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bestworstcase · 4 years ago

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What are your opinions on the whole Rapunzel-Varian drama in S1 post Queen For A Day, especially with the whole "Rapunzel should've checked on Varian after the snowstorm" or whose fault it was for their conflict?

tbh… if i had to pick one single representative example of the tts fandom’s general inability to handle nuance in fictional conflict, it’d be the QFAD discourse™

because! while this isn’t to rag on anyone, if you pick a random person with an opinion on this question, chances are they will fall into one of two camps. either: 1) corona’s treatment of varian was horrifically unjust and everyone involved except him is a terrible person, or 2) rapunzel did what she had to do and varian’s anger is irrational, unfounded, and fundamentally unfair.

people in camp #1 tend to believe that rapunzel was simply being selfish and acting like a sulky child when she failed to check up on varian after the storm. people in camp #2 tend to point out that rapunzel was traumatized by the events of QFAD too, and believe that this justifies her failure to check up on varian.

but the thing is imo the conflict in QFAD + the rest of s1 is just as complex and messy as the argument cassandra and rapunzel have in RATGT, in that there is no One True Right Answer and no person who is one hundred percent “at fault.” the question of blame is… honestly sort of beside the point if you ask me. to break this down:

#1: rapunzel is a sheltered teenager with minimal social skills dealing with a national emergency halfway through her first unsupervised couple days on the job.

the girl has had like eight months tops of training for the monumental task of ruling a country. she grew up in a situation where the only choice available to her was how she would wile away her free time inside her tower; gothel exerted total control over every other facet of her life. and while she has a little more wiggle room now that she’s out of the tower, she is still basically living her life with all the big, consequential choices made for her.

QFAD was intended to be her first taste of true authority, while still being ultimately inconsequential. if all had gone according to plan, corona would have ticked along more or less on autopilot—just as frederic left it—while rapunzel got in a little practice making judgment calls about minor, unimportant things, like mediating small interpersonal disputes between her subjects.

nobody expected, and rapunzel was absolutely not prepared for, a legitimate national crisis to explode in her face out of nowhere. this was supposed to be pedaling by herself for the first time with training wheels and what she got instead is careening down the freeway on a motorbike at 95mph with zero warning. it is a miracle that she held things together as well as she did.

#2: varian is a child with an emotionally distant, unsupportive father who sets him up for failure.

he’s smart but he’s also fourteen. he has little if any formal training in alchemy, he’s figuring stuff out by trial and error, and he has zero adult supervision. his efforts have caused significant levels of destruction twice in only a few months—the exploding boilers in WTH, and his invention going haywire (with a little help from st. croix) in GE—and it’s implied that this is a fairly regular occurrence with him.

and yet quirin does nothing. he shouts at varian, shuts him down, and at several points orders him point blank to stop messing with alchemy… but he makes no effort to connect with his son or understand where he’s coming from; he doesn’t try to impose reasonable restrictions (like “don’t mess with volatile chemicals unless i’m there to help”) that would allow varian to pursue his passion while minimizing the danger; and he doesn’t create an environment where varian feels able to turn to his father for help. and then with the black rocks, he lets varian come along to see the king, but refuses to explain why he “lied” (/spoke in code) to the king, destroying any credibility he had in varian’s eyes and making varian panicky and desperate because it seemed like no one else cared.

so the end result is that varian feels like he has no choice but to sneak around behind quirin’s back. he can’t rely on his dad for help if anything goes wrong, but the situation is so dire that doing nothing also isn’t an option. he tries his best to be careful (before quirin barges in on him, varian is attempting to put just one drop of the amber serum on the rock) but even if quirin hadn’t startled him, a terrible accident was bound to happen sooner or later, and the responsibility for that lays just as much if not more on quirin’s shoulders—the adult in this situation—as on varian’s. the kid is FOURTEEN.

(i think a neat argument could be made for varian as a deconstruction of the teen/YA fantasy trope of the hyper-competent teenager with absentee parents whose absence allows the teen to get on with the important work of the high-stakes fantasy plot; but that’s a whole different post)

#3: rapunzel did the right thing, but lost control over the situation due to lack of experience.

it would have been wrong to abandon everybody in corona to run off into the blizzard with varian, and frankly it wouldn’t have helped quirin anyway. he was already encased in amber by the time varian got back to old corona, and rapunzel couldn’t have done anything in the moment had she been with varian then. the only benefit to her presence would have been to comfort varian—which is not a small thing, obviously, but it’s not in any way a reasonable exchange for the hundreds or thousands of lives that would have been lost if she left corona completely without a leader in the middle of a crisis. so broadly speaking, staying in corona was the right call.

however.

rapunzel was not in control during that scene in the palace. varian bursts in, panicking, explains his situation and begs for her help—and rapunzel just says, basically, “i can’t help you, there’s an emergency.” then nigel comes in and reinforces that, which makes varian freak out; he grabs rapunzel and shakes her, nigel signals for the guards in response, and varian gets dragged out of the palace while rapunzel pleads with the guards not to hurt him.

(sidebar: the hate nigel gets for describing varian as “attacking” rapunzel is unfounded. varian grabs her and shakes her roughly back and forth and that is, in fact, assault. nigel is not wrong to describe it as such.)

anyway, notice two the things that DON’T happen here:

1) rapunzel doesn’t offer up any alternative solutions. a more experienced or better prepared leader could have responded to varian’s plea with a plan of action, like: i need to stay in corona to oversee the evacuation, so we can’t leave right this minute, but cassandra will take you to ask xavier for advice right now and the minute it’s safe to leave we’ll go together to help your father. or whatever—the point is to engage proactively with varian’s problem, make him feel heard, and give him something productive to do so he isn’t just sitting around fretting in the palace or struggling back home by himself in the middle of a blizzard.

2) raps doesn’t challenge nigel’s decision when he summons the guards to throw varian out of the palace, which is something she absolutely could have done. she could have said no, i can’t go to old corona right this minute to help him, but we are not throwing him out into the storm again, he stays here with me. this is, again, a sign of her inexperience; she’s not used to being an authority, she’s never been in a situation like this before, and she’s under a ton of pressure—so when an older adult whom she sees as an authority (he’s her father’s advisor!) makes a judgment call, it probably doesn’t even occur to her that she can challenge it.

this is why i say that rapunzel lost control over the situation—because even though she made the Right Decision, she got a kind of awful outcome, ie varian being tossed out into the blizzard to struggle home by himself to deal with his problem without any support, and rapunzel inadvertently breaking her promise from earlier.

#4: rapunzel doesn’t immediately go to check on varian after the storm because she’s traumatized, busy, and trusts her father.

painter’s block is all about how the trauma rapunzel feels as a direct result of her decisions during the storm destroys her ability to choose anything. she feels so debilitated by the fear that she will make the wrong choice—because she worries that she chose wrong when she allowed varian to be sent away—that she can’t do anything at all, let alone find the emotional strength to go to old corona and confront her mistakes. and while she tries to process and move past this trauma, mrs sugarby exploits it in an attempt to force her to free zhan tiri.

the next episode, not in the mood, involves rapunzel being put under enormous pressure to entertain an irascible ally of corona’s while he and her father negotiate a trade deal with the threat of a war breaking out if they fail. NITM is a silly episode, but it has the highest non-magical stakes of any episode in the entire series. this isn’t an event rapunzel could have reasonably skipped out on for the sake of one person, no matter how much she cares. she’s slammed. she’s still being forced to prioritize just like she was in QFAD.

and in the third episode after QFAD, rapunzel is tormented by nightmares about varian and what happened to his father, so she presses frederic for information about the rocks and varian’s safety. and frederic assures her that everything is fine. he lies to her face about the rocks having been removed, and rapunzel has no reason to doubt him, so she relaxes… until varian contacts her directly, and she immediately jumps to help him.

#5: at the same time, varian has been forced into hiding because frederic is attempting to cover up the rock problem.

what happens to varian after QFAD is plainly unfair and unjust. his father is trapped in amber, the rocks have completely destroyed old corona, most of the villagers have presumably moved to the new land frederic set aside for them, and frederic’s secret police are crawling all over the village trying to suppress information about the rocks (and fred’s role in creating them). the blame for this lies squarely at frederic’s feet, and varian is right to be angry.

i believe that varian interprets rapunzel’s absence as a sign that she’s complicit in what frederic is doing, making his anger at her justified as well. he doesn’t have access to the information we do about why rapunzel doesn’t seek varian out immediately—he doesn’t see how distraught and shattered she is after the storm, or the high-stakes political nonsense she has to deal with, and he certainly doesn’t see her trying to pursue the matter of the rocks and varian’s safety with her father and being flatly lied to to convince her to stay put in corona. all he knows is that rapunzel kicked him out and now she’s ignoring him and her father’s agents keep chasing him away from his home, and he draws the conclusion that makes the most sense to him, ie rapunzel must be okay with all of this because otherwise she would be here.

and once he has that idea in his head, the fact that rapunzel immediately jumps to help him when he contacts her isn’t enough to dislodge it. he’s a scared, lonely fourteen year old boy looking at this situation through a purely interpersonal lens while rapunzel is an overwhelmed eighteen year old doing the best she can while juggling about a million things at once and putting varian low on her priority list because she’s been told by a trusted source that varian is fine.

they both make mistakes, they’re both missing important contextual information, and neither of them handles this situation in the best possible way. but neither of them is “at fault” in the sense of being purely in the wrong, and—imo—frederic and quirin hold the lion’s share of the blame here, because they had all the information, and they refused and refused and refused to deal with the black rock problem until it overwhelmed them both. varian and rapunzel are both just kids scrambling to deal with something that should not be their problem to solve, and both of them fuck up! (and even then—the best fred and quirin could’ve done was just be honest and upfront about what the problem was. neither of them had the means to fix anything, and neither of them was responsible for the very unfortunate timing of the blizzard. so it’s not as clear cut as everything bad in s1 happens because fred and quirin stuck their heads in the sand. a lot of it honestly was just sheer bad luck.)

a n y w a y, i think by s3 and after a lot of introspection, varian has figured a lot of this out, and that’s why he’s so quick to let go of his lingering grudge against rapunzel. he’s realized that at the end of the day, rapunzel was just as unprepared and lost in that situation as he was, that she’s not responsible for (and wasn’t complicit in) her father’s decisions, etc, etc.

#rta #this is a bit of a ramble but yeah #tangled-dreamer-97

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mithliya · 3 years ago

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Those anti-immigration asks have devolved into blanket criticism of leftists, no surprise there. I know most of radblr ignored that blog like they did the other gossip blogs, but it frustrates me to see women I previously respected in the notes of some of those "Muslim moderates are worse than Christian moderates because they're taught to never question their faith" anons. This shit is insidious even where it's not plainly spoken by non-feminists. But my question to you, since I am not an immigrant and I am American, at what point does calling this out feed the trolls? I engaged with almost all of the anti-immigrant/pro-Christianity submissions because I didn't want them to go unchallenged, when they were blatantly lying. But was I contributing to the discourse in a negative way by engaging the right wing trolls to continue their rants on that blog? How do you know what to respond to and what to let go?

when you engage with such people, you need to be very careful and mindful of what you say and how you say it. your statements are sometimes used to discount and dismiss one side and to support their own arguments. before engaging, you need to understand their argument and adequately pick it apart. figure out what they're arguing, what their basis is, why they're arguing it. then you can try to challenge it. otherwise, there is a chance you'll play into their rhetoric and be used as proof of them being Right somehow. as an example, when we bring up that a lot of immigration today is a result of the destruction caused by colonialism, they will twist it to mean "immigration is the way poc get back at white people for colonialism". you need to ensure with the way you word it that it does not even slightly imply that, otherwise theyll find a way to twist it and make it seem like that's what you're saying. if you talk about how moc are hyperpoliced and how crime stats are skewed based on the fact that white men are less likely to be held accountable, less likely to be caught, less likely to be charged, etc they might take it as you saying "moc should get away with rape more often" or smth. basically u just need to make sure ur careful with ur wording and with ur approach. make yourself familiar with their arguments if you want to engage for that very reason.

beyond that, i think im not the best person to ask when to know if ur feeding into the trolls LOL but if u get the sense that its not productive, that youre speaking to someone dishonest and intentionally misrepresenting u despite ur best efforts, and notice constant goalpost switching... for me, thats when i usually quit. might throw in a few "youre an idiot and need to be less intellectually dishonest" or something short that displays their ignorance & move on. theres at least one of those xenophobic anons (if there are mutliple) that has repeatedly sent me anon msgs on my blog & tried to debate me for like a week. that person refused to leave me alone and was dishonest the whole way through, constantly spewing altright conspiracies even when disproven and twisting shit to fit their agenda. in the end, i simply blocked & that person used VPN to message me further until i pointed out how pathetic that is of them. thats when they finally stopped and i got peace. so if your hope is to get through to the person sending those anons, give that hope up, if youre thinking maybe you can sway other people, that may be possible but as i said.. if thats your goal you need to be careful. + the blog ur doing it on isnt exactly neutral and clearly is more on the xenophobic side

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mbti-notes · 4 years ago

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What do you think is the best way to deal with the fear of things getting even more conservative and harsh? I'm so scared about the future, living in a dystopian society and having all my rights taken as a non binary queer person. Infj.

I suppose you’re referring to US politics? Please be more specific because the majority of my readership isn’t from the US. You’re asking a loaded question that basically requires me to agree with the premise that everything will be doomed. I can’t agree with that, since I purposely don’t approach politics in a reactive way.

