#it’s people who only view the holocaust like a moral story

[patricia-taxxon]

i think the maus thing comes from their view on what people expect victims to act like, they brush off works like maus as only "a holocaust memorial book" and flat out ignore the raw mommy issues segments because it doesn't fall flat with their perfect victim stereotype, if they acknowledge the raw human part of these stories then it falls into what they deem "problematic" and can't ennact empathy anymore, but i when they find someone who they already threw into the problematic horrible person meat grinder then they give themselves the permission to act outraged and think it's morally correct to harass you. because these stories to them aren't representative of real people's lives but more like items to consume and chew up and spit into segments of "nice victim who does nothing wrong and we should only look at them with pity and no other emotion" and "horrible person who does problematic things" (sorry if this sounds incoherent my thoughts are jumbled and im not that great at English)

Thanks for the thoughts, I'm feeling much if the same things. Nevermind how much Maus is built around dismantling the perfect victim empathy through suffering paradigm

[soracities]

Hey! It has been on my mind lately and i just wanna ask..idk if it would make sense but i just noticed that nowadays ppl cant separate the authors and their books (ex. when author wrote a story about cheating and ppl starts bashing the author for romanticizing cheating and even to a point of cancelling the author for not setting a good/healthy example of a relationship) any thoughts about it?

I have many, many thoughts on this, so this may get a little unwieldy but I'll try to corall it together as best I can.

But honestly, I think sometimes being unable to separate the author from the work (which is interesting to me to see because some people are definitely not "separating" anything even though they think they are; they just erase the author entirely as an active agent, isolate the work, and call it "objectivity") has a lot to do with some people being unable to separate the things they read from themselves.

I'm absolutely not saying it's right, but it's an impulse I do understand. If you read a book and love it, if it transforms your life, or defines a particular period of your life, and then you find out that the author has said or done something awful--where does that leave you? Someone awful made something beautiful, something you loved: and now that this point of communion exists between you and someone whose views you'd never agree with, what does that mean for who you are? That this came from the mind of a person capable of something awful and spoke to your mind--does that mean you're like them? Could be like them?

Those are very uncomfortable questions and I think if you have a tendency to look at art or literature this way, you will inevitable fall into the mindset where only "Good" stories can be accepted because there's no distinction between where the story ends and you begin. As I said, I can see where it comes from but I also find it profoundly troubling because i think one of the worst things you can do to literature is approach it with the expectation of moral validation--this idea that everything you consume, everything you like and engage with is some fundamental insight into your very character as opposed to just a means of looking at or questioning something for its own sake is not just narrow-minded but dangerous.

Art isn't obliged to be anything--not moral, not even beautiful. And while I expend very little (and I mean very little) energy engaging with or even looking at internet / twitter discourse for obvious reasons, I do find it interesting that people (online anyway) will make the entire axis of their critique on something hinge on the fact that its bad representation or justifying / romanticizing something less than ideal, proceeding to treat art as some sort of conduit for moral guidance when it absolutely isn't. And they will also hold that this critique comes from a necessarily good and just place (positive representation, and I don't know, maybe in their minds it does) while at the same time setting themselves apart from radical conservatives who do the exact same thing, only they're doing it from the other side.

To make it abundantly clear, I'm absolutely not saying you should tolerate bigots decrying that books about the Holocaust, race, homophobia, or lgbt experiences should be banned--what I am saying, is that people who protest that a book like Maus or Persepolis is going to "corrupt children", and people who think a book exploring the emotional landscape of a deeply flawed character, who just happens to be from a traditionally marginalised group or is written by someone who is, is bad representation and therefore damaging to that community as a whole are arguments that stem from the exact same place: it's a fundamental inability, or outright refusal, to accept the interiority and alterity of other people, and the inherent validity of the experiences that follow. It's the same maniacal, consumptive, belief that there can be one view and one view only: the correct view, which is your view--your thoughts, your feelings.

There is also dangerous element of control in this. Someone with racist views does not want their child to hear anti-racist views because as far as they are concerned, this child is not a being with agency, but a direct extension of them and their legacy. That this child may disagree is a profound rupture and a threat to the cohesion of this person's entire worldview. Nothing exists in and of and for itself here: rather the multiplicity of the world and people's experiences within it are reduced to shadowy agents that are either for us or against us. It's not about protecting children's "innocence" ("think of the children", in these contexts, often just means "think of the status quo"), as much as it is about protecting yourself and the threat to your perceived place in the world.

And in all honestt I think the same holds true for the other side--if you cannot trust yourself to engage with works of art that come from a different standpoint to yours, or whose subject matter you dislike, without believing the mere fact of these works' existence will threaten something within you or society in general (which is hysterical because believe me, society is NOT that flimsy), then that is not an issue with the work itself--it's a personal issue and you need to ask yourself if it would actually be so unthinkable if your belief about something isn't as solid as you think it is, and, crucially, why you have such little faith in your own critical capacity that the only response these works ilicit from you is that no one should be able to engage with them. That's not awareness to me--it's veering very close to sticking your head in the sand, while insisting you actually aren't.

Arbitrarily adding a moral element to something that does not exist as an agent of moral rectitude but rather as an exploration of deeply human impulses, and doing so simply to justify your stance or your discomfort is not only a profoundly inadequate, but also a deeply insidious, way of papering over your insecurities and your own ignorance (i mean this in the literal sense of the word), of creating a false and dishonest certainty where certainty does not exist and then presenting this as a fact that cannot and should not be challenged and those who do are somehow perverse or should have their characters called into question for it. It's reductive and infantilising in so many ways and it also actively absolves you of any responsibility as a reader--it absolves you of taking responsibility for your own interpretation of the work in question, it absolves you of responsibility for your own feelings (and, potentially, your own biases or preconceptions), it absolves you of actual, proper, thought and engagement by laying the blame entirely on a rogue piece of literature (as if prose is something sentient) instead of acknowledging that any instance of reading is a two-way street: instead of asking why do I feel this way? what has this text rubbed up against? the assumption is that the book has imposed these feelings on you, rather than potentially illuminated what was already there.

Which brings me to something else which is that it is also, and I think this is equally dangerous, lending books and stories a mythical, almost supernatural, power that they absolutely do not have. Is story-telling one of the most human, most enduring, most important and life-altering traditions we have? Yes. But a story is also just a story. And to convince yourself that books have a dangerous transformative power above and beyond what they are actually capable of is, again, to completely erase people's agency as readers, writers' agency as writers and makers (the same as any other craft), and subsequently your own. And erasing agency is the very point of censors banning books en masse. It's not an act of stupidity or blind ignorance, but a conscious awareness of the fact that people will disagree with you, and for whatever reason you've decided that you are not going to let them.

Writers and poets are not separate entities to the rest of us: they aren't shamans or prophets, gifted and chosen beings who have some inner, profound, knowledge the rest of us aren't privy to (and should therefore know better or be better in some regard) because moral absolutism just does not exist. Every writer, no matter how affecting their work may be, is still Just Some Guy Who Made a Thing. Writing can be an incredibly intimate act, but it can also just be writing, in the same way that plumbing is plumbing and weeding is just weeding and not necessarily some transcendant cosmic endeavour in and of itself. Authors are no different, when you get down to it, from bakers or electricians; Nobel laureates are just as capable of coming out with distasteful comments about women as your annoying cousin is and the fact that they wrote a genre-defying work does not change that, or vice-versa. We imbue books with so much power and as conduits of the very best and most human traits we can imagine and hope for, but they aren't representations of the best of humanity--they're simply expressions of humanity, which includes the things we don't like.

There are some authors I love who have said and done things I completely disagree with or whose views I find abhorrent--but I'm not expecting that, just because they created something that changed my world, they are above and beyond the ordinarly, the petty, the spiteful, or cruel. That's not condoning what they have said and done in the least: but I trust myself to be able to read these works with awareness and attention, to pick out and examine and attempt to understand the things that I find questionable, to hold on to what has moved me, and to disregard what I just don't vibe with or disagree with. There are writers I've chosen not to engage with, for my own personal reasons: but I'm not going to enforce this onto someone else because I can see what others would love in them, even if what I love is not strong enough to make up for what I can't. Terrance Hayes put perfectly in my view, when he talks about this and being capable of "love without forgiveness". Writing is a profoundly human heritage and those who engage with it aren't separate from that heritage as human because they live in, and are made by, the exact same world as anyone else.

The measure of good writing for me has hardly anything to do with whatever "virtue" it's perceived to have and everything to do with sincerity. As far as I'm concerned, "positive representation" is not about 100% likeable characters who never do anything problematic or who are easily understood. Positive representation is about being afforded the full scope of human feelings, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and not having your humanity, your dignity, your right to exist in the world questioned because all of these can only be seen through the filter of race, or gender, religion, or ethicity and interpreted according to our (profoundly warped) perceptions of those categories and what they should or shouldn't represent. True recognition of someone's humanity does not lie in finding only what is held in common between you (and is therefore "acceptable", with whatever you put into that category), but in accepting everything that is radically different about them and not letting this colour the consideration you give.

Also, and it may sound harsh, but I think people forget that fictional characters are fictional. If I find a particularly fucked up relationship dynamic compelling (as I often do), or if I decide to write and explore that dynamic, that's not me saying two people who threaten to kill each other and constantly hurt each other is my ideal of romance and that this is exactly how I want to be treated: it's me trying to find out what is really happening below the surface when two people behave like this. It's me exploring something that would be traumatizing and deeply damaging in real life, in a safe and fictional setting so I can gain some kind of understanding about our darker and more destructive impulses without being literally destroyed by them, as would happen if all of this were real. But it isn't real. And this isn't a radical or complex thing to comprehend, but it becomes incomprehensible if your sole understanding of literature is that it exists to validate you or entertain you or cater to you, and if all of your interpretations of other people's intentions are laced with a persistent sense of bad faith. Just because you have not forged any identity outside of this fictional narrative doesn't mean it's the same for others.

Ursula K. le Guin made an extremely salient point about children and stories in that children know the stories you tell them--dragons, witches, ghouls, whatever--are not real, but they are true. And that sums it all up. There's a reason children learning to lie is an incredibly important developmental milestone, because it shows that they have achieved an incredibly complex, but vitally important, ability to hold two contradictory statements in their minds and still know which is true and which isn't. If you cannot delve into a work, on the terms it sets, as a fictional piece of literature, recognize its good points and note its bad points, assess what can have a real world impact or reflects a real world impact and what is just creative license, how do you possible expect to recognize when authority and propaganda lies to you? Because one thing propaganda has always utilised is a simplistic, black and white depiction of The Good (Us) and The Bad (Them). This moralistic stance regarding fiction does not make you more progressive or considerate; it simply makes it easier to manipulate your ideas and your feelings about those ideas because your assessments are entirely emotional and surface level and are fuelled by a refusal to engage with something beyond the knee-jerk reaction it causes you to have.

