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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 10 months ago

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By: Kevin Ray

Published: Jan 23, 2024

Prologue: Navigating Cultural Revolution

I’m days away from starting rehearsals for my third literary adaptation as a theater director; my heart is pounding with excitement and fear. There’s nothing more thrilling than the electricity of a vibrant rehearsal room full of talented, generous, creative actors and designers, collaborating with me to adapt literature into a play, but it’s also anxiety-producing because there are a million creative decisions to make. Nonetheless, the theater is booked and the curtain will rise in October 2024; the only thing to do is persist in the pursuit of making great theater.

The inspiration for this production—an adaptation of a 1924 dystopian novel by Russian heretic Yevgeny Zamyatin—arose from my experience, not in creative persistence, but persisting in the face of an ideology that endeavors to bar heretics like me from the arts.

A culture of the arts without heretics isn’t a healthy culture—it's a boring culture. Regrettably, a small but very loud group of activists in the theater have sidelined heretics by demanding artists conform to an identity-grievance fueled monoculture.

Fortunately, I found a way to make theater. I feared I’d be forced out of the field altogether. I lost work for refusing to promote concepts such as “White Supremacy Culture” and “Decolonization,” I infuriated some by refusing to adopt “gender-neutral pronouns,” and I faced disdain for being white, male, and even for identifying as gay and not “queer.”

Unfortunately, I was prepared to deal with identity-based discrimination—I’ve faced prejudice since the beginning of my career.

Act I: The Wrath of Westboro

I was drawn to theater from a young age, partly because theater groups were welcoming to oddballs, weirdos and outcasts who didn’t fit in elsewhere. Even before it was clear to me, my classmates knew I was gay, and I silently endured daily bullying. Theater was an oasis where I could get away from demeaning comments and fit in with other kids. I relished using my imagination to stand in the shoes of a character who was not me; facing obstacles in a different time and place.

By the late 1990’s I was acting, singing and dancing in a professional production of a musical that toured small and mid-sized cities across the United States. Getting paid to tour in that musical was the epitome of a “dream come true.”

I was lucky to be in that show for various reasons. First, the production held auditions in New York, a city overflowing with talented performers. Being cast in that show was, as they say, “a lucky break.” But this was not the first break I had had in my life.

When I was eight years old, I had a break of a different kind: I broke my neck. The two vertebrae just below my skull were fractured. A neurosurgeon told my mother and me it was rare to see someone with this injury still alive, most people died instantly; the few who lived were permanently paralyzed. After the neurosurgeon explained the procedure he would perform, he looked directly into my eyes and said, “If there is anything you want to do in your life, you should do it before this surgery.” I said I wanted to have another birthday.

I survived; and at twenty-six, I was dancing across stages around the country. More than lucky, that was miraculous.

The last bit of luck I had was the date of my birth. If I had been born a few years earlier, I may not have lived to see my twenty-sixth year. The generation of gay men who came just before me were ravaged by HIV/AIDS. As reported, “by 1995 one American gay man in nine was diagnosed with AIDS.” The epidemic also spawned an anti-gay activist movement.

Enter stage left: the Westboro Baptist Church. Founded by Fred Phelps in 1955, the church gained notoriety in the early 90’s for picketing a park frequented by gay men. As reported, they also “picketed at American soldiers’ funerals, thanking God for killing those who’d fought for a country that ‘institutionalized sin.’ They prayed God would kill Westboro’s enemies.” The musical I was in prominently featured gay male characters, making it a prime target for Westboro’s bigoted activism.

As our tour bus pulled into the parking lot of a Kansas theater, church members stood outside holding signs that read “God Hates Fags” and “Two Gay Rights: AIDS and Hell.” Many in the cast were gay, but to the Westboro protestors we were not three-dimensional human beings with the capacity to love, dream and hate, just like them. They didn’t care about the commitment we had to our craft, the challenges everyone overcame to be cast in the show, and that, at the end of the day, we were all performing in the musical because of our love for theater. The point of identity-grievance activism is to ignore our common humanity and weaponize identity.

The protesters were within their legal right to peacefully hold signs with heinous language. Considering the musical highlighted how difficult the lives of gay men can be because of the discrimination they face, I wonder if Westboro’s activism only deepened the meaning of our show: as they walked past the signs, that audience experienced, first-hand, the ignorant vitriol many gay men encounter.

I was afraid that night, but I did what I had to do: I went on with the show; Westboro didn’t stop me from living my dream.

Despite fringe groups like Westboro, the late 1990’s was a time of great advances for gay men. As the country headed toward a new century, society was becoming more welcoming to a wide variety of minority populations. How could any of us have predicted the identity-grievance nightmare that was to come, and the impact it would have on the theater?

Act II: A New Dream

When actors aren’t working in a show, they survive by holding down a “day job.” Around 2002, I stumbled into a day job as a Teaching Artist. Teaching Artists visit schools on behalf of cultural institutions (theaters, dance companies, orchestras etc.) delivering arts programming, often in under-funded districts that don’t have budgets to hire full-time arts teachers.

I didn’t think I would like teaching, but within a few months I was hooked. The students loved the opportunity to get out of their seats and participate in theater activities, and I was fascinated by the challenge of writing a lesson plan; it was like a magical chemistry experiment: two parts explaining directions, twenty parts playing games, one part classroom management. And it was a kind of performing, the curtain went up every time I entered a classroom.

I remember the exact moment I decided to stop pursuing acting. When I arrived at an elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens for my third or fourth visit, I opened the door to the classroom, and the students exclaimed, “HE’S HERE!” At that moment I thought, “Nobody is excited when you walk into an audition room, but these kids, their teacher, and you are excited to be together in this classroom – go where it’s warm.”

I worked hard to improve my skills. I read books about teaching, went to conferences, and studied pedagogical theories. But the best way to learn how to teach, is to teach. So I took as many jobs as I could get, working with every age group from pre-K to high school, with students diagnosed with “special needs”, students who predominantly spoke Spanish and Polish, jobs in low-income neighborhoods and jobs at high-profile theaters offering programming for youth from wealthy families. I worked in schools, summer camps, and church basements. I loved theater, and I now loved teaching, which led me to a new dream: to become a theater professor.

In 2008, I enrolled in a graduate program without understanding all master’s degrees are not considered “terminal.” When I completed the program, I was devastated to discover my degree had no value in the academic job market. I sank into a deep clinical depression and spent the next year and a half digging myself out with the help of a skilled therapist. But in 2016, I had another lucky break: I was chosen for a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Theater Directing. I earned my “terminal degree” in 2018. I was on my way to a successful career in academia, but a new kind of activism attempted to kill that dream.

Act III: Something Wicked This Way Comes

In the summer of 2018, I attended a national conference for theater professionals in higher education. A panelist with experience on hiring committees explained, “To teach theater and direct productions at a college or university, you have to have an MFA and you have to show the committee you can get yourself directing work at regional theaters.”

I left the panel deflated. During my final stretch of graduate school, we practiced “elevator pitches” for potential interviews with artistic directors. Although the professor said my pitch was excellent, I wondered, “Who would I pitch to? My chances of meeting with an artistic director are less than my chances of a sit down with the Pope!”

I knew this because an activist movement sometimes referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) was deeply entrenched in the theater industry. In the same way Westboro Baptist Church demonized me based on an identity trait I could not change, CSJ activists in the theater were deciding who was a so-called “oppressor” based on identity. I was nearly everything they deemed “oppressive”: white, male, middle-aged and, probably worst of all, I identified as gay, not queer. For readers unfamiliar with the distinction, gay simply connotes same-sex sexual orientation while queer conjoins sexual orientation with a laundry list of radical leftist politics. Although many claim the word queer is “inclusive” of the variety of identities encapsulated in the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ acronym, as Andrew Sullivan explains, “queer” is “designed to trigger gay men, especially gay men who aren’t politically of the far left … to make us feel we aren’t part of the world or of the community.” Rather than function as a term of inclusivity, “queer” has been weaponized to identify and exclude traitors.

When I asked an aspiring playwright what she thought my chances were, she said white men had been directors “for so long” and it was time that they step aside. I didn’t think a person’s race or sex determined whether or not that person had the skills, talent or commitment to be a theater director.

Theater artists were the last people I suspected would attempt to bar anyone from participating in the arts based on identity. We were the oddballs, outcasts, and weirdos who accepted each other because our differences excluded us from mainstream culture. Now, my colleagues in the theater no longer saw me as a three-dimensional person with thoughts, feelings, and dreams untethered to my identity. Instead, I was nothing but an embodiment of identity characteristics they wanted to amputate.

I ran into a professor from my first stint in graduate school at a reception for theater directors in higher ed. Mid-conversation he said, “Look around this room! I’m the only person of color in here. I’m not feeling supported! Come with me.” Without telling me his intentions, he led me over to the event’s planner and told her the organization needed to do a better job getting “directors of color” into the room. I stood frozen, a dumbstruck pawn furthering someone else’s activist agenda.

I was used as a pawn again when I attended the second night of a festival of theater directors’ projects in development. The first two works came and went from the stage, but the third piece started on an odd note. A bald, middle-aged man stood center stage and a young female director sat far away from him on the stage’s edge. At first, I thought this was a curious experiment in hyper-realism, but I soon realized it was not a performance. The director apologized to the audience for the work presented the night before because, she said, she’d received several emails saying the piece “offended” and “harmed” some audience members. The man center stage chimed in, but was quickly cut off by the director who asserted, “I’m speaking now.” It was revealed the man was a former NYPD officer who asked the director to help adapt his experiences on the police force into a play. Suddenly, audience members who had been at the previous evening’s performance were standing and shouting at the retired officer. Each time he tried to defend himself, the director cut him off saying it was not his “time to speak.” The man’s wife stood up and pleaded, “My husband is a good man! He protected this city on 9/11!” But the ravenous audience continued to shred the retiree over the “offensive” and “harmful" words presented the night before, words we were now not allowed to hear. I never learned what the police officer said that caused this reaction. But from the way he was treated, it seemed his mere existence as a police officer was contrived as somehow “harmful" to these people—who wouldn’t even let him talk. After the “show” I approached the theater’s artistic director and said, “I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.” She said, “There were some things he needed to hear.”

On a cold January weekend in 2019, I was alone in my Brooklyn apartment desperately trying to hatch a plan to change my prospects in an ecosystem increasingly intolerant of people and views that did not conform to CSJ. To get a college teaching job, I needed to direct something. I decided I could either whine and cry that the activists were preventing me from realizing my dream, or I could create my own opportunity. If I couldn't direct a play at an established non-profit theater, maybe I could independently direct and produce it myself.

