#in reality the problem people have with them is the propaganda they publish to attempt to enforce their lifestyle as the ''correct'' one

[gender-euphowrya]

the trap a lot of people fall for is they think "it's okay to be a tradwife" when they really mean "it's okay to be a stay-at-home mom" because tradwives have successfully convinced them the words mean the same thing

[mariacallous]

The war unleashed by Russia almost three years ago in Ukraine is rightly recognized as one of the great crimes of the twenty-first century. Understandably, little attention has been paid so far to the impact the conflict is having on Ukraine’s international image. And yet amid the trauma and horror of Russia’s invasion, there are growing signs that the unprecedented media spotlight on Ukraine since 2022 is gradually helping to transform global perceptions of the country. As a result, Ukraine is now finally emerging from a prolonged period of international obscurity that has hindered the country’s progress for centuries.

International ignorance of Ukraine has been a feature since long before the country regained independence in 1991. Following the Soviet collapse, little was done to address this lack of outside awareness or strengthen Ukraine’s national brand in the global arena. This low profile helped set the stage for Russia’s disinformation efforts, with foreign audiences often prepared to believe all manner of outlandish lies about a country that was otherwise unknown to them. Thanks to the recent media focus on Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists are now finding that their distortions are not so readily accepted. This is an ongoing process, but it is already possible to identify a number of important facts about Ukraine that have taken root in the international consciousness since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

1. Ukraine is not Russia

The fact that Ukraine is not Russia may seem insultingly obvious when viewed from a Ukrainian perspective, but in reality this was the fundamental image problem facing the country in 2022. Indeed, it is no coincidence that on the eve of the full-scale invasion, Vladimir Putin published an entire essay denying the legitimacy of a separate Ukrainian state on the grounds that Ukrainians are actually Russians (“one people’).

Putin did not invent this narrative of Ukraine denial himself. His predecessors have been insisting that Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russia since at least the eighteenth century, and have ruthlessly manipulated the historical record to support their arguments. Throughout the Tsarist and Soviet eras, anyone attempting to counter this Great Russian narrative or highlight Ukraine’s long statehood struggle was treated as a dangerous heretic subject to the harshest of punishments.

For generations, Russia was able to impose its imperial propaganda on international audiences, with Ukrainians silenced and Ukraine misleadingly portrayed as an intrinsic part of Russia’s own historical heartlands. It was therefore understandable that when an independent Ukraine appeared on the map in 1991, many had trouble distinguishing it from Russia. This created much confusion and went some way to legitimizing subsequent Russian attempts to reassert its authority over Ukraine.

The full-scale invasion has changed all that. Since February 2022, international perceptions of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine have undergone a radical transformation as global audiences have witnessed the ferocity of the Russian attack and the determination of Ukraine’s national defense. The war unleashed by Vladimir Putin has killed hundreds of thousands and shattered millions of lives; it has also destroyed the myth of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people.” As the invasion approaches the three-year mark, it is now safe to say that anyone who continues to insist on the indivisibility of Russia and Ukraine is either acting in bad faith, or is so stunningly ignorant that their opinion can be disregarded.

2. Ukraine is huge

Prewar Ukraine’s low international profile encouraged many to imagine the country as an obscure and irrelevant statelet whose fate mattered little to the wider world. Meanwhile, very few people seemed to appreciate that Ukraine was in fact the largest country wholly in Europe. That is no longer the case. Throughout the past three years, the map of Ukraine has featured relentlessly in the international press. Even casual observers have grown familiar with the outline of the country, and cannot have failed to notice how large it looms over its European neighbors.

Media coverage of battlefield developments has also helped to underline the sheer size of Ukraine. Despite regular war reports of major offensives and record advances, the overall picture of the front lines has changed little since the first year of the war, underlining the comparative vastness of Ukraine. While Ukraine may still appear small when compared to Russia, it is a huge country by European standards. Growing awareness of this fact is helping to shape perceptions of Ukraine’s geopolitical significance.

3. Ukraine is an agricultural superpower

Prior to 2022, Ukraine was probably best known to many around the world as the site of the Chornobyl disaster. Associations with the world’s worst nuclear accident were particularly unfortunate as Ukraine is anything but a radioactive wasteland. In reality, the country’s real claim to fame is as the breadbasket of Europe. Ukraine’s fabled black soil is among the most fertile land in the entire world, making much of the country a giant garden of agrarian abundance.

Since 2022, Russia’s invasion has helped educate international audiences about Ukraine’s crucial role in global food security. Extensive media coverage of Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade has underlined the importance of Ukrainian agricultural exports, with disruption caused by Moscow’s interference leading to famine fears in Africa and price hikes on basic foodstuffs throughout the West. Growing awareness of Ukraine’s status as an agricultural superpower has undermined Kremlin efforts to portray the invasion as a strictly local affair, and has mobilized international opposition to the war.

4. Ukraine is an innovation hub

For decades, international perceptions of Ukraine were plagued by lazy cliches depicting the country as a terminally corrupt backwater on the vodka-soaked fringes of Eastern Europe. These deeply unflattering caricatures of Ukrainian stagnation were always misleading. They are now also hopelessly outdated. Since 2022, Ukraine has demonstrated that it is a sophisticated high tech nation capable of more than holding its own in the most technologically advanced war the world has ever seen. Ukraine’s ability to develop, deploy, and update its own domestically-produced weapons systems on an almost daily basis has done much to debunk the negative stereotypes of old and establish the country’s reputation as a leading innovation hub.

Ukrainian defense tech companies have been responsible for a string of particularly innovative battlefield solutions that have caught the eye of global defense industry giants and helped Ukraine even up the odds against the country’s far larger and wealthier enemy. For example, ground-breaking Ukrainian marine drones have turned the tide in the Battle of the Black Sea and forced Russia’s entire fleet to retreat from Crimea, while Ukrainian long-range drones routinely strike targets deep inside Russia. As a result, “Made in Ukraine” is now recognized as a stamp of quality throughout the international security sector. This image transformation is already attracting international investors and will shape Ukraine’s economic development for decades to come, with the country’s defense industry and broader tech sector set to be in high demand.

5. Ukraine is united

The full-scale invasion has seriously undermined longstanding Russian efforts to portray Ukraine as a country irrevocably split along geographical and ideological lines. The narrative of a divided Ukraine has been a mainstay of Kremlin propaganda since the Soviet era, and has been central to the disinformation that has accompanied the escalating Russian aggression of the past two decades. For many years, this crude oversimplification of Ukraine’s regional complexities proved superficially persuasive among international audiences, but it has been decisively debunked by Ukraine’s united response to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Ukrainians across the country have overwhelmingly rallied in opposition to the invading Russians, with residents in supposedly “pro-Russian” cities such as Odesa and Kharkiv proving no less determined to defend themselves and their homes. This is not to say that regional diversity is no longer a feature in today’s Ukraine, of course. On the contrary, Ukraine remains just as subject to regional differences as any other large European nation. However, the Russian invasion has shattered the myth of a terminally divided Ukraine and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the vast majority of Ukrainians bitterly oppose the idea of a Russian reunion.

[joy-haver]

On Science, Denialism, and Community

These content warnings apply to 1 specific section, which is marked.

Cw colonialism, white supremacy, ableism, racism, eugenics.

✨✨✨information and trust ✨✨✨

I keep seeing people, who all have otherwise very thought out belief systems, saying things like “trust science” and “we wouldn’t have all these problems if people had better critical thinking skills” and “people just need to listen to the research.”

If you agree with one of those statements, I want you to really think it through for a minute.

Do you make all of your decisions based on research? Do you get all of your information from peer reviewed journals? If so, what are your standards for what you consider good research? Do you rerun all the numbers to make sure they didn’t make any mistakes? Do you check all the citations that the article your reading relies on and make sure that each of those is up to your standards? What about the citations of those articles? How do you know that the numbers they have you are true? How do you know the peer reviewers weren’t paid by the same company, or the same industry? How do you know for sure that there aren’t 100 studies that say the exact opposite thing that never saw the light of day because no one would publish them?

And like, of course you don’t do those things. You can’t answer all those questions. It’s literally impossible to always act on the best information available and always check everything. At some point, you are relying on trust. It’s just a question of how much trust, and who you are trusting.

Science denialism is one thing that can happen when that trust is broken. And, as I’ll describe bellow, that trust will be broken for anyone whose paying attention

✨✨✨Science as an institution ✨✨✨

I think it’s important to remember that the vast majority of what this society has called “science” over the years had been little more than propaganda pieces to justify colonialism, eugenics, and white supremacy. Anyone whose ever worked with data can show you how to manipulate it. But you don’t even need to manipulate it on purpose to do bad science. Hell, for most of the research that happens in this country, the grant selection process manipulates the data on its own. You can make science justify almost anything. The scientific method is okay as a framework, but it is not perfect. And the institutions that exist around it are very good at using the imperfections of the method to create their own propaganda. And they have a nice little shield of science to hide it behind.

But really, take a look around you. The scientific method has brought us many good results, but the idea of science has also justified the worlds worst atrocities. All social harms that exist today exist, in part, becuase they were given scientific justifications. Because at the end of the day, science will tell you whatever you want it to. Information that pushes back may come into existence sometimes, but it will be ignored unless it can be used to someone’s advantage.

[content warnings start here]

Even so called “good science” that genuinely is an attempt at finding truth and understanding reality is not morally neutral. Every advancement has its uses. Advancements in plastics might mean more plastic is made. Advancements in mathematics means more bombs. Advancements in psychology are used to propagandize you. Advancements in medicine are used to create more effective eugenics. Sure, sometimes advancements may help you a little. But the always help power maintain itself more. And sure, sometime s good science that isn’t useful to the system slips thru the cracks, but they will find a way to reincorporate it into the matchine.

And if that’s what the good science does, what about the bad science?

The sterilization and murder of disabled people, of black people, of immigrants, of indigenous people STILL happens in the name of science, separating indigenous people from thier families was done in the name of science. All of the fatshaming that we’ve propagated around the globe has been done in the name of science, and that has a death toll too. Capitalism is justified in the name of science. Incarceration is justified in the name of science. State power is justified in the name of science. Colonizing countries, destroying indigenous food ways, forcing people into sweatshops is done in the name of science.

The murder machine that is the USA relies on science, The propaganda machine that keeps people believing in it relies on science.

[content warnings end here]

And if you’ve ever tried to talk someone out of a belief that’s based in bad science, even committed and nuanced researchers, even using good data, most of them won’t change their minds. How could they? Because what’s the alternative? Aren’t the only two options to be committed to science or to deny it entirely?

✨✨✨Denial ✨✨✨

I think the reason we see so much total science denialism is because people start down the right track. They start to realize that a lot of what they were taught in the name of science is bullshit, and they are correct. You see this a lot with disabled people. Someone will realize, thru personal experiences, that doctors don’t know shit and are making most of it up as they go, and that even the research they do have is usually misguided or flat out wrong. And then they’ll say fuck it, I guess everything they say is a lie. And that’s where you get science denialism.

The problem doesn’t start with the denialists. It starts with the institution. And the more you tell people to just “trust the institution”, the more they will understand that you have no idea what you are talking about. You will push them further into their belief, because you are denying the existence of the very real problems they are pointing out.

But you know who is willing to listen? You know who is willing to understand them, and to teach them even more things that are “wrong”? The climate change deniers. The antivaxers. The TERFs. They are willing to soothe the part of someone that feels hurt, and betrayed, and lied to. They are willing to take that anger and give it a direction. They are willing to say “your right, and I’m sorry. Here’s what we can do about it”.

The only reason I didn’t go down that same path of denial is because I have a lot of free time to find and read academic studies, and I have enough training to understand most of what I read, or at least to know how to find information to understand. And also because I have a lovely community around me. But most people can’t do the research I’ve done, and even if they could, they wouldn’t have the time, and even if they did, no one person can be fully informed on every topic. And they shouldn’t have to be. But we literally cannot trust a single one of these institutions. Science has just as much blood on its hands as the church, and it’s trying it’s best to outpace it. Science is made of lies and propaganda. Can you really fault people for overcorrecting and going full denialist?

As long as we treat it as tho the problem is the denialists, we’ll just be creating the circumstances for more denialism.

✨✨✨ Community ✨✨✨

Remember what I said about trust? About how, at some point, you have to trust someone. Well, here’s the good news. You can actively choose who that will be. This is called community building.

For this to work, you have to be committed to reality. You can’t believe that things just happen, you have to understand that everything is causal, and you have to understand the causes of everything. You must be committed to making your worldview as consistent as possible, and you must be willing to foster that in other people.

Now, it’s not easy. And to do a good job of it, you have to have already interrogated a lot of your beliefs. You have to have a strong system of values and standards that you hold yourself and others to.

But if you have that, you can start to build communities of people you trust. You can split up some of the labor of coming up with ideas and unlearning, and then you can share it with each other. Now, you still have to be critical, even (especially) of the people you trust. You still have to put in work. But doing it as a community means that you won’t have to do so much work. You can share the load of unlearning and relearning. And you can use some of the information science gave you, but you have to verify it, and really think it through.

And when someone comes to you and tells you something, listen to the truth of it. Even if they are lying to you, listen for how they got to the point where they feel that they need to. Even if they are factually wrong, listen for the truth of the experiences that made them believe that. And comfort that part of them. Affirm their pain, affirm their mistrust, and don’t be angry with them. Instead, point them down a path that’s more grounded in reality, and introduce them to community.

✨✨✨closing statement✨✨✨

So many anarchists and likeminded folks realize that we must destroy institutions of power, and that the only way to do that is through community building. Science, heck, even Knowledge itself, is an institution. And of all the institutions we need to destroy and remake, it’s one of the most important. Because the institutions that we can’t live without, the ones that provide the most important services, are the institutions we must replace first. Our systems for food, housing, socializing, conflict resolution, and of course, our systems for making meaning, all need to be replaced before the old ones can be destroyed.

Revolution is not the act of chopping down the Great Tree of Power. Revolution is the act of growing a forest around it, choking it to death by removing its access to light and nutrients, until it is nothing but rot to feed our soil.

[Edit: I want to say that i don’t think I did a perfect job writhing this, and I am very very thankful for any critiques. I think I make have expressed myself only about 65% of how I would like to. I appreciate any add-ins or critiques or thoughts about it]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[maggiec70]

Another Review, This One about Marie-Antoinette and the Revolution I promise that this is the last one for some time. Thanks for being kind and not slamming me for my indulgence.

Trianon: A Novel of Royal France

Elena Maria Vidal [aka Mary Russell, and self-published by her Mayapple Press]

Prelude: I originally posted this review two years ago, in May 2013, where it received a 50/50 split between helpful and not helpful votes. Normally I wouldn’t care what sort of votes or comments any of my reviews attracted, since my reviews are simply my opinion of the books I buy—or borrow—and read. However, two of the many vehement and outspoken fans of this writer were so livid that I disliked this book that they expressed their outrage by posting one-star reviews on a book I wrote, which neither of them read, and boasted about their little exploit on comments to someone else who shared them with me. So to prevent further damage, I removed this review. But I’m not happy with the path of least resistance. If I wanted that I’d never give any review less than five stars, right? So I am reposting this review, and I expect some of the folks who adore Trianon because of its overarching theme of Christian/Catholic piety and forgiveness will return here with their most un-Christian brickbats. Let’s see how long it takes…

My Review originally posted on Amazon and Goodreads in 2013, and removed in 2019:

No author can deliver either “The True Story” or “The Real Personality” of anyone. No author whose work is liberally larded with endnotes and a dense, lengthy bibliography can do it. No author who admits she or he is writing historical fiction can do it, either, despite “years of research.” A writer is only as credible as his or her research, and if the writer approaches the arduous task of research with preconceived ideas, or conducts research as if it were some sort of divine mission, the resulting work will have problems.

This story of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette has problems--a great many of them. In her preface, the author states that all characters were real people, which is perfectly true. She states that the “incidents, situations and conversations are based on reality.” That claim is not so true. Whose version of reality, for example, are we to believe?