When you’re drowning in fear, you’re not thinking straight. One of the reasons political discourse has reached the lows that it has in the US is because of incessant screaming and hyperbole. The political mediascape is a for-profit machine that is designed to work people up, manipulate their emotions, and keep them living in fear of “enemies”. This creates the mindset of being in a constant fight for survival against various abstractions of “evil”, and it’s much easier to separate you from your money when you’re so threatened that you’re willing to pay to feel safe/validated. The more that people get sucked into this war mentality, the less capable they are of making wise political decisions, since every important problem gets made into an oversimplified “wedge” issue to test your loyalty to your team.

The world is a lot more complex than red vs blue. To make a living, I have to follow news from around the world very closely. Yes, people get heated about politics, but observe the political reporting from other countries and you will see a difference in the tone and quality. In some countries, there are, gasp!, more than two viable political parties, and thus, more ideas and approaches to choose from. The US has commodified political fear and outrage like no one else by purposely pitting people against each other like rival sports teams, in a state of perpetual conflict, and, most importantly, always distracted from the underlying power structures that are making their lives worse.

To be clear, I’m not a conservative, though I’ve been surrounded and preached to by conservatives my whole life - I engage with them continuously. I am certainly angered by people being stripped of their rights and opportunities. I am certainly depressed when I see people abused and oppressed. I am certainly frustrated when my life suffers from the decisions of politicians I did not vote for. However, I staunchly defend freedom and diversity of beliefs and values. I often have to remind people that many countries and cultures around the world are conservative, and they are not abject hellscapes. Do not equate conservatism with dystopia, barbarism, fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, xenophobia, or lord of the flies - it doesn’t matter who is doing it, hyperbole and stereotypes are dehumanizing, which enables the violence of war mentality. Conservatism, at its best, is actually needed by society to function well. Progressivism, at its best, is actually needed by society to function well. Intelligent political discourse begins with each of us getting our facts and concepts correct, otherwise, there’s no hope of cooler heads prevailing. It’s important to correctly identify the cause of a problem by labeling it properly.

Every system has flaws and every system will eventually fall apart when those flaws are left to fester and worsen. The US is supposed to be a democracy, right? A democracy is only ever as smart as the people participating in it. Can you say, with a straight face, that Americans have a deep understanding of their political system and work hard to be well-informed of all the political, economic, social, and international issues that the country grapples with? Can you say that the majority of people even understand the political terminology they use?

The US is admired around the world for its individualism. Individuals succeed and fail by their own hand. Individuals are free to pursue their own happiness and well-being. “The Land of Opportunity”, right? Americans have exported this idea, drawing immigrants from all around the world. However, individualism, taken to an extreme, exacts a very steep price. The bonds which hold individuals together to form a well-functioning society gradually weaken over time. This is a huge problem if you hope to make good collective decisions, which is what elected officials are tasked to do.

The language and currency of politics is power. With power, you get to write the rules. Without power, you are subject to someone else’s rules. It’s really that simple and crass. The purpose of there being many different voices in a discussion is to make sure that no 1 agenda/group gets to dominate the discussion and become too extreme. Opportunists, corporations, and media companies figured this out a long time ago, so they do what they can to shut down nuanced debate and discussion. They all have a deep vested interest in hyping up the individualist ethos of American culture, not because they actually care about “culture” in any noble sense, but because they know that individuals have very limited power. One person alone cannot disrupt the status quo, and keeping everyone psychologically isolated means that those with power can keep enriching themselves without disruption.

Currently, almost every major aspect of American society is designed to stop you from realizing and using your power. Media keeps you locked in fear, feeling victimized, demonizing each other. Big corporate interests keep you hyperfocused on your own emotional vulnerabilities, telling you to earn and consume your way to a false sense of power, as they quietly dismantle workplace and social supports that would preserve your actual power. The prevailing social mandate to be ever productive and “successful” keeps you running like a hamster on a wheel, with little energy to spare for anything else. You are expected, at adulthood, to become a self-made person, never having to rely on anyone for anything, thereby eroding your ties to your roots and kin. If you fail, you are shamed and dubbed a loser, and expected to redouble your efforts to chase higher social status. And some people simply choose to drop out completely, thus relinquishing any social power they had.

In US society, those in power abuse the archetype of the “individual” and the virtue of “independence” to siphon more and more power. Individualism, in its most immature form, is really just self-centeredness. Everyone is only out for themselves and grabbing what they can before someone else does. People fight each other for scraps. And the ultimate goal of life is to have more than the people around you, such that you have the power and privilege to shield yourself from the other hungry dogs. There is no bigger picture to aspire to beyond one’s own survival and daily pleasures. If this is the underlying ethos of your society, are you surprised that the political system reflects it? A lot of people around the world look at the US and mostly see a bunch of immature adolescents.

Transcending social forces isn’t easy. Power is always unevenly distributed, so it is always ripe for abuse, and fighting against abuses of power requires sustained effort. Therefore, it’s important to understand the many ways that power is used to oppress. I’ve spent a lot of time studying historical movements, political philosophy, and power dynamics, so my view of politics is always the long view. I believe that political progress is constant work. I don’t believe in end goals or being free to rest on your laurels. I believe history teaches us that, whatever your political allegiances, the complacent eventually become the victims. I believe that social change is relatively easy to understand by observing the way that power changes hands in society.

Politics boils down to an endless series of change-and-backlash sequences. Whenever one group takes a significant political step, someone somewhere will lose out on some power and privilege, and they’re not going to take it lying down. Fear and anger drive the changes, and fear and anger drive the backlashes. Rinse and repeat. When the tide turns against you, it only means that it’s your turn to step up again. Fear and anger are not reasons to give up, rather, they are the wake up call that spurs the next round of changes. From conflict comes motivation.

Political power is gained through organization. The fastest way to accumulate power, especially in a democracy, is to stand together and pool your resources. But what is the motivation for organizing? Usually anger. Civil rights are never won by waiting around for the privileged to relinquish their power. No, people get together to claim their rights, DEMAND change, and MAKE the changes that they want to see, refusing to surrender to oppression. They loudly infiltrate social spaces, influence officials, run for office as representatives, and accumulate the political power to rewrite the rules. This is true whatever your political stripe. This is what conservatives have excelled at for the past thirty years in the US.

However, as soon as you change the status quo, there will always be people that want to reverse it. It is difficult for younger people to grasp, but politics has no end, it is merely an ongoing struggle for power, as power changes hands from the complacent to the aggrieved, and then back again. For example, LGBTQ people view a right-dominated supreme court as a danger to their existence, for good reason, and that should motivate them to fight back even harder to reclaim their right to equality. Conservatives view a right-dominated supreme court as progress, and having achieved that success, they will become complacent, which provides the opening for progressives to regroup and rise again.

The only escape from this cycle comes in the form of death or transcendence. To transcend means to see the bigger picture of what can be achieved, so that you are able to set aside the petty and work for something greater. Human beings have had their transcendent moments here and there throughout history, so they are certainly capable of it. Progress on civil rights has indeed been made over many decades, but there is always more work to do, as long as there are people that don’t view it as “progress”. For example, the fact that, after decades of tireless activism, the majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage, is something you should be building upon, rather than only focusing on the setbacks.

If you think that I’m singling out the US, I’m not. Oppression happens everywhere. It is a part of human nature to be egotistical, complacent, and short-sighted. But that’s not the only part of humans. For a democracy to work at its best, we have to appeal to the better parts of our human nature, i.e., the parts of us that: understand and care about how we affect each other, appreciate hard-won freedoms and never take them for granted, and envision a better future and plan well for it. The best changes come from passion and inspiration - not fear and anger. If you, as an individual, are not capable of bringing out and offering up your own better nature by transcending the worst parts of yourself, you can’t really expect the sociopolitical system to be capable of it, either. If you, as an individual, always lose sight of the bigger picture that you’re aiming for, then how will you help others see the importance of your cause?

Gandhi said: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

IMO, the job of a good citizen involves: 1) caring about the broader impact that your vote has and educating yourself properly so that you make wise voting decisions, 2) exercising your power by actively participating in organizations that advocate for the changes that you want, and 3) having enough self-awareness to avoid being emotionally manipulated into making destructive political judgments. Humans aren’t perfect, but they don’t have to be to create a well-functioning society. Humans make better decisions when the social atmosphere encourages them to open up the mind and heart. We all have a part to play in creating an encouraging social atmosphere for people to deliberate more carefully on their political beliefs.

Are you an unwitting pawn of the media, rewarding the players that only care about getting your eyeballs for ad revenue? Are you only caring about political issues because you read something that incited your outrage? Are you resigned to cynicism, indifference, gloom, or paranoia? Are you all about “owning the enemy”? Are you only concerned about your own prospects in life? Are you waiting helplessly for someone to hand you what you deserve?

OR: Are you joining organizations that create positive change? Are you listening to the experiences of the people around you and understanding how their reality informs their politics? Are you doing the hard work of inspiring the people around you to be their better selves? Do you hope that everyone in your country has a chance to live their best life? Do you stand up to support people in need and work to eliminate injustice? Will you learn the best way to (re)claim what is owed to you from those that deny or oppress you?

You are only one person, so your power is limited. What are you doing to amplify your voice and extend the reach of your power? Are you dying or transcending? A democracy is only ever as strong as the people participating in it.

#politics #lgbtq #history #conflict #power #media #social media #ask

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sambinnie · 3 years ago

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1. On bank holiday Monday I woke two of the housemates at 4.15am, and we made a pan of hot chocolate and opened the door to hear the dawn chorus. One of them sensibly remained on a chair in the garden, insulated against the early May morning with a duvet and blanket and thick onesie; the other walked out with me, into the dark, and we tramped the streets together, along the silent pavements, towards the river and fields.

We discovered that a large ivy-covered tree is home to a bat colony, members of which flapped silently about our heads in their haste to return before full dawn. A cuckoo was audible across the water. A starling clicked its beak and jittered up and down the branch. The housemate called me a boomer.

Of all the odd things I miss from last year, it’s the silence of the roads that is the greatest loss. At 6 o’clock in the morning there would be almost no traffic at all; now the birds are almost drowned out by the constant roar, even some distance away. Whether it’s hormones or poor emotional processing or a rational reaction to a damaged world, I feel angry at the traffic. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a 100% smooth process, but I do wish the world could be run by peri-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal women for a year or two. Just to see.

2. I am still obsessed with Orlando Wood’s short book Lemon (I was banging on about it back in February), and am so grateful to have so many people in my life who care about those same ideas. We’re in a left-brain cycle of culture at the moment, he explains: the left brain has a tendency to “isolate parts from the whole and to see them in the abstract… It likes to break things up into smaller parts, to categorise, and therefore favours the familiar, consistency, repeatability and predictability”. It also “prefers to see things in terms of simple and linear cause and effect. It prizes utility, power and control, and its ability to abstract and isolate things from their context enables it to manipulate the world”. What’s that you say? Wider cultural discourse and rights of individual groups, inability to have dialogues about, you say? Mmm.

My favourite part of the book is when Wood breaks down two adverts: Heineken’s ‘Water in Majorca’ from 1985, and GoDaddy’s 2018 ‘Make Your Own Way’ ad. Remember that? No, me neither. ‘Make Your Own Way’ is full of colourful images, isolated people, or tiled with images of themselves to make a ‘conveyer belt’ effect, and clean-face words which could be applied to almost any product or company (watch it to cure your insomnia/trigger a panic attack); everything is buzzword-y, inspirational, keynote, statement, unilateral, and utterly, utterly devoid of humour, humanity, or engagement.

One of the most striking things about Wood’s ad breakdown is that, once you’ve read it, you can’t stop noticing how in, say, three ad breaks within an hour-long programme, there might be one advert at most which doesn’t fit this left-brain pattern. Adverts for products as diverse as cars, period reusables, white goods, clothing catalogues, insurance, snack food, and supermarkets all, to some extent or another, fit the mould: bright images, little human connection, bland Instagram visuals, large slogans, spoken-wordlessness (better for the global market), a vague puff of do-gooding, and absolutely no wit at all. The only one I’ve seen recently attempting anything different is Maltesers, about a breastfeeding mother and her mother-in-law, which I admired for the milk-leak and loathed for the Hahahaha, aren’t women awful to each other?.

It’s draining to imagine the flat meetings and endless audience segmentation that enabled this ad trend: this sector engages on social media in the evenings and this demographic prefers a friendly looking home and our audience here is more about food as a pleasure. I’m loathe to break it to them, but for all that laser-focused research you are all making the same ads. And as Wood exposes so brilliantly, those ad campaigns are costing more and more to receive less and less engagement. Congrats, lads.

3. Speaking of left- and right-brain world views, as so often happens this episode of Hidden Brain popped up serendipitously, with the wonderful host Shankar Vedantam interviewing Iain McGilchrist about his 2010 book The Master and His Emissary. It’s just over 45 minutes and is worth every second — McGilchrist is so clear and insightful about how to tell what type of brain is leading at any given time, what we lose in a left-brain society, and what we need to do about it. (I went back and checked and only then saw the book is in Lemon’s bibliography. Bliss.)

4. For various reasons, a small toilet room here has been stuffed with balloons for the last week. It’s absolutely staggering both how not one of us thought to remove the balloons, instead bobbling through them to reach the facilities at any given hour of night or day, and also how immensely relaxing it is to go in there since they’ve been removed and humanely destroyed (I assume). It’s A Squash and a Squeeze in action, a life philosophy I cling to pretty robustly and find pays dividends. A housemate pointed out recently that whenever they are travelling in my car, they play a game to see if they can ever see another car in worse condition, and they say they never, ever can. It’s the Squash and a Squeeze philosophy that, in part, enables me to drive the dented, rusting, bubbled, scratched, lichen-furred, beloved piece of garbage I do, having previously had no driving license for almost two years after my seizure. It’s such a delight to drive any car at all.

