#but inaction is still a choice it's still a failing politically and morally

[mollysunder]

I know Heimerdinger's Christian Linke's favorite character, and I sort of tolerated it in s1, but now it feels like things are a little too indulgent. Heimerdinger gets to team up with Ekko to launder his reputation through Ekko and the Firelights. Heimerdinger gets the first narrative game and second character teaser in the promotional cycl. Heimerdinger gets to SING A SONG that's included on the s2 Arcane soundtrack (Spin the Wheel).

Maybe I'd be less annoyed if the show at least did more to acknowledge Heimerdinger's failings as a leader, but his character description can't even do that. This is how the official Arcane website describes Heimerdinger:

"Heimerdinger warned the Piltover Council about the dangers of using magic without tangible solutions for safeguarding its use. Learning from his mistakes with Jayce, Heimerdinger inspires Ekko to keep looking for a solution and works with him to solve the problem, instead of just offering advice."

That's not Heimerdinger's main problem! The problem is the fact he's the person most singularly responsible for the state of Zaun and Piltover. It feels like the show and the cast are just dancing around the fact that Heimerdinger technically has the highest body count in the show (Day of Ash, pollution, extreme poverty, etc). The one time someone puts him to task (Jayce), the show makes it seem like Jayce is wrong or overstepped, and yeah he did do it for Viktor's sake, but Jayce was right! Heimerdinger's bad at his job, he shouldn't be in a leadership position if he's a bad leader.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Stormlight Archive Character Thoughts - Moash

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Words of Radiance, and traces Moash’s arc in Oathbringer and Rhythm of War. So, Rhythm of War spoilers!

Moash realizes almost immediately that he’s made the wrong decision, both in terms of what he’s thrown away and who he’s given his trust and loyalty to. He misses Rock’s stew. He misses the companionship of Bridge 4. Graves isn’t as “refined” as he seemed on first acquaintance and doesn’t have any strength of character when the chips are down - a constant reminder, by contrast, of Kaladin, who showed determination and leadership under the worst possible circumstances. Moash hates himself, and is miserable at the thought of the trust and friendship he’s thrown away:

Moash sagged, patch in his fingers. He should throw that thing into the fire.

Storms. He should throw himself into the fire.

(It’s a storming campfire, Mo, you’re not going to be pulling a Maedhros here. You’d just get some burns and make a mess.)

And then the Fused show up and his companions are suddenly dead in an instant. His Shardplate and Shardblade are useless to him. Everything he still had remaining from his choice is gone. And what he has left is his training, from Kaladin. Kaldin’s all over the page here; through the whole fight, Moash is thinking about what he learned from him. And he uses that training to kill a Fused. And then he identifies himself as Bridge Four.

(I think this is part of the reason the hatred for Moash is so strong. Every chapter in this 5-chapter mini-arc ends with a moment that could be the starting point for Moash to turn around, to make better choices. We’re constantly being reminded that the possibility is there, the potential is there. And he never does.)

At this precise point, I think there’s actually a chance that Moash would have made his way back to Bridge Four if the Fused had left him there in the Frostlands, but instead they carry him off to Alethkar. (He’s still thinking about Kaladin. The Kaladin-obsession doesn’t come out of nowhere in ROW, it’s here all along.) He’s also still regretting his choice to betray Bridge Four, and despising himself for it. (Well, Bridge Four had been a special case [in being a place where he found acceptance], and he’d failed that test. And I threw it all away. Why do I always do that?) But he’s not seeing it as a wrong decision, something where his regret can push him to change, to do better. He’s seeing it as a fundamental characteristic of who he is.

The next stage of his downward spiral is generalizing from “I’m just screwed-up and unfixable” to “Humans are just screwed-up and unfixable.) He’s doing it even before he encounters Highlord Paladar: Why must we always take some precious, Guff, and find ourselves hating it? As if by being being pure, it reminds us of just how little we deserve it. But the attitude calcifies with the realization that Alethi social hierarchies have survived even occupation and enslavement: He wasn’t broken. All of them were broken. Alethi society - lighteyed and dark. Maybe all of humankind.

This is not, at its heart, a political realization. It’s personal and emotional: when you’ve already decided you’re an inherently broken, contemptible person, it’s soothing to have company by deciding that, at least, so is everyone else. At this point, he’s still willing for Kaladin to be a rare exception. By Rhythm of War, that’s no longer the case - he needs Kaladin to validate his choice to give up by doing the same thing. (As another deep irony of Moash’s arc - seriously, he’s the dark mirror to so many people - Teft is also deeply self-loathing and self-sabotaging, but lets people help him out of that, keeps fighting, and refuses to let that be the end of his journey. Moash simply accepts it as who he is, and then - to disperse the guilt - as who everyone is. Likewise, it’s the dark mirror of Dalinar’s Always the next step. You can do wrong, and then accept there’s no other path and that’s who you are now, as Moash does, or you can choose to keep trying, to grow, to be better.)

And so Moash accepts his friend being beaten as just the way the world works. He sees injustice. He doesn’t try to stop it, because to him it’s inevitable. But underneath this numb acceptance, he still hates himself for it, and volunteers for hard labour. This continues to be a habit for him, into Rhythm of War; even when Odium is keeping back his emotions, it remains a way to express the self-loathing he can no longer consciously acknowledge.

Moash’s days pulling the sledge are the seed of his later actions in other ways, too. It felt good to be told what to do. Not to have to think, not to have to choose, and to be able to tell himself - or be told, it feels like this is the moment Odium starts talking to him - that his betrayal (which he’s now moved to eliding simply as what happened at the Shattered Plains) wasn’t his fault. (The thought I was pushed into it is an obvious lie - he jumped at the chance to be part of the assassination.) And turning away from independent though to blind obedience, and from remorse to rejection of guilt or resposibility, is the path Moash ultimately takes when he joins Odium and gives up his emotions.

And I think this is also why he resists the mistreatment of the singers who Kaladin helped - as long as he can tell himself that the Singers/Fused are better than humans, he can obey them without having to think. Seeing them beat their own people, in a way that specifically reminds him of the treatment of Bridge Four, breaks through that; he has to stop it, lest the whole mental barrier, the decision to regard the Fused as morally superior, come tumbling down. It’s positive action, but in service to his ability to maintain longer-term apathy and inaction. And that apathy and surrender to the idea of the Fused as superior is then strong enough to survive even the realization that they’re treating him exactly like a bridgeman again.

By the last chapter in Moash’s Oathbringer Part 2 mini-arc, Odium is very clearly talking to him, urging him to give up the guilt he still feels over betraying Kaladin, to tell himself that it’s not his fault; a voice that Moash gives in to. He asks the Fused for vengeance, but it’s all wrapped up in this need to not feel guilt, the need to either deflect blame or to justify his actions to himself; and killing Elhokar doesn’t make him feel any better.

I don’t think the Bridge Four salute he gave Kaladin after killing Elhokar was villainous gloating. I think, in a twisted way, it was sincere - he’d talked himself into thinking that Elhokar’s death, that vengeance, was something Kaladin would want (or at least, should want) as well, but couldn’t bring himself to countenance - so Moash did it for him. For both of them. Roshone likewise, in ROW.

So in summary, Moash’s motivations, choices, and non-choices in the Oathbringer mini-arc are the foundation for all his later actions. 1) Renouncing responsibility. He goes from feeling guilty about his betrayal of Bridge 4 and about throwing away the chance they represented; to regarding the choice as inevitable because he’s fundamentally broken; to regarding all humanity as fundamentally broken, so what he did wasn’t anything unusual; to telling himself (or accepting Odium’s telling) that it wasn’t his fault and he was pushed into it, whuch is patently false; to giving up his emotions to Odium entirely so he doesn’t have to feel guilt. 2) Renouncing choice. From ‘Rhythm of Work’ (Chapter 48) onwards, Moash enjoys being told what to do, not having to think, not having to make decisions; this is what produces his killing of Jezrien, which he does without even caring about it. It’s likely founded in the middle part of his guilt-to-rationalization spiral, the belief that making bad choices is just who he is (therefore it’s better if someone else makes them for him). And it drives his entire arc in Rhythm of War, where he flees from Renarin’s vision of the good person he could still choose to be, and desperately needs Kaladin to make the same choice he did - giving up - so that he can tell himself it’s the only choice possible.

This is particularly striking because I would sum of the key themes of Oathbringer as responsibility and redemption (Dalinar, obviously; Szeth, starting on the path of thinking for himself and being responsible for his choices; Elhokar, recognizing his failures and seeking to do better; Teft, letting himself rise from the morass of self-hatred to become a Radiant) and one of the key themes of Rhythm of War as choice (Maya’s “WE CHOSE” and Kaladin’s vision of Tien both reinforcing that volition is important, and one shouldn’t deny a person’s choice of self-sacrifice by treating them as just a victim; similiarly, the common people in Urithiru choosing to support Kaladin; Venli choosing to confess her actions, do better, reveal herself as a Radiant, and return to her people, despite her fear; and Kaladin’s choice to keep trying, keep fighting, in the face of despair and hopeless odds). Moash is the counterpoint to both these themes - the anti-Radiant.

The final thing I’m going for in this essay is to emphasize that, to me, Moash is a complex and interesting character whose arc has excellent resonances with many other characters’ arcs. I could be happy with an ending in which he is redeemed, unlikely as that appears (my favoured starting point is are Taravodium - whose personality is very different from Rayse - seeing him as too much of a flat villain for T’s purposes, and casting him off; meaning that Moash would have his emotions and guilt back in full force, and be blind on top of that, and have to decide what to do with himself). I could be happy with an ending in which he isn’t redeemed - as noted, his arc is a dark inverse not only of many other characters’, but of the central themes of the books, and could well continue on that path. But it can be frustratingly simplistic to see the character only discussed in the form of a one-line meme.

[tcnks]

THE ROOM IS ON FIRE AND SHE’S FIXING HER HAIR—

𝖖 𝖚 𝖔 𝖙 𝖊 𝖘

“Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what’s underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there’s just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she’d ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.” — The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman. 

𝖇 𝖆 𝖘 𝖎 𝖈

NAME: Nymphadora Patagonia Teodora “Fabiola” Black Tonks. Or, understandably, just Tonks. One of the most excruciating moments of a young Tonks’s life was the dissociative experience that came from hearing Professor McGonagall read her entire name aloud (Baptismal name included, as if they didn’t have enough to deal with, though her dearly departed Godfather’s addition had thankfully not made the cut) stony-faced and with suspicious volume, at the Sorting Ceremony. It was a humiliation that took years to live down, which is probably why a repeat offense at her Auror Academy graduation ceremony broke down her last, tired, moments of resolve. Only her nearest and dearest can get away with anything other than just Tonks these days.  NICKNAMES: Dora. Peuchen. Dorita. Estrellita. (An increasing array of absurd petnames that she bears with varying levels of grace.) AGE: 29 BIRTHDAY: April 6, 1973 GENDER: Demigirl. PRONOUNS: She/They BLOOD STATUS: Half-blood. SPECIES: Metamorphmagus (Wixen).

𝖋 𝖆 𝖒 𝖎 𝖑 𝖞

MOTHER: Andromeda Dorea Tonks nee Black. FATHER:  Edward “Ted” Álvaro Sepulveda Tonks

𝖕 𝖍 𝖞 𝖘 𝖎 𝖈 𝖆 𝖑 𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖊𝖘

FACE CLAIM: Daniella Pineda BUILD: Small but athletic. HAIR: Variable.  HAIR COLOR: Variable. EYE COLOR: Variable. SKIN COLOR: Variable. DOMINANT HAND: Left. ANOMALIES: (Everything) Tattoos; a mish mash of stick’n’poke, magical and non-magical tattoos that have been amassing over the years. SCENT: Roasting coffee beans, oranges, cinnamon, honey. ALLERGIES: Unemployment. Children under the age of four. FASHION: Eclectic. Entirely dependent on her moods.  NERVOUS TICS: While she’s gotten much better at controlling her Metamorphmagus abilities over the years, it still takes a tremendous amount of effort to prevent her emotions from influencing them. This means that there are definite tells to be found in her appearance as to what her mood is, particularly in times of high emotional stress. The rule of thumb has always been that the darker her hair is, the moodier she is.

𝖑 𝖎 𝖋 𝖊 𝖘 𝖙 𝖞 𝖑 𝖊

RESIDES: A flat located above Dogweed & Death Cap, Diagon Alley. BORN: Porthmeor, Cornwall. RAISED: A cottage right on the waterfront, Porthmeor, Cornwall. PETS: None that are hers, specifically. She recently gave a dog to her parents in the hopes it might absorb some of their attention. CAREER: Former-Auror. Current Head of Security for Club Raven. EXPERIENCE: Auror’s Academy Graduate, 1994. Eight and a half years as an active duty Auror before suspension.  EMPLOYER: Cavalier Avery. POLITICAL AFFILIATION: Light.  BELIEFS: Alastor Moody was (and still is) the greatest auror of their time. That blame falls as much on the shoulders of those who fail to take action as those who commit the crime. That neutrality really isn’t an option when there is a choice to be made about human rights.  MISDEMEANORS: She is an officer of the law. FELONIES: .. In the name of the law? (No.) DRUGS: She really does care about her career. SMOKES: Has never once made it through an entire cigarette. ALCOHOL: Yes. DIET: A steady diet of leftovers that her father’s filled her freezer with.  LANGUAGES: Spanish, English. A creative combination of both. PHOBIAS: She is terrified of losing her abilities or the prospect of failure. HOBBIES: Finding trouble wherever she goes. Fixating on work. Annoying Moody. Terrorising her cousins. TRAITS:  + Vibrant / - Tactless: Loud. Energetic. Brash. Annoying. There were many ways in which Tonks’ existence could be quantified, but subtle was not one of them. Over time Tonks has taken to wearing her loud reputation like her own coat of arms; her very best and worst attributes flaunted with a deliberateness that seems almost too knowing, too on the nose, to not be covering for something. Arrogance and recklessness, hot-headed impulsiveness and a particularly caustic brand of wit wielded with a blunt charm that she’s grown increasingly fond of throwing in the face of the people who would whisper behind her back about just where here loyalties lie these days. The flippancy with which she greets the world, like she’s in on the joke that the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught the punchline of, only seems to grate on those who wish she’d treat the importance of her position with a little more respect. Tonks lives her life at full volume, with little regard for the opinions or delicate feelings of others who would ask her to reign it in, just a little, for their own comfort. + Driven / - Reckless: Nobody could ever say that Tonks did not possess an iron will, when it came to the things she wanted in life. Underneath all that vibrant glossy armour she wears like a warning sign, Tonks’ honourable qualities lurk: she may not always enjoy the banal, everyday routine of being an Auror, just as she may not think much of the people in charge, but Tonks is dedicated and steadfast in her job and worked tirelessly to get there. She has proven, time and again, a willingness to make the hard choice and put the greater good over her own reputation or honour. It takes a certain kind of steel to say precisely what is on your mind, to act even when duty and honour and all those boring noble virtues they try to instil in young Aurors tell you not to. She has never lacked for that sort of courage: the kind that requires a certain amount of defiance and a whole lot of audacity (and the willingness to circumvent every rule of authority, when your real loyalties and values are tested). Tonks has been forging the steel in her spine since she was old enough to frustrate her parents with her own headstrong opinions on what she wanted from life and how that differed from their hopes for her, and if she did not flinch (often) beneath her father’s gentle disappointment than there was certainly no one in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who could make her cringe. And that was the truth of it: what people called boldness was only a matter of knowing what you wanted and being unafraid of what it would take to get it — and there was no length that Tonks was not willing to go to in order to do what’s right. + Insightful / - Nosy: If there was one thing that Alastor Moody taught her during those long years in the Academy, it was the value of deeds over words. The department may have been overrun, of late, with those too preoccupied by political ambitions to see the bigger picture and be willing to ruffle feathers, but Tonks has always been more insightful than she’s given credit for. Her knack for reading a room and the intentions of the people in it had been honed by her naturally suspicious mentor and years spent studying faces intently, all their little quirks and shapes, in order to recreate them in the mirror. For better or for worse, when put into a tight corner Tonks does not falter and she does not hesitate. Those who would call her impulsive would probably be correct, but she vastly prefers decisive and while her approach doesn’t always end well, she’s resourceful enough to almost always land on her feet running.  The talents of a fighter, however, are not the talents required of a diplomat and lately her propensity for digging her nose into things that the higher ups have deemed off limits have landed her in hot water within the department. While Tonks has always considered her talent for thinking on her feet, acting decisively without wasting time on the buffering, to be her strongest asset, she fears that in order to return to the job she worked so hard to get, it will be inaction that is required of her this time around. Trading her autonomy for one man’s whims again is not something Tonks relishes the idea of, especially when there are dire consequences for turning a blind eye to what might be coming.

