#failure point identification

[yandere-toons]

Yandere Bakugou Katsuki (Platonic & Romantic Headcanons)

Warnings: mentions of child abuse (with domestic implied in association), bullying, intense violence, toxic mindset.

A.N. - Usual friend/partner format is absent to denote character's complicated relationship with intimacy!

"Friend" is a word he would never use, as it implies a degree of closeness and equal standing that Bakugou struggles to accept, that eats up the freedom and control he refuses to surrender, although others apply it for him.

Despite the enforced distance, Bakugou is quick to harass and torment any who claim intimacy with you or wish to establish such. This stems less from any clash with such feelings in Bakugou and more from the simple fact that attention divided is attention lost. Additionally, letting some extra into your life is another way of calling him incapable of fulfilling that need, a grave insult that rouses him to sever this dead weight on the battlefield.

Whomsoever has the gall to take that mantle from him, a death match will settle the undying question of whether his passion can conquer theirs. If they manage a desperate escape or a swift rescue, Bakugou will forever brand them a coward and challenge them on sight to let him finish the job.

It is difficult to overstate the amount of enmity he feels for those who intrude on the relationship. All who came before him, with the superior bond of time, cluck their tongues and sneer at his efforts to surpass them; all who come sniffing after him, he refuses to see as anything other than leeches in need of plucking and destruction.

A volatile household has imbued in Bakugou a hypersensitivity to all forms of criticism. He wishes to never again feel so trapped and powerless as the loser of a fight, so he exerts a similarly aggressive level of control over others, believing violence to be the one reliable way of coming out on top.

After all, no relationship is without contest as far as Bakugou was taught: compromise and compassion are tools for the weak, who cannot stand alone and serve only to elevate the strong. Some opponents, such as his teacher Aizawa, present a challenge not undertaken without first suffering heavy penalties to his dream, and thus this battle of wills is relegated here to a more passive defiance.

Through strength and superior force of will, a connection with Bakugou can only be a deterrent to other bullies and all the Minetas of the world. It is a pathway to unmatched companionship, performance, and success. All other relationships are transient, but with Bakugou, the results are entirely concrete and, by extension, reliable. You don't need nebulous concepts like "good company" preached by lesser individuals when Bakugou will ensure the identification and erasure of all vestigial weaknesses.

Additional elements in your life are, at best, a source of concern as dead weight or, at worst, actively prohibiting your well-being by limiting your time with him. Anyone who refuses to exact their pound of flesh in the relationship is either a liar or an idiot. Lies mean danger and warn Bakugou to expect an attack; idiots are not long for this world and therefore are unworthy of his time save for the occasional heckling.

Bakugou drives himself to excel at his every pursuit, trusting in such a "mastery over all" persona to cover his weak spots and allow for nothing that others could point at as his one failure. If he wins in all contests, then who could legitimately claim he is wrong?

Bakugou thrives on any chance to flaunt his strength — but abhors the idea of being used in the same manner as a lowly foot soldier; that is, presented as cannon fodder and expected to die a forgotten tool. Such requests are seen as an attempt at controlling him, which in and of itself is indicative of disrespect and cannot be tolerated.

Any advances from another in your life, he assumes, are a deliberate slight against his pride; and the knife must be stuck in a thousandfold lest he be remembered as the simpering coward who showed his belly at the first glare of competition.

Bakugou expects a mountain of boasting and gushing at the supposedly generous act of bestowing upon you his undivided attention; he, however, remains silent on the affair so as not to suggest any emotional dependence, an achingly true reality he is certain others will prey upon with mockery and invasive questioning. The loss of control over his attachment is a long-kept secret, for once it goes beyond his immediate control, it becomes a potentially gaping vulnerability, one readily exploited by his many enemies.

Despite his best intentions, Bakugou is much like the mother he fought so hard to survive and escape, a fact he both resents and considers necessary to protect himself. Only through being the strongest, and king of the hill, will his voice and his desires never again be ignored.

Bakugou often re-enacts these fights on his own terms, where the opponent is hopelessly outmatched and he can assume the position of power, subconsciously spewing the same insults and threats that were used against him to eke out a sense of worth and control in his life.

As a youngster, Bakugou is ripe to demand participation in all group activities. He frames his team as the one for whom success is guaranteed and assures you he only partners with winners. Any who step in or challenge with another word are blown away.

Among classmates, Bakugou has made a habit of targeting your favourites and any more who dare to dream they can take his place, unable to cope with a future where he is unnecessary. He must be essential, for anything less is an insult to his capabilities and a potential source of vulnerability.

In combat exercises, no one else is allowed to engage you. Those who land even a single blow, he puts through the wall. Bakugou himself is noticeably milder with his attacks on you, taking aim at less vulnerable areas and shooting to stun rather than kill. Training with you is fundamentally still a competition, but he won't allow you to be harmed by any of the lesser candidates and would-be heroes.

For the opposing team, Bakugou displays an enduring hatred and arms his attacks with power enough to blow through the human body and split the concrete wall behind it. This is no longer a game to him, but something deeply personal.

He leaves a slot open on his team and chases away any who seek to fill it, convinced that with an ample enough show of force, you will realise the error of your ways and switch sides to the clear winner. Still, he cannot let slip that he hopes for such a thing and would be hurt by its absence. If anyone asks, the slot was left open because his team, having him as a leader, did not require full manning.

At the peak of junior high, Bakugou's emotions spiral: lunging for perceived rivals, pummeling them, and teasing an explosion down their throat. Teachers, victims, and spectators alike keep quiet, half in fear for their own safety, half in the hope that he will grow out of it. The threat of death in such encounters is quite high, but any follow-through is likely to occur after the school day ends, where no one can block Bakugou from his prey.

Still at the peak of junior high, Bakugou is king of the schoolyard, and yet, has just as little power at home as he did before. This constant failure demands more showboating and greater performance at school, lest Bakugou be unacceptably rejected as another lost cause. He will never realise his goals if the world is not reshaped as it must be.

With age comes more power, and with more power comes more wins; and soon enough, Bakugou turns his hostilities on teachers. While in grade school, the few who tried to coax him into letting his "special friend" play with other kids were dismissed as copycats of his mousy father and roundly ignored; but in high school, the many who resort to lectures and threats sound all too like his mother and trigger a host of aggression.

Calls are made to his home about increasingly violent behaviour, which in turn leads his mother to scream profanity for hours and lay hands on him as punishment. His father, shut out of the loop by a dismissive wife and an equally hostile son, mistakes the vicious cycle taking root for general delinquency. He tries to talk Bakugou into standing down, but risks his own life in the process and so remains resigned to the background.

These well-intentioned but ineffective efforts, in a tragic twist of irony, feed Bakugou's attitude that no one has his back, and he must fight to keep hold of his one safe spot in life. As his "special friend," you must see his excellence and, only in continued and ever-greater reminders, be motivated to stick with him as you should. When he decides to grace you with his presence, there will be no distractions, only recognition for the inner weakness of all who fall short of his towering standards.

Well into his formative years, Bakugou retains a growing distrust of adults, viewing them as inherently antagonistic figures who seek to smother his freedom and cannot be relied upon when it counts. They are, at best, effete annoyances and, at worst, monstrous obstacles to be endured only until they may be properly annihilated.

Conditioned to see a potential foe in everyone, only once stout trust has developed can Bakugou turn his back and not fear the glint of the blade come swinging to make him regret it. These innocuous displays remind Bakugou of how much would be at stake if the intensity of his true feelings were revealed or, worse yet, surreptitiously exposed by some gossip-prone dunce.

In the event Kirishima turns the wrong phrase, Bakugou allows him to escape with a comparatively light thrashing, whilst everyone else is subject to the uncorking of years of rage and belligerence. Only his "special friend," worth more than all others, is spared the worst of his wrath.

Nothing riles him so as a battle with an audience, and when Bakugou has someone in particular to impress, what remains of the enemy is carted off the field on a stretcher. Through an excessive response, Bakugou simultaneously asserts his dominance as the premier hero, crushing his villainous opposition, and unambiguously demonstrates why choosing him in lieu of all the others was the only sensible conclusion. Everything is right in the world, at least until the next challenge presents itself.

Strength is the greatest virtue, and nothing says "superior dedication" like dropping your worst enemy at your feet after everyone else cautioned forgiveness. Bakugou sees a downed enemy as a current and future threat, but he sees a broken and crushed one as a sign of power.

Climbing to the top rung is his way of proving, both to himself and to the world, that Bakugou Katsuki is no longer the little boy who only dreams of victory and cannot face his mother. All opponents, today or tomorrow, will be summarily crushed, and Bakugou will prove, definitively, that any opposition was wrong to contest his will. In the heat of battle, he charges to conquer, afraid only of the feeling of smallness that comes with loss.

Raised in an environment where violence was the only way to be heard and respected, backing down from any kind of challenge is tantamount to cowardice; and the cowardly have no hope in this world, merely asking to be walked over and trampled. Pity and mercy are insults from the lips of those who look down on him, who see him as no threat and wish to deepen the wound of his mistakes.

Bakugou shapes his value on what he can accomplish rather than who he is. The rage and panic after a failed exam, the violent jealousy — it all stems from one core belief: if he is less than the best, he is nothing.

[tobiasdrake]

Genuinely curious what the original plan for Android 16 was.

It's widely known that the plot of the Android arc changed multiple times over the course of the series. 19 and 20 were originally intended to be the arc's true villains. In fact, Trunks calls them out by serial number when he's first giving the infodump about his future.

This isn't a Viz-ism, either. He says "19 and 20" specifically in the original Japanese.

Those two Androids, not 17 and 18, are the ones ravaging his future. However, as is commonly known, Toriyama's editor former editor and currently a trusted friend Kazuhiko Torishima was unimpressed by the Androids' design.

The funny thing is, this isn't the only glaring plot hole that the abrupt shift in plot created. It's easy to pin down 20's flight to his lab as the moment Toriyama switched gears, because he's forced to bring in Bulma to rerail it onto the new story - creating another massive plot hole in the process regarding what Bulma knows.

See. In addition to Trunks clearly identifying 19 and 20 as the Androids, this scene three years in the past had another moment that becomes an issue later on. It's when Bulma says this:

See, Trunks has explained that Dr. Gero is creating the Androids as we speak and will set them upon everyone in three years' time. Bulma suggests having Shenron reveal the location of Gero's lab, and then they can all run off and gank him.

She gets voted down because Goku, Vegeta, and Tenshinhan are all super interested in fighting these Androids.

Goku tries to spin some guff about a moral reservation but he adds that in as an afterthought. His kneejerk is that he wants to fight. It's Krillin who ultimately succeeds in talking Bulma down, via some 4-D chess maneuvers against Vegeta.

Krillin's planning on using the Androids as a common cause to trick Vegeta into becoming one of the gang.

Which. Y'know. Goes off without a hitch, honestly. Krillin is a tactical genius and all-a y'all owe him respect. He manipulated Vegeta straight into that redemption arc.

In any case, this is where Trunks's warning leaves us: In three years' time, Dr. Gero will unleash 19 and 20 who will kill us all. If we knew where he was, we could do something about it, but the will to actually do that isn't there.

So.

Three years later, during the fight with 20, he uses Bulma as a distraction to make his escape. Upon rescuing her, Bulma's able to positively ID 20 as the doctor himself.

More than that, she knows exactly where he lives because he's a famous celebrity whose personal information gets talked about in the scientific community.

She just never brought it up before because no one ever said Dr. Gero was involved in any of this.

This is an even bigger HOOOOOOLY SHIT than the clear identification of the Androids' serial numbers. What Bulma knows flipped between these chapters.

So we make our way to Gero's lab to meet the arc's Actual Villains For Realsies, 17 and 18.

As a sidenote, not to be outdone in jankiness by Goku dropping the Senzu into a pocket dimension earlier, Toei has Dr. Gero's broken-off right hand occasionally regenerate by magic in this scene.

This arc is rough for everyone.

In any case, this brings us to the awakening of 16.

At this point in time, the retcon has finished taking effect; 17 and 18 are now retroactively the Androids from Trunks's future, but 16 is something different. Another Android that Trunks has never heard of before.

Dr. Gero practically pisses himself with terror when the prospect of 16 being awakened comes up.

In the same breath that Toriyama rewrites 17 and 18 to be the True Actual Villains For Realsies of the arc, he also introduces the enigmatic 16. All we know of him is that Gero believed he was a malfunctioning, uncontrollable failure whose awakening would threaten the whole planet.

The Twins question 16 about the true threat he represents.

But all he has to offer in response is this... eerie smile, as if he knows something he isn't sharing.

Answering "Are you going to kill us all" with a smug grin is fucking ominous. Shortly after, we learn that whatever 16's malfunction is, it scared Gero so much that he never made another of the same kind of thing that 16 is again.

What went so horribly wrong that it spooked Gero into trying out human base models and? It's worth noting that while Gero did go back to the mechanical design for 19, he considered the subsequent failures of 17 and 18 following whatever happened with 16 to be sufficient reason to can the Infinite Energy design entirely.

Android 16 is the most formidable design Gero ever created to kill Goku with. And he refused to ever make another like him again.

Current Dragon Ball lore, per interviews with Toriyama, say that he didn't want 16 released because 16 has sentimental value to him. But that doesn't explain why he didn't make other Androids like 16, and these panels themselves are telling a very different story. They're hyping up the mystery of 16 to be the true ultimate threat of this arc - At least, once he finally gets a chance to meet his one true adversary.

However, this doesn't last. Torishima didn't like the Twins as villains either so Cell was created instead. It was later revealed that 16 was very strong and also has a bomb in his chest that would wipe out a small portion of the countryside.

But the nature of this terrifying and enigmatic threat to the planet sure to unfold if 16 awakens, something so terrible that Gero was afraid of ever making an Android like 16 again, would be lost to the cutting room floor.

[mariacallous]

The Israeli attack on a humanitarian convoy in Gaza in early April that killed seven aid workers with the U.S.-based aid group World Central Kitchen has ignited a fierce global backlash against Israel’s policies of engagement in the territory. The attack involved the successive firing of three missiles at three vehicles, driven by suspicions of a Hamas combatant’s presence within the convoy, according to reports.

In Israel, the event is being portrayed as an accident, “a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the Standard Operating Procedures,” as the Israeli military’s investigation team concluded. In humanitarian circles, it is seen as evidence of a culture that “treats Gaza as a free-fire zone with total impunity for gross attacks on civilians,” as Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International who served in both the Obama and Biden administrations, has suggested.

But for the discussion to be useful, it should progress beyond these immediate interpretations to examine the deeper cultural patterns underlying such incidents. Most crucially, it must scrutinize the shift in military policy and ethos that can be traced back to the Elor Azaria affair of 2016-17. Azaria was an Israeli conscript who was captured on video executing a wounded and immobilized Palestinian assailant in Hebron. The Israeli military prosecuted Azaria for manslaughter and sentenced him to 18 months in prison.

While the case demonstrated the military’s commitment to its own ethical codes, it also sparked widespread protests from right-wing factions and a general backlash against military procedures. The army was accused of failing to support Azaria and creating a culture in which soldiers would hesitate to use force against Palestinian militants. To counter this claim, and from that point forward, the military began to announce the number of Palestinian fighters killed in its operations, demonstrating that its forces did not hesitate to engage.