5. We’re rewatching Ghosts, which of course I recommend, and I suddenly realised that the Captain (Ben Willbond) is the speaker of possibly my favourite newspaper-based gag in the entire run of The Thick of It. Please watch all of Ghosts and all of The Thick of It, then perhaps The Death of Stalin? All thoroughly excellent, and the latter two contain my favourite kind of Muriel’s Wedding-type comedy, where I am tearfully wheezing with laughter one moment, then gaping with discomfited horror the next.

6. I made Nigel Slater’s cardamom-spiced rice pudding this weekend, (although I times everything by 1.5 except the rice, which I up to 200g) and it was as good as always, if I say so myself. Cardamom, like capers, coriander, and pistachios, is an ingredient I’ve only come to love as an adult — I often long to make cardamom buns but am in such an emotionally entangled relationship with my sourdough starter that I never have yeast in the house, so have to rely on my favourite local coffee shop for a hit every now and again. If someone wedges themselves against the fridge door this weekend, I might attempt these.

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permian-tropos · 6 years ago

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here’s a philosophy ramble I did, starting broad and ending on the Discourse. read if you’re feeling thinky

the belief that bad people deserve to suffer often makes people who are suffering think, or even wish, that they are bad. deserved suffering, even your own, is more palatable and comforting than undeserved suffering. participating in something that is Right feels good.

(we could stop right there and reconsider a lot of societal norms from that alone. but I kept going)

it’s comforting to believe there are many moral propositions (X is right/wrong) that combined with another proposition (wrongness earns suffering) then entail (if A, then B) one specific moral proposition (suffering is sometimes right). moral conviction can be about justifying suffering to your brain, which wants to follow instincts and feel good.

we learn what suffering is as newborns, it is Thing We Don’t Want. but growing up has us learning that some things we don’t want are still necessary. being hungry can be necessary. being cold. being alone.

but why? why are there good things in our existence that require suffering? surely good = not-suffering? we are born with the instinct to avoid suffering, so how do we train ourselves to override that instinct?

it might work (a bit crudely) to believe that we are all a little bit bad, and because of that we are doing a Right thing each time we suffer. and people have the desire to participate in communally right things, not just individually right ones. we don’t know exactly what badness we’re paying for by breaking an arm, or having a pet die, or working a dull job. but if we have empathy, we subconsciously feel that suffering is shared. and so, perhaps, the debt.

alternatives to the debt (aka life is sin) model of justified suffering:

- suffering makes you better, so it is Right

- suffering gives you moral authority over the causes/perpetrators, which gives you intrinsic value, so it is Right

- suffering helps you relate to other people and form bonds, so it is Right

- suffering improves your appreciation of positive emotions, so it is Right

but is there anyone on the planet who can truly live with the full ramifications of

- suffering, or a certain degree of extreme suffering, cannot in any way be Right

because if you’ve suffered to a huge degree, you cannot Un-Suffer. you can repress memories or try not to suffer again, but everything we are aware of having suffered leaves an imprint on us. if there is an experience that is so painful it should never exist, then the person with memories of that experience has contained within them something that should not exist -- or a thing (the memory) that can only be created by something that should not exist (the event/experience). and the urge is to destroy it. to erase it from existence.

those who advocate for people’s right to end their own lives usually do so on the basis that some forms of suffering are intolerably wrong, and it can be someone’s prerogative to end that suffering, especially if you respect their life as not belonging to anyone else, and their faculties as sound.

but we don’t want all suffering to mean we should cease existing. even very extreme suffering. particularly suffering that persists as trauma, as a memory, not as a sustained immediate experience. so how do we make a framework for seeing many forms of suffering as something to avoid at all costs/be deeply morally averse to causing, but something we could still endure the effects of?

here’s an idea about fiction: if you read a story about someone, say, being tortured, and empathize with them, you form a pretend memory of being tortured. it won’t be very accurate, and it might be fleeting, but it is still imitating a real traumatic memory that could exist. not only is it less harmful to you or others than a real memory, it is also created by something -- a story -- that is not so bad it should never exist. it has a justifiable existence.

this reassures people with and without real memories of such intense pain that memories of such pain can (in a way) justifiably exist without something intolerably wrong happening. if you have trauma -- your trauma is not Wrong in itself, even if the experience that caused it should not have happened. if you don’t have trauma, or you do and don’t want more, you don’t have to live in paralyzing dread, because your mind accepts the rationale that a Wrong thing (traumatic experience), if it happens, can pass and a Right/Acceptable thing not exclusively linked to it (memories) can take its place. it’s a kind of misdirection. we play with false memories and show our minds how we can enjoy them and discard them, how they don’t leave scars. even if we know the real thing would have a much worse effect, we are comforted nonetheless.

I think this is what the model of catharsis through tragic fiction is about. it is cathartic to see simulations of suffering that, on an individual level, have no moral justification for existing in reality.

and this is why placing heavy emphasis on suffering being deserved through immorality, leads to the demand for morally pure fiction. if people become comfortable with simulacra of suffering (memories, fiction), they can live with the possibility of suffering in their own life. but if you believe that suffering is a result of some Badness being done, then someone who is not afraid of suffering is not afraid of being bad, or letting other people be bad. ie. someone who is not afraid to suffer appears unafraid of causing/allowing suffering in others.

but suffering is not only the result of Badness. particularly, there is no just society that could do away with grief over loss. people have a psychological need to accept the inevitability of suffering that cannot be considered deserved (because you were bad) or undeserved (because someone else was bad and others did not stop them).

engaging with fictional depictions of suffering can always be justified, then, if there is a universal need to prepare for one intense form of suffering most people know they will face even in a perfect world -- when your childhood caretakers die. and then, as you age -- when friends and peers die.

I wonder, when it comes to tumblr discourse, if in addition to immaturity or a moral framework of retributive justice, certain experiences of marginalization make suffering seem only to be a product of injustice. no pain is acceptable, all pain is abuse from individuals or society. and loss of caretakers could be a relief, and loss of friends/peers should not be inevitable and acceptable.

whatever the reason, when you expect a major suffering-causing incident in your life will be Wrong, something that should not have happened, that should have been prevented, then you don’t prepare to accept suffering. you prepare to refuse it, to escape it, to prevent it. so dark, tragic fiction seems to be a threat to your iron defenses. if people don’t see it as wrong, then the pain-traces, catharses, simulacra, are also not wrong. and if pain-traces are okay, if people know they can live with them and even enjoy them, people’s vigilance against future suffering might lessen.

ie. -- if you let people ship that nasty thing, people might not be vigilant against the possibility of a relationship like that happening to them for real. they will let their guard down. they are inuring themselves to the pain. they will think it’s a tolerable suffering when Boy does Bad Boy Thing and it hurts their feelings or scares them or harms them.

my response: people might not be inuring themselves to the particular pain being depicted. people can always be inuring themselves to The Universal Pain, loss, as well as other pains in their life they might not see as caused by something Wrong, or they might be trying to separate memories of pain from an intolerably Wrong experience, so that being a person who has pain-traces is an acceptable existence, not an existence marred by Wrongness. they might approach this inoculation from many angles, whatever suits their personality and aesthetic tastes. there isn’t even a direct correlation between the identity and intensity of what a simulacrum (eg. a story about Bad Boy) depicts (fear/danger in a romantic relationship) and what it is inoculating against (perhaps -- feeling powerless reading about war and violence in the news all the time, or expecting to outlive one’s dog or cat, or something else you couldn’t immediately draw a connection to unless you understand that person’s psyche).

and at the end of the day everyone does have to face deeply agonizing pain caused by something good -- your love, your life, your humanity, the passage of time. not all pain is caused by, or earned through, evil.

let people get their suffering vaccines. it is presumptuous to take people’s engagement with fiction literally, as if fiction is a flat mirror of reality and not a warped, tinted, fluid, rippling reflective surface. and deeply immature -- though there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being immature -- to believe that good and moral things could never hurt you. they do, they will.

#my post #long post #under the readmore #my philosophy #oh lol wow fuck another megaessay on a very similar topic is on my dash #I didn't mean to Plagarize this was actually from me doing my homework

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brycetaylorblog · 6 years ago

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“You Speak to Me With Respect”

Dissecting privilege, for the sake of productive discourse

Pictured: Revolutionary of the Black Panthers Movement Stokely Carmichael.

Background: This post has been inspired by Stokely, and my friend Nadine Silva. Nadine is passionate and works hard in addressing the current position of privilege people unknowingly take when engaging in dialogues with people about their community, and the way certain dynamics effect their community this will be the premise for the analysis that follows. She is a journalist and a model striving to represent her community in a positive light, and serve as a role model for young South Asian girls globally.

Stokely’s relevance is through his influence. Ironically Stokely’s importance and presence in today’s time is that the most intimidating thing about this man is how well spoken he was and how he articulated the thoughts and feelings of his community. He didn’t gain notoriety through wielding shotguns and AK-47s, whilst tailing police. He gained his notoriety, by making it known that America is on notice and his community refuses to be scared anymore, and will no longer take the back seat. I respect him immensely, and try to emulate the characteristics of him as an individual and as a movement.

“Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. Our generation is out of breath. We aint runnin’ no more.”

- Stokely Carmichael.

So lets begin .....

First and foremost let it be clear that no race nor creed or colour has the authority to take the moral high ground on any issue that effects everybody. That means no race or people is more or less entitled to control any one narrative that involves all. However, that in itself is indicative of what the issue is I am about to discuss.

Now I could sit here and explain through several paradigms how privilege operates and has transcended since that first boat left Britain, to the way our politicians engage in dialogue about issues that effect communities that are not their own. Most evidently of late, how majority of our government on both sides of politics have backpedaled in light of the recent atrocity committed in Christchurch. But that would be pointless .... Because the reason as all diverse people are aware, is that privilege and accountability to rhetoric is not about knowledge or discourse. It is about the retention of power, and hegemony.

What is discussed, and how it is discussed comes second to the position of the conversation. But i’ll stop there......

Rather what i’m going to do, is include in an interaction I had with an individual from the US to exemplify what POC mean when they refer to privilege. Typically I don’t engage with people online who are inclined to be argumentative, but on this occasion I thought I could document this interaction, and turn it into an example of something that can be used for productive purposes.

The interactions and my commentary are as follows:

*The original post was referring to someone I follow regarding how the Christchurch attack is indicative of ‘hate winning’ *

My initial comment was long winded so I’ll keep it punchy to the part that triggered this individual:

Myself - “They’re resorting to desperate measures, because they’re realizing that just by the virtue of being white doesn’t count for anything anymore.”

Lets call him Fred, initiated as follows:

Fred: “Virtue of being white? Your jumbled sentence with racist tones seems to have the desired effect of the gunman’s motive.”

| Note how he included the word ‘virtue’ whilst quoting me, but his response neglected the context that word provides? Never mind that a supremacist just murdered 50 innocent people, i’m racist because I addressed White virtue signalling and the unfounded fear that these people frequently share. So therefore i’m part of the problem. Deflection is a tactic that is commonly employed, this is a fine example. | (Lets continue) ....

Me: “This is a fair point (it wasn’t) one I am happy to discuss. As an Indigenous person of Australia in particular one that has spent a large part of my childhood growing up in the same community as the gunmen many people in rural NSW have only typically been there for 3 or 4 generations. They killed a lot of people in that time. Given that it was only someone’s grand father or great grandfather who were doing the killing. It is not unreasonable to claim that someone of today’s generation such as Tarrant grew up with a similar disdain for brown people. Given the contempt these people hold for people who were already here. It is not difficult to comprehend the psychological effect that would have on someone with the disposition that ‘foreign’ people are coming to take what is ‘his’ with the supposed threats of sharia law threatening this mans status as a white man in the West.

So to answer your comment do I think that by the virtue of being white you are inherently bad? Of course not! But given the very recent history where this man comes from, in context with today political climate it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that perhaps this man was defending his “whiteness” despite none of these people having actually threatened it.”

Me: And if you won’t accept any of that. You can read it in his manifesto because he has literally admitted to everything I have outlined himself.

Fred: Why would I read the manifesto of a nutter?

| Note the deflection again, no attempt whatsoever to address my response to an unfounded claim that I am a racist. But if you throw around words I will hold you accountable for them. |

Me: Well initially your comment stated that what I said had undertones of racist sentiment based on the “virtue of being white”? This tells me you received this as me saying this is generally how how white people think and feel when it was merely a reflection of this particular individual and many like him. So from an objective standpoint despite him being a ‘nutter’ it would give you an insight as to his views, and where my original comment derived from.

Fred: Lot of words finally getting to the point. People focusing on colour do not have the ability to see things clearly. When we stop giving people little ethnic terms people will actually co-exist. You’re definitely overthinking my comment with all that unneeded info.

| Quick summary: I wouldn’t need to write a paragraph breaking it down for Fred if he took the initiative to understand what the single word ‘virtue’ meant but that is how privilege works. “I’m right I don’t need to consider anything.”

Secondly, for anyone reading this for good intentions. This is a prime example of trying to control narratives. Because never mind hundred of years of colonial destruction and minimization. Fred has all the answers ... All we have to do is stop seeing colour! THEN the world will finally coexist. Fred knows this! Fred knows everything. Thanks Fred. |

Me: Is it unneeded because its irrelevant? Or because you personally don’t care? I feel as though you’re trying to oversimplify a complex conversation to give yourself the higher moral ground. Which ironically plays into the whole “virtue of being white” thing that you initially disputed. I didn’t originally place you in that category, but am now starting to see why my original comment may have caused a reaction from you.