𝖋 𝖆 𝖛 𝖔 𝖗 𝖎 𝖙 𝖊 𝖘

LOCATION: Porthmeor Cove, Cornwall. SPORTS TEAM: The Holyhead Harpies / La Rojas. GAME: Quidditch. Football if her dad is the one asking. MUSIC: Smashing Pumpkins. MOVIES: Jurassic Park (for sentimental reasons obviously.) FOOD: The free kind. BEVERAGE: Coffee.  COLOR: Varying shades of pink, magenta and red.

𝖒 𝖆 𝖌 𝖎 𝖈

ALUMNI HOUSE: Hufflepuff. WAND (LENGTH, FLEXIBILITY, WOOD, & CORE): Red Oak, 13 3/4″, Bendy, Dragon Heartstring. AMORTENTIA: Woodsmoke, Jasmine, Bourbon, Honeysuckle. PATRONUS: Jackrabbit. BOGGART: Herself, without her abilities.  Barty Crouch Jr.

𝖈 𝖍 𝖆 𝖗 𝖆 𝖈 𝖙 𝖊 𝖗

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good. MBTI: ESTP-A MBTI ROLE: The Entrepreneur  ENNEAGRAM: Seven ENNEAGRAM ROLE: The Enthusiast TEMPERAMENT: Choleric. WESTERN ZODIAC: Aries.  CHINESE ZODIAC: Ox. PRIMAL SIGN: Hippopotamus.  TAROT CARD: The Chariot, The Hierophant. TV TROPES: Blue Collar Warlock, Revisiting the Cold Case, Boisterous Bruiser, Allergic to Routine,  Heroic Resolve, Old Cop/Young Cop. SONGS: Sabotage - The Beastie Boys / Reptilia - The Strokes / Tonight, Tonight - Smashing Pumpkins / I Am The Highway - Audioslave / Time to Pretend - MGMT.

[wombwindow]

Voting Faith

With the 2020 Election just a week away, I thought it would be helpful to discuss the importance of the faith vote and what it means to vote your faith. Voting is an important fundamental American right, experience, and duty. One I would encourage every citizen to exercise, especially in a republic democracy such as ours. In America the people have the privilege of shaping, empowering, and curbing their government through their collective voice and choices. A tremendous opportunity that can have profound and lasting consequences, but an opportunity many among us neglect and avoid. Why? Perhaps it’s because some people believe their voice doesn’t matter. Maybe they feel their beliefs are not represented. Or stronger still that the candidates presented are unacceptable. But how will a Christian’s lack of participation change these circumstances? If Christians want better candidates, greater representation, more focus on their values and beliefs, they must get involved in the political process. Very little, if anything, changes in a vacuum! Christians aren’t likely to influence or shape our nation through apathy and inaction. No, we must participate, we must lead, we must fight, and we must vote. But how should we vote? And why are Christians so divided in their votes?

Looking at research data about the 2016 election will confirm a general election turnout of around 60% of eligible voters (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/10/22/voter-turnout-2020-ranking-us-presidential-elections/6006793002/). As well as the reality that around 40% of Christians fail to vote. And that among Christian voters each major party secures at least 40% of the votes cast by Christians, creating a substantial divide between the way Christians see the candidates, parties, and issues surrounding the elections (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/). Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, vote more for the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, but not by an overwhelming majority when all subsets are examined. Looking at the numbers one realizes that if all professing Christians voted, and voted with greater harmony, the influence God’s people could exert in the representative leadership of our nation would be enormous. However, a divided church, largely negates its opinion and renders a much smaller influence in the governing affairs of the nation. So, why are Christians divided and how can they become more unified? By looking to Scripture and the ways of the Lord.

The Christian community must rally around the authority of Scripture and the baseline teachings of God. The Bible encourages participation within our world systems and speaks to the most important issues facing our nation. Jesus, in responding to taxes, said, “…Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s...” (Matt. 22:15-22). And Paul advised in the Book of Romans that, “Every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed…” (Romans 13:1-7). Christians, when given the opportunity to vote, need to vote. As God’s representatives on earth and His agents of light, we must vote.

As for the issues that are presented before the body of Christ in elections, Scripture also must be our guide. The issues of life and abortion have been before the American voter for nearly five decades. The Bible is emphatically clear on how we should side. Christians must side with life and against abortion, the intentional destruction of preborn human beings. Psalm 139 declares we are, “knit together in our mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13-16). And the Book of Acts reminds that, “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:22-26). The Scriptures declare marriage is between one man and one woman. Genesis proclaims, “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). With the Book of Hebrews reminding Christians to, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Heb. 13:4). Regarding today’s gender question, Scripture is also not quiet. The Bible affirms that gender is a reality of creation and not a choice of the whim. Genesis states, “When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them” (Gen 5:1-2). And the Book of First Corinthians reminds: “In the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God” (1 Cor. 11:11-12). Making clear there are only two genders, each with purpose and supporting roles. As to race, the Bible declares there is only one. Genesis One, the Bible’s chapter of beginnings, reveals that, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…’” (Gen 1:27-28). And again, in Acts, “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). When Christians embrace that WE ARE ONE RACE and begin to treat all God’s children as brothers and sisters, we will see the beginning of the end of what we today call “racism”. As to poverty, healthcare, fair wages, education, judges, and a host of other issues, if we’ll turn to Scripture and prayer, we will discover God’s plans, inform our minds, and build common ground around God’s revealed truth. The Bible is not silent about today’s issues and questions, do we know it?

Finally, as to the candidates, those modern-day Caesar’s vying for power, Scripture asks us to pray for them and evaluate them in light of God’s ways. Prayer is vital to the life of our nation and all things. Christians are admonished to pray and pray routinely for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Paul urged in Timothy, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:1-2). Christians should vote and they should pray—are we praying for this election and all those who serve our nation in government?  When it comes to candidates running for secular office, we need to evaluate their character and their policy positions and past actions. Paul, writing in Corinthians, understood that the world is different from the church when he communicated, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world” (1 Corinthians 5:9-10). And similarly, as Christians evaluate their choices for president or the congress, they will not often have the luxury of choosing from superb moral people. However, by examining a candidate’s personal character, their affiliations and positions, and their policies and actions, we can make determinations about which candidates align most closely with God’s teachings and principles. Holding the candidate up to Scripture’s declarations about good and poor leadership is a good place to start. Proverbs 29 tells us, “By justice a king builds up the land, but he who exacts gifts tears it down” (4) And, “If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked” (12). And further still, “If a king faithfully judges the poor, his throne will be established forever” (14). Looking at these and other Scriptures, Christians can discern which candidates best represents the counsel of God.

I pray my fellow Christians will vote and pray during this election. May the Word and the Spirit guide us to the best representatives for our government. May we get involved in the political life of our nation at all levels and may we routinely pray for those in office. Let us serve God at all times, but especially as we exercise the privilege of voting for our representative government.

 God bless, Joel

Colorado voters, remember to vote “yes” on 115. The measure will ban late-term abortion! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mDaXCxxrbU

Please enjoy the following incites about faith voting from Barna:

https://www.barna.com/research/notional-christians-big-election-story-2016/

https://www.barna.com/research/religious-beliefs-have-greatest-influence-on-voting-decisions/

[rhodanum]

One of the greatest challenges in writing anything multi-chapter for TDP is that it would involve me having to reconstruct the political systems of Katolis & the Pentarchy from scratch, so that everyone aside for Viren (and even he has his moment of impressive bungling) doesn't end up being an imbecile in terms of statecraft.

A quick recapitulation, starting with the dysfunctional mess that is the High Council of Katolis. And particularly That One Idiot who said, I quote: "Xadia sent assassins and they took the King's life. There hasn't been the slightest skirmish since then. Maybe that was it. They've had their revenge and everything will just... settle down now."

It's a good thing I didn't try to livetweet S2, because that would've caused a whole storm of "who the hell put this numbskull on the council? He isn't fit to look after a chicken-coop, much less a nation!" Seriously, that's the sort of opinion that a baker or a farmer or a cobbler or any other regular citizen is expected to give, the standard 'keep your head down and hope it all blows over by itself.' Not someone who is part of what is supposed to be a national ruling body.

The murder of a sovereign (no matter how morally justified on the side of the people doing the murdering) is, by definition, an act of war. You really don't want to be the first to strike? Fine, then. But at least mobilize the militias / the standing army and take precautions. But we don't see even the most basic self-defense measures being instituted.

Which links to the second glaring issue: not only is the council as a political body both unable and unwilling to act, it is paralyzed by Katolis seeming having no proper redundancy systems in case of murderized sovereign with an heir who is well under the age of adulthood. Standard procedure is instituting a regency (Viren wasn't wrong at all here, even if his goal involved Ezran never touching the throne) so the bloody kingdom doesn't end up in gridlock. It doesn't matter if the regency lasts a week, a month, a year or more. The goal of any ruling body is ensuring the continued political and economic functioning of the kingdom and the well-being of the people. Which cannot be done if decision-making is tied to the King's seal and said seal cannot be used by anyone other than the King's heir, who is missing and who has an entirely uncertain Estimated Time of Return. But instead of acting and picking up the regency for how long it takes for Ezran to be back, the high-rollers of Katolis sit & wait.

This is what drives me bonkers about Opeli, incidentally. She spends her time being an obstructionist force with no actual constructive and politically functional ideas behind said obstructionism. She doesn't pick up the regency or do anything to resolve the gridlock. Amaya, at the least, has the excuse that she's an essential component of the Breach's defense, through her command of the Standing Battalion. But even she takes a dunk in the 'Lawful Stupid / Stupid Good' fountain, when she justifies her refusal to accept the regency not through the importance of her military command right at the border with Xadia, but through 'Ezran is the rightful ruler.' Ma'am, 'rightful ruler' isn't going to matter a jot if you end up with anything from economic instability all the way to possibly getting invaded.

And then there's Harrow, whose inability to deal with his own burdened conscience and crushing sense of guilt when it came to the people he lost resulted in him effectively deciding to dump his people's well-being on the shoulders of a ten year old. It's not fair to Ezran and Callum (who effectively lost a third parent in a row) but, far more importantly, it's not fair to everyone else who has to pick up the pieces, because a ten year old cannot be expected to rule much of anything. (I'm looking forward to S3, but definitely not to the 'and he was a far wiser ruler, for he had the Innocence of Childhood' nonsense that will probably be going on with Ezran's plot-line. The only way his rule would make sense to me is if the council make him a figurehead and handle actual rule themselves. But I don't have much hope for that, because said council, as pointed out above, doesn't have a good track-record when it comes to actually decent statecraft).

The rest of the Pentarchy suffer from the same flaws as the rulership of Katolis. The same 'head in the sand / hope the storm passes if we ignore it' malarkey. The same waiting for others to act before committing to anything. Queen Aanya of Duren says noble, nice-sounding things in refusing to commit to preparations for war. I'd find them less of an irritating manner of writing if the show ever presents neutrality in a state of war as being absolutely no guarantee of safety. (I was talking with @ma_ya_mo_ri about this. I find neutrality a cheap cop-out in terms of writing military conflict because the both of us, as Eastern Europeans, know from our history that it did jack-shit when it came to keeping our countries from getting the shit conquered out of them). While we're at it, Aanya's platitudes, coupled with her essentially waving the Divine Right of Kings in Viren's face is, as far as I'm concerned, another notch in the 'this is why you don't let children anywhere near political power' post. (That scene is extremely telling and it says a lot about issues of class within the Pentarchy -- it means that you can study as much as you like, become as much of an accomplished specialist in your field as you like, sacrifice until your very body is crumbling and falling apart... but you'll still be shot down by a random kid with a crown on their head, whose only real achievement was winning the lottery of birth).  

Mind you, all of the above doesn't mean I think Viren didn't make mistakes either. His most egregious was the plan concerning the Princes, because he should have known that Soren and Claudia wouldn't have ultimately been able to go through with it. Two (relatively untested) teenagers, who have been life-long friends with the targets? It was always doomed to fail. I can sort of see why he did it, if I squint -- he needed two people that he could place his utmost trust in, on very short notice. It was still a stupid choice, likely one motivated by desperation and lack of any other immediate option.

What should he have done instead? Well, for one, Viren should have given very serious consideration to bringing Ezran back alive and using his position as his father's best friend / unofficial uncle to teach the kid and mold him into the sort of King he thought was necessary for Katolis and the rest of the Pentarchy. It's apparent why he didn't do it and went with the nuclear-option instead. If war is on the horizon, you don't have enough time to forge the young King you need, while also being in a state of constant war with the rest of the council for influence over said King.

If the kill-option was the only viable alternative in his mind, he should have ensured it was entrusted to someone who could go through with it. A stone-cold, trained killer-for-hire, instead of his kids. Regicide isn’t a course of action where you can afford either half-measures or mistakes. Even better, while we're at 'should have done's': have a small team of wetwork specialists trained in secret, taught to be utterly loyal and employ them for highly sensitive operations, where any sort of mistake or bungle can spell disaster. But he didn't have such a team trained (just as, for example, he didn't cultivate loyalty toward himself within the Crownguard, thus ensuring the rest of the Council couldn't use this fighting-force against him) because he never actually planned to take head-of-state powers within his own hands, before the disaster with Harrow.

The actions we see from S1EP4 onward aren't those of a man who always planned to overthrow his best friend and stage a coup, but rather someone who acted rashly, saved Harrow's soul against his will... and then was stuck in an impossible situation, with a kingdom without a ruler and paralyzed into complete inaction, along with the loss of humanity's greatest asset against Xadia (the Dragon Prince egg). No wonder he looks as if he's flying by the seat of his pants, juggling seventeen things all at once and actually failing at the basics of a proper coup (such as ensuring the support of the armed forces).

Viren's fault, that trips him up again and again, is (hilariously and ironically enough) the fact he isn't actually ruthless enough for the position he's currently in! He's an idealist at heart and genuinely believes that people can be persuaded to make the rational choices, with the right arguments. This is what leads to his fall-from-political-grace and arrest at the end of S2. He takes an enormous risk in using the King's seal and lying about his status as Regent in front of the other rulers of the Pentarchy, effectively putting all his eggs in the one basked titled 'surely they'll see sense and act', if the danger is presented to them in a clear and concise manner.' But that's not what happens and his enormous gamble backfires, in that his lie becomes known to the rest of the council and results in Opeli's efforts to have him arrested. His idealism in thinking reason could sway the rest of the Pentarchy bites him right in the arse.

[kylandara]

A very interesting take. I would sadly agree Jon fell from grace, because whether political Jon is true or not, he enable Dany this far to cause the destruction she did. Not that Dany doesn’t get the max blame, but Jon has his share for his own soul. I can almost imagine his PTSD when this is all over. Onwards

——————-

The hysterical reactions to Dany’s dark turn were initially amusing to me because I enjoy suffering, but as this week has gone on, I have grown more disconcerted by 8x05 myself. I am not an emotional person by nature, but each day I am more agitated by the episode rather than less. I didn’t know exactly why it bothered me so much until I realized that I was running through the same stages of grief that Dany stans were.

Both of us lost our heroes.

I had been laughing about Dany stans not seeing where her arc was going when there is ample foreshadowing in books and show as pointed out in articles, metas, posts on Reddit, answers here on Quora, YouTube videos, wherever it is you go for GoT fan content, Dark Dany has been discussed. I thought the proof was so overwhelming that to not see it meant you were in denial.

I did not know I was in denial myself.

I thought Dany stans were watching a different show than the rest of us.

The truth is, I was watching a different show than some of you.

