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happiness-is-a-warm-gun · 1 year ago

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"Be that as it may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against one another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and sometimes childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending they were fourteen. There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza took pleasure in their antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that kept coming back to her during her two years in the country) that man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. Man the cow parasite is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.

Now, we may treat this definition as a joke and dismiss it with a condescending laugh. But since Tereza took it seriously, she found herself in a precarious position: her ideas were dangerous and distanced her from the rest of mankind. Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man's care. Man was not the planet's master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration. Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man maitre et proprietaire de la nature. And surely there is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.

[. . .]

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

One of the heifers had made friends with Tereza. The heifer would stop and stare at her with her big brown eyes. Tereza knew her. She called her Marketa. She would have been happy to give all her heifers names, but she was unable to. There were too many of them. Not so long before, forty years or so, all the cows in the village had names. (And if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.) But then the villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere machinae animate. The world has proved Descartes correct.

Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin's head and ruminating on mankind's debacles. Another image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications:

Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse of Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.

And that is the Nietzsche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, the master and proprietor of nature, marches onward."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

#the unbearable lightness of being #milan kundera #kundera #nietzsche #descartes #literature #quote

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aizenat · 2 years ago

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Hearing a trump supporting proud republican “everyone is so triggered all the time” woman lament about how ridiculous it is that men who do not have female reproductive systems are even allowed to make decisions on women’s right to choose and our health was not a thing I expected to hear today but alas here we are.

#conservative women are such a trip #in that sense I actually find the ones who think like tomi lahren at least consistent #the ‘I don’t want federal government telling me what I can and cannot do with my body including whether I can and cannot get an abortion’#but the fact that she was lamenting on the idea fundamentally that no man even a well educated one knows enough about female anatomy #or health to make proper and informed decisions #wild #wild ass take #simply wild #ah well #the complexities of humans I guess

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opinated-user · 2 years ago

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it just occured to me that i never fully explained how deeply wrong this ask (https://lily-orchard.tumblr.com/post/692207852489703424/as-a-trans-man-i-really-dont-like-that-you-paint) actually is.

As a trans man, I really don't like that you paint hair cutting as something that's just a bad trope. I and a couple of my trans/nonbinary friends cut our hair during our gender exploration. I can't speak for them, obviously, but it was a huge moment of euphoria for me. Obviously there are bad reasons for a character to cut their hair, but cutting it for gender exploration makes sense.

LO answered: I get that, but the trope is so ubiquitous and so many characters start with unique and interesting designs only to be given the same two or three haircuts that it bothers me on a fundamental level.

It’s not that it’s a bad trope, it’s that so many people’s idea of character development starts and ends at “Okay but like… what if they buzzed their head?”

what LO actually did here was to tell a trans man that cutting hair ruins an interesting design for a female character. this is annoying already because, as we know, the only change rey's LO has in comparison with the original is that now she uses her hair loose but otherwise there's no actual design at all. all the credit still goes for whoever was in charge of the costumes in the movie. LO's lying on that front. but then she doesn't realize or cares to think about the implications of telling any of this to a trans man who was already uncomfortable with her handling the issue. i can't speak for that anon, but if trans women are punished by society for trying to approach feminity (like by negating them having long hair, like LO claims is her case) then trans men are punished for rejecting feminity (refusing to have long hair). of course that every trans man has their own style and long or short hair is not the end all when it comes to gender or presentation, but a common experience for that demographic is to be told things like "you were prettier when you were a girl" by people who refuse to accept their identity. transphobic groups and people might even go so far as to lament how trans men/non binary afab people have "ruined" their bodies by transitioning or how they must have "internalized misogyny" to do something like that. this is a different kind of transphobia that trans women are usually exposed to but it's very insidious and normalized. when LO says that a gender non conforming masculine rey (non binary or trans man) will never have short hair because that's misogynistic and it would be inherently worse for her looks, she's invoking the same rethoric and narrative from those groups. again, can't speak for that anon, but if any trans person felt uncomfortable with how LO goes about this issue this is the reason why. she's not just reaching for anything to try to make her point more valid, she's actively participating on a form of transphobic microagression the more she tries to justify her preferences. once again, just for clarity's sake: none of this would matter if LO just said it's her preference or that she's uncomfortable writing about cutting hair because of her own experience. nobody would judge her for that. but when she uses that specific kind of argument, that female characters should embrace longer hair or else their interesting designs are "ruined", all i hear are the kind of women who post on social media about how Elliot Page now is ugly, looks unhealthy and was a lot more attractive as a woman. the fact that she said that to a trans man speaks volumes of the kind of ignorance that LO carries with her about anyone that isn't what immediately concerns to herself.

#lily orchard

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destielshippingnews · 3 years ago

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Edvard's Supernatural Rewatch & Review: 1x04 Phantom Traveler

In this week’s analysis, I’ll be discussing the unfortunate introduction of Abrahamic mythology, the lamentable gender politics of Dean in his nightwear, and magic languages.

Supernatural’s fourth offering, 1x04 Phantom Traveler, (not a misspelling, 'traveller' is spelt like that in America) is a solid episode. It’s not fantastic, and Supernatural certainly has better to offer, but it’s still an entertaining watch which introduces demons into the Supernatural universe and continues developing Dean and Sam’s characters, making them more distinct.

It is also the first episode Robert Singer directed for Supernatural. I didn’t see much to particularly comment on in the direction for this episode (my two years of Media Studies were not wasted on me at all), but one interesting choice, however, is the tracking shot of Dean’s sleeping form straight after the title card. EscapingPurgatory podcast had a shrewd postulation: the intended audience was heterosexual educated men between the ages of roughly 15 and 39, but a lot of them would be watching with their girlfriends and wives etc, and Dean is the brother who’s available at the moment.

Returning to the plot of the show, the script does itself a major disservice as early as the cold open. This episode was broadcast in America four years after 9/11 (almost four and a half in Britain) and was right in the middle of the decades-long and still ongoing war on drugs. The atmosphere surrounding airfare has changed fundamentally. The air hostess clearly saw the man’s black eyes and was affected by it, and should have alerted somebody on the plane to her worries, because she would have thought he was on drugs of some variety at the very least, and possibly smuggling drugs on the plane. However, for the purposes of the plot she does not act on her misgivings, but simply gasps and goes about her day.

This raises the question of why the demon revealed its presence like that. Demons are usually incredibly stupid on Supernatural, but this level of dumb is difficult for me to believe. The air hostess could have very easily had the man thrown off the aeroplane, and then its plan would be scuppered. The most likely reason was to show the audience that the man was possessed, but the audience was going to find that out in about a minute’s time anyway, so why reveal it there? It breaks the fourth wall in a bad way.

Whilst on the aeroplane and the demon’s plan, the episode never makes the demon’s motivations explicit. Sure, Sam claims that demons like death and destruction for their own sake, but this doesn’t fit well with how demons behave later in the show. They are, forsooth, as thick as poo, but they usually have higher ups telling them what to do. Was the demon’s repeated downing of aeroplanes part of a higher up’s plan?

Before I go on, it’s worthwhile mentioning that this episode is the first one to introduce the idea of an actual Abrahamic Hell in the Supernatural universe. It’s not the only genre show of its kind to have included something like this, with Charmed having the Underworld where the Source of All Evil resided, and Buffy having various Hell dimensions, but those two examples weren’t Hell as depicted in the Bible.

Joss Whedon specifically avoided the idea of a Hell and employed dimensions ruled by demons and demon gods rather than Archangel Lucifer. Charmed used the Underworld as an equivalent of Hell, but it was not a place of punishment for human souls. While Charmed is definitely my least favourite fantasy/horror/sci-fi genre show (Prue notwithstanding), I appreciated that it took a step away from Abrahamic mythology. Buffy/Angel were even better, having their own mythology that had precious little to do with Middle Eastern religions and more to do with Dunsany, Lovecraft or sometimes even Tolkien.

Kripke, however, took the lazy route with Abrahamic, specifically Christian, mythology, a choice which I believe was to the show’s detriment. It’s supposed to be a show about American folklore and urban legends, but that stuff eventually gets thrown under the bus. Forget Native Americans, screw the Americanised versions of Scandiwegian lore, screw the Old West and the Gold Rush and all the tales revolving around America’s history. And Canada? Pfft. What even is Canada? And don’t even think about Mexico. Let’s just have yet more desert myths from 2-3000 years ago.

My distaste aside, this universe has a Hell (and a Heaven), and demons are made by torturing humans until all humanity is gone from them, or by letting the humans off the torture rack if they agree to become the torturers.

Knowing this, two possibilities come to mind. One is that this demon is repeating its own human death for some reason, and another is that it kills people and drags their souls to Hell to make more demons.

Repeating its own death is entirely speculative, but this episode mixes up demons with traits later associated with ghosts and death echoes. Never again is an EMF reader used to detect demonic activity, and unless I’ve forgotten a certain example, demons aren’t shown to act as specifically as this again.

The second option, that of dragging souls to Hell, doesn’t seem likely as it’s made clear that demon deals or trades are required in order for Hell to get its claws on human souls, at least in usual circumstances. There’s nothing saying that demons can’t just decide to drag certain souls to Hell, and there is an implication at the end of this episode that this might actually be the case, but it’s a stretch. If this were the case, however, it would give the demon a real motive and make the episode less of a stand-alone bit of fun with overt X-Files vibes.

Sticking with Hell events on the aeroplane for now, let’s skip to the end and the exorcism. Whilst trying to exorcise the demon, it tells Sam that Jessica is burning in Hell. Dean tries to reassure Sam by saying that demons read minds and that it was trying to get to him, but demons can only know the minds of people they possess. This then leaves three options: the demon was lying and Jess is in Heaven, it was telling the truth and Jess is in Hell, or the demon was just trying to get to Sam, but unbeknownst to him Jess actually was in Hell.

Technically speaking, Jess shouldn’t be in Hell. She didn’t make a deal (that we know of) and it’s established later in the show that most people go to Heaven anyway. But Kevin didn’t, neither did Eileen or Bobby. Mary did, even though she made a deal with Azazel, and she died under the same circumstances as Jess. As Jess is never mentioned as being in Hell by another demon in the show, and as Dean, Sam and Cas eventually visit Hell and find nothing of her there, we can assume Jessica went to Heaven.

The exorcism in this episode is strange compared to exorcisms in the rest of the show. The Doyle (external to the text) explanation is clearly that the writers didn’t know exactly how they wanted things to work yet, but the Watson (within the text) explanation could be that they used a different exorcism ritual. Later in the show, there is no intermediate stage between being expelled from the host body and being banished to Hell: they just go directly down. This version, though, forces the demon to manifest and thereby makes it much stronger and more dangerous. I personally think the version in this episode makes the demons more of a threat because it’s harder to exorcise them, but I can see why it became streamlined later in the show.

The fact the demon possessed the aeroplane, however, raises the question of why it didn’t do so in the first place. Maybe it’s more fun to possess a human first.

Speaking of the ritual, Jared tells us on the commentary that he had to have a Latin teacher from a local university instruct him in Ecclesiastical Latin because he learnt Classical Latin at school. As a language person, I’m left wondering why. It’s the same language, just pronounced differently. Does the spell need to be pronounced in a certain way in order to work? If so, would the Ancient Romans have been completely incapable of expelling demons with their own language? Would they have had to rely on Greek, Etruscan, Gaulish or Sumerian for the rituals? It’s just completely unnecessary, especially as we later see Rowena casting spells in Scottish Gaelic, Irish witches casting spells in Irish, Celtic ‛demons’ performing rituals in Gaulish…

At least the university teacher got a little bit of extra money, I suppose.

Sticking with the aeroplane a little bit longer, Dean’s fear of flying is a welcome expansion to his character, though it was clearly included with the intent of making fun of him. It could easily have been played as such, but Jensen’s comments on the commentary indicate he saw it as an opportunity to provide more depth to Dean, as his connection with Lucas through their shared childhood trauma did in 1x03 Dead in the Water. In these two episodes, Jensen begins taking Dean away from the writers and making him his own: he was supposed to be the sidekick, but Jensen said nope.

