and calmly by Ghanaian Swahili student Annabel Naa Odarley Lankai.

So, the solution is to colonise other Africans? And I think this is push to force Swahili on everyone can be rooted in nothing other than Pan-African idealism.

Africa should "have something that is of us and for us", the 23-year-old adds.

Swahili is not “of” all of us.

But in addition to her idealism, Ms Lankai thinks that knowledge of the language will help her get a job following graduation.

Because Pan-African institutions are obsessed with forcing Swahili on everyone.

At its recent heads of state meeting, the African Union (AU) adopted Swahili as an official working language.

The African Union cannot justify this selectivity. At the very least, they should also add Hausa.

"Swahili… comes [with] a sense of ownership," says Ally Khalfan, a lecturer at the State University of Zanzibar, echoing the views of Ms Lankai. "It is about our property and our identity as Africans."

It really isn’t. I feel no connection to Swahili whatsoever. It is a foreign language to me in the same way that English and French are. The fact that it is natively spoken by other African people does not affect this in the slightest.

If Swahili is to become truly pan-African it will take political will, an economic imperative and financial investment to reach all regions.

So, colonialism.

#swahili #swahili language #pan africanism #africa #colonialism #colonisation #language #languages #multilingualism #rant #linguistics #lingblr #langblr #african languages

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 5 years ago

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Humans Are Space Orcs, “The hypothetical

I decided to go back to and play around with my older style of writing today. Taking a bi of a break from the main plot line for a little bit :)

As a doctor, I often wonder about hypotheticals. What would happen if my patient was injured in this way, what would I do. Working with humans I find each scenario has to be more outlandish than the next assuming the human is going to do something stupid.

However, in all my time with humans there is one hypothetical that I find most interesting: what would happen if early human/nonhuman communication never happened, and like animals in documentaries, or at zoos we learned about the humans purely through observation.

Humor me for a moment as I write this as I think it could be an interesting thought-experiment for the scientific community.

I imagine we would see them as a series of logs made by the zookeeper as the humans were captured and placed into their enclosures, not knowing that the humans were sentient.

I see it going something like this.

Day 1 - we encountered the strange creature on a distant planet. We have never seen anything like them before. They tall, though that is only by way of the walking bipedally. Their arms are very long, and their eyes face forward. We were forced to capture them through tranquilization as they were uncooperative. We have a group of them, about six that we released into the enclosure. They are very agitated, and we must do what we can to calm them or otherwise worry about causing them significant stress. I can see them now lying on the ground resting their heads, they do not look well from the drugs, but we hope that the side effects will not last long.

Day 2 - We have yet to determine the genders of the creatures or even if they have any. It is difficult to tell, though there are subtle anatomical differences that we assume might have some bearing on the subject. Luckily for us they ate within the first day, and continue to eat well. As far as we understand their diets, these creatures can eat a large range of food, more than any animal or alien we have ever seen, and this including meat, plants, and plant byproducts.

Day - 4 They have a very large range of vocalizations, in a very complex structure that almost seems as if they are speaking to one another. They grunt hiss click hum, and so much more. As far as we can tell, they seem very social and tend to congregate in a small circle to commune with each other. When they sleep, they tend to sleep in a large group, or within the same general vicinity of each other. It sees they have a strong pack mentality.

Day- 3 we were forced to move them to a new enclosure as, last night one of the zookeepers ran across the creatures scaling the wall of their enclosure using the digits on their hands and feet to hold to the rough surface and pull themselves upward. I and the other scientists are a bit put out as we should have known this based on the anatomy of their flexible toes, and the sockets of their shoulders. These creatures are very good at climbing. For this reason the new enclosure is much larger, it has a pool of water and many tall branches to climb though there is a field around it to keep the creatures form climbing out.

Day 4 - The pool was a good idea as the creatures seem to enjoy submerging themselves in water. We know now that their strangely colored skin is not actually skin but some kind of artificial covering. They take off this artificial skin if they enter the water and put it back on after they leave. We also know the difference between the males and the females now as the males have more defined muscular structures and the females are more rounded with softer angles. As far as we can determine there is no behavioral difference between the two species.

Day 5 - We think they know they are being watched, as they have a habit of obscuring themselves in the furthest end of the enclosure where it is difficult for them to be seen. They have even taken some of the fallen branches and erected a bit of a screen to hide away prying eyes, or at least that is how it seems. Some of our experts assume it was actually in order to build a proper nest though we cannot be entirely sure about that.

Day 30 - We are worried about one of the females. Her body structure has begun to change over these past few weeks, and her belly is becoming distended. We are worried about some sort of blockage or bloating caused by the misuse of food. The other creatures seem to be worried about her as well. We might go in and tranquilize her and bring her out to examine her at some point tomorrow.

Day 31 - we had to sedate every creature in the enclosure in order to pull the female out and separate er form her pack. We tried to separate her naturally from them, pulling her to one side of the enclosure, but it seemed as if they knew what we were doing and the other large males and the one aggressive female would not allow her to go. We had to dart all five of the others to capture her, though when we pulled her out we were delighted to find the reason for her distended belly has nothing to do with the food. It seems as if we had inadvertently picked up a pregnant alien creature., which is likely why the others were so protective over her. We worry though because upon examining the internal structures we are concerned that the head of the offspring will not be large enough to fit through the pelvis. We are not sure if this is what the natural progression of their child bearing is supposed to look like.

Day - 50 we have been doing some tests on our creatures and have found a few interesting things. Their senses are far superior to our own. We once thought that their eyes would be adapted to hunting and racking movement, and while that is true in low light situations, they actually have very sharp sense of binocular vision, and are very competent at guessing distances. They seem to be a primary visual creature, and we assume that their vision is even better than ours. There is some evidence that they can even see somewhat in the dark, though based on our examination of their behavior they are primarily a daytime animal.

Day - 61 We think that they can hear us talking outside the enclosure. In fact, we think they have a very sensitive set of hearing organs. They often behave in ways that make us think they might be able to hear us. They always seem to know when we are coming into the enclosure to feed them. They tend to stand very close and watch us very carefully. We are worried that they might attack, but so far they have not. The most disconcerting is the large male and the smaller female. The way they watch some of our handlers unnerves them, and I am going to have to hire new hands to help with this project

Day 70 - They can use tools! It is an exciting and amazing discovery. But just the other day we say them begin to make things using strips of their own not-skin and some branches. They have tied rocks together and are even using them to smash up bits of food. Their hands seem very capable of doing such things as they are actually quite delicate in their movements. Each diget can be controlled to the finest degree and the rotational movement of their wrist implies extreme dexterity. Many of us think that this leaves them on a path towards sentience. Our scientists estimate that they have the intellectual capabilities of a five-year-old child.

Day 90 - great progress has been made! The creatures extreme vocalizations has added to their advantage, in that we have taught them how to speak! The sentences are very rudimentary of course, like a child, but they can ask for food, help, and express their displeasure. However, the problem is, they seem to have discovered greater words of displeasure from the people observing them and have taken to yelling rude slurs at the attraction goers. We think they like getting a reaction. They are very aggressive, and are becoming more so as the days go by. We worry about their health.