Books are profoundly, and I do mean profoundly, important to me-- and so much of who I am and the way I see things is probably down to the fact that stories have preoccupied me wherever I go. But I also don't see them as vital building blocks for some core facet or a pronouncement of Who I Am. They're not badges of honour or a cover letter I put out into the world for other people to judge and assess me by, and approve of me (and by extension, the things I say or feel). They're vehicles through which I explore and experience whatever it is that I'm most caught by: not a prophylactic, not a mode of virtue signalling, and certainly not a means of signalling a moral stance.

I think at the end of the day so much of this tendency to view books as an extension of yourself (and therefore of an author) is down to the whole notion of "art as a mirror", and I always come back to Fran Lebowitz saying that it "isn't a mirror, it's a door". And while I do think it's important to have that mirror (especially if you're part of a community that never sees itself represented, or represented poorly and offensively) I think some people have moved into the mindset of thinking that, in order for art to be good, it needs to be a mirror, it needs to cater to them and their experiences precisely--either that or that it can only exist as a mirror full stop, a reflection of and for the reader and the writer (which is just incredibly reductive and dismissive of both)--and if art can only exist as a mirror then anything negative that is reflected back at you must be a condemnation, not a call for exploration or an attempt at understanding.

As I said, a mirror is important but to insist on it above all else isn't always a positive thing: there are books I related to deeply because they allowed me to feel so seen (some by authors who looked nothing like me), but I have no interest in surrounding myself with those books all the time either--I know what goes on in my head which is precisely why I don't always want to live there. Being validated by a character who's "just like me" is amazing but I also want--I also need-- to know that lives and minds and events exist outside of the echo-chamber of my own mind. The mirror is comforting, yes, but if you spend too long with it, it also becomes isolating: you need doors because they lead you to ideas and views and characters you could never come up with on your own. A world made up of various Mes reflected back to me is not a world I want to be immersed in because it's a world with very little texture or discovery or room for growth and change. Your sense of self and your sense of other people cannot grow here; it just becomes mangled.

Art has always been about dialogue, always about a me and a you, a speaker and a listener, even when it is happening in the most internal of spaces: to insist that art only ever tells you what you want to hear, that it should only reflect what you know and accept is to undermine the very core of what it seeks to do in the first place, which is establish connection. Art is a lifeline, I'm not saying it isn't. But it's also not an instruction manual for how to behave in the world--it's an exploration of what being in the world looks like at all, and this is different for everyone. And you are treading into some very, very dangerous waters the moment you insist it must be otherwise.

Whatever it means to be in the world, it is anything but straightforward. In this world people cheat, people kill, they manipulate, they lie, they torture and steal--why? Sometimes we know why, but more often we don't--but we take all these questions and write (or read) our way through them hoping that, if we don't find an answer, we can at least find our way to a place where not knowing isn't as unbearable anymore (and sometimes it's not even about that; it's just about telling a story and wanting to make people laugh). It's an endless heritage of seeking with countless variations on the same statements which say over and over again I don't know what to make of this story, even as I tell it to you. So why am I telling it? Do I want to change it? Can I change it? Yes. No. Maybe. I have no certainty in any of this except that I can say it. All I can do is say it.

Writing, and art in general, are one of the very, very, few ways we can try and make sense of the apparently arbitrary chaos and absurdity of our lives--it's one of the only ways left to us by which we can impose some sense of structure or meaning, even if those things exists in the midst of forces that will constantly overwhelm those structures, and us. I write a poem to try and make sense of something (grief, love, a question about octopuses) or to just set down that I've experienced something (grief, love, an answer about octpuses). You write a poem to make sense of, resolve, register, or celebrate something else. They don't have to align. They don't have to agree. We don't even need to like each other much. But in both of these instances something is being said, some fragment of the world as its been perceived or experienced is being shared. They're separate truths that can exist at the same time. Acknowledging this is the only means we have of momentarily bridging the gaps that will always exist between ourselves and others, and it requires a profound amount of grace, consideration and forbearance. Otherwise, why are we bothering at all?

[fierceawakening]

I am not Jewish, but this kind of story is absolutely what I grew up hearing. Especially the “the reason Palestinians didn’t leave was because other Arab countries didn’t want them,” said in a way that implied heavily that Israel treats them as full citizens which I now know is not true for most. (And assumed they’d agree that it made sense for them TO leave, when many if not most did not.)

It was easy to believe it, for me as an uninvested person. The Jews had just been through the Holocaust and knew what oppression was and why it was bad. Surely they could never oppress others! If they did at all it must be the growing pains of a just democracy.

None of that was true. It kind of makes sense that it wasn’t! In terms of individuals, a lot of traumatized people are a big mess at first. They lash out and mistrust. They see their experience everywhere because they can’t possibly have processed it yet and might not ever.

Why wouldn’t a traumatized country be a cruel one? At least at first?

But we want to think otherwise. We want to think that people learn right away, straightforwardly. That they set immediate boundaries and are unquestionably honorable because they’ve seen the worst.

I don’t know. But I think this was definitely how I was raised to see Israel, that its wars were short because it knew better than the rest of us only to repel its enemies, not take revenge. You war with them they shove you off in A WEEK.

None of it’s true! At all! But it feels bizarre to read “some people just have a colonialist mindset” as if we think the literal reality is okay because some people “are civilized” and others aren’t.

It was, yes, a version of that that we were fed. But it was explained in a way that seemed more plausible than just “Arabs are backward dirty nomads.”

Few people, at least on the political left, would swallow that pill uncoated.

I don’t know. Not sure what my point is here. I guess just that the way I hear people who assume Israel is good described just… seems cartoonish. There’s elements of what we were told in it.

But mostly we were just thinking of it like a story: those people had the plot happen to them, the climax happened last chapter, now they get to eat feta and oranges in peace. They’re happy. They have some bad memories but things are mostly good. That’s how things work.

(This is, by the way, why I agree with a lot of tumblr when it says “Judeochristian” isn’t a thing, that the American right made it up—*but yet, I also* think there’s more to the story.

Judeochristian as I was taught it ALSO MEANT Israel was inherently morally good. That it arose out of the same broad culture as US democracy, so it must be just in ways theocracies were not. It was a beacon of hope, because Judeo meant Like Us. [Ironically this is *true* but not actually *good.* We oppress black people. They oppress Palestinians. Like us, yes. Sigh. Don’t copy that part!]

I think people are going to misanalyze some things if they miss that that’s part of it.

It’s weird looking back on it now really, because Judaism says “this stuff happened” and Christianity says “and then this stuff happened and the sequel was kinda more important” and Islam says “and then THIS stuff happened and THAT sequel was really the big deal.”

So it’s… pretty obviously political that Judeochristian peels off the third book but considers it legit that there’s EITHER one OR two. What. Either iterating is okay or it’s rude. Pick one.)

[estrellanesjohnchristian]

True Narratives and Testimonies



ESTRELLANES JOHN CRISTIAN

APR 30, 2024

True narratives are explanations about actual events or experiences that are often narrated in storytelling form. These stories aim at appealing to the reader’s emotions as well as providing them with truthful information. Testimonies, statements refer to people’s first person accounts or views regarding their personal happenings or observations.

True story: "Into the Wild" by: Jon Krakauer. Christopher McCandless left society behind and went to live in Alaska but Jon Krakauer gives us the chilling true account of what really happened to him. This book tells about the journey he took there, the difficulties he faced, and how everything ended up so horribly.

Testimony: Holocaust survivor stories – These reveal firsthand descriptions by witnesses who experienced Holocaust events; they talk about such things like fear, determination for survival among others.

1. Introduction: This is where we meet Christopher McCandless, the young man with aspirations of becoming a performer. It sets the stage by telling us about his relocation to Alaska and why he decided to abandon everything he had known until that point in life. However, it also gives additional information about what might have driven him into such a radical lifestyle change; like for instance what could make someone give up all comforts and start living on streets with no roof over their head?

2. Summary: The second part of this book is mainly focused on McCandless’ journey. He describes his travel experiences – places he visited, people he met along the way and difficulties faced during each encounter as well as sharing some thoughts about those experiences which can be quite enlightening for an individual who has never been exposed to similar situations before reading “Into The Wild”. With all said though one thing still remains undoubted — that while in wild nature alone without any support from civilization there are certain facts about life learnt through personal intuition rather than being taught through moral lessons or lectures given elsewhere among civilized communities

3. Evaluation: While all this was happening, McCandless could vent out his emotions and thoughts; he could share what he thought about his choices and how they touched him and the people around him. It can also enlighten us about freedom, liberty, and human spirit from the tales he tells.

4. Conclusion: The end of the book connects to McCandles’ story where he reflects on what the trip meant to him personally but not only this did it further more gave us a chance to think deeply about life lessons which we can derive from this experience so as apply them in our lives too; perhaps it also accounts for why his narrative still touches individuals even now.

[nbmsports]

'The danger never goes away': Christopher Nolan didn't intend for Oppenheimer movie to be so timely | Ents & Arts News

The world's first nuclear explosion happened on 16 July 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested in New Mexico.Now a new film about the so-called father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, looks at how he came to create a weapon that would change the world and how it changed him.

Image: J Robert Oppenheimer on the test ground for the atomic bomb in September 1945 Decades since its invention, as Russia's war rages in Ukraine, the weapon's threat to the world is back in people's minds.Director Christopher Nolan, who also wrote the movie, basing it on the Pulitzer Prize winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, told Sky News he never meant for his film to be so timely."I had a conversation with one of my teenage sons about what I was working on and he literally said to me - 'Does anybody really worry about nuclear weapons anymore? Is that really a thing in the world?' "To which I said, 'Well, maybe that's a reason for making the film but beyond that, it's just a very, very dramatic story about how our world changed forever'. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

1:29 Actor Cillian Murphy and director Christopher Nolan speak to Sky News about their new film Oppenheimer "Two years later, he's not asking that question anymore and neither is anybody else for all the worst possible reasons, and that's symptomatic of our relationship with the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear holocaust - it ebbs and flows with geopolitical shifts in a way that it shouldn't - I mean, the danger never goes away." More on Christopher Nolan To inhabit the role of Oppenheimer, Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy lost weight and perfected a new accent and also had to learn about quantum physics and grapple with Oppenheimer's morality."Actors love getting jobs and then they're dying to finish them, that seems to be the way," Murphy told Sky News.