Under the leadership of the military’s chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, from 2019 to 2023, the killing-based criteria were reinforced. Kochavi’s goal was to remake the army into a “lethal, efficient, and innovative” fighting force—in other words, a death-generating army. He promoted this vision by enhancing the precision of weapon systems, improving the coordination between forces and intelligence, and increasing the rate of fire.

Kochavi’s directive for field commanders to assess, at the end of each combat phase, the number of enemy forces killed and objectives destroyed—rather than solely focusing on territorial conquest—signified a shift toward necrotactics, where the primary goal of military engagement is killing the enemy. Killing becomes not just an outcome of warfare but its principal aim.

The approach of using body counts as a metric of success has notably intensified during the current war. Soon after the Oct. 7 attack, the Israeli military began consistently reporting the number of Hamas fighters killed, echoing the way U.S. generals announced enemy fatalities during the Vietnam War—a scenario where traditional metrics for evaluating combat success are elusive, thus making the body count, rather than the strategic objectives achieved, the primary indicator of success. This was particularly evident as the Israeli death toll ticked up and the stated objective of dismantling Hamas appeared increasingly unattainable.

In fact, the military appears to have established a quantitative goal from the outset. According to the journalist Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, the Israeli army developed an artificial intelligence-based program named Lavender, designed to identify targets for assassination. This system tagged approximately 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza as suspected militants, marking their residences (and therefore their families as well) for potential airstrikes. The deployment of Lavender contributed to the deaths of around 15,000 Palestinians in the war’s first six weeks, according to the report.

By setting a numerical target, the Israeli military shifted from viewing outcomes as a measure of progress—like neutralizing the threat posed to Israel from Gaza—to making body counts the main standard. The trend has been reinforced by a pervasive adoption of the language of killing among military commanders. “Now we will go forward and kill them all,” Brig. Gen. Roman Goffman was quoted as saying just before the ground operation in Gaza began, in just one prominent example.

As Israel faces an impasse in Gaza, lacking a politically articulated exit strategy, the reliance on killing and its quantification as a metric for success becomes increasingly pronounced, leading to the erosion of operational constraints. This shift was evident in the recent raid at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which inflicted extensive damage to Gaza’s most crucial health care infrastructure. The hunt for Hamas members has, to a significant degree, become an end in itself, complicating the dynamics of the conflict and placing military objectives above political resolutions.

This shift provides some context for the tragic killing of the aid convoy team—though it makes it no less disturbing. Once one or two armed individuals were spotted in the convoy, their neutralization became a top priority, apparently eclipsing overarching strategic considerations—factors that should have been incorporated at the tactical level. Fundamentally, such a situation warranted an approach aimed at preventing civilian casualties, especially along a deconflicted route designated for humanitarian aid delivery and when no direct threat was posed to Israeli troops. Moreover, the overarching political rationale should have prioritized safeguarding humanitarian missions, given the potential repercussions for Israel’s global standing amid the crisis in Gaza.

Yet the events unfolded with a seeming obsession for lethal action, as vividly illustrated by reporting in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: Upon spotting a gunman or two, Israeli forces targeted three successive vehicles from the air. After the first one was hit, passengers moved to a second vehicle, which was then struck by a missile. And when the wounded were transferred to a third vehicle, it too was fired on. This appears to be a case of obsessive kill confirmation, overshadowing the principles of necessity, proportionality, and the sanctity of civilian life.

Hence, the fundamental issue extends beyond merely revising the rules of engagement or monitoring their application more closely, as such measures alone would prove inadequate to prevent future incidents. The problem also transcends the flawed assumption that every part of Gaza can be considered a free-fire zone where engaging Palestinian militants indiscriminately is justified. What is crucial is dismantling the prevailing culture that equates killing with military success.

Yagil Levy is a professor of political sociology and public policy at the Open University of Israel. His most recent book in English is: Whose Life Is Worth More? Hierarchies of Risk and Death in Contemporary Wars.

[disease]

HUMAN // THEORIES

Humans, or modern humans (Homo sapiens or H. sapiens), are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the only surviving species of the genus Homo. A great ape characterized by their hairlessness, bipedalism, and high intelligence, humans have large brains, enabling more advanced cognitive skills that enable them to thrive and adapt in varied environments, develop highly complex tools, and form complex social structures and civilizations.

I. SPECIES OF PRIMATE – in terms of biology, we fall under the classification of animals. we share more similarities with fellow species under this classification opposed to less similarities. study the behavior of fellow animals, limitlessly, and focus your attention on that of their primitive states-of-being. apply these tactics to our advanced state of multi-faceted intellect, and learn from them.

II. HIGH INTELLIGENCE – a privilege amongst humankind that, to an exponential degree, fails to be utilized by the masses. success in relation to survival is largely attributed to this level of intelligence on a day-to-day basis. with the exception of cases linear with cognitive neurodiversity—excuses against the enrichment and manifestation of this attribute remain impotent. failure to both utilize and acknowledge this predisposition will only lead to mortal sterility.

Humans are highly social, with individual humans tending to belong to a multi-layered network of cooperating, distinct, or even competing social groups—from families and peer groups to corporations and political states. As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, languages, and traditions (collectively termed institutions), each of which bolsters human society.

III. HIGHLY SOCIAL – as if an art form opposed to a science, one must not only enforce to find a comfortable balance regarding this subject, but also attune themselves into the identification of natural compatibility, emotional maturity, and self-interest of individuals they encounter. if one chooses to form a social attachment with a subject who’s imbalanced in any aforementioned concepts, a state of emotional/energetic hemorrhage may occur. ideally, one must invest the majority of their energy into those in which form a unified duality of mutual restoration with oneself; opposed to the inclination of self-sacrifice, fueled by a multitude of various factors. one must vigilantly prioritize themselves as to not grow tarnished in an act of preservation for not only themselves—but for the consistent nourishment of their otherwise deep-rooted connections in which an active catalyst has been established. avoid social martyrdom.

Humans are also highly curious: the desire to understand and influence phenomena has motivated humanity's development of science, technology, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other frameworks of knowledge; humans also study themselves through such domains as anthropology, social science, history, psychology, and medicine.

IV. HIGHLY CURIOUS – passions, as sacred as they can be bewildering, [sub]consciously occupy the largest percentage of our time. to be mystified by that of which is misunderstood may be one of life’s most-precious offerings. our pursuits in creativity reward us with a key which unlocks subliminal facets within our psyche, only to be comprehended at a later point in time. these lay the foundations at our primal core, and, as a divine mission which one chooses to either ignore or commence upon, choosing the latter inevitably trails the path toward self-actualization. a probable reason why we exist—without the ability to reference some comprehensive manual—is to polarize us toward what we will produce as an earth-bound monolith to perpetually inspire future generations of those impassioned by the very same mystical essence that once lay dormant within ourselves.

As of January 2024, there are more than 8 billion humans alive.

you uniquely represent 1 amongst eight billion.

radiate your inner light for those blind to the dark.

[my-acatalepsy]

This may not actually help you or achieve my goal of guiding you to be less TERF-y. But I'd recommend reading books about Zen Buddhism, because although it articulated a lot of things that match my perspective on gender. You ask "what else is there", yet you also want to abolish gender roles - tell me, if I, an AMAB person who doesn't do vocal training or shave my arm and legs and regularly wears "men's" clothing, how can my identification with she/her pronouns and the concept of womanhood not lead to the dissolution of "gender roles" as we know them? The shovel is not in my hand while I go forward with the shovel in my hand. I identify as a woman because I choose to - not arbitrarily, on a whim, but rather I choose to listen to the part of me that says I am one in defiance of not matching the definition according to either "biology" or "stereotypes". I walk on foot while I ride on the ox's back.

TERFs are nice to you because they see you as someone they can lure over. They weren't so nice to Imane Khelif. And if you keep advocating for single-sex spaces, all you're really doing is working towards a world that's decided cis men will never possibly get better and will always be a danger to women, that's taken the bleak, defeatest stance that feminism will ultimately be a failure and women will be an eternal prey animal. I sincerely wish you the best of luck in escaping the the destiny that's been designed for you.

thank you for responding! i have a few issues with these points, feel free to respond but you don’t have to of course

being GNC does help dissolve gender roles, however, if you say your gender is woman and you conform to those gender roles you aren’t really GNC in a way that helps dissolve gender roles, you’re actually enforcing them

what part of you says you’re a woman? what is that experience like? i can understand sex dysphoria but i wish i understood how you can feel like a woman

most of the posts on my feed (while they are curated) weren’t actually mean to imane khalif, some said she shouldn’t have been in that match but that was the worst of it

single sex spaces are important because men pose a real danger to women, that doesn’t take a defeatist stance. plus, i’m not a separatist in my own life but there’s no denying that movements like the 4b movement in korea work

[foundation-site-89]

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Out of Universe - The Person Behind Site-89

Heya! I’m @vixen-music, in-universe name Vixen Cinders!

I’m the girl behind this whole page, and it all started due to a little song that I found called Keter Qualities. That’s what set me on the path towards getting utterly obsessed with the Foundation.

In true Vixen fashion, I decided to make a Tumblr page for my newest obsession. However, unlike my other pages, this one is gonna be entirely open! Anyone can do what they want, as this is more of a setting than a character! As such, the Ask Box will constantly be open, and submissions will be made available to anyone who wants to participate!

I hope you lot enjoy your time here, and let’s build Site-89 together as a community!

[lasplaga]

If Osmund were to meet Mother Miranda (or if he already has) what are his thoughts? Would he have any thoughts on the Lords? Is there a secret meeting between cult leaders we don't know about?

-;┊ 𓆙 𝕺𝕺𝕮 ; ◥ 𓆙      —      𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐙𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐈𝐍𝐐𝐔𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒 --- ALWAYS Accepting!

Not canonically because Osmund was in exile until 1984 at the earliest. However, in my verses where Osmund was resurrected post 2004, I do explore a dynamic with Mother Miranda. I've been a mutual of @fallesto for a while, who writes her VERY well, so I do suggest a follow if you're not already.

Osmund pities & sympathizes with her because it is extremely traumatic to lose a child. Lord Saddler has endured his fair share of trauma itself to the point it was insanity inducing ( such as with Glenn, sound familiar? ), so he really resonates with her in that aspect. Mother Miranda's power & influence is also respectable, but not nearly on the same level as him, as he was motived enough to eventually target / infiltrate people close to The President & United States government as a whole. We don't have anything to support if Las Plagas & Mold is compatible besides them both being related to fungus, so unfortunately, they wouldn't be welcomed into Paradise if they were incompatible. Whether or not Osmund would go out of his way to kill them is a different story. Mother Miranda only wanted her daughter, whereas Osmund wanted the entire world, so if he could / can bribe her sect to look the other way while he dominates the globe, if not assist him outright, I'm sure they would get along swimmingly. Osmund has no quarrel when it comes to experimenting upon children, therefore he has no moral issue with finding a suitable vessel for Eva, no matter how long it takes or how many times he fails. A part of him internally asks why Mother Miranda simply wouldn't make "another one" to replace Eva, but this VERY GROSS line of thinking is just a byproduct of his ancestral lineages life expectancy being extremely poor. Lord Saddler is very desensitized to the loss or suffering of children as he grew up in an environment where it was normal to cannibalize your siblings / comrades.

I haven't had the chance to interact with an Alcina, Karl, or Salvatore, ( so I won't comment exactly on them yet ), but Osmund finds Donna FAR from hideous, & does wish that she would eventually leave from her isolation. There is an entire religion that would not see her as a failure, nor disfigured, or as an abomination. To them, mutations are a blessing & it is something his congregation seeks to obtain. With @dollhidden's Donna specifically ( I also recommend following! ), he truly enjoys her company, & feels terrible for her. It's important to keep in mind that he values a mutant much more than he would a human, as he sees the latter as biologically imperfect & inferior.

Any of The Dimitrescu Daughter's he is fascinated by & feels a sense of kinship for, due to being more related to arthropods / insects than a human being, additionally with the fact he worships them. Lord Saddler is aware of the whole "man-eating" sentiment & is absolutely down for that sort of thing, but he is to dense to see that THAT also applies for himself. Lord Saddler doesn't see himself as masculine since he is not BIOLOGICALLY masculine, there's also a whole historical thing with male monks dressing / behaving feminine but that's an entirely different conversation, however it does contribute to his identification as non-binary & androgynous, he is a parasitic hermaphrodite, & sometimes he is pretty clueless to the fact that not everyone is inside his own head, 24/7. Some information he expects others to know without prompting because he is so used to implanting / exchanging thoughts via a Hivemind, & that God doesn't really have a gender, he's "just" God. One day he will learn that he is also a disgusting "man-thing", sadly. Unless he's offered an exception on the basis he can literally make / have children by a parasitic technicality. Which, he does consider his plagas offspring his own children, the same as a human would with a baby.

[phlve]

Subtype Trait Structures: sp6

Guilt

The identification with the aggressor and introjection of an internal persecutor, to defend themselves from external threats, entail the development of a superego that constantly feeds the feeling of guilt. This self blame is a way of controlling the world: “If it is my fault, I can do something about it.” Then, they look for punishment, as masterfully portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, all with the hope of placating this uncontrollable self-persecution.

Unconscious behaviors sometimes lead them to “turning themselves in” to get the punishment through which they, uselessly, hope they will be forgiven and “rescued.” This neurotic mechanism leads them to search for the love of one of their parents (usually the father) through the admission of fault and inadequacy, with the goal of forgiveness. Therefore, the conservation E6 sees attaining love and appreciation through their own merits and personal value as impossible.

Persecution

Seeing themselves as constantly at fault, they also feel persecuted: they project their internal persecution externally. It is a form of paranoid thinking which incurs the following: other people are always ready to catch your faults, attack you, and criticize you, and if they do not, it is only because it is convenient for them to hide their intentions at the moment to ensure they punch down the line.

Given that they demand from themselves more and more, they can’t handle that it is other people that are accusing them and they continuously oscillate between victim and accuser.

Accusation

The conservation E6 has the competitive desire to take the place of the authority which tends to cause controversy. They always believe they know how things should be done while submitting to their superiors at the same time. At the same time, they love and hate the authority that they mystify.

It is hard for them to take on responsibility in negative situations (failures, conflicts, etc.) out of fear of being vulnerable and the other taking advantage of them. They accuse with the purpose of defending themselves and ensuring that others don’t accuse them.

Worry

They obsessively search to confirm what they are and what they do. The dominant fear is of failing and doing wrong; and it is so dominating that it blocks action or expression, and is as if they lacked an internal method to determine the validity of a personal choice. Prior to action, a long and troubling process leads them to ruminate with a rigidity that turns into pure inaction. The fear of judgment compromises doing, with inhibition leading them to known or comfortable goals.

In the work environment, they choose to do things they are sure of. They avoid changes in the workplace for fear of not being able to deal with them, of lacking the ability or knowledge; they do not propose things but rather hope that others do for them.

They do not like to improvise, they prefer to prepare before new situations, out of fear of ridicule. The moment of confrontation with the other is very stressful. The feeling is always that they are not ready enough. They need continual confirmation, by the people they trust in, that they are doing the right thing. When this confirmation does not come to them, they mentally review, typical of an insecure person, what they have said or done.