From the preface we know immediately that the author’s work is an “attempt to correct many of the popular misconceptions” about Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. She claims that these misconceptions have been promoted by “secular and modernist historians,” and asserts Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette can “only be truly understood in view of the Catholic teachings to which they adhered and within the context of the sacrament of matrimony.” Surely no one takes this allegation seriously? If you do, then it is like saying these two people were defined then--and are being defined now--by nothing other than their religion and their marriage. Even someone with minimal knowledge of this period of history knows better that that. But there is more in this vein: “The apocalyptic events through which [Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette] lived dealt a serious blow to Christendom from which we have not yet recovered.” Certainly no reasonable person with any knowledge of history can believe the entire French Revolution was either apocalyptic or a lingering canker on the body of civilization. To be perfectly fair, the author warned me of her mindset, but I really couldn’t wait to see how Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette would be rehabilitated, cleansed of all the failings and wickedness unjustly assigned to them by all the secular historians who believe the vile, revolutionary propaganda, and then magically transformed into two of the most saintly people ever to rule anywhere at any time.

This story is hagiography, not history, and not even good historical fiction. The author uses hyperbole, hysteria, cloying 19th century-style purple prose, clichés, and some sophomoric punctuation and dialogue. I can understand wanting to show one’s readers another side of a person, or in this case, an entire family, and show this aspect based on solid research if one is a historian, or less strenuous research if one is not. However, I can’t understand inundating a reader on every page with glowing, breathless, adjective-laden descriptions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, a few of their family members, and even fewer lesser folk. In order to further emphasize the too-good-to-be-true nature of the king and queen, their children, the king’s sisters, and the queen’s intimate friends, everyone else in Paris or Versailles or Le Petit Trianon is simply bad, or immoral. These morally bankrupt folks include intellectuals or freethinkers, atheists, Freemasons, philosophes, Protestants, Jews, and every single revolutionary of every single political stamp.

I find it hard to accept, for example, that Marie-Antoinette had the most radiant skin in all of Europe, perhaps the world, or that Louis XVI was so much like Saint Louis, the crusader king. Especially amusing was the second chapter supposedly seen from the nine-year-old Madame Royale’s point of view, which provided a wealth of details of the largesse, magnanimity, and saintly nature of her parents. This chapter also provided a wealth of details about the sweet, kind, delicate, and utterly beautiful intimate friends of the queen, de Polignac and de Lamballe. Of course, most of these details are well outside the purview of a child, and expressed in a style foreign to a nine-year-old.

There are some entertaining inaccuracies throughout the book, which makes me wonder about all those alleged years of research, and some hilarious bits that I do hope never appeared in any historical document. Ever. For example, Marie-Antoinette’s lengthy conversation with Madame Elisabeth about her opposition to French aid to the American “rebels”--those dreadful people rising up against their lawful king, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s Masonic cabal--had me on the floor. For all I know, Antoinette may have said this, as well as the absolute drivel that followed about how admired Louis XVI was, even to the extent that her brother, Joseph, allegedly came to France to see “for himself why [her] husband was so loved by his people.” Despite the author’s magnificent--and completely specious--spin on the nature of Louis XVI’s and Marie-Antoinette’s utter lack of intimacy in the first six to seven years of their marriage, Joseph came to talk to his brother-in-law about the facts of life. There is not, I think, any evidence for the claim that Louis XVI was universally beloved by his people, even the “simple people” or the peasants, as the author loves to go on and on about, though she does so in a noticeably patronizing manner. There is definitely no evidence for the claim that the much-maligned philosophes and freethinkers feared Louis XVI “despite their derisive and nasty comments [about the king].” I was also intrigued by Louis XVI’s comment about how the birth of his son and heir “nearly coincided with his [??] victory over the British at Yorktown.” Such hubris from a would-be saint, and completely inaccurate, of course.

When the Estates-General met on May 5, 1789, Louis XVI’s speech to the assembled delegates was “magnificent...echoing with all the ardor and majesty of the Bourbons.” Not according to quite a number of delegates among all three estates, including some underwhelmed clerics in the First Estate; they said Louis mumbled, was nervous, and mostly inarticulate. The good, kind, benevolent governor of the Bastille, the marquis de Launay, was indeed attacked by the sans-culottes, but “the dreadful Marquis de Sade” was most definitely not in residence in the Bastille, having been released from the Bastille ten days earlier. It is also difficult to claim there was nothing but “flimsy evidence” against Louis XVI at his trial, and the only charge brought was that he gave money to the poor “to enslave the nation.” There were thirty-three specific charges, most of which were substantiated by copies of the king’s correspondence found in the infamous iron box in the Tuileries Palace. I was amazed at the statement that on September 2, 1792, “there began five days of carnage unlike anything Paris had experienced since the days of the barbarian invasions.” Apparently the author hadn’t heard about Catherine de Medici, regent for her son, Charles IX, who ordered the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre on the occasion of her daughter’s marriage to Henry of Navarre. In that case, a Catholic queen ordered the deaths of more than 3,000 French Huguenots in Paris alone, twice that of the casualties of the September massacres. Sometimes history can be inconvenient for the story one is trying so desperately to tell. Madame Royal’s husband did not go to Italy to fight Napoleon, thus proving himself to be a brave and able soldier. He commanded a cavalry regiment in the Bavarian army and fought not Napoleon but General Jean Moreau at Hohenlinden. It was a decisive French victory, and the duke was certainly on the wrong side of it. Napoleon was not a friend to Maximilien Robespierre; he knew his brother Augustin, and was actually imprisoned briefly after Robespierre was executed on 9 Thermidor because of his alleged Jacobin sympathies. Napoleon did not “fire grapeshot upon a crowd of poor peasants rebelling against the revolution.” He fired on a faction of the Royalist army led by émigrés and outnumbering Bonaparte’s forces roughly six to one. But grapeshot is indeed a great crowd leveler.

In her effort to sanctify Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the author has criminalized virtually everyone else. This trend begins with the Assembly of Notables in 1787, and continues unabated until the last page. The king, the queen, the various mesdames of France, the friends, the children--all are saintly, heroic, courageous, full of fortitude, true to their faith, and so forth and so on. The revolutionaries are all several rungs below beasts, and made up of unrelentingly bloodthirsty, vicious, crude, nasty, and godless mobs who tear innocent folk apart. This is black and white, and it does not work. It is dishonest, it is inaccurate, and it is, at the end of the day, just plain ridiculous. Even Georges Lefebvre, the respected French Marxist historian of the Revolution, was far more subtle in his description of the entirety of this great event in terms of economic determinism that this author is here with her maudlin, hagiographic portrayal of two people who were, after all, not much in the way of royalty. Their deaths define them far more than their lives ever did, I think.

The most dishonest aspect of this book is, of course, the shrill insistence that Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were somehow Super Catholics, that their faith was deeper and more worthy than anyone else’s, except for a select few family members, and that they were defined by their Catholic faith. I think that is the author’s view, not how the king and queen would see it. Either way, to view anyone through the single prism of religion--or gender, or political affiliation, or economic status--or any other lone defining characteristic is to fail to understand anything at all about the person, or persons, or the age in which they lived.

There are legions of folks who gush endlessly and fatuously about Marie-Antoinette, if one considers the amount of historical fiction churned out about her. There are probably enough folks who think Louis XVI was worthy of sainthood, as was Marie-Antoinette. The Church did not—and has not—come to that conclusion. There was nothing remotely special about these two royals, other than the fact that they were wrong for the times in which they lived, rather like Nicholas II and Alexandra. Oh, well, some Russians are also trying to turn them into saints.

Postscript: The enraged, saintly author of this saintly garbage attacked me personally for my review, as well as a review of a friend of mine. Then she tried to contact our employers to complain about what dreadful people we were. She indulged in several inflammatory screeds on her blog, Tea at Trianon, that were clearly beyond the pale, and it was here that she doxed both me and my friend.

I got her banned from Goodreads and all her reviewing privileges removed from both Amazon and Goodreads.

I also find it eminently fitting that she launched another blog in 2016, this one in support of all things Trump.

[milkboydotnet]

Report Of The Commission On The National and The Colonial Questions

Comrades, I shall confine myself to a brief introduction, after which Comrade Maring, who has been secretary to our commission, will give you a detailed account of the changes we have made in the theses. He will be followed by Comrade Roy, who has formulated the supplementary theses. Our commission have unanimously adopted both the preliminary theses, as amended, and the supplementary theses. We have thus reached complete unanimity on all major issues. I shall now make a few brief remarks.

First, what is the cardinal idea underlying our theses? It is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations. Unlike the Second International and bourgeois democracy, we emphasise this distinction. In this age of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in all colonial and national problems.

The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The vast majority of the world’s population, over a thousand million, perhaps even 1,250 million people, if we take the total population of the world as 1,750 million, in other words, about 70 per cent of the world’s population, belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies, as, for example, Persia, Turkey and China, or else, conquered by some big imperialist power, have become greatly dependent on that power by virtue of peace treaties. This idea of distinction, of dividing the nations into oppressor and oppressed, runs through the theses, not only the first theses published earlier over my signature, but also those submitted by Comrade Roy. The latter were framed chiefly from the standpoint of the situation in India and other big Asian countries oppressed by Britain. Herein lies their great importance to us.

The second basic idea in our theses is that, in the present world situation following the imperialist war, reciprocal relations between peoples and the world political system as a whole are determined by the struggle waged by a small group of imperialist nations against the Soviet movement and the Soviet states headed by Soviet Russia. Unless we bear that in mind, we shall not be able to pose a single national or colonial problem correctly, even if it concerns a most outlying part of the world. The Communist parties, in civilised and backward countries alike, can pose and solve political problems correctly only if they make this postulate their starting-point.

Third, I should like especially to emphasise the question of the bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. This is a question that has given rise to certain differences. We have discussed whether it would be right or wrong, in principle and in theory, to state that the Communist International and the Communist parties must support the bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. As a result of our discussion, we have arrived at the unanimous decision to speak of the national-revolutionary movement rather than of the “bourgeois-democratic” movement. It is beyond doubt that any national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, since the overwhelming mass of the population in the backward countries consist of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist relationships. It would be utopian to believe that proletarian parties in these backward countries, if indeed they can emerge in them, can pursue communist tactics and a communist policy, without establishing definite relations with the peasant movement and without giving it effective support. However, the objections have been raised that, if we speak of the bourgeois-democratic movement, we shall be obliterating all distinctions between the reformist and the revolutionary movements. Yet that distinction has been very clearly revealed of late in the backward and colonial countries, since the imperialist bourgeoisie is doing everything in its power to implant a reformist movement among the oppressed nations too. There has been a certain rapprochement between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often—perhaps even in most cases—the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, while it does support the national movement, is in full accord with the imperialist bourgeoisie, i.e., joins forces with it against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes. This was irrefutably proved in the commission, and we decided that the only correct attitude was to take this distinction into account and, in nearly all cases, substitute the term “national-revolutionary” for the term “bourgeois-democratic”. The significance of this change is that we, as Communists, should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. If these conditions do not exist, the Communists in these countries must combat the reformist bourgeoisie, to whom the heroes of the Second International also belong. Reformist parties already exist in the colonial countries, and in some cases their spokesmen call themselves Social-Democrats and socialists. The distinction I have referred to has been made in all the theses with the result, I think, that our view is now formulated much more precisely.

Next, I would like to make a remark on the subject of peasants’ Soviets. The Russian Communists’ practical activities in the former tsarist colonies, in such backward countries as Turkestan, etc., have confronted us with the question of how to apply the communist tactics and policy in pre-capitalist conditions. The preponderance of pre-capitalist relationships is still the main determining feature in these countries, so that there can be no question of a purely proletarian movement in them. There is practically no industrial proletariat in these cotmtries. Nevertheless, we have assumed, we must assume, the role of leader even there. Experience has shown us that tremendous difficulties have to be surmounted in these countries. However, the practical results of our work have also shown that despite these difficulties we are in a position to inspire in the masses an urge for independent political thinking and independent political action, even where a proletariat is practically non-existent. This work has been more difficult for us than it will be for comrades in the West-European countries, because in Russia the proletariat is engrossed in the work of state administration. It will reaaily be understood that peasants living in conditions of semi-feudal dependence can easily assimilate and give effect to the idea of Soviet organisation. It is also clear that the oppressed masses, those who are exploited, not only by merchant capital but also by the feudalists, and by a state based on feudalism, can apply this weapon, this type of organisation, in their conditions too. The idea of Soviet organisation is a simple one, and is applicable, not only to proletarian, but also to peasant feudal and semi-feudal relations. Our experience in this respect is not as yet very considerable. However, the debate in the commission, in which several representatives from colonial countries participated, demonstrated convincingly that the Communist International’s theses should point out that peasants’ Soviets, Soviets of the exploited, are a weapon which can be employed, not only in capitalist countries but also in countries with pre-capitalist relations, and that it is the absolute duty of Communist parties and of elements prepared to form Communist parties, everywhere to conduct propaganda in favour of peasants’ Soviets or of working people’s Soviets, this to include backward and colonial countries. Wherever conditions permit, they should at once make attempts to set up Soviets the working people.

This opens up a very interesting and very important field for our practical work. So far our joint experience in this respect has not been extensive, but more and more data will gradually accumulate. It is unquestionable that the proletariat of the advanced countries can and should give help to the working masses of the backward countries, and that the backward countries can emerge from their present stage of development when the victorious proletariat of the Soviet Republics extends a helping hand to these masses and is in a position to give them support.

There was quite a lively debate on this question in the commission, not only in connection with the theses I signed, but still more in connection with Comrade Roy’s theses, which he will defend here, and certain amendments to which were unanimously adopted.

The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of economic development is inevitable for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal—in that event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development. Not only should we create independent contingents of fighters and party organisations in the colonies and the backward countries, not only at once launch propaganda for the organisation of peasants’ Soviets and strive to adapt them to the pre-capitalist conditions, but the Communist International should advance the proposition, with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.

The necessary means for this cannot be indicated in advance. These will be prompted by practical experience. It has, however, been definitely established that the idea of the Soviets is understood by the mass of the working people in even the most remote nations, that the Soviets should be adapted to the conditions of a pre-capitalist social system, and that the Communist parties should immediately begin work in this direction in all parts of the world.

I would also like to emphasise the importance of revolutionary work by the Communist parties, not only in their own, but also in the colonial countries, and particularly among the troops employed by the exploiting nations to keep the colonial peoples in subjection.

Comrade Quelch of the British Socialist Party spoke of this in our commission. He said that the rank-and-file British worker would consider it treasonable to help the enslaved nations in their uprisings against British rule. True, the jingoist and chauvinist-minded labour aristocrats of Britain and America present a very great danger to socialism, and are a bulwark of the Second International. Here we are confronted with the greatest treachery on the part of leaders and workers belonging to this bourgeois International. The colonial question has been discussed in the Second International as well.[7] The Basle Manifesto[8] is quite clear on this point, too. The parties of the Second International have pledged themselves to revolutionary action, but they have given no sign of genuine revolutionary work or of assistance to the exploited and dependent nations in their revolt against the oppressor nations. This, I think, applies also to most of the parties that have withdrawn from the Second International and wish to join the Third International. We must proclaim this publicly for all to hear, and it is irrefutable. We shall see if any attempt is made to deny it.

All these considerations have formed the basis of our resolutions, which undoubtedly are too lengthy but will nevertheless, I am sure, prove of use and will promote the development and organisation of genuine revolutionary work in connection with the national and the colonial questions. And that is our principal task. Excerpted from:  V. I. Lenin, The Second Congress Of The Communist International (July 19-August 7, 1920)

[feste-the-jester]

Do you know what’s fun?