As much as this has frustrated me to no end, I think it has been the greatest success of GoT that D&D have exposed us to ourselves. Or at least, it would be if we pulled ourselves away from our feelings long enough to acknowledge what’s been staring us in the face the whole time.

Dany was not the only hero who fell from grace Sunday. I have been grieving for my own.

Dany burned thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people Sunday, a horrific and inevitable event.

My hero stood by and watched. Worse, my hero knew it was likely to happen and enabled her. Even worse, my hero marched his men South to help her. And still worse than that, when Varys looked him in the eyes and said they knew what was going to happen, Jon refused to even try to stop her.

My hero did not commit the inexcusable evil that Dany did (Yes, EVIL. Yes, INEXCUSABLE.) But my hero did not take a stand. My hero was not heroic. My hero stood by helplessly while children were burned alive. How harshly did I condemn Stannis and the Red Woman for burning Shireen because I loved her? How harshly should I then condemn Dany for the same crime tens of thousands of times over? How harshly did I judge Stannis’ enablers for not stopping him? How harshly must I then judge Jon for not doing something, anything before Dany burned King’s Landing?

Dany stans justified every life she took before 8x05. I justified every life Jon had taken. No, there is no moral equivalence between those, but on Sunday, both committed wrongs that there is no justifying. Again, there is no moral equivalence between Dany’s actions and Jon’s inaction, but I realized my emotions as a Jon fan have been paralleling to a much subtler degree, Dany fans.

They are shrieking about bad writing and OOC behavior, and I have been saying much the same of Jon. But, maybe I was just as deluded as they were, believing what I want rather than paying attention to what I was seeing.

I thought the Battle of Winterfell was bad writing. I didn't think D&D were actually trying to tell us something about Jon, but maybe they were. Yes, his strength is uniting people, but if they are being led by the wrong person, it is meaningless to do so. As seen on Sunday, the wrong leader leads to madness.

The events of 8x05 may be the narrative punishment for Jon not taking up his crown with further spiraling yet to come, or, perhaps it was the rock bottom of him refusing his destiny and what we witnessed is what motivates him to rise up. We might see him well and truly defeated in the finale by what he has participated in, or he might take a stand.

Either way, I don't think this season has been the total destruction of his character I initially thought it was. I think what we’re seeing is writers allowing a hero to suffer the emotional and psychological impact of what he's been through. I wish they would let us experience it with him, I wish they would have give us more that a rare glimpse, but just because I wanted something different doesn't mean they weren't being purposeful.

I resent what they've done because they took my hero from me and gave me a broken man. That's too realistic for me to enjoy, and I wanted to enjoy this season, not suffer through it. I did not want my vision of a victorious hero thwarted for anything. And that’s when it hits me. This is why it hurts. I can either morally compromise myself to pretend like Jon wasn’t wrong, or I have to allow my hero to fall.

Many were upset by Jaime returning to Cersei because we bought into his version of himself as a man escaped from his captor. We thought he had become good. We wanted him to be with Brienne. Yet, how can we objectively say that staying with a new lover is the morally superior choice to trying to save the life of the woman who bore his children? The woman who was pregnant with his child? In falling from grace in the eyes of Braime shippers, Jaime made the right choice.

Jaime is a better person for having died trying to save Cersei than he would have been had he chosen to fulfill his own selfish desire to let her die alone. He wasn’t good enough for Brienne before, he certainly wouldn’t have been if he had let his child die without attempting to save it. In breaking the hearts of shippers and fans around the world, D&D (damn them for making me appreciate them after I decided I didn’t!) turned Jaime into a morally superior character in 8x05 than the Breaker of Chains. A guy who pushed a child from the window attempted to save life while our Khaleesi took it.

Just because we have a version of a character in our head and a path for them to follow, just because we know what we want and are upset when we don’t get it, doesn’t make it better. Jaime chose better for himself than we would have chosen for him. Shame on us for being so morally incompetent that we didn’t recognize it immediately. By leaving her and trying to rescue Cersei, Jaime was closer to deserving Brienne than he ever had been before.

Another surprise in the episode is that The Hound had more moral clarity than Arya. The Hound who murdered for a living became the voice of sanity when he told Arya that if she followed where he led she would only find death. He told her to choose life even when he couldn’t. Arya listened, she chose to put aside vengeance and preserve life rather than take it. And here, we, the audience had been cheering her quest for vengeance, only to then cheer on the new decision, because we are led by our emotions and dumber for it. The Hound had better morals than we did. THE HOUND.

Cersei, that power crazed woman was just another victim. The bells rang and Dany burned them all anyway. And all the Dany stans who are finding ways to excuse, rationalize, or simply crying out “character assassination” are just in denial. Your hero failed the test of basic humanity because she has always wanted to. Her first instinct has consistently been to burn and destroy, she’s just always happened to have someone holding her back before.

That’s not bad writing. That’s making your audience question what we’ve been accepting and reject what characters say about themselves and think critically about what we have witnessed with our own eyes. It’s mental torture, but it’s the right kind of subversive because there are threads we can find that were always going to lead us here.

Some of us had been condemning Cersei and cheering on a woman who was essentially doing the same things. We just didn’t recognize it because we didn’t want to. Because Dany was framed as a hero, and we all know Cersei is a villain, we didn’t stop and think about what Dany has been doing for years and ask if it was right.

Jon didn’t know as much about Dany as we did. Maybe he hadn’t heard of what Dany did before coming to Westeros. Perhaps he didn’t fully comprehend what happened during the loot train attack, but he saw her talking about wanting to burn the Red Keep in s7, he saw what dragons were capable of beyond the Wall and during the Battle for Winterfell, he heard his queen threaten Sansa’s life for the horrible crime of asking what they were going to feed the armies. And yet, he refused to ever question her.

I don’t know that he had a good alternative, but Varys chose to defy the queen and die rather than take part in her plans. Jon refused to help him. Was Jon being a fool or was he being cunning? I still don’t know, but either way, he stood by while an innocent man burned. Either way, he did nothing. Nothing is never the best you can do. Except, nothing is what humans do all the time. I was prepared for Jon to lie, to be sneaky, to outsmart and use people. I was not prepared for that. I wanted clean margins around my hero, and they didn't give them to me.

People wanted Jaime to kill Cersei because we all know she’s evil, never mind the fact that Jaime has done his fair amount of evil, never mind that she was carrying his child. We don’t mind evil, we just don’t want it to upset us. In our heads, murdering Cersei was fine, but hurting Brienne wasn’t. We accept the grey, the dishonorable, the bad, but only when it’s in line with what we want.

I wanted Jon to be darker this season than the Jon we’ve had before, but I wanted it to be in line with the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be justifiable. I didn’t want it to be in the form of a mistake. I didn’t want it to be him misjudging the character of his queen. I didn’t want it to be at the cost of the lives of countless children.

I was willing for Jon to stray from the hero’s pretty, pretty path just enough to make it interesting, not enough for it to matter. This was a detour I did not expect, that I can’t just ignore, and that is a brilliant move by the writers. Oh geez, I’ve just complimented D&D again. Someone save me!

Jon, no matter what he does next, is stained in blood. He can’t be the hero I wanted him to be, there is no erasing this mistake. I didn't want him to fall prey to a cult of personality, I didn't want him to be stupid. I still don't believe he’s a total idiot, but while I watched 8x05 I took notes and when I reviewed them, I sounded like two different people. One screaming at Jon for being a moron, the other entirely sympathetic because he didn't have a choice. Both views were guided by my emotions. Whether he fell in love and was in denial or if Pol Jon is true and he believed he had no choice, Jon was complicit.

Either because he allowed love to blind him, or desperation to take over, while I still have hope for him, I can't deny what I saw. I hated seeing Jon as he is now: a man made less than what he is. He isn’t the hero I had fabricated in my head. I didn’t even know I had done that, but I had. This isn’t what I wanted. It’s not how the story is supposed to go.

But it is how this story went.

I wanted the fairytale. I wanted Jon to be untouched by what Dany did. I wanted him to remain innocent. I didn’t want him to be weak. I didn’t want him to fall. I wanted him to be above this.

But on Sunday our heroes fell.

What happens when they fall?

We can deny, excuse, insist its solely bad writing, claim it’s OOC, or we can accept that we are simply upset because it isn’t what we wanted. The second step is to acknowledge that this is what it means to have morally grey characters. This is the realism in fantasy GoT has always been touted for, we just never had to suffer so much for it all at once. We never had to face the reality that our heroes aren’t pure goodness, our villains aren’t pure evil with such high stakes before. It’s one thing for Jon to miscalculate and be murdered by his men, it’s another for him to not prevent a city of people from burning alive.

The “grey character” idea only works if you still recognize good and evil. We can’t twist right and wrong to make sure our heroes are always in the clear. Grey characters does not mean we should be morally colorblind. It means that the good and bad still exist, but that both reside in each character and in each of us. We have to choose how to act, and in certain situations, we will wander closer to one side than the other. It’s saying, let’s make heroes falter and villains sympathetic and force ourselves to see ourselves in what we hate, and what we hate within ourselves.

We had seen the good side of Dany intermingled with the bad, but the bad emerged in an unprecedented way on Sunday, and suddenly now we know that how we had masked it was always about protecting our own feelings, not about understanding who that character was at her core. Some in the audience have found strength in Dany, and to see her fall tore at parts of themselves that she had impacted.

Jon is still lighter grey than Dany, but on Sunday, I saw a streak of something repugnant to me, something that is the natural fallout of Jon’s behavior all season, but I had been ignoring it. Before this season aired, I expected victorious Jon. Now I think, even if Jon survives, I don't know how he'll live.

It is shocking to me how much it hurts to let go of my delusions and think, this is it. This is what all those words I’ve been spouting off about complex characters mean, and now I have to accept it. I have to “Look the truth in the face” as Sansa says, and as silly as it is since it is a tv show, it genuinely hurts! To a certain as yet to be quantified amount, Tyrion and Jon refused to do this. To a greater extent, Dany stans refused to.

I refused to.

So, what do we do when our heroes fall?

We must choose to be heroic ourselves. We acknowledge the truth. No more complaints or excuses. Our heroes fell last Sunday because this is that story.

I mentioned in a previous answer that I had a general feeling of defeat this season, and I think this is why. Jon has been slipping off the pedestal, and I have been trying to keep him up there anyway. Whether Jon was a “Northern Fool” or unsuccessful “Political Jon,” he isn’t the man I wanted him to be. D&D emphatically knocked him off his hero perch Sunday. Silly to be so attached to keeping him there, but I was. Emotionally, I was depending on my hero to make it all better. Maybe the point is, there is no hero who can?

Dany climbed too high and fell too far. She isn’t coming back from this. In my eyes, Jon hasn’t. D&D just made him fallible. He made a grave error and thousands upon thousands of people paid for it. I thought he would rise up a hero and prevent this, but there was nothing in this season to indicate that he could or would, and when the time came, he didn’t. I didn’t expect to see consequences for his “My Queen” routine, heroes don’t usually suffer those, but it is right that Jon see where that leads. It is good that we see it.

I think that’s what I’ve been mourning. I wanted hero Jon, not human Jon. Seeing Jon stand there with Drogon over his shoulder while Varys burned was very upsetting. I couldn’t reconcile it with who I thought Jon was, but that’s because I was thinking in the traditional sense of hero. In other books and shows, that wouldn’t happen. But, Jon made a series of choices that led to his presence and inability to do anything at Sunday night’s slaughter. Based on his decisions this season, Jon’s fate of standing there while people were murdered was just as inevitable as Dany’s fate of being the one to burn them.

It is much harder on the audience to endure this kind of story, but GoT has never tried to be easy. I didn’t want this, but it’s okay to not always get what we want. It’s okay for the writers to crack my rose-colored glasses.

Regardless of my misconceptions, in spite of his mistakes, Jon is still Jon. I still have faith in him. He’s just not impervious to failure, and somehow, I had forgotten that. And, for the first time, I genuinely do not know what the cost of this will be. That’s why I am so disturbed. I don’t want Jon to suffer, but his inaction may require narrative punishment. Maybe what we witnessed is the only catalyst that would force him to do what he needs to do, but it may be his mental and emotional undoing.

I don’t want that. I am uneasy after this episode because for the first time, I am genuinely wondering if I was wrong all along. Maybe this story isn’t building up to Jon defeating all odds, maybe the odds defeat him. So, instead of insisting that the writers are wrong, I am wondering what story it is they are telling. Is this a story about what it takes to make a man who can survive the game? Is it about a man who refused to play the game and will therefore be punished? Is it about a man who tried to play the game and learns that there is no winning without losing? Is the point that there is no winning at all?

I don’t know anymore.

So, in this, I have sympathy for the other side of the fandom that has broken hearts this week. And it isn’t entirely because D&D made bad choices, wrote this season poorly, should have had a longer season. I am upset because I am not liking the story they are telling me. I am not sure that that is anyone’s problem but my own for not recognizing what this was from the beginning. I’m still hopeful, I don’t know what we will see in the finale, but I have to accept that my hero fell on Sunday, and I don’t know if he will get back up. He could, but it is possible that he won’t

[hotelconcierge]

THE GENDER NULLARY

Trigger warning for everything that follows: the coddled, over-sensitive, “triggered” millennial crybaby does not exist. Hold your applause—the COSTMC is an oxymoron because coddling does not sensitize, it scleroses. Have you met these people? They can’t feel an emotion without an audience and a week to rehearse. The performative offense of this group results from high emotional tolerance, not low; sad-rage is heroin to everything else’s Motrin, and no matter how vast the safe space, some kids are gonna hang at the outskirts hoping to score.

Of course, even the phoniest opportunist has a few real triggers—the type that precludes rage because you’re numb in the fetal position. And of course, there are many uncoddled e.g. traumatized people who are genuinely vulnerable to the many, many instances of genuine cruelty and callousness.

Every community with a code of conduct is a safe space to some extent. My lawyer advises no comment on whether safe spaces are good or bad in principle, because it depends: who is being included, who is being excluded, where will they go, and who is enforcing the rules.

My concern is the way these debates are settled. And when the excluded protest against political correctness—that human resources plot to merge all safe spaces under one state capitalist thumb—they ditch culture war bushido and strike at whomever can be hurt the most.

What you have to understand is that the PC debate is a farce. When the public demands a witch for the stake, the NYTimes selects David Brooks,

perhaps the most balding, white, sanctimonious chump at a newspaper full of balding, white, sanctimonious chumps. Here are four critiques; don’t read any of them unless you still find it exciting to watch a strawman burn.

What’s more interesting is that while Brooks criticizes upper-middle-class culture for being “laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class,” his article is nothing but illegible cultural signifiers. Which, duh, he’s writing for the Times. Brooks thus renders himself irrelevant (which was the point): his critics focus on his blunder of political correctness (the high school grad intimidated by a chicken pomodoro) and dismiss him as classist accordingly.

Lesson: Anyone who opposes political correctness from within will lose and be humiliated. Even without the unforced error, Brooks could have been dismissed as rich and white. His archives could have been mined for hypocrisy. Even a charged non sequitur would have crushed his argument: “So it’s no big deal that it’s legal to murder transpeople in all fifty states? No, I’m David Brooks, better focus on political correctness!” Of course, plenty of non-bourgeois oppose PC, but you’ll never hear that point of view in the Times because, yikes—internalized racism.

The result is that the anti-PC viewpoint is only taken seriously when it refuses the framework of PC. I don’t mean “taken seriously” like there is a meaningful debate. But when an internet troll calls you, say, “a fucking spic faggot,” you can’t reply “hah, well that just shows your heteronormative, colonialist assumptions!” without looking like a wimp. You have to reply with equal bile, which smells of hatred, maybe fear. And it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of hatred, but it’s better than being treated—like Mr. Brooks—with contempt.

Trolls, like catcallers, flashers, and school shooters, are men who ran the numbers and found: being hated > being invisible > being humiliated in the official channels. The first two go back to chimps, the third variable is society-dependent, and wowza does ours fuck it up. Men want to become masculine, citation needed, and when society shit-talks the honest path to manhood then it is inevitable that those foolish enough to listen will turn to the black market. And once that’s your game...