Indecision and Doubt

Their thoughts are centered on subjective content, to defend themselves from what they do not perceive clearly. But, they do not recognize having departed from absolutely subjective premises. Their primary goal is to demonstrate (especially to themselves) that their idea is valid. A “cogito, ergo cogito” complicates things to such a point that their thought eventually remains in the hands of doubt.

Doubt is connected with self-invalidation and ambivalence. They constantly devalue themselves but at the same time have a great self-concept. They feel persecuted (in extreme cases can lead to a paranoid schizophrenia). They even doubt what they doubt. They are suspicious of others and suffer from chronic uncertainty about which action to take.

They love and hate the paternal figure that represents authority. They desire to please and attack. They go through phases of contact and withdrawal: the desire for a relationship and for fusion is as strong as the fear that they will completely become vulnerable. They have not built the ability to establish clear boundaries, and they move with extreme ambivalence between their desire to satisfy their own needs and fear of losing the relationship with the other.

Due to this fear, while the E9 has given up on maintaining the difference between the self and the other therefore solving the conflict, the E6 invaded by the threat constituted by the other, withdraws to protect the self, inhibiting any kind of decision and, therefore, any action, whether it be at an interpersonal level with an external other, or at an intrapsychic level with a self understood as the essential set of emotions and needs of the other.

Passivity

The issue of control is basic in childhood and adolescence both among their school peers and their loved ones. The message received is: “The world is dangerous; you are weak and influenceable and, therefore, we are the ones who will guide you because we know what is adequate for you.”

Introversion

Between the psychological types described by Jung, the conservation E6 corresponds to the reflective introvert. The introvert, locked in themselves, stays clear of too much contact with external reality. This introvert is characterized by the primacy of thought: the ideas that they have of other people affect their relationships, without them realizing the distance that they are introducing into them. They have a negative relationship with the other, which comes from the indifference to rejection. Thought tends to disarm the adversary. The other is always a little neglected or surrounded by measures of caution they defend themselves from external demands with.

The conservation E6 fears that emotional manifestations of the other will overcome them. They prefer reading to overt social contact, are introspective, schedule their activities, and control their impulses and feelings.

Lack of Trust

The first psychosocial structure that the child learns, according to Erickson, is trust. With milk, the child incorporates their mother and nutrition. The derived wellness makes the surrounding objective world acceptable: this is the base upon which we base our mental world.

“I am what I get,” the kid could claim, in the sense that they trust themselves and others by the quantity and quality of the security of what they’ve received. The conservation E6 has been unable to incorporate the feeling of wellness connected to the relationship with a nutrition-bringing mother, and as a consequence, they have not been able to build this trust on security. This lack has made them insecure and fearful.

Ambivalence

The conservation E6 was an over-protected child who did not feel accepted in their own true needs, which came with a recognition of their own less positive qualities.

If the child does not get help in their efforts of individuation to be who they are, or is pushed toward a definition of themselves that satisfies the representation of their parent over their true nature, there are two possibilities: submitting or rebelling. Or the two reactions together, which is what usually happens.

At first, the child rebels, but over time, they end up accommodating themselves to the demands and needs of their parents to avoid rejection and the withdrawal of affection, to not fall flat with disapproval, and in practice, loneliness.

In their ambivalence, the conservation E6 cannot live serenely with adaptation nor rebelliousness: both polarities are unsatisfactory for them and they live in an irreconcilable dilemma between freedom and obligation.

Self-Denial

When they have to choose between what they are, between their project, put out ahead by their own efforts, and others’ projects, which is presented with guarantees of maximum support, the conservation E6 accepts the easiest solution: other’s proposals.

They give up a super important need in this way: realizing their own efforts. At the root of this, they feel a very strong hostility that, unable to manifest it, comes back against themselves in the form of blame. To be accepted, they activate adequate behaviors, like obedience, goodness, and solidarity. These are hard to attain if they are countered with other needs, like a natural selfishness or the need to be oneself, even with that aspect’s own accompanying miseries.

They “eliminate” unacceptable impulses that, in spite of everything, they struggle to carry out. The fear that they can overcome this self-censoring is what we call “anxiety.” In other words, the E6 puts their mind to a self-idealization whose dominant traits are perfection, and feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. In this manner, they make the illusion that they’ve outgrown self-hatred and conquered others’ approval. That they have overcome the base conflict between their need for self-realization and others’ needs.

Submissiveness

In Karen Horney’s description of neuroses, we can see this E6 in the conciliatory personality, whose style of conflict resolution is resignation, particularly in tending to renouncing with submission. The neurotic “resignation” restricted the field of action connected with their own desires.

They can renounce all ambition for success, in that it implies effort and, additionally, the danger of being imprisoned by others’ expectations and responsibilities. They prefer to cultivate intense imaginative activity and fear their elevated ideal of themselves, while they delay the necessary action to make things reality. They tend to be convinced of chasing what they want, which they don’t really know much about. They lose the orientation of action because they do not have contact with desire, nor with its implied emotional aspects. This leads the conservation E6 to a detachment leading them to occasional inertia in the plane of action.

The submissive resignation causes extreme neurotic worry about conflict and punishment. The mechanism of projection is evident through the way they invest others into co-action and hostility instead of recognizing their difficulty to be “free” and themselves.

The conservation E6 is one type who can fall victim to inertia, paralyzed in all aspects of their life. To drain the anxiety at the root, they feed a spooky omnipotent world that does not reveal an authentic position of independence. And with submission they do not take action but rather maintain an ultimate defense stemming from their internal world.

Selfishness and Stinginess

The conservation E6 houses the “crazy” idea that material and emotional resources are scarce and that they can always lack basic things, with a threat toward their own survival. From this erroneous perception, they derive their worried, and “selfish,” attitude with only some material things and emotional relationships.

This selfishness is manifested in an attitude of always putting themselves before others, out of a reaction of fear that they will never be up to the challenge faced. In general, this fear is not conscious, and when it is, they become very ashamed of it and see it as something that should not happen.

Cloudiness

The way of thinking in conservation E6 is always oriented to the past or the future. It is essential to the need for security to predict anything that could happen and to be in a situation to face difficulties, and directly proportional to the distrust in their capacity to do so.

Thinking about the past, in itself, is essential to the maintenance of control over possible errors committed through the feeling of guilt, with the goal of corrective action and finding safety. The feeling of guilt is, additionally, a defense mechanism against pain, from which they cannot be abandoned.

Feeling comes after thought, which conditions it. As Hegel claims: “If emotions are not coherent with thought, that is bad for emotions.” They control, above all, the emotions that could cause conflicts with people significant to them. It is hard that they allow themselves a moment to not think about anything, unless they get validation that it is ok. When this happens, this “not thinking or doing” is very pleasant for them.

Their thoughts are seemingly logical, but only on a superficial level; in their deepest core, they are undefined and cloudy. This allows them to not define themselves to other people, a strategy which maintains their absence of deep commitment, and avoids confrontation and conflict. In reality, emotions controlled like this come back strongly and dysfunctionally when thought no longer allows a solution to problems.

Inhibition

The conservation E6 is very inhibited, in both instinctual impulses and aggression. Their hesitant character is a vacillation between their impulses and an equally intense fearful inhibition that stemmed from a fear of the father or, more widely, authority figures, and has led to a strong superego.

They tend to have the personality, which can last a lifetime, of a “good kid”: someone who ensures they live according to ethics and others expectations, with an ingratiating attitude, often smiling.

Insecurity

Very different from the schizoid E5, who is a true loner, this character’s timid nature is more like a type of stepping aside out of fear of annoying someone or out of insecurity, but truly yearns for closeness, and satisfies their need for emotional support with a few close relationships.

Inefficiency

It is always a laborious process for the conservation E6 to make a decision, or even move: due to their fear of change, it is easier for them to lengthen a situation than to keep moving forward and confront a new challenge. This deliberate slowness, together with the tendency to create a fog to obscure the clarity of things, make them less agile. Like the “fool” in fairy tales who, for fear of making their own decisions, is often manipulated.

Fantasy

This type is much more of a dreamer than a doer, substituting reality with fantasy. A certain inefficiency is the other side of their inclination toward their internal life and noble ideals.

The inhibition of emotional expression makes them a hypersensitive and fantasizing character, blocking them from action and instinctual spontaneity.

For a strategy oriented toward controlling commitment, dreaming of fusion with another is more functional than a tangible relationship, which would bring confrontation.

Without a Right

The conservation E6 has always felt like a stowaway: someone who got on board without a ticket: in their family, in love, at work. They are the disinherited heir, the wife abandoned at the altar, the laid off worker. It is as if the shadow of these possibilities never abandoned them, ever present.

Suspicious

The conservation E6 is always alert, looking for signs and indicators of hidden meanings (opposite of the E3 who wants to have everything under control). They reflect too much!

They also like instructions. As dutiful distrusters, they resolve conflicts trusting in logic. While the E7 uses intellect as a strategy, the E6 shows a fanatic loyalty to reason. To feel confident, they adopt the strategy of searching for problems: they must have them in order to solve them.

Source: PDB Wiki

[likealittleheartbeat]

I perhaps sacrificed clarity for wit in the wording of my poll: Which queer fiction experience would you prefer--queer representation without queer themes or queer themes without queer representation? "Queer," after all, has been famously hard to define among its theorists. On of the founders of its theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, does some work to articulate the history of its definitional flexibility in her article "Queer and Now." But I think Heather Love's introduction to Feeling Backwards gets at the heart of it, "When queer was adopted in the late 1980s it was chosen because it evoked a long history of insult and abuse--you could hear the hurt in it." This is what I mean when I say "queer" themes, messages that invoke and evoke the hurt.

Of course, as @irresistible-revolution pointed out in a question in the comments of the poll, "don't queer themes produce queer subjects." If queer is understood as the queer theorists define it, this is inevitably true. Words wrestle away from the theorists, though. If you do a tumblr or google search for queer representation, you can imagine what you find. LGBT identity--Q with it's variation between questioning and queer, though often included in the label, fails fabulously in crafting a workable identity; note it's lack of a pride flag or stripe--requires an affirmative action, which is why certain pieces of the narrative are so important to its politics. You need to come out, you need to make your identity visible (either visually, with public actions like marriage, dress, etc. or with speech, which brings us back to coming out), you need to have pride. Any failure to follow through with these acts puts your access to identity at risk. Identity is a potent political mobilizing force and has led to some pretty incredible legal changes in the past 70 years (although, as far as queer identity mobilization, the AIDS crisis certainly kicked that into overdrive beyond simple identity politics). This is what undergirds the general usage of "queer representation:" lgbt identity made visible and explicit. Identity, in this case, requires from its media the same as its subjects. They must be total and pure in their positive identification--positive, meaning additive, here, although the need for emotionally positive depictions seems to often follow--which is why so much discourse erupts about the quality of representation. The legitimate identification of the characters and the work in total is being debated.

If "queer" as the theorists posit it is about the hurt, it's about the open negative spaces where the barbs stuck in. To wrestle the word away from the academics for a second to talk about real life, instead, we LGBT-identified individuals might remember a time before our identity emerged or crystalized, when experiences of strangeness, difference, pain, and alienation were the markers we could recognize. Can this recognition exist in a representation, either a character or a human being's census marker? Perhaps--especially if we consider that's what the word queer is supposed to mean according to the academics lol. But, as the theorists realized when they tried to define it, the definition was liquid and dodged their attempts to pin it down. Describing it involved putting individuals in relationship to their hurt, to those that hurt them, to their attempts, failures, and successes to make peace with those injuries. I hear a proud voice in my head complaining that LGBT individuals should not be defined as disabled, deficient, or inherently traumatized by their gender or sexuality. Queerness, the hurt we hear in it, while it derived from the language hurled at certain gendered expressions that deviated from the conservative norm, elaborated a more general difference and expression of that difference in relation to others, so it wasn't limited to LGBT individuals (which is why it was so functional a theory for literary analysis that preceded those identity categories and tucked experiences and meanings into subtexts). You see, unlike identity, queerness is not individual but relational, relational with those with similar kinds of hurt but more importantly relational with the individuals and institutions opening the wounds.

This queer relationality blossoms into strange solidarity across what we would consider typical identity groups, because the shame or injury they experience because of their marginalization is familiar and understandable (Zuko and Aang are great examples of this). It also means that engagement with narrative is vastly more important than engagement with signifiers and visibility. Relating takes time. Even more dangerous to the tribalism of identity (that's often, as in the case of LGBT identity, established in the face of oppression) is the encouragement that queerness can engender to relate to those that caused them harm, to even empathize with the harm they might have incurred which caused them to project their hurt onto others or to the harm they feel but work to ignore caused by hurting others. In a way, this strips persecutors from their perceived sense of "normalcy." It queers them and returns them to profane, queer, humanity.

I created my poll while watching the anime Fruits Basket. It made me consider other animes like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena, which draw LGBT-identified viewers in. All three shows depict cross-dressing and same-sex attraction but, two out of the three, conclude with heterosexual coupling for their happy endings, and Utena doesn't end with any of its same-sex couples together, exactly.* Despite this, the shows are rife with queer themes around parental abandonment, abuse, gender deviance, attachment, etc., more so (and much more successfully, I'd add) than a lot of proper shows with LGBT representation.

Closer to home for this blog, Avatar the Last Airbender is adored by LGBT identified people even as it lacks any LGBT representation (I won't compare it to LoK because it's more complicated than matters of representation to compare the sequel series quality and the subsequent admiration or lack of it). What moves these people in the show? I could be wrong, here, many people watch shows with a much less analytical and empathetic style than me. Yet, it's hard to ignore how prevalent the queer themes of Avatar the Last Airbender are. These narratives of disappointing and losing parental figures, attempting and failing to live up to expectations, betraying your own values in response to alienation and grief, embracing victimhood or villainy or savior status to garner a sense of self even if it is false until you find something truer. These are deeply queer themes not because only LGBT-identified people experience them but because they are in response to deep wells of hurt. What they result in when probed, however, is a world much more open to LGBT practices and queer practices. It's often thought said Katara and Aang's final kiss feels tacked on, as if it furnishes this queer text with a conservative heterosexual ending. Focusing merely on their genders, this ignores so many aspects of Katara and Aang's journey, of course, that make their particular heterosexual dynamic quite queer (their colonized status, their gender expressions, the development of their relationship beyond simple dynamics of hero and damsel in distress), not to mention the embrace between Zuko and Aang at Zuko's coronation that offers possibilities like 1800s style romantic friendships beyond the last scene. It's quite possible, I'm saying, that we love ATLA because its more queer than other explicitly LGBT offerings.

If it isn't clear, when choosing between the two options, I'd choose queer themes without queer representation. I appreciate the inclination toward the other. I want to see character allowed to have fall for and have sex with the same genders. I want to see characters who explore and transition with their genders and gender expressions. I yearn for characters like myself. But I recognize how hollow that can quickly turn. Who I am is more complex than a simply LGBT identity. In fact, there are plenty of LGBT characters and people I feel no personal connection to. Aang feels much closer to my personality than any explicitly gay character I've ever encountered. And I've often related to people who experienced marginalization because of their race and intellectual intensity much easier than I've related to anyone over their LGBT status. Representation is cool and interesting and can be explored in so many cool ways, and I love it and obsess over it, but it has it's limits, and one of them is that representation doesn't render good fiction. It's just a demographic. If you're into that stuff (and it's intricacies, like me), cool. Fiction just needs to take a little more time, breathe a little more, be a little more weird and long-winded and hurt, and by all that I mean queer.