Picking the blog of someone you don’t like, and seeing how far you can twist things to make it fit the BITE model -criteria to identify a cult. GREAT fun. All you need is a bit of creativity and a total disregard for accuracy. Don’t believe me? Let’s have a try and see how we do! The Bite model can be found here, with many thanks to the Fool for bringing it to my attention.

I. Behavior control:

6. Manipulation and deprivation of sleep.

The Fool lives in Australia and most of his readers are in a different time zone. This means that every time he starts publishing numerous posts about the latest drama, his followers are likely to get absorbed in it, depriving themselves of sleep and becoming more susceptible to his interpretation of things.

9. Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self indoctrination including the Internet.

Each time the Fool decides on a new “sin”/aberrant behavior that the “enemy” is guilty of, he will publish many posts repeating the same assertion. Frequent repetition of the core message is a well known indoctrination technique. Many of the Fool’s followers are likely spending an inordinate amount of time on his blog, judging by the speed and frequency that “likes” from the same people appear.

10. Permission required for major decisions.

The Fool often receives and publishes asks, asking him for permission to create a blog similar to his, asking if it’s ok to follow or interact with Simon Alkenmayer, whether they or their friends are safe etc.

11. Thoughts, feelings, and activities (of self and others) reported to superiors.

Readers inform the Fool of what is happening on Simon and Kristina’s blog, report (often mistakenly, rarely, if ever, corrected) what Simon has said or done, both on tumblr and on other social media, such as Twitter. They also contact the Fool to report on their own thoughts and reactions to Simon.

12. Rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.

Readers who agree with the Fool and mirror his opinions are rewarded with sympathy (for their negative experience) and by having their intellect and critical thinking skills praised. Anyone who disagrees is deemed to be naive, immature, indoctrinated by Simon, incapable of logic etc. Indeed, the whole continued existence of the Fool’s blog is arguably a form of punishment for Simon “threatening him” with legal action back when the blog was first created. This communicates to members what kind of retribution they may expect if they cross the leader’s boundaries.

13. Discourage individualism, encourage group-think.

Any reports confirming the Fool’s assertions about Simon are immediately welcomed, believed, and adopted into the canon. Dissenting voices are “sent by Simon”, “haven’t read or understood the Fool’s arguments” or have been “manipulated.” The Fool does not acknowledge that it is possible for an intelligent, reasonable and objective adult to read his arguments and disagree with him.

14. Impose rigid rules and regulations.

Such as not answering asks that are not formatted to his liking, and he “can’t be bothered to read”.

16. Threaten harm to family and friends.

The Fool will publicly assert that he has never threatened anyone. However he has gone out of his way to connect Kristina to Simon, who is portrayed as “the enemy”. Several people, including this Jester, have been warned by friends to be careful of attracting the Fool’s and followers’ ire.

18. Instill dependency and obedience.

Readers expect the Fool to tell them which of Simon’s behaviors are problematic. Anyone who disagrees is likely to be accused of the same. (“If you think this isn’t racist, then you are also racist” etc.)

II. Information control:

1. Deception:

a. Deliberately withhold information.

Such as selective quoting, neglecting to withdraw statements that have been proven wrong, and not acknowledging any outside posts that don’t fit with the narrative.

b. Distort information to make it more acceptable.

Such as selective quoting, ignoring context and applying his own interpretation to things said by the “outsiders”.

c. Systematically lie to the cult members.

For example repeating that Kristina accused him of physically setting a fire on her drive.

2. Minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information, including:

a. Internet, TV, radio, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, other media.

Frequent repetition of how “unreadable” Simon’s books are, or how “long and ranting” his posts are can be seen as discouraging his followers from accessing them and forming their own opinion.

b. Critical information.

Any posts sharing positive experiences involving Simon are either ignored or discounted.

d. Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate.

Every time one of the Fool’s theories on Simon’s misdeeds is disproven, the Fool quickly moves on to a new accusation, keeping his followers from going back and reconsidering his previous posts.

4. Encourage spying on other members

b. Report deviant thoughts, feelings and actions to leadership.

The Fool often receives and publishes third party reports on Simon’s posts and behavior, inside and outside of tumblr. These are not fact-checked, but are welcomed and encouraged.

c. Ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group.

The Fool often receives and publishes third party reports on Simon’s posts and behavior, inside and outside of tumblr. These are not fact-checked, but are welcomed and encouraged.

5. Extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including:

b. Misquoting statements or using them out of context from non-cult sources.

The Fool will often misquote Simon, and those misquotes will go on to be repeated with frequency by him and his followers.

III. Thought control:

1. Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth.

a. Adopting the group's ‘map of reality’ as reality

If you don’t believe the Fool to be right, you are illogical, brainwashed or “reaching.” Frequent use of phrases such as “Obviously,” “We all know” etc reinforces this.

Everyone the Fool interacts with must acknowledge that what he is doing is critique, despite all evidence to the contrary.

b. Instill black and white thinking

Simon is “a bad person.” Everything he does must be seen and interpreted through this lense, which is reinforced frequently. The Fool often writes or publishes that Simon is “a bad person,” “a garbage person”, “an asshole” and similar descriptors.

c. Decide between good vs. evil

The Fool gets to determine what is good and what is evil. Simon is evil, and must be called out at every opportunity. The Fool and his followers are good, so any slurs, lies or offensive statements they make are excused and covered up.

d. Organize people into us vs. them (insiders vs. outsiders)

The Fool’s followers are intelligent, “have brains” and would never endanger anyone. The Fool trusts them to handle things appropriately. Simon’s followers are simple, impressionable, a mob. The Fool does not trust them to report their own experience, and their judgement is compromised by definition.

2. Change person’s name and identity.

The Fool calls Simon “Si”, “Krimon” and “Kristina”. Anonymous visitors to his ask box are encouraged to choose a “code name” to protect them from the evil Simon.

3. Use of loaded language and clichés which constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzz words.

Using loaded terms such as “misappropriation”, “grooming” to describe Simon’s actions and descriptions such as “critique” for his own writing help the Fool elicit the reaction he wants from his followers.

6. Memories are manipulated and false memories are created.

For example an influx of Anonymous asks that somehow suddenly realised years later that Simon behaved badly towards them, even if they didn’t think that way back then.

8. Rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism.

The Fool has blocked people for disagreeing with him. He frequently shuts down polite questions and uses sarcasm to avoid answering. Despite not affording Simon the same luxury, the Fool expects his readers to “take his word about what he meant” with a post, even if the messenger is politely explaining how it came across.

9. Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy allowed.

For example saying that he will “not publish any asks defending antisemitism. Even if that’s not what you think you are doing.” In effect, if you disagree with the Fool’s interpretation of Simon’s behavior as antisemitic, then you are defending antisemitism. No dissent allowed.

10. Labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful.

No one possibly believes Simon is an actual monster, and if they do, they are unable of critical thought.

11. Instill new “map of reality”.

Commenting on someone’s art, mocking them, calling them names, is “literary critique”. Attempts to answer to accusations are “rants”. Asking someone if the possibility of legal consequences bothers them is “threatening” and “becoming irrationally angry”. And so on...

IV. Emotional control:

1. Manipulate and narrow the range of feelings – some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong or selfish.

Simon’s feelings are not even real, according to the Fool. Simon could not possibly be affected by the Fool’s actions. He is not real and has no feelings. Instead, he is only capable of “ranting”, “manipulating” and “doing things for attention”. Any concerns brought to the Fool about how his actions are affecting Simon, are answered with “You need to remember he’s not a real person”.

3. Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault.

If Simon or his readers are upset, it’s their fault for looking at the blog. If anyone’s reputation is damaged as a result of claims the Fool makes about them, it’s on them. The Fool is free to make any comments he sees fit, with no consequences.

4. Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as

b. You are not living up to your potential

Being part of Simon’s group means you are allowing yourself to be manipulated and brainwashed. You can not reach your full potential unless you renounce Simon.

c. Your family is deficient

Your “found family” of gentle readers is deficient.

d. Your past is suspect

Your past experiences are not proof of anything. Bad things may have been happening in Simon’s space, and you may have been part of them.

e. Your affiliations are unwise

You are choosing to affiliate yourself with someone bad. And you are unable to tell he is lying to you.

f. Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish

If you share your thoughts, feelings or actions to defend Simon, it doesn’t prove anything, and by defending him you are harming others.

5. Instill fear, such as fear of:

b. The outside world

c. Enemies

The Fool makes sure to repeat often enough that readers might be targeted by Simon and his followers. He curates that expectation and then reinforces it by publishing Anons who agree.

8. Phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority.

Not so much fears of leaving the Fool’s group, as much as cultivating fears of leaving/going against Simon’s group. The Fool’s group is presented as a safe haven.

d. Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and roll.

Those who don’t embrace the Fool’s blog and choose to remain with Simon are weak-minded, brainwashed, unable to reason, or bad by association. There can be no legitimate reason to like Simon.

e. Threats of harm to ex-member and family.

No explicit threats are made, but seeing the treatment of Kristina Meister is implicitly threatening.

See? Of course all this is just an exercise -a thought experiment. But it’s about as well-argued as the Fool’s original analysis. (Which is to say, neither deserves to be taken seriously.)

[heystephwrites]

The Peace Referendum

Originally published on October 13th, 2016 I wrote this blog post to answer questions I received about the peace referendum in Colombia.

The week before last, in the midst of the SENA strike aka the impromptu and undesired holiday, I began to write a blog post titled COLOMBIA SIGNS PEACE DEAL. Well, two weeks after the referendum I can say that someone certainly signed a peace deal but it wasn’t Colombia.

President Juan Manuel Santos, a man of polarised opinion, was seemingly making good on his pre-electoral promise of peace since, three weeks ago, he signed a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels. The FARC, whilst not the only rebel group involved in the 52-year conflict, are by far the largest and most influential. It was assumed that if this deal had been accepted by the Colombian population other groups such as the ELN would follow suit in the coming months and years. Alas, they did not and thus it’s back to the drawing board for the peace talks.

The decision against the peace treaty has left many, Colombian and extranjero alike, scratching their heads in confusion. Why would the people vote no? Are Colombians not interested in resolving the longest-running armed conflict in the Americas? The answer, as always, is it’s complicated. Nothing here is straightforward; not the conflict; not public opinion; not even the referendum itself.

In theory, referendums seem like a wonderful avenue of direct democracy in an otherwise imperfect system, in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Referendums are extremely rarely used, although 2016 does seem to be the year of the referendum (here’s looking at you Brexit, Thailand, and Italy among others) because alongside other flaws they have the tendency to be incredibly unpredictable. In this case, up until the day of the vote the polls had forecasted solid support for the ‘yes’ camp but it was not to be. To determine why this was, one must look at what drives voters in a referendum. Is it a carefully deliberated conviction based on clearly explained facts? Probably not.

In this and other referendums, the voting public was not sufficiently informed to make decisions on such a complicated and technical issue. This wasn’t merely a vote for peace (to which all would agree) but on a specific peace treaty, one that the details of which were not made abundantly clear. There was a sense of secrecy about it and secrecy always breeds mistrust. What we do know about the peace treaty is that it was particularly lenient towards the FARC. It was extremely lenient in fact, no-jail-time-and-10-seats-in-parliament-to-a-diminishing-and-discredited-rebel-army lenient.

This should really have been foreseen, however. Santos is still in power because of his promise to do what his predecessors could not and secure lasting peace. His second term of presidency was secured by the skin of his teeth, just 50.95% of the vote as opposed to 68.9% in 2010. Many of his supporters that tipped the scales were those among the left that hoped for peaceful negotiation with the FARC. One can assume this is what drove his tactic of peace “at any costs" - a tactic criticized by his old buddy and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.

That said, buddy mightn’t be the best word to describe their current relationship as although Uribe helped win the presidency for Santos in 2010, the two later split. Uribe’s campaign against the peace deal is thought to be one of the principal reasons that the no vote prevailed.

The basis of Uribe's campaign was that the FARC should be punished harshly for their crimes.

“Peace is exciting, but the text of the Havana deal is disappointing,” said Uribe

Uribe’s campaign took advantage of the widespread hatred of the FARC. Honestly, the phrase widespread hatred might be an understatement. For many Colombians, there is a special place in hell for members of the FARC as the most recent period of violence was started by the FARC’s insurgency and the violence has been pretty horrific. The numbers reported vary but most agree that it has left; more than 260,000 dead with the large majority being civilian; 6.9 million people internally displaced (which, for reference, is even more than Sudan and Iraq combined), and over 75,000 people have disappeared or been kidnapped. Somewhere in the region of half of all Colombians have lost a family member to violence over the years and many understandably lay the blame at FARC's door. Yet, when looking at the evidence that doesn't come directly from the Colombian government, one can't help but feel the hatred is, in some cases, misplaced. If you read nothing else in this post please read this:

“The United Nations has estimated that 12% of all killings of civilians in Colombian conflict have been committed by the FARC and ELN guerrillas, and the rest, 80%, by government forces and paramilitaries.”

So yes, the FARC have undoubtedly done some atrocious things but the Colombian government also have A LOT to answer for.  

This has obviously never been mentioned. In the same way that many voters in the UK were swayed by xenophobic propaganda, strong personalities such as Nigel Farage, and expensive advertising campaigns during the Brexit movement, the hatred of the FARC was a much more beneficial political tool for Uribe’s campaign. In the UK, voters were lured with falsified promises, all of which have fallen to the wayside, leaving many regretting their decision. Whether this happens in Colombia remains to be seen.

In addition to hatred, many citizens mistrust the FARC. This, as has been mentioned, is not the first attempt at peace or a peace deal. In previous endeavours, the FARC have gone back on their word and this also played a major factor in the outcome.

Interestingly though, the areas in which one would expect people to have the most hatred towards the FARC voted for the peace deal. It seems the area’s most affected by the violence just wanted it to stop. They were not interested in vengeance, just peace.

For this reason, the phrase "tyranny of the majority” is often associated with referendums. This situation is an example of the worst kind because the whims of the majority have superseded the needs of the minority. Although in this case, "the tyranny of whoever bothered to leave their house on that rainy Sunday" would be more apt.

Referendums are only direct democracy if people bother to take part in them. Turnout for this one was a disappointing 37%. Reasons for this low turnout vary from the weather to general indifference. Another thing to remember is that unlike Europe most Latin American countries are new to direct democracy (the exception being Uruguay) and Colombians especially, weary from years of violence and disappointment, are particularly politically apathetic.

Another difficulty that plagued this referendum was a problem with separability. This is the inability to separate the facts before them from other issues. There were a few somewhat direct issues; others were completely unrelated. One less related issue was Santos and his government.

Everywhere except Colombia Santos’ popularity is soaring but here in the country itself, it’s at an all-time low. Colombia’s economy has been struggling of late and unemployment is at 9 percent. He has made some highly questionable moves during his presidency but this isn’t all Santos’ fault; the low prices for oil and trade relations with China have a lot to do with it. Regardless there are many Colombians that believe he has been far too preoccupied with peace negotiations to really deal with the economy. Peace should bring eventual prosperity to the country but for now, the Colombian peso has fallen sharply against the dollar since the talks began in 2012. Although before the referendum a yes appeared certain to anyone paying attention, nationally or internationally, it seemed to many nationals that his interest lay more in international public opinion. This only fortified the perception within Colombia that, now nearing the end of his time in political office he was pursuing other honours and that his haste for a deal was not for the good of the nation, but to secure the Nobel Peace Prize.

Whilst campaigning overseas Santos made the Secretary of Education, Gina Parody, the face of the yes vote in Colombia. No one is sure why, Parody is even less popular than Santos, but we can be sure that this backfired on him. One of the ideas that Parody tried to push was gender-specific care for victims of sexual violence, however, because Parody is openly gay, right wing activists twisted this when it was reported to the general public. Somehow it ended up being explained to already concerned Christians as a “gender ideology” that sought to promote sexual diversity. Many voted no because they believed the treaty to be a threat to the nuclear family. Sadly after months of having her sexual orientation used to sabotage her work, Parody has since resigned.