ACT IV: Burning Down the House

As part of my Teaching Artist work, I had experience “devising” original plays with youth. Devising is a theater-making technique that means collaboratively creating a play originating from an idea rather than a playwright’s pen. “Devisors” start with source material such as newspaper articles, transcripts of court documents, old photographs, paintings, stories, anything that stimulates ideas a devising ensemble can transform into a play. On that frigid weekend in 2019, I decided to devise a play from ghost stories by Edith Wharton. Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton skillfully used fiction to criticize rigid social structures and her lesser-known ghost stories overflow with rich social commentary and wry humor. I pitched the project to some colleagues from my MFA program. Excited both by the stories and my collaborative approach, they all said, “Yes!” They didn't see my identity as a liability, but my employers did.

In the fall of 2019, at an annual “back to school” workshop, I was, for the first time, segregated into what’s called a “racial affinity group.” When asked why we were breaking into groups by race, our supervisor said, “Because we live in a systemically racist country.” I was asked prior to the meeting via a Google survey if I was willing to participate in racially segregated groups, and I responded, “No.” After I was put in the “white affinity group,” I asked the facilitator why I had been segregated at work against my will. She told me she would get back to me. She never did.

At another arts organization, my supervisor called me into a private meeting to reprimand me for refusing to let my co-workers address me with “they/them” pronouns in emails. She said everyone was using “gender-neutral pronouns” in an organization-wide campaign to “dismantle patriarchal systems of oppression.” I let her know that I was a gay man, proud to be one, was not willing to let anyone else decide what my pronouns should be, and that applying pronouns to a person who doesn’t want them is the definition of “mis-gendering.” My supervisor bristled. I said, “Well then, we will have to agree to disagree.” In response, she slammed her hand on her desk, jumped out of her seat exclaiming, “NO!” and left the room. I wasn’t hired back.

I was also pressured to incorporate concepts from CSJ into my teaching. The idea was to “embed” theories such as Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Ibram X. Kendi’s “Anti-Racism,” Judith Butler’s “Queer Theory,” Frantz Fanon’s “Decolonization,” Kimberly Crenshaw’s “Intersectionality,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” into pre-K to 12 arts-instruction.

Instead of spreading the joy and excitement of theater, I was to use theater instruction as cover for indoctrinating children into a worldview that taught them to see themselves as victims or “oppressors” based on their race and sex. When I voiced concerns, I wasn’t offered further work.

Determined to “dismantle” so-called “harmful white-centered” practices in the theater, activists were inadvertently destroying collaboration. The most important ingredient in collaboration is trust. Trust enables collaborators to bravely take artistic risks as an ensemble. But the activists were sowing distrust by reducing everyone to identities “oppressing” each other; re-casting benign interactions as overt acts of prejudice or covert insults like “white women’s tears” and “microaggressions”—the latter is a doctrine that turns everyday interactions, like asking where someone is from, into a grave racial insult if a listener decides their subjective feelings are hurt. Where there are no real insults or real acts of aggression, “microaggressions” can be manufactured out of thin air. Rehearsal rooms became ticking time bombs where activist artists could hurl overblown accusations of supposed psychic harm at any moment.

Not satisfied with obliterating collaboration, the activists jettisoned their audience. As reported in Washingtonian, when a theater endeavored to revamp its programming to create “the most woke theater in Washington,” the journalist wondered, “Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times?” To which an executive board member replied, “It’s entirely likely that as we continue the work we’re doing, we’re going to lose more people, and I think we’re all okay with that.”

I attended one show that ended by pressuring “the folks who call themselves white” to leave their seats and stand on stage to understand that they don’t “own” their seats. At another show, “non-Black audience members were invited to leave” before the end because the play was “not for or about” them. Some productions held segregated “black out” performances. How do you reach hearts and minds when you’re kicking hearts and minds out of the space?

When the pandemic hit, and all our work meetings took place on Zoom, I repeatedly heard the phrase “burn it all down” from my Millennial and Gen Z colleagues. Their perspective seemed to be the theater that existed before the lockdown was a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, capitalist (fill in whatever “-ists” and “-phobics” you could think of) oppressive system of “predominately white institutions” traumatizing artists through a “nonprofit industrial complex” (an oxymoron in any case) that needed to be vaporized. As reported in The Intercept, Millennial and Gen Z employees across the nonprofit sector were, in the words of one anonymous senior leader, “not doing well” and creating a “toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it - callout culture, cancel culture whatever - [that’s] creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is.” It should have come as a surprise to no one that, during 2020’s summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, the atmosphere imploded.

First came the "Not Speaking Out” list, a Google spreadsheet listing the names of not-for-profit theaters that did not make a “sufficient” statement on social media about “systemic racism.” Then came “We See You White American Theater,” a twenty-nine page list of demands for reform that included race-based hiring quotas, ceasing “all contractual security agreements with police departments,” and requiring “creative teams to undergo Anti-Racism Workshops at the beginning of each rehearsal or tech process and ensure accountability with signed statements.” Finally came the targeted attacks on non-compliant individuals. One of the most heartbreaking incidents was the pressure campaign that preceded an executive director’s resignation. Her own staff circulated an online petition to the entire membership stating:

We are here to tell you that, underneath your dress of respectability politics, your slip is showing… it looks like your predatory tokenism of BIPOC staff members, your opportunistic fundraising, and your calculated obstruction of anti-racist programming.

This executive director played a major role in sustaining not-for-profit theater in New York City through the aftermath of 9/11 and "The Great Recession” of 2007-08 and was an ardent advocate for promoting women as leaders in the field. But the petition painted her as a notorious racist who needed to be excommunicated. I was horrified to see the document populated with the names of people I’d known for years. I declined to sign. No one publicly came to this woman's defense because the activists’ tactic was clear: do what we say, or we will cull you from the field too.

Overt discrimination permeated every meeting I attended that summer. At an organization established to support theater directors, one member asked the group’s president, “Can we have a conversation at some point about the ethics of white directors?” When asked for clarification, the member said, “This is about the ethical responsibilities of white… members as we work to transform the American theater… and whether white directors should be directing.” The president responded, “We’ve already begun to put a task force together… to help particularly our white members work through setting up rehearsal halls and production processes that are anti-racist.” It was odd that only white directors were singled out as needing support understanding what is or isn't “anti-racist” because, from what I saw, there was a lot of racial discrimination aimed at white people.

A prime example was American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Keith Wann, who lost work solely based on his skin color. As New York Post reported, the director of ASL for Broadway’s The Lion King stated, “Keith Wann, though an amazing ASL performer, is not a black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King.” To be clear, and typical of the convoluted logic of this movement, the director was advancing the proposition that only black ASL performers should play the animal characters in The Lion King. Since when was it “anti-racist” to insist that only black people were uniquely fit to play animals? Citing race-based employment discrimination, Wann sued. According to court documents, the case settled in Wann’s favor with lightning speed. Perhaps this employer should have provided staff with “anti-racist” training that included Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John G. Roberts and his plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, which states, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Activists pressured artists to create theater aligned with their beliefs. As reported in The New York Times, the artistic director of a festival that once prided itself on being “uncensored” canceled a show because the playwright and performer dared to assert, “There are two sexes, male and female.” The artistic director explained, “I support free speech, I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.” Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, explains the motivation behind this type of behavior in his book Kindly Inquisitors, “In an orthodox community, the threat of social disintegration is never further away than the first dissenter. So the community joins together to stigmatize dissent.” Stigmatizing unorthodox views by canceling shows that express them is censorship, and theater artists used to know better: In 1992, Stephen Sondheim refused the National Medal of Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stating it would “be an act of the utmost hypocrisy” to accept the award because the NEA had become “a conduit and a symbol of censorship and repression rather than encouragement and support.”

Unlike film, television and recorded music, live theater has no rating system; it should not look for ways to self-censor. Not only should theater reject self-censorship, it should overflow with a wide variety of plays that explore uncharted, daring and dangerous topics. Why not unleash diverse perspectives on various stages and let audiences decide what they think? Instead, activists insist the theater should be comprised of people who, however much they all may look different superficially, must all share the same beliefs. That’s not diversity, it’s monoculture.

If some artists want to create shows that extol CSJ, they have every right to pursue their projects. However, they have no right to bar other artists from daring to critique CSJ’s inconsistencies and intolerance.

Westboro knew they could hold slanderous signs, but they understood attempting to stop the show was beyond their purview–it’s time CSJ activists in the arts learned that lesson.

A few voices of dissent have begun to document the devastation caused by this activism as Clayton Fox does in his essay “The Toxic Gentleness of the American Theater”, but a New York Times article titled “A Crisis in America’s Theaters Leaves Prestigious Stages Dark” hints insiders know some of this “crisis” was self-inflicted. As an executive director admits, “Some theaters have forgotten what audiences want — they want to laugh and to be joyful and to cry, but sometimes we push them too far.”

ACT V: Building New Institutions

At the risk of being the skunk at the garden party, I don't believe logic and reason can be used to persuade theater leaders to take an off-ramp from their misguided allegiance to CSJ. Their devotion is fundamentalist in nature, and that is nearly impossible to pierce by persuasion, even if someone could get them to listen in good faith.

Look at the example of former Westboro member Megan Phelps-Roper: it took thirteen years of engaging with opposing views before she left the church. At fifty-one, I can’t wait for people to change their minds before I make art. The way to make art now is to build new institutions that state from inception a commitment to freedom of artistic expression, a recognition that ideological conformity is not a prerequisite for participation in the arts, and a pledge to refrain from making statements on social media about current events. If theaters want to tackle current events, do it on the stage.

Despite the storm around me, I pursued my ghost story project. I needed funding, so I looked for grant opportunities. One application asked, “Why this project, why now?” I wrote that a project based on ghost stories was relevant to the moment because they are about our relationship to transgressions in the past. Every ghost story features the living encountering an apparition who returns either to make the protagonist aware of a past injustice, or to punish the protagonist in the present. Considering Ibram X. Kendi declared in How to Be an Anti-Racist, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” I thought it would be meaningful for audiences to experience what happens when people are punished for things in the past, whether they had anything to do with the earlier transgression or not.

It worked! In 2021 I received two small grants to produce and direct Unearthly Visitants. The project went so well that my collaborators and I decided to mount a second show, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's 1909 science fiction story "The Machine Stops." In a review, a critic wrote the play was "a Space Mountain roller coaster ride, an intellectual white water rafting expedition, a production that will have you talking about it for hours and days to come.”

Every moment putting those shows together was pure joy and fulfillment. I didn’t “embed” CSJ into the rehearsal room or the plays. I didn’t force the ensemble to declare preferred gender pronouns, no one was accused of “microaggressions,” and I didn’t impose my socio-political beliefs onto anyone else. The rehearsals were about the bliss of creating the best productions we could devise.