Image: Tom Conti as Albert Einstein with Murphy. Pic: Universal Pictures "So, yeah, it was time for a holiday after that for sure, if you do anything for like 17, 18 hours a day and you're in that and you're on set all the time, naturally there will be a cost and then you feel at the end there's all this displaced energy and you're not quite sure what to do with it, and you start moving furniture around."Nolan interjects: "And have a sandwich".For the director, known for movies including Intersteller, Inception and Dunkirk - and who has a reputation for shunning digital effects and greenscreen - it wasn't recreating a nuclear explosion that posed a challenge.Instead, he says he found the casting process daunting. Spreaker This content is provided by Spreaker, which may be using cookies and other technologies. To show you this content, we need your permission to use cookies. You can use the buttons below to amend your preferences to enable Spreaker cookies or to allow those cookies just once. You can change your settings at any time via the Privacy Options. Unfortunately we have been unable to verify if you have consented to Spreaker cookies. To view this content you can use the button below to allow Spreaker cookies for this session only. Enable Cookies Allow Cookies Once Click to subscribe to Backstage wherever you get your podcasts"The ensemble - with Cillian at the heart of it as Oppenheimer - but then his interactions with this entire team of people coming together to pull off this, you know, impossible feat, that was a challenge for me."Doing these group discussions, these arguments, these interpersonal relationships and all of that, all of which came into such a kind of hothouse atmosphere with the Manhattan Project and everything they had to do in the years that they were there."That was something I'd never really taken on before."

Image: Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy. Pic: Universal Pictures The extremely positive early reviews for Oppenheimer suggest Nolan rose to that challenge.But now, with promotion for the film interrupted by the US actor's strike, it remains to be seen whether audiences will have the appetite for a three-hour epic about the creation of the atomic bomb - the end of the world perhaps too close for comfort to be considered entertainment.Oppenheimer, which also stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh and Robert Downey Jr, is released worldwide on Friday 21 July. Source link Read the full article

[midrashic]

Thoughts on Erik's and Charles' philosophies and viewpoints? How they view humanity?

oh, anon, i’m so glad you asked.

An Important Disclaimer: i know that some people have a fixed understanding of their favorite characters and write them the same way every time, & i respect that, but that’s not me. to me, canon is like seeing the tip of the iceberg; there’s no way to predict the shape of the submerged portion. sure, you can extrapolate from what you can see, but humans are strange and inconsistent, if you tried to predict what a person’s entire existence is like from a comprehensive understanding of how they behave in the starbucks coffee line you will fail, and i apply this principle to fictional characters. i believe that canon can give rise to a whole host of equally valid characterizations. (this is not to say that all characterizations are equally valid; there’s “this person is selfish” and “this person is unselfish” and then there’s “this person is an alien infiltrator.”)

so i write erik and charles differently every time, and never consider one version “in-character” while another is not. i try to write them within the confines of how i understand their canon characterizations, for example i always write erik as someone who leaves charles behind on the beach, but sometimes i write the beach divorce as erik choosing morality for the first time and sometimes i write it as him giving up on morality forever, and i think canon opens up spaces for both these interpretations. so erik’s and charles’s philosophies are not something that can be pinned down with any degree of accuracy.

Another Important Disclaimer: i hate the original trilogy, so this answer only takes as canon the alt timeline movies. i don’t have a justification for this. i just don’t like them.

with that said, here is what i feel a version of erik & charles would believe:

i’m going to assume that you’ve at least heard the paradigm “erik is a cynic, charles is an idealist” before. that’s how most people understand their conflict. through this lens, people take a couple of things for granted: charles’s pacifism means that he values life above all else, erik’s violent tactics means he doesn’t. charles is a deontologist, who believes that morality is following a set of rules about what is moral and what is not; erik is a consequentialist, who believes that the right thing to do is what results in the best outcome, or that the ends, at least to some extent, justify the means. this is an age-old ethical conflict and sexy as hell. superhero stories are particularly rife with possibilities to explore ethical conflicts, and people love to take apart the trope of the violent consequentialist villain and the idealistic deontologist hero. [points at the steve x tony meta i used to write & reblog and clarifies before anyone comes after me that it didn’t claim that tony was either violent or a villain, but rather that he was one of the few consequentialist heroes in western media]

this is all valid as heck & i have in fact written these versions of charles and erik before. but there is also tons of meta out there written in the heydey of this fandom (i assume) about violent consequentialist villain erik and idealistic deontologist hero charles. stuff about how charles’s telepathy might affect his feelings that no one, no matter how terrible, deserves to die; stuff about how erik’s experiences during the holocaust means that his driving value, the only rule he takes as a moral absolute, is that his people must not experience genocide. if you wanted to dive more into these versions of them, that meta is out there! i don’t think this post needs to reiterate the great work that i’m sure was done.

so let’s think instead about a different conception of charles’s and erik’s values: a conflict between peace and justice.

this looks like charles taking up what we call in the real world respectability politics. he is aware that anti-mutant violence is a result of the way in which humans negatively perceive mutants. his is a campaign of changing hearts & minds, his goal is to move the norms of society far enough toward tolerance that the friends & families of bigots would react with disgust if they said anti-mutant things--much less got caught violently attacking a mutant!--that public disapproval would prevent overt discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. this charles focuses on the mind of the human as the point of change, this charles cares--above all else--about preserving mutant lives in the long run. this charles disapproves of mutants who do not, by the example of their lives, work to prove to humans that they aren’t so different: mutant criminals, unfriendly activists, and--worst of all--the pro-mutant terrorist.

the problem, of course, is that mutants shouldn’t have to be perfect to be treated as human. a policy where mutants are asked to be better to be treated the same is fundamentally unfair; and this injustice is what erik is first and foremost concerned with. violence erupts when erik takes justice into his own hands by punishing humans who do horrific things to mutants because they won’t face consequences any other ways. and erik is less concerned with the future, with incremental change, with the ends. he wants everything to be fair & just right now, and more important than winning hearts & minds is doing what he can to save mutants who, under charles’s policies, might be sacrificed at the altar of history. incremental change isn’t going to save the mutant who is experimented on today and dies tomorrow. ripping off the doors of the research facility is.

& this version of charles is fundamentally pragmatic. charles’s greatest desire is now to prevent genocide in the future. to that end, for the dream of human-mutant coexistence, charles accepts an imperfect now. incremental change, at heart, recognizes that the way things are now is wrong, but worries that if too much changes too quickly, reactionaries will take away any progress that was made. for this charles, radical change would be nice but is unrealistic; just because something is the right thing to doesn’t mean that it’s possible, or, perhaps, would necessarily lead to more good than harm. this charles is a consequentialist (to an extent); playing nice with humans and making political compromises and knowing that people will continue to suffer while change slowly takes place are all worth it, if it gets the job done.

& this version of erik is fundamentally idealistic. erik will fight for justice, even if it turns the humans against them further, even if as a result of his actions mutants are even more heavily persecuted, because it’s the right thing to do. and this might be baked into their histories: charles can see the future; erik, who was taught when he was young that he has no future, prioritizes the suffering around him now. erik is a control freak; if he can stop one mutant from getting hurt, he must. but charles, whose power means that he knows much better than erik that control and consent are complicated, views “doing all he can” as a slippery slope. what if he does control every mind in the world and wipe out all anti-mutant sentiment? do the ends justify the means to that extent? “can’t,” to charles, means more than whether he physically can or cannot do something; he can’t solve the human world’s hatred of mutants because it’s morally, psychologically, not in him. (this is why he is only a consequentialist to an extent. morals are complicated: for example, charles is often described as an “integrationist/assimilationist” to erik’s separatism, but he does teach an all-mutant school.)

as far as humanity--that’s a complicated topic. do you mean the “species” homo sapiens non-superior, do you mean the humanist idea that every person alive is part of a universal brotherhood and ought to take care of and respect each other, or do you mean whether charles & erik think of themselves as humans, as in the opposite of monsters? again, acknowledging that canon is not explicit on any of these subjects, and that a whole range of positions is possible for both of them (from “erik learning that he’s part of a new species confirmed all his greatest fears that he is a monster and his rejection of conventional morality is a kind of psychological self-harm” to “anti-humanist charles being like, ‘it's such a cliche, but the metaphor of people and snowflakes? it's completely true. exquisitely, utterly true... and just like snowflakes, when you take even the smallest step back, they become truly and utterly indistinguishable’"... you know, charles and erik who are both convinced they’re monsters would be a hell of a fic. lots of “when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you love it” vibes) means that these questions could fill up an entire other post, or even multiple posts. but lest i dive into a hole of meta and never find my way out, i’m going to stop here, after presenting two conceptions of charles and erik’s moral dichotomy for your consideration. but “philosophies and viewpoints” is a broad & bold question, and if you want to return to this issue, my inbox is always open.

[aplusblogging]

An Analysis on the History of Gender in the Horror Genre

This is one of my classmates’ final projects for Sociology. I loved it so much I asked for her permission to share it here. Hope you enjoy it too!

Transcript under the cut, since the auto-generated captions are mostly accurate but punctuation is good for comprehension.

TRANSCRIPT:

“My name is Davis Barelli, and in this video essay I'm going to look at the portrayal of gender through the lens of the horror genre.

Women in particular may have a reason to keep coming back to the genre, outside of a cheap thrill. In a study done by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and Google, using the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient—or the GDIQ—it was determined that women are featured on screen and in speaking roles more than men only in the horror genre. With the advent of the MPAA rating system in the '30s, the kind of horror we know today didn't re-emerge until the '60s.

Making female characters who would later become known as "Final Girls" the vessel for traumatic experiences allowed viewers—especially men and boys coming home from war—to see someone reacting to trauma in the way that they wanted to, but wasn't socially acceptable. Instead, the model for men to see themselves in was the macho, womanizing jock who goes outside to find the big bad, typically resulting in him being the first to die. While there was a lot of good in the survivors of these horror movies very commonly being female, a specific archetype of the female survivor made it clear what kind of girl it took to be the hero.

The Final Girl being portrayed in '60s, '70s, and '80s slasher horror as an innocent virgin stereotype was no accident, what with America experiencing the breakdown of the nuclear family and Christian morals thanks to the free-love movement of the '60s. This led to frequent themes of occultism, homosexuality, and hypersexuality in horror at the time. Characters who gave in to these evils were given a death sentence, as opposed to the Final Girls, who were rewarded for their abstinence with survival.

When films did stray from the norm by casting male leads in sequels in place of the Final Girl, a double standard emerged. Male protagonists were branded as "homosexual" for acting like the Final Girls before them, and the actors who portrayed them had their careers effectively ruined. Where the '70s gave rise to exploitation horror centered on violence against women, '80s niche horror had different scapegoats.

Cannibal Holocaust, released at the beginning of the decade and directed by Ruggero Deodato, tells the story of a group going to the Amazon in search of a missing film crew. They discover footage detailing the gruesome things the crew did to the tribe they encountered before they were killed. Not only is the portrayal of hostile tribes in the Amazon harmful to the actual tribes in the Amazon, but framing the main character of the film as a kind of white savior for not wanting the footage of the tribe distributed is basically rewarding him for the absolute bare minimum.

The other standout film of the '80s notorious for its subject matter is that of Sleepaway Camp. Sleepaway Camp tells the story of a young girl who experiences the death of her family during a boating accident and is sent to live with her aunt and cousin. She and her cousin go to the summer camp and it quickly becomes a bloodbath. The reveal at the end is that the young girl was the culprit, because she wasn't a girl at all, but her twin brother who was forced by the aunt to live as a girl. The narrative of trans people as dangerous, deranged villains pretending to be a different gender due to mental illness or against their will is deeply harmful to the LGBTQ people who were battling misconceptions at the time similar to this, and still are.