In making Dean afraid of flying, but having him so insistent upon flying in spite of it, The Show perhaps did itself a bit of a disservice in its mission of making Sam The Hero and Dean The Sidekick. Dean was terrified, but flew anyway. That is bravery, and it’s what the audience wants to see in a hero.

Sam, however, does not miss an opportunity to make me dislike him (you knew this was coming at some point, don’t look surprised). Not only is he incredibly unappreciative and derisive of Dean’s talents, such as making his own EMF from an old Walkman, but he was also derisive of Dean’s fear of flying.

Sorry, let me reword that. Derisive of Dean for being scared of flying. It’s perfectly rational to be afraid of being in a giant metal bird suspended miles above the ground, but Dean agreed to it anyway in order to save people. And Sam treats him like a child because he’s scared of take-off and turbulence. Dean’s fear is a rational one, something that a person who hasn’t been sheltered from reality would have. Sam’s greatest fear, however, is…

Clowns.

I get it, they’re brothers, and siblings are supposed to rib on each other like this (the siblings I still talk to aren’t like this with me or each other, so I find it difficult to relate to Dean and Sam’s relationship) but it makes Sam come across as an utter cunny-hole. If somebody is clearly terrified of something and on the edge of a panic attack, you don’t sneer and mock, and then demand he calm down. Sure, Dean needed to calm down and Sam was the only one who could do it, but talking to him like a child just reveals how little Sam knows of taking care of other people. He’s the pampered younger brother, and it really shows.

He also shows a lack of judgement when roughly putting a hand on Dean’s shoulder while he was distracted. Dean’s essentially a war child (and suffers C-PTSD) and you just shouldn’t do things like this to somebody like that. That’s how you trigger panic attacks or flashbacks. Ask a veteran, I’m sure s/he’ll agree.

Aside from that, the middle-aged man on the aeroplane winked at Dean – winked – when Dean was walking down the aisle with his EMF reader. A man winking at a man has sexual overtones nowadays, and has done for a long time. How many men wink at a built guy standing over them like that unless they’re sure they won’t be punched in the face? Dean had his EMF reader out at that moment, but he was simultaneously on somebody else’s radar. Something about Dean set sexual bells ringing in cameo middle-aged man’s head. Regarding Sam, there’s two important moments for him in this episode (Jess aside): when he discovers John talked about and praised him in his absence, and when he exorcises the demon. It’s made clear in a few episodes’ time that Sam never felt like he fit in with his family, and that he believed John was disappointed in him. Exactly how he came to this conclusion is uncertain, since John doted on Sam and afforded him liberties he never would have allowed Dean, but it’s clear their relationship is difficult. Going away to university was Sam’s attempt to run away from the dysfunctional family he felt an outsider in and to escape John (and Dean): that he apparently didn’t speak to either John or Dean during his time there says a lot.

He finds out, however, that John praised him, undermining somewhat Sam’s belief that John regarded him as a disappointment. Episode 1x05 Bloody Mary provides another moment of character growth for Sam that subtly changes the way he perceives himself, but all in due course.

Praise from parents is important for children, and it really shouldn’t be hard for parents to tell their children they’re proud of them, even if they don’t say it in as many words. In spite of his difficult relationship with John, Sam gets that by proxy in this episode (whilst Dean’s happily checking out all the men in the hangar) and it changes the way he sees himself and John, even if only slightly.

The other moment – discussed above – is his exorcism of the demon. I don’t mince my words about disliking Sam, but even I can see he had potential. He’s the weird kid who wanted a normal life, but because of cursed blood had that hope denied him. Series 4 shows us the beginning of what Sam could have turned into when his blood magic arc truly kicks off, and it could have been a riveting plotline if written and handled well. Think for example of Willow in Buffy and the journey she went on with her magic powers: there was real darkness in there, and a gargantuan struggle to overcome it and become stronger.

This exorcism reminds me of Willow’s first steps at witchcraft in 2x22 when she casts the spell to restore a certain character’s soul and we see the potential for true strength as she performs the spell with ease. This exorcism of Sam’s should have been something similar, and his demonic powers should not have been completely removed and forgotten about in 8x23. He could have been Supernatural’s answer to Willow, and the Dark!Sam arc in series 3-7 could have been the first in his descent into darkness and his fight back out to take control of his own powers and become the opposite of what Azazel wanted him to be.

But – and not for the last time – three words come to mind. Such potential, Supernatural.

You might remember I mentioned the tracking shot of Dean (and neglected to mention the revealing shot of his thighs and underwear). Paula R. Stiles’ suggestion that the fact the writers and director for this episode were men doesn’t cheapen it is one I don’t understand. Jensen is in my 100% objective and unbiased opinion one of the finest men alive, but exploiting that in order to draw in an audience does cheapen the show.

To be fair, Supernatural is hardly high culture and commercial television is about revenue, but things like that break the illusion of artistic integrity, just like not making Dean explicitly bisexual does because that’d scare away too much of the audience. If having scantily-clad women in a show or film is there for the male gaze and drawing in money, then so too are Dean’s thighs and buttocks, similarly cheapening the show. If the male gaze objectifies women, stripping them of their power and subjecting them to male desires, then the female gaze objectifies and strips men of any power they might have and subjects them to female desires.

If it’s bad for the gander, it should also be bad for the goose.

Neither do I think it matters one bit that the writer and director are men, or am I supposed to believe a woman has never encouraged or coerced another woman to flash a bit of boob in order to get men to empty their pockets? Claiming that presenting a person as an object of possible sexual attraction turns him into an ‛object’ is strange, and that claim’s only ever made when women are being presented for men’s enjoyment.

But let’s stick to Supernatural because I have work in the morning. To be honest, I never notice if a woman on screen is being subjected to a ‛male’ gaze because I have no sexual or romantic interest in women whatsoever: if a woman is supposed to be portrayed as appealing to men’s eyes, it’ll usually go straight over my head because it just doesn’t register as having anything to do with sex. Interesting, however, is that this begins the trend of treating Dean in certain ways that women are usually treated, or associating him with ‛feminine’ traits.

Some people go overboard with for example Dean’s association with and likeness to Mary, his taking on the parental (maternal?) role in Sam’s upbringing, his knack with children etc, and use it as evidence to suggest that any traditionally masculine behaviour – or masculine behaviour at all – from Dean is a performance to keep up an act so that he can hide how feminine he really is.

My take on this is quite different than the condescending viewpoint that a man behaving like a man is performing and pretending. Dean’s ‛feminine’ traits are not his ‛true’ self in opposition to his feigned masculine behaviour. There is absolutely no contradiction between Dean exhibiting ‛feminine’ traits such as being good with children, cooking, or trying his hardest to fill the role Mary would have filled, and being a masculine man who identifies very strongly with being male.

I do think it’s fascinating, though, and the complexity and depth of Dean as a male character is one of the reasons he is one of my favourite characters. We rarely get to see men who are very manly and also incredibly loving, loyal and paternal and who exhibit a normal range of human behaviours and interests, including ‛masculine’ and ‛feminine’. That’s what normal men are like, something television and film seem to have forgotten.

Regarding Dean in bed, note that he is a stomach sleeper (sleeping on your stomach keeps your tummy safe), and this is consistent throughout all fifteen years of the show. However, this early in the show he takes his trousers, outer shirts and shoes off, in contrast to sleeping fully dressed as he begins doing sometime rather soon. He’s alert and cautious this early in the show, but not yet quite so worn down that he can’t be bothered to get ready for bed.

Note also that both brothers have sleeping problems here. Dean knew Sam was still up at 3am, meaning Dean likely slept for less than three hours, having been woken up by Sam at 5:45.

The end of the episode presents the brothers with something to be hopeful about. John has a new mobile phone number, the first evidence they’ve had so far that he is very probably still alive. It’s not much to go on, and John does not answer Dean and Sam’s call, but it’s something the boys can latch on to and keep them searching for John. Whether or not they should be searching for John is another question altogether, though, but at least it got the plot going in 1x01.,

Phantom Traveler is a strong but flawed episode which builds on last week’s expansion of Dean’s character and role, as well as introducing demons and Hell into the lore. The cut scene where Dean has to remove all his concealed weapons before going into the airport really should have been kept in because it says a lot about his character, as does his sleeping with a blade under his pillow, but other than that, I’m happy to leave this episode now on a positive note.

#Michael's Supernatural Rewatch #SPN Rewatch #spn 1x04 #phantom traveler #sam winchester #john winchester #dean winchester #demons #hell #male gaze #female gaze #christian mythology

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wesenschau · 3 years ago

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Israel, Pharaoh, The Tents of Kedar and Mary

In Deuteronomy 32:21 we are told what happens when Israel deviates from God’s hierarchical prescriptions:

“They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.”

It is in God that all things have their being/existence, it is in God’s mind that all things are sustained. This means, when man turns away from the cosmic hierarchies which God operates in creation by, they are turning towards non-being/non-existence/disintegration/exile. We can see a typological pattern throughout the Old Testament of Israel failing to fulfill the torah, tending towards non existence, being exiled and then being reunified through the gentiles. This article from James Jordan explores this concept more in-depth. What it means for Israel to move God to jealousy with that which is not God, is to turn away from divinely established meanings and names of reality and try to name/bring meaning to things on your own account (it is the attempt to make a name for oneself [gen. 11:4]). This is the fundamental sin which divides us from God/where God wants us to be. Of course there is always a redemptive aspect to this pattern. This can be seen most clearly in Christ’s redeeming the sin of Adam.

Whenever Israel turns from God, they face exile -- they are sent to the wilderness; God then turns his attention to the wilderness and shows Israel how the wilderness/unknown aspects of reality are to be reconciled into the grand cosmic structure of things. The books of Isaiah and Jeremiah shed much light on this. For Jeremiah, as a mosaic-type prophet, Israel has become the new pharaoh. Note Israel disobeying God’s commandment to “not . . . return the people to Egypt . . . , since the LORD has said to you, ‘You must never return that way again” (Deut 17:16) in Jer. 31, and Israel committing the sin of pharaoh in Jer. 34 (the refusal to release slaves/the presumption that man can account for all aspects of reality). Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help! (Is. 31:1). For Isaiah Israel is as a barren woman requiring a kinsman redeemer. At the end of Daniel we are told from the time of the book till redemption is 1290 days, which is 430*3. 430 years is the time from Abraham till the time of the exodus (Gal. 3:17)/ the time of sojourn in Egypt (Exodus 12:40). There is a triplet “exile” from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up (Dan. 12:11). In order these three sojourns are under: Antiochus Epiphanes -> the Maccabean dynasty -> Herodian dynasty + Jewish priesthood. The little horn of Daniel 7 corresponds with the 2-horned land beast of Revelation 12 and has a twofold operation of Herodian and corrupted priestly power structures. This two horned beast is the same beast that crucified Christ and is described in Revelation as the whore of Babylon, who “in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints” (Rev. 18:24). This is the same Jerusalem whom Jesus laments over in Mt. 23:17 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!“.

This brings light to the passage in Matthew 2:3 where God calls His Son out of Egypt -- Egypt, being Israel. It is no wonder that Ishmael, son of an Egyptian, is shown by Saint Paul to be a symbol of Israel/the law in Galatians 4.

Now that we have established the pharaonic nature of Israel at the time of Christ, we can open up a prosopological reading of Psalm 120:5. In Psalm 120:5 we see Christ sojourning in Meshech and dwelling in the tents of Kedar. Meshech is a son of Japheth and one of the surrounding nations in the battle of Gog and Magog. Kedar is a son of Ishmael and is associated with the nomadic wilderness (Ezk. 27:21; Jer. 2:10). Ps. 120:5 is Christ mourning over the apostasy of the Jews -- the giving up of their wings of holiness (Num. 15:37-41) and their taking up of wings of abominations (Dan. 9:27). “Woe is me!” cries Christ, “that my people have rejected me! Woe is me! That the temple has become desolate, like a wild desert! Woe is me! That I dwell in the temple which has been transformed to a foreign tent of nomads!” The consequence of Israel’s rejection of Christ is that he is to bring light to the nations, which, although obviously good, is not good that it needs to be done under the pretext of Israel’s disobedience. Christ’s mourning over the temple in Luke 19:41-44 (note verse 42 and Ps. 120:7) comes from the same place as Jonah’s mourning over the conversion of Nineveh under the gourd plant. The conversion of gentiles meant the disobedience and demise of Israel; thus Christ laments: “Woe is me! that I sojourneth in a foreign nation, that I have been forced out into Egypt, even unto the tents of Kedar, to find someone to share my love with!”