Identity is important. I don't deny that. My identity surely informs my views, but it is not the totality of who I am. Reducing everyone to the same person based on identities serves activists’ causes, but we are simply not all the same.

Artists have choices: they can use identity to blame, shame and divide, or they can use identity to bring people together, helping us see what we have in common, despite our differences. Most new theater I've seen that wades into identity expresses a contradiction that linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter identifies in Woke Racism: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people,” while simultaneously insisting, “You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.” McWhorter discusses only race, but the contradiction he pinpoints has been applied to various “oppressed” identities in several plays. This fashion is wearing itself out, but I fear it will leave behind a long-lasting stain of resentment, assuming an audience remains in its aftermath.

One of the four Wharton ghost stories I chose to include in Unearthly Visitants, “The Eyes,” featured a main character Wharton strongly suggests is homosexual. The story shows the cost he pays for not accepting himself. Anyone can identify with struggling for self-acceptance. Wharton didn’t wield homosexuality as a weapon to berate and alienate, she used it as a window to let readers experience the price paid for refusing to accept oneself. Theater should offer audiences more windows, and fewer mirrors merely reflecting back every audience member's identity.

Being an independent producer and director is hard, but rewarding. I choose who I work with, what we work on, and how we collaborate. It’s a lot of responsibility, but when things go right it feels great. It’s not what I imagined I’d be doing in my fifties, yet here I am, putting together my third production: an adaptation of Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We. Zamyatin is a true hero: a Bolshevik who left the party when it declared “all art must be useful to the movement,” he spoke out against party orthodoxy when doing so had mortal consequences. In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin wrote,

“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.” The same could be said of “true theater.”

I owe both the Westboro Baptist Church and Critical Social Justice activists heartfelt gratitude because their efforts backfired: instead of culling a gay, white, middle-aged artist from the field, they created a resourceful, resilient and persistent artist, committed to freedom of expression, fairness, a belief in common humanity, and hellbent on finding joy and fulfillment as a theater director – isn’t that a great thing.

And I haven’t given up my dream of getting a college or university teaching job. As the saying goes, “Don’t quit before the miracle.”

Epilogue: Calls to Action

Essays like this can make readers feel overwhelmed because things aren’t changing fast enough. Fear not–there are things you can do to help:

Like and follow artists whose work you support on social media;

Subscribe to Substacks and alternative publishing outlets like this one;

Write a letter to your local theater. If you see a show you liked, let them know. If they put on lousy shows, write a letter telling them you didn’t like what you saw and why;

Don’t give money to theatrical institutions putting on shallow morality plays. Instead, give money to organizations you like. Send a letter explaining why you didn’t contribute to the former’s annual fundraiser and why you did to the latter;

Keep in mind the saying, “Politics is downstream of culture.” If you care about the future of our country, get involved in the arts.

“I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.”

This is literally what they did in China. It's called a struggle session.

#We The Black Sheep #Kevin Ray #corruption of arts #the arts #social justice activism #critical social justice #ideological conformity #ideological capture #ideological corruption #Westboro Baptist Church #racial discrimination #woke racism #wokeness #woke #cult of woke #wokeism #wokeness as religion #politics is downstream of culture #religion is a mental illness

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hekateinhell · 2 years ago

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human aus of tvc are so much fun idk why people don't write them more often! i've had this plot bunny of l/a living in a ramshackle paris apartm. armand lives above lestat and he has this ruggish bf (santino?) and the guy isn't scared of armand's friend/neighbor bc he's never seen him & only heard he's gay, blonde and a ballet dancer so absolutely no threat right? Well SIKE bc one time he yells armand a lil too loud & suddenly his door is kicked open and a blonde beefcake has him in a chokehold

I actually think about the why part of this question a lot, because (obviously) I love a good AU! In my opinion, it's because of our fandom's very complicated history with fic that has continued to influence VC creator culture today. I think a lot of people do want to be creative and experiment, but (and maybe it's just me, I don't know) I get the feeling like collectively there's this sense of waiting for someone else to do it first that will indicate it's acceptable to play outside of the box.

Whether it's beyond writing the juggernaut ships (Loustat and Devil's Minion) or exploring kinks (this is a very kinky series, people!) or the endless possibilities of AUs, there's a certain audience for everything and I find people do respond pretty well to something different! It's always with a sense of surprise too, which I find funny and interesting and little sad, because it's nothing that you'd be batting an eye at in most other fandoms from what I can tell.

But because we're a fandom that only recently has started writing fic in the open (recently in comparison to our almost 40 years of existing), I feel like we're only just now starting to be that much more adventurous in a sense. You can talk openly, exchange content openly, it's a very different landscape than it was before. So I'm excited to see what the VC fic offerings will look like in a year or five years from now—it feels promising!

I got carried away lmao I HAVE THOUGHTS, but let's talk about this plot bunny. I just have to say... the image of Lestat kicking down Santino's door like the Big Bird gif laid me the fuck out. Anon, PLEASE. 😭 (Also not a bad analogy for how he came barging into Armand's cemetery self-imposed cell, from Armand's POV).

It's very sweet to think about Armand and Lestat starting off as friends! I always imagine that Amadeo and mortal!Lestat would've gotten along beautifully (they would have both fallen into the canal lbr). And Lestat's so protective of him in canon, it translates well. 🥹

Of course, Armand isn't going to tell his abusive boyfriend much about his friends and what he does when he's on his own. For a bit of a darker theme... maybe Santino's also his pimp? Armand doesn't tell Lestat any of this, he's too ashamed and hates appearing weak, and he just wants to forget his problems in the few moments where they can hang out on the front steps and share a snack and a cigarette. And Lestat might have his head in the clouds sometimes, but he's not stupid. He hears things, sees how Armand shrinks into himself and ignores him completely if Santino's around, won't speak unless told to, etc.

Lestat's young though, and not thinking how he might be worsening the situation by acting so rashly. Even though Armand's going to be grateful later, he's horrified in the moment knowing that Lestat's just made himself a target of Santino's gang in the future. And that Santino is going to think Armand's been running his mouth to Lestat and he or one of his buddies be taking it out on Armand the first chance they get.

Insert lots of drama, hurt/comfort, sex... Lestat and Armand eventually run away together and start over in New York City. Similar crappy apartment, only they're safe and together, and they live HEA.

~ fin

#this was a smorgasbord of a post #fandom thoughts #au thoughts #armand/lestat #vc #you ask and hekate answers

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phoenixyfriend · 2 years ago

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A and M for the end of year writing asks please

End of the Year Writing Meme!

A. If you could rec a piece of music to accompany one of your fics, what would you pick? Why?

This is a little cheesy but I feel like Hailee Steinfeld - Most Girls would be really nice with Shiny Rainbow Knife, since it's very much "fuck yeah, you're a girl, and you're awesome."

M. Meta! Have any meta about a story you’re dying to throw out there?

I feel like I've shared most of the meta for things I've written already??? Uhhhhhh okay, got one.

The Making of Mand'alor Kryze has a lot of question for 'how do we have this diaspora child remain connected to his mother's culture now that she's dead?' Obi-Wan goes for the equivalent of Sunday School, searching for a religious center that doubles as community center. The meta/lore part is actually that this is directly influenced by my experience as an immigrant and part of the Serbian diaspora of the 1990s.

I moved around a lot as a child, but I spent a huge chunk of it in the outer boroughs of NYC, and later Long Island. In that time, we went to the Saint Sava Church of New York City (Trinity Chapel Complex), first somewhat regularly, but later only a few times a year, due to it being several hours away depending on traffic. I don't remember a whole lot of theology or scripture. What I do remember, though, is that after a service, we would all filter out into the adjacent building, where there was food, holiday parties, a few pianos, sometimes poetry readings. For all that religion isn't a part of my life, I associate a lot of cultural memories with that church because it was one of the only places I could reliably see other members of the diaspora that weren't just my parents immediate friends.

(I did do Sunday School, actually. I got pulled from it for, among other things, asking too many questions.)

So in my eyes, a 'cultural center' is often specifically the religious center, and then things branch out from there. If you aren't a particularly large minority population, you don't get secular spaces other than a few restaurants. But you do, probably, have a church.

(Or used to. Saint Sava Church of NYC burned down in 2016 for reasons that are officially a mistake with the candles, but widely suspected to be arson. They're still working on building up the funds to rebuild.)

Now, the actual application to the story is different, because Korkie is more religious than I am, and there actually is a sizeable Mandalorian community, such that they can have their own neighborhood. It is, however, a good starting point for Korkie to connect with the nearest Mandalorians, and I'm imagining that Obi-Wan is a bit more invested in ensuring Korkie does know Satine's religion as a faith, not just in theory.

#star wars #the clone wars #Korkie Kryze #Obi Wan Kenobi #phoenix answers memes #diaspora

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reasoningdaily · 1 year ago

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The Atlantic: Are You Plagued by the Feeling That Everyone Used to Be Nicer?

I have a long-running argument with my brother. He insists that his children, who are growing up in New York City right now, are a lot less safe than we were as kids in the same neighborhood. I happen to know this is absurd, and I’ve tried for many years to convince him. I’ve shown him news reports, crime statistics. Once I even downloaded an FBI report showing without a doubt that New York was much more dangerous 30 years ago. But he is unmoved. He remembers our childhood as gentler, safer. And I have to admit—there are moments when I walk around my old neighborhood and see visions of the mailman tipping his hat to my 10-year-old self, and the neighbors smiling as I made my way home to dinner.

Why do so many of us have this feeling that when we were younger, people were nicer and more moral, and took care of one another better? An experimental psychologist named Adam Mastroianni had also been wondering about this persistent conviction and did a systematic study of the phenomenon recently published in Nature.

Mastroianni documents that this hazy memory is shared by many different demographics, and felt quite strongly. He explains how the illusion works and why it has such a hold on us. And most important, he explains how it can distort not just our personal relationships but our culture and politics. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Mastroianni and staff writer Julie Beck about the illusion of moral decline, and why it persists so strongly.

Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.

The following episode transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Hanna Rosin: So, Julie, you know—even though I get annoyed when other people say people used to be nicer, I kind of think I might feel that way too.

If I have a vision of my childhood and I’m walking down the street from the playground, I imagine all my neighbors saying, “Hi, little Hanna.” [Laughter.] And the mailman coming by, you know, and tipping his hat at me, and the old man walking his dog.

And, you know, I have no idea if this memory is accurate, but I definitely have that feeling that people were nicer.

Julie Beck: Did you grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? Or what was it?

Rosin: No; I actually grew up in Queens, New York. So it’s probably, certainly not true. [Laughter.]