[jk-scrolling]

The problem with trans women in women's pro sports is the refusal of spectators to see them as women, and everything else about the debate is fine details that can be worked out by individual governing authorities.

What's the point of spectator sports? It's entertainment. It's spectacle. It's letting the audience feel a sense of vicarious struggle and victory as they root for their chosen team or athlete. And the identification with the chosen team or athlete is naturally stronger when the spectator feels there's some important commonality. A gender, or race, or region, or even a class background.

Whatever other lame excuses they offer, that's the real reason men complain about how "boring" women's sports are: they can't identify with women athletes the way they do with men. You only hear this from the most sexist men, the men who consider women the most alien and the least worth trying to understand.

Cis woman spectators who can't see trans women's excellence as women's excellence can't feel a vicarious sense of victory when trans women succeed. They can't see trans women's records as expanding possibility for all women. They can't feel inspired and empowered by trans women's success the way they would by a cis woman's success. It's a simple empathy failure.

[mariacallous]

A landmark study has uncovered corruption “red flags” in government Covid contracts worth more than £15bn – representing nearly one in every three pounds awarded by the Conservative administration during the pandemic.

The analysis, billed as the most in-depth look yet at public procurement during the crisis, warns that systemic bias, opaque accounting and uncontrolled pricing resulted in vast waste of public funds on testing and personal protective equipment (PPE).

The review of more than 5,000 contracts across 400 public bodies identifies 135 high-risk contracts with a value of £15.3bn where investigation is merited due to the identification of three or more corruption red flags, which include a lack of competition, delays or failure to release information on procurement, and conflicts of interest in the award of contracts. The report by Transparency International UK finds:

At least 28 contracts, worth £4.1bn, went to those with known political connections to the Conservative party. This amounts to almost a tenth of the money spent on the pandemic response.

Fifty-one contracts, worth £4bn, went through the “VIP lane”, a vehicle through which certain suppliers were given priority, of which 24, worth £1.7bn, were referred by politicians from the Conservative party or their offices.

£1bnwas spent on personal protective equipment from 25 VIP-lane suppliers that was later deemed unfit for use. The VIP lane was found to unlawful by a high court judge in a 2022 ruling.

Eight contracts, worth £500m, went to suppliers that were no more than 100 days old.

The UK government awarded more than £30.7bn in high- value contracts without competition – equivalent to almost two-thirds of all Covid contracts by value.

The Department of Health and Social Care wrote off £14.9bn in public money over a two-year period – equivalent to the government’s total spend on personal protective equipment.

In response, a spokesperson for the Conservative party pointed to a National Audit Office report that found that ministers had properly declared their interests.

“Government policy was in no way influenced by the donations the party received – they are entirely separate,” he said.

The Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said she will appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to examine an estimated £7.6bn worth of Covid-related fraud, with particular focus on the billions wasted on useless PPE.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) is investigating PPE Medpro – a company led by Douglas Barrowman, husband of the Conservative peer Michelle Mone – which was awarded government contracts worth more than £200m. Barrowman and Lady Mone deny any wrongdoing.

But researchers warn of a potential higher cost to the public purse than that acknowledged by Reeves as a result of the previous administration’s widespread and “often unjustifiable” suspension of procurement checks and safeguards.

Of the £1tn-worth of contracts signed in the three years from February 2020, government data shows that £48.1bn was spent in relation to the pandemic, largely on Covid testing and PPE, and a third (32%) of that spending raised serious concerns.

The report, entitled Behind the Masks, acknowledges that there had been a need to act quickly as Covid took grip, but the authors claim there was an unjustifiable disregard for publishing the details of contracts and an unhealthy reliance in government on uncompetitive procurement even as the impact of the crisis on the health system subsided.

Almost two-thirds of all high-value Covid contracts by value lacked competition. A year into the pandemic, UK contracting authorities were still frequently making awards without competition even as countries in the EU such as Italy were reverting to competitive bidding.

It is claimed that the so-called VIP and high-priority lanes – which triaged offers of assistance that came via officials, MPs, members of the Lords and ministerial offices – enabled unqualified politicians to fast-track the reviewing of offers from PPE and testing suppliers – a practice said to be unique to the UK’s pandemic response.

About 2% of all offers – about 500 – went through the VIP lane. Of these, 51 suppliers were successful, representing a 10% success rate, compared with the 0.7% rate on other routes, while the prices paid were on average 80% higher.

The report estimates that Covid contracts boosted some suppliers’ profit margins by as much as 40%.

Of the 135 contracts identified as being high risk, the report’s authors write: “The most common red flags were delayed publication of contracts and those awarded uncompetitively. However, most of these contracts exhibited red flags across multiple areas of risk – including those associated with the supplier profile, the procurement process and the contract outcomes – and often spanning all three. Some contracts displayed as many as eight red flags.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “The chancellor has been clear that she will not tolerate waste and will appoint a Covid Corruption Commissioner to get back the money that is owed to the British people.

“The commissioner will report directly to the chancellor, working with the secretary of state for health and social care, and their report will be presented to parliament for all members to see.”

The findings have been published on the day that public hearings examining the impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system are due to start. Transparency International UK, as part of the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, has core participant status in the proceedings.

Joe Powell, a Labour MP and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, said: “The scale of money lost to the taxpayer is staggering. Amid a cost of living crisis, it is simply unacceptable that so much money could have been lost to cronyism and human error. Public money must be accountable.

Daniel Bruce, the chief executive of Transparency International UK, said there had been a collapse in the normal checks and balances, and that a slew of changes in procurement was necessary to rebuild confidence in the system.

He said: “The scale of corruption risk in the former government’s approach to spending public money during the years of the Covid pandemic was profound.

“That we find multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contacts – amounting to a third of all such spending – points to more than coincidence or incompetence.

“The Covid procurement response was marked by various points of systemic weakness and political choices that allowed cronyism to thrive, all enabled by woefully inadequate public transparency. As far as we can ascertain, no other country used a system like the UK’s VIP lane in their Covid response.”

[indignantlemur]

Writing process question: With a story as long and involved as Emigre, do you have a master plot plan with an idea of where things will go all the way till the end, or are you sort of making it up in sections as you go? Or somewhere in between?

Hello! I started out, some 12 years ago, with a nebulous plot idea and a bunch of characters with a broad idea for an actual story in the background. I knew where I wanted my characters to go, the big scenes I wanted to write, and I had only a vague notion about the ending.

That worked for me for the first little while, but then my computer died and I lost my vague guideline notes. After that I was completely lost and totally disheartened. Regrettably, this coincided with some very unpleasant happenings in my personal life, and ultimately I ended up stopping my writing entirely.

Since returning to writing, I've salvaged all of the plot points I can recall and I've actually sat down and written out a point-for-point roadmap. I've patched as many plot holes as I can with this roadmap, tried to account for all of the characters that have been mentioned even once, and have a very thorough accounting of what happens from now until the end of the story. This has actually been hugely helpful, and I find it a lot more productive than my old, off the cuff method of writing.

So, for example, I'll usually set up something like this:

Bulreeng Taal: Dagmar and Thelen go to the local festival. Mixed results. INCLUDE:

A. First Vrath-Thelen encounter, goes poorly ; "I just wanted to talk to her and walk her home -because I thought she was in danger- and I was an idiot. I forgot how words worked and came off like an ass." B. Differing reactions to Dagmar, nice positive feels and disappointing negative reaction C. Draw from [inspiration 1] and [inspiration 2] for the festival but keep it alien! Figure out colours/themes, traditions, lore! D. Themes of healing and moving on/letting go throughout E. Enemies-to-loves starting vibes? See if it fits. F. Dagmar and Thelen have a conversation about boundaries, Tha’an/Sannev politics, and making an effort. Establish bestie-dom! IMPORTANT SUBPLOT INFO: Plant seeds for Dagmar/Thelen, maybe Vrath/Thelen where applicable but don't break the chapter for it

2. Date with Shral! (NOTE: Same day as BULREENG TAAL.)

A. Shral and Dagmar chat; expand upon dynamic, emphasize themes of calming and settling each other. B. SHRAL LAUGHS. Great maple syrup heist, ridiculousness. C. Constellations and lore! Write up a draft of a creation story, figure out themes and tidbits. Contrast the Star Thief with the Great Maple Syrup heist? Skip if it breaks the flow. D. Dagmar's gear failure - look up details for hypothermia, cold shock, and reactions to sudden, extreme temperature drops. Make it realistic. Gear fails gradually, a little at a time, before abruptly cutting out. E. If it fits, revisit intimacy between Dagmar and Shral. Consider realistic hesitation and reasons for caution - for Dagmar especially. Work with limitations from that perspective. F. Character development point: Shral is more open during intimacy, versus closed off and stoic otherwise. Contrast important! G. Ruin an arbiter's day, drop hints about Shral, make Dagmar oblivious. INCLUDE: yellow flash, identification cards, autopilot. “What’s wrong, Esheth? You look like you’ve seen a sea spirit.” / “I think I pulled over an Am Tal operative for speeding today.” / “...Oh shit.” / “It gets worse.”

The important thing about setting up my notes this way is not to hold them up as hard and fast rules but as guidelines. Sometimes the dialogue I'd like to include doesn't quite work, or the scene progresses more organically if I skip a bit here or leave some exposition for later on.

Currently, I have the entire story mapped out until the end, with two story arcs to complete and a bunch of additional chapters as well for various bits of lead-up, lore, exposition, and development. I also have about a dozen side stories tentatively mapped out in a similar fashion, too!

Cheers, and thanks for the ask! <3

[bunnyloaves]

4k words of mean streets meta-analysis

so remember that analysis post i made about mean streets thru the lens of noir film, buddy film, and framing perspectives yEAH 

idk how well written out my thoughts are, but some dots were connected and imma let the thing speak for itself lmaoo, its written in APA style cuz ive got nothing better to do w my life, so im not really going deranged and just saying oh yes, they were totally in love,, like i had to work around and stick to a sorta academic language,, and yanno i tried using film think piece ideas to gently nudge the idea that these dudes are in fact so immensely dependent w each other lmaoo,, anyways as far as im concerned all the quoted info is cited and some of these essays really are cool :>>

here it goes lmao, its for the long haul, liKE its really really stupidly long

The Streets Sure Were Mean: A Homosocial Reading of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973)

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. All the rest is BS and you know it.” The ascribed phrase succinctly summarises the ethos and crux of the film. Mean Streets (1973), directed by Martin Scorsese, on the surface, is all about punk gangsters living in their own sin (Ebert, 2003). In the context of meta-analysis, drawing away from the characters, conditions, and plot points of the film. Mean Streets is described by Raymond (2006) as a movie operating within the genres of crime, buddy, noir, and musical (p. 3). The streets sure were mean. Definitely. Homosociality in my 70s buddy film? Surely. The following essay aims to explore a homosocial reading of Mean Streets (1973) specifically through the archetypes and tropes of the noir film genre, buddy film genre, and in-film framing.

1. Noir Film

Analysing Mean Streets through the lens of the noir film genre allows for several interpretations and narrative implications. The femme fatale is a staple trope within the noir film pathos. According to Nesbitt (2009), the femme fatale is the character through which masculine fears are articulated. Her power lies in bringing out uncontrolled drives, losing subjectivity and agency within the male character. Because of this, the femme fatale is evil, and must subsequently be punished by the narrative. The punishment or penance of the femme fatale is a reassertion of power by the threatened male subject (p. 15). 

Scorsese films tend to operate within the genre and limitations of the noir film. About this, Stern (1995) considers that there is no femme fatale figure in his films. The bad-object for whom the male subject is drawn and tempted is absent externally. Stern suggests that the male subject may be fascinated by his own repressed femininity or homosexuality. Identification with the bad-object allows for narrative resolution and a character’s resolution, either the femme fatale is turned good or is punished by the narrative (p. 26). Raymond (2006) suggests that the femme fatale is internalized by the character of Charlie through his obsessive guilt, yet the figure of bad-object choice may also have been projected onto Johnny Boy, whom he has to save (p. 10). 

The internalized femme fatale falls in line with other Scorsese films, wherein the threat to masculinity is drawn from within the characters. The male subjects are those whom the narrative has to either punish or turn into good objects to achieve narrative resolution. These male characters have to be transformed into good characters or punished– in order to affirm and assuage the male fears. For Charlie in Mean Streets, his punishment as an internalized femme fatale is failing to save the individuals he took under his wing, be it Teresa or Johnny Boy. That is the tragedy Scorsese paints of Charlie, his greatest punishment isn’t that of death, but of the spiritual anguish of inadequacy and failure, not only to protect but also to achieve penance. An extension of this, is Charlie failing to attain penance for the surmounting guilt he feels. His failure to protect Johnny Boy is failing to achieve that penance for his sins. The punishment of the internalized femme fatale as that failure to protect, serves to revoke the sense of control of the male subject instead of reasserting that control, which makes the ending even more tragic. But the femme fatale is all about becoming good or being punished, so either way, the film reaches its conclusion in accordance with these archetypes.

In analyzing Johnny Boy as a femme fatale figure, Charlie’s religious fixation must be considered first. Traditional Christian imagery prevails throughout the film. Described by Ferrante (1994) as containing imagery of the sacrificial crucifixion, scenes of confession, religious statues, and iconography (p. 12). Charlie is the penitent figure seeking forgiveness. Although the film is rife with Christian imagery, penance never occurs in the Church but instead upon the mean streets of Little Italy. 

The penance which he seeks is ascribed to the character of Johnny Boy. The way in which Charlie interacts with him and whether through his actions Johnny Boy is redeemed dictates the potentness of his penance. Maxfield (1995) likens Johnny Boy to an anti-Christ figure, in that these two figures are consistently associated with rooftops. Christ is a white statue on the rooftop in the Feast of San Gennaro sequences and Johnny Boy is shown twice on the rooftops of Manhattan. In this framing, Christ and Johnny Boy are juxtaposed against each other, and Charlie defined himself as a Christian in his interactions with Johnny (para. 25). Charlie’s saintly fantasies take shape and gain expression in his relationship with Johnny and oftentimes his Franciscan moral imperatives trump his own self-interest (Quart and Rabinow, 1975).

Bliss as cited in Maxfield (1995) puts it that Johnny Boy is the cross that Charlie must bear as a prelude to his own redemption (para. 7). Yet tension arises when Johnny plunges himself into deeper and deeper trouble with his debtor because he is testing the limits of Charlie’s devotion to his penance and by proxy, his devotion to Johnny Boy as well. As the object of his penance, Johnny Boy is an object of fascination. Yet many of the problems later on faced by him, stem from his interactions and proximity to Johnny Boy. There is a loss of agency within the male subject, as a result of his interactions with the femme fatale. Though Charlie himself never does anything to genuinely put himself at risk and at odds with the favor of his uncle, which may say something about his role as a penitent— in that he is half-hearted and reluctant to sacrifice anything of value, to attain penance through Johnny Boy. Nonetheless, his ‘vouching for’ Johnny Boy undoubtedly puts him at odds with several of ‘the boys’ of Mean Streets.