Day 100 - two of the large males got into a fight yesterday. We assume it was over mating rites with the remaining female, though that is only a theory. The way the creatures fight is very strange, they ball their hands into fists and then hit each other like using a club. Sometimes they use the hard bony ends of their elbows, or the tips of their knees. A few times they even used their legs to strike at the other. The feat of balance was quite amazing and the power generated from blows like that was scary. Visitors were urged away from the enclosure when wounds started appearing. Both males were covered in blood. We had gone to sedate them but by the time we came back the fight was over and the two males were sitting with each other at the edge of the pool washing their wounds. We think they find the water soothing, though we worry about sickness or infection.

Day 140 - We cannot get to them, overnight and out of sight of our keepers they have constructed a sort of den or nest surrounded by thick leaves and tree bark. There is no way to see in, and there is no way to dart one of these creatures while on the inside. We have been to get them while they are out in the open, but they always hear when the enclosure or the windows open and have taken to carrying around large shields made of leaves and branches. None of our darts have made it through sticking uselessly into branches. We worry greatly considering the female is coming closer and closer to her delivery day.

Day 170 - We have a plan for sedation, though it will require an enforcement team armed with the tranquilizer guns to preform it. We are worried about the female and the offspring, which we intend to rear by hand. We have no idea how the other larger humans are going to react when the smaller human is brought into the enclosure. They could kill it. We do not want this happening, and besides, we think this creature could be very docile if hand raised by us.

Day 181 - The mother went into labor last night, and we were called in by one of the zookeepers. We have to act very fast and are assembling a team. We are worried she might die as the sounds coming from the enclosure has caused us to close down the entire zoo. She seems to be in great pain as we have never heard a creature make that sound before. All of the creatures seem agitated as well, those who are not in the enclosure with them are pacing around outside. They seem very nervous.

The team has been assembled and it has been quiet for some minute except for a distant squalling. The large ales and other creatures are encircling the little habitat as if curious. We are worried the large males will find this as a sign ofweakness and attack.

Day 182 - please help us. We went into the enclosure as we had assumed with hour weapons ready to take the little offspring away to safer area for cleaning, however as soon as we got close to the den, the creatures attacked. We did not see them camouflaged in the leaves, and they seemed to erupt out of nowhere. Our leader was violently bludgeoned with a rock, and another was strangled manually by the small female. Each one of them was violently killed.

Two of our team managed to make it to the door of the den but as they did, the still blood covered female leaped outward and attacked screaming. She was the most violent out of all of them and practically ripped the limbs off two of our men before killing them. Protecting her young.

The large male carried the sleeping creature fin his arms as the female searched around for any more survivors. There were none and the door had been left open. One of our valiant men tried to go and close it, but he was murdered as the door was flung open crushing him against the back wall. The child was handed back to the mother and now they are hunting about the zoo in a pack. I have locked myself in this room hoping they will not find me, but even now I can hear a rattling outside the door.

Day of freedom - Hello you slimy bastards. Didn’t think you could talk did you. Either way you better hope we get back to our home planet, otherwise we will take this one for ourselves and make you suffer till your bones bleach dry under and unforgiving sun.

A little bit melodramatic there at the end I know, but I have spent far to long with humans, and I understand that they would probably be just as dramatic as I am making it sound. Also, I just realized that I technically just wrote some fiction, which means the humans are definitely rubbing off on me

#humans are space orcs #HUMANS ARE WEIRD #humans are insane #humans are space australians #humans are space oddities #earth is a deathworld #Earth is space Ausralia

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eretzyisrael · 4 years ago

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Antisemitism and the Jewish State

Jews have always been in the minority in their temporary diasporic homes, and so they have usually been at the mercy of antisemites. If at a given time and place they are not actively persecuted, the possibility of persecution always remains, as European and even American Jews are rediscovering today. The commandment to keep one’s suitcase packed is no less apt today than in previous centuries.

Despite the heartwarming (but illusory) feeling of a worldwide solidarity of good people engendered by Yair Lapid’s recent remarks that antisemitism is just a particular form of a much more general collection of religious, ethnic, racial (etc.) hatreds that all those of good will should decry, the pervasiveness of antisemitism over the millennia and its shape-shifting nature show that it is indeed sui generis, unique. And we learned from the Holocaust that the Jewish people ultimately must stand alone against it.

Early Zionists like Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, A. D. Gordon, and of course Theodor Herzl thought that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty would remove much of the basis for antisemitism, by ending the parasitic economic life of diaspora Jews and restoring to them their self-respect as productive beings. The world had forgotten that the Jews had a homeland and saw them only as a people who belonged nowhere, and who were permanently aliens no matter how long they lived in a particular place. Of course the Jews themselves never forgot, but that only added to their foreign and exotic nature in the eyes of their hosts.

Gordon thought that through the labor involved in the creation of a self-sufficient state, the Jewish people could be fundamentally changed. With the removal of the restrictions of the diaspora, Jews could now engage in truly productive work, especially agriculture, which would create a “new Jew,” a strong, self-reliant one, different from the cringing targets of diasporic pogroms. A Jew that for once knew how to defend himself! The socialist kibbutz movements that actualized Gordon’s program did in fact create such a Jew (although the loss of Jewish tradition and spiritual motivation that followed did not serve the state well. But that’s another story). Once the Jews became an “ordinary” people, with an ordinary homeland containing Jewish police and Jewish prostitutes, it was expected that antisemitism would die out.

Today Israel has plenty of both police and prostitutes. But antisemitism did not die with the reestablishment of a sovereign Jewish state. It simply mutated, and today its virulent “Delta Variant” is the extreme, irrational, obsessive hatred of the Jewish state that I’ve called misoziony. Hand in hand with traditional religious, racial, and political antisemitism, misoziony became a useful tool for Islamic dictatorships and other anti-Western forces. In particular, the Soviet Union invested a great deal of ingenuity employing it as a tool to develop an anti-American (and of course anti-Israel) bloc in the UN. Today, various forms of antisemitism permeate the world.

Imagine that it were possible to assemble Bogdan Chmielnicki, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Louis Farrakhan, Ismail Haniyeh, Jeremy Corbyn, Rashida Tlaib, Lara Friedman, and Gideon Levy in one room. Antisemites all, albeit of greater or lesser import. They would agree about very little except the vileness of the Jewish people. Their followers and their ideas are everywhere; the initial impetus by the KGB in the 1960s and 70s set fire to the latent Jew-hatred whose overt manifestation today is so shocking to those who don’t know the history of the Jewish people.

Most initiatives to “fight antisemitism” rely on some form of educational enterprise. These are doomed to fail, especially “Holocaust education,” which is intended to make people behave better toward Jews by making them feel sorry for them. Psychologically, this has the opposite effect, causing subjects to distance themselves from Jews. Antisemites respond that the Holocaust is either a Jewish lie, or if it did happen, it was because Jewish behavior precipitated it, and they are encouraged by Hitler’s partial success and want to finish the job. They add that Jews are like Nazis. Misozionists insist absurdly that their “criticism of Israel” is different from antisemitism rather than a mutant form of it. They too add that Israelis are like Nazis.

Misozionists will also say that the existence of the state is the whole problem. If Israel didn’t exist, there would be no conflict, no terrorism, no hatred. I point to the entire history of the Jewish people prior to 1948 as a counterexample.

One thing that has been learned is that Jews cannot end antisemitism by improving themselves, either by involvement in “social justice” activities to help other oppressed groups (many of whose members don’t like Jews much anyway), or by becoming “new Jews” who drive tractors and milk cows rather than lending money.