A mariological reading is also, in my opinion, applicable -- particularly in light of Sg. 1:5-6. Mary, like Isaiah, comes from a people of unclean lips (Is. 6:5) (note the solution to this uncleanness is sacrificial/eucharistic in nature [Is. 6:6-7 -> Ps. 120:4]). In a mariological reading of song of songs we see a Holy Bride seeking nothing but to serve and love her Bridegroom. We see that Mary desires to bring Christ into her mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived her (Sg. 3:4) and to lead Christ, and bring him into her mother’s house who would instruct her (Sg. 8:2). I believe this is fulfilled in Luke 2, in the presentation of the Lord in the temple (and continues to be fulfilled by many faithful Christians bringing Christ into the various profane institutions/structures in which they were raised. On a grander scale the Church has never failed to take profane philosophy/worldly knowledge and baptize it and consecrate it to the Lord).

[Side note: Sg. 8:3 provides an interesting insight into the Marian aspect of the Eucharist -- demonstrating her inseparability from the Church, which I would like to develop/explore further, God willing].

In my opinion, Mary’s confession of being black, but comely and being likened unto the tents of Kedar, and the curtains of Solomon is possibly twofold in its allegorical indications:

1) Mary is in a temple which is stained -- where the curtains of Solomon have become like the black tents of Kedar. Why did this happen? because Israel failed to keep their own vineyard and was subjected to enslavement under foreign rule (Sg. 1:6). Because of Mary’s identification with the temple and her people, which are of an unclean lip (Is. 6:5) she mourns over their uncleanness, but shows that there is still hope in the whittled down, comely line of David, which is a sign of God’s faithfulness. Because the Jews have become like Egypt, the children of Mary’s mother (meaning: the benefactors of second temple corruption) force Mary and her Bridegroom out unto the real tents of Kedar, where Christ transforms them into curtains of Solomon (Sg. 1:5-6). It is interesting to note Kedar’s connection to Egypt -- Kedar being a son of Ishmael and his Egyptian bride (Gen. 25:13) (Ishmael was also born of an Egyptian woman [Hagar, Gen. 16:1]). (The fact Ishmael had an Egyptian mother and an Egyptian wife further solidifies the association of bride and mother in this context. Also note the comparison of the Bride to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots in Sg. 1:9).

2) This next idea is ultimately connected to the concept of original sin and the story of Adam being installed as the priest/keeper of his garden/vineyard but he failed to do so, and because of that, God had to put barriers/mediators between Adam/man and Himself in order that the sun may not burn them (sg. 1:6). Mary, although sinless, carried the burden of original sin. It is because Mary had original sin but was sinless that she perfectly fulfilled her place in the arc of salvation as new Eve. (Eve did not have original sin but still sinned -- Eve was like the curtains of Solomon but voluntarily brought upon herself exile out of the garden into the wild tents of Kedar. Mary, however, although stained by the blackness and burns of original sin remained altogether comely.)

The antimonies of black, but comely and the tents of Kedar / the curtains of Solomon (as well as the multitude of twofold descriptions throughout the song of songs) definitely call back to the two goats in the day of atonement, in which all of reality is accounted for by God and the prescribed participation in that reality by Israel -- although, this is a concept I need to explore more in-depth.

[The unknown/wild aspects of reality, represented by the tents of Kedar, are not inherently evil and will ultimately be reconciled within God’s total account of all things within His cosmic structure of reality. It becomes evil, however, when man attempts to structure reality and account for these wild/unknown things within his own naming/reasoning.]

Many of these ideas are drawing heavily upon concepts I’ve been introduced to by Kabane/Seraphim Hamilton, who never fails to provide inspiring, edifying and brilliant content.

This was a jumbled together mess of ideas but I hope some level of coherency was achieved and that someone can learn something from this. 😄

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duhragonball · 5 years ago

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Talkin’ ‘Bout Star Wars

I just realized someone might see this title and think it’s a review of Episode IX, which I kind of forgot about. Actually, I was gonna talk about this Count Dooku audiobook I bought, but I guess I only got back into Star Wars books because of Episode IX, so maybe I should back up.

I liked Rise of Skywalker. I went in unsure of what to expect, because a lot of people hated Episode VIII, and I thought it was awesome, so when I saw scathing criticism of IX, I had no idea whether to take that seriously. “Man if you thought VIII was bad, IX’s even worse.” Stuff like that where I didn’t know how to interpret it.

The fundamental problem with IX is that they were going to do a Leia-centric movie and Carrie Fisher died before they could get started. I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with why Darth Sidious is all over the movie, but maybe he would have been in it regardless. He definitely brings a lot of star power to the movie. He makes it feel more important than it would have been if it was just Kylo Ren horsing around as the main bad guy. And while I enjoyed Carrie Fisher as the hardboiled-but-sensitive General Leia, she never seemed quite as comfortable on-screen in the sequel movies as Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford. I mean, she was in VIII, but she spent most of it in a coma, and Laura Dern seemed to be her understudy. Maybe Carrie was just waiting for the spotlight of Episode IX, and maybe she would have risen to the occasion, but if not, they would have done well to have the Emperor in the same movie, just to carry some of the load.

I’ve seen complaints about how fast-paced Episode IX is, and how ridiculous some of the revelations are, but you know, Episode IV realllly drags for the first half-hour, so I’m happy they made a new one that caters to six-year-old me’s desire to get on with things. As for the whole Rey Palpatine thing, I don’t know, was that any less absurd than whatever fan-theories were floating around in 2016?

I liked Rey’s character arc in this movie, where she goes from having no family to being terrified of her pedigree, to declaring herself to be “Rey Skywalker”. Also, I dig her yellow lightsaber, even if she never got a chance to use it in the movie. In fact, let me get a picture of that up here....

Niiiice. Whenever I look this up, I see all these links to fan theories about what this means, or how it’s a callback to eight other characters from the comics who had yellow lightsabers, but I’m pretty sure she only ended up with this color because they wanted to give her something different and uniquely her own. If she had a blue or green blade, fans would think she took the crystal out of one of Luke’s old lightsabers, but this indicates that she built her own from scratch. Also, Rey even having a lightsaber is probably intended to demonstrate that she still has a mission in the galaxy, even after the First Order and Sidious are defeated.

Anyway, the main issue I have with the movie is that it does play fast and loose sometimes. It felt like they had a plan for Finn and a plan for Poe, but both plans sort of got lost in the shuffle, and we sort of have to take their big victory as newly minted generals to serve as a finish to their character arcs. Leia’s big moment is basically her lying down to take a nap, and I get it, that was probably the best they could do, but still. I read Nein Numb got killed in the movie, and that kind of pisses me off.

Mostly, it just doesn’t hold up as well as “The Last Jedi”. I think part of the reason “Revenge of the Sith” is the most popular prequel movie is because it pays off the thing everyone wanted to see: Anakin becoming Darth Vader. I remember the first time I saw “Attack of the Clones”, and I was kind of surprised to see Anakin kill all the Sand People, like they were turning him evil a little too early, so that had me wondering if he might turn to the dark side in that movie, which sort of distracted me from what was actually happening on the screen. With Episode III, you knew exactly what you were getting, because they couldn’t save any big moments for “Revenge of the Sith, Part 2.” In a similar vein, I think the big thing audiences wanted from the sequel trilogy was to find out whatever happened to Luke, and Episode VIII answered that question completely. It sort of undercut Episode IX, and I guess that was what J.J. Abrams was complaining about.

Darth Sidious’ whole comeback is kind of a problem. I love the character, and it makes sense that he could somehow survive and come back. In the movie, he just quotes his line about “unnatural” abilities and that’s the only explanation we get for how he survived Endor, built his new fleet, and made Snoke. People call it a cop out and they’re not wrong, but he’s the one character who can get away with it. That said, his return raises far more questions than answers, and somehow he’s even stronger than he was before, which raises even further questions. I mean, if he could just go to this secret planet and build a fleet of planet-destroying ships, why did he bother running for public office?

I’m sure there’ll be a novel that tries to tackle some of those issues, but the bigger problem here is that Episode IX made me realize that I missed the more vulnerable Darth Sidious from the prequels. What I love about Episode I is how you’ve got the Sith, looking very similar to the Emperor and Vader in Episode VI, except they don’t have the might of the Empire behind them. In Episode I, Sidious can’t just force choke his subordinates when they displease him, because he needs those guys. Darth Maul can’t send a legion of troops to capture Queen Amidala; he has to do it by himself. They have to be sneakier and trickier than they are in the original trilogy, because they’re still trying to get the Empire set up, and that’s really fascinating to me. Even in the original trilogy, Palpatine is supreme, but still vulnerable. He dissolves the Senate, but only once the Death Star is available as an alternative. He worries that Luke Skywalker “could destroy us.”

In Episode IX, he seems to have no worries at all, I guess because he’s counting on Rey to murder him for whatever essence transfer he was planning. I suppose this was why he finally died to his own Force Lightning, with Rey deflecting it with two lightsabers. Critics ask why he didn’t just stop shooting lightning, but that’s kind of his deal. He kept shooting at Mace Windu, even when it wrecked his face, and he kept shooting when Darth Vader turned on him. I mean, if he stopped shooting lighting at Rey, what then? His fleet would lose the battle, and Rey would refuse to kill him, and he’d just be stuck. The Sith crave power, and power only matters when you exercise it, so it makes sense that all the Sith characters get wrecked because they bit off more than they could chew. If you asked Sidious why he didn’t just turn off his lightning, he probably wouldn’t even understand the question.

I think it might have been cooler if Darth Sidious had been a ghost, or maybe an electronic backup of his brain, or something like that. He looked pretty cool hooked up to that life support system, and I liked the idea that he was reduced to a shell of his former self, but even that would still be a grave threat to the heroes, especially if he got Rey or Kylo Ren to take orders from him. Maybe he should have actually gotten to possess Rey, and then he would finally get all the gonzo powers he displayed in the movie, and Rey would have to kick him out of her body. I dunno, maybe that’s not so different from what we actually got.

I see fans talking about all these alternative versions of Episode IX, like that leaked script, or the concept art, etc. They lament “Why didn’t we get this movie?” and I think that misses the point. Maybe one version or another would be better, but in the end you really only get one movie, one shot at telling the story. At some point, someone has to make the decision as to what makes the cut and what doesn’t. The problem with writing a story is that the version in your head always looks better than it does in print, because in your head it’s this nebulous, ever-changing thing. When you sit down to write it, you have to commit to one version, and decide whether to do this or that. In this day and age, it’s a lot easier to find out about alternate versions and unused drafts. You can watch the “This” version of a movie, and then go on the internet and see details about the “That” version they didn’t use. And it’s easy to complain that they made the wrong call. “Justice League” fans are convinced that there’s a secret “Snyder Cut” of the movie that would somehow be better than the version that actually made it to theaters. That’s kind of sad, because they clearly must have enjoyed the theatrical cut to some extent, or they wouldn’t care about some other version of the same movie. But instead of appreciating what they got, they obsess over a supposedly better version that may not even exist.

I’m probably no better, because I sort of went into Episode IX figuring that it didn’t matter if it was good or bad, because there would be comics or novels that might expand on the stuff I wanted to see. I think what I really want is a story of how Sidious survived Endor, and how he got set up on Exegul or however you spell it. That, and Rey buckling some swashes with that yellow lightsaber. Everyone’s mad about Rose Tico getting a small part in Episode IX, but to me it almost doesn’t matter, because she can be in whatever Rey comic series they make after this. I mean, that doesn’t do Kelly Marie Tran any good, but I think she’s got a good career ahead of her, with or without Rose Tico.