At the tipping point of the film, when Michael hires a gunman to chase after the trio. As described by Librach (1992), Charlie chooses discipleship when he chooses to act. Acting out by defying his uncle and helping Johnny Boy escape, both Michael and the ‘neighborhood’ law which these characters represent (para. 3). The neighborhood law is that of masculinity. Giovanni as the immovable godfather is an object of masculine strength and the law of the patriarch. On the other hand, the law of the neighborhood is machismo, both of which the three attempt to escape from. 

Whether or not he is saved due to Charlie’s interference or further damned by merely postponing the inevitable, Johnny can be read as a femme fatale figure whose ultimate fate in the film— punished with a gunshot wound to the neck— serves to affirm Charlie as the male subject. In the externalized femme fatale, the character of Johnny Boy is the bad-object choice who has to be saved or otherwise punished. His punishment at the hands of the narrative, affirms this reading. Johnny Boy’s role is to dictate whether or not Charlie’s penance has come to fruition. As cited in Librach (1992) the idea of spurting blood is like a purification within the Scorsese canon. The blood which spurts forth from Johnny Boy’s neck serves a similar symbolic function as that of the Christ-like young criminal of some of Scorsese’s earlier films. The blood of the sacrificial object only purifies if there is a subject worthy of purification (para. 5). By the end of the movie, Charlie fails to attain penance through his interactions with Johnny Boy. 

Johnny is a sacrificial object of purification, with Christ metaphors made using rooftops, and is the gauge by which Charlie measures his penance and fails. While Charlie is the subject of purification, only if he happens to be worthy of it. Woodsworth (2014) describes that the suffering of male characters as they sacrifice and devote themselves to each other pose as arguments of each character’s inner goodness, thereby allowing for masculine redemption (p. 24). Charlie never sacrifices anything meaningful or valuable to himself in order to help Johnny. Never risks his favor with his uncle, and never sacrifices his position to help Johnny. This reveals him to be an inadequate penitent, unable to follow through with virtuous suffering in order to acquire redemption for himself. Yet a change occurs in the last arcs of the film, Charlie choosing to act by aiding Johnny despite posing a risk to himself. This action thus earns him the blood of the sacrificial object that purifies. The fact that both he and Johnny Boy are shot and bathed in their own blood, legitimizes the reading of both the internalised and external femme fatale. Internalized, Charlie acts in earnest goodheartedness, thereby resolving the insecurities posed by the femme fatale. Penultimately, the film’s ending reveals him to be an inadequate penitent, and despite his efforts, he only manages to damn them both— and living through the crash and despite it— is the tragedy which Scorsese paints. 

2. Buddy Film

Mean Streets may also be analyzed through the lens of a buddy film. The narrative structure, tropes, and common characteristics of the buddy film lend a homosocial reading of the film. It is valuable to highlight the particular structures of the buddy film genre as recounted by Wood, cited in Raymond (2006). Wood describes the buddy film as such, where female characters are marginalized. He expounds this by pointing out that the central characters are typically male, and female characters are presented only after the male ones are developed. Within the narrative of Mean Streets, female characters are objects to present the culture’s racism and sexism (p. 6).

Farber as cited in Woodsworth (2014) describes the nature of male relationships as portrayed in buddy films, as films where the male protagonists share the purest kinds of love and women are merely detractors and derisions of a beautiful friendship. Women are depicted as civilizing forces from whom the male subjects must escape (p. 20). Raymond (2006) claims that normality, ie. heterosexual romance, and monogamy, are linked to the figure of Teresa (p. 7). These characteristics are evident in Mean Streets in that the most developed and focal relationship within the movie is that of Charlie and Johnny Boy. Most of the plot revolves around the interactions between male characters while the females are reduced to objects through whom issues such as sexism and racism are portrayed. Particularly, Teresa is used to depict racism, in how she treated the black housekeeper and ableism, in how she is treated and regarded by most characters aside from Charlie. Diane is also an object through which racism is portrayed, in that she is a viable and available sexual figure but Charlie, despite his interest, never pursues her because of her race. The same could be said of the Jewish women whom Johnny enters the bar with, they are objects of desire, surely. But they are never given much thought nor development beyond the figures which they stand for in the eyes of the male characters.

Schuckmann (1998) states that buddy films feature a marginal female character who serves as a token object of exchange (p. 6). Similarly, Raymond (2006) states that the presence of women in these films only serves to affirm men’s heterosexuality (p. 9). In the buddy film, the male relationship is never validated, it is off-set and diverted by the film's ending. Any depiction of tenderness or intimacy between men is often offset and rectified by affirming the male characters’ heterosexuality. This is where the female character finds herself, as an object by which that masculinity is affirmed. Charlie’s relationship with Teresa may be read as such, as described by Maxfield (1995), the audience has no idea when the affair between Charlie and Teresa began, nonetheless, it is brought into the audience’s minds well after the closeness between Charlie and Johnny has already been well-established (para. 19). From the intimate apartment scene, the film cuts directly into an almost dream-like sequence of the affair, where until a few minutes into the scene the audience is left doubting the reality of the affair— whether or not it is the mere fantasy of a voyeur looking into the window. Maxfield (1995) describes that Teresa may be read as a proxy towards whom Charlie resorted when consummating the male relationship is prohibited (para. 20). After the apartment scene depicting an easy intimacy between men, there comes the need to affirm the male character’s heterosexuality and Teresa serves as a vessel to portray that, and this role is one typically relegated to women in buddy film genres.

Wood, as cited in Raymond (2006), describes the absence of home, as another characteristic of the buddy film genre. The idea of home does not exist, the journey always leads to nowhere. Home is not a place but an ideological position. Wood likens the concept of home to normality as in, heterosexual romance, monogamy, family, status quo, and the law of the father. Normality in Mean Streets is found in the figure of Giovanni and Teresa, as the law of the father and heterosexual romance, respectively (p. 6). Each of these characters also offers a physical and concrete home to Charlie. A restaurant from Giovanni, which further encroaches Charlie into the world of Little Italy; and an uptown apartment with Teresa, which pulls him out, literally and figuratively, of the so-called mean streets. Yet at the end of the film, Charlie rejects both notions of home, be it by will or by proxy. According to Maxfield (1995), in the original script, due to his prolonged interactions with Johnny and Teresa, Charlie is disavowed by Giovanni, and is given money so that he may leave the streets of Little Italy for good (para. 3). So in his only genuine act of personal sacrifice, Charlie rejects the notions of masculinity and normalcy provided by the figure of Giovanni. In his desire to stay among the streets and act upon his penance, Charlie time and time again rejects Teresa’s offers of moving in with her, thereby rejecting the promise of home. 

Woodworth (2014) states that women no longer serve as a mirror through whom masculinity is confirmed, instead, other men provide and affirm masculinity for the male subject. (p. 16) It is not Teresa who affirms masculinity for Charlie—masculinity in the sense of providing, vouching for, and a general figure of guidance— it is his proximity and treatment towards Johnny which validates this. 

Lastly, Wood, as cited in Raymond (2006), describes the buddy film as having a male love story. The emotional charge and center of the film lie in the male/male relationship. It is the relationship between Johnny Boy and Charlie that lies at the crux of the film’s narrative and structure (p. 7). Teresa may be read as an off-set of the central male relationship because it is only after Johnny Boy and Charlie spend the night together at the apartment that she is introduced in the film. 

Kimmel, as cited in Woodworth (2014), describes that masculinity is a homosocial enactment—men greatly need the approval of other men. Bech as cited in Woodworth (2014) amends that being a man entails an interested relation from man to man. This male interest includes the act of comparing and mirroring, and that of companionship and mentorship. Though he does not necessarily equate homosocial desire with homosexual desire, Bech suggests that a distinct line between the two may not exist, and that distinction is not unbreakable.  To quote Woodworth (2014), “The connections between wish, longing, body, male images, togetherness, sharing, security, excitement, equality and difference in relation to other men which are intrinsic to identification make it impossible to keep it apart from eroticism.”(p. 51) There is this sense that only men are privy to each other’s camaraderie and regardless of their intimacy with women— be it their girlfriends, wives, or beaus— togetherness and intimacy are things only truly afforded to other men. Maxfield (1995) describes Charlie’s desire to conceal his affair, and Johnny’s visible jealousy may point to a latent layer of homosexuality in their relationship (para. 18). 

Masculinity is male-loving.  It is gauged by the evaluation and response of other men towards it, and this aspect is clearly portrayed within the film. In the many moments of intimacy between the characters. There is a blurred line between seeking external approval from other men—asserting themselves towards others— and homosexual inclinations. The feminine role of affirming the male subject’s masculinity is one that Johnny takes in. By being vouched for, and helped by Johnny is this passive figure and he is the gauge by which Charlie measures not only himself but his penance as well. 

3. In-Film Framing

Lastly, Mean Streets may be analyzed through the lens of its own filmmaking and in terms of the film’s own language instead of through the implications of its genre. 

Within its own cinematic language, Raymond (2006) describes ‘otherness’ in Mean Streets as a means of attraction. Particularly induced by the transgression involved in acting upon it. Sobchack, as cited in Raymond (2006), describes that the ‘others’ who are displaced and distant from the culture’s signifiers of place and function are attractive for the very idea that they are socially problematic, ambiguous, and dangerous. The manner in which Scorsese frames the world of Little Italy, effectively presents the undesirability of home and its sense of security (p. 11). Ultimately, by the end of the film, Charlie rejects the notion of home and stability, offered by Teresa and Giovanni. Though throughout the film he is reluctant to act out contrary to the norms and rules of the streets. In his inability to bring up Johnny’s debt to Giovanni, out of fear of falling out of favor with the patriarchal figure of the uncle— the godfather; and in repeatedly rejecting Teresa’s invitation to move into an uptown, upscale apartment away from the petty violence of the streets.

Quart and Rabinow (1975) describe the relationship of the male characters to those of the ‘outsiders’. Homosexuals are regarded with contempt, black people are sexual and erotic figures, and Jewish persons are similarly erotic figures. Though these individuals are considered othered —- marginalized people in that community — despite their ‘otherness’ they can be desired, joked, and drunk with (p. 5). Charlie desires Diana, and that much is evident, yet he does not commit nor choose her, instead he leaves her hanging and waiting under some stoop. The same could be said of the Jewish women Johnny enters with at the bar, though he considers them attractive or a viable lay, he does not care to remember their names at all. Charlie’s relationship with Teresa, as an epileptic, and Johnny, as a delinquent to the internal rules of the streets, both put him at odds with his uncle. They are similarly transgressive options for Charlie, ones that may leave him out of favor, that are dangerous, and contrary to the norms of the streets. Both are relationships that he desires to pursue, though with varying degrees of success.

Schuckmann (1998), describes that in the buddy movie genre, though homoeroticism is evoked by the literal coupling of the male partners as buddies, this homoeroticism is offset and dispelled by homophobic jokes and remarks. As part of this dispelling, an outright depiction— caricatures even — of gay characters are present to safely dispel and offset homoerotic tensions (p. 6). Johnny and Charlie are a buddy duo, though they aren’t necessarily on good terms or buddies in a conventional sense, the bond cannot be understated and despite their bickering, they fall under the category of buddy film couples. In the apartment scene, there is an intimacy and vulnerability presented, and just as the window scene serves to affirm the characters’ heterosexuality, the many homophobic remarks spoken throughout the script serve to offset and dispel the homosociality between the two main characters— just as overly performing masculinity and machismo may serve to quell any internal insecurity.

Raymond (2006) highlights the two homosexual characters riding along in the car after the bar shooting incident. These characters parallel Johnny Boy and Charlie. One is loud, belligerent, and out of control while the other attempts to calm him down and steer them both away from trouble (p. 8). A reasonable man attempts to restrain his irrational and unruly partner to minimal success (Maxfield, 1995). Wood, as cited in Raymond (2006) points out that these characters serve to prove that the main characters are not like that. The homosexuals serve to both prove and disprove the relationship between Johnny and Charlie (p. 9). In inadvertently presenting them as parallels, Scorsese entertains the idea that the coupling of the main characters is legitimate. The colors and framing of the scene exemplify this, Johnny wears a similar-looking outfit to the loud, unruly partner, while Charlie wears similarly muted colors to the reasonable partner. Yet the manner in which they exit the frame—leaving in opposite directions—asserts the fact that the central main buddy relationship does not in fact ‘swing that way’. Though in their ‘buddy-ness’, homoerotic implications may be derived and construed, it is ultimately disproved by the film's text. These characters mirror Johnny Boy and Charlie and displace the homoerotic tensions as described by Schuckmann (1998). 

Raymond (2006), describes that Charlie and Johnny mirror that of the musical romantic couple, wherein the surface qualities of the other, correspond to the repressed personality of the other. Evident in how Charlie is all inward repression while Johnny is all outward expression (p. 17). Another reading of their ‘couple-ness’ aside from the plausibly deniable buddy trope, is that of the musical couple wherein the characters are two sides of the same coin. These two characters are integral and deeply tied to one another because they are reflections. Maxfield (1995) describes Johnny acting out aggressively in ways that Charlie may want to but is too repressed and cautious to express. Charlie likes Johnny Boy for his capacity to act as his own surrogate id (para. 16).

Maxfield (1995) likens Johnny to the tiger cub which Tony stores in the backrooms. It represents an inherent feral and fierce nature. Tony believes that he can tame that fierceness, and hones it with enough affection, but it may someday turn on him. For Charlie, Johnny plays a similar role, as an incarnation of wild instinct (para. 17). Johnny is volatile and violent, and Charlie does his best to rein him in with little success, his tiger turns on him, in the end— with Johnny’s self-destructive tendencies, damning all three of them. Johnny being a dangerous, destructive, and contrary option for Charlie may tie into the idea of transgression as an object of desire. Though Johnny is by no means marginalized, his manner of conduct puts him at odds with the rest of the streets. Thus, Charlie objectifies— because he tends to sublimate the individuals not for who they are but for what they represent; ie. Johnny as penance— those who are outsiders to the normality and standards of the streets as attractive pursuits. Though this does not necessarily mean that the subject of the desire acts upon it, for within the world of the streets, this desire is often repressed— via religious guilt, dispelled and distilled into prejudice— via homophobic or racist remarks. In the language of Mean Streets, those who are transgressive and contrary are objects of desire. Desirable, for the otherness of their race and identity; as well as characteristically, attraction to wildness and fierceness— as portrayed by the tiger cub. 

Similarly, both the marginalized individual and tiger cub pose a sense of threat, potential danger, and a source of conflict for Charlie— and for this, they are all the more enticing. So whether it's for its potential as forgiveness and penance or challenge and 'contrary-ness', Charlie is drawn to ‘othered’ individuals. Perhaps in Johnny, Charlie seeks out an individual more volatile and destructive than he would ever allow himself, because of this, the intricacies of the main buddy couple cannot be understated. 