Already you can see that the situation is very, very complicated and if I’m honest I’ve barely scratched the surface. The more important question is “so what now Colombia? Where do we go from here?” Back to the drawing board, it looks like. Let’s just hope there are no casualties while we wait.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids (NYT) Huge winter storms plunged large parts of the central and southern United States into an energy crisis this week, with frigid blasts of Arctic weather crippling electric grids and leaving millions of Americans without power amid dangerously cold temperatures. The grid failures were most severe in Texas, where more than four million people woke up Tuesday morning to rolling blackouts. Separate regional grids in the Southwest and Midwest also faced serious strain. As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 23 people nationwide had died in the storm or its aftermath. Analysts have begun to identify key factors behind the grid failures in Texas. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed power demand beyond the worst-case scenarios that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, a large fraction of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy conditions, with some plants suffering fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked. Many of Texas’ wind turbines also froze and stopped working. The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions—as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure.

‘A complete bungle’: Texas’ energy pride goes out with cold (AP) Anger over Texas’ power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted Tuesday as millions of residents in the energy capital of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat—out for 36 hours or longer in many homes—would return soon or stay on once it finally does. “I know people are angry and frustrated,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who woke up to more than 1 million people still without power in his city. “So am I.” In all, between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no power nearly two full days after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts. More bad weather, including freezing rain, began arriving Tuesday night. Making matters worse, expectations that the outages would be a shared sacrifice by the state’s 30 million residents quickly gave way to a cold reality, as pockets in some of America’s largest cities, including San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, were left to shoulder the lasting brunt of a catastrophic power failure, and in subfreezing conditions that Texas’ grid operators had known was coming.

Military recruitment (Foreign Policy) A meager job market has given military recruitment a boost around the world, the Wall Street Journal reports. In Canada, applications to join the armed services surged 37 percent over the last nine months of 2020 compared to the previous year. Australia reported a 9.9 percent annual increase in applications. The United Kingdom met its military recruitment targets for the first time in seven years and in the United States, 92 percent of eligible personnel re-enlisted, compared to just 83 percent the previous year.

Volunteer paramedics patrol streets of Venezuela’s capital (AP) Venezuela’s deepening crisis has gutted emergency ambulance services, so a group of volunteer paramedics has stepped into the void to offer life-saving help on the tough streets of Caracas. Calling themselves Angels of the Road, the volunteer corps relies on donated medical supplies and funding from international organizations. Despite receiving no paychecks, its roughly 40 paramedics are ready at a moment’s notice to jump onto motorcycles and fire up their single ambulance and race into the streets. Jonathan Quantip, 44, said he and co-founder Zuly Rodiz launched the project two years ago after watching their native Venezuela precipitously decline over years of political and social crisis. “We Venezuelans have to solve our own country’s problems,” Quantip said. “We have to use the skills we’re each good at.” The group works on a shoestring budget with nothing left over for wages, so each paramedic relies on another source of income. Some donate their off-time after working in hospitals and firehouses. Others flip burgers in fast-food restaurants.

‘We are like captives’: life in Britain’s quarantine hotels (Reuters) Mohamed Noor faces 10 days in COVID-19 quarantine in a hotel room near London’s Heathrow Airport after falling foul of new border controls because of a flight delay. “I don’t have a book. I don’t have a Koran. I don’t have nothing here,” Noor, a 55-year-old Muslim, said by phone after his arrival on Monday, a day later than planned, landed him with a 1,750-pound ($2,400) bill. In another hotel nearby, 61-year-old Sole, who declined to give her surname, said she realised too late that the new rules would kick in before she returned from visiting friends in Chile. “We are like captives in these rooms,” she said. Britain says the measures, effective since Monday, are needed to protect its COVID-19 vaccination programme and guard against new coronavirus variants. People returning from any of 33 “high-risk” countries where travel to Britain is banned must pay 1,750 pounds for a 10-day quarantine hotel package. After being taken by bus to government-contracted hotels, they must spend most of the time in their rooms and have meals delivered to their door.

Toothless travel restrictions (Foreign Policy) Irish holidaymakers have suddenly shown a keen interest in dental hygiene as they attempt to shirk strict lockdown measures to escape the bleak North Atlantic winter. Traveling for “essential medical, health or dental services” is allowed under Ireland’s coronavirus restrictions, leading to a surge in dental surgery appointments in Spain’s Canary Islands. Roberta Beccaris, a receptionist at a dental surgeon’s office on the island of Tenerife, reported taking multiple calls from prospective Irish clients, who have demanded e-mail confirmations of the bookings. Police can issue fines to rule-breaking travelers of roughly $600, although they are powerless to stop those with proof of a medical appointment. “Obviously as they are not turning up, we now understand it is just an excuse for a holiday,” she told RTÉ radio.

Spain betting on vaccine passports to revive summer tourism (Reuters) Spain hopes the introduction of vaccination passports combined with pre-travel COVID-19 testing will allow British tourists to return to Spanish destinations this summer, a tourism ministry source told Reuters on Tuesday. The government has no plans to introduce quarantines on foreign visitors, and was also counting on a wider agreement to be hammered out between Europe and Britain to remove restrictions on non-essential travel, the official added. Over 2020, as global travel was dramatically curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic, foreign tourism to Spain—one of the world’s most visited countries—fell 80% to just 19 million visitors, a level not seen since 1969.

China steps up online controls with new rule for bloggers (AP) Ma Xiaolin frequently wrote about current affairs on one of China’s leading microblogging sites, where he has 2 million followers. But recently, he said in a post, the Weibo site called and asked him not to post original content on topics ranging from politics to economic and military issues. ���As an international affairs researcher and a columnist, it looks like I can only go the route of entertainment, food and beverage now,” the international relations professor wrote on Jan. 31. Ma, who often posted on developments in the Mideast, is one of many popular influencers working within the constraints of China’s heavily censored web who is finding that their space to speak is shrinking even further with the latest policy changes and a clean-up campaign run by the country’s powerful censors. Beginning next week, the Cyberspace Administration of China will require bloggers and influencers to have a government-approved credential before they can publish on a wide range of subjects. Some fear that only state media and official propaganda accounts will get permission. The latest move is in line with ever more restrictive regulations under President Xi Jinping that constrict an already narrow space for discourse. The Chinese leader has made “digital sovereignty” a central concept of his rule, under which authorities have set limits and increased control of the digital realm.

Japan’s ruling party wants more women at meetings—unless they talk (Reuters) After a sexism row sparked by Tokyo Olympics chief’s saying women talked too much at meetings, Japan’s ruling party wants women at key meetings—but only if they don’t talk. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has proposed a new plan that allows five female lawmakers to join the party’s key meetings as observers. Toshihiro Nikai, the party’s 82-year-old secretary general, said on Tuesday that he heard criticism that the party’s board is male-dominated, but added that the board members are elected. But it is important for the party’s female members to “look” at the party’s decision-making process, he said. Those female observers can’t speak during the meetings, but can submit opinions separately to the secretariat office, the daily newspaper Nikkei reported. Requiring female observers at meetings to remain quiet has drawn criticism that the party is out of touch.

Big protests across Myanmar as UN expert fears violence (AP) Demonstrators in Myanmar gathered Wednesday in their largest numbers so far to protest the military’s seizure of power, as a U.N. human rights expert warned that troops being brought to Yangon and elsewhere could signal the prospect for major violence. U.N. rapporteur Tom Andrews said he was alarmed by reports of soldiers being transported into Yangon, the biggest city. “In the past, such troop movements preceded killings, disappearances, and detentions on a mass scale,” he said in a statement issued late Tuesday by the U.N. Human Rights office in Geneva. “I am terrified that given the confluence of these two developments­—planned mass protests and troops converging—we could be on the precipice of the military committing even greater crimes against the people of Myanmar.” Wednesday’s turnout in Yangon appeared to be one of the biggest so far in the city. Protesters have adopted a tactic of blocking off streets from security forces by parking vehicles in groups with their hoods up and the excuse of having engine trouble.

Anti-Chinese Sentiment in Myanmar (Foreign Policy) Widespread protests against the Feb. 1 military coup in Myanmar have taken on an increasingly anti-Chinese tone, with rallies held outside the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, Myanmar and calls growing for boycotts of Chinese goods and services. Misinformation is spreading, including rumors that Chinese soldiers have infiltrated Myanmar and that Chinese software will be used to set up a Great Firewall. On balance, it seems unlikely that China supported the coup, especially given its relatively good relationship with the National League for Democracy. Anti-Chinese sentiment has a long history in Myanmar, both on the national level and at the local level, due to conflicts among ethnic Chinese communities and others. Chinese investment projects have been major flash points, especially the Myitsone Dam, which was suspended in 2011 following the move toward democracy. Locals have decried the environmental impacts and forced relocations associated with such projects, while Beijing has been keen to get them restarted. There is also growing anti-Chinese feeling across Southeast Asia. Many young people see parallels between the 2019 Hong Kong protests and their own resistance against local authoritarianism. China’s tactless authoritarianism and resentment toward outsiders contributes to that solidarity, but the main driver is the willingness of local autocrats and the uber-rich to suck up to China for their own ends. That can mean, as in Myanmar’s case, that China is blamed even when it hasn’t actually done much.

Sidelining MBS (Foreign Policy) The United States will downgrade its engagement with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as part of the Biden administration’s drive to “recalibrate” relations with the kingdom, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday. President Joe Biden will instead conduct diplomacy through Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, dealing a blow to the crown prince’s standing in Washington.

Gunmen kidnap at least 20 boys from Nigerian boarding school (Washington Post) Gunmen stormed a north-central Nigerian boarding school early Wednesday, kidnapping at least 20 teenage boys, the local governor said—the second mass abduction of children to shake the country in three months. The attackers raided the Government Science Secondary School in the town of Kagara before sunrise and dragged the classmates into the dense woods. Three teachers and 12 family members also vanished into the night, Abubakar Sani Bello, the governor of Niger state, said on television. Schools in the region have been shuttered. Helicopters hovered over the treetops as security forces continued their search and, by midmorning, authorities were still counting the missing.

[irinapaleolog]

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for educational and research purposes only. It has been published to shed light and correct understanding on the escalating issue of hatred of women online. By extension, this article also aims to inform readers on right-leaning and left-leaning internet hive minds and their negative influence on culture, politics, and society.

T/W: This article contains mentions of sexual assault, violence against women, suicide, incest, racism, anti-semitism, sexism

If you’re a woman who is active in an online, women-dominated fandom space, then you’re well aware of everything this article is about to tell you.

You’ve read every death threat.

You’ve gone through the sometimes graphic — but always malicious — anonymous message or tweet explaining every way in which some person you’ll never know would like to harm you.

You may have been banned from a fan forum or had your messages wiped from a Discord channel by a bot or mod who decided that your thoughts and your words as a woman were not allowed around here.

You’ll probably remember all the times your sexual identity, your race, or your religious affiliation was questioned and erased.

You have read every time the latest hive mind online has labeled you a sexist. A racist. An abuse apologist. A school shooter. An inbred. A Nazi. A mental case. Inhuman.

You probably know somebody whose had their information put up on Reddit threads or 4chan forums or alt-right YouTube channels for everybody to see. The aim? To determine if maybe they could find ways to hurt that individual in person or — at the very least — make their life a little harder.

And of course, you know all too well that all the threats, lies, bullying, defamation, doxxing, and dehumanization is driven by the internet’s systemic fear over women enjoying media made for them, on their own terms, and on their own time.

We’ve experienced countless cycles of this outrage, ranging from comic book heroes to k-pop. One of the most recent iterations, however, is driven by a desire to see two fictional space wizards kiss in a galaxy far, far away.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a fan of “Reylo” in the Star Wars fandom, well, it looks a bit like this:

All of the screenshots, located above, catalog a small sample of the four years of hate sent to “Reylos:” fans who are interested in the canon romantic dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. These fans are predominately women.

And, no, let’s get this out of the way: These hate posts, while directed towards fans of a fictional pairing, have nothing to do with fictional characters. This hate has everything to do with policing and punishing women for collectively enjoying fiction in a way deemed incorrect by various political and social agendas. The end goal is always the same — bully these women until they become silent.

Defining a “Bullying Hive Mind:” The “Alt-Right” vs “Antis”

The ways in which bullying hive minds reach this end goal are dependent on the political alignment of the cyberbully. Either they are pursuing an agenda dictated by alt-right circles or one dictated by factions of the progressive left, both of which gained internet popularity in the early to mid 2010s.

Most people — whether it’s because you’ve kept up with the aftereffects of the 2016 election or because you’ve spent anytime on YouTube as of late — are familiar with the alt-right. This group leans male and is driven mostly by insecurity, overt misogyny, and a sense of ownership over what they think are “male-dominated spaces” being overrun by women. It’s another example of extreme conservative thinking: what was mine should stay mine and anybody who thinks differently than me needs to get out of my way.

Arguably the biggest example of alt-right hate and harassment online is Gamergate, an anti-women bullying campaign that first arose on 4chan. The movement’s aim was to push women out of gaming journalism, game design, and gaming fandom by sending death threats, rape threats, stalking women, and dehumanizing women to their peers.

The event bolstered the anger, insecurity, and sexism of young men into an online hive mind that continues today, most notably in Gamergate’s successor “Comicsgate,” which orchestrated the attempted sabotage of Captain Marvel’s release.

These people are not hard to find. They parade their ideas on Reddit or, increasingly likely, on monetized YouTube channels. Their tactics often include spreading misinformation using false “evidence;” discrediting women’s interests by reducing them to “mental cases;” dogpiling; and doxxing.

In Star Wars fandom, this right-leaning group refers to themselves as “The Fandom Menace.” The group was created by former Comicsgate supporter Ethan Van Sciver, who goes by ComicArtistPro Secrets on YouTube. He frequently uploads videos — clickbait title and all — with common alt-right buzz words like “SJW.”

The Fandom Menace was formed in response to The Last Jedi — a more inclusive, forward-thinking addition to the Star Wars franchise that was inspired by the writings of Robert Bly, a leader in the mythopoetic men’s movement. The focus on feminine power and multiple women with complex character development and speaking roles within the film — in addition to the death of Luke Skywalker — powered this hate group to see Star Wars under Disney as “feminist propaganda.” They were driven by the belief that Disney was attempting to erase men from the Star Wars fan community. This led to several targeted hate campaigns including one that ran actress Kelly Marie Tran off of social media.

Where the alt-right works to monetize their hate through public YouTube channels, left-leaning circles are less well known to the general public. Reactionary left-leaning circles that operate within fandom spaces tend to skew younger (mostly generation-z and late millennial) and are predominantly women. They rose in 2015 with the onset of Tumblr and in response to the changing dynamics within “shipping” fandoms. For the uninitiated, “shippers” are groups of people within fandoms who center their attention around a specific relationship within that fandom (e.g. Rey and Kylo Ren).

In online spaces, this reactionary, left-leaning group is better known as “antis.” This name was given to this group after they became known for demonizing, demoralizing, and/or dehumanizing any individual in a shipping fandom who they deemed to be promoting “problematic” content through the fiction they consumed.

Anti harassment campaigns follow a consistent pattern where genuine concerns about real-world injustice are misinterpreted and applied to fictional properties in an attempt to create a 1:1 comparison and exert power over another (often marginalized) group. They start by leveraging performative accusations around real world issues such as sexism, racism, homophobia, sexual assault, and gendered violence against fictional characters deemed by the group to be representative of these problems. The guilt-by-association of these characters is then applied to the people who like these characters, and a general warning is issued: “stop supporting them, or else.”

When this accusation is ignored, it is then weaponized into bullying campaigns that aim to belittle and discredit women through dangerously shallow and irrational pearl clutching. The motivations and levels of participation in these harassment campaigns vary, but they tend to move from one large fandom to the next, focusing on whatever pop culture character will award them the most clout.