I don’t know, maybe this is why I don’t watch movies very much. I’m mostly into franchises, where the movies themselves are just tentpoles for all the other media. They don’t really need to be good, so long as some good lore comes out of them that someone else can use. I was thinking the other day about how Episode II is widely considered one of the weakest Star Wars movies, but every Clone Wars story that came after it was directly inspired by that film. And there’s a lot of good Clone Wars stuff out there. It just makes me wonder if Episode II can really be as bad as they say it is. Then again, it probably doesn’t make sense to say that spinoffs can retroactively fix what should be a standalone work.

Anyway, I started this post because I wanted to talk about how YouTube keeps recommending me Star Wars meta videos, mainly about the Sith, because that’s what I’m into, and they’re usually covering stuff I already knew. There’s at least three channels devoted to recapping stories from comics and books, or just straight up repeating information that was directly stated in the movies. “Did you know Palpatine wanted to KILL Darth Vader?” Yes, I’ve known since 1983. He told Luke to kill him and he wouldn’t do it. Then he and Vader killed each other. It’s not complicated. The funny thing is that I watch all these different Star Wars videos, and I can tell they’re narrated by different people, but they all sound like the Burger King Foot Lettuce guy.

I got bored with these, so I started listening to the Dooku audiobook that came out last year. It’s been pretty decent, but I was hoping for more Sith lore, and this book seems mostly focused on Asajj Ventress learning about Dooku’s Jedi career. I’ve only got a half hour left in the book, and Dooku hasn’t even resigned from the order yet, so I don’t think I’ll see much of what he was up to between Episodes I and II.

#/#//#///#////#/////#star wars

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pi-cat000 · 6 years ago

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MSA time travel idea (part 10)

Summary: Arthur falls off a cliff and lands in the past.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Vivi POV, Part 8, Part 9

Part 11: Lewis POV

Micky gestures to the narrow street, running down the side of the shop he’s just spent almost an hour in. Arthur glances around, but there is still no one in the immediate vicinity.

“You can drop the bags kid,” Micky comments when Arthur begins to shuffle, shopping bags and all, in the direction indicated.

Arthur thinks about following the instruction for about two seconds before asking, “Can I hold onto them?”

Sure, it would free up his arms but he had just spent a whole day and several hundred dollars tracking this stuff down, he’s not about to leave it on the ground where any random person could grab it.

Micky gives him an odd look, and shrugs, “Whatever,”

“Thanks,” Arthur mutters, realising after the fact how odd it is to be thanking the guy holding him a gunpoint. Micky apparently thinks so too, raising a brow. In his defence, this is the most recent shitty thing to happen in a long line of shitty things. It’s not even in his top ten. Not currently. He hopes that's not about to change. The Arthur rubber band is stretched pretty thin by this point.

Thus Arthur ends up lugging an armload of shopping bags around the back of the darkening building, lamenting his innate ability to attract crazy people because he doesn’t think this has anything to do with something ordinary like being robbed.

It is pretty gloomy in the one-lane street, and he almost doesn’t spot the second man propped against one of the walls next to two hefty muscle bikes, which he recognises from his brief spat at the Peper’s diner. There is no Lewis to bail him out this time. Shorter and heavy than his counterpart, with the red scrawly hair, the second man glares at the both of them when they come around the corner.

“Micky,” he snaps, voice deep and gravely, matching his angry scowl, “What the hell are you doing?”

“What!” Micky retorts, “It’s the best way to get results.”

Harsh words are exchanged, growing in volume, and Arthur shuffles back a step to give himself breathing room in case the two angry men decide to open fire. This whole scenario is an unknown, different from his first time around. It’s making him increasingly nervous. He doesn’t want to die here, not when he has things to change. Though, if he does end up murdered in a back alley, it would probably put a stop to Vivi and Lewis’s supernatural road trip.

“All you needed to do was ask a few questions and explain what's happenin. Not traumatise him,” Leather guy number two lectures.

Arthur coughs, shuffling his bags around so they can rest on the ground. His arms are getting tired.

“Does he look traumatised to you?” Micky retorts, waving the gun in Arthur's direction. Both sets of eyes settle of him, expressions narrowing in suspicion. Though the second man is glaring, Arthur’s not getting the same vibe shouting DANGER, it’s almost welcoming in comparison to Micky's aura of violence.

“My names Dan, who’ve already met Micky here,” Dan turns toward him, stepping in close, holding out a dusty hand to shake. There is an expectant pause. Arthur stares at the limb. He’s not sure how he feels about shaking hands, not after he just got his right one back and whole again.

The expectant silence stretches awkwardly. Arthur extends his arm slowly.

“Arthur, was it?” Dan asks. Great, they knew his name.

“Yeah?”

He tries to contain the flinch when their hands connect and is partially successful. Dan doesn’t seem to notice. His grip is vice-like, and he gives his arm a firm shake, frowning like Arthur is a confusing puzzle.

“Apologies for all this,” a gesture at Micky and the gun, “My brother’s an idiot,”

Micky scoffs but steps back to lean against a wall, lowing his gun to keep a watch on the street's entrance.

“You’re probably wondering what this is about.”

“A little,” Arthur answers honestly. Now the gun is not pointed right at him he can re-centre and logically work through what’s happening. The constant chill of threat is still hanging around, but it’s not entirely overwhelming.

Dan nods and continues, “Now, this might sound strange so keep an open mind, but we’re like investigators, you see, except we look into strange and unusual occurrences. As it happens, your town has an unusually high…” Dan pauses to think, “let’s call it an otherworldly presence, about it. If you could tell us anything about the place, we’d be grateful.”

The only supernatural entity in the area he knows of is Mystery and, as apprehensive as he is about the dog, he’s not about to sic two guys with guns on him. Not to mention, he’s pretty sure Mystery would wipe the floor with any regular human. Guns or not. Also, you don't just hold someone hostage to ask whether their town it haunted or whatever without some ulterior motive. He’s not an idiot.

“So does that make you supernatural detectives or something?” He asks both for clarification and to stall while he figures out what exactly is going on.

“Yeah, in a nutshell, sure,” Dan considered him, crossing his arms and stepping back, “You’re taking all this awful well for someone who’s supposedly new to it,”

Arthur raises his hands in what he hopes is a placating gesture, “Ah, my friend, Vivi, she’s super into that sort of thing. We’ve been in a few weirder than usual scapes as a result,” he laughs as naturally as possible, “I’ve never believed it much myself,”

At least he’s finding it easier lying to these guys than he did with Vivi and Lewis. All that practise has to pay off at some point, even when it’s not exactly where he wants it to.

Micky, apparently, has had enough with the stalling because he pushes aggressively off the wall, “Cut the crap kid. We saw you last week. No one builds a spiritual pressure that fast without extra help,”

The gun is back and in his face.

Arthur holds his hands a little higher, and can’t help but ask, “Spiritual pressure?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’ve got double what a human should have. What was it? Messing around with the occult? You some sort of shifter.”

“I really have no idea what you’re talking about,”

“Calm down Mick,” Dan waves a hand to calm his brother, dropping into a more serious tone, “Look, Arthur, he’s how this is going to go. We’re going to run a few tests. See if we can get anything off you. If there’s nothing, then you’ll be free to go.”

While Micky glares, now silent, Dan pulls out a pack of chalk. He gestures Arthur forward and begins to sketch out a circle on the grimy concrete around his feet. He recognises a few of the symbols. After The Cave and getting his arm removed Arthur had paid a lot more attention to the library’s worth of supernatural books Vivi owned. This is infinitely more complex than any of the stuff he’d read. Was this whole situation a result of time travel? He can’t see how the two would be related, but nothing else of significance has happened within the last week which could have caused the change in....spiritual pressure? Of course, he’s not about to try and explain that.

Several meters away he can hear the sounds of a roller door shutting as shops close for the evening. The whole area is darkening, throwing long shadows across the cement and asphalt. There is no way he’s beating Vivi and Lewis home now.

“So, it’s just the two of you, doing this investigating supernatural stuff,” Arthur breaks the silence, the need for answers outweighing his apprehension.

“Yeah, just us for the moment. It’s more of a side job,”

“Have you been doing it long?”

“Long enough to know a few things.”

Slowly, it begins to dawn on him,- now that’s he not in immediate danger,-that this may be the perfect chance to do something about The Cave. This was a chance to take action before Vivi and Lewis even got near the thing. If Micky and Dan were any good then maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

“Hmm,” Dan hums after what feels like several hours of sketching, stepping back to contemplate Arthur and the circle.

“What?”

“You seem human enough, congratulations.”

Arthur breaths in relief. There was a small part of him which had worried that he had been changed fundamentally by the time travel. It’s nice to have some positive confirmation that he’s somewhat normal.

“Serious?” Micky grumbles, finally shoving his gun back into his pocket, “A whole day wasted for a false alarm.”

Dan shrugs loosely, addressing Arthur appearing more perplexed now, “True to word. You’re free to go. Sorry for the drama but we have to be sure about this stuff,”

He packs away his chalk, moving a foot out to smudge the intricate lines decorating the ground. Arthur takes a step back to watch, hesitating.

“You heard what he said. Get out of here kid,” Micky orders, lighting a cigarette, still muttering obscenities under his breath.

“You know how I said my friend was into this sort of stuff,” he starts and pauses.

Dan glanced across at him, “What about it?”

“A few days back we went on a day trip to check out this cave. Err, nothing really happened, but there were a lot of warnings about the place being cursed,” That’s what Mystery had told him the few times he had worked up the nerve to ask about The Cave. Some sort of evil curse which had latched onto Arthur and could only be removed via amputation, “Maybe something happened there?”

“Never heard of a curse that increases spiritual pressure,” Dan frowns, staring with dark scrutinising eyes.

Arthur shrugs, “It’s the only thing I’ve done differently in the past week,”

“Can’t hurt to take a look I guess. Where’s this cave located?”

Because it would seem weird to rattle off the location of a place he had supposedly been to only once, Arthur fishes around for his phone. Dan leans in to copy the address, commenting, “I’d keep these supernatural trips to a minimum if I were you. Most of this stuff’s harmless, but there’s always a few nasties waiting in the shadows.”

Preaching to the choir there.

“and keep an eye out for anything strange happening. Spiritual pressure is a lot like a beacon of sorts. Some say its linked in with the soul, not that there’s never been proof of that except for that fact that a lot of those nasties are drawn to it. Your town seems safe enough, we did a whole sweep and didn’t get much in the way of recent malevolent activity, but it's always best to be careful. Esapicaly when you've got more of it than normal...”

Dan finishes and gives him a stern expression.

“Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep a lookout,” Arthur offers to which Dan nods. Now there’s no undercurrent of malice Dan kind of reminds him of his Uncle.

“You see anything weird give this number a call.”

A business card, which is mostly blank save for a number, is thrust into his hand. As much as he would like to stay and ask a dozen more questions its already dark and Vivi and Lewis were probably freaking out about his absence. He shuffles back over to his shopping bags, hulling them up. Neither Micky or Dan say much else, though they both watch him make his hurried exit.

Note: And the moral of this fic is: lying is bad and it will come back to bite you. Will be returning to Vivi and Lewis in part 11, hopefully to be done in the next week.

#msa #mystery skulls animated #fanfiction #fanfic #time travel #arthur kingsmen #and some OC's who are totally going to be fine #thus concludes arthur's mini adventure

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Trump, frustrated by unpopularity with Jews, thrusts Israel into his culture war

https://wapo.st/2zfPtcc

“In his typical buffoonish way, he thinks that by [pushing] out these instructions, essentially, to American Jews to get in line and become his supporters he’s going to be successful,” Shapiro said. “It’s all shaped by his narcissism. It’s all shaped by his transactional nature. It’s all shaped by his insatiable need for praise and confirmation of his greatness and appreciation for the gifts he’s bestowed on whoever it is he’s courting. And it’s not going to fly with this community.”

Trump has no concept of history or religion. His whole life he has done and said things to create conflict between groups of people and promoted or engaged in racism. He's has always believed in his own superiority over others, thinks he knows what's best for everyone and is unwilling to listen to other people's views. The danger in this current moment is the fact that he has surrounded himself with white nationalist sycophants who have their own agenda and no one who's willing to challenge his ideas or actions. My greatest fear is he will create a problem or situation, as he sees he losing the election, with the help of others to try to stay in office.