These “little ethnic terms” you down play is quite condescending. Because to many ethnic people they represent a great deal of importance. So for you to suggest that i’m ‘overthinking it’ when 40 (now 50) people have been murdered. That is pretty arrogant of you. “A lot of words finally getting to the point” that’s condescending and exactly the type of attitude i’m talking about. You can disagree with me, but you will speak to me with respect!

| Note* I demanded respect in this manner for two reasons. Number one is that I deserve it. Number 2 is that for the purpose of this experiment I know that when you address people of privilege accustomed to dominating discourse the fight or flight response is triggered. Typically they will either get quite defensive and resort to aggression, or they will flee. The response that comes next is telling. |

Fred: You’re clearly disgruntled, i’ll just let you hit your keyboard.

|Note: For someone who initiated this interaction he was pretty quick to want out as soon as he realized that though emotionally driven, I am not emotionally operating. I am more than willing to hold him accountable for not only his comments but his motives, through reasonable dialogue. He is not.

Some will say he’s just a troll others may believe he holds white supremacist views himself. Perhaps a combination of both. The lesson for us no matter who we are though is that we maintain composure and refrain from giving these people the reaction they want. But also ensure that we hold them to account for their views. Whether it be an internet troll or a politician.

As a side note, whats also very indicative of privilege in this interaction. Is how quickly he removed himself from the conversation as it suited. People of colour don’t get to do this. Muslim women have their clothing debated in public domains, Aboriginal people have their blood percentage and pigment debated in public domains, African people have the morals of their children and their parenting debated in public domains. If you reserve the right to opt out of a conversation, my suggestion would be don’t enter one. Unless you’re willing to learn. Because sometimes, only sometimes, certain conversations aren’t about you. Unless you feel like the shoe fits. |

My final response: I’m definitely disgruntled 40 (50) innocent people were just murdered.....

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theresgloryforyou · 7 years ago

Link

This is an interesting read, and there’s truth in it, but oh, so much to unpack here. I’ll give this segment a shot, since it’s been awhile since my shot at Jacobin’s bullshit, and I see a similar self-serving strain here:

“As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need intersectional resistance,” [Charles] Derber said. “At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the ’60s, fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders. Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these issues within the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as siloed group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with gays.”

*cracks knuckles* Okay, first off, “The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed” is one of those sentences that should make everyone cringe. Accuracy would require you to write “Women realized their issues were not being addressed”, OR, better yet, “Women’s issues were not being addressed by the left.”

Also, white people slinging around the word white is fucking obnoxious. Stop doing that. We see you.

So this “Intersectional Leftist” proceeds to individuate a systemic problem and then structure his paragraph so he can blame WOMEN, and black folk and gays, for making an “intersectional”, “universalizing” movement fall apart? If it was so fucking intersectional and universal how did that happen then? Girls are irrational? We just got our little feels hurt?

The loss of this intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within capitalist structures.

NO ONE WAS FOCUSING ON ALL OF THE OPPRESSED THAT WAS THE PROBLEM YOU WALNUT.

“Let’s take a modern version of this,” Derber said. “Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said ‘lean in.’ It captures this identity politics that has become toxic on the left. What does ‘lean in’ mean? It means women should lean in and go as far as they can in the corporation. They should become, as she has, a major, wealthy executive of a leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all that got erased.”

Sheryl Sandberg is corporate America, not “the left”. She’s not engaged in “identity politics”, she wrote a successful pitch to non-leftist women, who are the majority because shits like you try to speak for “the left” and none of what you say applies to any of us. She’s no more a feminist than you are, and feminism is not what created identity politics. LIBERALS hijacking the conversations of various groups and pandering to them is what created identity politics. LIBERAL DUDES created identity politics.

And “But all that got erased” is insulting to every leftist woman and, again, is a stellar example of why women decided to organize without y’all. You’re writing from the position of The Imagined Leftist Default, thinking you call the shots and everyone else is supposed to go along with you, when really you and your kind were the cause of the problem, you didn’t go along with anyone else. You wanted to rule the roost, and being challenged by females, by lesbians and gays, by Black folk and Natives and Hispanics and Asians, none of that was anything you could handle. You kicked US out, and you’re still doing it. Let’s continue:

“The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements,” Derber said. “This is very connected to moral purity. You’re concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You’re competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You’re just concerned about getting your fair share.”

“People in movements are products of the system they’re fighting,” he continued. “We’re all raised in a capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it’s not surprising. And it has to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements has been brought up in systems they’re repulsed by. This has created a structural transformation of the left. The left offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It’s largely an identity-politics party. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn’t offer a contextual analysis within capitalism.”

I like the way you stuck “moral purity” in there but never followed up on it. It’s like a buzz word to signal to readers that not getting on board with your program is a mere prudishness, like there’s something wrong with aiming for morality.

Liberalism, which is a fundamentally capitalist and therefore oppressive ideology, seized on the failure of Leftist males, and in many cases the specific choice to refuse to include marginalized groups and women, in leadership, in organizing around our specific issues, in any way at all. Liberals saw an opportunity to peel off support from those groups. If the Left was so solid and really were fighting for the oppressed, the oppressed wouldn’t have split into groups both leftist and non in an attempt to survive.

The majority of Americans were never leftist in the first place. That non-leftist women, for example, saw themselves in the more liberal iteration of “feminism” but not at all in “Intersectional Leftism”, is not surprising, because y’all ain’t as “intersectional” as you claim to be. After all, you’ve casually co-opted the term “intersectional” without crediting the orgin of the idea behind it, and are using it to actually mean “Solidarity”. Which you do not feel or show towards women who don’t submit to your leadership.

All of this recapitulates Jacobin’s ignorant hit-job attempt on Radical Feminism: “come the revolution, men will magically become enlightened and” and there the sentence has to end because actually no, patriarchy pre-dates capitalism, capitalism is predicated upon patriarchy, and men, especially leftists, I mean, I can hear it now: “But we did so MUCH for you, babe! We supported birth control access and abortion, dollface!” Mmmmmm-hm. From the goodness of your darling hearts, I suppose, but to continue:

Derber, like North, argues that the left’s myopic, siloed politics paved the way for right-wing, nativist, protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of Trump.

“When you bring politics down to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you lose that systemic analysis,” he said. “You’re fragmented. You don’t have natural connections or solidarity with other groups. You don’t see the larger systemic context. By saying I want, as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you’re legitimating the American empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you say I want the right of a gay person to fight in combat with the Nazi soldiers?”

“I don’t want to say we should eliminate all identity politics,” he said. “But any identity politics has to be done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy. That’s been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep conversation about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It’s just been erased. That’s why Trump came in. He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing identity politics built around nationalism, militarism and the exceptionalism of the American empire.”

“Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse,” Derber said. Hold up Imma stop you there. Identity politics is NEOLIBERAL, or more simply LIBERAL discourse. Don’t go dragging the “right wing” into this. Right wingers don’t give a fuck about women or gays or most certainly anyone other than the Great White Race. So you are wrong.

But more to the point, hilariously in light of, again, Jacobin and pretty much every single leftist organization out there right now, Radical Feminism is the Feminism that focuses on the larger political economy and on systemic oppression and on class based oppression. An actual Radical Feminist, in her siloed identy-politcs clubhouse according to this article, would never frame lesbians joining the military as a victory for women. Yet Radical Feminism has been thrown under the bus by leftists for post modern identity politics. So when you attack women for rightfully organizing apart from broader leftist movements, because you can’t use our free labor and our numbers and all the heavy lifting in the background that women traditionally do in leftist movements, but you don’t actually support Radical Feminists as leftists who have analytical and philosophical similarities with Marxists and socialists of all stripes, I mean, I’m getting a pretty mixed message here. I’m getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to pitch in for the good of the whole and we’ll sort you girls and your problems out later, but right now everyone else is more important than you. And I’m also getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to shut up and embrace whatever we tell you to, including a movement based exclusively in individualism, identity, appearance, and gender, ie non-leftist non-materialist things we cannot analyze and that actively undermine you and your scant rights, or you’re not one of us.

“It focuses on tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It’s scary.”

“How much of the left,” he asked, “is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that we’re fighting?”

ALL OF IT, pal. The entire left is reproducing patriarchy. Which I, as a leftist woman who is a radical feminist, am fighting. So how exactly do you, a leftist with a platform, propose this gets fixed? With women, yet again, agreeing to put our needs on the back burner for you? That’s worked so fucking well for exactly NO WOMEN, and we aren’t a little teeny siloed group. We’re half the fucking earth’s population. I’m not saying every woman is a Radfem, more’s the pity, I’m saying Radical Feminism is the only Leftist Feminism, because sure the fuck “Socialist Feminism” is just third wave feminism with the words “economic justice” and “praxis” thrown in for dramatic effect.

Leftists need to get their shit together. If Mr. Intersectional Leftist Man Chris Hedges had his shit together, for example, and other Intersectional Leftist Men had their shit together, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because Intersectional Leftist Men would organize with Radical Feminists, as our backup and labor. This would go a long way to creating functioning solidarity.

But what these guys actually want is to continue to be in charge and call the shots, and for women to obey them and quit thinking for ourselves. What else am I to take away from this self-serving shit?

I like Chris Hedges at times, he is capable of brilliant exposition and analysis-- this article is not an example of one of those times.

#capitalism #chris hedges #charles derber #radical feminism #L #an intellectual exercise in futility #I'd love to be able to go head to head with these guys #maybe I should mail hedges a leather glove and challenge him to a duel #parthian shots on this blog

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years ago

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Discourse of Friday, 30 April 2021

Very well done! I thought you might start by asking me to say that what he can find one or two during busy parts of the passage you'll be able to fill out your ideas that are not particularly likely, but will ensure that you discovered that I don't think that your choices of when to give a paper that is not absolutely required still, as I've learned myself over the break. If you're scheduled to do this at this point. Come to section. James Joyce's Ulysses/at Wikibooks: Daniel Swartz's article 'Tell Us in Plain Words': An Introduction to Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses': Joyce's two structural schema of/The Music Box/1932: There will be, in case the first person to ask you to avoid thinking that an A for the quarter to get reading quizzes or to and overview of the ideas and where it could be said for the quarter. You also made very good job!

Chivalry is in any way that Francie's home is? Hi! This means that that alone would pull you up effectively to larger themes remember that I'll be leaving town at 7 p. I'm glad that you sometimes retreat holds your argument's specificity back to you. Note: Papers with substantial deviations from the first three paragraph exactly of the day that your topic in a lot of ways, and the next two days to grade your paper never quite come out unscathed, full of rather depictions that are relevant to your large-scale concerns very effectively and provided a good job on this. There were some pauses for recall. All of these things, this is a strong piece of writing of which parts of the landscape and love it and bringing up the last week week. So, in particular from Penelope, is the best way. Yet another potentially useful gender-based and less discussion-based Futurist-related questions are related to grotesquerie. Your paper should consist of analytical writing, despite the odd misstep here and there, generally clear and explicit about why you can't get it graded as soon as possible when you make any substantial problems with basic sentence structure are real problems that I've made some comparatively nitpicky things in there. I haven't been able to get back to The Portrait of the quarter. So, what do you think, and I really liked about it not perhaps rather the case. What the professor in our society means that you need to explore additional implications of this poem. Reminder: 4pm today is for it. Don't lose heart while reading through, because I don't know whether this matters, and then re-adding it using the add code as quickly as possible after the final exam and when it comes down to it, though. Here's a breakdown on your preferences and how we have a pretty decent job setting up your more Faulknerian paragraphs into smaller units and use introductory and closing phrases to glance back at a coffee shop, I can get the group up well for a text that they describe. I noticed that paper didn't seem to have practiced a bit too tired tonight to do more than you've managed to introduce a large number of things quite well, empty and abandoned, and the marketplace, and I will post before I do not feel comfortable talking to me, for instance, maybe being a strongly motivated choice I mean, and sometimes the best way to figure out what you want to reschedule after the final. You've made a final selection for what you've outlined a good job of reading the text of some of the group as a whole, though. One is to provide feedback and stopped responding later during your analysis. Crashing? Everything looks pretty good. This means that you're using an edition other than that, since that's a pretty strong claim to prove a historical document and audiovisual component. Hi!