This energy evolved with the '90s, which shifted its focus to supernatural teenage hormones, with the likes of The Craft and many others. Looking at the villains of these movies, though, is a clear pointer to the ostracization of the "weird kid" in the '90s. This is most prominently seen in The Craft, where a girl with supernatural powers befriends a group of girls pretending to be witches. She bestows them with real powers and hijinks ensue. The film culminates in the ringleader—who, out of the group, is the least conventionally attractive—being put in an insane asylum for her misdeeds, while the rest of the group gets off relatively scot-free. This served as an unfortunate continuation of the narrative that girls who were weird were to be punished, but if you were pretty, you could get away with it.

With the 2000s filled with American-made J-horror and classic horror remakes, I'd like to skip forward, save for one movie.

In the 2000s a movie came out that caused a huge ruckus over how bad it was, but I think deserves a spot here for its portrayal of teenage girls in horror. Jennifer's Body, directed by* Diablo Cody, starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, tells the story of Jennifer getting possessed after a botched human sacrifice because she lies about being a virgin. It was almost universally panned by critics, who called it a "sexploitation film lacking the all-important ballast of sincerity." Both Cody and Fox—who were gaining fame for Juno and the Transformers franchise, respectively—were already written off by critics, most of whom were men, before the movie had even been released. In reality, Jennifer's character was unique for being the mean girl who gets killed off, the big bad, and a revenge film-esque survivor, all in one. And her best friend, "Needy," was the sarcastic, dorky, sexually active Final Girl we never would have seen in classic horror.

The last decade has given rise to a genre dubbed "intelligent horror," ushering in an age with less mindless bloodlust and more nuanced characters and themes. Directors Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are arguably at the forefront of the intelligent horror genre; Peele's Get Out and Us giving people of color representation in a severely whitewashed genre. Get Out, especially, has received praise not just for the representation of people of color, but the very real, very prevalent issues of race and police brutality. One of the most important aspects is the depiction of the white savior character in the form of the protagonist's girlfriend, who is revealed to actually be a villain, showcasing the dramatization of the danger of performative activism and how that affects people of color.

Ari Aster, on the other hand, deals with themes of mental illness and family trauma, something unfortunately somewhat universal. While mommy issues and cults are nothing new in horror, Ari Aster's work frames both subjects very differently, especially in regards to the women in his films. Midsommar heavily focuses on Dani, the protagonist's, mental health and manipulation by others throughout the film, as she navigates grief unapologetically and realistically. This portrayal of grief in Midsommar from a woman's point of view is so important, because Dani is clingy, she's anxious, she's emotional, and she's human. As opposed to the polished, over-dramatic depiction of women and their emotions that are so commonly seen in horror.

Over the decades, horror and its portrayals of the human experience have shifted to continue being a compelling mirror for the issues of the time. But something that will always be current is that we can be scared.”

End of transcript.

*Jennifer’s Body was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama

[masteroftheblade]

What are your favorite and least favorite animes? Why do you like/dislike them?

oh god here we go lmao 🤠👍 prepare for an entire novel as always lol

my favorite animes atm are Naruto, Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, and Claymore. Overall, my favorite genre of anime is shonen (and in case you dont know what that is, its basically shows that are marketed to young boys. it'll have shit like superpowers and poorly written female characters). My least favorite genre is Shoujo (marketed at young girls). I honestly don't hate the entire genre, I just hate how much romance is in there since im pretty romance-repulsed. If there were more Shoujo series like Claymore, I'd probably be in love w/ it. I'll start talking about these shows individually, starting w/ Naruto.

1. Naruto.

Honestly, the only reason I started watching Naruto was because my friends peer pressured me into doing it, and it actually differed from what I expected it to be story-wise. The beginning of the show started off amazing; it had excellent world building, magic systems, interesting characters, and it attempted to address how messed up the whole shinobi system is. But then Naruto got on the front page of Shonen Jump, and everything went down from there. It started to focus more on cool fight scenes than the actual plot. I wont get too much into that, because you can literally find entire blogs dedicated to dissecting that, but Naruto killed itself w/ its own popularity. That said, I love the characters and world building and I can look past most of its flaws anyway.

Would I recommend reading/watching it? Yes, but only to say you did it for bragging rights. Don't go into watching Naruto if you want deep looks into imperialism and militarized governments, because you will get the complete opposite of that :P Also the best way to watch it is to watch it with friends.

2. Dragon Ball.

I only started watching DB about a month ago, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think its a garbage series. The fight scenes have little to no weight to them, because no matter what, the protagonist of that episode will always succeed in some way. For example, when Goku (a 12 y/o boy) was fighting Giran (a 10ft tall godzilla man) and was getting his ass beat until Goku just... randomly grows back his tail that was cut off earlier and wins. We are never told why he grew back his tail, and i think he only gets it back so he can have a cool fight scene in a later episode. Goku can literally be battling genocidal gods and he will still always win. The show also goes out of its way to sexualize/show a female character being harrassed. Every. Fucking. Episode.

That said, it is a fun show, and I really enjoy watching it. Like Naruto, I really love the characters and the world they are in, I just hate the way it was handled, and its painfully obvious that DB was made by a bunch of old men in the 80s. Unlike Naruto, however, I really appreciate how simple it is. It doesn't force a narrative about space genocide or whatever being bad, and I'm very thankful because that kind of narrative would be absolutely botched in this kind of series. It's also nice to have a show that doesn't take itself too seriously. Shows like AOT are amazing and important, but those shows can be overwhelming with their heavy subject matter. I would only recommend watching DB if you want to see some really good art/character design. Don't take the show seriously, and you'll have a good time.

3.Attack On Titan.

This anime was actually the first I've ever seen! I saw the very first episode when it aired in 2014, so I'm definetely biased in that regard, but I still try to look at this show in the most objective way I can. This show does almost everything right. The pacing, the characters, the art, the plot, you name it. It takes a concept that looks silly on paper and turns it into this grueling story about war, politics, and the trauma of being a soldier. It never treats it's characters like they're only one-dimensional, or like they are there just for one purpose only. These characters feel human in a way Naruto and Dragon Ball could never be. But there is one thing that has me concerned about this show, and its about the weirdly anti-Semitic undertones it has.

You probably heard the controversy already, but it really effected the way people on the outside of the fandom view the series. The show is heavily inspired by European culture, specifically that of Germany, and there are an ethnic group of people called The Eldians in the show that are pretty anti-Semitic in this kind of setting. The Eldian people have the capability of turning into Titans, and the Titans are what divided the world and killed millions. As a result, another group of people started doing the shit the Nazis did to Jewish people, basically making the Eldians into this weird allegory for the holocaust??? Which was kind of a shock to me when I first realized that was the angle they were going for. I genuinely did not expect that considering what the series started off as. The foreshadowing is there and all, I just didn't think they'd use real-world events as inspiration.

Now, this actually has the complete opposite problem Naruto and DB had. Naruto and DB had amazing ideas and concepts that went to shit, AOT's whole holocaust narrative was trash from the beginning.

The show could have easily had a different kind of social/political commentary without even going near the holocaust narrative. It comes off as kind of a half assed idea that people put way too much effort in, so it's kind of in this weird grey-area between "modern anime masterpiece" and "what the fuck were they trying to get across with this show?". If you asked me what the moral of the show was, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

Now, because of the fact that the Eldians can literally turn into man-eating beasts, this makes the comparison of Jewish people and Eldians very racist, and it doesn't help that Japan is still full of legitimate Nazis, making the whole situation look even worse. Since I am not Jewish, I wont speak for other Jewish people. There is a very heated debate on whether the show is racist, and frankly I don't think it's within my right to say if it is or isn't. What I will say, is that I really loved the show and appreciated the social commentary it provided, and I think a lot of people would benefit from watching it, but I think it's also important to listen to Jewish people's views on the show. For this reason, I specifically avoid reblogging AOT stuff, but I do love that show and I wont hate on people who do reblog stuff from it. It's definitely not a light watch, but it does provide a lot of thinking material.

4. Claymore.

This. Show. Was. Amazing. But. Underrated.

First off, this is a shonen show that is led by a majority female cast and a female protagonist, and all of those women are badass swordwielding lesbians and I love it. Second, the art style is beautiful. Third, the story is really interesting from so many angles, so much so I am not even going to mention what its about because you dont need to know, you just need to watch it and see what happens. The first season was an absoloute ride of a show, and if you love shows like AOT or Berserk, you'll love Claymore. Honestly, this show was what AOT should have tried to be. It also has its fair share of militarized imperialist commentary, but this is the only show on this list that actually fucking critiques imperialist ideals and has a main character that actively refuses to participate in that kind of oppressive system, choosing to fight it all together.

But the show got fucking cancelled right before the first arc even finished. You can thank shows like Naruto for that 🙃🙃🙃

10/10 Would reccomend, but just be prepared to be left on a major cliffhanger. You can try reading the manga, but it's kind of hard to follow since all of the warrior girls look the same.

[icantbelieveitsbrigi]

What's wrong with SNK? I'm not even trying to start discourse. I'm interested because I only watched the first 2 seasons and never got around to the rest.

Hey no worries! It's ok to ask questions :))

(I may have some info a little wrong, and this is getting typed up in a bit of a rush, but the overall theme is what's important here)

I was really off put by the series and stopped reading way back when chapter 98 or something came out??? I don't remember exactly- but it was when we got back story on the Titans...

Turned out the Titans are the Eldians, who spent thousands of years murdering and raping the world to produce more Titans... and then the titan people were put in what was essentially concentration camps?? They had arm bands and everything 😰 which... yikes... was Isayama alluding to like... the holocaust cuz...that is NOT the same...

There's a lot of subtle nazi-esque imagery and stuff, Eren is now... committing genocide??? The writing is miserable, Isayama has made some sus comments (mostly refusing to clarify what his personal political views are) and both heavy right wing and left wing fans have taken what they wanted from his seemingly "morally gray" story. (Some things just cannot be left up to interpretation...)

There's just...so much... the story is supposedly to hurt fans intentionally (end I'm tragedy) and I just...can't be bothered with that kind of a shit.

It's hard to find info on these matters (lots of opinion heavy articles, not a lot of facts), so I would recommend doing some thorough research and forming your own opinions on the matter!

Good luck!

[multiculturalliteraturethemes]

Author Bio

Hello to everyone reading this blog! I am Alexandra Gawronski, an English major at Grand Canyon University, who would like to share with you some of the knowledge I learned in my Multicultural Literature course. This blog is meant to help teachers and other students gain an understanding of themes in literature and culture. 