Trump, frustrated by unpopularity with Jews, thrusts Israel into his culture war

By Philip Rucker | Published August 22 at 6:00 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 22, 2019 3:49 PM ET |

President Trump decided long ago that it would be smart politics for him to yoke his administration to Israel and to try to brand the Democratic Party as anti-Semitic.

He set about executing a pro-Israel checklist: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights as part of sovereign Israel, and taking a hard line against Iran. And he promoted himself as the greatest president — a deity even — for Jewish people.

Yet Trump has become flummoxed that Jewish Americans are not in turn lining up to support his reelection, according to people familiar with his thinking, and he has lashed out in predictable fashion.

“If you vote for a Democrat, you’re very, very disloyal to Israel and to the Jewish people,” Trump said Wednesday on the South Lawn of the White House. He was amplifying a statement he made in the Oval Office a day earlier: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Trump’s use of the word “disloyalty” drew immediate criticism from Jewish groups, whose leaders said it echoed anti-Semitic tropes about where American Jews’ loyalty lies. The president insisted his comments were not anti-Semitic.

Regardless, this turn in the president’s rhetoric about Jews magnifies his transactional approach to politics and his miscalculation that his hawkish interpretation of support for Israel should automatically translate into electoral support from Jewish Americans.

It also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivations of many Jews, who are not a monolithic voting bloc but rather prioritize a wide range of issues — not only Israel, but also education, the economy and the environment, as well as civility and morality.

“He is reflecting a concept of Jewish Americans as single-issue voters around Israel, which we’re not; that we’re uniformly hawkish on these issues, which we’re not,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group. “In reality, what matters most to us are the exact values that the president is spending his term trashing. We care about equality and justice, and we embrace the notion that this is a nation of immigrants and opportunity for all.”

Looking to his 2020 reelection bid, Trump is thrusting Israel into the culture wars he has waged as president. He is trying to make support for Israel a litmus test — along with immigration and guns — and calling Democrats anti-Semitic to fire up his base.

Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama, said Trump’s expectation that Jewish people vote for him because of his record on Israel is “breathtakingly cynical.”

Trump’s transactional expectations for Jewish voting patterns reflect how he views other voting blocs. He routinely defends himself against charges that he is racist by citing the relatively low unemployment rate for blacks on his watch, as well as the criminal justice legislation he signed last year, as if those are the only issues of concern to black voters.

Trump has claimed a “Jexodus” movement of Jews from historically backing Democrats to Republicans. But polling shows this may be more fantasy than reality.

In the 2016 election, 71 percent of Jewish voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and 23 percent for Trump, according to exit polling. Gallup tracking poll data in 2018 showed that just 26 percent of Jewish Americans approved of Trump’s performance as president while 71 percent disapproved, making Jews the least likely of any of the religious groups studied to support Trump.

Trump has been told over and over again that he is “the most pro-Israel president ever,” according to a former senior administration official, delivering on a wish list that includes recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — but the official said Trump is angry that he has not received more plaudits from Jewish Americans. Trump contrasts his unpopularity with Jews to the overwhelming support he enjoys from evangelical Christians.

This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the president’s mind-set, argued that Trump’s rhetoric of late is “a manifestation of frustration of not getting the recognition and the praise and the support that he feels like he deserves as a result of what he’s done.”

Trump placed an early bet on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and they forged a close alliance, but Netanyahu faces a difficult reelection bid next month, and a loss would be devastating to Trump. Furthermore, Trump’s push for a Middle East peace deal has stalled, and the Palestinians have rejected the U.S. proposal.

Still, Trump tweeted a quote early Wednesday from Wayne Allyn Root, a noted conspiracy theorist and conservative radio host in Nevada, who praised Trump on Newsmax and lamented that a majority of Jews vote for Democrats.

“President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America … He’s like the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God,” Trump quoted Root as saying.

Jews do not believe in a second coming.

Trump has used statements from Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) criticizing Israel and its treatment of Palestinians to label them “anti-Semites.” And he has called them “the face of the Democratic Party.”

The Trump campaign’s chief operating officer, Michael Glassner, issued a strongly worded statement Wednesday accusing Democrats of supporting those who want “to wipe Israel from the map.”

��As a Jew myself, I strongly believe that President Trump is right to highlight that there is only one party — the Democrats — excusing and permitting such anti-Jewish venom to be spewed so freely,” Glassner said. “In stark contrast, there is no bigger ally to the Jewish community at home and around the world than President Trump.”

At Trump’s urging, the Israeli government last week blocked the two congresswomen from visiting the country, citing their support for a boycott movement against Israel. The Israelis then relented in response to a request from Tlaib to visit her grandmother, who lives in the occupied West Bank, but the congresswoman ultimately decided not to make the trip because she would have been required by Israel to pledge not to promote boycotts.

[Tlaib says she will not go to Israel after the country initially rejected her request for a visit, then reversed course]

Democratic leaders have publicly supported the congresswomen, even as they have sought to distance the party from some of their sentiments. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at this spring’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee that his party supported Israel and that it was “absolutely vital” to continue doing so.

“Those who seek to use Israel as a means of scoring political points do a disservice to both Israel and the United States,” Schumer said, in a veiled reference to Trump. “Our politics may be more polarized than ever, but it is incumbent upon all of us who care about the U.S.-Israel relationship to keep it bipartisan.”

After Trump’s “disloyalty” comments this week, Schumer said in a statement Wednesday: “When President Trump uses a trope that has been used against the Jewish people for centuries with dire consequences, he is encouraging — wittingly or unwittingly — anti-Semites throughout the country and the world.”

On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates also denounced Trump’s comments.

“Come on, man. That’s like a dog whistle. ‘Loyalty.’ Come on,” former vice president Joe Biden told a crowd in Newton, Iowa.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey shared his understanding of Jewish values. “There’s an idea in Judaism about kindness and decency and mercy,” he told reporters in Altoona, Iowa. He added, “One of the greatest Jewish ideals is to welcome the stranger. One of the great Jewish writings comes from Micah. That is, you know, ‘Do justice. And love mercy.’ These ideals are not being evidenced by the president of the United States.”

Chelsea Janes and David Weigel in Iowa and Emily Guskin in Washington contributed to this report.

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captivatesearchmarketing · 4 years ago

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The Dominance Theory: A Dog Training Fallacy

We as a whole grew up with similar thought of how canines work for large dogs: they utilize actual power to battle to be the alpha, to submit contending canines in the pack. This idea is so engraved in our mind that in English, being the big cheese implies that you are the most 'predominant' around. Indeed, even individuals who have no interest in anything canine related will have without a doubt found out about the significance of being predominant, the pack-pioneer, the alpha.

Indeed, even now, when it has been so totally disproven, to such an extent that most mentors will gaze intently at their noses at any individual who dares to absolute the expression "strength" or - more awful! - "alpha job", this thought that canines are attempting to assume control over the world each proprietor in turn is as yet a tragically pervasive idea among canine devotees.

Everything from pulling on the chain and bouncing up, to eating something you dropped on the floor and pursuing the feline, has been accused on a canine's quest for incomparability or a proprietor's absence of authority abilities.

It truly is a marvel that we consider canines man's closest companion by any stretch of the imagination, what with this alleged companion's consistent endeavor to oust us. You feed him, wash him, care for him and sometimes even dress him, you take him to the vet when he's wiped out and give him a comfortable spot to rest when he's worn out, and how can he reimburse you? By arranging an overthrow! The nerve! In any case, how did this misinformed idea of rank become?

We as a whole realize that wolves overwhelm each other, they have a severe chain of importance where subordinates are denied prime assets and people are continually engaging for strength, correct? All things considered, no, that is not actually how it functions. Incidentally, our past ideas of lupine social conduct depended on hostage wolves. People from various packs had to live in nearness of one another, a profoundly unnatural condition for them, prompting exceptionally unnatural conduct. The bloodbaths over assets were the aftereffect of stress, while in the wild, there are no adversary packs since space isn't an issue.

In the wild, a wolf pack is comprised of a monogamous pair and a few ages of posterity, who leave the pack after arriving at sexual development (at around two years old). Free-running canines, particularly those in a more metropolitan setting, incline toward a lone life. They are astute scroungers eating pieces of food sources to a great extent, they don't have to chase in gatherings since they don't chase huge prey.

In wolves, all individuals from the pack are associated with somehow in raising the youthful and acquiring food, though canines are not monogamous and just the mother is liable for raising her puppies. In specific regions (ordinarily provincial) where canines have been found to meander in free gatherings ('enrollment' is just impermanent) a pregnant female will isolate herself from the remainder of the gathering to conceive an offspring and care for her young. Along these lines, you can see the undeniable imperfection in applying wolf conduct when considering canines. Canines and wolves are far off family members (notwithstanding being of similar species) and hence not ethologically tradable. It isn't so much that these gatherings do not have any similarity to structure, it's that order is just significant in a couple of circumstances, much like it is for us people.

Since it has been "regular information" for quite a long time that wolves are continually engaging for predominance, it's straightforward in what way many canine proprietors could confuse a basic absence of habits with an endeavor to move up in position, however in all actuality your canine is not any more prevailing when he runs out the entryway than the individual who just zoomed by you to make sure about that last little spot in the lift you were going to stroll into. He's not any more an alpha when he jumps for the food you dropped than the woman who grabbed up that sweater you just put down briefly. These people aren't attempting to state their strength, they're downright impolite: they've put their necessities in front of the requirements of others. Canines, similar to individuals, who aren't instructed to carry on appropriately can't be relied upon to realize how to do as such.

Does this mean your canine shouldn't be shown any limits or rules? Obviously not. In any case, clinging to the predominance hypothesis isn't the way accomplish this. It is extremely defective, and used to legitimize the utilization of impulse in canine preparing. A canine won't satisfy a solicitation for three primary reasons: she is scared, uncertain or what to do or essentially more inspired to accomplish something different... Not on the grounds that she is predominant! Much the same as people, canines improve a generous good example and pioneer, as opposed to a dictator.

Before I go on, I should recognize the huge number of rankled coaches who are tingling to call attention to that, all together presently: "canines are not fuzzy people!" Very evident, but rather all things considered (particularly the part consigned to epicurean practices and the satisfaction of necessities), we are fundamentally the same as, notwithstanding the conspicuous distinction in appearance. Creatures are gluttonous essentially; considering first oneself is an early stage endurance strategy that has stayed with us and won't probably ever leave. I should take note of that this doesn't imply that philanthropy doesn't exist in certain species (one of which is the canine), however that veers off from the object of this article.

The canine that sits prior to being let out or trusts that something will be offered to her isn't demonstrating a type of subjection, she's simply a 'neighborly' canine. Clearly she has no real idea of social decorum, yet she's been instructed that specific practices (sitting, remaining, stopping to cry or bark... ) are the best way to get what she needs (treats, fondness, opportunity... ).

It is a typical misguided judgment that canines attempt to 'assume responsibility for the stroll' by pulling on the chain, as just the pioneer strolls in front. Canines, even those that are the most awesome aspect companions, don't walk next to each other. Canines aren't pack creatures, however even in wolves, status isn't controlled by where an individual strolls, every creature stays out of other people's affairs. It's the same when they're out on a stroll with you: a canine that pulls is simply attempting to stay out of other people's affairs decently well while fastened to a drowsy biped! To request a canine to spend the span from a walk wandering frustratingly gradually close to you is asking a ton; it is not necessarily the case that it is unthinkable, however it takes a great deal of restriction to not pursue the vehicle, fowl or jogger that has gotten her attention, or explore that pee, Skittle or corpse a foot from her nose!