This blog is far from politically correct, but I try to mock only the deserving— bureaucrats, demagogues, cowards, and conformists—and for behavior, for the things people can change rather than those they can’t. But people tend to be insecure about the things they can’t change, and it just so happens that in America insecurity is always wound up in sex. Every debate about safe spaces thus devolves into a debate about gender: a catalog of body dysmorphisms, a who’s who of racial castrations, cuckold, bitch, cunt, whore, freak. You’d think everyone would be against this level of discourse, but gun control means one thing on Park Avenue and another thing entirely in Wichita. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the popular and unpopular from being unpopular. Calls for PC go nowhere because cruelty is the best weapon some people have.

Idiot [unemployed, probably no friends]: “So you’re sympathizing with racist, misogynist trolls. Wow. Just—I can’t even.” I didn’t say anything about sympathy. I said that a society gets what it pays for. IMHO, most shock-value trolling is both ineffective—it strengthens the case for Big Brother—and morally disgusting. But it’s a symptom, not the disease. Like oxycodone, trolling is recourse for people with nothing better to do, and like The Opioid Epidemic, the hand-wringing has less to do with fixing the problem than with making it so consumers don’t have to look at something ugly.

The content of trolling is thus extremely not the issue, but even so, I’ll take the bait. To accuse someone of failing at gender is the worst sort of punching-down. It’s not just hateful, it’s lazy, it’s bullying the foreign kid to make up for getting your ass beat at home. And it’s dumb. Forget about the moral argument—my critique is that the gender police are not even wrong.

Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), who coined the term “performative gender,” the antecedent to “sexuality is a spectrum,” has reached Antichrist status in some circles and in fact received a personal diss from Pope Benedict XVI. She’s good, and if you wanna throw down you gotta throw down with the best. So: Does Butler write like a pedant getting paid by the syllable? Does she open each topic with a chain of passive-aggressive rhetorical questions? Does she have the worst fanbase this side of Harris and Klebold? Does she have a point?

Hemlock time. How do you define gender? “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate with sex.” Okay—what’s sex? “Aren’t you a doctor or something? XY and XX.” I’m flattered by the appeal to authority, but weren’t you the guy complaining when the CDC lowered the normal testosterone range? How do you feel about androgen insensitivity syndrome?

You can deny your eyes and insist that having an SRY gene makes Eden Atwood male, but from a medical perspective Eden is estrogenized, at risk for osteoporosis, and going down in the chart as an F.

“Look, fella, I know a dime-piece when I see one.” So modify your definition: hormone levels, fertility, waist-hip ratio, empathizing over systematizing, long bathroom lines, 10 Things I Hate About You...The first problem is that all of these traits exist on, sorry, a spectrum, from menopausal women to full-figured men. The choice of which traits to include—and where to draw the cut-offs—and if the division is binary or quaternary or nullary—is just like, your opinion, man (woman/they/them). The bigger problem is that now you’re defining sex as gender.

This reduces your original statement to, “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate.” Which is true. And as far as stereotypes go, gendered ones ain’t bad, maybe even necessary to function, the guy wearing a V-neck probably does like shaving his pubes. But they are still stereotypes, man-made, imperfect, and punishing to those who do not conform. I’m no cultural relativist, some people suck and deserve cold and swift judgment, but is the presence or absence of armpit hair really the hill you want to die on?

There’s a practical argument to be made against fractalized gender: it’s confusing. With 3^^^3 possible sex-gender-orientation combos, how are kids supposed to know how to grow up? Aren’t imperfect gender roles better than 24-year-old otherkin? I hear you, guy wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket and listening to Mötley Crüe, but Tumblr semantics are a consequence of twenty-teen spirit, not the cause. If we weren’t arguing about the gender binary (and before we were) we’d be arguing about the range of femininity or masculinity; the crusade would be for pixie cuts and stick-and-poke tattoos to be considered as feminine as Brazilian butt lifts. Don’t be fooled by words—do you really want society to have one idealized template per gender? How would that ideal be decided? Majority rule?

There’s a hilarious overlap between the people who get mad about preferred pronouns and those who call for a return to “traditional masculinity.” The idealization of some Hollywood-ified tradition isn’t the problem; if you want to roleplay a fursona, go ahead. No, what’s pathetic is the begging. Rather than be a man, in spite of the system, you demand validation from the system for aspiring to be a man. Being against identity politics is the new identity politics. That’s why right-wing culture warriors are so into the idea of crybaby millennials—it’s comforting to believe that you’re actually strong (since you don’t drink from plastic water bottles) and that anyone getting laid is actually xeno-estrogenized. Even if this was true, obsessing over it, masturbating to it, using it as an excuse for self-pity and inaction—that makes you a  _ _ _ _. Four-letters. Multiple choice. Maybe hangman will teach you something.

The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. (Gender Trouble)

My beliefs are no doubt way south of Ms. Butler’s on the political compass, but we agree about one thing: that ain’t a nice way to go out.

But this is precisely the way in which the laundry-is-a-social-construct movement has failed. I have held off on criticizing them because it’s too easy, when you mock Rachel Dolezal for being “transracial” you get to pretend your own self-image is meaningful, but no, all identities are power poses in front of the bedroom mirror, meaningful only insofar as they help you with the rest of the day. “Well, SCIENCE says that—” You sure you want to play that game? Again, I respect anyone who has the courage to defy their assigned caste. I have no purity objections to a transhumanist society where the tap water runs ecstasy and you can get augmented genitals at Starbucks. I don’t even mind Bushwick. The problem with the mad libs youth isn’t the slew of labels—intersectional, nonbinary, pansexual, curious kinkster, ethically polyamorous, empath, casual baby witch (mostly crystals, auras/energy)—the problem is, what are you going to do with them? And there’s a patriarchy-approved answer: buy shit and beg for validation.

If gender is performative, if identity is not necessary for political action to be taken, if the possibilities are infinite once freed from the bounds of phallogocentrism, then why is it that so many cultural subversives sound exactly the same? You know the stereotype. Bondage. Anxiety. Smoking when drunk. Circlejerks of praise for completing the most basic of tasks. Very, very bad poetry. Expensive fashion draped across waif-like models. Guilty pleasures: junk food, liquor, and problematic TV. Hated roommates. Emoji marxism. Twitter. “today i feel cute enough for a selfie, might delete it later.” “didn’t get out of bed until 2 i’m trash lol” “wow, some casual racism at work today. i’ll just laugh and someday burst because i hate confrontation. but whatever.” I’m not saying these traits describe anyone real, although they might. I’m saying: why is this the stereotype?

Discussion questions: When people type in lower case, what emotion do they hope to convey to the reader? The alt-right often asks if “liking feminine traps” is “gay”—is there anything more heterosexual than wishing you had a weaker male friend to validate your penis? Would trans rights even be an issue if the majority were FtM? How many modern protests can be summarized as “consumers demand product”? Who would win, every chafed masculinist and joyless academic or one flamboyant 19th century playwright? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”

Choose:

HYPOCRISY’S BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

THE FALSE NEGATIVES

[niikocomic]

Legend of Niiko Information Masterpost

Considering there's currently two Legend of Niiko sideblogs on Tumblr, I'll be closing down the inactive one shortly. This is just a compiled list of information regarding the fancomic brought over from the old blog along with new information brought up since. This is as much for my benefit as it is your enjoyment and anything I've written now is subject to change depending how the story grows. Still very much so a W.I.P.

GENERAL INFORMATION

- Book 1: Substance - Book 2: Power - Book 3: Freedom

- The events of The Legend of Niiko happen exactly a century after the events of Book 2 of The Legend of Korra. So about 97 years after Korra's story. (The extended time gives me more breathing room to do what I want while still staying within the confines of the Avatar world...And I also think Korra deserves to have a long and happy life.) - The Legend of Niiko takes place in what would aesthetically be the mid-2020s. - Book 1 will be a standalone story, but the events that take place act as the catalyst for what happens in Books 2 and 3, which will have an overarching story. - While Niiko is the Avatar and will always be the central character, he always shares the limelight with another character similar to Aang and Zuko in Atla. (Book 1 being Elke, Book 2 being Qu Lin and Book 3 being Rao for the first half and Anmu for the second.) - The last thing Varrick invented before his death was the cell phone, they’re called Varriphones. (This literally has no weight on the story as a whole I just wanted to be the first to claim the idea because I’m petty like that). - The only characters still alive from Korra's days are: Jinora, Mako, Rohan, and Ikki. - Niiko is very close to Jinora. Who taught him airbending alongside Master Heliun, who is Anmu's mother. - Niiko suffers severe performance anxiety, which is probably due to an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. He's uncomfortable in being in the spotlight, hyper-aware of people's opinions of him, and overthinks into complete inaction. - Loved the idea of being the Avatar when he found out he was at the age of 8. While he still holds some childlike wonder to his position, as he's grown older and more wise to what the job entails so has his fear towards it. - Niiko’s animal guide is a Hyena-Hog affectionately named Miu. - His bending opposite was firebending. - He tends to blame Avatars Aang and Korra for his own failings. As they achieved so much at such young ages and (in Niiko's opinion, at least) have set the bar of what makes a great Avatar too damn high. *- While mecha technology still exists, the demand for it died after Kuvira’s siege of Republic City. However in recent years there’s been a rise in robotics technology, mostly from the influence of Ba Sing Se Robotics. It’s founder and CEO a Mr. Changming Huang.

*- Team Avatar 2.0. I made a post of what Korra’s Team Avatar did between the events of Lok and Legend of Niiko. Which you can read here.

- Team Avatar 3.0.   - Niiko. The Avatar. Age 25 years. Born 245 AG. Height 6'4.   - Elke. Waterbender. Age 23 years. Born 247 AG. Height 6'0.   - Rao. Firebender. Age 24 years. Born 247 AG. Height 5'9.   - Qu Lin. Non-Bender. Age 24 years. Born 247 AG. Height 5'6.   - Anmu. Airbender. Age 21 years. Born 249 AG. Height 5'4.

BOOK 1: SUBSTANCE. SYNOPSIS: "Returning to Republic City to announce his presence as the world's new Avatar, Twenty-five year old Niiko finds himself caught up in the disjointed political climate of a failing Police Force and a new task force vying to take their place as tensions rise from a radical group wanting answers for the so called 'De'pea Incident'."

- Takes place mostly in Republic City. - Book 1 is based on cyberpunk narratives, and will have roughly 10 chapters. - Focuses on the relationship between spirits and humans over the past hundred years along with how Korra's choice to leave them open is seen now that it's become the norm. - Technology has advanced to the point that they have things like television, computers and the internet. However the advancement has made some of the things from Korra’s time redundant. - The Avatar world has become more bureaucratic within the past 97 years, with benders needing to be legally registered. - The Spirit World and the portals are protected by a glorified task force known as The Spirit Protection Forces. Led by Captain Arrluk. All that is known about their beginnings is that they cropped up after the events of the De'pea Incident, a spirit world related tragedy that left hundreds dead and many more displaced. - Those thousands affected by the De'pea Incident were left homeless and without answers or any compensation. They now live illegally around the Republic City spirit portal, which has since become closed off to the general public. *- Here’s the character design for Captain Arrluk. Along with a non-spoilery summery of the founding of The Spirit Protection Forces. - With the elderly Mako still Chief of Police, the police have begun falling behind due to it's inability to adapt to the changing times. Because of this the rise in crime has skyrocketed, and most of the government funding going towards the Spirit Protection Forces who seen as more capable of maintaining peace. - While the Republic City Police Force has seen claims of police corruption in the past 30 years, the Spirit Protection forces has had it's fair share of cries of money laundering. - In Book 1 we see the beginning of Niiko's spiritual training. - We see how Niiko deals with the celebrity of being the Avatar while trying to do his duty.

BOOK 2: POWER SYNOPSIS: "To be determined."

- Takes place four months after the events of Book 1. - Is more similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender in that it has Team Avatar travelling the world rather than being in the one location. - We meet Niiko's family and learn more about his past. - There's an actual horse at some point. - Probably the lightest of the three, as we see Niiko's spirital training in Book 1 come to fruition along with him being more comfortable in his role as the Avatar. - With the events of Book 1 still looming over Niiko, we do see him questioning his own morals while trying to uphold Avatar Korra's legacy.

BOOK 3: FREEDOM SYNOPSIS: "To be determined."

- Takes place four years after the events of Book 2. - While the characters move around a lot less than what they did in Book 2, they are only in Republic City for a chapter. With a huge chunk taking place in the Fire Nation. - We meet Fire Lord Yezun and his daugher Princess Yebun. - Rao's younger sister Omi becomes a focal character. *- We also meet Qu Lin’s second brother and his husband. - Book 3 is darker than the prevous books, with Niiko facing an enemy in which he can't physically fight or talk his way into a solution. - It also focuses on Niiko struggling with his connection to Raava and Vaatu.

[getoffthesoapbox]

[R:MotM] - Hwa-Gun vs. Ga-Eun

As I was browsing through various corners of the internet where fans of this show gather, I found increasingly I had a few things I wanted to say about the apparent differences between Hwa-Gun and Ga-Eun and why Hwa-Gun seems to be attracting so much interest despite being a secondary leading lady. I thought I’d explore this bit more, and maybe it’ll be useful to anyone who is looking for a different viewpoint to supplement their enjoyment of the show. =)

I didn’t come into Ruler with any preconceived notions about who was playing the heroine or which actress was being featured. I began watching Ruler fairly late in the game and was just in it to see a new sageuk that looked pretty. This maybe colors my perspective a little differently than those who’ve followed the story from the beginning.

From the beginning, it wasn’t initially clear to me who the leading lady would be, at least not until the crown prince chose Ga-Eun. Once he chooses Ga-Eun (very soon into the story), Hwa-Gun’s position as secondary heroine became solidified.

However, the viewership seems to fall into two camps: one camp which is disenchanted with Ga-Eun as a heroine and wishes Hwa-Gun held that position, and another which feels Hwa-Gun is where she should be and that Ga-Eun is the proper heroine, even if the writing doesn’t always feature her.

I personally fall between the two camps. I’m not at all disenchanted with Ga-Eun--I think she’s a lovely character and a charming girl. But I do find myself wistfully wishing as I watch the show that the creators had been brave enough to try the Hwa-Gun character as a heroine rather than a secondary lead. Since I understand the appeal of both sides, I thought I’d attempt to explore the draw and the appeal of the Hwa-Gun character, while still acknowledging the virtues of the Ga-Eun character. 

Capturing the Viewers’ Interest

On paper, there’s absolutely no reason why Hwa-Gun should be more interesting than Ga-Eun.

On paper, Ga-Eun is a perfect leading lady--she’s kind, sweet, loyal, and compassionate. She does everything right--her only flaw is that she perhaps jumps to conclusions too quickly and doesn’t investigate events thoroughly. But who could blame her, when these events involve the very emotional and tragic loss of her father, her only remaining family, and her entire life? She’s a brave girl who is well worthy of the leading lady position and the heart and affection of the crown prince. 

Unfortunately for Ga-Eun, her very worthiness renders her...a tad too safe, a tad too boring. And this would be fine if she were paired with a secondary lady of the usual secondary quality--a catty, ambitious, scheming girl who possessively latches onto the crown prince the way the false crown prince latches onto Ga-Eun. With a secondary lady of dubious quality, it’d be easy to root for Ga-Eun.

But Hwa-Gun is not such a simple character, nor is she lacking in her own charms. What Ga-Eun has in compassion, Hwa-Gun makes up for with wit, intelligence, and cunning. She’s a woman raised within the realm of power and politics, the granddaughter of the most powerful man pulling the strings in the land. She is a selfish, spoiled girl, but she’s by no means an unloving or unkind girl. While she is not as compassionate for the poor or the needy or the downtrodden as Ga-Eun is, she does have a deep and single minded love for the people who are closest to her, and to their people. This includes more than just the prince--her father, Gon, even her grandfather--and it’s within these conflicted loyalties that Hwa-Gun makes for a compelling and interesting character, in spite of her flaws. 

Flaws Make the Woman

I think the reason we now commonly see the call for Hwa-Gun to be the heroine (and I myself sympathize with this perspective) is for two reasons:

Real, genuine flaws in a heroine are unusual (especially in asian drama) and they make the viewer sympathetic because they touch on the viewer’s own humanity.