Multicultural literature is literature that shows aspects of life from the viewpoints of different cultures across the world. These works of writing show the reader what life is like outside of their own culture and demonstrates the values of these other cultures. Throughout this course, we have discussed works from ancient China, China during Confucius’ time, modern China, Native American authors, Africa, African American authors, Latin America, and Post-Holocaust Jewish authors. These pieces of writing each demonstrate different cultures, values, and beliefs that are held throughout the world. 

Global, in relation to literature, means that a work of writing can be translated and read across the world. These works, however, are not only understood by other people from different cultures across the globe but can also be related to. Although the works all display different values and beliefs, they all have one thing in common: they all show human nature. Although people from all over come from different places and act differently, we are all still human, share many universal morals, and have emotions. Although someone today may not be able to share the same insight as a person who bore witness to the Holocaust, we can still understand that kind of pain and sorrow that they felt because these are feelings that all humans have felt at some point. This makes literature global because people from across the globe can relate to it.

The blurring of national boundaries in 20th-century literature can best be explained as the mixture of two or more cultures. The “blurring” of two nations occurs in literature when values from more than one culture mix in order to show that these cultures have mixed and that they have a mixture of beliefs and values. A real-world example of the blurring of national boundaries outside of literature can be the marriage of two people from different cultures. When this happens, the two families of the couple are joined together and as a result, their views, beliefs, and values will mix and the family will no longer have just one national identity. 

20th-century literature portrays struggles with cultural identity by using stories to convey the intricacies of identity and how many do not exactly fit into the culture they were born into. In many cases, stories show a character being torn between cultural identities or disagreeing with the values of a culture that they are supposed to represent. In many pieces of Chinese literature, you can see women who are forced to submit to cultural norms in order to fit into their cultural identity, despite disagreeing with the way things are and the share of power that was held between men and women. 

[aowski]

De-Spiritualization

American Indian Activist Russell Means gave a speech in July 1980 at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. He spoke from the perspective of his people, the Oglala Lakota, who lived in North America long before the Europeans came. He warns people, specifically his people, to beware of the Marxist alternative to Capitalism, because at the end of the day, both “ism’s” are materialist at their core. Both philosophies see the world as labor, material, and a means of production. Both philosophies use human beings to transform the natural world into products for gain, whether for personal profit or a collective progress. In either philosophy, human beings and the natural world are expendable.

There is an underlying pathology of Western thought that Russell illuminates to get at the root of these materialist philosophies:  De-Spiritualization.

Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say–and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

…

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. 

…

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process.

— Russell Means

Despiritualization is not secularization.  Secularization is a “disassociation or separation from religious or spiritual concerns” (Oxford Languages). One can have a relatively secular worldview and still maintain a sense of reverence, a sense of the sacred regarding the natural world and human life.  Despiritualization is the loss of a that sense. 

In both indigenous and Judeo-Christian traditions, creation flowed from the Spirit. The Torah opens with the story of creation: 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1)

In the Scriptures, the presence of the Spirit is symbolized by a dove. In Genesis  we first see that dove hovering over a formless Earth. It is as if the Spirit paused for a time, in awe of the life that was about to begin and grow upon the Earth. Eons later, human beings’ materialistic mindset and relentless drive for gain laid waste to Earth. We have desecrated the planet. It is as if we shot the dove, the Spirit of God, and watched as her wounded body fell into the sea. 

As Means points out, despiritualization also leads to dehumanization. Once you lose the sense of the sacred towards human beings, anything is possible. Human beings then become expendable fodder in the service of other goals: land acquisition, mineral rights, political power, or just more “breathing room”. 

In modern times, economics prioritized the agenda. The value of human beings,  their laboring ability, was determined by the market:

The Value or Worth of a man is, as of all other things, his Price. —Thomas Hobbes

This materialist, mercantile view of human beings gave rise to slavery. De-spiritualization cleaved the sacred from the human, leaving only economic value. Greed, combined with the European (White) sense of superiority, and the moral cover given by Papal decrees supporting a “Doctrine of Discovery”, resulted in chattel slavery.

Unfortunately, despiritualization led to things even worse than slavery. In the 20th century, dehumanization was used as a pragmatic (utilitarian) political tactic to create a common enemy. It leverages the existing resentments. During the Holocaust, it focused the anti-Semitism that existed across Europe at the time. It then progressed to policy (apartheid, revoking citizenship, rendering people stateless), and finally, according to Hannah Arendt, to “eradicate the [very] concept of the human being”. She goes on to say that once the concept of the human is lost, dehumanization can proceed apace to an industrial scale, so that during the Holocaust, “factories [were built simply] to produce corpses”.

In the case of the Holocaust, the usual and relatively slow stages of destruction (mining, industry, pollution, war, incarceration, and oppression) were skipped to get to the final goal of complete annihilation of a people. But as Russel Means points out, we too are presently struggling to survive against “the very industrial process which is destroying us all”. Carbon pollution, deforestation, and agribusiness are straining the eco-systems upon which we depend. 

It looks as though we are slipping on a banana peel on our way into the abyss. But there is another path: 

“There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth”. — Russell Means

At the margins of Christianity, saints and mystics recovered a sacred regard for creation: 

“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”. —St. Francis of Assisi

The answer to despiritualization is re-spiritualization. We must slow down and look. And not just look, but behold. We need to see again with awe and wonder.

Behold the beauty of creation. 

Behold the Earth, a blue marble in space. 

Behold the water of life on the Earth’s surface. 

Behold the thin blue haze that gives us the breath of life.. 

Behold the auroras that remind us of Earth’s invisible shield. 

Behold the pyramid of life atop which we sit and which we depend. 

It is the balance of cosmic forces that allowed life to be conceived on this planet. It is also the balance of natural forces on Earth, over which we have some control, that allows life to continue. If this balance should be lost, we would pass into oblivion. 

The Scriptures also challenge us towards a sacred regard of human beings.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created them; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

We are of the Spirit. But we are also of the Earth. Re-spiritualization requires that we remember both, for: 

Salvation lives in memory. —Lyle Enright

The COVID epidemic reminds us that humanity and all living things share this planet together. COVID arose from the very life processes we share with all living things. In sickness and in health, the Earth remains our only source of life. 

We need to rekindle empathy for the Earth which “groans in travail” (Romans 8:22) and for each other to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). We have to allow ourselves the space to feel empathy. 

We also must stop and behold the sacred human of our brothers and sisters:

“The brilliant Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), said the only thing that really converts people, the ultimate moral imperative, is “the face of the other.” … When we receive and empathize with the face of the other (especially the suffering face), it leads to transformation of our whole being. It creates a moral demand on our heart that is far more compelling than the Ten Commandments. Just giving people commandments on tablets of stone doesn’t change the heart. It may steel the will, but it doesn’t soften the heart like a personal encounter can.”  — Fr Richard Rohr

If we can behold the beauty and fragility of the Earth and the kindred, human face of the other, we are on the path to recovery of what is sacred. Then we might stop killing the planet and each other.

https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/

[hislittleflower-throughconcrete]

I know that tone is impossible to read on the internet especially since I’m anonymous but I mean this in good faith and with respect: that post you just reblogged grossly oversimplifies the factors which led to the holocaust and is disrespectful to victims of the holocaust

I appreciate how measured and fair this comment was.

Firstly, that post - when I saw it - had a string of reblogs that seemed superfluous (such as people saying “I’m jewish and this is why I hate generalizing groups of people”) and/or that I did not agree with. But those reblogs also helped to hash things out in a little bit more detail. I also know that anything about the holocaust and WWII could never be articulated in a tumblr post with as much detail, balance, and nuance that it deserves. 

The only things I can think of is that you believe it is disrespectful is comparing Jewish people to white people or rich people, or to compare Antifa groups to the mentality of the Nazi party. The post does not say the holocaust is happening again to rich, white people, that Antifa will put those people in camps, or that those people are suffering like holocaust victims. It says that generalization of groups of people, combined with toxic beliefs that “the other” is evil for simply belonging to that group, are toxic and wrong. Nevertheless, that sentiment (while true) is not the reason I reblogged the post in the first place.

I believe very strongly that no person is or has ever been evil (or perfect), and that painting people as one dimensional demons (or angels) in history prevents people from learning from past events and leads to the repetition of the same bad attitudes, beliefs, and decisions. I’ve had a five paragraph (okay, maybe 10 paragraph) essay rattling around in my head for a long time about that, but haven’t written it because life keeps getting in the way. The “thesis statement,” if you will, is that abortion, its proponents, its opposition, those who know what it is and does and those that don’t, and those who don’t give a damn, strongly mirror human injustices that have happened in the past, but because of the black and white portrayal of history, no one can identify with the “bad” side -those guys are “evil” and “inhuman”, right? I’m not evil. I have emotions and hopes and dreams, I love others. I believe that this thing is right, and my reasons for it being right are rooted in the desire to do good. How could I be on the wrong side of history or humanity then? Well, because history is often taught like a bedtime story, with heroes and villains. Even when told “objectively” (can anything be told truly objectively, especially textbooks marketed to public schools? I digress) one sees the actions and the results of those actions - not the humanity for all people involved, or the reasons that rattled around in their brains, how they justified their actions to themselves, and the messiness of everything. Usually one point of view is told, and it is of the “good guys” analyzing ~those~ guys, those evil creatures who killed countless jewish people or abused and treated slaves like property. Kids in classrooms internalize that they are the good guys, and it’s reinforced by the fact that they can’t identify with the bad guys because bad guys aren’t painted like normal people who love their mom, try their best to make a positive change in the world, care about the environment and would stick their neck out for a friend. If more people realized that they could be the “bad guy” portrayed in history books 200 years from now, even though they are not inherently evil and just believe incorrect things and make decisions based on those erroneous beliefs, that would be revolutionary. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Sorry for my ramble, because I’m sure that that aspect of the post was the last thing to jump out at you, but that’s why I reblogged it. Please let me know if I didn’t address your concerns. TL;DR I don’t believe that in 10 years Bill Gates will be in a concentration camp, or that Kim Kardashian has it as hard as holocaust victims. I just care about people thinking critically about their beliefs, decisions, and morality.

[aion-rsa]

Gina Carano Was Fired from The Mandalorian, But Should Cara Dune Live On?

https://ift.tt/2N0IeiI

Gina Carano deserved to be fired from The Mandalorian after months of posting dangerous online rhetoric that goes against everything Star Wars should stand for. After Carano used her Twitter bio to mock the common practice of users listing preferred pronouns, denying the gravity of the Covid-19 pandemic, posting election fraud conspiracy theories, refusing to show support for Black Lives Matter, and implying that being a right-wing conservative today was like being a Jewish person during the Holocaust, Disney finally did the right thing.

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” read her now-deleted Tik Tok post.

While Carano did return for The Mandalorian season 2, which wrapped just before the Covid lockdowns that seemingly triggered the actor’s toxic views on social media, Disney decided that it had seen enough. In a statement released on Wednesday night, a spokesperson for Disney said that Carano’s “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” The spokesperson also confirmed that Carano “is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” effectively putting an end to her time on The Mandalorian and Star Wars. Deadline also confirmed that Carano and her agency UTA have parted ways.