A huge issue emerges when we think about that, as people, we have this assumption that our canines be capable comprehend our communicated in language. Most canines go their entire lives not understanding what the word 'no' signifies, despite the fact that they hear it consistently for the duration of the day. Above all else, canines get on tones more than singular words, which is the reason I can call my canine 'Wilderness Breath' and he'll run right to me. Also, advising a canine not to accomplish something is for the most part useless on the grounds that no doubt he's doing numerous things immediately, and you've quite recently advised him 'don't'. Don't what, precisely? It is substantially more profitable to mention to him what he ought to do, it rules out understanding. This basic wellspring of miscommunication is the thing that causes so many canine proprietors to accept that their canine is either prevailing or outright dumb. Aside from "no", "calm" is the main word individuals appear to anticipate that their canines should know. Interestingly, shouting will really get most canines to bark considerably more! In case a sharp "calm!" really surprises the canine into quiet, the proprietor's reaction typically isn't to convey that the suspension of commotion was the thing they were requesting (with the utilization of a prize), however to return to what they were doing, which tells the canine nothing. All things considered, at times, they'll even be accidentally remunerating the canine for woofing: he barks and they give him consideration, he's calm and they overlook him.

A conversation on canine strength just wouldn't be finished without a whoop to the alpha job: the crazy act of sticking your canine to the ground to build up yourself as his boss. Agreeable canines show their tummies constantly, as do wolves. On the off chance that they do it in nature, for what reason wouldn't we be able to adventure and copy it? For one thing, is anything but an agreeable signal, it's a mollification motion. A canine uncovering his mid-region is communicating finished innocuousness, he's ended up in an apparent tense circumstance, and is endeavoring to make it exceptionally certain that he intends no damage. Second, never at any point will you see a canine flip another canine on his back (besides in instances of unseemly play). This signal is offered, not constrained. Constraining a canine to the ground will fail to help your relationship, best case scenario, it will startle her, even from a pessimistic standpoint it can leave you with a piece of your face missing. The alpha job was sustained by the Monks of New Skete and enormously advocated by Cesar Millan, every one of whom have since professed to lament both utilizing and promoting said practice.

Some other time you may see a canine go "midsection up" is during play. In any event, during play, it is the canine on the ground that starts the conduct, his non-verbal communication will be locked in yet liberated from strain (no shaking or humiliated) and he is allowed to get up when he satisfies.

Realizing the reasons canines do what they do may appear to be a technicality, however it can fundamentally influence the result of your preparation. A canine that devastates the house since he has detachment nervousness will probably not advantage only from having something additionally fascinating to do, while a canine who obliterates out of fatigue generally will. Similarly, rebuffing a canine for being a canine will never really yield disappointment and scant outcomes. Coaches who vilify canines by causing wrong cases about progression and strength to do as such to legitimize not exactly sympathetic preparing strategies, yet - fortunately! - that is not the manner in which many canine proprietors decide to see their canine companions.

The most widely recognized analysis I hear concerning the utilization of non-conflictual preparing strategies is that it will make the canine become subject to treats, declining to do anything you ask without the conviction of a prize. Tr

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friend-clarity · 4 years ago

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Conrad Black: Universities have become cesspools of political correctness

Canada is a relatively tolerant and civilized place, but you would not guess that from the publications being put out by the University of Toronto

Conrad Black, May 29, 2020, National Post

This column is written for all those who feel oppressed by political correctness in Canada. It is prompted by my wife Barbara giving me the magazines sent to alumni of University College (UC) at the University of Toronto and by the University of Toronto itself, each quarter. I receive a sprinkling of information from the universities where I graduated (Carleton, Laval and McGill) and from some that kindly gave me honorary degrees, but I have never seen anything like this.

The college alumni magazine identifies three contributors of whom one describes herself as “a peace and love hippie with a dream of doing a meditation retreat at Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Monastery in southern France,” and the second is the former associate director of UC’s “centre for sexual diversity studies.” The piece of the incoming principal of the college focused on the widespread need for attention to “students struggling with mental health problems” and celebrated his college’s “iconicity … of diversity and inclusion.” He also dwelt upon the “uncomfortable iconicity” in referring to a creek that once flowed through the campus but is now entirely subterranean. “We need … to include Indigenous teachings, learners and scholars in our midst.… The river still cleanses this area and its ancient powers continue to flow despite attempts to submerge its force.” The principal of such a well-known university college should have a clearer idea of legitimate subjects of iconization.

There was a tribute to my dear friend of more than 40 years, Supreme Court Justice Rosie Abella, winner of an award named after another old friend, the late Rose Wolfe (a former chancellor of U of T), both delightful women. Rosie referred to her belief as an under-graduate in “the perfectibility of the human condition, in progressive change, in excellence, in the symbiosis of reason and equity.” What she really meant and how she has amiably enacted it, is her fervent belief in practically every left-wing cause that does not oppress human rights: redistribution of money from people who had earned it to people who had not, reduction of the influence and status of individuals in favour of institutions purporting faithfully to enhance the welfare of the majority and a river of concessions and preferments to organized labour. By all means give Rosie an award, but not for elegiacal nonsense about the perfectibility of man through democratic Marxism. Next came a piece about a photographer who specialized in portraits of LGBTQ writers who “capture what’s essential.” (They were good photographs.) Then came the inevitable confession and repentance of Canada’s “ugly legacy of occupation and forced assimilation by settlers trying to extinguish the culture, rights and humanity of Indigenous peoples,” and the obligatory demonization of the residential schools system.

Fortified by this bracing sorbet of monochromatic lamentation on the evils of most Canadians and of the country that pays for all this, I prorupted on into the University Magazine. As if in prearranged sequence, it began with, “The white man has stepped everywhere across this land without seeing the people and how they have been injured or incapacitated by his exploits. They have also taken our children and removed them from their communities for generations until they are no longer connected to their family and community.… The white man could not keep to himself, he had to have more land, more gold, more fur.” I have written about the true history of the colonization of North America by technologically superior European states many times; the falsification of history cited above incites the question of who these people imagine are paying to circulate their opinions on glossy magazines to the descendants of the people whose right to be here they are disputing.

The next section was a series of alumni who had been battling various types of oppression. One more time: an apologist for the recent illegal native obstruction of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline explained that, “Canada is actually not Canada because the original nations on this land never gave up the right to govern themselves.” What is required is “a fundamental rethink and reimagining of what Canada is as a country.” There was a historian specializing in African-Canadian studies, with no hint of the fact that virtually all African-Canadians were liberated slaves (including those that Gov. Guy Carleton refused to hand back to Washington , a slaveowner, in 1783), or refugees from slavery, including 40,000 American slaves who fled the U.S. in the 30 years before the Civil War, as well as such American anti-slavery advocates as John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Josiah Henson, the model for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel.

The people featured are apparently champions of good causes, but the alumna who directs a climate science centre at a Texas University and regularly asks, “Is it too late to save the earth?” before answering that that all depends on how quickly fossil fuels can be discarded (which is not about to happen in Texas), incites some doubt. Instead of activism, the focus in climate matters should be on research, since there is no reliable consensus on whether whatever is happening is outside the normal climate cycle, is or is not anthropogenic, could or could not be beneficial, or what its extent might be. As in other subjects, it is generally wise to know what is happening before militating about what is to be done.

The drenchingly predictable article on “fake news” referred to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election although the authors of the interference remain unknown and the extent of it was insignificant. Naturally there is not a word about the three-year malicious fiction that the current president had colluded with the Russian government to influence the election. The absence of coverage of the greatest constitutional scandal in U.S. history and the closest that country has ever come to a putsch is the most egregious fake news of all.

A chapter on the “Dictionary of Canadian Biography,” an admirable work of scholarship, comes perilously close to justifying imputations of racist bigotry to former prime minister John A. Macdonald. He gave Native-Canadians the right to vote and had many allies in the Native community, including Poundmaker and Crowfoot, and the revisionist descriptions of the chief founder of this country as a quasi-genocidist are an abominable injustice that has no place in a respectable university. The interesting article on the university’s dental museum was the only part of either publication that wasn’t stiflingly politically correct.

These magazines are for the alumni, and should not focus exclusively on agitators, even for good causes. The publications of a university that celebrates the iconicity of diversity and inclusion should air the inconvenient facts that the Indigenous people did not occupy or govern Canada. Canada’s Native policy has failed, but not out of malice or stinginess, and the Natives are not blameless. As for the climate, diversity would require mention of dissenting views, or at least acknowledgement that many countries around the world continue to expand their fossil fuel usage.

Canada is a relatively tolerant and civilized place, but you would not guess that from these offerings. Jordan Peterson is right that anything calling itself “studies” is not a real academic subject. Most of this allegedly iconic activity is not productive work and is really just a pseudo-academic workfare measure to defer unemployment that is hideously expensive, of doubtful utility and encourages its beneficiaries to bite the system that indulges it like an ungrateful viper.

National Post [email protected]

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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years ago

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 11

While Evergreen State College students were protesting a professor who wasn’t cool with every white person being told to leave the campus for the day, the school's provost asked professors to go easy on students who "have diverted time and energy from their academic work," and to consider “the physical and emotional commitment” of student protesters when deciding their final grades. “The student protesters have diverted time and energy from their academic work to promote institutional change and social justice.” This comes after college president George Bridges had agreed to comply with student demands that protesters be excused from homework assignments while they demonstrated their disgust with the professor.

A University of Utah professor has created a "Racial Battle Fatigue Research Group" to examine the ways in which "microaggressions" cause "battle fatigue" for non-white people. “The focus of the Racial Battle Fatigue Research Group will be to examine offensive racial mechanisms i.e. racial microaggressions and racial battle fatigue in education,” according to the group’s website. While there is no formal research project affiliated with the group, it plays host to monthly meetings during which students discuss racial battle fatigue and methods of combatting it. The group’s leader explained that to stop “battle fatigue,” white people need to stop committing microaggressions and other instances of racism. “People should be aware of how things they may say or do subconsciously can be perceived or received as racial microaggressions. While the vast majority of whites are people who don't intend to do those things, these microaggressions can still hurt people of color, regardless of intent.”

To the mounting list of ways to possibly offend other students on college campuses these days, you can now add talking about your homework. “Sure, you had no ill-intent, and absolutely nothing racist in mind at all, but by merely uttering that you found your homework easy out loud, you risk a microaggression,” Stanford Prof, Ruth Starkman writes. Trying to explain why an assignment wasn’t too hard for you is also a microaggression. “Not everyone went to your high school, had your fortunate circumstances, or such a dazzling delivery room arrival.” Fundamentally, Starkman says, some students struggle while others breeze through because of an injustice - namely “unevenly distributed knowledge.” In Starkman’s mind, any student who comes to a university with a decent educational foundation is excelling because of their wealth and privilege. “Congrats if you did. Try not to be a jerk about it.”

A “privilege checklist” provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asks students to acknowledge that being unaware of their privilege is itself a form of privilege. The “Diversity Learning Tree” offers a series of “privilege checklists” designed to help students determine whether they have White privilege, Able-bodied privilege, Heterosexual privilege, Male privilege or Social class privilege. The checklists are based on the Peggy McIntosh article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which argues that white people benefit from an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” not enjoyed by people of other races. Notably, the final item on the male privilege list paradoxically states, “I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.”

A professor at Georgia State University has published an academic journal article lamenting the “insidiousness of silence and whiteness” on college campuses. She plans to show how white professors contribute to oppression by failing to speak out against microaggressions. Her main issue describes the reaction to the U.S. News & World Report ranking falling due to low GRE scores for admitted PhD students, where suggestions saying no applicants with scores below the 50th percentile should be admitted is simply unacceptable. She points out that “78 percent of African American examinees had combined scores that fell below 300, as did 66 percent of Puerto Rican examinees,” and that therefore the proposed high standards would adversely affect those subgroups. Towards the end of her paper, she explains how the silence of white academics on racial issues in academia contributes to oppression. “Remaining silent may itself be the luxury of white privilege and may reinforce oppression. This is particularly true when working as a white faculty member, operating with high levels of white fragility, within a system of higher education cloaked in whiteness.”

Public museums and memorials serve our nation’s “foundational commitments to white heterosexual male supremacy,” according to two Texas A&M University professors. It’s unsurprising that Tasha Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot both teach Women’s Studies at TAMU. “In short, the embodiment of the American identity in commemorative sites is, more often than not, a white heterosexual cisgendered male, reaffirming the ‘great man’ perspective that dominated American historiography for too long.” Dubriwny also worries that war memorials in particular could perpetuate a problematic ethos of masculinity within the broader culture, saying they highlight “an aggressive, heroic, combat-centric masculinity and take part in a larger heteronormative cultural script.”