Bari Weiss wrote a book called “How to fight Antisemitism.” I liked the book, but the title is a poor one. The enemy is not “antisemitism;” it is antisemites. There is only one way to “fight antisemitism” and that is to instill enough respect for – and fear of – Jewish power in antisemites to deter them from their anti-Jewish activities. The ideology can die out on its own (or not, we don’t care). The real enemy is not an abstract ideology, but concrete and specific: we and they know who they are.

And that is why a Jewish state, even though the fact of its existence does not itself prevent antisemitism, is invaluable in ending it. A stateless people is a powerless one, and the use of power is the best remedy for Jew-hatred. The Jewish state has bombed nuclear reactors in enemy countries, and Israel’s covert services have arrested or killed terrorists all over the world. Jewish police protect Jews in Israel from terrorism, and Jewish diplomacy, backed by military and economic power, can defend them in the diaspora. Ultimately, persecuted Jews can go to the Jewish state; indeed, Israel has preemptively rescued Jewish populations in danger in places like Ethiopia and Yemen.

If there is a problem, it is that too many Israelis have forgotten Jewish history and even the history of their state. They think that now we are a “normal” people in a “normal” state, and so we can relax and live normal lives. We aren’t and we can’t. Our state has a unique responsibility: to protect and nurture our people in a hostile world.

Abu Yehuda

#Israel #Jew Hatred #The Diaspora #Zionism

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generalchelseamayhem · 4 years ago

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Old Arguments: Feminism Helps Men Too

It's like this.

Imagine, if you aren't actually, that you're a woman. A left-leaning one.

I would guess that you probably don't like religious fundamentalism, because religious fundamentalists of many kinds are known for their regressive attitude towards women's rights, and maybe you've even spent some fraction of your life breaking away from religious doctrine so that you may live your life more freely.

Now, imagine that you encounter a well-established atheist group. They've been fighting the influence of religious fundamentalism on society at large for years or even decades at this point, noting the many general and specific ways by which they suppress various human rights and freedoms. Obviously, a regressive attitude towards women's rights would be part of that, though it wouldn't be their only complaint.

With me so far?

So in that situation you might say something like "I think the danger to women's rights posed by religious fundamentalism merits a dedicated feminist movement to combat their influence."

How would you feel if, at that point, the atheists turned around and said "Nah, we don't need feminism for this, we already have atheism. We've been fighting this battle for years, and when we finally achieve our goals, it will have the additional effect of benefitting women's rights anyway. Why don't you just come and join atheism instead?"

I would imagine that you would find this a wholly unsatisfactory answer to your problems. The way you prioritize social issues in your brain cannot allow it to be satisfactory. You came into this issue prioritizing the rights and freedoms of women. Would you really be okay with fighting for that cause on someone else's terms? Would you be satisfied with knowing that a victory for atheism is a victory for feminism by tangential association?

I would imagine the answer is "no". With whatever degree of emphasis you choose to add to it.

Now apply this line of thinking to men's rights.

For years we have been told "feminism helps men too!" followed by incredulous and scornful dismissal when somehow the idea that feminism fights for men, so you might as well be a feminist, doesn't happen to resonate with us as well as expected. The go-to follow-up argument is usually something like "Well, obviously they were just right wing trolls who didn't REALLY care about men's rights. If they did they would have just embraced feminism like we told them to."

As I hope I have just demonstrated, that's not at all how it works. You would not accept a social movement for something that happened to tangentially benefit women as a whole replacement for feminism. You want a social movement that you can engage with on your own terms and prioritizing the causes that you want to fight for. It should not come as any great surprise that we do too.

Men need a men's rights movement. One that they can engage with without kowtowing to the needs of another group. One that prioritizes the needs and issues of men without qualification. It's as simple as that.

I have heard many, many arguments over the years for why MRAs shouldn't exist. With the exception of the thoroughly disproven and largely deprecated "Men don't have real problems!" argument, they are almost all preoccupied with how an MRM has been implemented in the worst ways, then use that to justify why an MRM doesn't need to exist at all. Which, again, is not how it works. If feminism, god forbid, was so badly implemented as to cause more overall harm than good, that wouldn't magically stop women's rights from mattering. Neither for men.

This may come across as a cynical read, but I think people whose response to the subject of men's issues is "feminism helps men too!" are on some level afraid of losing control of the discourse. Making all men who are concerned about men's issues into feminists would be a convenient way of dictating when and how they talk about their own issues - after all, men's issues are not the priority of feminism, they will just happen to be an incidental beneficiary of all the really important work. If you toe the atheist line and campaign against teaching creationism in publically funded schools like we asked you to, maybe one day everybody will stop seeing virginity as a measure of a woman's worth before marriage. I know that doesn't sound like it follows, but it does, trust me.

I guess I understand that fear on some level. If my time in the MRM has taught me anything it's that men, especially angry, marginalized, mentally ill, or overlooked men, do not always express themselves in ways that women are used to or comfortable with. Giving those men a dedicated movement to talk about problems with their own voices must seem like a nightmare for some. But no social progress will be made by telling you all you want to hear, and neither by you pretending that what you don't want to hear doesn't exist.

#MRA #MRM #men's issues #feminism #rant #worldview #social justice

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canmom · 3 years ago

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but yeah to possibly state the obvious: live action and animation have different strengths, it's not actually that one is superior and should subsume the other ofc. live action allows you to capture a certain subtlety of performances, tiny facial movements and gestures, that even the most naturalistic character animators would struggle to achieve. human bodies are so intricate and complex that even realist animation (the tradition of takahata and kon) must make simplifications for the sake of comprehensibility to both artist and audience.

animation meanwhile has a sense of clarity and a certain kind of force that can come from the interplay between the artists' ambitions and their practical limitations.

like, it's not that everything is totally under the top down control of an individual artist's grand vision, because animation is still the product of a whole unwieldy social machinery, and a lot of the process of creating animation is an evolving dialogue between the vague idea you have, your references, the material you've already created, and the actual physical motion of your hand putting down lines. when you set out to create an animation, you don't know what it will look like at the end any more than the director of a live action film knows for sure how their shots will turn out.

you draw a line and you think, does that look right? "yes", or "no i'll erase it", or "almost, and i'll just tweak this bit". the moment when you hit play and your character comes alive is still magical, not despite but because you've watched the whole process of creating it 'from inside'. this is especially true in the fact that animation is always in all processes i've seen a process of gradual refinement, from storyboard through rough animation, tiedown, cleanup, ink and paint... you're never just directly 'downloading' images from your head onto the screen. you can visualise the scene, and you might feel it's cooler than what you're able to create, but what other people see is going to be squeezed through that process.

if you get obsessed with the history of animation the way I've been doing the last year and a half, what you see is a process of development, cross-pollination and inspiration. the influential animators like Yoshinori Kanada or Ichirō Itano will open up new routes for iteration, and gradually the collective effort reaches places that people couldn't have imagined before, people discover new ways to apply the poses and ways of drawing shapes and lines and ways of composing scenes and physical technologies like the multiplane camera or 2D-in-3D. it's a process of gradual exploration, like a biological organism evolving. each film is a statement in itself but also hopefully, through the impacts it has on current and future animators, a stepping stone to something that wouldn't have been possible before.