Two days later, Carano doubled down, announcing a new movie project with alt-right pundit Ben Shapiro’s conservative website The Daily Wire. She will develop, produce, and star in the movie, which will release exclusively to the site’s members, according to Deadline. Carano dubiously framed her next move as “a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob.”

But while Carano may see herself as a rebel fighting for the right to claim “freedom of speech” no matter how hateful or downright false her posts, there are also plenty of Star Wars fans who are relieved to see her jettisoned from the universe they love. While Disney should still be held accountable for how it failed John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, actors of color who faced racist attacks upon being cast in the Sequel Trilogy, and who were sidelined as the trilogy progressed, the company has done a much better job of late of showing where it stands on the issues. The company stood in support of The High Republic show host Krystina Arielle after she faced similar attacks. By firing Carano, Disney and Lucasfilm have taken a clear stance not only against bigotry but the kind of dangerous rhetoric that has become pervasive among a small but loud minority of the fandom (although I’d hardly call them actual “fans”).

THR learned from a source close to Lucasfilm that the studio had been “looking for a reason to fire her for two months” and that Carano’s Holocaust post was “the final straw.” According to the outlet, Lucasfilm had previously planned to have Carano star in her own Mandalorian spinoff, potentially Rangers of the New Republic, and considered making the announcement during its investor’s day event in December before that idea was scrapped due to her social media posts.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Does Carano’s firing mean that this is the end of her character’s time in Star Wars? While the end of Cara Dune’s storyline in The Mandalorian season 2 teased that there would be more to her journey as a mercenary turned New Republic marshal, for the moment, that adventure seems to have been cut short. That said, some fans are already wondering whether Cara’s life in the galaxy far, far away could continue without Carano.

A few people on Twitter have suggested that the character should simply be recast, with Lucy Lawless already positioned as a frontrunner among fans. The Xena: Warrior Princess and Battlestar Galactica actor and activist would be more than a suitable replacement for Carano and the kind of talent the Star Wars brand should want to work with. Not to mention that Lawless would bring the energy, grit, and physicality needed to play a tough-as-carbonite brawler like Cara.

Let's make #LucyLawless the new and improved #CaraDune! #TheMandalorian @Jon_Favreau @dave_filoni pic.twitter.com/xuqqM3SOea

— 𝕂ℝ𝕀𝕊𝕋𝕀𝔸ℕ 𝕆𝔻𝕃𝔸ℕ𝔻 (@kreshjun) February 11, 2021

But as nice as it is to dream of Lawless or another fan-favorite performer taking on the role of Cara Dune and continuing her story, Star Wars has traditionally been averse to recasting its characters to the point where the franchise would rather paste a questionable CGI version of Mark Hamill’s face on another actor’s head than cast someone new to play a younger Luke Skywalker. (Sebastian Stan, for example.)

Not that Lucasfilm hasn’t tried recasting before, such as when it brought on Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover to play pre-Original Trilogy versions of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story, but that movie was a box office failure for the studio. While there are many reasons why that film failed, a few fans might tell you it’s because Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams weren’t in it. If history tells us anything, it’s that there’s a section of this fandom that does not like change.

That’s not to say Disney should go out of its way to pander to viewers who are resistant to change. Big franchises like Star Wars need to embrace change to stay fresh and better reflect audiences. And Disney certainly shouldn’t prioritize people who would be mad if anyone but Carano played Dune on The Mandalorian or Rangers of the New Republic. My point is that Disney would likely save itself a lot of grief by not doing anything else with the character at all. There’s no doubt that the path of least resistance for Disney would be to phase out the character completely, giving her a quiet off-screen exit, perhaps coupled with some brief exposition in season 3 regarding where she went. Done.

Is that fair to Cara Dune and the fans who see themselves in her? Cara quickly became a fan-favorite after her debut on the Star Wars live-action series as a fierce gun-for-hire who’s not quite a hero and is as prone to violence as Din Djarin but who will ultimately choose to do what’s right. Many have lauded Cara for the ways she breaks away from the “traditional mold” of female Star Wars characters who have come before, both in terms of her morally gray motivations and her buff appearance, which, as fans of The Last of Us II‘s Abby will tell you, remains a rarity in our entertainment.

Read more

TV

How The Mandalorian Gave Fans a Different Kind of Star Wars Story

By Lacy Baugher

TV

Why The Mandalorian Was Always Destined to Meet Luke Skywalker

By Ryan Britt

Unlike Leia, Cara is a former Rebel shock trooper from Alderaan who didn’t immediately fall in line with the New Republic, preferring the chaos and danger of living in the Outer Rim than joining up with the new galactic government, which she felt wasn’t doing enough to quell the ever-present threat of the Empire that had destroyed her home planet. She preferred to brawl in cantinas and make her own way in the galaxy sans an official allegiance or badge, a lifestyle rarely lived by Star Wars‘ women — at least on screen. (In that way, Cara has much more in common with breakout Marvel comic book character Doctor Aphra.)

Sure, some of these traits began to change, but the show took its time developing Cara’s character, and by the time she did join the Republic’s law forces in the Outer Rim, it was after she’d witnessed many of the atrocities committed by what was left of the Empire. And even with the badge, she did some things on her own terms, like helping Mando and friends rescue Grogu from Moff Gideon.

To many, Cara has been a unique character worth following for years to come, whether it be on more seasons of The Mandalorian or in an eventual spinoff. Fans could perhaps still get that opportunity off-screen were Lucasfilm to continue Cara’s story in the books or comics, as it has with many other characters for over 40 years. It might just take some waiting.

But the mere fact that many fans want to see Cara’s story continue without the toxic presence of the actor who originally brought her to life is a testament to the power of the character herself. Like the best Star Wars characters, Cara seems to have staying power, and perhaps she deserves to outlive Gina Carano’s time with the franchise.

To The Mandalorian‘s credit, there are many other great female characters to look forward to on the show, including Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff), Koska Reeves (Mercedes Varnado), and Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), who will actually star in The Book of Boba Fett later this year. (Please bring back Frog Lady, too.) They’re fantastic characters with their own motivations and stories, and I’d love to see more of them in season 3, but not all female characters are interchangeable and the other women in The Mandalorian’s world cannot replace Cara’s unique contributions to the show. They cannot simply “fill a spot” left behind by the last female hero, a character who was one of our first introductions on the show.

There’s perhaps no obviously right answer or course of action when things are still so raw and production is moving quickly on the next year of Star Wars stories. Does keeping Cara in Star Wars also ultimately mean that Lucasfilm is acknowledging Carano’s legacy with the franchise? Maybe. But should a great character that people look up to and relate to be allowed to exist beyond the bad decisions of an actor or its creator? Probably.

We only know this for sure: if you never see Cara Dune again in Star Wars, you only really have Gina Carano to blame.

The post Gina Carano Was Fired from The Mandalorian, But Should Cara Dune Live On? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[revlyncox]

No Human Being is Illegal on Stolen Land

This address was written for the Washington Ethical Society for indigenous People’s Day Sunday, October 11, 2020, by Lyn Cox. 

One of the things I notice about the values expressed in the story, “Grandmother Spider Brings the Light,” is that none of the characters attempt to keep the sun for themselves. In this legend, we are entering a paradigm in which the basic necessities of life are shared freely. In the world of the story, members of the community are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of all. The warmth of the sun is something that would be ridiculous to hoard. Part of the sun’s worth comes from the way it shines on the whole community, and the way in which the whole community works together in response. Each character makes suggestions and participates in the work, and even the setbacks give the whole community something to learn from. Proximity to raw power leaves its mark on some, and this is another reason to take turns. In the world of the story, people understand that their well being is bound up together.

These values stand in sharp contrast to the values brought to this continent by European conquest and colonization. The colonization mindset is still a strong current in United States law, policy, and culture. The assumptions of colonization influence ideas and customs about property ownership, the scale of impact of moral choices, and what it means to be an American. The way we understand class, race, education, the use of force in civil society, and so much more is tangled up in the mindset of colonization. Among the urgent issues arising from these roots is that of immigration justice. The way we understand who is welcome in our communities and how we demonstrate that is filtered through the assumptions of colonization. Justice for Indigenous people is one aspect of the project of dismantling systemic racism. Economic justice is an aspect of dismantling systemic racism. Immigration justice is an aspect of dismantling systemic racism.

The abstract concepts can be dizzying when we first become aware of the connections between all of the issues that bring suffering and division in our society. Today’s Address has a lot of history and facts, and we’ll put out a document with references and links after Platform. We might begin by focusing on our relationships, and on understanding that our interrelatedness extends beyond our immediate circles. We show up for our neighbors because of our common humanity, because we are connected in community, and because our liberation is bound up together. We work to understand how the myths of colonization have affected our minds so that we can clear away the obstacles to rich and full relationships with all of our neighbors and loved ones.

The impact of injustice for Indigenous people and for immigrants is closer to home for some of us than others; WES includes people from a variety of backgrounds. When we add just one degree further to include the consequences for our spouses, children, and close loved ones, many of us have a very personal view of the effects of systemic racism in affairs related to Indigenous communities, in policies toward immigrant communities, and in a variety of government actions that fall especially heavily on people of color. If it’s not you or someone in your immediate inner circle who is impacted by any given manifestation of systemic racism, it is almost certainly a friend in this Zoom room or someone close to them. Shifting our priorities to be rooted in love means remembering that threats to Indigenous sovereignty, cruelty and abuse in our immigration system, out-of-control policing that destroys lives in favor of property, all of these things affect specific human beings-- people we care about.

Indeed, the very assertion that the people we care about are human beings, with human rights -- people who deserve dignity and self-determination -- flies in the face of colonization. So let’s step back a bit and look at the roots of that philosophy.

In her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the roots of the European mindset of conquest back to the Crusades, heading into the Inquisition and to the enclosure of public lands in the 1600s. She writes that the privatization of the common lands, creating a permanent underclass of landless poor, was both an expression of the trend in European conquest and also one of its mechanisms. “The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their descendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry.”  In essence, what happened with enclosure was to more deeply codify the idea that a few people mattered but most didn’t, and that property mattered more than the majority of people.

Meanwhile the Crusades, which was an attempt to take control of lucrative trades routes, also brought new avenues for oppression. Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us that this period brought us the papal law of limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood, beginning in 1449. Clean blood referred to ancestry that was exclusively Christian. So, in other words, even converting to Christianity did not bring legal equality to those whose ancestors were Jewish or Muslim. Some people are more important than others. Only some people are really human.

It is not an accident that this is the same period of history that brought the Doctrine of Discovery. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V decreed that so-called Christian nations had permission for the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian territories and peoples. This became a cornerstone of international law. In 1823, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the discovery rights of European sovereigns had been transferred to the new United States. Indigenous ways need not be respected, according to the Supreme Court in 1823.