University of Maryland campus police launched an investigation into a discarded piece of plastic wrap after receiving a report about a “possible hate-bias” incident. “Out of an abundance of concern, we are looking into this matter and conducting a review of our cameras in the area,” the department informed students via email. A UMD student tweeted a picture of the plastic wrap suggesting he was convinced that the detritus was intended to resemble a noose. In response, another student remarked that "I'm sick and tired of all these fucking nooses." The campus police said in their statement that this noose was rather “a type of material used to contain loose items during transport.” Colleges are so unsafe these days, you guys!

Aztecs. Redskins. Crusaders. Those are a few of the mascots that have been deemed offensive over the years. There’s a new one to add to the list: Millionaires. That’s the moniker for Lenox Memorial Middle and High School in Massachusetts, but now students polled at the school want a new nickname. A ninth-grader at the school said, “It divides us within our community. It has become associated with the top 1 percent of our country, which excludes and burdens a very large majority of the population and currently plays a large role in the division of the United States.” The mascot has historical origins, dating back to decades ago when millionaires who owned cottages in the town donated money to build the school and kept the town afloat as local residents served in the military overseas. But fuck those rich white assholes.

The new director of the Claremont Colleges’ LGBTQ center has drawn concern over his tweets saying he’s “wary of and keeps his distance from white gays and well meaning white women” and that police exist to “service and protect white supremacy.” Jonathan Higgins was recently appointed as the new director of the Queer Resource Center of the Claremont Colleges, a cluster of five elite private campuses in Los Angeles County.

Two feminist Geography professors, Rutgers University professor Carrie Mott and University of Waterloo professor Daniel Cockayne wrote an article for an academic journal arguing that citations in scholarly articles contribute to "white heteromasculinity" by ignoring research by women and people of color. They say that “white men tend to be cited in much higher numbers than people from other backgrounds,” but dismiss the idea that this is due to the relative preponderance of white male geographers. “To cite white men does a disservice to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism,” they argue, defining “white heteromasculinism” as “an intersectional system of oppression describing on-going processes that bolster the status of those who are white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” They just so happen to leave out the fact that men account for 63 percent of geography professors, and publish 73 percent of research articles related to geography. As always though, if a woman or minority is misrepresented, it has to be because they are being oppressed.

Reed College in Oregon is offering an all-inclusive, all-expenses paid trip for high school students from “historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds.” The program is only available to “African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander" students. Minority students are eligible to apply for the all-expenses paid trip regardless of their socioeconomic status or their need for travel assistance. Similarly, the “Women of Distinction” program at Smith College provides an all-expenses-paid campus visit for selected “African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American students.”

Colleges should “screen” speakers to ensure that they are not giving a platform to “intolerant perspectives,” a University of Maryland student argues. Moshe Klein argues that "there are important reasons to censor speech on the campus," saying some viewpoints make certain students feel "unsafe." “There is nothing inherently wrong with screening speakers, teachers and even students on the campus. Intolerant points of view prevent certain groups of people from participating in campus life safely. There are important reasons to censor speech on the campus,” Klein asserts. He says students would be justified in tearing down “fascist white power posters” and contends that it was reasonable for Harvard to revoke the acceptances of incoming freshmen who participated in meme-sharing, because such action demonstrated “that there is no space for intolerant behavior.”

The Chicago Theological Seminary offers a video on its website designed to help white people understand their privilege by donning a metaphorical pair of "white privilege glasses." The group explain that “the racial divide will only change when white people understand the concepts of privilege and begin to identify and correct the systems that advantage one group over the other.” One of the first scenes the white person encounters is a street sign indicating “Jefferson St.” and “Washington St.” both of which transform to read “slave owner” through the lens of the white privilege glasses. In another instance, the man walks up to a police officer and gets a friendly response, only to have the officer storm away once he puts on the white privilege glasses. The video concludes with the person wearing the white privilege glasses failing to hail a taxi. In addition, the guide also asks participants to “Perform A White Privilege Audit” by taking a few minutes to “consider how White Privilege manifests itself in your life.” “Look at the pictures hanging on the walls of your home. Who is represented in your personal photographs? In paintings? Who are the artists? Do they reflect various races?” one of the prompts asks.“Look at names of the streets in your town. Or the names of local colleges. Or, even the faces on the money in your pocket. How many are white?”

Freshmen at San Jose State University now have to pay for their own mandatory diversity training, which is incorporated into a Frosh Orientation that comes with a $250 price tag. The addition of microaggressions training to the orientation was made public by Chief Diversity Officer Kathleen Wong. According to Wong, the training consists of a video of microaggression skits, filmed with the cooperation of a film class in SJSU’s on-campus studio. “Attending is required,” their FAQ page reiterates, warning, “If you do not attend or leave during any portion, you will be blocked from class registration.” Financial costs for start with a $250 registration fee and an $80 fee for each family member accompanying, and students must pay either $54 or $71 per person per night for bedrooms during their orientation.

American University sophomore Leanna Faulk has penned a letter to complain about how white people make it about themselves after a terrorist attack. The “One Love Manchester” concert benefiting victims of that city’s terrorist attack was one of her main issues with white people and their “savior complex.” She writes, “Only two of the 16 performers at the One Love Manchester concert were black: Pharrell Williams and the Black Eyed Peas. While the majority of the individuals affected by this attack were not black, it is still very important to recognize the lack of non-white entertainers asked to perform. Organizers of other benefit concerts like One Love Manchester play a role in promoting the white savior complex by allowing white individuals to speak in times of crisis.”

UC Berkeley’s SHIP, the Student Health Insurance Plan, will add two new benefits for transgender students beginning next month: fertility preservation and laser hair removal. The former is necessary as hormones used to treat gender dysmorphia can completely scramble their fertility and the latter is “critically important for transfeminine people.” Last year SHIP expanded its transgender benefits to include “male-to-female top surgery.”

A New York University librarian recently felt compelled to pen a post bemoaning the “racial fatigue” she experiences “in the presence of white people” following an academic conference. She says said that she “hit her limit” after spending five days “being splained to” by "white men librarians" and "nice white ladies." “Race fatigue is a real physical, mental, and emotional condition that people of color experience after spending a considerable amount of time dealing with the micro- and macro-aggressions that inevitably occur when in the presence of white people,” she wrote. “The more white people, the longer the time period, the more intense the race fatigue.”

A top UK university is to replace portraits of its founding fathers with a “wall of diversity” of scholars from different backgrounds following pressure from students. Kings College London is planning to remove the portraits of former university staff from the main entrance wall and replace them with BME (Black and minority ethnic) people. The proposal to exclude white scholars from the entrance wall follows criticism from students who claimed that the presence of such portraits is too “intimidating” for minorities. Professor Patrick Leman, who unveiled the plans, said that the university will swap “busts of 1920s bearded men” with more diverse scholars to ensure the institution feels less “alienating.”

#college

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stopkingobama · 7 years ago

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I Went to Charlottesville During the Protests. Here’s What I Saw.

Photo: CC0

I picked quite a time to go on a weekend trip to Charlottesville.

What was supposed to be a nice getaway with my wife turned into a journey through the eye of a national media storm.

On Saturday, clashes between “Unite the Right” protestors and “anti-fascist” counterprotesters at the foot of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue—which the City Council had voted to remove from a local park—turned violent.

One woman was killed when an Ohio man allegedly associated with the white nationalist marchers rammed his car through a wave of people. He has been charged with second-degree murder.

The clash between Nazis and leftists in the streets was an ugly and surreal scene one would associate with 1930s Germany, not a sleepy American town in the heart of central Virginia.

A City, and Country, in Shock

The attitude of people around Charlottesville—the silent majority—deserves to be noted. They were almost universally upset, blindsided, and resentful that these groups showed up in their community to drag down its reputation and fight their ideological proxy wars.

Albemarle County, which includes Charlottesville and a few other small towns, is deeply blue in its most populated centers around the University of Virginia and dark red on the outskirts. It’s politically purple. Yet everywhere I went, the attitude toward the protests was similar.

As a thunderstorm rolled in on Saturday evening, a waitress at a restaurant I ate at said, “Let’s hope this washes the day away.”

A local gas station attendant told my wife: “These people from out of town, Nazis, [Black Lives Matter], they’re all hate groups to me.”

In the aftermath of the events, most townsfolk walking in the Charlottesville downtown area appeared stunned and shaken. The overall feeling in the area was resentment—certainly not sympathy for any of the groups involved.

It would be a mistake to blow the events in Charlottesville too far out of proportion by linking either side to a mainstream political movement. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small-scale clash between groups who clearly represent an extreme minority in this country.

Even calling the gathering of a couple hundred people a “movement” would be a stretch. The overwhelming media attention given to these fascist, racist groups even before violence took place served as a conduit for the views of this handful of people.

The media’s role in blowing this event out of proportion is lamentable and predictable, but it doesn’t excuse what took place.

What the event does demonstrate is the looming danger of identity politics run amok. This is what is in store if we are consumed by the tribal politics that have destroyed so many other countries.

In June, I wrote about why I think politically incorrect historical monuments—even Confederate ones like the Lee statue in Charlottesville—should stay.

>>> Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues

At the time I wrote:

In our iconoclastic efforts to erase the past, we rob ourselves of knowing the men who forged our national identity, and the events that made us who we are. This nation, of almost incomprehensible wealth, power, and prosperity, was created by the decisions of men like Lincoln—and Lee, too.

The zealous march to obliterate America’s past, even parts we dislike, will leave us a diminished civilization.

Though many have now jumped to conclude that the events in Charlottesville show the need to give in to the desire of people to tear down statues, this will only serve to strengthen and embolden the radicals—on both sides—to step up their efforts to plunge the nation into constant social unrest and civil war.

Identity Over Individuals

In a sense, the “alt-right” and leftist agitators want the same thing. They both seek to redefine the battle over American history in racial and tribal terms in direct opposition to the most basic ideas of our national existence.

Such was the case in the unsightly scene in front of Charlottesville’s Lee statue.

The real individuals whom these statues represent simply ceased to matter.

It was telling that a counterprotest erupted in Washington, D.C., in front of the Albert Pike memorial. Pike had been a Confederate general, but the memorial itself was simply dedicated to his work as a freemason and not his military career.

That fact was irrelevant.

Only the war over identity mattered. Pike must be plucked out and purged.

In a country of 320 million people of stunningly diverse ethnic backgrounds and philosophies, this is a fire bell in the night for complete cultural disintegration. The end result will be uglier than the already sickening events that took place this weekend.

The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, rightly noted what this means for the direction of the country: “[I]t is the open conflict of a nation at war with itself over its own character. This war will end badly, no matter how it plays out. And the way this story ends is in demolishing [Thomas Jefferson’s] Monticello brick by brick.”

There is no arc of history bending perpetually on its own toward justice. History is instead a series of twists and turns, influenced by cultural and social forces as well as individuals and communities.

America has never been a perfect nation. It has benefitted from great ideas advanced by imperfect men, and almost miraculously formed a great and good national community out of widely disparate elements.

This history is worth remembering and even celebrating. It shouldn’t be buried because a few evil men have twisted it to serve their causes. Nor should it be used to attack and haunt the living.

As the late 19th-century poet Henry Van Dyke wrote:

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack: The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. But the glory of the present is to make our future free — We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

This is the spirit of our country, and it won’t change because a few thugs wish to turn our most fundamental principles on their head. We have a duty to repudiate them through a stronger dedication to the founding principles that have made this country great.

Commentary by Jarrett Stepman. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Trump Protesters

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americanlibertypac · 7 years ago

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I Went to Charlottesville During the Protests. Here’s What I Saw.

Photo: CC0

I picked quite a time to go on a weekend trip to Charlottesville.

What was supposed to be a nice getaway with my wife turned into a journey through the eye of a national media storm.