of course the same is absolutely true for live action film. I think the reason i'm so specifically obsessed with animation though is that it necessarily kind of foregrounds the techniques it's employing instead of even being able to try to have the filmmaker and role of the camera disappear. (not that it stopped old Walter Dismey from applying his resources to try, or modern CGI effects animators for putting realism as the highest goal.) also maybe it's more accessible to my jank autistic brain which doesn't find it so easy to see those little subtleties of acting lol.

but yeah, so much of the work animation is trying to push against stuff that is trivial in a live action film. even a 'bad' actor always has weight and balance, always eases in and out in a physically realistic way, cannot help but blink and twitch and look like a living being; with animation we really have to struggle to get that moment where our brain stops thinking 'that's a drawing' and starts thinking of it as real physical lifeform, and even then it always carries the traces of that process of creation. something about that just fascinates me more and more... this is why I love the work of Shinya Ohira so much

anyway I do nevertheless want to get more into live action film, even if my calling's going to still be animation lol. (just look at Naoko Yamada to see how animators can adopt the language of live action to greater expressive effect. i want to enjoy films but also i want that sorcerous power.) i'm planning to at some point soon retire Toku Tuesday in favour of a general international film night, because running a weekly movie night turns out to be a really good way to teach yourself about films as well as just a fun thing to do lol.

#animation

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a-room-of-my-own · 5 years ago

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Have you read "An Apology to JK Rowling" by Petra Bueskens on Areo? I'm pathetically grateful to read something so clever and well articulated on the subject after the amount of abuse JK has been subjected to

It's a great piece so here it is, thank you anon!

Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor. Rowling outlines why the biological and legal category of sex is important: in sports, in rape crisis shelters, in prisons, in toilets and changing rooms, for lesbians who want to sleep with natal women only and at the level of reality in general. Rowling marshals her experiences as an androgynous girl, as a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and as someone familiar with the emotional perils of social media, in ways that have resonated with many women (and men). Her writing is clear, unpretentious, thoughtful, moving, vulnerable and honest. At no point does she use exclusionary or hostile language or say that trans women do not exist, have no right to exist or that she wants to rob them of their rights. Her position is that natal women exist and have a right to limit access to their political and personal spaces. Period.

Of course, to assume that her missive would be engaged with in the spirit in which it was intended, is to make the mistake of imagining that the identitarian left is broadly committed to secular, rational discourse. It is not. Its activist component has transmogrified into a religious movement, which brooks no opposition and no discussion. You must agree with every tenet or else you’re a racist, sexist, transphobic bigot, etc. Because its followers are fanatics, Rowling is being subjected to an extraordinary level of abuse. There seems to be no cognitive dissonance among those who accuse her of insensitivity and then proceed to call her a cunt, bitch or hag and insist that they want to assault and even kill her (see this compilation of tweets on Medium). She has been accused of ruining childhoods. Some even claim that the actor Daniel Radcliffe wrote the Harry Potter books—reality has become optional for some of these identitarians. Rowling’s age, menstrual status and vagina come in for particularly nasty attention and many trans women (or those masquerading as such) write of wanting to sexually assault her with lady cock, as a punishment for speaking out. I haven’t seen misogyny like this since Julia Gillard became our prime minister.

The Balkanisation of culture into silos of unreason means that the responses have not followed what might be loosely called the pre-digital rules of discourse. These rules assume that the purpose of public debate is to discern truth and that interlocutors on opposing sides—a reductionist bifurcation, because, in fact, there are many sides—engage in argument because they are interested in something higher than themselves: an ideal of truth, no matter how complicated, multifaceted and evolving. While in-group preferences and biases are inevitable, these exist within an overarching deliberative framework. This style of dialogue assumes the validity of a persuasive argument grounded in reason and evidence, even if—as Rowling does—it also utilises experience and feeling. By default, it assumes that civil conflict and opposition are essential devices in the pursuit of truth.

Three decades of postmodernism and ten years of Twitter have destroyed these conventions and, together with them, the shared norms by which we create and sustain social consensus. There is no grounding metanarrative, there are no binding norms of civil discourse in the digital age. Indeed, as Jaron Lanier shows with his bummer paradigm (Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent) social media is destroying the fabric of our personal and political lives (although, with a different business model and more robust regulation, it need not do so). The algorithm searching for and recording your every click, like and share, your every purchase, search term, conversation, movement, facial expression, social connection and preference rewards engagement above all else—which means that your feed—an aptly infantile descriptor—will quickly become full of the things you and others like you are most likely to be motivated to click, like and share. Outrage is a more effective mechanism through which to foster engagement than almost anything else. In Lanier’s terms, this produces a “menagerie of wraiths”—a bunch of digitised dementors: fake and bad actors, paid troll armies and dyspeptic bots—designed to confect mob outrage.

The norms of civil discourse are being eroded, as we increasingly inhabit individualised media ecosystems, designed to addict, distract, absorb, outrage, manipulate and incite us. These internecine culture wars damage us all. As Lanier notes, social media is biased “not towards the left or right but downwards.” As a result, we are witnessing a catastrophic decline in the standards of our democratic institutions and discourse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary culture wars around the trans question, where confected outrage is the norm.

This is why the furore over Rowling’s blog post misses the point: whether we agree with her or not, the problem is the collapse of our capacity to disagree constructively. If you deal primarily in subjective experience and impulse-driven reaction, under the assumption that you occupy the undisputed moral high ground, and you’ve been incited by fake news and want to signal your allegiances to your social media friends, then you can’t engage in rational discussion with your opponent. Your stock in trade will be unsubstantiated accusations and social shaming.

In this discombobulating universe, sex-based rights are turned into insults against trans people. Gender-critical feminists are recast as immoral bigots, engaged in deliberately hurtful, even life-threatening, speech. Rowling is not who we thought she was, her ex-fans wail, her characters and plots conceal hidden reservoirs of homophobia and bigotry. A few grandstanders attempt to distinguish themselves by saying that they have always been able to smell a rat—no, not Scabbers—and therefore hated the books from the outset. Nowhere amid this morass of moral grandstanding and outrage is there any serious engagement with her ideas.

Those of us on the left—and left-wing feminists in particular—who find trans ideology fraught, for all the reasons Rowling outlines, are a very small group. While Rowling is clearly privileged, she has also become the figurehead of a rapidly dwindling and increasingly vilified group of feminists, pejoratively labelled terfs, who want to preserve women’s sex-based rights and spaces. Although our arguments align with centrist, conservative and common sense positions, ours is not the prevailing view in academia, public service or the media, arts and culture industries, where we are most likely to be located (when we are not at home with our children). In most of these workplaces, a sex-based rights position is defined a priori as bigoted, indeed as hate speech. It can get us fired, attacked, socially ostracised and even assaulted.

As leftist thinkers who believe in freedom of speech and thought, who find creeping ideological and bureaucratic control alarming, we are horrified by these increasingly vicious denunciations by the left. The centre right and libertarians—the neo-cons, post-liberals and the IDW—are invariably smug about how funny it is to watch the left eat itself. But it’s true: some progressive circles are now defined by a call out/cancel culture to rival that of the most repressive of totalitarian states. Historically, it was progressives who fought against limits on freedom of speech and action. But the digital–identitarian left split off from the old print-based left some time ago, and has become its own beast. A contingent of us are deeply critical of these new directions.