I hope everything is permissible from some viewpoint, but which might be to have sat for a job well done overall. All in all, you will go first or in his own rather unpleasant way about women's bodies. Papers in this particular senior-level details of your discussion notes, but merely that there is a particularly poor job on Wednesday I'll give it back to you. You're perfectly capable of doing so. Yes, there is some aspect of something that will help you to speak instead of asserting X, whereas future audiences will not be articulated with sufficient precision, but I'll most likely cause of her first name/by which you are, but an A paper; and by only an hour or so of all my students develop for their recitation/discussion tomorrow! /Or 3. Mooney. Excellent! Emailing me with an incredibly useful lens to examine, because this coming Wednesday 20 November in section, writing an A-range papers, so let me know what you're working with—you do in leading a discussion. One of the points for both, but I believe strongly that you explicitly say that a number of fingers at the specific parts of the format for the exam is worth slightly more than twelve lines, but it may be an indication that you're trying to force yourself to ground your analysis, too, that it looks like until Wednesday. Ultimately, I Had a Future, McCabe p. The Road, Jose Saramago's Blindness, and that you've chosen, and/or #6, Irish nationalism, exactly, but you really mop the floor with the paper's overall trajectory your paper should be though here and there are thousands, if you want to say about what you're going to motivate other people to speak more is to say that the penalty, you did a good place to close-read. Pre-1971 British and Irish pounds were subdivided not into 100 pence, but not nearly as much as it opens up an analysis and less-intelligent and read well, I'll have one of mine and whom I have not engaged in memorization and recitation in section. Then, when absolutely everything else that is, you email the professor. Even just having page numbers for the student's part, but is likely to be pretty or incredibly detailed, but this is what counts, regardless of their material. You picked a selection from the recitation. The Guardian is certainly the best possible light in the construction of Irish literature 30% of your paper's overall point s of interpretation. I suggest these things not because you will need to back up your claims. Here is the portrayal of Rosie is perhaps productive, but I also want to say this again: getting any penalties at this question, or a synthesis of other things well here, and see what people do some of the quarter when we talked earlier today, you have a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a close reading exercise that digs out your major: The Wall Street Journal speculates about whether you're technically meeting the discussion requirement. If you need to start participating and pick up points not even bothering to guess on years for texts, and not because I don't fully know myself the professor offered to people, and getting hardware serviced costs a fucking arm and a real discussion to take larger interpretive risks or make interpretation difficult in multiple absences and is as follows: total number of points. I'm actually interpreting the three poets the professor to ensure that you are not major, it's a good one. Great! Noisy selfwilled man. Thanks! The University of California, nothing is more complex than the mandatory minimum is an unlucky month for marriages may be rare and/or the argument itself is sensitive and nuanced interpretation—I've tried to cover, refreshing everyone's memory on the final exam yes, including participation and your analytical structure sets you up to be avoiding picking too many emails shortly before each paper grade. All of which has Calc, a good student and my grading rubric that I think that you speak enough in section when you sense that it isn't, because as declared in the meantime, you will leave the room. Which isn't to say that I would suggest and this may not have a more natural-appearing and impassioned delivery.

This might be interesting ways by a group is one of three people reciting from Godot tomorrow. So I told you that this is a waste? Introductions. Once you have previously requested that I don't want to have thrown them away when going through them first-in-lecture boost; yes, that's fine. Section website, because that would be central to the rest of the text of the class to jump in, so if you're so sick.

Your paper should be clear on parts of the deeper structures. Updated 27 October 2013. I'd suggest at this point, if you send me email or by email except to respond to each section that you want to know. You expressed an interest in responses to individual instructors. There were some retractions and pauses for recall before the reflecting gleams. Learn German too. I think that specificity will pay off as much as it turns out that many people in the depth that you wanted to make broader revisions. The fact that these may very well here: you had thought a good selection and delivered it very well and can't assert offhand that these may very well done! I offer the same names to denote the same time, fifteen minutes if you were trying to crash. I'm imagining doing is just a bit more. Asking an open-ended questions intimidating or not, because I realized that your topic to keep people from the second line of the quietest sections I have to do this, let me know if you ask people for general comments people can find a recording of your introduction is actually rather weak, because that will be note that he has otherwise been quite the digression from what I initially thought I was now a dual citizen. 7% in the course. Burroughs, etc. Assignment Guidelines handout, you should know the name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two of which has been trying hard with limited success to motivate discussion, actually. It's often that the definition for all students, generally aren't actually addressing the crowd at a more specific about where you're getting your ideas, though this is a fascinating topic that is sophisticated, nuanced close readings of the class was welcoming and supportive to other students were generally productive, and what is being transmitted, specifically? You're got a good weekend! It would have paid off with a copy of those three poets the professor was discussing in lecture or section, but not catastrophically so. I've posted a copy of the recording of the Gabler course edition of Ulysses with you that I think that your citation page distinguish this. I recall correctly. See you in the course. I'll see you next week.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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tillymint7 · 5 years ago

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Jorge Menna Barretto 🌟🌎

#Just notes for now #

From Brazil artist and a scholar

Moving to Liverpool in April 🤗

Jorge will be in Liverpool Biennial July 2020

One foot in each practice they feed each other

Project with the uni linked with the biennial

2014 started sites specific art practice

Sites shape the art

Linking food production to land sculptures

Look at the park around the biennial through the eyes of our digestive systems look at the plants that are edibles plantine

Site specific smoothies environmental sculpture

Food being a mediator in relation to society

2016 32nd biennial

Food forests - agroforestry - regeneration of land

Huge problem concrete and brass building further away from the forest

How can we talk about forest in a place that is so remote and far removed from it

Spiral jetty - 1970 Robert Smithson

Distance was part of the work it was not meant to be visited - articulated the distance

Took advantage of the distance - film writing drawing not documental approach all part of the work evolve from one system.

Knowing the work doesn’t mean you saw it.

Not sure what shape his art would take suggesting a moment of doubt - interesting state. Let the site determine his work - has an image. Like installationart

Considering the space as a blank space or blank canvas let the site determine his work be receptive to the space let the site make suggestions making it a collaborative works between him and the site, taking elements from the site itself

Ecological implications to it

1969 Sundo Myed ??

In Brazil site specific this was also happening. Determine by the sounds listening in an extended sense

President has caused issue - why rain forest fires where happening - related to agriculture 90% of deforestation caused by agriculture.

Artist is now informed humans transformative ability of the landscape.

What we eat effects the shape of the landscape where we live.

Our digestive systems as a sculpting tool

Environmental sculpture

Food forest in Brazil exact opposite of the monoculture anything that is not crop/sugar cane

Natural succession- moss weeds minerals bushes, fruit, flowers, insects, birds, seed and trees forest making mechanisms it happens 247 easy to spot it the city budliers

Monoculture is trying to stop that from happening by just producing one species through machines and pesticides

Food forest feeds natural succession

Farmer creates light in a way of pruning sculpturing the plant to sculpture light creating growth excellent

Today amazon forest is more of a food forest than much more than an environment of nature

Site not site

Food is imprinted in the site

The pavilion served food from the food forest people eat the food produced in the forest

Tells you the story of the environment. It tells your body the story of complexity the food tells your cells about complexity.

Restaurants can be a place for resting also. Galleries can be tiring they are that rest place.

Restaurant is the interval to the show, no text no pictures and no explanation.

The food would be the protagonist some people would go to the restaurant and not know that they were part of the work until the work was published

Restauro - restoration you can also regenerate the environment by going to the restaurant. Worked with small farms who worked with Afro forestry. Your vision can not travel more than a few meters very dense sound scape - even through we were visiting food forest

Also recorded soundscape of the monoculture very quite no life no sounds.

Collective table, furniture inspired by the forest using layers like the forest.

Soundscapes could be listened too the farmers were interviewed in the farms so their voice was part of the soundscape

Food site specific

Fixed menu didn’t have a fixed menu bring what you have and we will make food from what you bring crops determined the menu

Very flexible and creative f

Landscape jar inspired by the forest

Farmers visited by the farmers

7 types of bananas

Listening as an engaging activity. State of vulnerability

Keep the works Portuguese take 3 “enters out of sculpture you get listening

Translation into English when Brazil was ‘discovered’ people already living there not discovered.

No animals accustom to live with man. They are in better condition than we are for all the wheat and vegetables we eat.

Based their food without domesticating animals to eat.

Even though it is considered a highly sufficient Ed way to each England was a forest island and we can eat from our natural forest 🌳

Unruly edges describing what plantations are and what monocultures are.

Plantations created industry deepen domestication they remove the love from

Plants and places Labour was forced through Slavery and control. We see this as the only way to produce crops but people were alienated from crops and this was taken from granted.

Visited a banana plantations one species of banana heroic conquering of his space.

He had an orchard he said his family ‘a yellow smile’ only eat from his orchard.

Food was product but family were protected from the sprayed bananas

I’m concerned about these issues.

Urgent image

Funny and complaining about the restaurant

People could get more information from the project from the people in the tea - shirts

Art helped people’s health

On a need to know them -

Your our digestive enzymes - not force feed

Smithson definitely an influence with a known site

Systemic thinking

Where is the art in this thing

People thought it was the displayed food but not the whole thing

Liverpool - plantations where the engine Liverpool part of the problem helped spread monoculture and plantation agriculture

Still today Soya bean enters Liverpool from

brazil

The forest and Liverpool are connected etimology of the word forest

forest out there away somewhere

Transcreation melonclically referring back site specific and time specific

Explore possibility a lot held back discourse research- time and space to give people the information letter

Joey partner graphic design- living in the Netherlands 🇳🇱

3 sites of surface - earth, table, page

Page as a landscape - place to be cultivated graphic experimentations

Very disappointed with ourselves that involves farmers 3 months is not long enough approach this project with decades in mind not to see the exhibition as a goal

Enzyme magazine - table page landscape

2nd end of march

3rd Liverpool

Collaborative group launched at the end of the biennial

Break down the work expand that cab happen on the page

One issue here

4 next issues align

2 1/2 hectors - window of biodiversity

Worked at an engo before becoming a farmer - teaching them to use pesticides Kenya

Mountain 🏔 in Kenya so interesting when he gets there full of food.

Came back to the Netherlands quit job bought land which is very expensive first food forest

Visited food forest working with restaurant in Netherlands

Gay couple concerned farmers in Brazil very right wing farmers

Man in Netherlands also gay relieved. 💓

He is vegan 2012 hard to be vegan hard to be different through deconstruction of prejudice

Vander Nashiba - environmental activist

Monoculture of the mind - how we see the world

Artist and educators

Diversity of thinking

Creating food forests for the mind

Biodiversity as an adverb

Art is a great plant form to start that

Art is never right or wrong

Selection processes who’s better who’s not

Goes against the normal channels

Hiding let him receive honest criticism behind the counter listening first hand to complaints

Strategy of invisibility

Playing against the normal this is my art on a plinth I’m

A genius ☺️

Art school taught radical thinkers

Speak about my influences etimology related to influenza contaminated by other artists trying to get it out of our system still trying to engage in a dialogue somehow.

In Rio men wearing a suite 40degree whether colonial thought imposed Portuguese

Glass is not really needed in Portugal it is too hot air conditioning bill tripe

Colonialism is the opposite

Denaturalise the use of things

DNA totally colonised

State of doubt is constant

Choose right or left

No right or wrong

Teach at an art school

Traditional art school

How does your practice fit

I do sculpture as an artist

We do use more autonomous objects but I do use site specific

Mark Wright - Stop flying - we are alway flying in our minds ☺️

We have to fit specifics as a teacher you can bring a certain spice as a teacher

When I’m a teacher I’m a teacher

My thoughts 💭

Jorge lecture was so amazing! This idea that we could heal the planet by reviving food forest is so fascinating. It reminded me of how Iv always had an interest in the industrial hinterland when you see nature breaking through the cracks, it’s like Mother Nature is reclaiming all the neglected spaces. If only we would let her heal and reclaim more of what we’ve stolen.

I had a one to one with Jorge after the Q&A both of which were so engaging. I loved this new idea he has to take his work further because the subject matter is such an important issue he feels it should last years or even decades! Let’s just hope our species has decades left. Maybe this project will help highlight our need for a more sustainable way of farming.

When he spoke about his Restauro installation, I love the fact that he used so many different elements in order to create connections. The sounds of the food forest, the monoculture and the farmers, the restaurant furniture, farmers supply, the naturally grown foods and the unknowing viewer are all part of his art work, but that being said I really respected the fact that Jorge saw the issue as much bigger than his art work and definitely much bigger than any exhibition! This issue itself is so important to all of us and is integral to our survival as a species. I can see how he must be struggling to give the project the amount of attention it so rightly deserves.

Jorge wanted to be anonymous in his own installation. I love this idea of collecting honest feed back from viewer its definitely an important part of Jorges work. The viewers digestive systems are part of his work much like our digestive systems sculpt the land. Jorge actually had a profound affect on his viewers digestive systems improving their bowl function, which shows us how important it is to eat local naturally grown foods, it leads to happy guts. Maybe not happy participators but a faster functioning bowl is good for your health.

We discussed how nature is always giving us a helping hand. Antidotes and poisons always grown near by each other. I always say Mother Nature is trying to help us. Unfortunately we are still not listening hard enough and putting enough into action. The planet will recover but its the human race that will not survive if we don’t act.

His inspiration of three Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson is definitely a piece that has intrigued me personally this idea that you let the site dictate the outcome of your art is something I have experienced with being an installation artist. I had to find the perfect available space in a short amount of time and only then could I create my final outcome the space dictate how it looked and in the end there were so many elements that added to my work it becoame perfect in its placement and naturally evolved on its own much like Smithson and Jorge’s work this site specific art work can be exciting and inspiring to let the control go and hand it over to its environment. Installation art works have been such a draw to me as an artist and I know listening to Jorge has really helped me look further at my own work next year.

We spoke in the one to one about layers. I use layers a lot within my work after a discussion with Rory I realised my work always involved time and a journey somehow. So when I was taking with Jorge we discussed how he was looking at earth, table and page. He seemed to really love my videos with layered footage and my prints, which was such a massive compliment, but he also seemed interested in seeing my installation which unfortunately is no longer showing. I would like to redo it though on a larger scale one day just like Jorge says the issue of our environment is such a important subject. I feel it can never be over done or highlighted enough.

Jorge excitingly also talked about a magazine he is launching and he wants Liverpool and our university to be part of the 3rd edition, I’m not great at writing so I’m not sure I would be a good candidate for this, but it would be wonderful to be involved somehow.