One woman was killed when an Ohio man allegedly associated with the white nationalist marchers rammed his car through a wave of people. He has been charged with second-degree murder.

The clash between Nazis and leftists in the streets was an ugly and surreal scene one would associate with 1930s Germany, not a sleepy American town in the heart of central Virginia.

A City, and Country, in Shock

As a thunderstorm rolled in on Saturday evening, a waitress at a restaurant I ate at said, “Let’s hope this washes the day away.”

A local gas station attendant told my wife: “These people from out of town, Nazis, [Black Lives Matter], they’re all hate groups to me.”

The media’s role in blowing this event out of proportion is lamentable and predictable, but it doesn’t excuse what took place.

What the event does demonstrate is the looming danger of identity politics run amok. This is what is in store if we are consumed by the tribal politics that have destroyed so many other countries.

In June, I wrote about why I think politically incorrect historical monuments—even Confederate ones like the Lee statue in Charlottesville—should stay.

>>> Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues

At the time I wrote:

The zealous march to obliterate America’s past, even parts we dislike, will leave us a diminished civilization.

Identity Over Individuals

Such was the case in the unsightly scene in front of Charlottesville’s Lee statue.

The real individuals whom these statues represent simply ceased to matter.

That fact was irrelevant.

Only the war over identity mattered. Pike must be plucked out and purged.

This history is worth remembering and even celebrating. It shouldn’t be buried because a few evil men have twisted it to serve their causes. Nor should it be used to attack and haunt the living.

As the late 19th-century poet Henry Van Dyke wrote:

Commentary by Jarrett Stepman. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Trump Protesters

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deniscollins · 7 years ago

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A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland

If you owned a welding company, what would you do if informed that one of the welders was a committed organizer for the Traditionalist Worker Party, a Nazi-group, who did podcasts for Radio Aryan, and posted Nazi support material on his Facebook page: (1) do nothing and respect his freedom of speech, (2) speak with him about restricting his political viewpoints, (3) fire him, or (4) something else (if so, what)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

“I guess it seems weird when talking about these type of things,” he says. “You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York, observational-humor way.”

Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.

If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.

And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.

“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?

Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”

Flattening the Edges

Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, “edgy,” with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.

“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”

His political evolution — from vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist — was largely fueled by the kinds of frustrations that would not seem exotic to most American conservatives. He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair.

Ask him how he moved so far right, and he declares that public discourse has become “so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people.” He name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, architects of “anarcho-capitalism,” with its idea that free markets serve as better societal regulators than the state. And he refers to the 2013 science-fiction movie “Pacific Rim,” in which society is attacked by massive monsters that emerge from beneath the Pacific Ocean.

“So the people, they don’t ask the monsters to stop,” he says. “They build a giant robot to try to stop them. And that’s essentially what fascism is. It’s like our version of centrally coming together to try to stop another already centralized force.”

Mr. Hovater grew up on integrated Army bases and attended a mostly white Ohio high school. He did not want for anything. He experienced no scarring racial episodes. His parents, he says, were the kinds of people who “always assume things aren’t going well. But they don’t necessarily know why.”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

In an essay lamenting libertarianism’s leftward drift, he wrote: “At this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.”

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

A Growing Movement

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”

Friendships Made and Lost

In 2012, Mr. Hovater was incensed by the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, believing the story had been distorted to make a villain of George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager. By that time, he and Ms. Hovater had been dating for a year or two. She was a small-town girl who had fallen away from the Catholic Church (“It was just really boring”), and once considered herself liberal.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Hovater found herself on social media “questioning the official story,” taking Mr. Zimmerman’s side and finding herself blocked by some of her friends. Today, she says, she and Mr. Hovater are “pretty lined up” politically.

As they let their views be known, friends left and friends stayed.

“His views are horrible and repugnant and hate-filled,” said Ethan Reynolds, a Republican and city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, who said he had befriended Mr. Hovater without knowing his extremism. “He was an acquaintance I regret knowing.”

Jake Nolan, a guitarist in one of the bands Mr. Hovater played in, stuck with him. “There are people who literally go around Sieg Heiling,” he said. “Then you have the people who just want the right to be proud of their heritage” — people, he said, who are standing up against “what appears to be an increasingly anti-white America.”

Mr. Hovater befriended Mr. Heimbach in February 2015 at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Heimbach, who two years earlier had founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, was holding a protest outside the proceedings and praising Vladimir Putin. The pair founded the Traditionalist Worker Party in the spring.

Soon Mr. Hovater was telling people that he would be running for a council seat in his hometown, New Carlisle, population 5,600. The announcement caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the heavy metal press. But he never filed papers.

On a recent weekday evening, Mr. Hovater was at home, sautéing minced garlic with chili flakes and waiting for his pasta to boil. The cats were wandering in and out of their tidy little rental house. Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games. A day earlier, a next-door neighbor, whom Mr. Hovater doesn’t know very well, had hung a Confederate flag in front of his house.

“This is kind of brackish territory here,” Mr. Hovater said. “A lot of people consider Cincinnati the most northern Southern city.”

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

They spoke about their future — about moving to a bigger place, about their honeymoon, about having kids.

#Freedom of Speech

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myupdatestudio-blog · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on Myupdatestudio

New Post has been published on https://myupdatestudio.com/ladies-their-property-and-financial-rights-in-kashmir/

Ladies, their Property and financial rights in Kashmir

The Judeo-Christian lifestyle certainly extends the management of the husband into ownership of his wife. Rabbis asserted the husband’s right to his spouse’s belongings as a corollary of his possession of her: “In view that one has come into the ownership of the female does it not observe that he need to come into the possession of her assets too?��, and “Considering he has obtained the lady have to he no longer gather additionally her property?” As a result, marriage brought on the richest female to grow to be almost penniless. The Talmud describes the financial state of affairs of a spouse as follows.

Financial Rights

Propwall

“How can a girl have whatever; anything is hers belongs to her husband? What’s he is his and What’s hers is also his…… Her earnings and what she may additionally locate in the streets are also his. The family articles, even the crumbs of bread on the desk, are his. need to she invite a visitor to her house and feed him, she could be stealing from her husband…” (San.71a, Git. 62a)

The fact of the problem is that the property of a Jewish girl become intended to draw suitors. It turned into this dowry that made Jewish daughters an unwelcome burden to their fathers. Hence, a woman in a conventional Jewish family was a liability and not an asset. This liability explains why the birth of a daughter was no longer celebrated with joy in the antique Jewish societies. Christianity, until these days, has accompanied the identical Jewish culture.

Both religious and civil authorities inside the Christian Roman Empire (after Constantine) required a assets settlement as a situation for recognizing the marriage. Families supplied their daughters growing dowries and, as an end result, guys tended to marry in advance at the same time as Families postponed their daughters’ marriages until later than were customary.

It’s miles very exciting that during most components of the arena Christians and Jews were able to do away with this discriminatory exercise, however, Muslim communities nevertheless education those pre-Islamic traditions. Many still see a woman as a burden, improve dowry from girl’s start, actively insist that Girls bequeath their belongings and jewelry to keep members of the family. Kashmir is not any exception.

Islam on Girls’ right to assets

Islam, for the reason that seventh century C.E., has granted Girls and married Women especially an independent persona. Traditionally in Islam, the bride and her family are underneath no responsibility in any way to present any present to the groom. The girl as consistent with Islamic thought is no liability. A woman is so dignified via Islam (at the least in principle) that she does no longer need to offer items in an effort to entice potential husbands.

It’s far the groom who have to present the bride with a wedding gift. This gift is considered her property and neither the groom nor the bride’s circle of relatives have any percentage in or manage it. In some Muslim societies lamentably we nevertheless follow the age old and discriminatory practices below which a girl infant is handled as a legal responsibility and after her delivery, dad and mom begin traumatic approximate dowry and marrying her off. Even today, a woman is acculturated into becoming a spouse more than turning into an intellectual and religious man or women, which Islam encourages us to grow to be, no matter our intercourse or gender. The Quran has stated its position on this difficulty pretty genuinely:

“And give the Ladies (on marriage) their dower as a loose gift; but in the event that they, in their own precise pleasure, remit any a part of it to you, take it and enjoy it with proper top cheer” (Quran four:4)

Stock Market

We have a tendency to examine the verse backward and strain on how obtaining the lower (Mehr) from a female is criminal underneath Islam, however, forget that It’s far absolutely below unfastened will. Ladies need to decide their dower and their right to possess it. Their fathers and different male spouse and children do no longer have any right to do that for her The spouse’s assets and profits are underneath her complete control and for her use by myself Considering that her, and the kid’s, preservation is her husband’s duty.

No matter how rich the wife might be, she isn’t always obliged to act as a co-provider for the circle of relatives until she herself voluntarily chooses to achieve this. Moreover, a married lady in Islam retains her unbiased criminal personality and her family call additionally. This is every other primary violation Muslims in today’s world luckily do. A girl neither keeps her name after marriage nor does she often collect a share of her parental property.

Women and ordinary economics

In these days’ Muslim societies maximum of the men need to marry Ladies who paintings such that they are able to utilize their spouse’s incomes closer to the family prices, which truly isn’t bad however What’s understated is the ‘loose will’ of the female. Any debate about free-will of a lady is visible as Western or current, whereas unfastened will to work, to spend on own family and to maintain lower is in entirety a girl’s absolute unfastened will, in religion. On one hand, men search for incomes spouses but however shy away from helping their other halves in family paintings.

Also, many respected men take away their Women’s salaries and deliver them a pocket cash to spend, based on the belief that Girls can’t be prudent with price range which has its origin in denying the fame of a complete questioning person to a woman. Prophet Muhammad’s lived enjoy is again rejected for example inside the feel that prophet who used to do all his paintings on his very own is aspect covered and some form of hyper-masculinity is challenged if a running girl needs her husband to help in kitchen or with infant rearing. In my very own extended family, I have visible guys name their other halves whilst the diapers of the child want to get replaced. That is a subject of discussion for another time however it connects here in our speedy rejection of actual Islam in terms of the actually said rights of Girls.

While properly-described assets rights are one of the fundamentals for Women’s monetary protection as well as wider economic improvement, we pick to deprive our Ladies of this. It’s miles no exaggeration that standard regulation prevails in Kashmir on the subject of the belongings distribution amongst siblings. Ladies from rural regions are told that Due to the fact they can not contend with the rural land, they better give it to their brothers. In most instances they are now not even informed that their percentage in property exists. Inland revenue places of work, in many instances men quietly get the property transferred in their names leaving out their married sisters who if at any time need to fall back on their parent’s proportion, do now not discover it there. I have been a witness to this during my walk. The officers and those do it below the apparel of preventing agricultural land from turning fallow. It’s far an implicit expertise that On the grounds that land is immovable assets, It’s far higher that it stays with the circle of relatives, i.E the male contributors.

Similarly, in urban areas, when it comes to property distribution and assets basically includes a residence, the girl who’s married in most instances is informed that her room (that’s her proportion in the belongings) shall stay intact, which in less complicated phrases method, not anything. In Each instance, maximum of the instances Women are not the owners of property, which religion and even felony gadget guarantee them.

I’m sure that many humans will say that their parents or Families deliver their Ladies a share in assets however that is an exception in place of the norm. In truth, It is an important element approximately which consciousness within the society need to be raised and since it comes below Muslim Private regulation, its application in exercise have to be ensured. We want to make sure that standard laws that implicitly justify the financial deprivation of Ladies’s discouraged. In those subjects, most of the society is quiet while Muslim Non-public law isn’t always followed, in reality, because it serves the need of the effective and unfortunately Girls give in so quietly.

Kashmir Conflict

The prophet of Islam was probably the first feminist guy and came up with the modern rights for Women to very own belongings inside the time whilst Girls had been themselves taken into consideration houses in Jewish and Christian traditions and nowadays, Muslims are racing backward and even justifying this backwardness beneath the clothing of faith simplest. Following Islamic standards, these days we ought to have had granted extra rights to our Ladies in the mild of recent time and age but irony is that we need to remind our community to even practice the loose will and empowerment that Islam mentioned loads of years in the past and that they’re bent on rejecting thinking that It’s far western idea.

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