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. I invited my colleague Julie Beck on to talk about something that’s always really bothered me. It’s when people talk about how things are so much worse today than they were in the past.

And they say things like “Neighbors used to be nicer, and everyone used to smile at you and help you out.” And sometimes it’s just grandpa chatter and you can pretty much ignore it. And then other times it turns into this “back when men were men and women were women”–type thing, which is more annoying.

Beck: There’s a benign wish to, like, tip your hat to the mailman. And then there’s a “Oh, we need to bring back the social order of the 1950s.” And then you’re like, “Whoa, how did we end up here?”

Julie analyzes psychological research and social trends, and she’s also the host of another Atlantic podcast, How to Talk to People.

And she’s here to help me understand this very interesting research that just emerged about this strong conviction people have that everything has gotten worse.

Adam Mastroianni: So my whole life, I’ve heard people say things like, “You used to be able to keep your doors unlocked at night,” or “You can’t trust someone’s word anymore.”

And I always chafed at those kinds of statements. So part of it was wanting to prove everybody wrong. But part of it, too, was like, Well, if they’re right, this is a big problem. And that’s kind of where we got started.

Rosin: That is Adam Mastroianni. He recently published a paper in Nature called “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” Adam is a psychologist, and he’s the author of the science blog Experimental History. And he spent a decade systematically studying why we feel things were better in the past … and what it means.

Mastroianni: I think my first year of graduate school was when Trump got elected. And so obviously it was a moment of “Make America Great Again” being sort of the vibe of the day.

Seeing claims that “The past was good, the present is bad, put me in charge and I can bring the good past back” also just made me see how this is much more than, you know, uncles and brothers-in-law and people on the internet saying these things— that these claims resonate with people, and they help put people in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, that’s my motivation for being interested in your research, because I have always had a kind of detached curiosity about why this line resonates so strongly.

Like, why is it that—and it’s not just American leaders, it’s leaders all over the world—they can just say, “Oh, things were better back then,” and it immediately clicks for people? Like, they don’t even have to explain it. You can just say, “You know, make America great again.” It’s like four words, and all the assumptions are immediately there for people.

Mastroianni: Yeah. When I give talks in an academic context about this paper, what I start with is the end of Trump’s inaugural speech, where he says, “You know, we’ll make America wealthy again and proud again and safe again and great again.” And I point out that the most important word in those sentences isn’t America or safe or proud or strong or great. It’s again.

Rosin: Yes!

Mastroianni: Just that word does a ton of work. Which is that: Well, if things used to be great but aren’t now, it means something changed. It implies that we can change it back. It evokes a sense of loss, but also a sense of possibility of restoring the loss.

Rosin: Yeah. And it is the word again. It’s like that one little word sort of resolves something emotionally for people. It’s hard to understand exactly how it works, but you say the word again, and everyone’s like, “Ah, you just filled a hole for me.” You know? What exactly do you mean when you say “moral decline,” and why, if it’s an illusion, does it feel so real?

Mastroianni: There are a few totally reasonable hypotheses about what people might think of when they talk about moral decline. It might be that everyone means, like, “I heard that the 1950s were a really good time. And so what I’m really telling you is things have declined since then.” Not that they got worse in the past 10 years; that they got worse, you know, 20 years ago or 50 years ago. And we’re just living in the bad times now.

In a later study, we asked people go back even further than that. “What about 20 years before that? What about 40 years before that?” And what they told us there is—“Before I arrived, nothing was happening. Things were good. Then I got born, and then things started to go downhill.”

And what’s especially interesting is: It doesn’t matter when you were born. So the people who were 30 told us it happened 30 years ago. The people who were 60 told us it happened 60 years ago.

Rosin: Wait, really? So literally, people think the decline began when they came on this earth?

Mastroianni: Yeah. So, I mean, we don’t ask, like, the day before or the day after. But the question that we asked was: “Rate how kind, honest, nice, and good people are today. What about the year in which you were 20?” And people told us it was better then.

“What about the year in which you were born?” And people told us it was even better then. And then we asked, “What about 20 years before that? And 40 years before that?”

And there’s no difference in people’s answers. That line is flat. It’s only when we asked about “20 years after your birth” that the line goes down.

Rosin: That is so interesting. I don’t think I fully grasped that. So people are projecting whatever personal difficulties or struggles of life—now maybe I’m extrapolating—onto the whole of humanity, like they’re protecting their own life span onto a historical, broader cultural, political life span.

Mastroianni: Yeah. And I mean, this is a bias of people’s memory, because you don’t have memories from before you were born. You do have memories from most of the time after you were born.

So it would make sense—if this is a memory bias—that it turns on sometime near the moment of your birth. Obviously not exactly then, but this would explain why we don’t see this for what people think about before they were born and after.

Rosin: Does it really not matter how young you are? The stereotype is obviously, you know, Grandpa Simpson. It’s like, older people are always talking about how things were better back then, but not necessarily younger people.

Mastroianni: Yeah; we totally expected to find that as well, and we didn’t really. So when you ask people about the decline that they have perceived over their lifetimes, there’s no difference in the decline that younger and older people perceive.

Rosin: Julie, I was surprised to hear that there wasn’t a difference between older people and younger people in terms of how they perceive this moral decline. I mean, you’re not an old person; you’re young. So do you remember ever having this feeling?

Beck: I distinctly remember I did not get a smartphone until I moved to D.C. in 2013. So in the years before that, when I lived in Chicago, I have a memory of having so many more interactions with strangers on the street.

And I definitely do not have those nearly as frequently anymore. And I think it’s just because we’re all looking at our phones, right? So part of me kind of romanticizes the, you know, chance encounters of the pre-smartphone era and all of that.

Rosin: Yeah. And when I hear you say that, I’m like, Oh, it’s fine for Julie to have that feeling, and it’s fine for me to have that feeling. But if I multiply it by a few million times, then I get this political movement of “Let’s go back to the era when things were better,” and that I don’t really like so much.

Beck: Yeah. One thing that this makes me think of, too, is a line of research that has found that social trust has actually been declining in the U.S. for decades. So people are essentially less and less likely to say that generally most other people can be trusted.

And so you’re totally right that there are really big political implications for thinking the past was better and people used to be more trustworthy.

For me, it feels like kind of a chicken-or-an-egg question. Like, do we trust people less because we believe they’ve gotten morally worse? Or do we believe people are worse because we’re more disconnected from our communities?

Mastroianni: We focused here on a pretty narrow question, which is, “Has the way that people treat one another in their everyday lives changed over time?” And do people think that it has?

This is a model of when things are bad, it’s easy for them to seem like they have gotten worse. And so I don’t think this is the only domain where we might find this illusion, because people say this about a lot of different parts of life.

You know: that art is worse than it used to be. That culture is worse than it used to be. That the education system is worse than it used to be. But it seems pretty clear to me that we are predisposed to believe that it’s true, even when it’s not.

Rosin: Your assumptions in this research are—people have this idea that a certain kind of morality has declined. But in your mind, it has not declined. So to you, this is like an illusion. I mean, you call it an illusion. Right?

Mastroianni: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So working within that assumption, what’s your explanation? Like, why would a majority of us be operating under a delusion/illusion? Like something that you’re saying is clearly not true.

Mastroianni: We think that there are two cognitive biases that can combine to produce this illusion. So this explanation has two parts. The first is what we call biased exposure, which is that people tend to attend to predominantly negative information, especially about people that they don’t know.

So this is both a combination of the information that they receive about people that they don’t know, which is primarily negative, and the information that they pay attention to. So this is why when you look out at the world beyond your personal world, it looks like it’s full of people who are doing bad things. They’re lying and cheating and stealing and killing.

The second part of the explanation is what we call biased memory. Memory researchers have noticed that the badness of bad memories tends to fade faster than the goodness of good memories.

So if you got turned down for your high-school prom, it feels pretty bad at the time. Twenty years later, it’s maybe a funny story. If you have a great high-school prom, it feels pretty good at the time. And 20 years later, it’s still a pretty nice memory. It doesn’t feel as nice as it did to experience it, but it still feels pretty nice.

And that turns out to be, on average, what happens to people’s memories: that the bad ones inch toward neutral faster than the good ones do, And the bad ones are more likely to both be forgotten and to become good in retrospect.

Beck: So when I read the paper, Hanna, I wondered whether what might be going on is that people are, to some degree, picking up on a real change in the world.

There’s the decline of social trust—but also widespread loneliness and disconnection and the erosion of community life, in the sense of fewer people knowing their neighbors and declining membership in community organizations.

And all of those things definitely have an impact on people’s personal lives. But I think it manifests as a vague feeling like, Oh, it’s just harder to make friends or harder to feel like I’m a part of my community.

So I wonder if we’re feeling this sort of vague and troubling sense of disconnection and assigning it a false explanation: that things used to be better before, and people just suck more than they used to.

Rosin: Oh, that’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is the feeling is real. Like, the feeling that something has changed is real because something has changed. There is more disconnection and loneliness.

So instead we make up this very tidy story. Like, “When I was a kid, things were better and people were nicer and the mailman tipped his hat”—and we just kind of stopped there.

Beck: Yeah; there definitely are real things that are really happening that would make people feel disconnected from strangers around them. And I wonder if, yeah, we just have a hard time psychologically, knowing why that’s the case.

Rosin: So Adam, I want to run a couple of theories by you. One is the possibility that something has actually changed. And we’re just calling it by the wrong name. That, like, something has declined. And this is from a different body of psychological research about social trust.

That there is a change in our isolation, our sense of connectedness, our face-to-ace contact. Like there are some societal changes which are real and structural and have kind of left a hole in us that we are misnaming morality.

When we read it here, we thought there are some things that are changing and that do leave us a little despairing—and maybe we’re just calling them by the wrong name.

Mastroianni: Yeah.

Rosin: Like we have this incredibly powerful feeling that something is wrong, and that “something” is connectedness or community or something like that.

Mastroianni: Yeah. So it’s very easy to slip from “People are less kind than they used to be” to “Things are worse than they used to be.” And so it is true that trust in institutions has declined over time. A lot of people also say that interpersonal trust has declined over time. And I actually think that case is much more overstated than the decline in institutional trust.

There’s some work by a guy named Richard Eibach on how people think the world has gotten more dangerous. And he finds that people believe this. And the people who believe this, especially, are parents. And when you ask those parents “When did the world become more dangerous?,” you get a date that is curiously close to the date of the birth of their first child.

The obvious implication being that nothing about the world changed. It was your worldview that changed. And now you have to, you know, protect this fragile life—and so you are much more attuned to the dangers of the world. That’s why you think there’s more of them.