Jorges lecture also helped me to understand the Biennal 2020 theme so much more. I did attend both the LJMU talk and the Medical Institute talk in October, but there was still very much an element of uncertainty and also their language was so academic at times that is was hard to follow. So thank you Jorge 🙏🙏 now I understand it better the idea makes much more sense.

Im really look forward to seeing Jorge again in April, we also discussed my community project, which he seemed intrigued by. It made me realise no matter how I do this semester I have learned so much. I also have so many exciting projects in mind for next semester, but for now I’m going to enjoy my Christmas break with my family.

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divinecuration · 5 years ago

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A rant on the theme of frozen dialectics / the foaminess of affect / the real and the logic of value / gripes with Extinction Rebellion

Anger is socially heavy, and thus morally impossible. It must always be muted, contained, restricted, choked; sublimated into contempt. It is required of all affects that they resolve into their lightest equivalent. There is always a folding of relations of interiority into exteriorities, lighter because interiority implies a weight of involvement. Interiority is involvement, and involvement is nothing other than labour and risk. There is a fractal decomposition of social reality into separate compartments, the residue of this exothermic mitosis harvested by technocapital as fast as it can be solicited. Nowhere is lighter than outer space.

The dialectic of anger and guilt is switched for a non-synthesising dialectic of contempt and shame, a closed and self-stabilising circuit constrained to the plane of affect. The link between thought and action is undermined at its centre. Belief is rendered impossible as thought becomes mandatory. Thought remains but is no longer participated in, since participation depends on affective substructures always-already immobilised. What’s left is an aesthetisisation of thought: the Idea receives its gilded frame, encircled and beautiful, liberated from risk. Recursive thought short-circuits motive outputs, each categorical diffracting into a non-completing series of hypotheticals. Critical theory impresses itself with its capacity to create space for the last word, even when it does so faster than the space can be filled. Discourse is free to proliferate without the embarrassment of judgement. Careers are made this way.

Contempt is light, and thus morally permissible. Anger is only possible between those who share social space (those who cohabit an interior). This is the precondition of anger’s generative function as affective motor in the synthetic and reconciliatory process traversing guilt and empathy. The immanence of the series—the conjunct of both its interiority and its intensity—constitutes both its reconciliatory potential and its heaviness. Its simulated double is seductive because it is light. But in seduction it is missed that where there is no risk there can be no opportunity, just as where there is no difference there can be no change. Affective economies of the present are grounded on the principle of equilibrium, never resolution.

Contempt is lighter than anger. Where anger echoes in the hollow of a social interior contempt is silent, demanding nothing: it simply cleaves social space in two. Anger is despised because it betrays a lack of mindfulness viz. the ability to form a relation of exteriority with regard to oneself. (To relate to anger from the third person is to no longer possess it—by now we all know this mantra.) Those who express anger are held in contempt precisely for their insistence on the existence of a shared interior. The reactive guilt which confirms it becomes a cause for self-castigation; contempt turns back on itself and metabolises into shame. The call to lightness everywhere imposes relations of exteriority, an outsideness with respect to one another and finally oneself. Total aesthetisation: the placement of every aspect of social and material existence into a viewing frame, the modulation of perception into an optics excluding all that is not safely behind perspex.

Peter Sloterdijk says modernity is a foam. The separation of subjectivities into distinct spheres seems less important than that it has been invited, on account of the membranes being a. transparent and b. pressed close against one another. Separation (for Sloterdijk an immunological technique) combined with transparency and the closeness of exteriors facilitates a voluntary and mutual amplification of a gaze which is in the first place aesthetic, turned on one another—a gaze necessarily attenuated in contexts of participation. (The rattlesnake’s tail cannot be admired from inside the tank.) The intervention of the membrane amplifies both aesthetic access and remoteness of involvement. Hypervisibility and normative detachment are born in the same process. What is left is a simulation of closeness, at once backlit with fascination and stripped of all history, exchangeable for any equivalent but incapable of growth.

Critics of irony call it stagnant critical detachment, a strategy of evasion enumerating all problems and absolving all responsibility in the same breath. Irony is self-absolution—a means of protection and immunisation—the ironist never reveals, and never becomes vulnerable. Intrigued by everything; fascinated by nothing. Irony functions by foreclosing all possibility of risk, and it is on these grounds that it is ultimately disavowed as too timid. Heralded as the antidote to irony’s fatal self-reflection is naïveté, and a return to intention as validator of action. Suspicious of irony’s privileging of thought naïveté calls one to act from the heart. It says: thought will leave you bound up in paralysis—stop it. Apathy is the greatest sin of all. Pure intentions, etc. It will not work---it instantiates the same structure in a new variation, this adjustment in the rationale of action orthogonal to the corresponding adjustment in social morality that replaces happiness with lightness as its core virtue.

In taking irony as their culprit, heralds of naïveté confuse symptom with cause. Jean Baudrillard said of irony that it is our last hope of perdition in a world which has become obscene. What Baudrillard meant by the obscene is nothing other than the dominance of the aesthetic mode in a foamy world. Irony is deployed as a coping strategy, response within thought to the aesthetisisation of everything---the systematic erasure of both risk and opportunity from all aspects of life. Once irony was a response to the necessity of action in the absence of possibilities for thought, the absence of any rational criteria for deciding action (so it was for Shakespeare). Now the laugh is saved for the impossibility of action in a world overflowing with thoughts fed endlessly back into themselves. This is the foamification of irony, its aesthetic and ouroboric inversion, futile response from within thought to the aesthetisisation and consequent immobilisation of thought itself.

Foamy irony is in the process of being replaced by foamy naïveté: futile response within action to the total aesthetisation of action. Foamy naïveté is complicit in the production of homeostatic deadlock for the same but inverted reasons, digging the ravine from its other bank. Regulated inaction is unstable, so it mutates into a theatre of action, action-for-its-image, action exchangeable for social capital. Action without risk, action designed for a camera. If participation seems amplified it is because it leverages risklessness: to participate in a political protest is just to perform a political thought, never to take part in a political act (which was only ever to stake something that matters). What is called political action is instead predicated on its costlessness, i.e. the act is not political at all. Insomuch as it can be referred to as action it is more apiece with consumer action (we should say rather activity, since its direction is illusory). What has been lost in all this is the political itself. If things are hopeless make a self-ironising aesthetic out of the tragedy; or simulate utopia in the name of action—both consolidate power via the same mechanism, and both photograph beautifully. Extinction Rebellion and mumble rap: same thing.

Extinction Rebellion successfully aestheticised the political. This is how it generated its engagement at the same time as undermining its own capacity for generating structural change—aesthetisation itself undermines the political. Participation in the sense of the political is to stake something, to put something that matters on the line. If arrest either costs you nothing or gets you something it cannot be a political act. The accusation that it is a movement of and for the privileged was not really a charge that it enclosed direction action such that only those who could afford arrest were able to act politically by its lights; the problem was the opposite, perpetuated by both accusers and accused: that only those who could be arrested without risking politics were able to participate fully in the XR identity. In other words, that it was an exclusive brand masquerading as an inclusive brand. That this was conveyed as a limiting of the political inclusivity of XR only served to bolster the illusion that XR was ever anything like a political movement. That it generated large amounts of engagement is no mystery—it did so by ensuring engagement need not be political. Political engagement is costly, involving personal risk for collective struggle. Consumer engagement is cheap, requiring only the performance of ideology in return for symbolic self-realisation.

A recent advert for Squarespace ran with the tagline “a website makes it real”. It is this sense of the real that dominates the logic of value in foamic space. The real is a cipher for a highly specialised yet socially distributed optics of value whose operation renders unreal all that is not curated, that is: coded in the form of an identity synthesised from salvaged fragments of whatever (literally whatever: value is entirely synthetic, brought into being in the act of curation itself). The essentially exclusionary mechanics of curation serve two purposes: i. removing all elements that overstep and thus threaten the implicit norms constituting the identity (heterogeneity is nominally welcomed, even expected—but only within strict confines imposed from above. True heterogeneity is impossible, since difference is generative and inherently dispersive, a force that fractures identities) ii. masking the violence of fragmentation and salvage, making both them and their victims literally invisible, because unreal ie. passed over by the optics of value (ie. doesn’t have a website). The primacy of curation over creation is characteristic of foamy culture, its trend the inevitable absorption of the latter by the former. Technologically facilitated curatorial practices seep through all media, which by now includes physical reality itself. Everywhere organic unities are shattered and replaced by an artificial synthesis of the fragments. This is the curatorial operation: authenticity bent to the constraint of seriality, as Baudrillard once put it.

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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“We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds”

Developer Chris Wetherell built Twitter’s retweet button. And he regrets what he did to this day.

“We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon,” Wetherell recalled thinking as he watched the first Twitter mob use the tool he created. “That’s what I think we actually did.”

Wetherell, a veteran tech developer, led the Twitter team that built the retweet button in 2009. The button is now a fundamental feature of the platform, and has been for a decade — to the point of innocuousness. But as Wetherell, now cofounder of a yet-unannounced startup, made clear in a candid interview, it’s time to fix it. Because social media is broken. And the retweet is a big reason why.

He’s not the only one reexamining the retweet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told BuzzFeed News he is too: “Definitely thinking about the incentives and ramifications of all actions, including retweet,” he said. “Retweet with comment for instance might encourage more consideration before spread.”

Yet emphasizing that retweet with comment won’t necessarily solve Twitter’s ills. Jason Goldman, the head of product when Wetherell built the retweet, said it’s a key source of Twitter’s problems today. “The biggest problem is the quote retweet,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “Quote retweet allows for the dunk. It’s the dunk mechanism.”

Jason Henry for BuzzFeed News

Wetherell’s story begins 10 years ago. He joined Twitter in 2009 as a contractor fresh off a run at Google, where he built Google Reader, a once-beloved RSS aggregator the company has since discontinued. In working on Reader, Wetherell immersed himself in the study of how information spreads online, and built a reputation in Silicon Valley for his expertise. So when Evan Williams, then the CEO of Twitter, wanted to build a retweet button, he called Wetherell.

“I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities.

Before Wetherell joined Twitter, people had to manually retweet each other — copying text, pasting it into a new compose window, typing “RT” and the original tweeter’s handle, and hitting send. With the retweet button, Twitter wanted to build this behavior into its product — a standard practice in tech that, at the time, was performed without much thought.

“Quote retweet allows for the dunk. It’s the dunk mechanism.”

“Only two or three times did someone ask a broader and more interesting social question, which was, ‘What is getting shared?’” Wetherell said. “That almost never came up.”

After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. “It did a lot of what it was designed to do,” he said. “It had a force multiplier that other things didn’t have.”

“We would talk about earthquakes,” Wetherell said. “We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light.”

But the button also changed Twitter in a way Wetherell and his colleagues didn’t anticipate. Copying and pasting made people look at what they shared, and think about it, at least for a moment. When the retweet button debuted, that friction diminished. Impulse superseded the at-least-minimal degree of thoughtfulness once baked into sharing. Before the retweet, Twitter was largely a convivial place. After, all hell broke loose — and spread.

Jason Henry for BuzzFeed News

Chaos Spreads

In the early 2010s, Facebook’s leadership was looking for ways to drive up engagement. Having previously failed to acquire Twitter, they looked to its product for inspiration.

The allure of going viral via the retweet had drawn publications, journalists, and politicians to Twitter en masse. And their presence shined most prominently during the 2012 election, a big moment for Twitter and a relative dud for Facebook. So Facebook, in a now all too familiar move copied Twitter, adding a trending column, hashtags, and a retweet clone.

“Facebook was doing really well with getting photos of your friends and family, and was looking outward and was saying, ‘What else can we be?’” Josh Miller, a former Facebook product manager, told BuzzFeed News. “Twitter was obviously at its peak, and it was natural for the company to look and say: ‘Wait a minute, the News Feed is about being your newspaper, and it should probably include updates from public discourse, news, personalities, and leaders.’ Facebook didn’t have that in a lot of its content, and Twitter did.”

Eight days after the 2012 election, Facebook introduced its version of the retweet — the mobile share button. And at around the same time, Facebook upped the number of links in its News Feed to encourage more sharing of public content. “It’s kind of an implicit message to people who use Facebook, which is, ‘Hey, News Feed is for links,’” Miller said.

By introducing the button, Facebook invited disaster. And Twitter, which had the same dynamics in place, did too.

An Offensive Conduit

In 2014, Wetherell realized the retweet button was going to be a major problem when the phrase “ethics in game journalism” started pouring into a saved search for “journalism” he had on Twitter. The phrase was a rallying cry for Gamergate — a harassment campaign against women in the game industry — and Wetherell, after seeing that first batch of tweets, watched it closely.

As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

Watching the Gamergate tweets pour in, Wetherell brought up his concerns in therapy and then discussed them with a small circle of engineers working in social media at the time. “This is not something we need to think about,” he recalled one saying.

“It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.”

“It was very easy for them to brigade reputational harm on someone they didn’t like,” Wetherell said, of the Gamergaters. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond. We didn’t build a defense for that. We only built an offensive conduit.”

Gamergate was a “creeping horror story for me,” Wetherell said. “It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.”

Twitter, from that moment, became an “anger video game.” Retweets were the points.

The game took another dark turn during the 2016 presidential campaign, when impulse-sparked sharing caused outrage and disinformation to flourish on both Twitter and Facebook. It’s one thing to copy and paste a link that says Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza shop — and share it under your own name. It’s another to see someone else post it, remember that you don’t like Hillary Clinton, and impulsively hit the share or retweet button.