Only a few on the left have had the gumption to speak up for us. Few have even defended our right to express our opinions. Those who have spoken out include former media darlings Germaine Greer and Michael Leunig. Many reader comments on left-leaning news sites claim that Rowling is to blame for the ill treatment she is suffering. Rowling can bask in the consequences of her free speech, they claim, as if having a different opinion from the woke majority means that she is no longer entitled to respect, and that any and all abuse is warranted—or, at least, to be expected. Where is the outrage on her behalf? Where are the writers, film makers, actors and artists defending her right to speak her mind?

Of course, the actors from the Harry Potter films are under no obligation to agree with JK Rowling just because she made them famous. They don’t owe her their ideological fealty: but they owe her better forms of disagreement. When Daniel Radcliffe repeats the nonsensical chant trans women are women, he’s not developing an argument, he’s reciting a mantra. When he invokes experts, who supposedly know more about the subject than Rowling, he betrays his ignorance of how contested the topic of transgender medicine actually is: for example, within endocrinology, paediatrics, psychiatry, sociology, and psychology (the controversies within the latter discipline have been demonstrated by the numerous recent resignations from the prestigious Tavistock and Portman gender identity clinic). The experts are a long way from consensus in what remains a politically fraught field.

Trans women are women is not an engaged reply. It is a mere arrangement of words, which presupposes a faith that cannot be questioned. To question it, we are told, causes harm—an assertion that transforms discussion into a thought crime. If questioning this orthodoxy is tantamount to abuse, then feminists and other dissenters have been gaslit out of the discussion before they can even enter it. This is especially pernicious because feminists in the west have been fighting patriarchy for several hundred years and we do not intend our cause to be derailed at the eleventh hour by an infinitesimal number of natal males, who have decided that they are women. Now, we are told, trans women are women, but natal females are menstruators. I can’t imagine what the suffragists would have made of this patently absurd turn of events.

There has been a cacophony of apologies to the trans community for Rowling’s apparently tendentious and hate-filled words. But no one has paused to apologise to Rowling for the torrent of abuse she has suffered and for being mischaracterised so profoundly.

So, I’m sorry, JK Rowling. I’m sorry that you will not receive the respectful disagreement you deserve: disagreement with your ideas not your person, disagreement with your politics, rather than accusations of wrongspeak. I’m sorry that schools, publishing staff and fan clubs are now cancelling you. And I’m sorry that you will be punished—because cancel culture is all about punishment. I’m sorry that you are being burned at the digital stake for expressing an opinion that goes against the grain.

But remember this, JK—however counterintuitive this may seem to progressives, whose natural home is on the fringe—most people are looking on incredulously at the disconnect between culture and reality. Despite raucous protestations to the contrary, you are on the right side of history—not just because of the points you make, but because of how you make them.

#Jkr #Team jkr

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talkingwoman · 3 years ago

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Fatal Attractions

The sudden reappearance of posts from the notorious Effie on my dashboard reminds me, not for the first time, that it is often very difficult to accept the possibility of unsavory and unbecoming behaviors from the men we have chosen to idolize. To some, the Effie accusations are a dishonest attempt to spoil the image of Armie Hammer and exploit the MeToo movement to personal advantage. As a diehard Armie fan and an unabashed feminist, I have come to suspect (I obviously cannot know the truth one way or the other) a more nuanced version of the relationship between these two individuals. Yes, I believe it is incontrovertible that Effie and Armie had a sexual relationship that endured for some substantial length of time. The responses of Armie’s attorney tacitly concede as much, threatening to use Effie’s own posts to Armie, which he, not she, provided to the legal team to document this unpleasant reality. Do I accept the allegations of abuse and actual rape? Much harder to discern, since consent is a central issue to that question. Armie and Effie differ on the consent issue, rendering the case a variant on the “he said, she said” model of sexual abuse cases. Absent recordings, videos, and/or corroborating witnesses to the encounters, it is impossible to judge factual accuracy to a legal, moral, or ethical certainty.

All of this said, two things seem obvious to me. First, (sadly) there is abundant circumstantial evidence that Armie is an adulterous husband, a serial philanderer, and a manipulative sexual partner. The stories his acknowledged ex-girlfriends tell are remarkably similar in their unwitting descriptions of predatory behaviors. I say unwitting because I very much doubt that these women have collaborated about and/or researched sexual practices or persuasive techniques that Armie introduced them to. Paige L didn’t even know what the term sadomasochist meant when Armie described himself as one; she said she thought it might be something like a Scientologist. We need to note that he sought out these women, following them on social media (a predator’s dream hunting ground) and arranging assignations based on those contacts. The repetition of this pattern bespeaks predation, a seeking of partners to overwhelm with attention and affection, groom, and ultimately persuade to submit to whatever acts the pursuer desires. There are websites, private clubs, even neighborhood groups that offer potential partners for any type of sexual activity imaginable. These cases, Courtney, Jennifer, Paige, et al, speak to a different dynamic, where the “wooing” of a partner into submitting to practices he/she is unwilling to or unfamiliar with, is a major appeal.

Secondly, it seems clear that unlike the post-separation liaisons that Armie had in very public ways, the relationship with Effie was more long-term, if sporadic. My personal hunch is that Effie believed her relationship with Armie was real and of great importance. When he separated from Elizabeth, she may well have thought that at last their relationship could be pursued publicly and with greater intensity than before. We have all seen this story in fiction and in real-life many times. For film buffs, think Play Misty for Me or Fatal Attraction. For true crime fans, think Jodie Arias. The cases are apt comparisons; a woman believes a sexual relationship is more important than her partner does, and when faced with potential or actual destruction of her dreams, her obsession leads her to commit physically or emotionally violent actions. It’s plausible to me that this woman, facing rejection by her idolized fuck-buddy, decided to blow the whole thing up, and proceeded to do so. That other women would come forward to share similar experiences was the unanticipated corroboration that brought calamity to Armie’s personal life and in all likelihood effectively ended his career as an actor. My guess is that neither Armie nor Effie anticipated the swift progression of events. What’s that old adage? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yeah, that about sums it up.

Am I sad and depressed about this analysis and chain of events? Damn straight. It is such a profligate waste. A sad and sorry mess for all, including adoring fans like me. Love you always, Armie. Find the help and strength you need to get healthy and happy once again.

#@694699 @onlyastoryteller @alittlefrenchtree @sometimes-jael

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mrs-nate-humphrey · 4 years ago

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So not to be dramatic, but if you could get a degree in discourse-ology, the topic of my master’s thesis would definitely be “Which political candidates did the characters of the CW’s Gossip Girl (2007-2012) support?” I’m doing this in order from most to least obvious, and considering both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

[ little ivy interjection here: i haven’t changed ANYTHING, except adding a screencap of the title + the submission, because that made me laugh & more people deserve to see it, and putting this under a read more because that’s how i generally try & organise stuff on this blog. so this submission is exactly as it was when i received it! also while we’re at it, anon, this MADE my day.]