Rosin: You know, Julie, I have this conversation with my brother all the time, and he’s always telling me his kids aren’t safe. He lives in New York. He’s like, “My kids aren’t safe. They can’t go outside. They can’t go down the block.” Like, he really freaks out, you know? And: “It’s way less safe than it was when we were kids.” And I’m like, “Dude, we grew up in New York in the ’70s, right?” It was really not safe.

Beck: Like, statistically.

Rosin: Statistically. And I’ve shown him news articles, and I once pulled out an FBI report. I specially downloaded an FBI report that showed, you know, crime statistics in New York from when we were kids.

And his conviction is so strong about this. I can’t budge him. I can’t show him enough numbers or statistics to make him think, Oh, things aren’t worse now.

I mean, Adam Mastroianni actually has a term for this. This is a little mean to my brother, but his term is unearned conviction. And I think what he means by that is exactly this. It’s like: Your conviction is incredibly strong, even though you have really no basis to back up the story that you’re attaching to that very strong conviction.

Beck: Yeah. I mean it seems like, regardless of the FBI report, the story your brother is telling himself is super-emotionally resonant.

Rosin: Yes.

Beck: And the stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives really do sort of shape who we are. It’s really interesting, because when we tell these stories to ourselves about our personal lives, a lot of times those stories fall into one of two categories. One being redemptive and the other being contamination.

And so a redemptive story is like: “I have suffered through these trials and come out stronger for it, and things are looking up.” Whereas a contamination story is like: “These trials have conquered me, and I am now broken and fundamentally a worse person.”

And it probably won’t surprise you to hear that contamination sequences are not great for people’s mental health. That research was done with stories that we’re telling about our personal lives. But it feels like we’re kind of telling a contamination story about all of humanity.

Rosin: I guess what’s depressing to me is: Why are those the ones that stick? I mean, there are redemption stories that are popular in American society.

But I feel like in a lot of moments in history, and now is one of them, these contamination stories—like “America was great once” or “Russia was great once”—have a particular kind of emotional juice and can really rally people.

Beck: Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s kind of like your brother’s fear in New York, right? Where it’s just like—that is so viscerally emotional. It’s the safety of your kid. And so, of course, that’s going to have like a way stronger impact.

Rosin: Now Adam, did you find any appreciable differences between demographics? So if not between old and young people, what about gender differences, or people with different political ideologies?

Mastroianni: We didn’t find any gender differences. We didn’t find any differences by racial groups. We didn’t find any education differences. The only other demographic difference that we found was an ideological one, a political one. The people who self-identified as more conservative perceived more decline over time than the people who self-identified as liberal.

But even for the people who were the most liberal, they still said that people are less kind today than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or whatever point in the past. So this is something that conservatives said louder, but liberals said as well.

Rosin: So someone who identifies as a liberal could believe that there’s less racism and sexism—but still believe that those other general universal markers of morality have declined.

Mastroianni: Yes. And in fact, it seems like they do. In our studies, the much smaller group of people who say that people are better now than they used to be—when we asked them “Why? What were you thinking of?,” one thing that does come up for them is there’s more tolerance. There’s less racism, sexism, ableism; all the isms.

So it seems like that’s not what people are spontaneously thinking of when they say that people are less kind than they used to be. Because if you ask them directly, “Do you think that, for instance, people treat African Americans with more respect and courtesy or less than in the past?,” a majority of people will say more today than in the past.

But if you ask them, “Are people more or less kind today?,” they’ll go less kind. So this is not what they’re thinking of when they answer the question.

Rosin: Yeah. So it’s a really, really specific feeling. I definitely think that people treat each other with more respect, largely because we have broadened the window of who is allowed to be respected, and sort of patriarchal notions of control over people’s bodies and who gets to make decisions. I mean, there’s so many ways in which we have opened the door to fairness and equity. I’d much rather be alive today than 50 years ago, for sure.

Mastroianni: Yeah, I agree. And so I think it was especially surprising that I’m sure there are many other people who agree. But even some of the people who do agree—they seem to think like, Yeah, but that actually doesn’t come from people’s heart of hearts. That they’re actually still worse to one another now than they used to be.

Yeah; they’ll say all the right things or they’ll have the right opinions. But you know, they won’t hold the door open for you, or they’ll cheat you when they can. Now people know the right things to say, but they still do more of the bad things.

Rosin: Do we feel the same way with people we know? Does it play out differently in our personal lives?

Mastroianni: You can actually also produce an illusion of improvement. You actually primarily hear good things and experience good things about people that you know. And so we thought that in your personal world, this illusion of decline might be turned down or turned off or even reversed.

And people told us: “People in general? Worse today than they were 15 years ago. People that I have known for the last 15 years? Better today than they were 15 years ago.”

Rosin: So Julie, one thing that Adam found that I thought was so interesting was that people we know—like our own people, people we’re close to or whatever—they’re somehow getting better over time, and yet the general public are getting worse. I don’t quite understand how those fit together.

Beck: So I guess we just think the moral decline is happening with strangers, with all those other people.

Rosin: Right.

Beck: And it seems like potentially the disconnection from community that many people are experiencing could just mean that we’re slotting more people into the “morally compromised, untrustworthy” category.

Rosin: Right. Like, if we met more people and we had more casual acquaintances and we went to our bowling leagues or whatever, then we might include more people in that circle of people we know. And those people are good people. So that could sort of spiral upward rather than what’s happening, which is a momentum downward.

Beck: Adam’s study kind of seems to say that if you get to know people, then you won’t think they’re on a downward slope of moral depravity anymore.

Rosin: For one thing, Adam, it sounds to me like the problem is that people are absolutely certain. Like they’re not questioning. Was the past a worse place? It’s a sort of lack of humility. Because if you try to understand, “Well, maybe what did get worse?,” then you would come up with more specific and useful policy solutions.

I mean, I assume one reason you did this research is to point out a mistake. Like, we’re all living under this delusion. And in your head—since you sound like a fairly optimistic person—is it “knowledge is power,” and people will know, and then they will stop? What’s the aim, or what’s your wish here?

Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, as a psychologist I a little bit despair of changing people’s minds, because I know how difficult it is. It doesn’t work the way that we think that it works, like, “Oh, you have the wrong model of the world. How about I give you the correct facts, and now you have the correct model of the world?” When does that ever happen? When has that ever happened to me? Like, never.

And one effect that I certainly hope that this has is: Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, and put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.

Beck: So, Hanna, now that we know this is an illusion, right, that’s very interesting. But will it actually change how you feel?

Rosin: I don’t really know. I mean, I feel like as a journalist, it depresses me a little bit because I spent a lot of time researching and marshaling facts, like I did with my brother. And to think that emotions ultimately squash all of that—I don’t really know what to do with that.

Beck: Yeah.

Rosin: But in my own personal life, awareness is helpful. I don’t think any bad can come from understanding your own emotional levers better. It’s not that it immediately leads to a change, but I don’t think it can ever be bad to understand, Oh, I’m having this emotional attachment or strong belief, and that’s leading me to behave in this way. That in and of itself is a small daily miracle. So that’s good enough.

Rosin: Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni and Julie Beck, and if you generally like learning about these psychological levers that are guiding our choices, Julie hosts a full season of conversations much like this one, on the Atlantic podcast How to Talk to People. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

#Are You Plagued by the Feeling That Everyone Used to Be Nicer?

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ireadyabooks · 2 years ago

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Celebrate Galentine’s Day with our fave strong, female protagonists! 💞

In the words of Miley Cyrus: “I can buy myself flowers!” 🌹 Celebrate self-love & female friendship this Galentine’s Day with our fave leading ladies in YA! 💘

ELIZA: THIS TIME IT’S REAL

When seventeen-year-old Eliza Lin’s essay about meeting the love of her life unexpectedly goes viral, her entire life changes overnight. Now she has the approval of her classmates at her new international school in Beijing, a career-launching internship opportunity at her favorite magazine…and a massive secret to keep. Eliza made her essay up. She’s never been in a relationship before, let alone in love. All good writing is lying, right?

Desperate to hide the truth, Eliza strikes a deal with the famous actor in her class, the charming but aloof Caz Song. She’ll help him write his college applications if he poses as her boyfriend. Caz is a dream boyfriend -- he passes handwritten notes to her in class, makes her little sister laugh, and takes her out on motorcycle rides to the best snack stalls around the city.

But when her relationship with Caz starts feeling a little too convincing, all of Eliza’s carefully laid plans are threatened. Can she still follow her dreams if it means breaking her own heart?

DAISY: YOU, ME, AND OUR HEARTSTRINGS

Daisy and Noah have the same plan: use the holiday concert to land a Julliard audition. But when they're chosen to play a duet for the concert, they worry that their differences will sink their chances.

Noah, a cello prodigy from a long line of musicians, wants to stick to tradition. Daisy, a fiercely independent disabled violinist, is used to fighting for what she wants and likes to take risks. But the two surprise each other when they play. They fall perfectly in tune.

After their performance goes viral, the rest of the country falls for them just as surely as they're falling for each other. But viral fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. No one seems to care about their talent or their music at all. People have rewritten their love story into one where Daisy is an inspiration for overcoming her cerebral palsy and Noah is a saint for seeing past it.

Daisy is tired of her disability being the only thing people see about her, and all of the attention sends Noah’s anxiety disorder into high speed. They can see their dream coming closer than it’s ever been before. But is the cost suddenly too high?

LEELA: DEBATING DARCY

This Pride & Prejudice retelling brings New York Times bestselling Sayantani DasGupta’s trademark wit and insight to her bright and funny YA debut!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Leela Bose plays to win.

A life-long speech competitor, Leela loves nothing more than crushing the competition, all while wearing a smile. But when she meets the incorrigible Firoze Darcy, a debater from an elitist private school, Leela can’t stand him. Unfortunately, he’ll be competing in the state league, so their paths are set to collide.

But why attempt to tolerate Firoze when Leela can one-up him? The situation is more complicated than Leela anticipated, though, and her participation in the tournament reveals that she might have tragically misjudged the debaters -- including Firoze Darcy -- and more than just her own winning streak is at stake…her heart is, too.

Debating Darcy is bestselling author Sayantani DasGupta’s reinterpretation of beloved classic Pride and Prejudice -- imaginative, hilarious, thought-provoking, and truly reflective of the complex, diverse world of American high school culture.

CICELY: A GIRL’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MAGIC

Perfect for fans of The Sun Is Also a Star and Blackout, this YA novel from Debbie Rigaud is a celebration of Haitian and Caribbean culture, and a story of first love, vodou, and finding yourself, all set against the backdrop of the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn.

Cicely Destin lives for the West Indian Day Parade, the joyous celebration of Caribbean culture that takes over the streets of her neighborhood. She loves waving the Haitian flag, sampling delicious foods, and cheering for the floats. And this year? She’ll get to hang with her stylish aunt, an influencer known for dabbling in Haitian Vodou.