TLDR;

To put it succinctly, Mean Streets employs the conventions of noir film not only to shape the mood and form of the film but to implicate Johnny as a femme fatale figure— being the bad choice path for Charlie that must be either punished or turned good by the film’s resolution. Johnny is reckless, destructive, and contrary to the conventions of the streets. Thereby Charlie’s prolonged interest and interaction with Johnny puts him at odds with the world he finds himself in. In the end, Johnny is shot in the neck bathing him profusely in blood, likened to an act of Christ-like cleansing which ties in with him being an object of penance. This penultimate tragedy and punishment in the hands of the narrative serve to legitimize Charlie as the central male subject of the film and resolve the insecurities posed by the femme fatale.

Mean Streets is categorically a buddy film, with a central male relationship at the heart of its plot. As per the conventions of the genre— women are marginal, home as a concept is absent, and male relationships surmount all else. This lends itself easily to a homoromantic reading, since women are marginal they typically serve to displace and dispel homoromantic tensions and prove the heterosexuality of the central male characters, beyond that, they are marginal to the plot. These female relationships serve as a proxy for the unconsummated male relationship. Conceptually, home is absent—Charlie rejects Teresa’s offers of moving together, thereby refuting home and heteronormativity, and refutes home in the streets by making himself unfavorable to Giovanni by constantly vouching for Johnny. The immense importance placed upon the central male relationship may cross the line of homosociality into homosexuality. Masculinity is inherently male-loving, thereby, there is a blurred line between seeking external approval from other men—asserting themselves towards other men— and homosexual inclinations.

Lastly, within the language of its own film-making, Mean Streets uses transgression to punctuate and define objects of desire. Teresa, Diane, and Johnny are all similarly transgressive options for Charlie, ones that may leave him out of favor, that are dangerous, and contrary to the norms of the streets. The women are desirable for the otherness of their race and identity. On the other hand, Johnny represents a volatility and brashness, much likened to Tony’s tiger cub. One that could perhaps be tamed with enough affection yet holds within it wildness and fierceness that could very well turn on its keeper. Though Johnny is by no means marginalized, his manner and self-destructive habits have put him at odds with the rest of the streets. Similarly, both the marginalized individual and tiger cub pose a sense of threat, danger, and a source of conflict for Charlie— and perhaps for this, they are all the more enticing. It is also of note that the pair of homosexual caricatures mirror Johnny Boy and Charlie, both in their clothing and the roles that they play to one another— one unruly and the other restrained. By inadvertently presenting them as parallels, Scorsese entertains the idea that the coupling of the main characters is legitimate. In their ‘buddy-ness’, homoerotic implications may be construed. Yet as the characters part ways in opposite directions, and as the script dictates more homophobic remarks, any homoromantic tension is immediately dispelled. 

References

Ebert, R. (2003, December 31). Mean Streets. RogerEbert.com.                https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-mean-streets-1973 

Ferrante, L. A. (1994). Redemption in the narrative films of Martin Scorsese: Related critical essays, with emphasis on" Mean Streets"," Raging Bull", and" Goodfellas". The Union Institute.   https://www.proquest.com/openview/59a2087263ebf282115193b09a2cc876/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y 

Librach, R. S. (1992). The Last Temptation in Mean Streets and Raging Bull. Literature/Film Quarterly, 20(1), 14. https://www.proquest.com/openview/91587245032050f8dbb7a447b3dd91c6/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=5938 

Maxfield, J. F. (1995). " The Worst Part": Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. Literature/Film Quarterly, 23(4), 279. https://www.proquest.com/openview/51f346d0182670237ef161cf32fa7291/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=5938 

Nesbitt, R. C. (2009). The femme fatale and male anxiety in 20th century American literature,“hard-boiled” crime fiction, and film noir. State University of New York at Albany. https://www.proquest.com/openview/f5b767ce0cecb085b64c8e99993ab04c/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750 

Quart, L., & Rabinow, P. (1975). The Ethos of Mean Streets. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 5(2), 33-34. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/39/article/487229/summary 

Raymond, M. (2006). The Multiplicity of Generic Discourses and the Meaning and Pleasure of Mean Streets. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 15(2), 62-80. https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cjfs.15.2.62 

Schuckmann, P. (1998). Masculinity, the male spectator and the homoerotic gaze. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 671-680. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41157425 

Stern, L. (1995). The Scorsese Connection. Indiana University Press. https://books.google.com.ph/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8HGq0WCJ8gEC&oi=fnd&pg=PP10&dq=The+Scorsese+Connection&ots=QwtOXWM_c4&sig=I_7F9WZd7OseVsdohi3W8pen6DQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=The%20Scorsese%20Connection&f=false 

Woodworth, A. J. (2014). From buddy film to bromance: masculinity and male melodrama since 1969. Temple University. https://www.proquest.com/openview/14b2bdc7ed5646e64de79408809c266d/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750

[nikibogwater]

Not to get Real on the main, but I really think we as a society need to talk about puberty and adolescence more. Because right now, everybody just sort of skirts around the reality of it. Even when adults try to talk to kids about it, they do a terrible job of preparing them for the full brunt of it. And what's worse, puberty has started to become inexorably linked to the idea of complete self-discovery and realization, to the point that it seems like everyone between the ages of 12 and 20 is in a self-identification arms race, desperately scrambling to decide who they are, when in reality, they are at the worst possible stage in their lives to do that.

Puberty is a lot more than just reaching sexual maturity. It's actually an entire phase of your life that can take years to pass through, and it involves way more than getting your first period or starting to feel super horny. Once Mother Nature hits you with her Adolescence Bat, your mind and body are going to be in a state of flux for at least five years, probably more. Not only do you have the physical discomfort of weird new biological functions, you're also going to feel very self-conscious and awkward. You're going to feel mentally ill, regardless of whether or not you actually are. You're going to feel anxious about the future, and pressured to figure out who you are and what you're going to do with your life. Everyone else in your age group will likely be pretending that none of this is happening to them, which will further reinforce the idea that there's something wrong with you. You might feel like a blank canvas, a background character, with no personality, no future, no real reason to be in the scene at all. And that can be really. Freakin. Scary. And it's also perfectly normal.

I dunno, I guess all I want to say is, if you're between the ages of 12 and 20 and experiencing all the crap that comes with that time of your life (or really any time of your life), it's okay to take it one day at a time. It's okay to just focus on the basics: eating and sleeping, doing your homework, being kind to others, and having fun. There's nothing wrong with you for feeling...well, wrong. What you're going through is natural, and it will take a few years, but I promise you, it does get better. You will find friends who love you for who you are, even if you haven't completely figured out who that is yet. You'll learn things about yourself by trying new hobbies and talking to people, and that feeling of being a nameless NPC will gradually fade away. And to any parents/guardians whose kid is going through this, try to be patient with them. They're going through a lot, even if it looks like they're perfectly fine on the outside. Make sure they know you love them, even when they pretend not to care, and that your love is unconditional. That can go a long way in helping a child grow into a successful adult.

When I was 16, I felt like I had no personality, that I brought nothing of worth to the world. I couldn't have told you who I was to save my life. But over the years, I slowly grew into the person I am now. I'm a storyteller, an artist, a gamer, a listener, a jokester, a noodle-armed pansy, someone who tries to prioritize being kind above everything else (to varying degrees of success and failure). And who knows who I'll be in another ten years! There's no end to the number of things I still have to learn, or ways in which I can grow, and I hope I never have to stop.

Edit: Also delete your TikTok and Instagram accounts. Trust me, this is genuinely the best thing you can do for yourself rn.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rona Dinur

Published: Mar 20, 2023

Intersectionality is everywhere. Once inhabiting an obscure niche of legal scholarship, the claims of Kimberlé Crenshaw and other intersectional theorists about the ever-present imperative to consider the “intersecting” or “interlocking” nature of various group-based “systems of oppression” now permeates almost every policy discussion. Notions associated with intersectionality and its modes of thinking are routinely invoked by activists and politicians, who implore people to consider their “intersectional positionalities” before voicing, or even forming an opinion, about social or political matters. Even more worryingly, intersectionality has slowly but confidently expanded into the hard sciences and medicine, where it purports to provide a framework for evaluating the social impacts of scientific inquiry.

It is a curious question what led to this overwhelming success and rapid spread of intersectionality to such wide-ranging and diverse fields. Many have pointed to the religious or ritualistic character of invocations of intersectionality and other notions associated with “Critical Theories” (such as Critical Race Theory). The usefulness of such “theories”1 for various political actors—specifically, the conveniently oversimplifying framework they provide for any policy and political discussion, practically absolving policymakers of responsibility to subject their positions to nuanced evaluation—is yet another feature that has probably contributed to their intentional perpetuation. My own broader thoughts on the matter are that similar to other Marxist-oriented “Critical Theories”, what intersectionality essentially does is hijack mechanisms of social cognition that we routinely use to navigate political and social reality, making it appear much more plausible and useful than it actually is, and helping it spread unchecked in many areas.

These broader sociological and psychological stories are, however, only a part of the picture. For intersectionality often fashions itself as offering a nuanced and insightful critique of legal arrangements designed to address group-based discrimination and inequality, and exposing overlooked and underappreciated failures of the legal system on that front. Specifically, Crenshaw’s original introduction of intersectionality into legal scholarship, in the now seminal 1989 law review article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics“, purported to offer a useful critique of the way American anti-discrimination doctrine addresses claims of discrimination brought by those that “fall at the intersections” of various social categories—most notably, Black women. Discrimination perpetrated against Black women, Crenshaw claims, does not fall neatly into either the category of race-based discrimination or into the category of gender- or sex-based discrimination employed in anti-discrimination jurisprudence. As a result of the “intersectional” nature of discrimination perpetrated against them specifically as Black women, the injustices they are subjected to remain invisible to the legal system. In Crenshaw’s own words:

“[D]ominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. […] this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination […] This [….] marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination.” (p. 140) 

Of course, intersectionality doesn’t stop at this narrow legal thesis. As can be gathered even from this short quote, already in Crenshaw’s ’89 article, and even more so in the decades following its publication, intersectionality has put forward a much broader theoretical apparatus, advancing a plethora of interconnected claims about what social and political reality consists in, how it operates, and how people should engage with it to implement intersectionality in real life (“praxis”, in critical-theoretical terminology). Critics of this broader theoretical and practical agenda often shy away from examining intersectionality’s supposedly more technical-legal parts; and so, this multiply-headed structure often leads to a situation where, in a move now familiar from other areas, intersectionality is parachuted into the public realm by a battery of “experts”, giving the wider public the impression that at least some of its claims and policy recommendations are a settled matter of legal analysis or theory. In short, while it seems transparent to many commentators and members of the public that intersectionality’s broader claim cannot withstand scrutiny, it remains the popular perception that it is comfortably grounded in a valuable critique of legal matters pertaining to discrimination and inequality.

Unfortunately, this perhaps last standing bubble of credibility will have to be burst as well. Contrary to the image delivered to the public by various advocates of intersectionality, it does not have much to offer by way of a serious critique of anti-discrimination law. In fact, I’ll show that Crenshaw’s claims about the failures of anti-discrimination doctrine in addressing what she might characterize as “intersectional discrimination” cannot be substantiated, and are in some cases undermined, by the very legal cases she uses in her ’89 article to support these claims. Ipso facto, all of intersectionality’s broader theoretical claims, for instance, about the inherently “intersecting” or “interlocking” nature of “systems of oppression”, cannot be legitimately claimed to be supported by this legal critique either. More specifically, we will see that contrary to Crenshaw’s claims, courts did adequately address cases of “intersectional” discrimination (and specifically those perpetrated against Black women)—including in the legal cases she specifically mentions in the ’89 article; and that a cursory examination of the details of these cases undermines the larger thesis about the “intersecting” or “interlocking” nature of various forms of oppression.

To see all of this, we’ll have to have a brief introduction to anti-discrimination law, after which I’ll examine the cases discussed in Crenshaw’s ’89 law review article.

Background about anti-discrimination law

Anti-discrimination laws were initially developed and implemented in the United States during the 60s and 70s. Back then, the main concern of this new body of jurisprudence was eliminating discrimination against African-Americans, and expanding opportunities for the group’s members in various domains where they had been previously excluded, including employment, education, housing, and the provision of goods and services. Generally, then, legislators, policymakers, and legal practitioners had a pretty straightforward image of what wrongful discrimination looks like when anti-discrimination laws were initially introduced: employers refusing to hire African-Americans, educational institutions refusing to admit members of the group, and so on—simply because of their skin color or racial identity.

In the decades following its initial introduction, anti-discrimination jurisprudence has significantly expanded in its purview, and the doctrinal and institutional arrangements it consists in became much more extensive and complex. Its main norms (which I briefly describe below) also emigrated to many other countries and jurisdictions, where the general apparatus of anti-discrimination jurisprudence remains similar to that of the United States. All of these later developments gave rise to a host of controversies over the legitimacy and appropriate interpretation of many parts of anti-discrimination law. Luckily, however, all of these can be set aside for present purposes, as the cases discussed in Crenshaw’s article fall squarely within the bounds of traditional anti-discrimination doctrine.

Here is a description of the main norms of anti-discrimination doctrine—those that are commonly used by courts to adjudicate legal claims of discrimination. I’ll illustrate using examples from typical employment discrimination lawsuits.

In order to prevail in an employment discrimination lawsuit, claimants or plaintiffs, that is, purported victims of workplace discrimination, have to show that they have been discriminated against by the defendant—their employer or potential employer, which could be a private company, a governmental entity, etc.—by proving in court that the conditions specified by either of the following rules are satisfied.

First, claimants can show that the employer has engaged in ‘disparate treatment’ (or, outside of the U.S., direct discrimination): roughly, that the employer intentionally or explicitly treated them differently (and disadvantageously), relative to other employees, because of their membership in, say, a certain racial, ethnic, or gender-based group. A straightforward example here would be not hiring a candidate based on their skin color, not promoting members of a certain community (or allowing them only into some low-level positions), and firing someone based on their group identity. Showing this often, but not necessarily, aligns with showing that the employer is prejudiced (or a racist/sexist etc.), or that they have engaged in the intentional exclusion of members of certain groups because of things such as racial animosity. In any event, proving that the conditions specified by the “disparate treatment” rule are satisfied is often difficult, because plaintiffs don’t have direct access to the considerations that the employer acted on (or their attitudes, mental states, etc.), and those might not be transparent even after legal discovery or disclosure procedures.

A second route that claimants can take is showing discrimination based on a “disparate impact” rule (or, outside of the U.S., indirect discrimination). There is still much controversy and political turmoil surrounding this supposedly more permissive rule/route, its underlying rationales, and its legitimacy. It seems rather clear, however, that it was initially at least partially based on an evidentiary rationale, and designed to help plaintiffs overcome the difficulties with proving their complaint under the “disparate treatment” rule. The “disparate impact” rule thus maintains that, at least in some circumstances, it is enough for plaintiffs to show that a certain employment policy or practice has a disparate negative (or adverse/disadvantageous) impact on members of a certain group (relative to other groups), or that it disproportionately negatively influences them. This was meant to target those employers that, in order to avoid legal liability under the “disparate treatment” rule, refrained from openly discriminating—but instead came up with policies that, despite not containing any reference to people’s group identity, resulted in the exclusion of members of a particular group. Another general rationale underlying this rule was that of eliminating the lingering effects of past discriminatory practices (for instance, by prohibiting “last hired first fired” costumes and word-of-mouth hiring practices in certain circumstances).2

Just a few points to notice here are the following. First, anti-discrimination laws in the United States and elsewhere typically mention certain categories, many of which are commonly considered to correspond to certain social categories, or categories that are socially important in some way (whatever that means precisely): race, color, gender, ethnicity, national origin, etc. Thus, anti-discrimination norms typically prohibit discrimination—disadvantageous, differential treatment—which is based on, or somehow related to, certain types of social categorization; American anti-discrimination law also prohibits classifications that are based on such categories. So, for instance, employers can’t select employees or fire them based on their race, and can’t introduce race-based classifications into their promotion policies.