Some people are more important than others. Only some people are really people. And who gets to be a human being, who gets to have human rights, is inextricably tied with the thirst for wealth and the desire of conquering nations to extract resources and labor from land and people not their own.

These are not natural laws. These are not ethics that are universal for all people. Civilizations all over the world have shown that other ways are possible, ways built on mutual relationship and community thriving. But the baseline assumptions of conquest helped make all of the misery of colonization possible. These baseline assumptions fed the lies that justified the enslavement of human beings, generation to generation, because the extraction of wealth for the few was more important than the human rights of the many.

We can plainly see the destruction that this worldview brought to all of the places that were targeted for conquest. But it wasn’t done destroying lives in Europe, either. There may have been periods of uneasy peace, when it seemed like enlightenment might eventually bring liberation to all, or at least to all who could be admitted to European universities. But the bargain was still built on inequality, and in times when there was land or wealth to be gained by the few, or in times when scarcity arrived and the ruling class needed someone to blame, the illusion fell apart. Felix Adler, educated in Germany in the 1870s, absorbed the hope that it was possible for people to regard one another as full human beings. But the powers of division had been dug too deeply. The legacy of dehumanization was still there, and the horrors of World War I and World War II showed that, once again, only some people were regarded as human.

It has been observed that the phrase “illegal immigrant” was not in popular use until World War II, and it was first used to describe Jewish refugees. You may recall that the potential arrival of these refugees in the United States led to another layer of racism and cruelty in U.S. immigration policy, on top of the racism and cruelty in laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. The attempt to keep out Jewish and Eastern European refugees, based on concepts of race rooted in blood, brought immigration quotas to carefully control who was allowed in. Having no place to go, those subject to Nazi persecution were tortured and slaughtered. It was this experience that led Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to coin the phrase that makes first half of the title of this Platform, “No human being is illegal.”

Wiesel said, “Know that no human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”

Yet, in 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice instructed U.S. Attorney offices to refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens.” Immigration attorney Shahid Haque-Hausrath explains that this term is used to “dehumanize immigrants and divorce [us] from thinking of them as human beings.”

Are we clear how we got here? Are we clear about how the dehumanization of Indigenous people, the dehumanization of people who were enslaved, and the dehumanization of immigrants and refugees, even unto this day, are all related? When it benefits the few to exploit people and land and all of our relations in order to extract wealth, that system rests on the idea that only some of us are humans, only some of us are worthy, only some of us deserve human rights. There are lies that are told to make it seem like some of us have provisional worth, conditional humanity; lies that try to entice us to help maintain this system -- lies such as purity of blood, or the superiority of the Euro-American definition of civilization, or that scarcity comes from the arrival of other poor people rather than from rich people hoarding wealth.

We need to untangle all of it so that we can remember that we are in relationship with each other. Colonization has been part of Western civilization for so long, it has infected our minds and hearts. Few of us are immune from subtle messages about the worth or lack of worthiness of people, especially people who do not contribute to wealth as it is commonly measured.

Our liberation is bound up together. Like the people in the story, “Grandmother Spider Brings the Light,” we can operate with a different mindset, one of collective well-being and shared wisdom. To get there, we will need to re-think our assumptions about the way people are permitted to live and move in the world.

That brings us back to re-thinking the rules and customs around us, a network of assumptions that rests on colonization. Basing the United States legal system on the belief that Indigenous forms of government were and are not valid and that Indigenous value systems were and are inferior meant that the treaty rights and governmental systems of sovereign Indigenous nations have not been respected. If we take Indigenous sovereignty seriously, different solutions become evident.

When we consider the issues of immigration justice, to take one example, many assume that the United States government is the only entity that can determine who remains within and who is expelled from this territory between Millinocket, Maine, and San Diego, California, let alone the territories currently known as Alaska and Hawaii. Elizabeth Ellis, Assistant Professor at New York University and a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, questions this paradigm. She writes:

“If we reposition ourselves, and think about migration not as American citizens, as documented or undocumented, but as settlers who have built lives and identities on Indigenous lands, and often at the expense of Indigenous peoples, this conversation looks very different.”

She goes on to say: “In articulating support for these critical [immigration] reforms, many typically appeal to humanitarian sympathy and visions of a modern world that provide all humans with the right to migration and citizenship. Yet we often forget that Native people have been fighting the United States’ efforts to carve borders into their homelands and territories for centuries and, in many ways, we have come to see exclusionary borders as a natural and normal state of international relations. In this context, then, including Native people [in the conversation] both bolsters challenges to US borders and provides alternative models of relationality and nationhood that may help us reimagine solutions to our current humanitarian crisis.”

Ellis gives a number of historical examples and contemporary applications in her full article. We’ll send out a link after Platform to a document with all of the links related to today’s Address.

Remembering that we are all related, then, we include immigration justice and supporting Indigenous sovereignty among our action plans for anti-racism and anti-oppression. As we heard in the reading that Karen shared, we can think of this in terms of restitution, in addition to being simply ethical and in right relationship with a goal for the common good. Not every person can do everything, yet we can coordinate in this community and with our community partners to embrace the whole circumference of the ethical manifold. We do this not simply out of compassion, but with recognition that another world is possible, a world of right relationship, and we hope to live into that world to make it as real as possible as soon as possible.

This Indigenous People’s Day weekend, there are two action items that might interest you. There is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, “The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States,” which aims to help us come to terms with the atrocities committed against Indigenous children and their families through boarding schools. Contact whoever will listen to you in the U.S. House of Representatives to let them know your thoughts on this bill. There is a lot of history to unpack, and this is a place to start. While you’ve got the attention of your favorite Member of Congress, you can ask them about the Native American Voting Rights Act. Indigenous voters are subject to many of familiar voter suppression tactics, such as reduced polling places and interrupted mail service. Check out the Lakota People’s Law project for more information on both of those. https://www.lakotalaw.org/

I asked R. of WES’s Immigration Justice Team for some other ideas about how we can work together toward collective liberation. R. reminded me of the Food Justice Initiative, which is connected with Sanctuary DMV. The Food Justice Initiative is a “systemic program rooted in justice” that helps immigrant families, regardless of immigration status, access mutual aid in the form of food and other necessities. Keep in mind that the COVID relief bill blocked aid to families in which any person in the household is undocumented. The Food Justice Initiative (article in the Post) gives us a chance to stay in touch with our neighbors and the needs they identify for themselves.

WES’s Immigration Justice Team has also been monitoring the situation of Binsar Siahaan (article in the Post), who was snatched from his faith community, Glenmont United Methodist Church, when ICE showed up and lied about the purpose of their visit. WES members may recall your past support of Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, who has been living in sanctuary at Cedar Lane UU congregation. R. points out that the strong organization of the Sanctuary team at Cedar Lane made it much more difficult for ICE to try the kind of underhanded tactics that they used to arrest Binsar, and that community support makes a tremendous difference. If you are on WES’s Immigration Justice action email list, stay tuned for possible actions we can take to support Binsar and help him return to his family.

R. told me, “Doing support work changes you as it changes the world. You meet people who are not anything like you, from different races, classes, faiths and world-views. It is the antidote to helplessness in the time of neo-fascism, as well. There are so many opportunities to join in.” He said WES members have written letters, gathered materials and funds, and attended vigils. The work is ongoing.

Humanism, to me, is a worldview in which we seek human solutions to human problems. And most problems are human problems; the few problems that are facts of the natural world are made exponentially worse by human choices to favor greed and selfishness over the recognition of our interrelatedness. Intellectual rigor and a humanist outlook lead us to dismantle the fallacies that undergird conquest and colonization; to note clearly the common roots of injustice affecting Indigenous peoples, people of color, and immigrants; and to turn toward right relationship in our thinking and in our practice. Let us remember that we are all related, and that our liberation is bound up together. So be it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boing Boing Charitable Giving Guide 2019

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. Please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!

Friends of the Merril Collection I'm on the board of the charity that fundraises for Toronto's Merril Collection, a part of the Toronto Public Library system that is also the world's largest public collection of science fiction, fantasy and related works (they archive my papers). Since its founding by Judith Merril, the Merril Collection has been a hub for creators, fans, and scholars. I wouldn't be a writer today if not for the guidance of its Writer in Residence when I was a kid. —CD

The Tor Project The Tor anonymity and privacy tools are vital to resistance struggles around the world, a cooperative network that provides a high degree of security from scrutiny for people who have reasons to fear the powers that be. From our early hominid ancestors until about ten years ago, humans didn't leave behind an exhaust-trail of personally identifying information as they navigated the world -- Tor restores that balance. —CD

Planned Parenthood Because we deserve health care, including reproductive, gender, and sexual health care. Because access to birth control and safe abortion is a human right. Because Trump's regime wants to destroy all of this. —XJ

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy does the important, boring, esoteric work of keeping the internet from tearing itself to pieces, playing host organization to free software projects like Git, Selenium and Samba (to name just three). The Conservancy keeps these projects legally sound and gives them a scaffold to hang their institutional structures on them. Without the Conservancy, the software you love and depend on would be in dire peril.

Electronic Frontier Foundation I have been proudly associated with EFF for a decade an a half now and have watched, half-awed, as it grew from a scrappy, brilliant little organization to a powerhouse of enormous scale and power. Every cause, every fight enumerated on this page and in your life and mine will be lost or won on the internet. EFF is the best hope we have of keeping that internet free, fair and open. —CD, MF

Creative Commons Creative Commons is best known as a tool for sharing-friendly artists, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning, and all over the world, CC has provided governments, agencies, research and scholarly institutions and NGOs with the tools to easily share across borders and the bewildering array of copyright laws. We can't beat trumpism without collaboration tools, and that includes legal tools. —CD

Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) For 16 years, Wikipedia has been figuring out how to negotiate truth among diverse and even warring points of view. It's not always pretty and it's not always nice, but no one's yet found a better way to let ideas bash against each other until something everyone agrees upon emerges. It's not pretty, but compared to our democracy, it's a beauty queen. —CD, KS

Human Rights Data Analysis Group For more than twenty-five years, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has used data and statistical analysis to hold accountable the perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. HRDAG is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that provides rigorous quantitative evidence for trials, truth commissions, UN Missions, and human rights monitors around the world. In 2019, HRDAG estimated the number of women held as sexual slaves by Japanese authorities in World War Two; the number of people disappeared in the final three days of the Sri Lankan civil war; and the number of people killed in drug-related violence by the police and other perpetrators in the Philippines. In the US, HRDAG critiqued the growing use of machine learning in the US criminal justice system, especially those used in place of bail to determine who should be released while awaiting trial. HRDAG's analysis has shown that machine learning can amplify biases in criminal justice data, for example by worsening racial disparities in policing. Other ongoing HRDAG projects include research on mass violence in the Philippines, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and several confidential projects in the US and abroad . —CD