Hwa-Gun seems to be “earning” her happy ending where as Ga-Eun seems to be “receiving” hers. Viewers naturally gravitate toward characters who are active about solving their problems, even when inaction is more than justified (human nature to prefer action). 

Significant character flaws are rare for heroines in general, which is a strike against Ga-Eun from the gate. Hwa-Gun, as a secondary lead, is allowed the freedom to not be a perfect compassionate infantilized angel. She’s a woman, with dark sides, who is not always compassionate. But who in real life is always compassionate? Who in real life always does the right thing? Very few people, and even if you think you’re one of the exceptions, the chances are you aren’t truly in touch with yourself as well as you should be.

Everyone has dark impulses, and to see a secondary leading lady being allowed not only to have those impulses, but to not be vilified for them and to be treated with narrative dignity and respect is refreshing and probably is one of the things drawing the sympathy of some viewers. 

Development with the Crown Prince

One of the other problems with Ga-Eun is that she receives the Crown Prince’s love very early in the story, and thus has not much to “do” narratively other than feel betrayed by him temporarily when she finds out he might have been the one who killed her father. Perfect couples who are meant to be are boring for a viewer, especially over a long series like Ruler. 

On the other hand, Hwa-Gun’s efforts to act by the Crown Prince’s side and to keep him safe and alive begin to come off as more sympathetic when compared to Ga-Eun being gifted the prince’s love so early on in the story. Viewers like change and the unexpected, and so having the Crown Prince shift his affection to Hwa-Gun would make for an exciting twist after the predictability of his stable relationship with Ga-Eun. 

Of course, that’s not going to happen because the writers are very clear that the Crown Prince has no romantic feelings for Hwa-Gun. There isn’t even a shred of interest from his side, which also contributes to making Hwa-Gun appear more sympathetic. While, yes, it’s unhealthy for her to work so hard for a man who doesn’t love her, we can’t help who we love and everyone has felt the pain of an unrequited or unfulfilled love that lasted many years after it began. 

Relationship Balance

Another factor viewers root for in a pairing which I think might be overlooked in the overall discourse is relationship balance. If a character has too much of X, viewers prefer a partner who has Y to balance X, rather than another character who also has too much of X.

For example, Ga-Eun shares the Crown Prince’s ideals. This ordinarily would make for a lovely match in a pairing, because sharing values is very important for long term happiness in a couple. However, the Crown Prince is so idealistic and so moral that he doesn’t know how to break rules and sometimes puts himself stupidly in danger over foolish ethical quandaries. Ga-Eun, as yet another overly idealistic person, isn’t going to be able to pull him back from his foolishness because she supports all his causes. This is all well and good if these two would go off and be farmers or merchants together, but they’re going to be King and Queen. A little bit of self-preservation would be good in at least one of these characters for them to be hypothetically successful.

This is where Hwa-Gun surfaces as a “better” choice for the Crown Prince on a practical level. Hwa-Gun’s focus is different from the Crown Prince. She places a higher value on his life than on his ideals. However, she does not dismiss his ideals, nor do her own ideals conflict with his. She is perfectly happy to work in service to his goal, so long as she can keep him safe. This makes her arguably more suited to the task of standing at his side as Queen--she will fight his enemies and destroy everything in the path to his ideal, but she also won’t support any foolishness on his part and will help come up with counter plans that will preserve his life. 

The difference is very clear in episodes 29-30. Hwa-Gun first tries to persuade the Crown Prince just to take over the Pyunsoo Group. When that fails, she comes up with a second plan using her father’s antidote. Ga-Eun, on the other hand, simply tries to convince the Crown Prince to sacrifice her and “do the right thing,” which of course he would never do. The argument against Hwa-Gun’s method is that, of course, the Crown Prince would die before submitting to Dae Mok, as the Crown Prince himself points out with the analogy of the wolf and the bloody knife. However, as we see, the Crown Prince does what Hwa-Gun wanted him to anyway because he’d never sacrifice Ga-Eun or Chun-Woo. Ultimately, Hwa-Gun’s method was the method he took, not Ga-Eun’s. This demonstrates, yet again, that Hwa-Gun understands the Crown Prince’s situation better than he does, and that she’s a better planner to be at his side than Ga-Eun.

When a viewer sees this, although she may be moved by Ga-Eun’s selflessness, ultimately it’s just noble stupidity. If the Crown Prince hadn’t been immune to the poison thanks to his childhood experience, he’d be dead thanks to his refusal to play the game Hwa-Gun’s way. What does that mean for his court with Ga-Eun at his side? Results do matter as much as the process--having a kind process which ends in failure is no better than a cruel process which ends in results. The point is to strike the right balance so that the kind process leads to good results. 

Again, this isn’t to say the writers are in any danger of choosing the Hwa-Gun route; this is only to explain why some viewers may choose to prefer Hwa-Gun as a candidate for the Crown Prince. Hwa-Gun, for all her flaws as a person and her myopic focus on the few people she holds dear, is far better positioned to maneuver the political field than a nobleman’s daughter who grew up outside the palace. Viewers notice this (I had a similar situation when I began to support Yeonhwa for So during Moon Lovers’ run), and their allegiances may shift accordingly. 

Ultimately, while I think Ga-Eun is a fine heroine and certainly fills her role adequately, Hwa-Gun’s just a more interesting character in general thanks to her conflicted loyalties and her narrative position and her action-oriented plotlines. A standard sweet girl doesn’t stand much of a chance against an unusual smart girl. Ga-Eun had an uphill battle from the get-go.

This is not to say that Ga-Eun’s actress is inferior in any way. I think the fact that Ga-Eun is still able to endear herself to so many viewers in spite of her character’s narrative weaknesses is a testament to the strength of her actress. Hwa-Gun’s actress certainly isn’t as good, and her character’s being carried more by the strength of the character than the strength of the acting. 

Long story short, sometimes perfect heroines don’t have enough edge to them to carry the viewers’ interest. Sometimes viewers just want a little more from their characters, and if a secondary lady offers that, they’ll gravitate in her direction. I myself appreciate what Hwa-Gun brings to the show, and I hope her popularity leads to a new horizon for leading ladies in k-drama land. =) It’d be nice for creators to realize that sometimes it’s okay to let the ladies have some dark sides. In the meantime, fans of Ga-Eun should rest assured--her place as leading lady will never falter. Ruler belongs to her.

[jason5577]

Sophie Scholl

They were guillotined 72 years ago today. And they deserve remembering.

Posted: February 23, 2015 in Political musings, Popular Culture et al, Religion

Tags: Anniversary of White Rose executions, Courage, German resistance, German resistance to Hitler, Germany, Munich, National Socialism, Nazis, resistance, resistance to Hitler, Sophie Scholl, University of Munich, White Rose, World War 2, World War II 40

The White Rose Sophie Scholl and members of White Rose One of the most disturbing, heart-rending and thought-provoking films we have ever seen was “Sophie Scholl – The Final Days”. The movie covers the efforts of a resistance group fighting the Nazis called “White Rose” Although the White Rose is well known in Germany, it is not well known overseas.

Der Weissen Rose was a group of mostly students at the University of Munich in Bavaria. Some were studying philosophy. Most, but not all, were religious in some way. Some of the boys had done military service but were allowed to do stints at university between stints on the Eastern Front. This experience provided them with more knowledge of what was actually going on than the average person living in Germany at the time, and it appalled them, but in their courageous resistance they still come across as young and somewhat naïve. It is this naivety that has made the White Rose so appealing. They operated from “pure” theological and philosophical intellectual opposition to National Socialism, to fascism, to dictatorship, to the war, and to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews.

To believe that there was very little resistance to Hitler inside Germany is a serious misunderstanding. Resistance to the Nazis began, of course, before they even came to power, and continued during the thirties and throughout the war.

Serving members of White Rose Resistance came from political groups of the left, centre and even conservatives, from unions, from churches and religious people, from within the government and branches of the military. Several attempts were made to assassinate Hitler both by groups and individuals. Although it did not succeed in overthrowing Hitler or ending the Nazi tyranny, the resistance did have an impact on the war and the ultimate defeat of the fascist regime. Why does it seem otherwise? Well, the Nazi regime set out systematically and ruthlessly to destroy all opposition. Thousands of the people who would have been part of an even more effective resistance movement fled into exile soon after Hitler came to power. Many more were perfectly understandably frightened by the danger and sank into silence and inaction.

Sophie Scholl was guillotined, as was her brother, another brother was lost on the Eastern front. In a final meeting, Scholl’s father told her he was proud of her and not to regret her sacrifice. She replied that she would see them again in Heaven. Sophie Scholl was guillotined, as was her brother, another brother was lost on the Eastern front. In a final meeting, Scholl’s father told her he was proud of her and not to regret her sacrifice. She replied that she would see them again in Heaven. Yet many did not and paid the price. At least 5,000 were executed and many more spent time in prison. Some were simply murdered. There was a feeling within Germany that people really shouldn’t undermine the government during wartime

Many ordinary Germans saw members of the resistance as traitors because that was what almost every source of information available to them told them they were.

Unlike in the countries Germany tried to conquer, the resistance had to assume that much of the population actually supported the government and would report their activities from a sense of duty or from totally justified fear, thus making their actions even braver. Nevertheless, their writings struck a chord with many in the community.

The nations fighting Germany during World War II also decided not to publicise the German resistance to Hitler during or after the war. The insistence on unconditional surrender and the strategic bombing raids which caused so many civilian casualties made it necessary to see Germany as guilty as a nation rather than as itself a victim of Nazi tyranny. The allied armies knew about the resistance and benefited from it but did not want to praise it, at least initially.

MovieSophieSchollSo the story of Sophie Scholl and her family and friends remained almost un-talked about until about the 1970s, when the German community started to discuss the war years more openly, and then again in 2005 when the remarkable film about the events was released.

You can watch the entire film, in its original German, with subtitles, below.

If you haven’t seen it, we cannot recommend it highly enough, but we warn you that it is gut wrenching.

Nevertheless, if you haven’t seen it, find a couple of hours, pour yourself a strong drink, and watch it. Those that died deserve to be remembered.

When people discuss the White Rose it has been suggested they were a brave but ineffective resistance movement. That is, in fact, not true. When they were active they caused the regime considerable annoyance. Although many who received the leaflets in the mail handed them in to police, many did not, and the regime had to deal with the fact that those who handed them in may have read them.

Sophie Scholl was an ordinary girl - devoutly Catholic, she fell in love with one of her fellow conspirators, she loved the countryside, she adored her parents. She was very ordinary, just very, very brave. Sophie Scholl was an ordinary girl – devoutly Catholic, she fell in love with one of her fellow conspirators, she loved the countryside, she adored her parents. She was very ordinary, just very, very brave. They managed to establish branches in Berlin and particularly Hamburg where sadly many of Hamburg White Rose met the same fate. The White Rose also had a role in a student uprising in Munich— which was quickly suppressed.

After their execution graffiti appeared on walls in Munich: “Ihr Geist lebt wieter” “Their Spirit Lives On”.

Others carried on the fight. Copies of the leaflets were smuggled out to the Allies and later dropped in their tens of thousands by bombers over German cities.

An example of the leaflets (there were a total of five) is produced below. The courage of young people who could make these arguments against the might of the Nazi Reich simply beggars belief. Especially as they operated in the sure and certain knowledge that one day they must be caught, with their horrifying deaths as the inevitable result.

Many brave people died during the Second World War. These young Germans were amongst the bravest.

THE THIRD LEAFLET

Salus publica suprema lex (Public safety is the supreme law)

All ideal forms of government are Utopias. A state cannot be constructed on a purely theoretical basis; instead, it must grow and develop in the same way an individual human being matures. But we must not forget that at the beginning of every civilization the state already existed in a rudimentary form. The family is as old as man himself, and out of this initial bond man, endowed with reason, created for himself a state founded on justice, whose highest law was the common good. The state should reflect the divine order, and the highest of all utopias, the Civitas dei, is the model it should ultimately resemble. We will not compare the many possible states here—democracy, constitutional monarchy, monarchy, and so on, but one issue needs to be made clear and unambiguous; every human being has the right to a just state, a state that safeguards the freedom of the individual as well as the good of the whole. For according to God’s will, man should be free and independent, while fulfilling his natural duty of living and working together with his fellow citizens, and strive to achieve earthly happiness through self-reliance and self-motivation.

But the present “state” is the dictatorship of evil. “Oh, we’ve known that for a long time,” I hear you object, “and it isn’t necessary to bring that to our attention again.” But, as I ask you, if you know that, why do you not rouse yourselves, why do you allow these men in power to rob you step by step, both openly and in secret, of one of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunkards? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right—or rather, your moral duty—to eradicate this system? But if a man can no longer summon the strength to demand his right, then he will definitely perish. We would deservedly be scattered over the earth like dust in the wind if we do not marshal our powers at this late hour and finally find the courage we have lacked up to now. Do not hide your cowardice behind a cloak of expedience, for with every new day that you hesitate, failing to oppose this offspringof Hell, your guilt, like a parabolic curve, grows higher and higher.

Many, perhaps most, of the readers of these leaflets cannot see clearly how they can mount an effective opposition. They cannot see any avenues open to them. We want to try to show them that everyone is in a position to contribute to the overthrow of this system. Solitary withdrawal, like embittered hermits, cannot prepare the ground for the overthrow of this “government” or bring about the revolution at the earliest possible moment. No, it can only be done through the cooperation of many convinced energetic people—people who agree on the means they must use to attain their goal. We have few choices as to these means. The only one available is passive resistance. The meaning and the goal of passive resistance is to bring down National Socialism, and in this struggle we can’t shrink from any means, any act, wherever it is open to attack. We must bring this monster of a state to an end soon. A victory for fascist Germany in this war would have inconceivable and terrible consequences. The first concern of every German is not the military victory of Bolshevism, but the defeat of National Socialism. This must be the first order of business; its greater imperative will be discussed in one of our forthcoming leaflets.

And now every resolute opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can most effectively fight against the present “state”, how he can inflict the most damaging blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. We can provide each man with a blueprint for his acts; we can only make general suggestions, and he alone will find the best way to achieve them.

Sabotage armament industries, sabotage every assembly, rally, ceremony, and organisation sponsored by the National Socialist Party. Obstruct the smooth functioning of the war machine (a machine designed for war that is then used solely to shore up and perpetuate the National Socialist Party and its dictatorship.) Sabotage in every scientific and intellectual field involved in continuing this war—whether it be universities, technical colleges, laboratories, research stations, or technical agencies. Sabotage all cultural institutions that could enhance the “prestige” of the fascists among he people. Sabotage all branches of the arts that have even the slightest dependence on National Socialism or serve it in any way. Sabotage all publications, all newspapers, that are in the pay of the “government” and that defend its ideology and help disseminate the brown lie. Do not give a penny to public fund-raising drives (even when they are conducted under the guise of charity), for this is only a cover. In reality the proceeds help neither the Red Cross nor the needy. The government does not need this money; it is not financially interested in these fund-raising drives. After all, the presses run nonstop, printing as much paper currency as is needed. But the people must never be allowed to slacken! Do not contribute to the collection of metal, textiles and the like. Try to convince all your acquaintances, including those in the lower social classes, of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists, of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to adopt passive resistance.

Aristotle, Politics: “Further….[a tyrant] should also endeavor to know what each of his subjects says, or does, and should employ spies everywhere…and further, to create disunity and division in the population: to set friend against friend, the common people against the notables, and the wealthy among themselves. Also he should impoverish his subjects; the maintenance of guards and soldiers is thus paid for by the people, who are forced to work hard and have neither the time nor the opportunity to conspire against him…Another practice of tyrants is to increase taxes, after the manner of Dionysius at Syracuse, who contrived that his subjects paid all their wealth into the treasury within five years. The tyrant is also inclined to engage in constant warfare in order to occupy and distract his subjects.

Please make as many copies of this leaflet as possible and pass them on!

Source: https://wellthisiswhatithink.com/2015/02/23/they-were-guillotined-73-years-ago-today-and-they-deserve-remembering/

[brucee-waynee]

Political Implications of Rogue One

I have a lot to say about Rogue One, particularly focused on its political implications. Let me begin by stating, I don’t see myself as a political scientist, nor a really huge fan of Star Wars. I have always enjoyed the franchise and I’m currently studying my bachelor’s degree in political science and peace studies. I hope its comprehensible. If you have any questions, please let me know.