As one of the biggest current pop culture “ships,” Reylos have drawn the antis’ ire on both Twitter and Tumblr since the ship’s inception in 2015. The following accusations have been leveled against fans of these characters since 2015. These accusations include:

That Reylos support real life abuse by wanting a romantic pairing between two characters who begin as enemies in an epic myth.

That Reylos are racists because they support a romantic pairing between two white characters.

That Reylos are sexist because Reylos write sexually explicit fanfiction between the “pure” heroine and the “bad guy.”

The importance of these causes and people’s ability to engage with them in good faith is recklessly diminished by blaming valid, real life concerns on women who are enjoying a fictional pair of characters from a film series. It disregards the fact that the women shipping these characters are not a homogeneous group in either their identity or their background. It erases the abuse that some shippers have experienced first-hand — -abuse they should not be forced to out on the internet in order for their shipping to be seen as socially acceptable.

When the Left Leans Right

Launching targeted harassment at any group of women celebrating an enemies-to-lovers ship won’t gain antis clout among their peers. As mentioned previously, Reylo is specifically targeted because it’s arguably the biggest ship in one of the biggest franchises in the world. This means that while Emma Watson said that the enemies-to-lovers dynamic in Beauty and the Beast is about “inclusion and love,” that classic Disney film is old and it’s been done. There is no longer a large, activated community around it, and, as such, there is little incentive to bully the women who enjoy it.

Once antis do decide to bully a ship, however, one of the main accusations leveled at followers of enemies-to-lovers ships is that what they are supporting is “dangerous” to society. To antis, symbolism and subtext in fiction are bypassed in favor of literal and often severe interpretations of a story’s greater meaning. This means that, theoretical little girls and grown women who are unable to separate fiction from reality are put at risk of harming themselves and others because of what they see in fiction.

The irony of this is that a group of mainly women confidently trying to convince other women that they must be protected from complicated romantic dynamics in fairytales is taken from a page in the American conservative playbook that is still used today. For decades, American conservatives have used popular media to scapegoat real issues in society that are easier to pass off as a consequence of the media our society consumes rather than what our society actually teaches and perpetuates.

For example: In 1948, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham began to publish magazine articles and books that claimed that comic books led to juvenile delinquency. While he had no scientific evidence, his writings caused a societal outcry that led to an investigative Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Here, conservative politicians demonized comic book writers and the comic book industry, declaring that “this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime, horror, and violence.”

The subcommittee eventually lead to the Comic Codes Authority — a comics industry created code that put restrictions on the art their creators could produce. The code stifled the industry for almost a decade.

Around the time the subcommittee’s investigation was coming to a close in 1955, the pearl clutching continued on television in a special news report entitled “Confidential File: Horror Comic Books!”

More propaganda video than actual news report, the narrator speaks over several young boys alone in the woods reading comic books. The narrator states:

“When I was a boy and hung with the gang we did a lot of things, we roasted potatoes, we went on expeditions, we tipped over garbage cans now and then, we wrote nasty remarks about the teacher on the sidewalk, but we never spent an afternoon sitting around like this, reading.

What a wonderful thing this would be if they were reading something worth while, something that would stimulate their desires to build and to grow. But they’re not reading anything constructive…they’re reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror, to the most despicable of crimes…

One of the wonderfully appealing things about children is that they haven’t yet come to the age where reality and unreality are divorced. The emotional impact of something they read in a comic book may be much the same as a real life situation they would witness.”

The news report goes on to show young boys stabbing trees with a knife and almost killing their friend with a rock after reading horror comic books.

This same outlandish, conservative mindset is what we see today in left-leaning anti culture. The difference now, however, is that these ideals are being regurgitated and repackaged for young girls as each generation of women gains more power within a patriarchal society.

For girls, the preoccupation is not around whether or not they will commit violence, but rather, who they will have sex with and how they will be treated as they grow within a historically male-dominated culture. The idea that women will get themselves into toxic, abusive relationships because they consume hyperbolic myths and fairytales instead of the real consequences of imposter syndrome, insecurity, and the restriction of women to explore their worth in society is no different than what conservatives said about boys in 1950s America. They asserted that boys would become violent psychopaths because they consumed multi-colored panels depicting fictional, exaggerated violence instead of the real life wars our countries waged, fear mongering on the news, or the pro-gun culture surrounding them daily. Both thought processes are damaging to the growth of our societal beliefs.

In fact, the fear and discomfort of women exploring sex within their own spaces is something that is threatening to groups on both the left and the right.

John Boyega’s New Years Eve Tweet: What Caused It and Why Did it Blow Up?

All of the screenshots above were taken within 4 days following a blow up on Twitter involving Star Wars actor John Boyega, a few sock puppets, and whole load of serial anti and alt-right accounts.

If you’ve been on Twitter this year, chances are you have noticed John Boyega trending. The 27-year old actor (best known for his portrayal as Resistance hero Finn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy) gained traction on Twitter New Year’s Eve when he posted a tweet of characters Rey and Kylo Ren fighting (as they do in a movie entitled, well, Star Wars) with the caption “Star Wars Romance.”

To anybody who had never touched fandom Twitter, the tweet appears harmless enough. However, the tweet was successful in doing exactly what it intended and exactly what lurking hate accounts who successfully orchestrated the bullying barrage wanted the tweet to do. It galvanized a hoard of antis and alt-right trolls and their following to — by their own admission — bully Reylos.

This particular incident began with Twitter user @crogman, a sock puppetnow going by the name of @solo_sebes. The sock puppet account appeared on Twitter in mid December 2019 and quickly entrenched itself in a community of Reylos by retweeting and posting Reylo-positive tweets and joining in on post The Rise of Skywalker discourse. The account was also quick to energize antis of the Rey/Kylo dynamic.

Now that the sock puppet is embedded deeply enough into the Reylo community that somebody within that community would see controversy on their timeline between @crogman and Boyega, @crogman tweeted at the Star Wars actor, “bro you’re extremely disgusting and gross also fucking disrespectful…you cannot be this jealous of adam driver dude as a black woman im fucking ashamed that someone like you represented us in star wars.”

The comment was included with a screenshot of John Boyega on Instagram writing “@heyfabrice it’s not about who she kisses but who eventually lays the pipe. You are a genius.”

Boyega’s Instagram comment was in response to a fan suggesting that Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in The Rise of Skywalker) was now available after her canon romantic partner, Ben Solo (played by Adam Driver) died saving her life.

Boyega’s comments upset some fans on Instagram who found that his comments suggested that a woman’s worth in romantic relationships — fictional or not — was a prize to be won by the man who gets to have sex with her first.

The sock puppet account inflamed a situation that would likely have stayed on Instagram. While antis correctly identified that the account was fake and was indeed blackfishing, antis incorrectly claimed that the account was created by Reylos to justify a group of white women attacking Boyega on social media. Instead, the account was clearly a plant meant to goad the actor into directing hate at Reylos.

This is proven by the fact that the account under its new username attempted to instigate hate towards Boyega’s co-star Daisy Ridley in the comments of Reylos’ posts shortly after New Year’s Eve.

Additionally, @crogman was not the only account never associated with the Reylo community that was used to inflame the situation with Boyega. User @FaberLima1 tweeted at Boyega under @crogman’s tweet writing “you are paying mico and only worsening your image. Better stop (and erase while you have time).”

Boyega responded to this tweet with several laugh emojis.

The account @FaberLima1 at the time of this screenshot has 6 followers and no tweets past December 25th. Like @crogman, the account posts Reylo-positive posts utilizing popular hashtags within the fandom including #BenSoloDeservesBetter, a hashtag created by fans of Ben Solo to express their dissatisfaction with his character’s ending.

Also like @crogman, the account was created in July 2019 yet has tweets only traceable in December, signifying that the account has been nuked perhaps multiple times.

Shortly after @crogman’s tweet to Boyega, antis began to push common anti-Reylo accusations. This included accounts who had never actively bullied Reylos. For example, user @sxidey posted several tweets accusing Reylos of “sexualizing Rey,” “harassing John”, and giving “money to the military.”

The latter accusation is a common left-leaning talking point against Reylos who support Adam Driver (a former marine). This particular comment was a reference to a Gofundme started by Ben Solo fans on Reddit. The Gofundme is raising money for Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces.

The account, however, had only had one recent mention of Reylo two days earlier on December 28th. The account itself is also new, joining in October 2019.

It’s possible that the account is simply a new anti account on Twitter. Regardless, the listing of anti accusations against Reylos almost at the exact time of @crogman’s post reveals the motive of inciting hatred against members of the Reylo community.

Another account, @itsjoey56138220, was also inflaming the situation early on underneath @crogman’s tweet with accusations that Reylos were racist.

Unlike @sxidey, this account has a history of inciting hate against Reylos with outlandish conspiracy theories including one theory that Reylos were created by the alt right who caused “ex Twilight bitches” to make the ship popular. The account has also claimed that Reylos are racist because Reylo shippers want a “whites only romance.”

Boyega, in response to users including two sock puppet accounts with no association to Reylo — and encouraged by anti accounts sewing seeds of hatred across Twitter — finally took to his own Twitter account to tweet:

The tweet, which currently sits at over 190k likes, caused tens of thousands of hateful, targeted tweets towards a group of fans made up predominantly of women and girls. It also resulted in several hate videos by alt-right YouTubers totaling hundreds of thousands of views, several hacked accounts, and the suicide baiting of a teenage girl.

The New Years Incident By The Numbers: How Boyega’s Tweet Set Off The Left and Alt-Right

Following Boyega’s tweet, reactionary users on both left and alt-right Twitter felt further emboldened to hate on a group of women they had been discrediting, dehumanizing, and sending death threats to for years. For myself, the event presented an opportunity, albeit an unfortunate one, to track these groups’ behaviors and quantify them. Ultimately, I had the goal to break down how these incidents are organized to hate on women, whether for purposes of clout or their desire to purge women from fandom spaces.

For this analysis, I took a sample of tweets that contained the word “Reylo” (the search pull also included its plural form “Reylos”) from December 31, 2019 (the day of Boyega’s tweet) to January 3, 2020. After cleaning the accounts to the best of my ability of “pro-Reylo” tweets, I was left with 25,012 tweets that contained negative and neutral comments about Reylos and the Reylo dynamic. I sifted manually through about 7k of these tweets to find key themes, which I verified utilizing a text mining analysis of the tweets.

I emerged being able to quantify the following key themes:

Hate, Trolling, Cyberbullying

Abuse, Toxicity

Racism

Sex, Sexualized, Objectification

Mental, Psychotic, Unhinged

“Hate” received the most individual tweets at ~2.2k tweets and received ~31.4 likes per tweet on average. Tweets containing themes “abuse” and “racism” received a slightly higher avg like count at 38.7 avg likes and 35.4 avg likes, respectively. These themes, along with tweets dealing with “sex” were all mentioned over 1k times.

What this suggests is that a smaller number of accounts with a wider reach were posting more substantive tweets with a focused agenda, while tweets containing “hate’ keywords were more likely to be lobbed out by anyone, including accounts with very little reach.

Tweets mentioning the theme of Reylo fans being “mental” cases had less tweets at 602 total tweets. This theme was pushed strongly by the alt-right circles involved as opposed to leftist circles, which dominated the conversation on Twitter. While this analysis does not focus on the alt-right’s reaction on YouTube, Twitter was used as a place to spread YouTube reactions created by notable Fandom Menace members.

Keyword Group: Hate

The “hate” keyword group quantified tweets containing any mention of trolling, cyberbullying, or hate towards Reylos. The fact that “hate” reveals itself as a top keyword provides further evidence that this event was viewed as implicit approval to bully a group of fans consisting predominantly of women. Anybody involved in sending Reylos hate were, by their own admission, the bullies and were cheering John on for “trolling” women and “putting [women] in their place.”

“Reading Reylo hate to cheer myself up”

“I don’t like Finn’s character either, but I love how John is putting Reylos in their place.”

“Seeing John Boyega troll the Reylos is the greatest way to end 2019”

The clear agenda to send hate towards a group of women and teenage girls was further validated by the fact that the incident was received positively by all sides of the political spectrum, from “progressive” antis to members of the alt-right. The members included the Fandom Menace and alt-right leader and Pizzagate supporter Jack Posobiec.

Both groups took advantage of the situation utilizing the same tactics they typically employ. The alt-right took to YouTube and Twitter to discredit women among their followers by using buzz-words such as “SJW” and “Twilight.” “Twilight” — which was mentioned 103 times in association with “Reylo” between 12/31/2019 and 1/3/2020 — is often used to describe any piece of media enjoyed predominantly by women.

The goal is to degrade women’s interests among their peers by pushing the narrative that Reylos are silly girls consistently preoccupied with the same trivial, valueless media.

Examples of tweets from the alt right include the following:

“John Boyega ripped the Reylo’s a new asshole. You haven’t seen this many acne riddled fatty Tumblr Girls lose their shit since Twilight ended.”

“My thesis: Reylos and most of these Neo Star Wars fans are just ex Twilight fans and self hating beta male cucks who attached themselves to the franchise like parasites. Next they will glom onto whatever film series is hot and continue their rot.”

“StarWars was so great before Disney. Now its plagued by psychotic Reylo fans, Tumblr freaks, representation-screeching SJWs, radical feminism activists, ex-Twilight fans, &wine-guzzling Disney-fan mothers caked Karen. &these are the people they’re now targeting for their fandom.”

On the other side of the spectrum, long-time anti accounts spearheaded the harassment of Reylo shippers, leveraging Boyega’s tweet to bombard Reylo shippers with hate messages. This included viral tweets from accounts with a history of anti behavior across multiple fandoms, along with multiple tweets from accounts with history of targeting Reylos.

For example, Twitter user @Iovestour tweeted, “oscar isaac going off about disney’s blatant homophobia & john boyega telling reylos to fuck themselves all within two weeks i love men men are my friends.” This tweet has more than 48k likes. You’ll be hard pressed, however, to find any tweets by the account past November 2019, even though the account has been active since March 2018.

All tweets made under the account’s former name “blinkapologist” have been deleted — a trait uncharacteristic of your normal Twitter user just looking to share their opinions and maybe curate the news. Past tweets (to which blinksapologists’ tweets and replies have been deleted) reveal a pattern of anti behavior including a history of going after individuals supporting fictional characters the anti finds problematic, utilizing extremist parallels to real-life events.

A reply to @Iovestour in June 2019 reveals the user had allegedly called victims of the Holocaust Nazi supporters. The accusation appears to have been said to supporters of Marvel character Wanda Maximoff.

Along with antis with history across multiple fandoms inciting hatred against Reylos, this event also revealed itself as a targeted harassment campaign due to the frequency in which some accounts tweeted at or about Reylos.

Boyega’s tweet caused some anti accounts within this sample to tweet over 50 times about Reylos in the span of 4 days including sadgeorgelucas1, who tweeted about Reylos ~100 times, drhorotiwtzfine, who tweeted about Reylos ~75 times, and saltandrockets, who tweeted about Reylos ~65 times.

This is not abnormal. Several of these top accounts were also consistently bullying Reylos. The accounts highlighted in red in the chart below are anti-Reylo accounts that were also included as mentioning Reylo frequently between December 31, 2019 to January 3, 2020. This includes once again drhorowitzfine, who has mentioned Reylo negatively ~1,150 times between 2017 to 2019. Other top anti accounts include winniethepoe1, who tweeted about Reylo ~320 times from 2018 to 2019 and ~25 times during Boyega’s New Year’s Eve incident.

Of course no harassment campaign can be waged without finding ways to make the people being bullied look like they were worth being bullied. One of the two main “arguments” thrown against Reylos included the predictable anti accusation of Rey and Kylo’s “abusive” relationship poisoning the mind’s of women and girls. Since Reylo shippers had made the decision to create transformative works and discuss a fictional romance found to be impure by the antis, Reylos could now be cyberbullied in real life for their morally reprehensible decisions.

Reylo is also referred to as “abusive” because some still try to stretch the narrative that Rey and Kylo’s relationship is incestual, and therefore Reylo’s are promoting incest.