Blair Waldorf: “Hillary Clinton is one of my role models. I do not break treaties, you ass!” (04x13) There’s no question that Blair would go hard for Hillary in 2016, she praised her on multiple occasions throughout the series. Blair’s a classic American neoliberal, third wave Democrat-type: she’s decently progressive when it comes to social policies, and would be decidedly supportive of causes like gay marriage, racial equity, and women’s reproductive rights, but she’s still very much in favor of maintaining the status quo when it comes to capitalism and the hegemonic structure of power that, lets face it, heavily favors her own class interests. To use the American healthcare system as an example: Blair would have been all for the Affordable Care Act, and is largely supportive of the idea of creating a public option - but single payer, nationalized health care? It just wouldn't work in a country like the United States for “X” reason (although the real reason, deep down, is that she doesn’t want to see her tax rate go up in any meaningful way). So she’s thoroughly for Clinton in both the 2016 primaries and the general election, she maybe even comes out with a line of high-end “I’m With Her” merchandise if she’s still CEO of Waldorf Designs, and is personally heartbroken when Clinton loses.

Flash forward to the 2020 primaries. Blairhates Donald Trump, like emotionally, viscerally hates him - his misogyny, his incompetence, and his blatant tackiness are a direct repudiation of her beliefs, and the fact that he’s representing Manhattan society and the Upper East Side to the world in such a godawful way is frankly embarrassing. So in a certain sense, her strategy, like frankly many Americans at the time going into the 2020 Democratic primaries is, “Which one of these candidates has the greatest chance at beating Donald Trump?” I see Blair being rather conflicted at first, but ultimately going for either Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris. She has a certain admiration for Elizabeth Warren given her professional background, but her policies are a bit too progressive for someone like Blair. Buttigeg is fine, but not especially thrilling. Biden, quite frankly, doesn’t seem like he has any real chance at winning, although I think he’d be Blair’s third choice after Harris and Klobuchar. I can see her leaning more towards Harris ultimately - although, after the “Amy Klobuchar throws staplers at her interns!!” rumors start spreading, Blair cannot help but, at a personal level, kind of respect her for that. When Biden unexpectedly takes South Carolina and then the Democratic nomination, Blair is a bit disappointed, but not overly so, and quickly marshals her financial resources into supporting and fundraising for him for the remainder of the election. At least it’s not Sanders - or Bloomberg. As a New Yorker, of course Blair’s opinion is “Fuck Michael Bloomberg”.

Chuck Bass: Now here’s where it gets interesting. Chuck, as you said, isn’t stupid - there’s no way he falls for the “build the wall” crap or any of Trump’s rhetoric, he knows it’s a bullshit farce and sees right through it. But you know what he definitely is? Deeply greedy and deeply selfish. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but Chuck Bass is, in many ways, the fictional equivalent of the Donald Trumps and Michael Bloombergs and Brett Kavanaughs of the world - new money billionaire who inherited his wealth from his father working in the real estate industry, who despite his lack of business acumen and deeply problematic history with women, has managed to coast through life failing upwards with absolutely no social or legal accountability? I mean, back in 2010, Forbes Magazine actually did a real interview with the fictional Chuck Bass in which they outright compare him to Donald Trump. I couldn’t tell you if the Gossip Girl writers meant to write Chuck as their Trump analogue - I mean, they did invite Jared and Ivanka onto the show, after all - but the parallels are just too strong to ignore. All of which is to say, not only did Chuck Bass vote for Donald Trump, he held exclusive political fundraisers for him and was probably a substantial donor to his campaign. Now, did Chuck distance himself publicly over time as the political climate became increasingly caustic and public sentiment towards Trump plummeted even further? Perhaps, perhaps not. It really depends on if the board of Bass Industries felt like being connected to Trump was a liability or an asset - but privately, I imagine Chuck once again voted for him in 2020, because the one policy Donald Trump did effectively execute during his tenure in office was massive tax cuts for billionaires, and for someone like Chuck Bass, that’s the only political policy that really matters. He wouldn’t wear a red hat and wouldn’t be caught dead within sniffing distance of a MAGA rally and the hoi polloi, but dude is basically the image of what the kind of rich conservatives backing the Trump administration for personal gain look like. On the off chance that the distastefulness of it all got to be a little much for even Chuck post-2016, perhaps he might switch his vote to Bloomberg. But I highly doubt Chuck would be politically invested in anything other than his own wallet to such an extent that he wouldn’t vote for Trump, no matter how much it would no doubt completely infuriate Blair.

Dan Humphrey: As the unofficial king of the hipsters, Dan has been a Sanders supporter since before it was cool. Seriously, Bernie Sanders appeals to Dan intrinsically on every level - his policies, his rhetoric, even his aesthetic - the rumpled old man with wild hair wearing mittens and railing against the upper class is the sort of thing that’s basically political catnip for someone like Dan Humphrey. Not only would Dan vote for Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries, he’d go out and be one of the celebrities campaigning for him. This would definitely lead to him butting heads with Blair, and she would no doubt call him out on supporting someone like Sanders when Dan himself is now a millionaire, who made his money from writing stories about the upper class. The fact that in 2017 he apparently gets married to Serena, a billionaire heiress, and may or may not have been engaged to her back in 2016 when the Democratic primaries were happening might cause him a bit of cognitive dissonance, but really, just because he’s climbed up the socio-economic ladder now doesn’t mean his values have really changed, have they? (Debatable.) In any case, in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections, Dan would definitely vote for Clinton and Biden respectively - although he’d be significantly more disgruntled about it than Blair would be switching from Harris to Biden. I don’t think Dan would be a “Bernie bro” in the way that term is used, but he’d definitely chafe against Clinton’s past policy decisions, and would probably make some snippy Tweets about her during the election. Nevertheless, once it became clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee and was a serious threat, I think Dan would change his tone and start encouraging his fans and followers to vote for Clinton. Likewise, in 2020, Dan would probably become one of the Sanders supporters doing outreach for Biden, having become more politically pragmatic following the experience of living under the Trump administration.

Vanessa Abrams: Much like Dan, Vanessa is a progressive, although unlike Dan, Vanessa’s activism is more focused around specific issues and less around specific politicians. I can see Dan and Vanessa being in roughly the same place in 2016, and given that the only real choices were between Sanders and Clinton in the primaries (RIP to Martin O'Malley), Vanessa would no doubt go for Sanders. Whereas Dan might campaign for Sanders directly however, Vanessa would instead focus her time and resources around advocacy for specific causes that are important to her, like climate change and racial justice, and would probably use her platform as a filmmaker and documentarian to advance those causes. I could very much see her getting involved with movements like Black Lives Matter and organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and taking part in protests, marches, and sit-ins. When the 2020 Democratic primaries come around, I could see her possibly switching from Sanders to Warren for a while (and Dan would definitely argue with her about it if she did), but I can also see her switching back to Sanders after Warren amended her support for single-payer, “Medicare for All”. She’d definitely vote for Clinton and Biden in the generals, but not enthusiastically.