If you have not seen the film, Rogue One: A Star Wars story, then avoid reading. This will obviously be full of SPOILERS. Find my words under the cut. That being said, my blog may be difficult to read on so I’ve upload my words to WordPress here.

Let’s begin by laying the ground work of my observation of the current political atmosphere, mostly in the West.

I have always been asking myself, what are the best methods at our disposal as political activists in an age of neoliberal global capitalism? Its hard to say for certain and I don’t think there is an answer or at least not one. Its not simple and politics have never been simple. I’ve always found myself questioning that grey morality, that there is really no such thing as black and white. No good and evil. That being said, with the rise of neo-conservatism, as a result of neoliberalism, we have had many outskirts of fascist movements. There motives are clear and though they may not seem so, it is evident they are uninterested in the reality that people are different. There is no longer a want for multiculturalism and diversity rather ethnic nationalism based on whiteness.

In Rogue One, the cast itself is diverse but I will not be speaking to that necessarily. I will be speaking to their methods of what the rebellion meant to these people. What I found interesting, is that unlike other Star Wars films, we seen huge sacrifice for the cause. And at the time, that’s all that mattered. Cassian Andor was an embodiment of the rebellion, as he grew up being apart of it. His character caught my eye because though he had come off militaristic or even violent to some, inside he was struggling with what was right and wrong. He addressed that the rebellion had done many wrongs, as did others in the fleet coded as Rogue One. They did things that they were not proud of but would likely do again if they knew that it would mean the end of the imperialist empire. They did not want to be like those oppressors in the empire, but took action and acted like the Red Army Faction (a simple google to learn more on them). I’m not condoning what that group did although its an interesting concept that heavily reflects that of Rogue One. They had revolutionary ideals, which is not a new concept for Star Wars, considering Leia’s iconic hair is from the Mexican Revoltuion.

You may be asking how our current political atmosphere and Rogue One intertwine, and I want to speak to that. I first want to address that although we may not have the same outward imperialist body that is fully observant in our daily lives, imperialism is still found but its not just one force driving it.

The current neo-conservative powers that have formed, be it with Britain and Brexit, Trump in the United States or the spawn of white supremacist groups all over the West, have shown to put blame on marginalized groups for issues that have arose due to global capitalism. The crises that have happened since the 1970s to the biggest crisis we’ve had in the 21st century in 2007-2008, has shown the failure of neoliberal capitalism. With the outsourcing of jobs to places with lower labour, and environmental laws, there has been more people pointing their fingers to immigrants and migrants as the blame for their economic insecurity. There’s little said of corporate powers and how they actually hold all the blame. We have also seen a rise of securitization, by which I mean militaristic state and private police forces attacking, particularly in the cases of Seattle WTO protest, G20 Protest in Toronto, Ferguson – Black Lives Matter, and most recently NoDAPL (There are more examples, I just can remember them all at this time).

If you’re still following me, this is where I’d like to make that connection. There has been a lot of people using the words of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as an outcry of how we must peacefully protest our way out of things. That peaceful protest will somehow stop the continued empire of you want to call it that, of capitalism and imperialism, but I have been questioning that rhetoric. That’s when I seen Rogue One. They sacrificed themselves as a group in order to gain information on how to destroy the new weapon the empire had built. This is obviously to easy for us in this age, but is it? We often try to peacefully negotiate with those that oppress us and we do so because we see no other choice. Sometimes, direct action is the best result. In fact, never have human rights or rights generally been fought for without violence, without bloodshed. I am not saying lets all sacrifice ourselves to save the world, rather that we need to be aware of the true enemy to us. That is the very system that we see reactionaries going out of their way to put blame on marginalized groups.

The result of Rogue One lead to ~spoilers~ for the ‘sequals’ of Rogue One, ended up in the fall of the empire. I won’t speak to the Force Awakens, as its on going but their sacrifice meant something. We don’t have the luxury of writing our own stories, rather we are judged by our actions or inaction's. We must remain strong and see value in grass root-community alliances. 

It is also about seeing that democracy is just all show for capitalism, that it always will elect people who will uphold this oppressive system. We seen this with Padme Amidala in Episode III of Star Wars, when she tried to negotiate with the political body of the intergalactic system. Her infamous line from the film is “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” Democracy can be argued not to have failed but more so doing what it was suppose to do. Its suppose to appease us and make us feel better. “At least I voted.” Rights have never been fought for by the ballot box. They may have helped but it was about grass root movements and the fight for the cause. The cause that Rogue One shown us.

I don’t have an answer things. But I know that if we continue to rely solely on our parliamentary political systems, we will continue to see more oppressive practices being accepted. We must be direct in our actions and instill that oppressors are in fear of us. That we will not uphold this system. That we want to see systemic barriers fall. If I took anything from Rogue One, it was that the cause is true and we can get there, as long as we have hope.

[language576-blog]

Donald Trump’s ‘party of health care’ has spent a decade failing to repeal and replace Obamacare

New Post has been published on https://languageguideto.com/awesome/donald-trumps-party-of-health-care-has-spent-a-decade-failing-to-repeal-and-replace-obamacare/

Donald Trump’s ‘party of health care’ has spent a decade failing to repeal and replace Obamacare

After a bruising midterm election in which widespread insecurity over the future of health care helped pace extraordinary gains for Democrat, allowing them to retake the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump has decided to re-up this failed strategy.

This week, the White House let it be known that the administration would not defend the Affordable Care Act in a case that could end in the wholesale invalidation of the Obama-era health care reform law. Such a result would cause no end of chaos, beginning with the prospect of tens of millions of Americans losing their current health insurance schemes. Nevertheless, Trump carried exuberant confidence, declaring that he would build the GOP the” party of health care .”

A strong pledge, indeed. But the idea that the GOP could ever be “the party of health care” is something of a stretch.

The problem that Republican lawmakers refuse to confront is that their own doctrines are misaligned with the desires of the American people. Most Americans, including die-hard members of the GOP base, favor their health care to be stable and affordable, with ready access and no surprise expenses. Most Republican health care proposals, on the other hand, posture health care as the hard-won privilege of those who build the correct moral choices in the Randian free market.

The idea that health care might be a human right is categorically repudiated; health care models proven to produce better outcomes through some measure of government intervention in the marketplace come in for similar chastisement as an un-American brand of socialism — whether it’s a wholesale single-payer scheme that would eliminate the need for private health insurance, or a more modest proposal to allow the government to option to bargain for lower narcotic costs.

What will happen if the Trump administration wins the lawsuit to repeal Obamacare?

Because these two points of view are impossible to reconcile, the GOP can never genuinely replace Obamacare with a bill that manages to achieve the same basic benchmarks for health care access and premium cost.

As a outcome, Republican alternatives to Obamacare tend to be at their best when they are in a liminal nation between being and nothingness. Once loosed from their Schrodinger’s box, exposure to the real world causes these bills to be disclosed as paradoxical scam. And lest you think this quantum mechanics metaphor is inapt, let’s recall that the GOP literally stashed one of its health care proposals in a basement hidey-hole, refusing to even let its own members look upon it.

But even a rudimentary recollection of the GOP’s recent history renders such metaphors unnecessary. In the activities of the decade since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have been trapped in a cycle of proposing alternative bills that then never arrive, after which the party, stricken with criticism over their inactivity, begins the process anew. It has always been this style, and there is no reason to believe this is ever going to change. But let’s go to the tape.

GOP political consultant Karl Rove, 2009:” In politics, you can’t beat something with nothing, so it is critical that the GOP offers an alternative to President Barack Obama’s government-run monstrosity .”

In 2009, as Democrat began to assemble the ideas that would, after much intra-party wrangling, lead to the Affordable Care Act, Republicans were still attempting to gin up alternative methods out of the remains of the scheme Sen. John McCain( R-AZ) put forward on the stump. While it may have been unjust to expect much more than policy protoplasm from the GOP so early in Obama’s first term, early signs suggested that Republican legislators were going to struggle to get on the same page.

In May, Sens. Tom Coburn( R-OK) and Richard Burr( R-NC ), together with Reps. Paul Ryan( R-WI) and Devin Nunes( R-CA ), introduced the Patient’s Choice Act, which like Obamacare had Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reform as an obvious antecedent. A month later, Reps. Eric Cantor( R-VA) and Dave Camp( R-MI) hurled together their own scheme, which was termed a” four-page exercise in public relations” by one observer. In July, Rep. Tom Price( R-GA) put forth the” Empower Patients First Act ,” which such a close similarity to other Republican bills that it caused some to wonder what was so markedly wrong about its predecessors that it needed to be created in the first place. Finally, in November, Rep. John Boehner( R-OH) offered an” Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute” to the emerging Democratic health care reform bill.

Nothing came of any of these early efforts. The CBO made mincemeat of Boehner’s amendment. The Patient Choice Act was referred to committee and never emerged. There was an” Improving Health Care For All Americans Act” and an” Empowering Patients First Act ,” both of which came to naught. As Sen. Max Baucus( D-MT) famously quipped,” I started reading a couple, three, of the Republican schemes, but frankly, there’s only so much time in the day .” Many of these initial ideas went on to serve as the recombinant DNA of future Republican failures.

American Spectator columnist Fred Barnes, 2010:” Republican … ought to go beyond advocating repeal of Obamacare, tell voters what they’d replace it with, and explain the benefits.”

As 2010 got underway, and the Democrats’ bill continued to draw inspiration from Mitt Romney, the GOP’s alternatives sought refuge in the minimal. The Weekly Standard offered a single-page alternative to Obamacare called ” The Small Bill” that never genuinely garnered much attention beyond its own masthead. Meanwhile, the White House’s first great efforts to bridge the partisan divide was met by the GOP offering” a blank sheet of paper” as a counter-proposal. As if to underscore the GOP’s nihilist position, Sen. Bob Bennett( R-UT) was defeated in the second round of balloting at his state’s Republican convention for the crime of working productively on a bipartisan alternative with Sen. Ron Wyden( D-OR ).

But on March 23, 2010, the GOP watched as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became the law of the land. Repealing Obamacare thus became the order of the day and Republican rapidly got back to the process of throwing bill after bill at the wall to see if any might stick. Rep. Paul Broun( R-GA) offered up the” Repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 ,” as his fellow House colleagues generated a parallel bill that would do basically the same thing but with an even longer name. Both bills went to committee and never returned.

Hope for the GOP nevertheless arrived in November with the election of a new Republican majority in the House.

Weekly Standard contributor Jeffrey Anderson, 2011: “[ Republican] need to show the American people that the choice is not between Obamacare and nothing. They need to provide a meaningful, sensible alternative to Obamacare’s comprehensive fails .”

In March of 2011, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein declared that it was ” put up or shut up period for Republicans ,” who, in his estimation,” managed to make it through the health-care debate without offering serious answers of their own, and — perhaps more impressive — through the election by promising to tell us their solutions after they’d won .” This earned him the ire of his conservative colleague, Jennifer Rubin, who accused Klein of” feigning there is no alternative to the deeply flawed Obamacare .”

This was the first instance of what would soon become a pattern, in which failed Obamacare alternatives led to conservative pundits to order Republican back to the drawing board. This would lead liberal pundits to remark about the paucity of Republican ideas, which in turn would inspire conservative critics to lambaste their lefty counterparts for failing to note all of the ideas that had failed in the first place.

The obvious route of breaking the cycle was, of course, to simply come up with a plan and stick with it. This proved to be so difficult that talk of replacing Obamacare actually began to fade. As Politico reported in July:” When they took control of the House, Republicans could scarcely stop talking about their plans to’ repeal and replace’ the health care reform statute. Six months later, they hardly talk publicly about those schemes at all .”

Romney health care adviser Avik Roy, 2012:” Conservatives are sorely mistaken if they believe that they can continue to campaign against Obamacare, without offering their own strategy for building health care more affordable for American households and the federal treasury .”

In January of 2012, with the health care law hanging in the balance thanks to a looming Supreme Court case, the Hill reported that” House Republican will be ready with a plan to replace President Obama’s healthcare law once the Supreme Court determines the law’s fate this summer” — and that an alternative to Obamacare would be ready to go no matter how the Roberts court ultimately ruled.

As you might expect, the Hill would subsequently report in May that” Republicans might not offer a comprehensive plan to replace President Obama’s healthcare law if the Supreme court strikes it down this summer .” In fact, in July, Cantor would tell NBC News’ Tom Brokaw that Republicans were merely preparing “to begin work” on the bill.

Weeks later, the Los Angeles Times would report that Republicans had” all but given up pushing alternatives” to Obamacare.

Washington Examiner contributor Mona Charen, 2013:” As Obamacare’s rising costs and constricted selections alienate the American people, Republicans must be prepared with alternative methods that is market-oriented, assembled and on the launchpad.”

Correctly predicting that the Obama administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s country marketplaces would be a fraught affair, Ryan would make an attempt to reboot the repeal-and-replace endeavor, telling the attendees of the Wisconsin state GOP convention,” This is the moment that we have to offer them real hope and give them real alternatives .” Price would answer the call and offer up another replacement bill, the” Empowering Patients First Act of 2013 .” Like so many other bills, its short life ended after it was referred to committee.

Nevertheless, members of the GOP attempted to renew their vows. Rep. Kevin Brady( R-TX) would tell Newsmax that the party would definitely” plan to have an alternative to Obamacare ready by this autumn .” Indeed, the Republican Study Committee would offer up the” American Health Care Reform Act of 2013 ,” which ThinkProgress described as a grab bag of health care ideas that the GOP had been proposing” since at the least 2007.” Like so many other GOP alternatives, this bill would also slip into the afterlife of committee limbo.

Price would tell Fox News that the Republican would definitely” bring forth a bill” to” unite Republican around health care issues” sometime after the new year because, as he said,” You can’t beat something with nothing .”

Karl Rove, 2014:” Republicans can easily pick[ Obamacare] apart, but they won’t win over voters without their own ideas .”

True to their word, Senate Republican unveiled the” Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act” not soon after the start of the new year. And true to form, wrote Jonathan Chait,” Within hours of the new plan coming into contact with political reality, things began to fall apart ,” as its authors realized that actually attempting to fabricate a funding mechanism for covering the uninsured invited political attacks. Once that became apparent, the authors” changed the language … insulating them from political assaults, but also neutering[ the proposal’s] value .”

By April, it was reported that the roll-out of the Republican alternative would be delayed once again. The Republican Study Committee briefly attempted to mount a campaign for Rep. Phil Roe’s( R-TN)” American Health Care Reform Act of 2013″( also known as HR 3121 ), going so far as to wear lapel pins that read” HR 3121, There’s A Better Way .” The whereabouts of those lapel pins has been lost to history, but HR 3121 died in committee.

In June, Cantor, through a spokesperson, reaffirmed that he was continuing” to work towards bold legislative solutions to replace Obamacare .” Weeks subsequently, Cantor lost his primary election to David Brat.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker( R ), 2015: “We must repeal Obamacare … but we can’t be brought to an end. The president’s policies must be replaced with a scheme that will send power back to people and the states.”

With Obamacare once again in the crosshairs of the Supreme court — this time in the King v. Burwell case — Republican lawmakers repeated their pledges to have an alternative ready to go no matter how the matter was resolved. Committees received instructions, task forces were enjoined, and the result was an” outline of a plan” cobbled together by a trio of Republican senators which would be forced to” compete with with several other replacing options .”

By the time the Supreme Court began hearing the oral debates in King, GOP lawmakers had not yet mapped out their route to a replacement. Nonetheless, the New York Times declared that “the search for a replacing by Republican lawmakers” was now, in its seventh year,” eventually gaining momentum.” And the Senate’s budget set an end of July deadline for the replacing bill.

But when July rolled around, the same old inactivity and excuses returned. Politico reported that” Republican lawmakers … say that the deadline doesn’t really mean anything .”

” It’s not a hard and fast deadline, ” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy( R-CA) insisted, adding, “I don’t think there’s a reason why we have to hurry.”