And maybe spot her dreamy crush, Kwame, in the crowd.

But fate has other ideas. Before the parade, a rogue, mischievous spirit seems to take possession of Cicely's aunt during a spiritual reading. Cicely hardly knows anything about Vodou, or how to get someone un-possessed. But it’s up to her to set things right--and the clock is ticking. She'll have to enlist the help of her quick-thinking best friend, Renee, and, as luck would have it...Kwame.

Cicely, her friends, and the reckless spirit who is now their charge set off on a thrilling scavenger hunt to gather the ceremonial items they need. And along the way, will Cicely discover surprising powers of her on?

#galentinesday #valentines day #romancebooks #yabooks #ireadya #teenbooks

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nuttysaladtree · 4 months ago

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(sighs) OK, so this is from a March 2, 2014 Reddit post by Sl33pT3rr0r in r/funny. In a comment, they clarify:

For everyone who is curious, The Friendly Toast in Portsmouth, NH puts olives on their fish burrito.

To those, ten years ago and now, asking who puts olives on their burritos, I feel like you're asking less about taste and more about authenticity. So I'm just going to quote John Paul Brammer on this.

In "Food Fight!" a July 18, 2023 post on his ¡Hola Papi! Substack, he sympathizes with those "wary of interlopers into their culture, people who will denigrate their cuisine one day and be celebrated the next for adding peas to it in a recipe for the New York Times or something" (italics original). Yet cooks or chefs with family ties to the region in question are punished for innovation:

Back in 2019, when I was smarter, I wrote about the Authenticity Trap, or the expectation on restaurants, particularly those serving Mexican or Chinese cuisine, to meet the criteria for what constitutes an "authentically ethnic" experience. In the essay, I discussed how Mexican restaurants in the U.S. will be punished for daring to experiment with recipes, as in the case of a Kansas City eatery founded by an immigrant from Guadalajara that garnered negative reviews for frying taco shells with Parmesan cheese, an ingredient sourced from nearby Italian-American establishments.

Brammer also mentions that a lot of what we consider classic dishes of a cuisine are much less old than we imagine (citing tiramisu and use of tomatoes in Italian cuisine). I myself have also fallen in the trap of considering Chinese American food inferior to Chinese food when they're just...different. Chinese American food should be evaluated on its own merits: that it allowed a marginalized people to thrive in an discriminatory environment hostile to them and, like many other immigrant-American cuisines, shows adaptability of their traditions to new ingredients and new customers.

That said: what a cute little doodle. Even without it, I, too, would prefer no olives in my fish burrito. Find olives too salty and overpowering, especially if the fish itself is cooked and seasoned thoroughly. But if someone else likes it: in matters of taste, there is no dispute.

#food #r/funny #the friendly toast #portsmouth #fish burrito #olives #Sl33pT3rr0r #john paul brammer #hola papi #authenticity trap #my-hobby-is-finding-the-source #<- last tag not for sitewide searching #edited post for clarity

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sweetprincess156 · 2 hours ago

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If you could have a house in any country, where would you buy it?

Oh that's a good question 👍 there are several countries I would like to live in.

1. I am a German girl and I love Germany and I like living here. My roots, my friends, my family and there are really many beautiful places here.

2. Spain: I loooove Spain - especially Andalusia. I've been there several times and I especially like the landscape away from the big cities. I love the small white villages and the Spanish culture and food

3. St. Lucia: This is a small, dreamy Caribbean island with white beaches, blue water and relaxed people. I love the sea and the sun - so this island would be a hot favorite :)

4. USA: The USA is big but I like the lifestyle. New York, San Francisco, Chicago and the many natural wonders are fantastic. I could imagine living there too.

5. Australia: I have relatives in Australia, but unfortunately I've never been there. One day I want to travel there. It looks fantastically beautiful in the pictures. People there also live differently than in Europe and they have a relaxed attitude to life

There are many exciting countries, such as Namibia, South Africa, Indonesia. When I have enough money, I would like to travel to all of them and see them all.

In conclusion, I would say: I really like living in Germany, but a small house in Andalusia and a second one in St. Lucia would be great :) Maybe I'll marry a rich man someday :)

#sweetprincess

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tommyandlala · 2 months ago

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Editor’s Note: This is being posted a day late, we are now in Nepal, not Japan.

We’ve been in Japan for ten days now, but that time feels like it’s been either a blink or lifetime. We’ve seen and done so much already- experienced more Japanese culture in a few days than most will in a lifetime - while knowing full well that we’ve barely scratched the surface. And hell, we are certainly not in Kansas anymore. To say things are different here is like saying that fire is different than water; that the drab plastic facade of a cookie-cutter apartment building is different than hand-cut stone of a fountain adorning the entrance to a thousand year old wood temple. Can you guess which country is which in this analogy?

It’s a feeling that I vaguely understood about Japan before we left and was hit over the head with upon arrival. How not only is the architecture of Japan’s physical world different, but how much the shared history, traditions, and values of the people influence everyday life in a way I’m not used to at all. And maybe it’s because we’re coming from the US, where you can feel yourself living through a fading empire’s swan song. Where products and apps and technology and transportation and public space (and often people, government, and culture writ large) not only never work the way they’re supposed to, but, by and large, exist solely to take your money.

But I digress, we are not talking about the stars and stripes, we’re talking about the land of the rising sun. And it has been beyond refreshing to experience a culture that invests in making things work for its people. Utility and practicality are baked into every aspect of life. This applies to the most visible parts of Japanese life, from a train system that is extensive and frequent to some of the cleanest streets that I have ever seen. Tokyo’s population is almost twice that of New York City’s, yet I saw all of three pieces of trash and two people sleeping on the street while we were there. Obviously, figuring out how to ensure such a massive, densely-populated area stays looking good is not simply a logistical problem to solve but a matter of customs and shared values. A culture of respect, honor, and emphasis on consensus goes a long way to ensuring that society functions as smoothly as possible. There aren’t public trash cans anywhere, but there’s also no trash on the street. That’s because everyone, collectively, cares enough to pack garbage out with them and not leave it on the street.

And that’s just one small aspect of the culture that feels different in a thoughtful, positive way that works for everyone. How about the fact that my Japan Rail tap card also works as a debit card when buying food at 7-Eleven? And why is 7-Eleven selling such delicious pre-made meals? By delicious I’m not talking about a hotdog that’s been furiously spinning on greased rollers under an aggressive heat lamp for the last twelve hours. These are noodle bowls with veggies and chicken, fish wrapped in rice and seaweed, squid and brocolli salad, or a simple egg salad sandwich on the fluffiest bread you’ve ever had in your life. All for a few bucks a piece. And they exist not only because of the demand (people want a convenient, cheap, and consistent snack) but because even at the corporate level there’s a principle in creating something of value for the consumer without price-gouging or eschewing quality. It feels like what I imagine growing up in the American post-war years must have felt like: high quality goods and services; products made with care and designed to last; things that serve a legitimate purpose - and all for a price that’s affordable to most working people.

Ok I could go on like this forever, commenting on all the fun, confusing, big, and small differences between cultures, but I’m getting carried away and I don’t think the point of this blog was to be a deep dive on how Japanese culture creates a more benevolent form of capitalism. So I’ll end by saying that obviously none of this is an original thought. No doubt a million other Westerners have remarked about these very same cultural differences upon their first trip to Japan. What I’ve realized is that there’s a gulf between reading someone else talk about it and actually experiencing it yourself. And crossing that gulf.. well folks, we call that traveling.

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kathleenkatmary · 2 months ago

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Silent Short Sunday Mornings: 9/15/2024 Ratings, Reviews, and Rankings

Check out my ratings, reviews, and rankings for all of the movies I've watched for Silent Shorts Sunday Mornings so far at my letterboxd.

Click the title of each short to watch on Youtube.

01. Skyscrapers of New York (1906): 4/5

I really love the opening establishing shot of NYC. I can imagine some might say that it lingers too long, but since this movie is about people building skyscrapers, I feel like that opening shot showing the buildings of New York and just how much a part of the city's identity skyscrapers are is important.

This is similar to The Tunnel Workers in that there is a narrative here, but there's a lot of time dedicated to just showing people working at this real location and how everything operates. There are some big differences though, particularly in he way that Skyscrapers doesn't take the diversion into a constructed set that leans into the fantastical.

All of the scenes that take place at the skyscraper location seem to have been filmed at an actual skyscraper that was being constructed. And I think it's all done in an extremely clever way. Much of that time early on where we're just seeing the way the construction site operates without any narrative is used to establish the suspense of the climax, where the two men get into a brawl on the top of the construction site. I imagine that they used some simple and clever tricks to keep the performers safe (like, I'm betting they weren't just brawling on the beams super high in the air). But because we saw the site operating like an actual construction site, seeing how high up everyone was while working, seeing multiple men hanging off of a crane while it dangles in the sky, with the real city in the background to show just how off the ground they are, it cements the danger of the location in our heads. And that makes the tension and danger in that final confrontation feel extremely palpable and real.

So yeah, the narrative here is pretty flat and forgettable, but I'm okay with that because I think that it does such an incredible job of using its location to sell the tension and fear of what the narrative leads up to. It's such an incredible way of constructing the story around the location.

I also have a lot of appreciation for this as a piece of history. The 1900s really was when New York City started to look and feel like the kind of city we know it as today, and so much of that comes from the skyscraped boom of this time period. Having these great shots of New York City, especially as part of a narrative film rather than a travelogue, is so special. And centering the story on the skyscraper serves as an example for just how much skyscrapers were a part of the popular culture at the time.

The rest of the reviews are behind the cut...

02. The Tunnel Workers (1906): 3.5/5

I found this one really interesting, but for its sets/aesthetics more than its narrative (though I do have some thoughts about that as well). Outside of bookend scene that take place at the characters' home, the entire film takes place at the location of the tunnel. But that time is split. We start at the above ground part of the location, which looks to be a real location. It really does seem to have been an actual operation site. I suppose it could just be a really good set, but I don't think it is. Because once we get underground, that IS a constructed set, and any idea of realism is pretty much thrown to the wayside. It creates such an interesting juxtaposition, especially since we spend a considerable amount of the runtime at the above ground part of the location, just watching how things operate.

And then when we get underground, the set looks a lot closer to something you'd find in one of Melies's fantasy shorts than the simple reality of what we've just seen above. I think this was the good way to go, because I doubt they would have been able to succeed at making the tunnel look starkly realistic (and I imagine they wouldn't have been able to film in an actual tunnel of this type), so leaning into the artificial and somewhat fantastic feeling probably did work better. But I also think it works well for the narrative. It's when we get underground that the emotion of the story really kicks in and we get the emotional confrontation between the two men. So I think having the set look and feel more fantastical in nature really highlights those heightened emotions.