Nate Archibald: For someone whose family business is politics and who, in 2017, is apparently a candidate in the New York City mayoral election, Nate seems to be rather removed from politics. As Vanessa puts it in 02x19, “The only thing Nate’s ever voted for is American Idol.” Still, as Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator, Nate kind of has to have an opinion, and in that respect, I see him gravitating towards the type of center-left “establishment” candidates that he and his family would no doubt have close ties with. In the Gossip Girl universe, the Vanderbilts are portrayed as being a lot like the Kennedys, and I think Nate’s policies as a mayoral candidate would really reflect that. In 2016, he would vote for Hillary Clinton in both the primaries and the generals without much of a second thought - after all, she’s the obvious choice, and there’s no way a candidate like Donald Trump could actually beat her, right? Actually, optimistically, maybe that’s why Nate decides to jump into the mayoral race in 2017 - previously, he had been for all intents and purposes politically apathetic, but seeing someone as genuinely vile as Donald Trump ascend to the office of the presidency stirs him out of that apathy, and he wants to make a positive difference in the only way an incredibly privileged white man from a politically prominent family knows how. So he runs as a Kennedy-esque center left candidate, further left of someone like Hillary Clinton, but more moderate than someone like Elizabeth Warren - sort of like Kamala Harris, now that I think about it. I have no idea if he would actually be able to beat Bill de Blasio given the major incumbency advantage de Blasio would have, but who knows. Come the 2020 Democratic primaries, I think Nate would probably just vote for whoever he believed was most likely to beat Donald Trump. I don’t see him having any sort of clear preference - maybe he would gravitate towards Biden on the basis of him being the most established candidate, or maybe he would gravitate towards Harris on the basis of her campaigning as the “moderate progressive” candidate. I could also seeing him liking Andrew Yang, come to think of it. In any case, he would most definitely support Joe Biden in the generals. How involved he’d be in supporting him really depends on whether or not Nate actually gets elected to mayor - if he was the mayor, he’d definitely endorse him and probably donate to him, but I think he’d be too wrapped up in his own political responsibilities to really do much more than that. If, however, he lost the election and was still the Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator, I can see Nate getting more involved alongside the rest of his family, officially endorsing him in The Spectator, hosting political fundraisers for him, and maybe even campaigning for him. The Vanderbilts in the Gossip Girl universe (I have no idea what the family’s actual political beliefs are in real life) definitely seem to me like they’d be Biden supporters, and I imagine they’d use their political clout to try and get Biden in, and more importantly, Trump out.

Serena van der Woodsen: Oh Serena. Look, she knows it’s important, okay? It’s just, she’s been really busy lately, and she doesn’t really like to think about politics, and hey, remember that fundraiser she did with her mom for last month’s philanthropic cause du jour? Serena’s a Democrat, vaguely, but if you tried to really pin her down on her political beliefs she’d probably just change the topic. So who does she vote for in 2016? The truth is, she doesn’t. Not in the primaries, not in the general, not at all. She meant to, okay, Blair’s definitely been pestering her to send in her mail-in-ballot for weeks, but she just got distracted and forgot. Serena really strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy thinking or talking about politics, save for perhaps a few specific issues, and she has a sense that everything will work itself out eventually and she doesn’t really need to participate. And then the 2016 election happens, and holy shit, she didn’t vote. Blair and Dan might have spent early 2016 bickering with each other over Clinton versus Sanders, but the one thing they can definitely agree on is “What the fuck, Serena?!?!” They both reminded her like, a million times, how could she possibly forget?! Serena feels really bad about it - she didn’t think it was such a big deal, she didn’t think Donald Trump could actually win! - and so she starts overcompensating whenever the topic of politics comes up, maybe even joins Vanessa at a few protests and marches, even though she’s still sort of clueless about the actual issues at hand. She does vote in the 2018 midterms, although only in the general election - straight blue ticket, all the way down. She takes a picture of herself at the voting booth wearing an “I Voted!” sticker and posts it on Instagram, tagging both Dan and Blair in the post (who already voted weeks ago using mail-in ballots, but it’s the thought that counts). Flash forward to 2020, and she really needs to make a decision about who to vote for in the primaries… but there’s just so many choices. Everything seems so scary and stressful and real in a way now that it didn’t back in 2016, and she can’t just ignore it and assume things will work out for the best like she did back then. So who does she vote for? Well, Serena always wins, so she votes for Biden. Conspiratorially, both Dan and Blair privately wonder if her voting for Biden isn’t on some cosmic level the reason for his unexpected victory, even if they know there’s no logical way that’s possible, right? But it would be such a Serena thing to do… In any case, Serena’s just happy her candidate won, and would probably host political fundraisers for him with her mom’s circle of philanthropic friends. Assuming she and Dan are still married at this point, she offers to help him do political outreach to Sanders supporters to get them to vote for Biden, which he sweetly dissuades her from given that most Sanders supporters would probably dislike her on principle.

So that’s how, in my opinion, the main cast would vote, ordered roughly in how confident I am about that analysis. You could make the argument that perhaps some characters would vote or act differently based on whether or not they’re dating or married at the time - like, would Chuck openly fundraise for Trump when Blair is a dyed-in-the-wool Clinton supporter if they’re married? (He totally would.) But I tried to consider them purely on the merits of their personalities and values, and not on the particularities of their situations at the time (with the exception of Nate, just because him being in office or not would obviously make a huge difference in regards to how politically involved he’s going to be).

I wish I put as much effort into my actual university essays as I did on Gossip Girl political analysis.

#meta #gossip girl #anon you're literally a legend #i cannot believe you submitted this to my little blog when you could've like......#sent it in to vox or something #it's just SO good?#also honestly 'i wish i put as much effort into uni as i did into gg meta' is like #THE BRAND on my blog so #*raises a glass* cheers!#i don't even have words i just think you're objectively correct about ALL of this #gg politics #submission #i am LITERALLY flattered to receive this gem thank you so much?#no no flattered is the wrong word: honoured is better #but i really appreciate it is all

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dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram · 4 years ago

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Good morning/afternoon/evening/night, Ralph. (I think I covered all my time zone bases there). I have been thinking lot lately about all the rhetoric in the fandom about Harry’s health and well-being, and how loud it has felt this year. To be clear, I am not asking for you to weigh in with your own speculations about how Harry is doing, unless you feel comfortable doing so. (I’m not telling you what to do either way, obviously, seeing as I am only a little grey icon in your inbox and have no right or way to demand anything of you.) I’m more looking for guidance or even just your rambling thoughts about what is respectful and appropriate when we’re wondering about a celebrity’s well being, and how you handle your own thoughts and assumptions about this. I feel like over the course of the last year we’ve just been inundated with all this panic and speculation about how Harry is unhappy or unhealthy or otherwise not himself, going all the way back to the Jingle Bell Ball Golden performance. Every time we get any new content there’s a wave of people saying he looks too thin and overworked like he’s not getting enough food or rest, or overweight and out of shape (pick a lane, people), he looks stressed, he looks sad, he looks angry, his eyes have lost their sparkle, his smile is dim, he’s addicted to drugs, he’d addicted to drugs because Jeff is doping him up to keep him going, he’s going to quit music, he’s going to hurt himself, blah blah blah. And the people making these “observations” hide behind the assertion that they’re just worried for his health when they’re faced with any sort of criticism.