Indeed, they did not hurry. And so in December, House Speaker Ryan announced,” We think this problem is so urgent that next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare .” Days afterwards, Ryan added a proviso :~ ATAGEND” I don’t have an exact timeline .”

Rep. Fred Upton( R-MI ), 2016:” Dedicate us a little time, another month or so…I think we’ll be pretty close to a Republican alternative .”

In January of 2016, Fox News reported on a major breakthrough, in which the GOP-led Congress” within hours of reconvening” was going to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare in the House, which, once combined with its Senate equivalent, would” send the measure to President Obama, daring him to veto it .”

Obama vetoed it. The fact that the repeal and replace measure was combined with another measure that would end funding for Schemed Parenthood raised mistrusts that perhaps the proposal was nothing more than veto bait all along.

Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers rededicated themselves to a more sincere effort to create an Obamacare replacement. With the heat of the presidential campaign season providing incentives of its own, Ryan vowed that he would come through with a proposal even if the gaggle of GOP nominees failed to do so. But by June, as Donald Trump procured the GOP presidential nomination, the best Republican lawmakers had at hand was” a white paper that is less detailed than legislation would be .” And so the task get handed off to Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.

“Plans you don’t even know about are going to be devised ,” Trump promised.

Sen. Bob Corker( R-TN ), 2017:” To be honest, there’s not any real discussion taking place right now .”

With the inauguration of Trump, GOP lawmakers — occupying consolidated majorities in both houses of Congress — were finally on the glide path to repealing and replacing Obamacare. At least, that’s probably what most people guessed the Trump presidency was going to play out. In practice, however, owning all of the veto phases didn’t enable the GOP to either repeal or replace Obamacare. Rather, it only illuminated internal divisions and intra-party dysfunction that the president absence the mental fortitude or the temperament to alleviate. Throughout Trump’s first spring in office, Republican were seemingly at one another’s throats more often than they were at the task of passing their long-promised Obamacare replacement.

House Republican managed to narrowly pass the American Health Care Act by a 217 -2 14 vote, prompting a Rose Garden celebration in which Trump expressed confidence that passing the Senate would be a mere formality.

Instead, all of the familiar patterns returned. The Senate missed its self-imposed July 4 deadline. The CBO filleted the bill — noting that it would leave 22 million people uninsured as a result of its passage. Revises and horse-trading failed to improve matters. In the end, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposed” skinny repeal” was the last vestige of the effort left alive — and McCain, who had been the deciding vote in allowing the matter to come to the Senate floor in the first place, cast the vote that killed the effort. A subsequently, even more last-ditch effort to revive the dead measure floated by Sens. Lindsey Graham( R-SC) and Bill Cassidy( R-LA) would similarly fail.

Taken as a whole, it’s hard to ascribed the “party of health care” moniker to a party that can’t seem to coalesce around a plan on most days, let alone pass a plan when consensus is achieved — even with full congressional majorities and the presidency in hand.

Despite this, some Republicans remain cheerful and optimistic even after Trump’s decision to throw everybody’s health insurance into arrears. As Graham enthused,” This is sort of like a new lease on life … Obamacare has failed and it’s not going to work … we have done enough to go after Obamacare, but not enough to replace it .”

” If we don’t have a proposal on health care then that is a mistake going into 2020 ,” he added.

Sounds awfully familiar.

Read more: thinkprogress.org

[unifiedsocialblog]

The Things Brands Do on Social Media That People Hate

Outrage is the fastest-spreading emotion on social media, according to multiple studies. People love to hate, and they’ll happily hate your brand if you give them the right reason.

Whether you see a raging firestorm of hostile tweets as free marketing or a living nightmare, this post is for you. Turns out there are endless ways for a brand to stumble across the line into irritating, phony or outright offensive behaviour.

Here are our some of our favourite ways to annoy and alienate your followers…

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

14 things brands do on social media that people hate

1. Oblivious self-promotion

Yes, brands are on social media to sell. Your audience isn’t going to hold it against you, for the most part. Unless you just won’t stop selling.

Not everything is about you, Cinnabon.

When you’re building your social media calendar try to follow the 80/20 rule: eighty percent useful (i.e., informative, entertaining, awe-inspiring, etc.) versus twenty percent promotional.

Or, another way of thinking about it: your audience is composed of human beings with thoughts and feelings.

2. Too much AI

Speaking of human beings, consider talking like one, too.

According to Pew Research, 66 percent of Americans have heard of social media bots, and 80 percent of those people think bots are bad.

If you’re considering automating your social media—whether it’s a customer service chatbot or a pay-for-Instagram-followers service—take a moment to consider how badly it could go.

Unless a booking assistant bot is actually faster and more convenient than the alternative methods, don’t risk annoying your potential customers.

Even more problematic: using a bot to automate your social media interactions (eg., retweeting certain hashtags or following/retweeting certain users).

Remember when the Patriots’ Twitter account managed to automatically post this image?

Maintain a human touch on social.

3. Non-apologies

Whether you’ve inconvenienced one person or offended millions, take the situation as seriously as they do.

This apology from the Patriots apparently looked fine to the people who approved it, but it missed the mark for two reasons:

A) it dodges blame, B) the language is inadequate given the offense.

Some key ingredients of a good apology:

Accept responsibility

Acknowledge the other person’s feelings

Don’t make excuses

Commit to being better

Try not to speak like a character from Kafka’s The Trial

4. Not listening

Social media is not a billboard campaign. When you’re crafting every post with the goal of actively encouraging engagement, at some point you’re going to receive less-than-positive feedback.

Don’t ignore complaints. Not responding to negative feedback is its own crystal-clear response. Not only can your audience see you cold-shouldering other customers, you’re missing out on an opportunity to transform the situation into a positive experience.

What’s the best way to get fewer complaints? Learn from the ones you do get.

People aren’t shy about telling you what needs to change. To that end, a social listening strategy can help you gauge customer mood across social media platforms, and act on it.

5. Thirsty customer service

Yes, brands need to listen. On the other hand, they need to avoid being creepy and invasive. In other words: if you are a chicken restaurant don’t flirt with people.

Sixty-four percent of customers only want a brand to chime in when they’re being directly addressed. It’s a double standard, but if people are out there talking you up it can be weird if you start chatting back.

6. Automatic cross-posting

Nothing says “I don’t care about this platform or the people who use it” more clearly than a post that was clearly meant for another platform.

This tweet is a perfect example of ineffective cross-posting. Twitter users are never going to click through to see an image on Instagram. (I mean, the load times!) And why would anyone say “link in bio” on Twitter, when you can easily post a link?

At best this tweet looks lazy, at worst incompetent.

Craft a new post for each platform. This isn’t a huge task, it just means small tweaks to caption length, image format, and vocabulary. It’s arguably easier than getting your apostrophes right.

7. Posting clickbait

“The best way to convert a potential customer is by misleading them right off the bat,” said no one, ever.

Yes we love clicks. But there’s a difference between compulsive, mindless traffic and a person who has been encouraged to take the first step in initiating a valuable relationship for both parties.

If you’re exploiting your audience’s lizard-brain to draw them in, they’ll figure it out sooner or later. Probably in micro-seconds. Probably even as they click the link they’re already annoyed at themselves (for falling for it) and you (for making them fall for it.)

This is just not how trust is built.

8. Posting engagement bait

One fraction of a step above clickbait (and still on Facebook’s radar as a spammy practice that the algorithm will seek out and punish) is engagement bait.

Source: Facebook

Begging for comments, shares, likes, reactions, or votes on any platform is honestly a little embarrassing. Your brand is above this kind of behavior.

There are better ways to encourage engagement, like running an above-board Instagram contest.

9. Acting cool

Ok, this one’s a little tougher.

Yes, some brands have managed to win hearts and minds with snark and weirdness. And some brands have managed to fail utterly:

As @BrandsSayingBAE’s bio states: “It’s cool when a corporation tweets like a teenager. It makes me want to buy the corporation’s products.”

Corporations may be people in the eyes of the law, but having a personality is not a commitment to take on lightly if you’re a brand.

It’s the internet. Someone will always find a way to mock you.

On the other hand, people will mock you if you’re boring, too.

10. Being boring

Dr Pepper Snapple act very serious online, considering they’re a group of people who call themselves “Dr Pepper Snapple.”

In 2017 they were so committed to being boring that they got a Twitter account called @OfficialRCCola shut down. The account had posted several viral tweets and attracted 10,000 followers in two months with its irreverent (and markedly anti-Trump) jokes.

Apparently, Dr Pepper Snapple would prefer to receive zero attention on social media. (Their Twitter account is almost entirely inactive except for the odd verbatim press release.)

Here’s a question for brand experts: at what point does their lack of annoyingness become, in itself, annoying?

11. Using emojis when you don’t know how to use emojis

Remember #ChevyGoesEmoji? Probably not. No one does, except for the poor auto journalists who received the company’s all-emoji press release in advance of the Chevy Cruze.

Turns out that for brands, emojis are a privilege, not a right. Learn how to use emoji in your social media strategy effectively, or spare yourself the embarrassment and don’t use them at all.

Not only was Chevy’s emoji use incomprehensible, the branded hashtag was a non-starter, too. Which brings us to our next point.

12. Using hashtags when you don’t know how to use hashtags

It is actually quite difficult to use hashtags without being just a little, um, basic. Using them in an interesting, smart, effective way? Extremely difficult.

For every successful branded hashtag campaign (brb googling “successful branded hashtag campaign”), there are a dozen self-owning fails: #McDstories #susanalbumparty #loveDP

Over the past few years, most brands have learned, often by watching other brands crash and burn, to back off on the kind of hashtags that will open up a floodgate of mockery and shame.

On most social media platforms—and Twitter especially, where humour and vitriol go hand in hand—hashtags require an expert hand.

For instance, using hashtags on Instagram in 2018 is very different than using them on LinkedIn, where they were only introduced this year.

Please. Don’t wing it.

13. Being fake

Remember 2013, when the concept of influencer marketing was understood as: a secret cabal of genius psychopath millennials who, for the right price, could make your single chart or your sparkling beverage popular?

These days audiences are more aware of (and resigned to) the fact that every shout-out is bought and paid for.

That said, if you’re going to “partner” with a celebrity for an endorsement, help your audience maintain their fantasy of independent thought.

Authenticity may be the most overused buzzword of the decade, but the concept still requires respect. Once you’ve lost it, it’s not easy to get back.

14. Being tone-deaf

The last point on our list is maybe the most difficult to get right.

According to a Edelman, in 2018 two out of three people identified as belief-driven buyers, meaning they will buy or boycott a brand based on its stance on controversial issues. (That’s 64 percent of people surveyed, which is a 13-point lift from 2017.)

Audiences are holding brands to a higher moral standard than ever before, which means brands aren’t choosing whether to engage, but how.

Risk-averse brands are naturally going to want to avoid the rampant polarization that clouds today’s political conversation. No shame there: check out these twelve ways to promote your “boring” brand.

It’s arguably a better choice than option two: going the faux-woke route and risking a Kendall “Pepsi” Jenner situation: a 21,000 percent increase in mentions over two days, most of them negative.

Meanwhile, there’s a third option: participating in conversations in a meaningful, unambiguous way. This is still going to earn criticism, but since 53 percent of people believe brands can do more to solve social ills than government can, it can also earn admiration.

Like we said at the top, outrage is the most viral emotion on social media. Nike’s genius here is repurposing the pre-existing outrage over Colin Kaepernick’s blacklisting by the NFL (which, in turn, was because of his outrage over police brutality and white supremacy).

Of course, the key is to ride the outrage, not generate it.

Use Hootsuite to avoid making your social media followers hate you. Compose, publish, and schedule posts in advance, engage your audience in real time, and keep tabs on your competition. Try it free today.

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[bluewatsons]

Russell Mannion & Neil Small, On Folk Devils, Moral Panics and New Wave Public Health, 8 Int J Health Policy Manag 678 (2019)

Abstract

New wave public health places an emphasis on exhorting individuals to engage in healthy behaviour with good health being a signifier of virtuous moral standing, whereas poor health is often associated with personal moral failings. In effect, the medical is increasingly being collapsed into the moral. This approach is consistent with other aspects of contemporary neoliberal governance, but it fuels moral panics and creates folk devils. We explore the implications and dysfunctional consequences of this new wave of public health policy in the context of the latest moral panic around obesity.

The Medical and the Moral

Since it emerged as an organised endeavour across western societies in the 19th century, public health has shifted focus a number of times. Initially it represented a collective response to advances in scientific knowledge about the sources and spread of infectious diseases, then the predominant cause of death. The emphasis was on large scale public programmes to improve hygiene, sanitation and air quality. While the pioneer sanitary reformers were motivated by a wish to reduce infectious disease and to harness the advances of science they were also motivated by a strong moral commitment, inspired for many by a Christian ethos, to promote the well-being of the populous.1 Deaths from infectious diseases in England and Wales dropped from 25.9% of all deaths in 1911 to 0.7% of all deaths in 2013.2 The predominant cause of death by the mid-20th century was non-communicable disease. In 1971, 50% of all deaths were from heart disease, this rate dropped to around 28% by 2013.2 This drop can be attributed to improvements in treatment and also to a focus on addressing causes of death, including via a smoking ban in all enclosed work spaces which was introduced in England in 2007. Deaths from cancer have risen throughout the 20th century, 6% in 1911, 29% in 2013, but these deaths characteristically now occur later in life. This shift in the patterns of death has occurred at the same time as increasing life-expectancy.2

This changing pattern of disease is reflected in a shift in public health policy. During the last decades of the 20th century the focus moved to one that sought to combat physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol consumption and poor diet. These were seen as modifiable risk factors, if these risk factors could be reduced there would be less non-communicable disease later in life. In the 21st century, while the focus has remained on addressing things that are seen as causal factors of non-communicable disease, the emphasis has shifted towards programmes which seek to promote personal responsibility, with individuals required to exercise self-discipline in the areas health professionals define as high risk. Individuals are exhorted to engage in healthy behaviour with good health being a signifier of virtuous moral standing, whereas poor health is associated with personal moral failings.3

This shift from a collective moral commitment, evidenced in public works programmes, via a combination of legal and behavioural change to a concern with the moral failings of those who are seen as putting their health at risk has occurred at the same time as a shift in the role of the state in healthcare, within a broader shift in the nature of government. These are shifts that have been well-documented within the neoliberal governmentality literature,4,5 with recent extensions exploring the role of pastoral power in promoting adherent patient subjectivities.6 According to Foucault7 the logic of neoliberal governmentality is to “to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision-making criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic” (p. 79). It identifies dispersed mechanisms and technologies of power. Some power is still “old fashioned” sovereign power of command, in public health this might be banning or taxing something or offering inducements to encourage desired actions. But some power is now disciplinary power and this is concerned with the formation of motives, desires and character in individuals. The effect it seeks is that “disciplined” individuals acquire the habits, capacities and skills that allow them to act in socially appropriate ways without the need for the exercise of external coercive power.8 But those individuals who do not act in a disciplined way find that their subsequent encounters with health services involve their being given communicative messages at whose core is social and moral opprobrium for making poor lifestyle choices. Those that make poor choices are stigmatised and a moral distance is created between the well-behaved and the miscreants who are behaving badly.

In effect the medical is increasingly being collapsed into the moral.9 There are three main consequences of this. The first is one of “dissolving the bonds of social solidarity”10 as a denuded sense of citizenship is created in those subjected to moral distancing.11,12 The second concerns the way moral distance allows the state to step aside from what had previously been seen as part of its welfare responsibilities. A new quasi-state welfare apparatus emerges which is designed to outsource welfare and, in so doing, reduce the welfare bill. The third consequence is that a shift to the moral does not work, it does not take cognizance of biological, structural and social causation and it misreads what motivates choice in individuals. We will explore this analytic weakness in relation to obesity below.

If a moral distance from those seen to not be accepting personal responsibility for their behavior is created the next step is to portray those so distanced as a risk not just to themselves but to others. That risk is not the contagion, and the need for segregation to prevent the spread of disease from the few to the many, that the early public health exponents were concerned with but a risk to the economic well-being of the favored citizenry, those whose behavior is seen as appropriately disciplined.