The idea that the relationship is incestual goes back to a 2016 fan clash over who Rey’s parents were. Many fans wanted Rey to be a Skywalker or a Solo, which would make her related to Kylo Ren, the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. The event involved Reylos being frequently lobbed with accusations of incest, and they were at one point banned from discussing Rey and Kylo’s dynamic on a popular Star Wars forum, Jedi Council Forums.

Another common theme was that Reylos were “toxic.” This theme was mostly fed by alt-right circles and originated with a post by Fandom Menace supporter Dataracer117, who has a history of harassing Reylos.

Dataracer117 has a history of voicing his contempt for Disney and their “radical feminist propaganda.” This is most notably seen in his involvement in Comicgate’s attack on Captain Marvel. This included digging up screenshots by fans of Captain Marvel who spoke out against the sexism being aimed against the film, accusing all the accounts of being “Captain Marvel bots.”

Like the Captain Marvel incident, Dataracer117 posted a tweet with screencaps that Reylos were allegedly sending death threats to JJ around the time of Boyega’s tweet. Despite Dataracer117’s history attempting to devalue women in fandom communities and despite the screencaps being debunked by the Reylo community, the screencaps gained traction around Twitter, YouTube, and in media publications including Buzzfeed. They were further used to create the narrative that Reylos are “unhinged.”

This narrative inflamed alt-right accounts, and they began to frequently frame Reylos as mental cases. Discrediting women is nothing new (in fact you can easily read about it in this essay on Western puritanical conditioning against women in the 17th century), and is to be expected from a community who dedicates their time to driving women away from their online spaces.

The second accusation that was used to fuel harassment against Reylos was the claim that Reylos were racist against Boyega. They claimed that Reylos’ harassment of the actor led women to be upset with Boyega over his Instagram comment. This led to harassment on his Twitter — which remember, was started by a sock puppet account not associated with the Reylo community.

While racism is a prevalent concern that needs to be addressed within all fandom communities-and questions over inherent privilege due to one’s community are something to be examined-no support was given to back up these particular claims about the Reylo community during this incident.

This is not to say, however, that isolated incidents have not occurred outside of this specific accusation within the Reylo fandom, as they would within any large and global group of people. However, these incidents are statistically insignificant to the population of people who discuss Reylo positively on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (which, according to the sample number of accounts who have discussed Reylo between 2015 to 2019, can be quantified at over 40k individuals. The true number is dependent on how many accounts — currently almost 70k — discuss Reylo negatively within the sample).

This particular accusation of racism has several layers to it and I would like to break them down separately.

“But Reylos Read Explicit Fanfiction”

The first part of this is that the nature of Boyega’s Instagram comments allowed antis and alt-right circles to attack Reylos on NSFW fanfiction and fanart written and drawn for and by women. It also allowed antis to draw more criticism around the ways in which Reylos analyzed The Last Jedi, a film with many allusions to the writings of psychoanalytics including Sigmund Freud.

After the release of The Last Jedi, the Reylo community, who had written long form meta analysis on the Star Wars saga since 2015, wrote lengthy metas about the symbolism in the film. Much of this symbolism was reflective of Rey’s sexual awakening throughout her journey in the movie.

Antis took issue with this and saw this as “sexualizing” Rey’s character. They asserted that women exploring sexuality through the lens of a fem-gaze narrative written for women was appalling, degrading, and out of line.

For anti and alt-right circles, the Reylo community’s openness to discussing sex in Star Wars through meta, fanfiction, and fanart by women (and generally for women) meant that Reylos could not take offense to Boyega’s questionable comment that suggested to some of his fans that Rey was a sexual prize to be won. The narrative antis spun was wholly unable — and unwilling — to separate women discussing sex in their own communities as different from men offering their sexual “jokes.”

This justification for bullying Reylos felt eerily similar to “she was wearing that, she asked for it.” It’s a highly socialized sexist line of reasoning women deal with daily and one that was readily accepted in this incident.

2. “But Reylos Ship Rey With The White Character”

Since 2015, Reylos have been accused of racism on the grounds that Reylos did not prefer Rey to be in a romantic relationship with the black male protagonist. This claim is presented without any evidence to back up the accusation.

Furthermore, the people who ship Rey and Finn (known as “Finnrey”) have done little to celebrate this pairing and act as a fan community. In fact, they have consistently acted more like a group that seeks to find ways to activate hate against Reylos instead of create content for their ship.

The two data visualizations below show every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Reylo” between 2015 to 2019 vs every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Finnrey” between 2015 to 2019. The gray in these charts represent the number of accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. The purple represents the overlap — that is the accounts who have tweeted at least once about the other ship.

The first observation is that the number of users discussing “Finnrey” is small in comparison to the number of accounts discussing “Reylo.” Finnrey was mentioned by 7,780 accounts while Reylo was mentioned by 69,484 accounts.

As mentioned, gray = accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. Purple = accounts who have tweeted about at least one other ship. So, in this case, out of the ~7.8k accounts that tweeted about Finnrey, ~60% of accounts mentioned “Reylo” at least once (4,665 accounts total). This number represents only ~7% of accounts who have ever talked about Reylo.

This data is supported by other statistics comparing the two ships. For example, on fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, the fic tag for Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren has ~16k fics. There are another 12k fics in the tag for Rey/Kylo Ren. The fic tag for Finn/Rey has under 2k fics.

3. “Reylos Have Bullied John Since 2015”

The most damaging false claim to come out New Year’s Eve was that Reylos had been attacking Boyega (and other Star Wars actors) with racist tweets since 2015.

It is very true that the actor has received heinous racist attacks. Most notably, the actor was attacked on social media following a #BoycottEpisodeVII hashtag that was started by two 4chan trolls in an attempt to get racist Star Wars fans to take the bait. It is well known that this hashtag was the work of racist alt-right accounts.

Since the hashtag, other attacks have been levied on Boyega. One of these attacks included a surge of outcries against him by The Fandom Menace, after a tweet posted in June 2018 stated: “If you don’t like Star Wars or the characters understand that there are decisions makers and harassing the actors/actresses will do nothing. You’re not entitled to politeness when your approach is rude. Even if you paid for a ticket!”

The Fandom Menace took the opportunity to bring their anger over Boyega’s comments to Twitter and YouTube, much like Comicsgate did when Brie Larson spoke in favor of diversity.

Reylos, however, are now being blamed for these attacks without any supporting evidence. They are also being blamed for the harassment of Kelly Marie Tran. The actress was bullied off of social media by alt-right trolls on her Instagram page, along with antis who saw her character kissing Finn as “sexual assault.”

You will not find any evidence linking the Reylos back to the targeted harassment of any Star Wars actors over the years. Predictably, however, you will find that the people who used this accusation to their advantage admitted that their own motive was bullying.

For example, Twitter user @notlipglosse tweeted “the way this man waited until he got his last star wars check so he could freely make fun of the racist stans who have bene harassing him since 2015 %@&@*!?!?!?” This tweet (at the time of the screencap) gained ~92.2k likes. A tweet posted on December 19th, however, reads “the way we’ve been bullying Reylo stans and calling them delusional and they won…,” further supports the data that this incident was about inciting hatred towards a group of fans predominately made up of women.

Another example is from user @irisckp. Shortly after Boyega’s tweet, the user tweeted “NOT THIS REYLO AND HER MUTUALS ACTING LIKE JOHN BOYEGA HAS BROUGHT SOME TYPE OF OPPRESSION WHEN HE WAS RACIALLY ABUSED BY REYLO’S FOR YEARS. HE HAD EVERY RIGHT.” Again this tweet was presented without evidence that Reylos had “racially abused” Boyega.

The tweet is referring to a livestream from a young woman in the Reylo community who candidly expressed discomfort over the false accusations and bullying. The livestream was taken by antis and used to further bully the young woman.

This bullying eventually descended into suicide baiting that resulted in the woman’s account being deleted. However, this did not stop antis from pushing the woman to kill herself. It also did not stop them from telling the teenager’s father, who had gotten involved in combating the harassment, to “live tweet your reaction when you find your daughters lifeless body dangling from her rooms ceiling fan.”

After @iriscpk’s initial tweet, the user admitted that they had “never seen Star Wars” (like a portion of antis bullying Reylos that night) and that “Reylo” is used as an umbrella term for their unsupported accusations of racism against Boyega.

The tweets again reveal that viral tweets making accusations against Reylos had no merit, and were not based in any evidence they had seen with their own eyes. These users were looking to be involved in the latest conversation despite the lack of evidence or knowledge and despite the real harm being done to the community the tweet targeted.

This supports the hive mind behavior behind this cyberbullying attack. There was no concern for any person hurt. There was no concern for the misinformation that was being spread. And there was no concern for the very real issue of racism in online spaces.

This was only ever about a group of women getting hurt and, hopefully, getting off the internet altogether.

Why This Matters and What This Means for Art and Society in The Digital Age

If you have gotten this far and you find this article absurd, you should. This much vitriolic hatred, ugliness, and anger over women analyzing and creating media for a romantic pairing in a Hollywood blockbuster is, to put it mildly, overblown. Unfortunately, it’s the reality. And it’s a reality that has even deeper repercussions if not addressed.

I wrote this article not only in a hope to correct the misinformation against a group of women in the Star Wars fandom, but also to address a larger issue of what it means when these hate campaigns are so readily accepted by the general public, by journalists, and by other fans.

The internet will continue to evolve as it already has. It will evolve into an ecosystem that will touch every single moment of our lives. It is a future that will be as brilliant as it will be terrifying and when we are so willing to demonize a group of women with no evidence but a tweet with a lot of likes, it shows that we are not prepared.

We are living in an age where art is being dictated to what a few executives read online, or what a data analyst may write up in a report. We have seen how Disney has made a movie based off of fan service easily found in Reddit threads. We have seen Paramount shift the schedule of an entire film to redesign a character after apparent outrage. We have seen Disney remove James Gunn from a major movie project following a targeted alt-right campaign to get him removed. And we have seen this with Warner Brothers choosing to green light their films using AI.

This pattern is concerning in part because we are willing to create art via algorithm. But, it’s also concerning because, unless these algorithms are properly coded and taught overtime to understand hive mind mentality, the machines that churn social listening data will be regurgitating intelligence corrupted by organized and hateful groups. These groups aim to restrict freedom of speech, diversity, and meaning in our art for the sake of political agendas laking any evidence, any substance, or any valuable goal.

I also wrote this article because it is not only our art that is at risk, but the ways in which we communicate as human beings online. The ability to see individuals — namely women — as inhuman or as less than with no second thought is something we should all understand is a problem. We have a deep inability to question what we see on our Facebook feeds, our Twitter timelines, or in our Instagram photos . We also live in an age where entire governments are being overturned by algorithms and social media ads. We are quick to blame Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and YouTube for this, and yes, while, those platforms have a responsibility of their own, we need to realize that it is our responsibility as well to always question what we see and search for evidence if it is not provided to us.

This example of bullying women in an online community is not necessarily synonymous with political elections, but it still presents yet another moment where people are failing to believe hard evidence over buzz words, sensationalized headlines, and clear, often spelled out agendas.

Until we learn not to react to everything we see, and listen to the people around us who come with facts, this type of behavior will continue, this type of behavior will get worse, and this type of behavior will impact us politically, socially, and culturally as we become more and more integrated as a digital society.

On January 10th, John Boyega posted a video to his Instagram account showing himself mocking tweets by women in the Reylo community. He did not blur out the names. These women were specifically targeted. The event created ~50k tweets continuing to bully women. Media outlets including Forbes, IGN, Cinemablend, Esquire, and The Wrap picked up the story. They all applauded the video.

In response, Reylos trended #reylolove — stories about how women in the community had positively impacted their lives.

They also created a charity event for anti-cyberbullying charity Cybersmile, which you can donate to here.

[terfslying]

Extremist Traits & TERFs

 The traits are taken from (here), which is a list of extremist traits by Laird Wilcox. Most examples are from interactions with people on this blog, because I’ve got to limit myself to something.

Character Assassination

“Extremists often attack the character of an opponent rather than deal with the facts or issues raised. They will question motives, qualifications, past associations, alleged values, personality, looks, mental health, and so on as a diversion from the issues under consideration”

TERF Examples: Character attacks on Susie Green, of Mermaids UK, to attempt to imply that her motive for Mermaids UK is to force her own child to transition. & Claiming Mermaids UK was a significant part of forcing a young UK child to be trans, when in fact he was being abused by his mother and Mermaids UK only ever were contacted by phone by the mother, and were not otherwise involved in any way.

Name-Calling and Labelling

“Extremists are quick to resort to epithets (racist, subversive, pervert, hate monger, nut, crackpot, […] and so on) to label and condemn opponents in order to divert attention from their arguments and to discourage others from hearing them out. These epithets don’t have to be proved to be effective; the mere fact they have been said is often enough”

TERF Examples: "pedophile apologist”, “infertile, fat white loser”, “rapist” (all directed at me!)

Irresponsible Sweeping Generalisations

“Extremists tend to make sweeping claims or judgements on little or no evidence, and they have a tendency to confuse similarity with sameness […] they assume that because two (or more) things, events, or persons are alike in some respects, they must be alike in most respects.”

TERF Examples: “trans women are just men”; use of crimes by cis men to attempt to demonstrate trans criminality

Inadequate Proof For Assertions

“Extremists tend to be very fuzzy about what constitutes proofs, and they also tend to get caught up in logical fallacies […] they tend to project wished-for conclusions and to exaggerate the significance of information that confirms their beliefs while derogating or ignoring information that contradicts them.”

TERF Examples: “This research is reliable because I agree with it, and I don’t care that the authors have deliberately published politically motivated anti-gay propaganda studies before”

Advocacy of Double Standards

“Extremists generally tend to judge themselves or their interest groups in terms of their intentions, which they tend to view very generously, and others by their acts, which they tend to view very critically. They would like you accept their assertions on faith, but they demand proof of yours. They tend to engage in special pleading on behalf of themselves or their interests, usually because of some alleged special status, past circumstances, or present disadvantage.”

TERF Example: Refusal to criticise WoLF + Julia Beck’s association with the Heritage Foundation due to presumed good intentions

Tendency to View Their Opponents and Critics As Essentially Evil

“To the extremist, opponents hold opposing positions because they are bad people […] not merely because they simply disagree, see the matter differently, have competing interests, or are perhaps even mistaken.”

TERF Example: I deserve to “rot in hell” because I don’t agree with TERFs

Manichaean Worldview

“Extremists have a tendency to see the world in terms of absolutes of good and evil, for them or against them, with no middle ground or intermediate positions. All issues are ultimately moral issues of right and wrong, with the ‘right’ position coinciding with their interests.”

TERF Example: Willingness to use and spread sources from the alt-right with no regard for the source, since if it coincides with their interest, it’s ‘right’

Advocacy Of Censorship or Repression of Their Opponents or Critics

“They may include a very active campaign to keep opponents from media access [… or] actually lobby for legislation against speaking, writing, teaching, or instructive ‘subversive’ or forbidden information or opinions.”

TERF Example: Pressure to isolate young trans teens from media access

Tend to Identify Themselves In Terms Of Who Their Enemies Are

“[E]xtremists may become emotionally bound to their opponents, who are often competing extremists themselves. Because they tend to view their enemies as evil and powerful, they tend, perhaps subconsciously, to emulate them, adopting to same tactics to a certain degree.”

TERF Example: "TRA’s”, “libfems”, “transcult”; emulating anti-feminist tactics by joining groups like Hands Across The Aisle to directly partner with anti-abortion, anti-feminist conservatives and divide-and-conquer

Tendency towards argument by intimidation

“Extremists tend to frame their arguments in such a way as to intimidate others into accepting their premises and conclusions. […] They use a lot of moralising, pontificating, and tend to be very judgemental. This shrill, harsh rhetorical style allows them to keep their opponents and critics on the defensive, cuts off troublesome lines of argument, and allows them to define the perimeters of debate.”