This whole ongoing rhetoric feels really…icky? I suppose? to me. I do kind of think he has looked more drawn and intense (“stressed” and “sad”) in the content we’ve gotten this year, but I also think (1) the content we’ve gotten has largely been pap shots and stunt stuff, (2) this year he had to postpone his tour, and we know he loves performing so that must have really sucked, and (3) this year has just been rather shit for all of us, we’re all stressed and sad and scared and frustrated by the larger political and social goings on, and by the ways our own lives are impacted. In the past, the content we’ve gotten where Harry looks the happiest and most at ease has been performance footage or him with his family and loved ones. We haven’t gotten any of that this year. It makes sense that the pictures we do get would feature him looking less than completely relaxed and jubilant. And then there are all the assumptions that he’s lost weight or gained weight and is therefore unhealthy or on drugs or drinking a lot and that just honestly pisses me off. You cannot tell jack shit about a person’s health from their weight, and especially not in random pictures taken at random intervals in random settings. To pretend you can is harmful, and Harry probably won’t see you making these assumptions about his mental and physical health based on the prominence of his cheekbones in a set of pap pics, but friends and strangers who are already struggling with their weight will. And the assertion that someone is dealing with an addiction of any kind (or, god forbid, and I hate even typing this, being subjected to drug use at the hands of someone with power over them) is an allegation that a) you can’t make from one picture and b) has really deep, life altering, tragic and painful and hard consequences for that person and all their loved ones, and deserves more respect and deference than to be treated as something you can just throw out into the great wild beyond and then forget about.

But beyond the fact that people are making hurtful and invasive allegations and assumptions about a real person’s private life based entirely on a very very limited and posed and edited set of content that was hand chosen to be given to us, I think the thing that bothers me the most is it feels like the people who are driving these conversations are doing so because they want something from Harry. It’s never (or rarely, I suppose) “man Harry looks tired in the pictures we’ve gotten lately, I really hope he’s taking care of himself, things have been so hard for us all.” It’s always “Harry has been so withdrawn and sad and angry he’s not communicative with fans and he’s not willing to engage with them when he sees them in public and I miss him. I miss my Harry. I miss happy Harry. I want him back. Give me Harry back.” Which tells me the concern isn’t Harry or Harry’s health, but rather the feeling that Harry owes us something that he hasn’t been giving, and now he must pay up or give us a valid excuse.

Then I do, occasionally though, find myself thinking “am I doing exactly what I’m complaining about? Am I assuming the worst of people based on a limited set of insights into their lives?” And in the wake of the Britney legal battle that has been unfolding recently, I sometimes wonder if maybe as fans we do have kind of a duty to call out celebrities when they seem to be struggling or acting incredibly out of character. Most of the time I follow this up immediately with the thought that I’m not responsible for anyone else’s health and safety, much less that of a 27 year old man I’ve never met and have no connection to beyond liking his music and his face, and I do truly believe that, but there is some part of me that feels uneasy just turning off all my concern, because I am a person who tends to be greatly concerned about everyone, who just wants everyone to be happy and healthy and safe and loved, and who wants to help people feel that way, where and when I can. So I guess what I’m asking, in the incredibly long winded and winding way I ask anyone anything (my poor husband, he gets a novel from me every time I ask what he thinks we should do for dinner) is do you have any of these same feelings and concerns? How do your navigate them? Where do you draw a line? Do you just withdraw completely from this type of speculation? How do you balance being a kind, engaged, empathetic fan with being a respectful, responsible fan who knows their limits? (And man, isn’t that the ultimate question?). Your blog is one I end up on whenever something big happens or a particular conversation pops up, because I’ve found that I really value the way you break things down and are willing to consider them from many perspectives, so I appreciate you even taking the time to read this.

Thanks for your interesting thoughts about Harry anon. I feel like there's a lot to respond to here and I'm going to start by answering the questions your questions - and then I'm going to get distracted and talk about a post I really hated.

I'm always a little bit worried about Harry, and all 1D members. He might be really struggling, that's always a possibility. Harry has lived a very intensely scheduled high workload life since he was 16. He might have had all sorts of responses to the fact that that schedule was removed, or anything else that is happening in his life. But I feel like I'm generally pretty boundaried about those concerns.

I think part of it is because my base line assumption is that boyband members are pretty fucked up. You don't need to know a lot about the history of touring musicians to know that. I think I've said before that if 1D members are eating every day and not doing needle drugs then they're doing better than we have any right to expect (and if they're not eating and are doing needle drugs, then those are coping mechanisms for intense stress and there's no shame in either of them).

I do think it helps with boundaries to be starting from a point that acknowledges how hard it is to be a popstar. I'm all about fantasies of omnipotence and in my day to day life I think I can fix all sorts of things, but I don't think I can make any difference to any 1D member's life.

In addition, I am profoundly affected by having been a fan throughout 2016. We know what it looks like when Louis was going through a horrendous, devastating, trauma - and it looks pretty normal.

None of this means I don't have opinions, or worries, but I am aware that my opinions or worries aren't facts. It's rare that I think that my worries should matter even to people reading my tumblr, let alone other fans in general, and certainly not Harry. You say 'am I doing the same thing as other people assuming the worst about people...', but I'd argue that that's actually not the problem. There's nothing wrong with assuming the worst of people. What is wrong is when fans think their assumptions about a celebrity should matter to anyone else. You don't have to turn off your concern to think that it's not a priority.

I definitely think it would be a very bad thing if people took the moral as the 'free Britney' movement as 'fans should call out celebrities when they think they're struggling'. That sort of surveillance isn't effective or useful. What has been useful for Britney is solidarity in a well documented power struggle, which is a very different thing.

And I can't emphasise enough how important the 'well documented' aspect of this is. What most fan worrying about Harry amounts to is: 'I don't like what he's doing, and there's no way he'd do things I didn't like and therefore there must be something wrong with him'. That's a really controlling way of thinking about people. I really think it's important not to reproduce that abusers logic.

I am pretty well insulated from that sort of discourse from a very well weeded dash. But I saw a post that was mostly about other fandom stuff, that treated assumptions like: "Harry must hate being with Olivia and he's suffering and it's clear he's not happy with his image and his team" as building blocks that you don't even have to argue for (this is the post - and I'm going to come back to one of the things someone said that was even worse in a second).

Lets stop for a minute and imagine that Harry hasn't got a problem pretending to date Olivia, and his main concerns are about the messiness of life and his career at this point in time. It is really fucked up and agressive, and pretty hateful towards Harry, to say 'oh he couldn't possibly want this. It's clear that he hates it.' etc. (I feel like I've been making this argument for years about people who object to Louis doing such things as smoking and not performing middle-class culture for them). When fans trash talk what Harry is doing at the moment, and suggest that believing he could be choosing what he's doing is some how an act of huge disrespect to him, there is every chance they are trash talking him and the choices he's making.

The final thing I want to draw attention to is how often this sort of fan storytelling is combined with a profound lack of interest in what 1D members are actually going through. The tags screen shotted and added on to the post I reblogged actually described Holivia as Douis 2.0. Apparently assuming that there was absolutely no connection between Douis, and Louis and his family's ultimately successful efforts to privacy as Jay was dying. What the fuck is wrong with people that they ignore that, and erase that? There's far more interest in making up 1D members suffering so that fans can continue to tell the stories they want to tell, than actual acknowledgement of what we know that they went through.

Sorry I got distracted. What I'm trying to say is that there's nothing wrong with having feelings about celebrities or telling stories about them. But it's so important to acknoweldge the limits of your knowledge and power, even when fandom discourse encourages the opposite.

#I cannot articulate how angry the tags about Douis made me #not just insisting that they were the same as Holivia #and therefore erasing what was going on for Louis in 2016 #but insisting other people do the same #None of this would be necessary #if people would just be OK with the fact that they were following closeted artists #and therefore those artists would pretend to date women #But instead #so many fans make up suffering to explain 1D members are doing things they don't like #and in the process show contempt for what we know they've been through

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