And that brings me to my thoughts on the narrative. I'm still kind of torn on how it all shakes out. Ultimately, it feels like there's a lot of runtime dedicated to showing stuff that really has nothing to do with the story. We spend quite a bit of time at the above ground part of the tunnel, and during that time we're mostly just seeing how it operates. I think that's fascinating to watch, but it's kind of a strange choice for the narrative and I don't know how I feel about it.

Overall, though, I think this ended up being a really creative and original way to tell a story that could have easily been straightforward and kind of dull otherwise. 03. The Hilarious Posters (1906): 3.5/5

When you watch a lot of silent shorts, Melies's stuff, as impressive as his effects were, can start to feel really repetitive. Eventually it does start to feel like the same stuff over and over, with either no plot or plots that exist simply to justify the effects.

So I found The Hilarious Posters a nice change of pace for him. It's a simple narrative framing, a bunch of posters essentially coming to life. But it does feel more like he had the idea and then found the effects and such to make it happen rather than the other way around.

And I really like how he did it. There are multiple posters coming to life at once, and it seems to be a combination of practical set construction for some of the posters and superimposition for others. I really appreciated that he used different techniques for different posters and went with practical on-set stuff where it would work rather than option for special editing effects for everything.

This is a nice change of pace for Melies.

04. Harlequin's Story (1907): 3.5/5

I feel like movies like this from the silent era are uniquely European, that they never could have been made in the US. While there are a few scenes that take place on constructed sets (which carry a nice dark fairy tale feel to them), I think what really sells the fairy tale feeling of so much of this is the fact that some of the outdoor scenes seem to have been shot in locations with actual castles.

Overall, I think that's what really stand out in this short. That fantasy fairy tale feeling really shines through. There is a kind of horrific moment that I don't think was meant to be where the main character is collecting the body parts of his beloved-turned-doll, but outside of that one moment everything else really feels distinctly and palpably "fairy tale".

Narratively, it's a lot more iffy. I feel like it would have been better served by more time establishing the relationship between the main character and his beloved before she's captured and he has to rescue her. That would have allowed for a more solid narrative an a better emotional resonance. There's a lot of time at the end dedicated just to dancing and stuff like that, and it's shot pretty uncreatively, which is a shame considering how well shot I think the rest of the piece is. So that time would have probably been better spent on building the narrative a bit more.

05. Passionate Drama (1906): 3.5/5

Okay, first thing's first… were 1906 swans just a lot more chill than swans now? Because I know from personal experience that if swans even so much as suspect that you might have food they get VERY aggressive. Those swans were too chill.

As for the actual movie… Pretty flat for something that's literally called "Passionate Drama". But I actually have some more thoughts on this one.

I'm really torn on the intertitle cards. While I think that intertitle cards are a great way to add a lot to a movie when used creatively, I also think that they can be incredibly effective when they're short and to the point throughout the entirety of a piece. That's how there's used here. The copy I watched didn't have English translations of the French intertitle cards, but because they were so brief and to the point I was able to pretty much get the gist of them. But this is a case where I think they would have worked better being a littler more flowery or over the top. Again, I have to point out that this is called "Passionate Drama", so the cards really could have been a good way to inject some of that passion and drama into everything else.

I think the bones of this story are good and there was a lot of potential here for a solid drama. Considering where the story goes, the wrong done to the main character by the man needs to be something that can really get us on her side. So I think making it more than just "she love him and they're together for awhile but then he leaves to marry someone for money" by adding a child to the mix, which makes the situation so much worse in multiple ways, really does that. It creates a solid justification for the way the main character feels.

The thing I appreciated most was just how it ended. I suspect some of that has to do with the fact that this is a French short rather than an American on. I'm so used to seeing films from this era being extremely moralistic in their storytelling, taking stories like this and making them about being a good person and doing the right thing and suffering making them better. So it's actually really refreshing to see something that doesn't do that. I feel like if this was from America it would just be a lot of the woman struggling in abject poverty with her child, wallowing in heartbreak and still loving the man from afar, but never hating him and never thinking of revenge, and then like making some awful martyr choice to like, raise his kid he had with the other woman or something. I love that instead of that kind of stuff she is presented as not just heartbroken, but angry, and rightfully so, that she takes such huge revenge, and that the movie then just ends without any kind of punishment or moralizing. It's a lot more satisfying to see a piece of shit man get what's coming to him rather than watching the woman who didn't so anything wrong be the one to suffer.

So yeah, this is extremely flat and lacking in any kind of emotion, but the basics of the story are doing so much that I appreciate that I can't help but really like this one and give it a pretty solid rating.

06. Silver Wedding (1906): 3/5

Really, when you think about, stealing gifts from a wedding is kind of the perfect kind of heist for a silent short, because it's not really something that needs a lot of planning and logistics, so it's something that can be showcased in a short runtime. I do think, though, that the drawback of that is the fact that a lot of the fun of heist and caper type stories is the planning and seeing the logistics and how they figure out to make it work. It's a lot less fun just seeing a couple of guys locking a door and filling their bag with stuff.

That doesn't mean this isn't fun, though. I think the scenes that bookend the actual 'heist' are where a lot of the entertainment of the short comes from. Getting to see everyone in this group of cheats and thieves getting ready for their scams and schemes, and then coming home with their spoils.

Really, I think the idea here was creative and fun, but there could have been more done with it, even with the limitations of filmmaking in 1906.

07. The Paymaster (1906): 3/5

A nice little drama that, unfortunately, can get a little hard to follow at points due to how poor the quality of the print is. It can make it difficult to tell characters apart sometimes. But even with that minor inconvenience, in the end it's still pretty clear what's going on in the narrative.

The shot composition here is nice, though everything being filmed in static wide shots does kind of kill moments that could be more suspenseful. Still, it's clear there was a lot of thought put into precisely how to frame the shots. Almost everything takes place outdoors (if I recall correctly there's only one scene that doesn't), and there are some really great locations, in terms of both just how lovely the outdoor scenery is and the choice of location made for each scene.

Overall I'd say this is a decent narrative short for 1906.

08. An Obstacle Course (1906): 2.5/5

Sam Reich should use this short as inspiration for an episode of Game Changer.

This is an interesting twist on the 'chase' comedy, which by 1906 was already pretty old hat for film. So it is nice to see a take on that kind of story that's centered on people willingly taking part in a silly 'chase' for fun and a prize rather than some wild comedy of errors. But because the whole premise is based around a voluntary obstacle course, so much of the things that typically make chase comedies work, like the escalation of chaos, just don't exist here.

It's all shot outside, though, so there are some great location shots.

09. Bobby and His Family (1906): 2.5/5

The coloring here is quite nice. It's clear that it was very carefully done as it's a lot more precise than a lot of other hand colored shorts from this era.

Everything else is pure nightmare fuel.

10. The Stepmother (1906): 2/5

Kind of a reverse Cinderella, but without the fantasy aspects to take the edge of off what really is an upsettingly realistic story. With the camerawork just being static wide shots, and without and kind of narrative flourishes, this really does just feel like a documenting of bad situation, so I really don't know how to feel about it.

#silent film #classic film #1900s film #1906 film #george melies #alice guy blache #film #movies #silent movies #classic movies #silent shorts #silent short films #silent short movies #short film #silent cinema #lists #my movie and tv stuff

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radiomonkeys2 · 3 months ago

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~PajamaJames

An infographic about the city of Atomsk on Planet Kollidor, starring the Titanist teacher and martial arts master Amota Kundorog

Atomsk is renowned on Kollidor and off-planet alike as one of the great landmarks of this particular stellar system, though tourism is discouraged unless you're simply coming to watch one of the many blood-fights taking place.

Atomsk is not a very welcoming place on any given day, and never was supposed to be much more than a hive of villainy and evildoers.

The original inciting idea for Atomsk dates back to 2015 around the time of the proto-Yabanverse, when I imagined the idea of what cities and cultures on Planet Vegeta might be like and inevitably came upon the idea that, if Saiyan women were so strong-willed and allegedly mighty, surely Saiyan Amazons had to exist in no-small number (respective to the small population of Saiyans, that is) and they must have formed their own spaces. Indeed, while I did not like Gine very much, one thing many people oft overlook about her and the implication of Saiyan non-combatants is that it appears that Saiyans are not leisurely like humans (or Tsufruians). Saiyans did not have air-travel, mini-malls, or cappuccinos— Gine, despite being a complete weakling, still seemed to be part of the Vegetan proletariat, suggesting that if nothing else, Saiyans were almost entirely segregated between workers and warriors with no other real definable classes— there didn't seem to be artisans, consumers, farmers, etc (then again, Toriyama never concerned himself with worldbuilding, so that might just be the implication). Either way, the point I took away was that if Saiyan women were indeed generally weaker than Saiyan men and less cut out for combat as Toriyama seemed to imply, that still meant they were almost entirely laborers, and not even service or professionals like we tend to view human women as being, but rather legitimately heavy laborers much like blue-collar men.

Of course, again, there is no actual evidence of this, only headcanon, but like with so many other ideas, I ran with this for the Yabans to create bollois (whose name literally stems to "industrial/heavy laborer person"). Heavy/blue collar laborer culture tends to share many similarities across the world, being very macho and tough, so that bled into those early ideas for bollois as well, leading directly to the current conception of them. And a side effect of that was the idea that bollois would be the primary builders of whatever cities were on the otherwise primeval, ultra-ultraviolent planet of Kollidor, and if that was the case, it just felt natural for some kind of "Martian Rome" aesthetic for them.

The general rule of thumb that "if bollois were male, we'd call this for what it really is" remains in play here. Atomsk being the "Anti-Themyscira" doesn't mean it's a rival city-state to Themyscira or anything, but that its context and values contrasts so sharply with Themyscira that it shows the difference in mindset between bollois and women.

In one Yabanverse AU, a "New Atomsk" is constructed on Earth-Prime when a colony of Yabans are exiled there in the mid 1940s, and it follows the same principles. This 'Nova Atomsk' is a place I used as a sort of "Anti-New York City" rather than "Anti-Themyscira," especially when that particular AU develops into the 1970s, and the overwhelming martiality and asexual laconic ruggedness of Nova Atomsk clashes fiercely with the decadence and hypersexual hedonistic decay of NYC. I may do more with that in the near future, because my love of sociology and politics makes the concept of "Yabans, especially bollois and yenois, in the conservative mid-20th century" inherently fascinating.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

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By: David Moulton

Published: Mar 10, 2023

Last month, GLAAD wrote an open letter to The New York Times protesting the paper’s coverage of trans issues. In particular, the group took issue with the way the paper has covered medical sex changes or “gender affirmation” for minors. Contrary to clinicians and experts quoted in the Times, GLAAD asserted the science behind this practice is “SETTLED.” The letter was co-signed by a wide array of human rights groups as well as celebrities like Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow.