TERF Example: Using the words “trans women” and “literal pedophiles and rapists” interchangeably in arguments

Use of Slogans, Buzzwords, and Thought-Stopping Cliches

“For many extremists, shortcuts in thinking and in reasoning matters out seem to be necessary in order to avoid or evade awareness of troublesome facts and compelling counter-arguments. Extremists generally behave in ways that reinforce their prejudices and alter their own consciousness in a manner that bolsters their false confidence and sense of self-righteousness.”

TERF Examples: “Peak trans”, “autogynephiles”, the bathroom & prison rapist tropes, to discredit trans women; “handmaids” and “libfems” to discredit cis women who disagree with them

Assumption of Moral or Other Superiority over Others

“Most obvious would be claims of general racial or ethnic superiority […] Less obvious are claims of ennoblement because of alleged victimhood,”

TERF Examples: Expanding real victimisation of women to include historically inaccurate concepts, such as ‘witch hunts were methods of controlling women’s knowledge’ to increase superiority; complete disownment of any moral responsibility for violence perpetrated or encouraged by TERFs

Doomsday Thinking

“Extremists often predict dire or catastrophic consequences from a situation or from failure to follow a specific course, and they tend to exhibit a kind of ‘crisis-mindedness’. It can be a Communist takeover, a Nazi revival, nuclear war, earthquakes (… etc. …) Whatever it is, it’s just around the corner unless we follow their program and listen to the special insight and wisdom, to which only the truly enlightened have access.”

TERF Example: Fair Play For Women’s unrealistic theory that if Gender Recognition Certificates were easier to get, women’s prisons would be flooded with trans sex offenders instantly.

Belief that it’s okay to do bad things in service of a good cause

“Extremists may deliberately lie, distort, misquote, slander, defame, or libel their opponents or critics, engage in censorship or repression, or undertake violence in “special cases”.”

TERF Example: Wetmeadow ‘distorting’ my post on the cotton ceiling to imply that I was saying same-sex attraction is a mental illness, to discredit me.

Emphasis on Emotional Response (and less on logical analysis and reasoning)

“Extremist have an unspoken reverence for propaganda, which they may call ‘education’ or ‘consciousness-raising’. Symbolism plays an exaggerated role in their thinking and they tend to think imprecisely and metamorphically.”

TERF Example: ‘consciousness-raising’ has a long history in extreme radfem spaces; in recent online spaces it’s more often called ‘peak trans’.

Hypersensitivity and Vigilance

“Extremists perceive hostile innuendo in even casual comments; imagine rejection and antagonism concealed in honest disagreement and dissent; […] Although few extremists are clinically paranoid, many of them adopt a paranoid style with its attendant hostility and distrust.”

TERF Example: Exposinglesphob’s entire blog

Problems Tolerating Ambiguity and Uncertainty

“[T]he ideologies and belief systems to which extremists tend to attach themselves often represent grasping for certainty in an uncertain world, or an attempt to achieve absolute security in an environment that is naturally unpredictable […] Extremists exhibit a kind of risk-aversiveness that compels them to engage in controlling and manipulative behaviour, both on a personal level and in a political context.”

TERF Example: “What do you mean, someone’s gender or sex might be ambiguous?? Woman is a biological term for adult human females, it’s simple”

Inclination towards “GroupThink”

“‘Groupthink’ involves a tendency to conform to group norms and to preserve solidarity and concurrence at the expense of distorting members’ observations of facts, conflicting evidence, and disquieting observations [… Extremists may] only talk with one another, read material that reflects their own views, and can be almost phobic about the ‘propaganda’ of the ‘other side’. The result is a deterioration in reality-testing, rationality, and moral judgement.”

TERF Example: Any source I give is bad, even if they’re genuinely trying to say that wikipedia is ‘good research’.

Tendency to Personalise Hostility

“Extremists often wish for the personal bad fortune of their ‘enemies’ and celebrate when it occurs.”

TERF Example: The fact that pretty much every person who isn’t a TERF and who discourses has been told to kill themselves.

Extremists often feel that the system is no good unless they win

“If public opinion turns against them, it was because of ‘brainwashing’. If their followers become disillusioned, it’s because of ‘sabotage’.”

TERF Example: Ex-terfs like myself either are just too dumb to understand radical feminism, or we never even existed in the first place.

[arcticdementor]

In yet another sign of our tortured political moment, the most meaningful civic discussion currently raging is being waged not by our elected officials, spiritual leaders, novelists or celebrities, but by two writers engaged in what may appear to be an intramural intellectual quibble in niche publications.

It began last week when Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, took to the journal First Things to point out what he believed was wrong much of American conservatism, a bundle of self-contradictory tics embodied, he argued, by National Review writer and dedicated Never Trumper David French. It didn’t take long for French to jab right back. A host of other pugilists, including New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, soon entered the arena, framing the argument in personal, sometimes quasi-slanderous terms.

…

Even worse, today’s social justice warriors, Ahmari continued, see any dissent from their dogmas as an inherent assault. “They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human,” Ahmari wrote, “lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” This means that no real discussion is possible—the only thing a true conservative can do is, in Ahmari’s pithy phrase, “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

…

Almost immediately, French delivered his riposte. Ahmari’s call to arms, he wrote in his response, betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both our national moment and our national character. “America,” French wrote, “will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.”

Which means that civility is not a secondary value but the main event, the measure of most, if not all, things. Bret Stephens agreed: In his column in The New York Times, he called Ahmari—who was born Muslim in Tehran and had found his path to Catholicism—“an ardent convert” and a “would-be theocrat” who, inflamed with dreams of the divine will, had failed to understand that it was precisely the becalmed civilities of “value-neutral liberalism” that has made his brave journey from Tehran to the New York Post possible.

…

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

…

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

…

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

…

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

…

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

…

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American.

Which is why American Jews, too—whether they identify as liberals or conservatives—would do well to take this squabble seriously. The liberalism that American Jews have defended so ardently, the reason so many of us ended up voting for the left and supporting organizations like the ACLU and cheering on firebrands like Bella Abzug, was geared to secure precisely the values and rights that Ahmari champions, without which it would have been impossible for us to survive, let alone thrive, as immigrants to a white, Christian-majority culture.

A religious minority cannot expect to last very long in a society, like the one the progressive left advocates, that is allergic to tradition and intolerant of dissent. Only in an America that takes faith seriously, that respects and empowers community, and that shudders at any attempt to censor wrong beliefs and incorrect thinking, can Jews hope to thrive.

[punkyblooze]

About Me:

Aye! My name is PunkyBlooze, I'm a transenby artist (he/they) new to Tumblr. This is a big ol TL;DR post just summarizing who I am and what I'm doing as an artist/author.

I'm a published author/illustrator that's working on their first novel, an anarcho-anti-superhero novel called Geist that follows protagonist Abel (the character in the middle) as he attempts to navigate the dystopian capitalist hellscape that is the City of Alastor hundreds of years in the unknown future. I plan to self-publish and sell it for cheap while I turn it into a free webcomic on tapas & social media. I'm also on Twitter, DeviantArt, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, everything. Most active on Twitter & DA. Getting an account on Mastodon too.

I have many stories in the works aside from Geist, ranging from children's stories to more adult stuff, but since I do venture into adult/NSFW territory, I keep all my accounts 18+. So if you're a minor, please stay away and do not interact. I will block you if I find out you're trying to follow me.

About Geist & Batman 2020:

Geist is basically anarcho-socialist propaganda packaged as a "superhero" story, in the vein of stories like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, & The Boys. It's been a vehicle for me to explore both my own political development and social consciousness, as well as my personal traumas and problems.

The story began as my own unique take on Batman, titled Batman 2020: Smile Like You Mean It, a story I began seriously developing back in the year 2020 when the Pandemic was going strong, and I was suffering through some intense family-related trauma.

Abel was originally Bruce Wayne/Batman & Jay (his blue haired counterpart) was Joker. The story and characters were extremely different from their source material. I changed up a lot of the races, genders, religions, physical appearances, backgrounds, and sexualities of the cast because I'm just tired of stories dominated by cishet white men & the toxic, bigoted culture that always follows them.

So, Batman became Black and pansexual, Joker became openly gay and genderqueer, and I decided to explore their obviously homoerotic relationship more directly.

Summary of Batman 2020:

"A year after the murder of his parents, young Bruce Wayne returns to “Crime Alley”, seeking vengeance. But what he finds instead is Jay, a strange boy with whom he forms a close bond as they team up to search the most dangerous parts of Gotham for the murderer.

Now a grown man, Bruce Wayne struggles with the haunting memories of what he experienced all those years ago. Meanwhile, an unknown killer frames his alter-ego, Batman, for the murders of the criminal associates of Carmine Falcone. With his relationship with the GCPD in shambles due to unchecked police brutality and the threat of Falcone plotting with Oswald Cobblepot to put an end to the Dark Knight once and for all, Batman is on his own to catch the real killer. And when Jay suddenly reappears, Bruce courts a dangerous relationship with his childhood friend as facts begin to bleed into fiction."

If you're interested, Batman 2020 can still be viewed on AO3 here: Batman 2020: Smile Like You Mean It - Chapter 1 - PunkyBlooze - Batman - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]

A lot of Batman 2020 was my attempt to reconcile my love of Batman, this wonderfully angsty fictional hero I'd grown up with, with the fascist reality of a billionaire decking himself out like a militant SuperCop Vigilante & violating everyone's rights to brutalize the shit out of poor people w/o ever thinking too hard about WHY crime never gets any better in Gotham.

Batman 2020 attempted to have Bruce Wayne himself come to these conclusions, including engaging in therapy and deeply questioning his own motives--whether or not he's actually helping anyone. I wanted him to realize it was his own kind, the uberwealthy that never go to jail and who's crimes against humanity are often legal or very easy to commit & escape jailtime from, that are destroying the city and his attempt to engage with real revolution.

I wanted to paint "superheroes" more like revolutionary anarchists and journalists, rather than fascist super cops. I also wanted to examine the dark side of that as well, with Jay/Joker representing the opposite end of the spectrum--the incendiary anarchist that just wants to burn everything down rather than build a new future.

However, I grew tired of being held back by the source material and the fact that the story had a snowballs chance in hell of ever getting picked up by DC or being monetized, so I put a hell of a lot more work into it and grew it into something entirely unique.

The dichotomy of Batman - The Fascist Supercop vs. The Bourgeoning Anarchistic Rebel - ended up splitting the character into two separate characters: Abel (Codename: Geist), my main protagonist, and Hunter (Codename: Lux), my main antagonist.

Abel is a man in his late 20's who spends the vast majority of his time actually helping his suffering community. He's not a millionaire, but he's a very well-off trust fund kid (with a TragicBackstoryTM) who invests every penny into his neighborhood. He's a volunteer firefighter and emergency responder, he volunteers on and funds an urban farm and community assistance programs, he engages with the homeless, disabled, & mentally ill, he teaches free self-defense classes, makes the effort to keep his neighborhood clean, etc. etc. etc.

The City of Alastor exists in a dystopian future hundreds of years after a huge meteor almost wipes out the United States as we know it. The City rises in the wake of that tragedy, but it's strangled by fascism, unregulated, bigoted privatization, monopolization by corporations, neutered Federal power and protection, and a terrible social caste system.

It was built in the belly of the crater where the meteor fell and grew in many floors on top of one another, with access to the best schools, jobs, transportation, healthcare, maintenance, etc. restricted to certain floors and neighborhoods that cannot be accessed without special working or housing VISAs.

By deliberate design, the bottom floors rot with poverty, disease, and violence, which they're unfairly blamed for and all but abandoned in. Most of the businesses and services are owned by a predatory corporation known as Valkyrie, which runs them like Company Towns. It owns everything from grocery stores to hospitals to schools and pays its employees in "Company Credits", little better than monopoly money, so they can never escape.

Abel's superpowers include turning invisible, which is an ability tied very tightly to his depression, and the psychic ability to engage with the dead, mostly through viewing their last memories and experiencing their deaths, which is traumatic and haunting for him. There are many people like him in Alastor who have mutated to develop powers, but they all hide it very well because everyone knows that mutants get Black Bagged and are never seen again.

His parents were the original two "superheroes" in Alastor, before the city got really bad. His mother, Mercy, engaged with "superhero" work more like Spiderman than Batman? Really light-hearted, mostly just trying to help her neighbors and behaving like a detective, but the horrible realities of the city push her into darker and darker territory along with her best friend and partner in crime, Valencia.

Eventually, the rich and powerful American Oligarchs that built and run Alastor catch on to what she and her partner are doing, and decide they want to cash in on vigilantism because the public approves of them. A powerful CEO runs for mayor on a platform of creating and legalizing a privatized police unit of "superheroes" with disturbingly little oversite and anonymous identities to be deployed in what they call "extreme situations". This mirrors the idea in Batman that Gotham "hands power over to the Batman" only in cases of dire need and how that would obviously go horrifically wrong in practice.

Naturally, Mercy and Val are mortified by the Oligarchs usurping their ideologies to promote the sort of fascism that they actively fight against. That story could be a whole book in and of itself, but the short version is they team up with an unlikely ally (the son of the CEO in question, Abel's father) and manage to foil his plans, causing him to lose the election to a man who is very actively against "superheroes". He's not perfect, but they had no other choice. They hang up their "superhero" identities and decide to engage in revolutionary work in other, legitimate ways.

However, the power structures of Alastor are a well-oiled machine, protected by Oligarchs with all the wealth and power to be utter immune to the law, and old enemies find out the heroes' identities. For their efforts to make the world a better and fairer place, Abel's parents are murdered after their 12-year-old son, Abel, is kidnapped and used to lure them into a trap.

This is a horrific memory for Abel, who struggles with CPTSD and a myriad of control and depression issues because of it. Although he inherits great wealth through the trust fund he was left, he's deeply fearful of the world and what he knows could happen if he rocks the boat too hard. He tries desperately to find hope, but often it eludes him, which is why he spends so much time trying to help the people around him (but not too loudly).

He's finally forced to reconcile this struggle when an old enemy rises anew. Once again, the idea of a privatized police force comes up in politics, but this time it is approved and unleashed on the lower levels of Alastor to combat rising rates of violence and crime. This force is spearheaded by a demented and morally corrupt man codenamed "Lux" who stalks the city at night and becomes a true terror to behold.

Unable to ignore the sheer brutality being inflicted upon his community, Abel takes up "superhero" work like his mother before him. But instead of chasing down petty thieves and playing fireman, he teams up with a group of like-minded individuals who strive to reveal the crimes and identities of the Oligarchs and their pawns to the world in the desperate hope that the truth will help spurn the people to Revolution.

[luciasanzturiel-blog]

Photography in Basque´s Terrorism

"Few in the world imagine that in a corner of Europe fear and shame oppress citizens, as it is happening in the Basque Country."

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna , which in Spanish translates as "País Vasco libertad", was a Basque nationalist terrorist organization. Their priority objectives were the independence of this region of northern Spain and the construction of a socialist state, and to reach them they used terrorism: murder, kidnapping, and economic extortion, causing 829 deaths and more than 3000 injured with their attacks terrorists, from Franco's dictatorship until 2018 when they announced their dissolution.

It was found in 1958, during Franco's dictatorship after the expulsion of some young members of the Basque Nationalist Party after the confrontation due to disagreements with the political line of that party .They considered the political struggle inefficient to achieve their ends so they decided to create Ekin, a movement that supported direct fighting. They committed their first violent action in July 1961.

Initially, it had the support of part of the population, when being considered one more of the organizations opposed to the ultra right-wing regime. That is why the left -wing Basque society and part of the conservative justified the acts of ETA as part of the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. But its radicalism caused that little by little it lost support, although the fear they caused scared  great part of the population that did not dare to show its rejection for fear of the indiscriminate actions of the band. The Basque society lived during all those years deeply divided and plunged into silence for fear of reprisals and only the support and defense of ETA could be publicly expressed. Their acts were condemned and qualified as terrorists by the vast majority of political and social forces nationally and internationally.