Beck13 has argued that there is a new form of modernity which he terms “risk society.” Such a society has a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization. Beck argues that people occupy social risk positions and that knowledge allows you to act to mitigate your own risks. Acting becomes a way of virtue signalling, and not mitigating your risk position makes you a “dangerous outsider.” The sorts of horizontal division in society that this creates can be looked at using the analytic construct of moral panics.

Mods and Rockers Ride Again

The social theory of moral panic was first introduced by Stanley Cohen in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics .14 The book focused on public reaction to clashes between two rival youth subculture groups, “mods” and “rockers,” in 1964 over public holiday weekends at beaches in Southern England. On the basis of analysing these clashes and the media and public response to them, Cohen developed a social theory of moral panic comprising five sequential stages:

An event, condition, episode or someone is defined as a threat to the values, safety and interest of the wider society.

The media then amplifies these apparent threats through inflammatory rhetoric These portrayals appeal to public prejudices, creating villains in need of social control (folk devils) and victims (the moral majority).

The publicity surrounding the threat creates a sense of social anxiety leading to a public outpouring of concern.

Government then responds to the public outcry and frames the alleged threat as being symptomatic of a wider social malaise that must be addressed.

The moral panic and the responses to it transform the regulation of economy and society with the aim of tempering public outrage.

The moral panic Cohen describes appears more characteristic of a form of government in which sovereign power was of central importance; the need for action to address the threat to social order, the way the response to the moral panic transforms the regulation of society and the emphasis on these folk devils needing social control. There is an intention to contain and suppress the transgressors. It is also a moral panic in which the “folk devils” are not seen as active agents beyond their initial transgressions.

Since its original formulation the concept of moral panics has developed with recent approaches subsuming the concept within a wider theory of moral regulation where moral panics are viewed as amplified and volatile expressions of temporary ruptures which occur when the routine processes of moral regulation fail.15 This is a formulation of moral panic that is consistent with governmentality, when sovereign power is not needed but routine disciplinary power does not quite seem to be enough invoking a moral panic is sufficient to bring things back under control.

The moral panic that most preoccupies public health today is one about obesity,16 often inaccurately characterised as “a disease of affluence.” This moral panic is different to the panic of the 1960s. These differences are best examined using the insights of governmentality and of risk society.

Obesity and the Body Politic

The World Health Organization (WHO) definition of obesity is, “abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health.” Obesity is identified within the health service via the use of a widely disseminated measure, body mass index (BMI). BMI is a calculation based on the relationship between height and weight. It will indicate to you, or to your doctor, if you are underweight, healthy weight, overweight, or obese. Obesity then is used as a signifier of a heightened risk of morbidity and of a premature death. It is also an indicator that you are likely to have a greater need for healthcare now and particularly in the future.

Rates of obesity are increasing globally and the ‘obesity epidemic’ is characterized as one of the gravest threats to individual and public health of our times.17 Public discourse around obesity displays many of the hallmarks of a moral panic. Those who are labeled obese are demonized in the media as immoral ‘folk devils’ (literally ‘fat devils’) who violate societal values of self-control and who place an avoidable economic burden on national health systems. Pressures to obtain the right body size or shape carries moral connotations which negatively frame those as being overweight or obese as being slothful, lacking self-control and gluttonous. The obesity epidemic is linked with broader political anxieties, poor levels of national fitness and the discomfort of the United Kingdom being seen as “the fat man of Europe” for exampe.16

Obesity prevention mass media campaigns (eg, Strong4Life  in the United States, Change4Life  in the United Kingdom, and Swap it, don’t stop it  in Australia) predominantly frame obesity as an issue of personal responsibility – arising from poor individual choices – which can be fixed by individuals taking personal responsibility for weight loss through making better lifestyle choices.

But whereas in Cohen’s example the folk devils were a very small group of people the obese are not! In all but one of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries plus the US people categorized as obese make up more than a fifth of the adult population (in the United States more than a third) and average adult BMI is higher than that identified as normal (Japan is the exception in both cases). Thus, the average adult is, at least, overweight.18,19

In this scenario where folk devils constitute a very significant proportion of the population and where, unlike the mods and rockers, they are not breaking the law, Cohen’s five sequential stages of the manifestation of a moral panic need modification. Rose8 has suggested a number of areas that illuminate how problems arise and are responded to in the context of governmentality. Table 1 captures a series of steps that shape the way obesity has become an issue of concern, in so doing it illustrates how this moral panic occurs in the context of governmentality.

Table 1. Governmentality and the Moral Panic Around ObesityHow Problems Arise and Are Responded toObesity as the Issue and the Obese as the Problem

Social Science Weighs In

There is intense critique within the medical sociology and ‘Fat Studies’ literature with regards to the assumed objectivity and neutrality of epidemiological science and its apocalyptic predictions around the so called ‘obesity epidemic.’5,20-23 This literature also highlights the creation of new moral panics around ‘classed’ demographics of fatness based on geographical location and social background, around “communities of color”22 and especially the moralisation around childhood obesity – which it is argued, serves as a vehicle for the victim – blaming of working-class mothers.24 Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dominant obesity discourse with its emphasis on individual moral responsibility and personal lifestyle modification, ignores biological, social and structural contexts. Between 40%-70% of body weight variance is inherited, with more than 200 genes influencing weight and fat distribution.25,26 There are influences that come from endocrine disruptors, from the effects of sleep debt, smoking cessation and from the side effects of prescribed medications.27 Obesity also follows social gradients in wealth and inequality28 and is influenced by ‘obesogenic’ environmental factors such as poor access to healthy food outlets, a high density of fast food restaurants and a lack of open space for exercise.29 There is also the impact of the vested interests of food and drink industries manifest in advertising strategies and in lobbying activity.

LeBesco30 claims that the new wave public health approaches to obesity are concomitant with the shift to a neoliberal form of governmentality which normalises certain kinds of bodies under a gaze that constantly keeps deviance under surveillance. Here population statistics function to measure and classify obesity as a type of unhealthy deviance from the norm which is subsequently deemed as a threat to society. Hence citizens are expected to “locate themselves within the BMI scale, to confess being fat and to seek the appropriate bodily discipline (diet and exercise) to avoid becoming an economic burden for society.”30 A discourse that associates weight with illness and promotes individual moral responsibility fosters the internalisation of weight-based stigma, engenders negative emotions of guilt, shame and anxiety for those who do not meet socially acceptable weight benchmarks31 and attracts other non-weight stigma identities including being morally flawed and being inconsiderate.3 Moreover, numerous empirical studies demonstrate that obesity stigma is ineffective in reducing the incidence of obesity as it acts as a stressor which promotes weight gain, has deleterious consequences for mental health (depression anxiety, body dysmorphia), is associated with a range of physical health issues and serves to deepen existing structural inequalities.31-33

Moving from sovereign to disciplinary power in public health, changes the repertoire of techniques at its disposal. We can see a shift in emphasis from large scale public works, via the use of the law to the now fashionable idea of nudging people to change.34 Nudge is a behavioural economic approach, one of a number that have become increasingly influential in public health as tools for influencing behavior change and encouraging ‘better’ choices. The approach is based on the somewhat oxymoronic notion of “libertarian paternalism” – a new branch of neoliberal governmentality.35 It assumes that policy-makers should not deny people options but that they should consider manipulating the choice architecture to promote “better” choices. Examples include: provision of information – calorie counts on menus, and changes to the default option – salad rather than chips. Nudge both individualises understandings of choice in relation to health and fosters paternalism in pre-setting the choice architecture. Its use augments and in some cases replaces a range of other techniques:

Hugs : financial incentives such as vouchers in exchange for healthy behavior.

Shoves : measures that restrict choice, like increasing the price of cigarettes or limiting takeaways and fast food outlets near schools.

Smacks : Bans, such as the restriction on smoking in public places.

Disciplinary Power Does not Eliminate Agency

While Cohen’s mods and rockers may have manifest personal and group agency as they clashed on the beaches the ensuing moral panic, and the use of sovereign power, did not allow for their continuing to have an active role. But disciplinary power generates resistance, marginalised groups seek to oppose dominant narratives and to offer alternatives. These efforts are opposed and their resonance is diminished by their being characterised as “special cases” but, over time, solidarities can emerge and counter narratives can be offered and sustained.7 This is a process that is evident in relation to obesity and is summarised in Table 2.

Table 2. Where There Is Power, There Is Resistance

The invocation of disciplinary power also relies on the communication of messages, but there is a paradox in that those who frame the message are not always in control of its communication. The media does not just communicate medical and scientific messages it also uses these messages in ways that serve the interests of the media, for example exaggerating the dramatic and alarmist elements of academic reports in ways that are believed to best satisfy its readers/viewers.38

Putting Governmentality, Individualised Public Health and Moral Panics Together

A consequence of the increased emphasis on individual responsibility for ill health means that neither state, civil society or private sector institutions are held responsible for health problems. Blaming individuals and groups for the health needs they manifest leads to a focus on disciplinary power and, in so doing, ignores underlying biological and structural causes and puts undue and counter-productive pressure on the vulnerable. This is not to argue a fatalist approach where individuals have no agency or self-determination in relation to maintaining their health. But creating folk devils and mobilising moral panics is a risky tactic, it is something that might be invoked for other issues where there is a reluctance to use sovereign power and where governmentality is not quite enough. Hier39 has talked of “panic as regulation” approaches. These sorts of issues are vulnerable to appropriation by right wing populism. Here health fears are politicised, simplified, and made spectacular, for example over immigrants accessing healthcare, or fears over malign experts in pocket to big Pharma promoting dangerous vaccination on a vulnerable populous.40-42 Fuelling moral panics and creating folk devils are blunt public health tools with the potential for consequences that bludgeon the vulnerable.

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Brandt A, Rozin P. Morality and Health. New York: Routledge; 1997. 10. Lister R. Poverty. Cambridge: Polity; 2017.

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[the-final-straw-blog]

Sean Swains September 9th Prison Strike statement

Prison officials recently placed Siddique Abdullah Hasan, a death row prisoner held at Ohio’s supermax, in segregation. Siddique was framed as a leader of the Lucasville prison uprising in 1993 and has been a vocal supporter of the September 9th national prisoner work stoppage. His segregation should really come as no surprise as prison (mis)managers have long waged a brutal war on truth and on the captives who tell it. What is disturbing and highly instructive is that Siddique’s segregation didn’t originate with the prison warden, but with the FBI.

Yeah. The FBI.

This further proves something I suspected in 2012 when prison officials segregated me and tortured me for having an “ideology.” While I was being tortured at a state prison, the FBI was on site. In fact, the FBI assisted by providing the Ohio prison system with training manuals on how to break me. Know where the training manuals were developed? The CIA.

The torture tactics that the FBI shared with state prison officials came straight out of the CIA’s Counterintelligence and Interrogation Manual. So, let’s connect some dots…

The FBI and CIA have essentially merged, so all of the dirty, nasty terror that the U.S. used to unleash exclusively overseas can now be employed right here at home. And the meta-data -collecting snoops reading your emails who perfected torture and state terror have state prison wardens on speed dial, giving unthinkable orders to those who run the largest, most sprawling human bondage system in all of human history.

This is no conspiracy theory, folks. Conspiracies are kept secret. The architects of this terror state are developing this ultimate control system right in front of your eyes. These enemies of human freedom are not saying, “We don’t know what you’re talking about,”—they’re saying, “We have Apache attack helicopters, so what are you going to do about it?”

They want you to know what they’re doing. They want you paralyzed with fear. That makes you predictable.

So, look. I’ve been invited to say a few words about why you should support the national prison work stoppage on September 9th. In doing that, I’m not going to rattle off facts and figures about how the criminal justice and corrections systems target racial minorities or how these systems serve to tip the scales in favor of social and political conservatism by neutralizing those who benefit most from radical change. I’m not going to explain how the indiscriminate police shootings of black people is just an outgrowth of the larger program. I’m going to assume that you’ve been awake and that you’ve already got a grasp of the painfully obvious.

We can also forgo moral arguments about lofty principles like equality and fairness and human compassion. Others can make those arguments much better than I can. Instead, I’m going to try to explain why your own naked self-interests are served in supporting this September 9th work stoppage.

Let’s talk about you.

As Edward Snowden revealed, somewhere in a dark government office, a national security creep is thumbing through your emails, listening to your phone calls, scrutinizing your search histories—he’s sniffing through your intellectual underwear. Do you know where this mass-surveillance plan was perfected? My calls have been monitored and recorded since 1991. Hacks in the prison mail room have been reading my mail for 25 years. So, what you now experience is just a more broadly applied, slightly more complicated program of surveillance developed right here in the prison mail room.

Our common enemy knows it would be too expensive to take the entire population to prison. So, instead, they brought the prison to you.

They’ve done studies on how much rule-deviant conduct the ycan deter just through the threat of surveillance—the knowledge that the government is watching and listening. Look around. How many cameras are pointed at you? Yeah. That was exported from prison too. Again, studies on how much rebellion can be minimized…

Riot response, shields and helmets and kittling—all that came from the prison yard to the college commons. Rubber bullets, pepper spray cannons, Tasers—all used first on prisoners and then perfected on you. Want to speak out against injustice?

Want to peacefully demonstrate your concerns in a public setting?

Yeah. Take this work.

So, thanks to the ever-evolving strategies rolled out from my world into yours, you now live your butchered half-lives with a shotgun in your face. You have the right to shut up…or else.

But you don’t have the right to a living wage. In the current election cycle, the corporate party candidates bemoan the disappearance of manufacturing and union-scale jobs to other countries. But they don’t talk about the jobs that moved down the street and over the barbed wire. Ohio prisoners performed slave labor for the Ford Motor Company and Honda for pennies a day while folks you know are sleeping in their cars. This slavery allows prison officials to run their plantations on the cheap, to your detriment.

And none of this speaks to the likelihood of desperate and destroyed human debris getting dumped from this debilitating program back into your neighborhood, with no opportunities and absolutely no tools for developing healthy relationships. We’re not dealing with a system here that fails to rehabilitate 90% of the time, creating future crime and victimization. We’re dealing with a system that works as designed, manufacturing crime and suffering, creating an industry of crime and crime response, a system that sees you and your well-being as collateral damage.

You’re not safer because prison (mis)managers lock up prisoners; you’re less safe because prison (mis)managers destroy and mangle human beings and then set them loose.

On top of all that, the militarized police force is a projection of a looming threat that you too can be scooped up and destroyed for decades directly, and that looming threat serves to maintain the current status quo. It’s a no-brainer that the prison complex is an integral component to the fascist police state keeping you un-free.

So, that being the case, a challenge to this control complex is pregnant with the potential for radically altering the government’s capacity to maintain all of the consequences just listed. It all goes together. The planned work stoppage on September 9th doesn’t seek better food or pizza parties for coddled criminals; it seeks to change the world you and I both live in. It seeks to empower the powerless to at least imagine the future we deserve and to inspire the belief that we can do something about it. Look.

You can struggle against the terror state when it is still disorganized and casualties will be few, or you can wait. You can wait and struggle against the terror state when its powers are established and casualties will be greater, or you can wait again…You can wait and struggle against the terror state when victory will be very hard and casualties will be great…or you can continue to wait. You can wait and struggle against the terror state when victory will be dubious and the struggle feels hopeless, or yet again you can wait… You can wait and struggle against the terror state when there is no hope of victory and you only fight because it is better to fight and to die that to live as a slave.

The choice is yours.

Some choose to fight now.

I make this statement in full knowledge that having said what I’ve said, I might never be heard from again…unless we take this motherfucker down. So, look. I’m not going to tell you that if you opt out of this pivotal stand against our common enemy and it fails that our children or our grandchildren will look back at this crucial moment and pity us for our cowardice and our inaction, that they will lament the intolerable existence under fascism to which we doomed them. No. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that if we don’t act now and if we don’t succeed, our children and grandchildren will live so un-free, they will sit in regimented rows in their classroom, wearing uniforms and arm-bands, and the teacher will swat the blackboard with a horse-crop to draw their attention to the message written there: “IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.”

And it will be as if this moment never existed.

Only one thing stands between us and that dystopian future: YOU.

This is Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain from Warren Correctional Institution at Lebanon, Ohio. If you’re listening, you are the resistance.

Check out this episode!