While it isn’t precisely clear what is the ground and justification for including certain categories and not others in anti-discrimination prohibitions, it seems reasonable and straightforward to suppose that those should correspond to the social categories around which there is, well, a lot of wrongful discrimination (or especially pernicious or persistent discrimination). These may differ, of course, from one society to another: in society X race may be an important category in that regard, in society Y it would be ethnicity, or culture, or language, in society Z age or marital status, and so on. Put simply, in order for anti-discrimination laws to be effective, the categories included in them should be responsive to the “social axes” along which wrongful discrimination tends to take place. To that extent, a given society’s anti-discrimination jurisprudence typically reflects the social categories or types of groupings that are significant with regard to patterns of discrimination and inequality in that particular society. 

All of this highlighting is important because, as readers familiar with intersectional thought have probably already noticed, what Crenshaw makes of the categories found in anti-discrimination laws far, far exceeds their actual pragmatic role. Particularly, she supposes (without evidence) that these categories reflect some underlying, deep-seated (“dominant”) views about the nature of the corresponding social categories and groups, and the nature of social reality more broadly; on the other hand (and in a somewhat self-contradictory manner), she suggests that these categories, and the way they are employed in anti-discrimination jurisprudence, hugely influence social reality—including the way society is organized group-wise, the relationship between different social groups, and the dynamics of various social and political conflicts they are involved in (that is, way beyond what would be expected from the law’s role in preventing or mitigating discrimination). Thus, the overall trend of Crenshaw’s discussion is supposed to show that the purported lack of “intersectional analysis” in anti-discrimination law, or lack of proper appreciation of the fact that categories sometimes “intersect” to create various classificatory combinations and sub-categories, stems from the control that “dominant” ways of thinking exert over our understanding of social reality; and that the same absence of “intersectional analysis” in anti-discrimination law somehow hugely negatively influences the lives of “intersectional” groups, and is a general destructive force in the various legal, social, and political struggles that are meant to improve their situation relative to the “intersecting” or “interlocking” oppressions they are supposedly subjected to.3

But it’s important to get things straight: legal categories, including those that are used in anti-discrimination laws, are just that—pragmatic tools that are meant to achieve certain aims. Of course, these can have all kinds of connections to reality, and to people’s beliefs, attitudes, or cultures (dominant or otherwise); similarly, the way certain categories are used in the adjudication of legal matters can influence people’s lives in all kinds of ways. However, the presupposition that legal categories are solely a reflection of the “dominant culture”, and that they, in turn, “structure” both the (immensely complex and highly distributed!) legal practice and the extra-legal reality in some unmediated way is, of course, just a tenet of the intersectional critical-theoretical dogma that no one should feel compelled to accept. In reality, there is no reason to suppose that the categories included in anti-discrimination laws, and the way they are employed in the adjudication of various legal matters, reflect anything particularly profound other than the need to address certain forms of discrimination. Neither there is a reason to presuppose a tight relationship between these categories—and whether or not they do, or should, “intersect”—and the nature of social reality; particularly, whether or not different forms of oppression “intersect” or “interlock” to generate more severe forms of oppression.4

Setting aside these various implausible presuppositions, and the article’s conflation of legal categories, social categories, social groups, and things such as oppression and disadvantage—and what it would mean for any of these different things to “intersect” or “interlock”—we can now examine Crenshaw’s more narrow legal claims, and the legal cases she uses to support them.

Intersectionality’s claims about anti-discrimination law, and the legal cases used to support them

Here is, in some more detail, what Crenshaw says about anti-discrimination law.

First, she assumes that there is a “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.”5 (p. 139)

She then says:

“[…] I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law […] I will […] contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. […] this juxtaposition reveal[s] how Black women are theoretically erased […] this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification, and remediation of race and sex discrimination” (pp. 139-140; emphases mine).

She then turns to examine the “doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework” (140), that is, the legal cases where the supposed lack of “intersectional” analysis is manifested, and unfairly influences courts’ evaluation of discrimination claims brought by Black female plaintiffs. She concludes this investigation with the following remarks:

“[…] the continued insistence that Black women’s demands and needs be filtered through categorical analyses that completely obscure their experiences guarantees that their needs will seldom be addressed. […] DeGraffenreid, Moore and Travenol [the legal cases discussed below] are doctrinal manifestations of a common political approach to discrimination which operates to marginalize Black women. […] Notions of what constitutes race and sex discrimination are […] narrowly tailored to embrace only a small set of circumstances, none of which include discrimination against Black women.” (pp. 149-151; emphases mine).

Based on these legal-doctrinal points, she also argues that the tendency to conceptualize discrimination as a “single-axis” phenomenon blinds us to the nature and mechanisms of social injustices that black women suffer from:

“[…] dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. […] Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. […] Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny […] the unique compoundedeness of their situation […] [A]cceptance of the dominant framework of discrimination […] not only marginalizes Black women within the very movements that claim them as part of their constituency but it also makes the illusive goal of ending racism and patriarchy even more difficult to attain.” (pp. 140, 150, 152; emphases mine).

Roughly, what can be gathered from this are the following claims:

Anti-discrimination jurisprudence operates within a rigid framework, that systematically ignores justified discrimination claims brought by claimants who have been discriminated against on account of their membership in some group that is defined “intersectionally”: for instance, on account of being a black female (as opposed to on account of being black alone, and as opposed to on account of being female alone).(To clarify: one can obviously bring separate legal claims, according to which they have been discriminated against—by two or more separate policies, or by a single policy—based on their race alone, and based on their gender/sex alone. Crenshaw’s complaint is that one can’t bring a claim that they have been discriminated against on account of being, for instance, a Black female in particular, that is, based on the intersection of one’s racial and gender/sex categories. However, these two separate things are not always clearly distinguished throughout the article).

From this particular “intersecting” nature of categories of discrimination, or from the need to acknowledge discrimination claims brought by victims of discrimination that is based on the intersection of two or more categories (for instance, Black females), we can conclude that patterns of discrimination, oppression, subordination, or disadvantage always “intersect” or “interlock” to generate qualitatively different and more severe (“compounded”) forms of discrimination, oppression, subordination, or disadvantage against those occupying the “intersection” of social categories.(As noted above, this jump from the doctrinal critique to those broader claims doesn’t make much sense anyway. But in line with this essay’s purpose, I’ll focus here on showing that these broader claims can’t be supported by the legal analysis offered in the paper).

So, can any of these claims be supported by an examination of the actual legal analysis conducted in the legal cases Crenshaw mentions in the article? Let’s check each of them separately.

Lack of adequate “intersectional” analysis (or treating race and sex as “mutually exclusive categories”) in anti-discrimination law? Lack of acknowledgment of claimants that have been discriminated against as Black females in particular?

Crenshaw directly examines three legal cases in the article. Most of the discrimination claims discussed in those cases were brought by black women, and directed at an employer’s general policies (and not at a single action or decision the employer made). These claims were evaluated, for the most part, based on the “disparate impact” rule discussed above, where plaintiffs have to show that the employer’s policies have a disproportionate disadvantageous impact on members of a certain group. Plaintiffs commonly attempt to show that by presenting data (statistical and otherwise) pertaining to the demographic makeup of a company’s employees, employment candidates, and so on, which indicates serious disproportionality between relevant comparison groups—for instance, indicating that a disproportionate number of Black employment candidates were rejected relative to the makeup of the general candidate pool, or that a disproportionate number of women were laid-off, relative to their share among the company’s employees (some other examples are discussed below).6

Introducing “intersectional” discrimination claims into this typical legal structure has several important implications, some of which are quite complex (and, accordingly, courts’ discussion in some of the cases is quite long and complex). What’s most important to notice is that lawsuits that are structured along these lines typically bring out (at least!) three distinct legal matters or questions where intersectionality may potentially be invoked, or where it appears relevant. Let’s briefly brush over them, so readers can get a sense of the complexity of the topic.

The first matter is the most basic: what is the nature of the legal discrimination claim? Is it a “single-axis” claim (e.g., I have been discriminated against on account of being a woman, or on account of being black), or a “multiple-axes”, “intersectional” claim (e.g., I have been discriminated against on account of being a black woman in particular)? Should plaintiffs be allowed to bring both types of claims in a single proceeding, and pick-and-choose the type of claim that best promotes their interests? (It is not necessarily the case that an “intersectional” claim is the stronger or more beneficial one for the plaintiff. This would vary depending on the circumstances).

Second, how should the data about the company’s demographic makeup be used when the claim is “intersectional”? That is, should the data be used or evaluated “intersectionally”, and in what way? The many questions that may arise here include, for instance, should the court evaluate a discrimination claim based on a “single-axis” breakdown of the relevant data? Or should it evaluate the data based on a breakdown that pertains also to a combination of identity factors, e.g., use separate statistics about black women, black men, white women, and white men? If a plaintiff advances an “intersectional” claim, is it okay to use both types of breakdowns—or are the two probative tactics mutually exclusive? What happens if the myriad of ways in which a certain data set may be broken down don’t align with the same legal conclusion, especially when several of the employer’s policies are evaluated?

Third, as we will see below, in claims directed at an employer’s general policies, that is, ones that influence a large number of the company’s employees or employment candidates, the trial is sometimes conducted as a class action, where one or several claimants/plaintiffs are officially certified to represent the larger group (or class) of the policy’s purported victims/plaintiffs. This raises a slew of serious legal questions and difficulties, because there are many potentially conflicting interests within the group of plaintiffs (and specifically between different sub-groups), as well as between the group and the class representative; also, anyone who is included in the officially certified class of plaintiffs is bound by the court’s decision, and so it is imperative to ensure that their interests are duly represented in the proceeding. Particularly relevant for examining “intersectional” discrimination claims are the following difficulties: can/should a plaintiff accusing an employer of “intersectional” discrimination be a representative of the classes of employees defined by the constituents of the plaintiff’s intersectional identity? For example, should a black woman suing for discrimination on account of being a black woman be allowed to represent all blacks, and all women, even those who are not “intersectional”? Or, alternatively, just all blacks but not all women? What happens, for instance, if some of the employer’s policies affect all women, but others affect only black women? And so on.7

These are all important and complex legal questions, with potentially major and wide-ranging consequences for the protection of people’s legal rights against discrimination (especially those of disadvantaged and multiply-disadvantaged groups!). More generally, it is apparent even upon a superficial examination that introducing “intersectionality” into anti-discrimination doctrine will have different manifestations or applications with regard to each of the three legal matters mentioned above (and there are probably other legal matters where an “intersectional analysis” might have yet other implications).

Nevertheless, Crenshaw doesn’t even explicitly make the distinction between these different legal matters, and does not attempt to address the many difficulties and open questions that would arise with regard to each of them. Instead, she simply mounts the general accusation that the legal system exhibits a complete lack of “intersectional analysis”. A brief examination of two of the three cases mentioned in the ’89 article reveals, however, that contrary to this blanket accusation, courts did engage in an “intersectional analysis” (and quite a nuanced one) across all of the legal matters mentioned above (I’ll get to the third case below8).

In Moore v. Hughes Helicopters, Inc.,9 a black female employee of a large helicopter manufacturer claimed that the company had discriminated against black females in particular (and not white females or black males, p. 480) in promotions and selection for supervisory and upper-level positions, and filed her complaint on behalf of black female employees (not all blacks or all female employees; p. 478). In the evidence educed to support her claims, she provided an “intersectional” breakdown of the percentages of white males, white females, black males, and black females at every level of employment (higher and supervisory levels vs. lower levels), and the Court discusses at length whether the higher concentration of Black females at lower-level positions indicates discrimination. Moore’s claims were ultimately rejected, because she failed to show that the black women employed at the company qualified for promotion, or that the company’s hiring practices had a disparate impact on black women (pp. 479, 484-486, and footnote 9 of the Court’s decision).

In a second case, Payne v. Travenol Laboratories, Inc.,10 three black women filed a complaint against a pharmaceutical manufacturer, claiming that the company’s educational requirements in hiring, its layoff policies, and its various methods of assigning employees to different types of positions led to both race- and sex-discrimination (pp. 251-253 of the Trial Court’s decision). Here, then, the complaint itself was not put forward as an “intersectional” one. However, as in Moore, the plaintiffs were certified to represent only black female employees and applicants for employment at the company, indicating that the question at hand was whether and how the company’s policies influenced them in particular (p. 253). When it came to evaluating the complaint, this was at least partially done in a way that aligns with an “intersectional” analysis. Thus, at several points where this is relevant, the Court evaluates the effects of the company’s educational requirements on hiring black females in particular, by examining statistics relating to the educational attainments of the general population in the relevant geographical area, broken down by the combination of sex and race (e.g., the percentages of black females, black males, white males, and white females in the area who have completed 9 or 12 years of education). The Court also compares figures relating to the demographic makeup of the company’s personnel at various positions, again broken down by the combination of race and sex (pp. 255, 257-260, 264 of the Trial Court’s decision). Similarly, the Court of Appeals11 reviews the relevant data, broken down in the same way (820-821, and 828, footnote 41 of the Court of Appeals decision). It was ultimately found that the company’s policies led to widespread discrimination, based in part on this “intersectional” evaluation of the data.

Further, in reviewing the Trial Court’s decision in the same case, the Court of Appeals devotes special attention to the question of class representation arising in connection with “intersectional” discrimination claims. It notes that various “intersectional” groups of claimants may have conflicting interests in pursuing such lawsuits, and determines that in this particular case there is such a conflict between black males and black females, and so that the black female class representative should not be certified to represent black males (pp. 809-812, 832-833; essentially, the two groups were competing for the same positions). In its general discussion of this point, the Court of Appeals engages in quite a sophisticated analysis of the inter-group dynamics that might accompany “intersectional” discrimination proceedings, and the legal difficulties this might create:

“[T]he court must examine the interlacing allegations of race and sex discrimination to determine whether an actual conflict exists. For example, if a black female argues that the employer favors white males to the detriment of both females and blacks, there is no inherent obstacle to her representation of both groups. […] In this case, however, the district court found an actual conflict of interests […] Black males are entitled to a class representative who is free from a desire to prove a claim that will impair their interests.” (p. 811 of the Court of Appeal’s decision).