The objectives of the Band, were soldiers because they had the power in the dictatorship and also the politicians, businessmen or those who did not pay the revolutionary tax with which they were financed.The Civil Guard, one of the security bodies of the Spanish State, was the main responsible for carrying out the anti-terrorist fight against ETA and for this reason was the main objective. Society identified it as one of the most important institutions of the State and its advances in the fight against ETA made it its worst enemy.

The attack against the Vich barracks in Barcelona took place on May 29, 1991. And although it was not the first attempt by the gang against the civilian population, it was extraordinarily documented by the photographer Pere Tordera. It consisted of the explosion of a car bomb with about 250 kg of ammunition parked next to the barracks of the Civil Guard of Vich, where 14 civil guards lived with their families. It caused 10 deaths, including five children, and 44 injured, most of them civilians.The explosion caused the demolition of the four floors of the building and an immense hole, which caused many victims to be trapped in the rubble. As the authors confessed in their day, it was sought to kill the greatest number of civil guards and to demonstrate with hardness that they were not weakened after the arrests of important members of the band and that the security of the Olympic games ,that would be celebrated in Barcelona the year next, was in danger.

On one hand, and with regard to photography, it should be mentioned that it has contributed in a fundamental way to the awareness of society against the armed band. Some of the most powerful and dramatic images have changed the vision of the citizen. The emotional charge that the photographs have made them go down in history as icons in the fight against terrorism.

The image of the bloodied guard carrying a wounded child in his arms has been used in numerous exhibitions of tribute to the victims. At the bottom of the image there is a rubble scattered on the street and several adults try to get the children out of the area of ​​the attack. The image is not especially violent but it is shocking, because the main victim is a girl and represents the indiscriminate murder of defenseless people, it is worn by a bloodstained civil guard, which contrasts with the speech of the band that defines them as repressors and torturers. At the bottom of the image is a couple with their daughter in a pram leaving the affected area and the whole street full of dust and explosion materials. The fact that the man is dressed in the uniform of the Civil Guard makes the image representative even for someone who does not know the story.

This other image portrays the funeral of the attack. Military carrying the coffins of the deceased and putting them in the hearse. The coffins appear in the foreground, their number impacts and conveys the idea of ​​death and social loss. They go on the shoulders of civil guards, the main target of the attack.The photo represents those affected by the massacre in a less violent way, calling the pain and remembering silently.

The image of the Civil Guard Barracks destroyed by a car bomb loaded with 250 kilos of ammunition again showed the barbarism of the terrorist group. The photo shows how the firefighters are trying to get the trapped people out of the rubble and the damage and the chaos / horror lived because the photograph gives the feeling that the rescue teams are immobile because of the magnitude of the disaster.

Again, the communicative function is the dominant one and transmits a feeling of statism and emptiness . There are no bodies, no blood, only dust and destruction of the building and that means that, without having to show images of wounds or mutilations, we can deduce the importance of the tragedy. The fact that so many firefighters appear helping to take victims transmits a message of solidarity to the population and highlights the importance of the institution.

Photography is not the true representation of reality. The photographer, through his knowledge of framing, lighting or focus, gives more or less importance to certain elements according to the message he wants to transmit.For example, in the first two photos the main objective is to focus on the victims and in the background, the collateral effects, the destruction. Pere Tordera has done so to give importance to the suffering and personal destruction, the damage and the created desolation, because that removes to a greater extent the consciousness of the spectator.

According to Susan Sontag's theory, the publication of photographs in the media has a great emotional impact. ETA used the repercussion of the means so that everybody knew of its reach and this caused fear towards the band. The problem is how to represent terrorism, without propaganda and maintaining respect for the victims, maintaining the right to information on the part of the citizen and the victims' right to privacy.The images transmit better than any text, the problem is that at the same time the intimacy of the protagonist is violated, and from there the debate arises: publishing a very interesting photograph informatively or prioritizing respect for privacy. The images were published by many media, some pixelated the faces of the victims and others showed their identity.

The first impact is a deep feeling of compassion, empathy for the suffering of others, the need to analyze the deep meaning of pain and how to react to it.Traditionally it has always been thought that tragic photography causes rejection and impotence. Sometimes the reaction is direct but other times images are not the necessary condition for society to have a reaction, sometimes it is necessary to read it and make our own conclusions. It requires an added narration, a text or a call through words to the individual to stir their conscience. 

In fact, many times saturation of images can even cause insensitivity, since photography causes a first impression that does not last over time. For Sontag, it is necessary to awaken the sensibility of the people, to make them see that responds to a reality, it is not an idealized pain, it exists. On the other hand, as affirmed by Sontag's theory, we place photography in our minds so as not to forget about experiences or events , but if we take it to an extreme, the excessive burden of tragic images in our head can lead to stagnation and inability to break away with the past and bring back together Spanish society and specially, Basque society.

In conclusion, these photographs help us understand and identify the conflict, especially to later generations, who, like mine, did not experience it.  Memory makes us bear in mind the consequences of these terrible and unjustified actions, so that we do not repeat them throughout history. That is why it is necessary for political parties to place victims at the center of the debate since in the past the support was insufficient and society turned its back on them. 

-Lucía Sanz Turiel

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica.02 May 2018. ETA.[online]. Available from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ETA. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

Letona, A. 9 May 2018. Terrorism Is Over.Now Spain Needs Lasting Peace.The New York Times.[online].Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/opinion/eta-spain-peace.html. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

El País.3 May 2018.La historia de ETA en imágenes.[online].Available from: https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/05/02/album/1525267950_499861.html#foto_gal_2. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

Susan Sontag Foundation. On Photography. [online].Available from: http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

Cultural Reader. 5 May 2011. Susan Sontag-On Photography-Summary.[online].Available from:http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/05/susan-sontag-on-photography-summary.html. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

Libertad Digital.5 December 2003. Susan Sontag suscribe “palabra por palabra” el manifiesto de los intelectuales contra ETA.[online].Available from:https://www.libertaddigital.com/nacional/susan-sontag-suscribe-palabra-por-palabra-el-manifiesto-de-los-intelectuales-contra-eta-1275759630/. [Accessed 4 December 2018].

[rhetorician-meeks-blog]

*Kanye’s Narrative*

Photo source: https://variety.com/2016/music/news/kanye-west-grammys-rant-twitter-1201713892/

Palczewski claims that “Narratives have great power to create understanding and knowledge,” but only when that power is articulated correctly. I will be examining the questions: What narratives does this artifact tell? What truths does it promote, limit, or ignore? Overall, is this narrative positive or negative for society?

In order to properly interrogate these questions, I will be using one of Kanye West’s public speeches/rants on Twitter. Feeling major negative feedback from recent public events, Kanye West’s narrative to his Twitter followers includes telling his audience to be whomever they want, he paints a picture of media being robotic propaganda, but is overall a positive narrative to introduce to society.

Prior to Kanye West posting this video of himself on Twitter, West had been dealing with mental illness in previous months to this narrative. However, he felt that his diagnosis was wrong. Shortly after, Kanye was featured on SNL and received negative feedback because of his support for Trump. This speech that West gives seems like an attempt to get his power back from media.In the video, West uses rhetoric to try to get his audience to not only understand how feels, but to emphasize that he is allowed to feel that way. West approaches this several different ways.

While narratives are not referential, they are based off of one’s telling of events. Kanye attempts to tell multiple narratives that are regarded are rhetoric because of the bias or perspectives he tells of the event. One of the first truths that Kanye’s narrative attempts to declare is the truth that the media is controlling our minds. In fact, Kanye not states that the media controls his mind and made him out to be someone he was not. He begins his narrative with examples of wrongness in the news media,stating that the media was wrong about the 2016 election. He then moves to apply those events to his specific instance. For example, one of the lines of his speech says that media posts “to make me look like I’m crazy to you. I am not crazy” (as cited in Meara, 2018). In this specific instance, West uses narrative to show his followers that he is not “crazy” no matter what any doctor, person, or media says. He uses examples of media being wrong to further prove they are wrong about him. West’s logic is that the media may say false things about you, but we have to look past that and just love. This brings us into another truth told through West’s narrative: we should love ourselves for who we are. This could also be seen as the end point to Kanye’s narrative about the media. Kanye West emphasizes the importance of ignoring what others say so we can be ourselves. In an attempt to emotionally engage his audience, he makes arguments using deeply touching phrases and sayings such as “the beauty you have is inside you. It’s not based on how many records you sell” (as cited in Meara, 2018). Every audience loves a good story about the protagonist who overcomes his rival’s opinions of him, and that is exactly what Kanye West gave them. He attempts to pull at their heart-strings by using deeply profound sayings.

One of the most crucial aspects to Kanye’s narrative being successful rhetoric is his persistence that the media that consumes our lives in the United States. In fact, West actually begins his taped speech with the words “I just want to talk about mind control” (Meara 2018). He then goes on to use the phrases “mind control” and “programmed robot” repeatedly throughout his video. West’s narrative is that the media has control of our mind and everyday lives. Palczewski also discusses this narrative of the media when they state “Newspapers, news shows, Internet sites are filled with narratives about the issues and personalities of the day,” referring to celebrities on the latter. The news media forms their own narrative of Kanye and his life, and the rest of the world is influenced by those news sites. Kanye is trying to go against this narrative. He uses these heavily connotative words regularly because they will stick in the minds of his audience. Mind control is scary to the average person, while programmed robots are sought to be the opposite of human autonomy. West also does this through saying things such as the media is “trying to control you based off of incentivising you” through determining status through how many ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ one has. Along with the implication of control, West also claims that people (he never specificies who) attempt to destroy creativity on a regular occurance. According to Kanye’s narrative, people try to hold him back from “posting something that is like positive on Instagram,” because they want him,“to not express [him]self” (Meara 2018). This also supports Kanye’s claim about the media’s narrative of him. Even when he tries to show “our heart and our spirit,” Kanye’s posts can be removed by any social media platform if it does not go with the “big agenda” (Meara 2018). Kanye’s narrative tells of a controlling, news-dominated United States that steps on one’s creativity. Through the narration of these events, his goal is for his audience to see the broader perspective of social media, and try to direct his audience’s attention to the control social/news media has over the United States. Kanye’s narrative is an attempt to open people’s eyes to the control and agenda the media (in any form ) has over most of the population. When assessing whether West’s narrative is a positive or negative narrative for society, there are many factors that come into play. As quoted in the first sentence of this analysis, narratives have the potential to have a big impact on society. According to Palczeski, “narratives can and should be judged on several levels: aesthetics, authorial intent, empirical truth, and social truth” (129). Kanye lacks aesthetic in his narrative, mainly because he is sharing experiences that are related rather than telling a specific story that has characters and a plot. Authorial truth evaluates “whether the rhetoric intends to make factual claims” (Palczewski). This is a hard judgement to make, especially because it revolves around something that is so large and institutionalized in America (social media platforms). However, Kanye’s narrative seems to be mostly events, reactions, and opinions. But when speaking about empirical truth, all of the events in Kanye’s narrative “reports the events as accurately as possible” (Palczewski). The last judgement to consider is social truth. Whether or not this is an objective reality and that society has all come to this moment/event/realization together. This is the driving force behind Kanye’s narrative. He wants people to see how media has progressed so negatively in our lives. Evidence leads that Kanye West’s narrative does not harm or hurt society in any way, but he does try to help society positively realize this. Kanye’s words are not full of hate or lies, but instead he gives his followers insight that could lead to a more positive future.

One of the biggest disadvantages of analyzing narratives is knowing what is actually the truth. Many people cannot even define what is true, so how are we supposed to know what is and isn’t truthful? This is one question that will prevent any ‘real’ truth from being known. We have to base that truth off of evidence like documentation or fossils in a sense. On the other hand, the advantage of assessing West’s narrative in this manner is that it allows us to see the direct viewpoint of Kanye. Essentially, we see his reactions and hear his thoughts and feelings. This is an opportunity that the media often takes away from him. It is easier to have a deep understanding of a problem when an audience hears two perspectives. In the United States, we are constantly hearing about Kanye West’s life. But did we ever stop to consider that the instances we hear about are only one side of the story? This is why analyzing rhetoric as narratives helps fill the gaps of truth that the media intentionally left out.

John Rodden can also speak to the advantages of narratives. Rodden states that instead of the physically provable pieces of evidence we normally see, we see a “more full-bodied and even impassioned” story that is “rational, but also emotive and ethical” (2008). Rodden brings to the table a very feasible argument. As (normal functioning) humans, we can all use our senses to help us see, hear, smell, feel, or taste things so that there is tangible evidence. But what evidence fails to consider is the other half of humanity. That other half is filled with emotions and mental feelings and reactions. Since every person (again, assumably normal) experiences emotions daily, it should not be used as a disadvantage to rhetoric as narratives.

Narratives play a powerful role when studying rhetoricism. Presumably, any credible narrative contains empirical and social truths that are told through the narrator’s perspective on those events. Since it is a personal recalling of the events/experience, it is easy to introduce bias into the story subconsciously, so we typically discount narratives. However, narratives are crucial to getting the full scope of things. When negative feedback came back to Kanye more than once, he decided to tell his narrative. Kanye West’s narrative to his Twitter followers includes painting the picture of media as robotic propaganda, and embracing themselves for whoever they may be. Overall, this is a positive narrative that would have positive effects on society.

References:

Meara, P. (2018, October 14). Kanye West Goes On Another Rant To Declare He's Not Crazy. Retrieved from https://www.bet.com/music/2018/10/13/kanye-west-rant.html

Palczewski, C. H., Ice, R., Fritch, J. (2012). Narratives. In Rhetoric in civic life (pp. 117-146). State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc.

Rodden, J. (2008). How Do Stories Convince Us? Notes Towards a Rhetoric of Narrative. College Literature, 35(1), 148–173. Retrieved from http://fulla.augustana.edu:2056/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=28047161&site=ehost-live

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The Significance of Engineering and Engineering Media in Day to Time Life

There is an old expressing which moves something along the lines of'the fact is the very first casualty of war ', and I think that it is particularly applicable as it pertains to the civil conflict that is currently unfolding with soft effects in Syria.

You can find two principal issues as it pertains to learning the facts about what's happening in virtually any conflict. The very first of the issues is the obvious fact that warzones are Belg-nieuws  dangerous areas to be at best. Journalist do needless to say get into warzones to supply insurance about what's occurring, but that generally means which they must be stuck with a military system so they have some defense and to ensure that their actions could be knowledgeable by military intelligence which will be maybe not offered to non-military personel. This has its own issues, since the writer can't move wherever they need and only see what the soldiers they are embedded with happen to see. But in Syria actually this is impossible. Rebel soldiers are ill-organised and usually associated with international terrorists, and as they are mainly a guerrilla force rather than normal army they've number appropriate bases and need certainly to dissolve back to the overall populace at times. Therefore journalists cannot actually tag alongside them. On the other area the Syrian regime has restricted all foreign revealing, meaning not only this journalists can't be embedded using them, but also means that there surely is an added layer of threat for just about any journalist seeking to operate independently. All of this combines to mean that it's virtually impossible for almost any skilled journalist to use inside Syria.

The 2nd problem is that both sides of any conflict can attempt to pose the reality to improve their own propaganda efforts. When lives have reached stake this is only to be expected. However when the only path for news press organisations to have information about what's occurring inside Syria is from people involved in the conflict, you will see that makes the information which is being described excessively unreliable.

American media gets the majority of the information they report from either Syrian state TV, or even more generally from an organisation named the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which will be located in London and correlates reports sent in from rebel communities across Syria.

Put to this the truth that virtually every place whose government might be expected to possess intelligence reports about Syria has stated help for just one part or another and therefore has a vested fascination with the struggle and you will see that finding neutral media about Syria is essentially impossible.

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