GLAAD is a media watchdog group that was founded in the ’80s to protest what they saw as the media’s homophobic coverage of the AIDS crisis. Their name was originally an acronym for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, but in 2013 they formally dropped the words “gay and lesbian” to reflect their advocacy for transgender people and the broader “LGBTQ community.” This shift in emphasis has been typical of gay rights organizations over the past decade, as what was once a movement focused on securing the rights and safety of gay men and women has transformed into a movement with different goals altogether.

The first time I announced my pronouns, “I’m David, he/him,” I was a freshman in college attending a transgender discussion group. It was 2005. At the time it seemed quite progressive—even for me, an openly gay 18-year-old volunteering at my liberal college’s resource center for gay rights. In the most progressive clique at one of the country’s most progressive schools, being transgender was still mostly a theoretical concept—a new frontier that college kids were just beginning to discover.

My next “trans encounter” happened half a decade later when I was living in San Francisco. My best friend in the city was another gay man, about 15 years older than me. In the late ’80s and ’90s, he had been involved with ACT UP, the confrontational activist group fighting against AIDS stigma, and he served as my guide to both the new city and its politics.

He had studied recondite critical and cultural theories at Berkeley and later in New York at NYU and Columbia. I looked to him as a mentor and a model of what it meant to be gay. His homosexuality was not just a random fact like eye color but rather a vehicle to defy and critique social norms. Put differently, he wasn’t just gay, he was queer. This entailed, among other duties, being the first person to explain the word “cis” to me.

Despite his militancy—or perhaps because of it—my friend had a wicked sense of humor, and could be quite cutting toward the left-wing activist milieu that came to dominate queer and trans spaces. I remember once, when I was a bit under the weather, I complained about being congested and then apologized for whining. My friend deadpanned, “Sounds like a cisgender problem.” I laughed. “Trans people never get a stuffy nose?” I asked. He replied, “No, because they’re too busy snorting drugs to dull the pain of living in a transphobic world.” At the time (this would have been around 2012) it was still practically impossible to imagine these terms—cisgender, queer—being embraced and affirmed by Wall Street and the Pentagon. But my friend traveled in circles that had already moved beyond the mainstream acceptance of gays, and were advocating for new, more radical sexual and gender identities.

If trans was going to be the next civil rights movement (and make no mistake, before it was officially announced by Hollywood and the DEI offices of corporate America there was a vanguard pushing for it), it required not just an oppressed class but also an oppressor class. “Cis” filled this role even though it didn’t really mean anything other than “not trans.” Cis society became a battleground whose rules and norms had to be subverted.

It was in fact my friend who introduced me to the concept of “misgendering” as a personal offense. He told me that someone in his circles had been talking about me behind my back in glowing terms. He said that this person had been referring to me as “they,” so as not to assume my gender. I asked my friend if this person did that when talking about everyone. Not everyone, my friend said, just people who seem like they’re with it. This was deeply flattering. I was seen as cool and edgy enough to have a flashy new gender identity.

I started dating a man and my life became more stable and domestic. I ceased to desire being queer in the radical sense. I just happened to be a homosexual living my life. Meanwhile the public fortunes of gay people kept getting better and better. Obama became the first president in history to endorse gay marriage and it seemed to actually help his reelection campaign. In 2015 the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell, identifying marriage as a fundamental right for all Americans, including gay ones. I had to marvel at the change in attitudes toward gay people in my lifetime. I first came out at 14, in 2001. My family was accepting, but there were still anti-sodomy laws on the books in some states. Homosexuals were not allowed to serve openly in the military. No viable presidential candidate from either party supported gay marriage. By 2015, in just a little over a decade, gay rights had won a total and unequivocal victory.

Today support for gay marriage is at an all-time high, with 71% of Americans backing it, including most Republicans. While left-wing causes like economic justice and equality have stalled, progressives can confidently claim to have won this culture war. If anything the victory was perhaps too sudden and total. In the fight for gay marriage, an activist infrastructure was built up; after Obergefell, the activists needed a new cause and found one in gender ideology.

The embrace of the transgender cause by America’s gay organizations is often presented as a matter of natural allyship between the closely related members of the LGBTQ coalition. In my view this is a misunderstanding. The interests of legacy gay rights organizations have increasingly become divorced from their traditional constituents, gay men and lesbians. For example: By 2016, the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest gay rights organization, was using the word “transgender” more than “gay” and “lesbian” combined in its annual reports.

A number of states now have laws banning the practice of “conversion therapy” and an even broader stigma exists against efforts to medically alter the sexuality of gay people. But the same is not true when it comes to gender, where the situation is roughly reversed. Gender has become the point at which the interests of a professional activist class intersect with those of the pharmaceutical and medical tech industry.

According to GLAAD, gender identity is “one’s own internal sense of self and their gender,” and is separate from biological sex. This emphasis on the immaterial over the physical can lead to the body becoming fungible material for medical experiments. Physically healthy people can be turned into lifelong medical patients for profit. In the business press, trans tech is touted as a budding industry. One savvy entrepreneur has estimated the transition market as “in excess of $200B.”

The executive branch of the U.S. government actively supports pediatric gender transition. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine is a vocal proponent of medical transition as the appropriate treatment for youth with dysphoria; furthermore, the administration supports the right of K-12 public schools to socially transition students with or without their parents’ consent. Social transition is the practice of treating a prepubescent child as if they were literally a member of the opposite sex. While it does not involve any direct medical intervention, social transition has been shown to make it less likely for the child to resolve their dysphoria on their own. This can in turn lock them into a lifelong path of medicalization involving the off-label use of cancer drugs to block puberty as well as cross sex hormones and surgeries.

Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, has said: “Given paucity of evidence, the off-label use of drugs … in gender dysphoria treatment largely means an unregulated live experiment on children.”

Gender is big business, but it would be a mistake to say this is all about the money. The ideology also provides a framework for young people coming of age in an increasingly disembodied culture. As a millennial born in the second half of the ’80s, I can remember adults warning me and my peers against spending too much time on the screen. Video games, TV, the early internet—the responsible adult world tried to ration our access to these things. They were united in their message that the real, physical world was superior. With the ubiquity of smartphones this became harder to maintain, and then in 2020 there was a normative shift with the pandemic response. Social distancing became the virtuous thing to do. The physical world was dangerous.

It should not be a surprise that a generation raised to think of physical reality as secondary to the personalized experience of digital reality would latch onto gender. According to one poll, 21% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ+. This is an astonishingly high figure, but it makes sense when you consider that in its current use identity is conceived as an inner essence that has very little to do with sex or the body. The figure is consistent with other research showing teenagers today have much less sex than previous generations. In place of embodied experience, young people increasingly have incorporeal “identities.”

I can relate. I was as confused as anyone when COVID hit and San Francisco suddenly shut down in late March 2020. At first, I believed that I was just following the science, and was unaware of existing pandemic preparation guides that stressed the importance of maintaining a normal life as much as possible during an emergency. The new lockdown paradigm was to act as if it were possible to simply freeze society and move life online. This may have worked for some people but not everyone could see lockdowns that way. I had been working in the tourism industry and almost immediately lost my job. My boyfriend and I got into screaming fights that summer. Living in a cramped apartment I had always needed other places—cafes and bars—I could escape to. Without that our relationship unraveled.

I needed a vibrant city, and it was gone. San Francisco had been turned off like a light switch, and transformed into a faceless place. The life I’d built for myself after 10 years in San Francisco, humble as it was, had ended. By the end of the year I’d moved to Minneapolis where my family lived.

In summer 2020, before leaving the city, I would occasionally take to Facebook to voice doubts about the official COVID response. I was startled by the vehemence with which people I knew defended the lockdown model. I was accused of spreading Koch brother propaganda when I shared an article on herd immunity by Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff.

Virtually all the leftists I knew were strongly in favor of closing schools—and keeping them closed indefinitely. I found this hard to square with their supposed belief in public education as a human right. Any questioning of the official narrative, however, was caricatured as eugenics, science denial, or simply wanting people to die. The world came to be divided between the good people who “followed the science” and locked down and the bad ones who didn’t. I was on one side of that divide and the majority of the people in my life were on the other.

Seeing a pseudoscientific consensus manufactured in real time, I began to question everything else I thought I knew. Inevitably this brought me back to gender. Even before COVID I’d noticed that it was becoming more and more common to introduce your third person pronouns at the start of a meeting. The eccentric practice I’d first encountered as a teenager was widespread—sometimes even mandatory—by 2019. Now it was no longer just a select few; seemingly everyone had a gender identity.

As with COVID lockdowns, this is a radical new experiment being passed off as firmly established consensus. Researchers and clinicians who dissent are targeted by activists. Borderline fraudulent studies are trotted out as definitive proof. Just as it was for COVID, the manufactured consensus on gender gets enforced politically by the progressive left. It’s as if my old comrades on the left have given up on any optimistic vision of democratic social transformation. In lieu of that, they make do with technocratic social engineering.

I could choose to stop being a leftist but can’t stop being gay. It’s still the most fundamental part of who I am. I have to face the sickening fact that much of this medical abuse is being carried out in my name. All the major gay rights organizations support an affirmative model for transitioning minors. They could have closed shop after achieving full equality, but no. “Gay rights” became institutionalized and morphed into a permanent LGBTQ+ industry. The public goodwill built up for gays and lesbians over the past generation is now being channeled into an entirely different cause.

I think back to my old friend and mentor in San Francisco, always on the cutting edge of every social movement. In my 20s I wanted to emulate his wisdom and radical disposition. I could not foresee the ways this disposition would be coopted in less than a generation. These days, seemingly all of society is becoming “queer,” and Pride is now something that everyone is expected to celebrate, even NASCAR. This new regime is appallingly humorless and literal-minded, lacking my old friend’s intensity, creativity, and wit. Yet it uses a lot of the vocabulary I first learned from him—“cis” and “trans” as well as “misgendering,” and coopts this former vanguard’s moral courage.

We, as gay men, have gone from being outsiders to mascots of an ideology that’s pushing hideous medical experiments on children—the wedge, it almost seems, to a new medical dystopia. If I now feel the need to once again make my sexuality a political issue, to speak “as a gay man,” it’s for the sake of disavowing this turn of events.

#David Moulton #queer theory #gender ideology #homophobia 2.0 #gay rights #religion is a mental illness

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