Ignoring this straightforwardly “intersectional” analysis, Crenshaw doesn’t acknowledge the legal difficulties noted here and the Court’s attempt to address them—difficulties which are, in some circumstances, inherent to the “intersectional” nature of the claim. Instead, she rebukes the courts for not allowing black women, who claim that discrimination has been perpetrated against them as such, to represent black men as well—hence suggesting, in effect, to expose the latter to a variety of potential risks to their legal rights stemming from lack of proper legal representation.12

Let’s now turn to the third case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors,13 where several black female employees of General Motors claimed that the company’s “last hired-first fired” layoff policies discriminated against black women. This case is mentioned first in Crenshaw’s discussion, and the article’s legacy is often associated with its critique. Here are some quotes from the Court’s decision, which are most commonly identified with Crenshaw’s claims about lack of “intersectional analysis”:

“The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super-remedy’ which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both […] The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” (pp. 143, 145 of the Court’s decision; pp. 141-142 of the article).

The Court here explicitly rejects the legal possibility of submitting “intersectional” discrimination claims (in evaluating that decision, readers should keep in mind the various complexities and difficulties briefly discussed above14). However, as we have seen, courts in the two other legal cases mentioned in the article did not explicitly reject this possibility, and much of the legal analysis in these cases amounts, in effect, to its implicit endorsement.

Moreover, putting forth the DeGraffenreid decision as representative of the “dominant” view in anti-discrimination doctrine is highly misleading. In fact, at the time of writing the article, another decision—in Jefferies v. Harris County Community Action Association15—had already explicitly endorsed “intersectional” discrimination claims brought specifically by black women, acknowledging that they can be discriminated against particularly as black women. The ruling is mentioned by the Payne v. Travenol court as the controlling precedent, and by Crenshaw in a footnote (footnote 13, p. 143). Here is the Court of Appeals in Payne v. Travenol:

“In Jefferies we held that a black female plaintiff is entitled to prove that she suffered discrimination as a black female, even if the employer did not discriminate against either blacks as a class or females as a class.” (pp. 822-823 of the Court of Appeal’s decision; emphasis mine). 

Furthermore, contrary to Crenshaw’s claims, the Jefferies court notes that special attention should be devoted to understanding and evaluating the specific mechanisms and dynamics that such discrimination may involve, and to finding adequate ways of addressing them. Here are some quotes (“Title VII” refers to the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination):

“The essence of Jefferies’ argument is that an employer should not escape from liability for discrimination against black females by a showing that it does not discriminate against blacks and that it does not discriminate against females. We agree that discrimination against black females can exist even in the absence of discrimination against black men or white women.”

“Black females represent a significant percentage of the active or potentially active labor force. In the absence of a clear expression by Congress that it did not intend to provide protection against discrimination directed especially toward black women as a class separate and distinct from the class of women and the class of blacks, we cannot condone a result which leaves black women without a viable Title VII remedy.”

“It is clear from the foregoing cases that an employer may not single out black women for discriminatory treatment. […] Recognition of black females as a distinct protected subgroup […] is the only way to identify and remedy discrimination directed toward black females. Therefore, we hold that when a Title VII plaintiff alleges that an employer discriminates against black females, the fact that black males and white females are not subject to discrimination is irrelevant […].”

(pp. 1032-1034; emphases mine).

It is worth contrasting these quotes with some of Crenshaw’s sweeping allegations:

“[…] the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women’s and Black men’s experiences. Under this view, Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups. Where their experiences are distinct, Black women can expect little protection […]” (p. 143 of the article; emphasis mine).

And, again:

“Notions of what constitutes race and sex discrimination are […] narrowly tailored to embrace only a small set of circumstances, none of which include discrimination against Black women.” (151; emphasis mine)

As readers can now fully appreciate, these allegations are patently false.

Intersecting oppressions, subordination, or disadvantage?

As mentioned above, there is no reason to suppose that claims about the way legal categories intersect, or should intersect, to create various “multiple-axes” categories—even if those are useful for the pragmatic aim of adequately adjudicating claims of discrimination in legal proceedings—should tell us much about the nature of things such as social groups (specifically, whether and how they “intersect” to create new socially significant subgroups), the experiences of group members (for instance, whether the experiences of black women are systematically different to those of black men), and the nature of things such as oppression or subordination.

Specifically, it is important to highlight that despite the general trend of Crenshaw’s article—where broad claims about the nature of oppression, disadvantage, etc., are made largely based on (purported) observations about anti-discrimination doctrine—investigating what things such as oppression are, and whether or not different forms of oppression “intersect” or “interlock” to generate qualitatively different and worse (“compounded”) forms of oppression, would have to involve a substantial empirical component. And, of course, the answers to these questions could be much more nuanced than what is suggested in Crenshaw’s discussion: for instance, an “intersectional” group may be more disadvantaged relative to “non-intersectional” groups in one domain (e.g., employment), but less so in another domain (e.g., education), and so forth.

Precisely because of the nuanced and evidence-based character that such discussions should take, it is important to notice that Crenshaw’s broad claims are at least partially undermined, again, by some of the facts presented in the legal proceedings discussed above.

At a minimum, we’ve seen that one of the reasons a new “intersectional” legal claim was needed in Jefferies and DeGraffenreid—that is, the claim that black women were discriminated against as such—was precisely the fact that black men and white women were not discriminated against in these cases. In other words, the setup of the legal claim itself shows that the injustices involved (as opposed to the legal categories) did not tend to “intersect” in those cases, and the claim that discrimination directed against black women is always a “compounded” form of discrimination against blacks and against women does not sit well with them.

The assumption that disadvantages suffered by “intersectional” groups are qualitatively different and worse relative to those suffered by “non-intersectional” groups is undermined by the facts presented in Payne v. Travenol as well. One would assume that if oppression, subordination, or disadvantage necessarily compounded in the way the article suggests, black women would be more disadvantaged, or more discriminated against, relative to black men. But the statistics brought by the plaintiffs in Payne v. Travenol indicate otherwise: while black women suffered more discrimination (relative to black men) in the internal assignment policies of the company, they suffered (slightly) less discrimination as a result of the employer’s candidate screening policy. This stemmed from the fact that the company’s candidate selection criteria were based on educational attainments, and black women were (slightly) less disadvantaged (relative to black men) in that domain (pp. 259-260 of the Trial Court’s decision). Similarly, the Court of Appeals in the same case discusses findings showing that some of the company’s discriminatory policies were less disadvantageous for Black females, compared to Black males (820-821 of the Court of Appeals decision).

Conclusion

Adequately addressing problems of discrimination, inequality, and disadvantage requires a nuanced discussion of complex ethical, legal, and philosophical questions, and a sober evaluation of relevant empirical data. This is not what intersectionality has to offer. Instead, it is a display of legal megalomania: sweeping, unsubstantiated accusations relating to the entire legal system are made based on a tenuous examination of legal materials; broad, all-encompassing theoretical assertions are then put forward based on this flawed legal analysis. All the while, important legal difficulties and questions—careful examination of which is crucial for developing effective anti-discrimination measures, and for protecting people’s most cherished rights—are either ignored or misrepresented. Victims of discrimination, especially those belonging to disadvantaged and multiply-disadvantaged groups, deserve better than that.

References:

[ Linked: https://ronadinur.substack.com/i/109388855/conclusion ]

==

It's interesting when you find out something like this. I had understood that, for all the chaos and insanity that had ensued, intersectionality was legally a legitimate and useful legal argument. It just didn't belong being applied to the entire world, to either view everything through it or restructure everything to counter it.

And then you find out it was bogus the entire time, unnecessary, an ideological trojan horse from the very beginning and that, in effect, Kimberlé Crenshaw wasn't just an inadvertent progenitor of the current social insanity, but a liar who deliberately struck the match to set the world ablaze.

[kingsignal-1225]

Ultimate Guide to PCB Testing Methods: Ensuring Quality and Reliability in Your Circuits

In the electronics sector, Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are the life-lines of virtually all gadgets that are in use in the modern society. From humble home appliances to gigantic industrial equipment, PCBs are the skeletal framework of hardware organization and connection of circuit elements. It is vital to guarantee the quality and dependability of these fundamental parts – thus enters PCB testing methods. It is our hope that this extensive hand will help identify the most suitable test strategies for PCB testing, why these techniques matter, and how to maximize your circuits’ functionality.

Introduction

Firstly, an increase in the capability of different electronic devices leads to higher necessary requirements to the PCBs used in their production. Performing tests on the PCBs is an essential step in the manufacturing process done to confirm that a given board performs as a unit to the expected levels. This guide aims at explaining various techniques of PCB testing with a view of having a better understanding on how to achieve quality and reliability on the circuits.

Why PCB Testing is Crucial

PCB Testing When it comes to the potential defects on PCBs, there are shorts, opens, and some component placements. They can cause device failure, decline in performance level, and sometimes also pose safety issues. Through high-quality testing regimes, it becomes easier to address problems before they reach the customer, and thus manufacturers will have reliable and efficient products. Key reasons for PCB testing include:

Detecting Manufacturing Defects: Solder bridges, missing and placed in wrong position components, all can be detected in the initial stages easily.

Ensuring Functionality: Ensuring that the PCB does what is wanted and needed when it is in use, and under several conditions.

Quality Assurance: Ensuring that the business meets industry standards, and what clients require of them.

Cost Efficiency: Decreasing the likelihood of rework and recall by identifying possible defects before they get to the customer.

Types of PCB Testing Methods

These are the types of PCB Testing Methods:

Visual Inspection

Technique one as also referred to as the VI or visual inspection is the simplest and basic type of testing done on PCBs. The technique entails inspecting the board with naked eyes for some of the common faults including solder bridges, missing parts, and misalignment issues.

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI)

AOI employs cameras and software algorithms to check PCBs for defects and performs the inspections singly. This method of inspection is far more efficient than the manual inspection and simultaneously versatile enough to identify numerous problems.

X-ray Inspection

Some functions which include examination of features of BPCs that could not be easily inspected include solder joints under components through x-ray inspection. It is especially effective in inspecting defects in BGA (Ball Grid Array) and other various packages as well.

In-Circuit Testing (ICT)

ICT entails applying different voltage across the PCB to checks on the electrical characteristics of the needy part and connections. The use of this method is highly recommended for the identification of functional problems and verification of the circuit’s goodness.

Functional Testing (FCT)

Functional testing evaluates the effectiveness of the PCB pointing to the fact that it can be tested when placed in use. This method enables the certification of that the PCB works as expected under actual environment.

Flying Probe Testing

In flying probe testing, the probes are moved around to test the electrical properties of the created PCB. Lower to medium volume production runs can be made easily by using this technique; hence it is advantageous in this regard.

Boundary Scan Testing

Boundary scan testing also called as JTAG testing extends test circuitry into all the components for testing the connections between them. Although, this method is very efficient for identifying connection problems and faults.

Burn-In Testing

Burn-in testing puts the PCB in a state of operational stress for a long time to capture early-life failures. This aspect makes the method reliable for the long term since it is likely to identify problems that may occur when the equipment is in use for a long time.

Detailed Analysis of Each Testing Method works

These are the detailed analysis of each testing method works:

Visual Inspection

Pros:

Simple and low-cost

Determined to be a system for the reporting of noticeable defects as soon as they are observed.

Cons:

Time-consuming for complex boards

Limited to visible defects

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI)

Pros:

Fast and accurate

Is capable of detecting various kinds of defects.

Non-destructive

Cons:

High initial setup cost

May need to have better settings optimized for specific boards.

X-ray Inspection

Pros:

Examines hidden features

Ideal for complex packages

Cons:

Expensive equipment

Requires skilled operators

In-Circuit Testing (ICT)

Pros:

Thorough electrical testing

High fault coverage

Cons:

Requires custom fixtures

Not for all the boards or servers that you wish to build.

Functional Testing (FCT)

Pros:

Ensures real-world performance

Detects system-level issues

Cons:

Time-consuming

The mathematical test object can involve complex arrangements of test configurations.

Flying Probe Testing

Pros:

Flexible and adaptable

Cost-effective for small batches

Cons:

Slower than ICT for big volumes

Applicable only when the board is specially designed

Boundary Scan Testing

Pros:

Interconnections have high fault coverage.

Said; No need to have physical access to the test points

Cons:

Requires boundary scan-enabled components

Complex setup

Burn-In Testing

Pros:

Identifies early-life failures

Ensures long-term reliability

Cons:

Time-consuming and costly

Perhaps stressful to the board

Choosing the Right Testing Method

The choice of the appropriate method of PCB testing can be influenced by several factors such as the level of complexity of the PCB and the numbers of boards to be tested as well as the actual costs of the testing process and other features. Consider the following when choosing a testing method:

Board Complexity: Great board densities or component placement can be a determinant as to whether one needs AOI or X-ray inspection.

Production Volume: Applications that are characterized by high volumes can be easily facilitated by ICT while the low to medium volume applications may require flying probe testing.

Budget: Both manual inspection and AOI are favorable for various production volumes, while X-ray and ICT are more expensive at the beginning.

Specific Requirements: There are two types of the test, namely Functional Test and Burn-In Test that should be made so as to attain the long term reliability in applications that are critical.

Best Practices for PCB Testing

Using the best techniques in testing PCBs increases the quality and reliability of the circuits that you are working on. Here are some key practices to follow:

Early Testing: It is recommended to carry out the tests when the product is still in its design and manufacturing phase so that problems can be noted earlier before they reach a very catastrophic level.

Automate Where Possible: Use method such as automation to reduce the time and improve on the quality of the testing.

Regular Calibration: It is necessary to check if all the testing equipment used for calibration are accurate.

Comprehensive Coverage: This way, you will be able to ensure that there are no defects that are not tested as the best testing approach combines all types of testing methods.

Document Everything: Ensure that you keep records of the tests performed, the results obtained, as well as any measures taken to correct the breaches.

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

These are the common challenges and how to overcome them:

False Positives/Negatives

Automated testing methods maybe good some times, they give you the results that are either positive or negative and this will lead to unnecessary rework or more alarming leaving critical defects unfound. In order to avoid this, make sure that testing algorithms and testing equipment are updated and fine-tuned from time to time.

Component Access

Some of the testing techniques involve handling parts of the circuit and with high density board this can be very difficult. Some of the ways in which testbench implementation can be avoided are as follows Boundary scan testing and X-ray inspection.

High Costs

Some form of testing such as X-ray and ICT testing is often very costly. The effectiveness must come with reasonable prices; try to combine some of the mentioned approaches to cover all the aspects without spending too much money.

Future Trends in PCB Testing

About the future, it can be stated that its trends will be in fact linked to the tendencies in technologies and expectations towards ever higher quality and quantity of tested PCBs. Key trends to watch include:

AI and Machine Learning: Using of intelligence algorithms and machine learning in testing algorithms to enhance the efficiency and the minimization of false negative or false positives.

IoT and Smart Manufacturing: Higher testing flexibility and opportunities for the continuous test process supervision.

Advanced Imaging Techniques: The need for better techniques that would enhance the detection of defects within a printed circuit.

Environmental Stress Testing: More focus in the testing of PCBs under different environmental pressures in order to improve on its longevity.

Conclusion

Quality and reliability of packaged circuits have to be maintained to contribute positively in any electronic equipment. This paper seeks to explain the common testing techniques for PCB so that PCB manufacturers are able to test and see if they are free from defects and if they are functional. This ultimate guide will give you a full insight on the available options in PCB testing that will enable you make the best decision that will give you perfect circuits.

The aim is to help you understand how to attain the best quality of PCBs, what methods are worth following, and what trends drive future improvements, thus contributing to the quality of the final electronic products and, consequently, consumer satisfaction.