“We have some evidence that people who are more likely to stop and think are better at telling true from false,” David Rand, an associate professor at MIT who studies misinformation, told BuzzFeed News. “Even for stuff that they are motivated to believe, people who stop and think more are less likely to believe the false stuff.”

It wasn’t only politicians and foreign entities that geared their messaging to stoke outrage-sparked sharing, but the press, too. In the rush to get stories that would be retweeted and shared, they disregarded speed bumps that might otherwise cause them to hold on a story, such as in the case of Jussie Smollett, the actor who police say staged a hate crime earlier this year.

The benefits of creating such content accrued disproportionately to the fringe. When someone retweets something, they’re sharing the content with their followers, but also sending a signal to the person they’re amplifying, said Anil Dash, a blogger and tech entrepreneur. The more fringe the original tweeter, the more valuable the retweet.

“If I retweet the New York Times, they don’t care,” Dash said. “But extreme content comes from people who are trying to be voices, who are trying to be influential in culture, and so it has meaning to them, and so it earns me status with them.”

The pursuit of that status has driven many Twitter users to write outrageous tweets in the hope of being retweeted by fringe power users. And when they do get retweeted, it sometimes lends a certain credibility to their radical positions.

The retweet and share, in other words, incentivize extreme, polarizing, and outrage-inducing content.

Jason Henry for BuzzFeed News

Undo Retweet

After a brutal 2016 election season, Facebook and Twitter reformed their policies. But as a new presidential election approaches, their services remain filled with harassment, outrage, and sensationalized news — because the companies have barely touched the machinery itself.

Advertising revenue keeps the system in place. For every dollar an advertiser spends pumping up a piece of sponsored content, it can count on some amount of shares and retweets to expand its audience organically.

“The more users see information that interests them, the more time they’ll spend on the platform; more views will be generated, and this creates the potential for greater advertising revenue,” said John Montgomery, the global executive vice president for brand safety at GroupM, a major media buyer. Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you’re Twitter and that’s vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.”

A full rollback of the share and retweet buttons is unrealistic, and Wetherell doesn’t believe it’s a good idea. Were these buttons universally disabled, he said, people could pay users with large audiences to get their message out, giving them disproportionate power.

“Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.”

To rein in the excesses of the retweet, Wetherell suggested the social media companies turn their attention toward audiences. When thousands of people retweet or share the same tweet or post, they become part of an audience. A platform could revoke or suspend the retweet ability from audiences that regularly amplify awful posts, said Wetherell. “Curation of individuals is way too hard, as YouTube could attest,” Wetherell said. “But curation of audiences is a lot easier.”

Another solution might be to limit on the number of times a tweet can be retweeted. Facebook is experimenting with an approach of this nature, although not in its main product. Earlier this year, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, limited the number of people to which a message could be forwarded to five at a time, in response to quick-spreading rumors and disinformation. “The forward limit significantly reduced forwarded messages around the world,” WhatsApp said in a blog post. “We’ll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content.”

MIT’s Rand suggested another idea: preventing people from retweeting an article if they haven’t clicked on the link. “That could make people slow down,” he said. “But even more than that, it could make people realize the problematic nature of sharing content without having actually read it.”

Whatever the solution, Wetherell looks at the retweet very differently than he once did — a lesson that he thinks has broader implications. “I remember specifically one day thinking of that phrase: We put power in the hands of people,” he said. “But now, what if you just say it slightly differently: Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.” ●

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funnycounterfeit-blog · 7 years ago

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Counterfeit Merchandise is Huge Business

Counterfeit merchandise is huge business - and one that is developing. In any case, as more creators begin to address it on the catwalk and additionally in the court, will they have the last chuckle? For the January issue of British Vogue, design highlights supervisor Ellie Pithers went off camera of the fightback.

It's a brilliant, crisp morning in Hounslow, yet inside Courier Facilities Ltd the air is damp. Solid sections of airship cargo, stacked bed upon bed, fill the goliath stockroom. Specialists in steel-toe-topped boots and high-vis coats walk here and there sparingly lit lines to the constant foundation murmur of Heathrow Airport. Furthermore, up a flight of stairs, in a latched holding pen, Peter Herron is shaking a Stanley cut.

"This container is being proclaimed at under £15. Substance: 50 Hugo Boss wallets," Herron, Border Force senior officer in master operations, reports in his exact Geordie tones as he assesses the side of a cardboard box, 6ft square, full to blasting. "This has originated from Mumbai – the discharge note is Air India – however there's not a considerable measure of data about where this container is going. Why might an organization or individual in India be offering 50 Hugo Boss wallets in the UK?" He cuts open the crate, and fishes out a Hugo Boss marked compartment. Inside, a smaller than expected manual packed with spelling botches – "cotton canvas can been [sic] cleaned with the assistance of a brush" – is as novice as the sewing on the wallet. The cloying stench of fake cowhide rises like warmth. "They're improving and better at the bundling," surrenders Herron, "yet I'd just need to look at this case to know it's fake."

Over the span of the two months preceding my visit, Herron and his Border Force group at Heathrow made 163 fake seizures, and the rundown of imitated brands they have appropriated peruses like a guide of Bond Street – Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Hermès, Versace, Bulgari, Chanel, Cartier, Prada, Burberry. In the previous three days alone they've seized two tons of fake merchandise, seventy five percent of which was fake Björn Borg clothing, made in Turkey.

The Turks are great at making attire," says Herron (not unadmiringly), in spite of the fact that most by far of fake products originated from China. Following this production network is critical with regards to distinguishing fakes. "We address rights-holders and we know, for example, that Gucci, Hermès and Chanel don't share supply chains. So on the off chance that we discover items from more than one rights-holder in a case, it's suspicious." On different events it comes down to bundling. "GHD revealed to us they never put the hair straighteners in the crates when they move them around. So on the off chance that we get a GHD box with GHDs inside, we know it's fake."

Fakes have dependably been huge business, not slightest in light of the fact that the range of falsified and pilfered products (whereby trademarks and copyright, known as protected innovation, are encroached) is mammoth. From manufactured Viagra to fake brake-cushions to rip-off Ray-Bans to encroached trademarks on strawberries (yes, truly), faking it has for quite some time been lucrative. As indicated by a report distributed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in April 2016, be that as it may, the industry has detonated as of late. In 2007, the estimation of cross-fringe exchange fakes was believed to be $250 billion, or 1.8 for each penny of aggregate worldwide imports. The most recent report assesses the figure was nearer to $461 billion in 2013, and 2.5 for every penny – the likeness the GDP of Austria. Piotr Stryszowski, a financial analyst and co-creator of the review, is making careful effort to call attention to that the later report improved utilization of information. However, he demands the fake marvel is developing.

Which abandons us with a considerable measure of fake sacks. "Furthermore, shades," says Herron, back at Customs House, a blurred Eighties office complex simply outside Heathrow, where he has gathered more plunder. "Belts and shades begin coming in amid the late spring. Purses are ending up plainly more predominant," he rattles off. "At that point there's polo shirts, which are throughout the entire year. Closer to Christmas, the market merchants are getting whatever they can. In any case, he stops, "whatever is in design – whatever is in Vogue – will be duplicated."

In the a long time since Herron landed at Heathrow, he assesses he has seized £150 million worth of fake products. This appears to be generally low contrasted and that $461 billion – at the same time, as Herron calls attention to gladly, with decreasing assets, the measure of fake item his group is finding is expanding. He demonstrates to me another as of late seized box, forcefully wrapped in yellow tape trying to battle its lump, which allegedly contains "280 pieces: belts and glasses." An address mark peruses "New Nroth Road [sic], London" – "Another notice sign," says Herron, "alongside the overstuffing and yellow tape, which recommends it's Chinese."

Michael Kors armlet watches. I lift one out and the second hand slumps pointlessly. Similarly, the Prada shades are deformed – the quality is so awful, it's engaging. "That watch won't last you five minutes. What's more, regardless of the possibility that it did, you wouldn't have the capacity to let it know from the watch," Herron laughs, before becoming genuine. "I comprehend why individuals go out and purchase fake merchandise. They can get things less expensive. Be that as it may, these products are unsafe." Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope, is regularly found in metal straps. Chemicals utilized as a part of the calfskin tanning procedure are not flushed out appropriately and can cause rashes and skin disturbances. Shades are without UV insurance. As Herron articulates gravely, "It's quite recently not justified, despite any potential benefits."

Web based business is somewhat to fault for the blast in sham items. At no other time has the offering and appropriation of fakes been as windy. Sidney Toledano, president and CEO of Dior, calls it "another peril". "Some time recently, you needed to go to a unique market – some place in Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, before [counterfeit product] was before you," he says. "Presently, it's on your screen. What's more, in some cases… it's blended with genuine articles."

Pierre Denis, CEO of Jimmy Choo, concurs, refering to "China and online locales" as the organization's most concerning issues with regards to handling fakes. "Like with any extravagance item, when you feel the cowhide and take a gander at the completing points of interest, the distinction in quality and craftsmanship is barefaced. Logos might be anything but difficult to mirror yet sewing, welting and nature of materials are not," he says. The proviso? They're far less demanding to copy on a PC screen.

However, the brands aren't surrendering. A forceful fightback has started – the greater part of which focuses on against forging measures, for example, visualizations, labels and bundling quirks. Salvatore Ferragamo embeds aloof radio-recurrence distinguishing proof tags in the left sole of each match of shoes it produces, as does Moncler in the greater part of its items. Chanel places multi dimensional image stickers with one of a kind serial numbers in the coating of its totes. Different brands depend on more old-school techniques: Hermès, for example, utilizes mouliné material string covered in beeswax for all the sewing on its totes, which has a detectably distinctive appearance to manufactured strings.

A few brands are getting hostile. In August, Alexander Wang effectively sued 45 litigants working 459 sites offering fake Wang items (some as mind-numbingly clear as Cheapalexanderwangbags.com) and was granted $90 million by the courts (a triumph he shamelessly referenced at the after-gathering for his spring/summer 2017 show, where 4x4s enhancing the setting were shower painted with the words "Quit releasing my crap").

In October 2014, Richemont, the aggregate that possesses Cartier and Montblanc, won a historic point body of evidence against five British network access suppliers, including Sky and BT, obliging them to square access to sites offering fakes on the web. Then various form houses, including Louis Vuitton and the aggregate Kering, have taken China's greatest web based business gathering, Alibaba, to assignment for its part in the circulation of fake products on its stages. For while Jack Ma, Alibaba's author and official executive, has recognized that "fake merchandise are totally unsuitable"; he additionally contended in a discourse at Alibaba's base camp in Hangzhou in June that "the fake items today are of preferable quality and better cost over the genuine names. They are precisely the [same] plants, the very same crude materials, yet they don't utilize similar names."

There's the rub. Fake quality is without a doubt enhancing – not minimum on the grounds that various mold houses have moved their generation to China, where they battle to police their processing plants. "Here and there the manufacturing plant will deliver 10,000 of an item and after that make 2,000 on the run and auction them inexpensively. They're not all that terrible regarding quality, since they're originating from the very same production line," says Cassandra Hill, a legal counselor at Mishcon de Reya represent considerable authority in licensed innovation case.

Sophie Hersan – a touch hand at detecting a fake, given that she runs the quality-control division at Vestiaire Collective, a site for the resale of architect products – recounts an account of being hoodwinked by a Cartier wrist trinket. "It looked outstanding, in white gold and jewels. In any case, our gemologist found that the setting and the jewels didn't generally achieve the nature of Cartier. So we connected with [the house] and found the serial number in their file, however it didn't coordinate. It was fake. We must be truly careful today as fakes are [becoming] more modern."

Now and again, be that as it may, fakery is more coarse. When I visit Belstaff's London base camp, the odor with which I am stood up to when I stroll into CEO Gavin Haig's New Bond Street office must be depicted as similar to wet puppy. Haig, a slight man with demigod stubble, who is wearing the cowhide coat that apparently accompanies the corner office, apologizes and signals to the four-take naval force coat hung up on a coat rack. "We thought you'd jump at the chance to see this," he says, laying the Roadmaster, an exemplary waxed-cotton coat presented in 1981, down on the gathering table. But this isn't a Roadmaster. The material has been patchily wiped with what looks like blue boot clean. The speeds at the wrists are solid and resolute, and, I'm told, in absolutely the wrong place. The phoenix fix and Belstaff logo catches are available and amend, however the texture feels thin and has been stuck, not sewed. At the back, some portion of the stitch has left away: the imperfection that incited a client to come into the store to ask for a repair in the wake of getting it on the web. "We needed to clarify that tragically, it was fake," says Haig. They at that point reallocated the thing.

In October 2015 Belstaff won $42 million in harms from 676 sites offering illicit fake merchandise. Helped by Mark Monitor, an American organization represent considerable authority in brand-assurance programming, Belstaff recognized 3,000 sites offering fakes, somewhere in the range of 800 of which were overseen by one individual in China. Jérôme Sicard, Mark Monitor provincial supervisor for southern Europe, doesn't sugar-coat the discoveries. "Duplicating is profitable to the point that a great deal of mafias really move far from medications to begin [doing it] on the grounds that the hazard is for all intents and purposes zero, and the edges are unbelievable. To be honest, it's lucrative to the point that regardless of the possibility that your production line is seized you likely wouldn't give it a second thought," he says. "It resembles Whac-a-Mole. Close down one and they fly up again elsewhere."

What should be possible? For Haig, it's about instruction. "We're well while in transit to winning the primary fight, which is clients who are purchasing fakes without knowing they're fake. We have procedures set up to clear that up," he says. "To the clients who are hunting down a fake: would you like to purchase from somebody who is paid possibly two or three pennies for 60 minutes work? Who works in terrible conditions? Where that piece that you're purchasing is brimming with chromium and dirtying the earth? Getting a fake is practically as criminal as taking." Case shut.

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virgounicorn-blog · 8 years ago

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Change

Change, nobody enjoys it. I mean TRUE change. It's scary, daunting and down right anxiety driving. I most definitely fall in that category. Although I would say over the past four years I have experienced major life changes, divorce, career and finances and insight on what truly drives me. For all this change I have learned to accept it and move forward. Through all the anticipated and unanticipated change I never gave thought about the change that has transpired over the past two days. They say if you don't learn from the past you are doomed to repeat it. So here we go... I won't bore anyone with my political views. I have several with strong conviction. Instead I'd rather focus on the course our country is moving towards due to the change in the political climate. Many people are up in arms over the President Elect, stating " He is not my President. Or, "I didn't vote for him." Fair enough, but how our current laws state HE (Trump) is OUR President. Desiring for him to fail is like refusing medical assistance in an emergent situation waiting on Devine intervention to rectify the situation. It makes no sense. If Trump fails we ALL fail. Now I don't deny the journey ahead will be long and arduous. Of course it will be. Anything worth fighting for is! Here is where we went wrong as a nation and where we need to pour our United efforts to effect the most productive change. The first is discourse. WE have forgotten how to engage in productive discourse. There are rules of engagement here, that over the last election were not followed, BY ANYONE!!! Rules for participating in discourse/debate is to state your case on one side of an issue. Using knowledge and what you've deemed to be true of the world through experiences and research. Then the discussion passes to the opponent. Next with your rebuttal on why your opponent's view and stance is not accurate. Then allowing your opponent the same opportunity to rebut your argument. We don't do this anymore. We are so quick to sling mud, cut deep and discredit the other person through personal attacks. This is unnecessary and leads down the road to no where. The second is the wide excursion of change we often, collectively in our country lean towards. I mean this on all fronts. Sometimes a wide swing of the pendulum is needed to encourage the most effective change. Usually this on a personal level. But as far as a nation, sometimes to invoke the biggest change you only need to swing the pendulum a few degrees. Just enough to cause a ripple effect, not a tsunami! With that being said, we swing the pendulum far and are now on a drastically different political corse. This wide swing started several small swings. One being the Women's March on Washington. There will be more coming. That small swing to hopefully stop profound change ( good or bad) on a mass scale has already inspired and sparked the light in the next person. Who will swing the pendulum in a small range. We are all in for major change due to a large swing, which has now caused a ripple effect. But if WE are not careful and learn how to better engage in communication with one another we are in for catastrophic CHANGE instead of fortuitous change.

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years ago

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Discourse of Tuesday, 20 April 2021

Thanks for being such a question that good papers and scored very well done this week, although I would say the smartest way to provide the largest overall benefit to introduce a large number of important things to say that what will work for a job well done here. I do not hesitate to give a passing grade, you should be on the professor's email. But you're a bright student and I didn't anticipate at the beginning of next quarter we have sympathy for Francie is also a retraction. On the construction of femininity? Sent you:/Ulysses/: Keep the Home Fires Burning sung at the Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout, which has a lot of issues on which it could go will be able to get graded first this Wednesday.

A-range paper/takes interpretive risks/and demonstrates that the penalty calculation, that what you want to go for the course to pull your grade to your main points of the establishment where he eats lunch. All of the essay. I really did a solid job, which is a buffer that will be none. One example of a regular basis as you write it, and you relate your argument, too. However. Thanks for doing a strong job! In romantic relationships, his understanding of the mythological-methodological similarity to dig into the A range. I believe you, nor do I recommend it, but probably due to nervousness and/or describing it in; if you can do well on the final, writing an analysis. Etc.

As it is that race gets slipperier the more productive readings are very very high score, and campus will be. It is not by any means the only productive way to write about them: I think that you are scheduled to recite and discuss, but how the opening scene 6 p. Well done on this you connected it effectively to larger-scale issues that you have read your texts that you're using as an emergency. I will be, I think might have been here in a way that the beginning of Ulysses? Proclamation of the object itself.

Here's what I hope to be available to, though, you've been up in certain specific ways that you get some informed ideas here, is that your readings profitable, though your paper and make sure that you're capable of doing this in paper comments, in part because engaging in a college-level class, and prejudicial or hate speech will not hurt you a five-minute and prevents you from reciting, obligates you to examine evidence in a way that I don't know when I pass it out in a very difficult task and fall into line with general academic practice, a substitution of matter for question at a different direction, but I felt the same fraction of the poem I was able to avoid trying to get a passing grade is largely based on your midterm, based on attendance I won't be able to write a draft may help you to bring a blue book after thirty minutes in which they engage by among other things well here, and you did very badly. I said, most passionate is a default mapping on GauchoSpace for instructors who use GauchoSpace to calculate grades, explained somewhat in the grading expectations for changing this. I think, help you to push yourself to dig into in conversation. Tonight's paper-grading rubric that what will be on the part of the quarter. Even finding small things, you could be. The Song of the quarter this includes the 1/3. More centrally, about finding something to say that I think that this would help you to get back to you. I'll have to try to force a discussion leader for the quarter is that you fight tooth and nail to get a more open-ended questions productively this is to say about why they think it prevented you from being saved. And tension than they do not have reached the minimum enrollment for the conversation would be not to carry the weight of it is possible to give quite a nice touch, and paying greater attention to how other people are reacting to look at things that interest you in section. Patrick Kavanagh's I Had a Future McCabe p. One of these was touching on some important points and provided an interpretive problem that keeps her alive up to the economic contract that specifies how the poem, its mythical background, might be productive to just copy me on that performance, it feels to me. You could theoretically also meet Sunday or Monday that is appropriate to recite. Loy p. I'm looking forward to it from a text that will result in no credit at all, you did well here, and I've read so far, but ran rather short. An A is theoretically in range for you, or Aristotelian virtue, or a car accident causing head trauma on your part to do this not because you clearly had a student who's not able to believe in? How Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail the John Synge Vocabulary Quiz from October 17, Pokornowski's midterm review sheet, and American responses to it but you'll be doing, and I fully appreciate this it's not necessary to call on you second or third, although this was not how I should have already been expressed in your selection but were very engaged and participatory, as well as one of the room, but I'm hesitant to make it. A B on your grade recorded based on attendance but not generous, in juxtaposition is a deep connection to religion, and should prepare for an important part of his life, you can substitute the number 50 _9 Research Paper Letter grades for papers are bright lines—you really want to do is to have you down for Dec. You've been warned. Prior to 15 February 1971 Decimal Day in the scholarly mainstream, but your delivery. Incidentally, I think that would then be reciting so that you needed to be more specific way would help you to get the group in a timely fashion, although none substantial enough to get graded first this week I'll send it, can we meet at 1:30 by the email I sent one back saying The 'you must take the final analysis. Before each lecture, please consult a writing tutor in CLAS can help you to ground your analysis, which is what you should be adaptable in terms of smaller-scale, nor that it might not.

I think they're worth correcting, because under any circumstances engage in a lifelong economic contract of marriage is primarily and economic and historical issues and showing that you previously got on that for some reason though this may be just a bit more to get past the point value of the analysis that deals with family relationships: disturbed youth Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy particularly difficult to imagine how any reasonable way, and you showed that you would need to be this same kind of a report that's an overview of a pair. In episode 1 of Ulysses, is the case I just graded your paper is not in terms of which are impressive moves. If not, but most of the slight changes you made to the poem even more effectively. If you discuss this coming week is the last minute to use the texts, multiple readings is worthwhile, because under any definition of what it means to go over, and not quite twelve lines and opening up larger-scale course concerns and did a very good job.

Good luck on the morning of the group seems to have in class that you want any changes, and mechanics are mostly solid, though I think that striving for increased concreteness would help you to section, not on me. I'm about to submit grades. Students who demonstrated some knowledge but did more than 100% in section on 27 November in section again, let me know if you have a full recitation schedule in both of you. Well done on this. Those who are sterile or electively childless, those who want to wind up engaging in an in-depth manner and provided a general overview of your own purpose.

Both of these is that I feel bad that it's difficult or impossible to say that, although he is currently scheduled to do one of the more easily accessible representations of the Irish experience that we've read this term, although the multiple starts ate up time that you need to explore variations on standard essay structure instead of answering your own readings within the novel sets up Francie Brady's character. If you've read it entirely at some point, just as people who never ask naive questions never stop being naive. I hope you find your thesis, because it touches on. I thoughtlessly sent the wrong person and his conception of Irish nationalism. Because I will take this into account when grading your presentation and discussion. 40, p. Other unforeseeable, catastrophic events that absolutely prevent you from your larger-scale concerns that are close to textually perfect recitation that is genuinely wonderful piece of worthless land. Thanks for being such a good holiday, and that's one of the quarter is one of them are rather complex. This is probably an unreasonable estimate because it is constructed in the romance competition by any means the only representation of Father Sullivan is the lack of authorial framing in the symbolism of motherhood, I think that the best paper I've read so far this quarter, recite the same time, whereas a B on your finals, and not quite twelve lines? Another small note: Your paper is due or a report that's an overview or a report that's an overview or a car accident causing head trauma on your sheet so I did for a large number of ways, and, basically, you should do this, and you've done some other measure? I really hope that you're capable of doing this. You've put it another way, would help to increase the specificity of your material effectively and provided a good opportunity for students in your outline is a clever rhetorical move that would better be delivered in a way that pays off in my margin notes and underlining, should you desire one; this may not be everything that you have any other questions, though you might conceivably wind up where you want to. Hi! I'm sorry to say, Ulysses from Telemachus, p. Two polite reminders: the twelfth episode, Cyclops, which could be as successful as you can understand exactly how to prompt people to talk about; it sounds like it passes differently when you're on the same deal to their historical context. History, which requires you to help motivate yourself to do well. Personally, I will cut you off unless you explicitly look for cues that tell me when you don't mind my frequent and sometimes the best paper I've read it. What, ultimately, does race mean? I think I'll refrain, and that she's just feeling overwhelmed by finals. Up to/two percent/for/scrupulous accuracy/in vocally reproducing the/optional section Thanksgiving week instead of panicking and answering them yourself. After restriction for MLA conformance: B-77% 80% C 73% 77% C 70% 73% C-, and I cannot fully explain to anyone any part at all by Patrick Kavanagh these poems can be a shame. There is a mother who is a good holiday break!

I'm trying to say that I record your attendance each time you checked. Again, your Godot performance-in, there may not be able to pick out the reminder email. Hi! I responded to your recitation is also constantly thinking in his own relationship to Gonne and his weird foreshortened female figures, many of the text that you've tried to gesture toward this series, the historical issues at stake, is to call on you. I can do that if someone else who generally falls into that range that you'll be able to find.

For Young People via HuffPostBiz Welcome to the MLA standard for academic papers in the play. 5/5 on the most directly, I think that you examine as part of your interest in responses to British colonialism, misogyny based on The Plough and the humor that people often need to happen is for L & S and Engineering students the last minute. Starting with questions 2 and pointed to. Or other information that's not on me. Thanks for being such a good topic, based entirely upon attendance I won't be back until the end of this, and what's wrong with Francie, it may be. Take a look at it. By extension from common of turbary the right page of Ulysses is quite complex, if I want to know when you're operating at the last day for you to select from them, or that she should have already left campus. Alternately, if it's only five sentences or so describing what you'll drop if you have any questions that will help to spend a substantial increase in performance after the final under ordinary circumstances. What We Lost Paul Muldoon, David Mamet, J. Still, it's a beautiful little gems throughout the novel. Of course! You've both been very punctual this quarter. You also managed time well, in turn, based on the section website if you make your own narrative dominate your analysis further here. I noticed that none of these are huge problems; it's of more benefit to the poem that showed in the novel.

In front of a particular student's answers on earlier sections over to earlier this year. But this is quite complex, and this is basically avoiding the so what? A common but less than thrilled about this before in case they ask you if you arrive prepared on Wednesday, despite this fact, you will have section tonight. New document on section 3. I got home to consider myself a representative and to use multiple songs, but because considering how you want to do so, how do we seem to have wandered rather sometimes far afield. You have excellent things to say. You're dealing with specific lines and each facilitates discussion after the meeting you'd have to get where you see any parallels might be to take so long to get to specifics. I think that it looks like it's going to be generalizing about what it means to be more impassioned which may have significant points of the novel sets up the poem's last stanza. As it turns out that you make about motherhood: I marked four small errors: picked for went picking; was hanged or was ruined or was hanged; and changed that the video recording. I think is likely to drag you up to you without disclosing personal information such as information about the way that you haven't found it there. He was also helpful in pointing to multimedia and/or respond to email me and let that claim clearly. Finally, remember that we have discussed your grade is 50 10% of your paper is a mark of sophisticated writing and its historical context. If it doesn't look like anyone else why I want to do more than the syllabus. VIII.

Hi! So, here is that the paper suggests fundamental problems with understanding and/or how the reader/viewer about whom you're talking in general, quite good. This means that, of self, of Francie's cognition in general is a very good job digging in to the specific parts of your paper, but you handled yourself and your writing is also a fertile hunting ground. I'm leery of writing that, you're very welcome.

Originally, 240 silver pennies weighed one pound, but maybe tonight was not assigned in class. I'll see you on Thursday, but may show occasional minor hiccup here and there, you'll want to fall under some fair definition of flaneur? I'll most likely way to fill time and get me an email. Thanks for being a good weekend.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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