Institute for the Future There are no facts about the future, only fictions. As we've learned in this crazy political season, nothing is certain about tomorrow. But even as our attention is captured by the present, we can begin to write the story to come. A place to start is the Institute for the Future's Future for Good fellowship. Institute for the Future, where Mark and David are researchers, is a 50-year-old nonprofit that helps the public think about the future to make better decisions in the present. The Fellowship directly supports inspiring social innovators who are working to make tomorrow a better place. You can help too. Make a donation of $100 and you’ll receive IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen's new book "The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything." —DP, MF

The National Wildlife Federation National Wildlife Federation is a voice for wildlife, dedicated to protecting wildlife and habitat and inspiring the future generation of conservationists. Now's the time: for the people currently in charge of U.S. policy, the cruelty is the point. —RB

The Marine Mammal Center When seals, sea lion, or many other sea going pals need help, if they get lucky, they may be taken to The Marine Mammal Center, a veterinary hospital just for them. Thousands of heartbreakingly cute, but very wild, animals are rescued, rehabilitated and released on an annual basis. I'm a volunteer. In addition to the hundreds of highly trained volunteers that make the hospital run, the center always needs cash for fish and medicine. —JW

Winn Feline Foundation The Winn Feline Foundation advances feline health by supporting research and education. Winn has funded over $6.4 million in health research for cats at more than 30 partner institutions worldwide. Current campaigns include funding for research on Chronic Kidney Disease, a condition estimated to affect more than 50% of senior cats. —KS

The Southern Poverty Law Center & the Anti-Defamation League The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defemation League fight hate, teach tolerance, and help secure justice, and fair treatment for all. "There is no 'them' and 'us.' There is only us." --Greg Boyle —JW

Facing History and Ourselves Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational group that helps young people study issues around racism, antisemitism, and prejudice in history, from the Holocaust to today's immigrant experiences to the killing fields of Cambodia. Their aim is to teach young people "to think critically, to empathize, to recognize moral choices, to make their voices heard, we put in their hands the possibility--and the responsibility--to do the serious work demanded of us all as citizens." —DP

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design The Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free. —CD

Free Software Foundation Europe Software has eaten the world, and software freedom is increasingly synonymous with human freedom. In Europe, far-right parties and authoritarians are inheriting a constellation of gadgets and devices that are "defective by design," built to allow corporations spy on and control their owners -- and those thugs are contemplating how they can use those companies' extraordinary powers to put whole populations under their thumbs. Free software in Europe, free software everywhere! —CD

The Internet Archive: In an era where the control of information has been weaponized, the Internet Archive's mission -- universal access to all human knowledge -- is a revolutionary manifesto. The Archive has taken on a new mission: to re-decentralize the internet and restore it to its indie, distributed glory. —CD

Open Rights Group The UK's answer to Electronic Frontier Foundation, and never more badly needed than now, with authoritarianism on the rise and the constant battering of the electorate with political misadventures and grandstanding. Brexit could allow the UK to escape the oversight of the European courts, paving the way for even-more-extreme measures. —CD

Amnesty International I just looked up Amnesty's founding principles and found tears rolling down my cheeks: "Only when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world’s people, will our work be done." These values need our support more than ever. —CD

ACLU On November 9, 2016 ACLU changed its homepage to a picture of Trump superimposed with the words SEE YOU IN COURT. ACLU's deep bench of kick-ass lawyers has been lately augmented by a much-needed group of freedom-fighting technologists, welded into the fighting force we'll need until the next election and beyond: from voter suppression to free speech, the ACLU is key to the fight. —CD, MF

Liberty With the UK plunging into surveillance dystopia where human rights are an afterthought and racial profiling is becoming official doctrine, it needs Liberty, an organisation with 80+ years' track record fighting for human rights in many incarnations of the British project. The Tories ran on a platform of repealing the Human Rights Act: when the government is officially anti "human rights," you need someone like Liberty to take the "pro" side. —CD

826 National Born in San Francisco’s Mission District in the back room of a pirate supply store, 826 National teaches young people the art and magic of creative writing through classes, DIY publishing projects, in-school programs, and drop-in tutoring at seven centers around the US. And it’s all free for the kids. Help open more 826 locations around the country! —DP

Fight for the Future Some of the Internet's savviest, hard-working-est activists. Fight for the Future has kept hope alive for Net Neutrality, leading the charge to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the FCC's Neutrality-killing sneak attack. —CD

Demand Progress Aaron Swartz co-founded Demand Progress, and as you'd expect from that history, they're relentless in reinventing the activist playbook for the 21st century. —CD

MySociety Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers. —CD

https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/charitablegivingguide2019.html

[sunflowerbloomss]

Hi! I've seen your post about Unorthodox. As a person who is not Jewish I wanted to search for opinions about this show here on tumblr to get to know different points of views, especially from Jewish people. Then I found your post and a few other posts. Many of them were criticising the show for using the "escape from the cult" trope. Yours was rather positive. Those people said that it's making Hasidic people look bad and that it's ignorant. What's your take on this?

hello!!! i actually have a lot to say about this so bear with me for a sec. my tl;dr is basically that the “escape from the cult” trope is always bound to showing “the cult” in the worst way possible, while on unorthodox the only person with bad motives from the community is moishe.

i’ll start by saying that the hasidic community they’re talking about is satmar, which is located in brooklyn and has many of the “rules” (for a lack of a better english word i know) that are presented in the series. they didn’t state the name in the series because they would sue their asses, but keep in mind that we’re talking about one of the most strict hasidic communities there are in the world. i am not as familiar with the subject as i would like to be, but i know names of a few hasidic communities and approximately how strict they are (though it’s complicated). satmar are known for leading a pretty strict way of life. when i told my mom i’m watching a show about a girl running away from satmar, she said “yeah, well, with them, the only way out is running of suicide”. (keep in mind that my mom really doesn’t like religion). so, generally - we’re talking about a very strict community that is known for being so strict.

now, to the series - i don’t think  they’re showing the community esty runs from to be a cult. i think that when we see esty “following the rules” she’s happy even after she runs she still loves her community. when things are not getting complicated for her - and even when they only start to - esty is still happy. she’s married and she has her family and she’s doing the things she loves. she realises she doesn’t belong there when she understands she has to give up the things she loves to do things she doesn’t love because “that’s the way it is”. when she gives up her piano lessons to go to this woman who tries to teach her how to have sex, when she forces herself to have sex even though she doesn’t want to, when she realises she has to live with yanky for the rest of her life even though she wants to go back to her grandmother’s house for a bit. this is where things start to get complicated for her - when she has to do the things she doesn’t want to do.

that’s when she decides to run. that’s when she thinks she can’t do this anymore, becuase she doesn’t like the idea of doing things simply because she must. now, here’s the time to stop and get back to reality again. i believe some of the criticism is about the fact that the series shows esty “having” to do things she doesn’t want to do to make hasidic communities look bad and sexist. i do not know personally someone who came from a hasidic communities (and frankly, i’m too lazy to google it) but i do know religious and haredi jewish people, and i’ll tell you this - from my personal experience and from many different people’s personal experiences, the more religious you are the more it’s okay for you to be sexist. this is a huge generalization, but i’ll say that orthodox jewish communities have a sexism problem (just like many other communities, yeah? i’m just saying that for our own discussion). i can talk a lot about sexism and judaism, but i’ll shorten this huge essay to this - ignoring the ways orthodox jewish communities use the bible and the rules of judaism to justify and amplify their oppression of women is also a problem. we don’t like to talk about it, because then we feel like we portray judaism as bad, but imo not talking about it or trying to soften it is unfair to every woman who gets beaten down by it. so i think showing the community pushing esty to have children and listen to her husband is not only okay but important. that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about other good things that happen in religious communities, but if we decide to talk about orthodox judaism we have to talk about this. imo it was very well done.

anyway, back to the story - so esty decides to leave. and she doesn’t tell anyone about it, because she knows they wouldn’t let her go if she would. how does she know that? she sees how much they despise anyone who decides to leave. this is also something that is important to represent about hasidic communities (and also about any orthodox communities, the more religious they are the importance of representing it grows) - they don’t like it when people leave. sometimes it’s because they’re afraid some things that are secret about their community would get to other people who are not part of it and then the community would lose it secrecy (which can be both good and bad, if you’d ask me). once again i don’t know a lot of stories regarding different hasidic communities (and every one of them is so different so the stories would be different) but i know many stories of people from religious and haredi communities who told their family they don’t want to be religious anymore, and their family had abandoned them. my disclaimer is that there are in fact some stories about those who are still in great touch with their family, and that they visit on holidays and so, but there are many stories about people who end up losing their family because they didn’t want this type of life anymore and the family couldn’t agree to that. (there are also many stories like this about families disowning gay kids in the name of the bible, but that’s for a different show). so anyway - the community wanting esty back even though it’s clear that she doesn’t want to go back to them is not portraying them as a cult. it’s pretty realistic imo.

and hey, she never says that she ran because she hates them and that she wants “to take this cult down” (which is a very important thing in the “escape from the cult” trope). she said she left because “i didn’t fit in there”. she didn’t try to take with her anyone, she didn’t try to “save” anyone from her community. if this show had really taken the road of showing hasidic communities as a cult, esty would’ve tried to take her aunt and grandma with her. she didn’t.

another thing that is important is how the only person from the community who is supposed to be unlikeable all through the series is moishe. now, i have something to say about this. there is a chance it’s by chance, there is a chance it’s just because how this turned out, but moishe - the character we’re supposed to hate - is the only character from the community (who isn’t esty or her mom) which “enjoys” sins. we have him betting (forbidden), and even though i think it’s not forbidden we have him taking yanky to a strip clup with him, which isn’t something i believe the community would look at as happily. moishe, then, is a character that sins both in the religion and in morals. he scares esty and he breaks into her mom’s house, he constantly lies to yanky just because he wants to. looking at all the characters who stayed in the community, the only one the audience is supposed to dislike is moishe. we’re supposed to like yanky, because he just wants to bring esty back; we’re supposed to like the grandmother, because she feels bad that both her daughter and her granddaughter left the community; we’re supposed to like the aunt, because she cares so much about esty and she doesn’t really know what to do.

so, really, after all that, we’ve come to the conclusion that the community esty comes from is shown both positively and negatively. the criticism isn’t there just because the director wanted the viewer to hate everything esty came from - it’s there because it’s important to show the negative sides of strict communities. we’re only supposed to dislike one character - moishe - who is someone we probably should’ve disliked even in another show, at a different time. 

i do want to say something about yael, since she’s the only representation of secular judaism in this show and imo her character is fantastic. as i said on one of my posts - i hate her guts, but i love her character. she’s the representation of the secular judaism, and when we see her from esty’s pov we see just how many things she does are not to many people’s liking. when esty says “my parents lost their whole families in the holocaust” and she replies “so did half of israel” we can understand how for her it’s not as a big deal as it is to esty. she talks about hasidic people the way this series is blamed for showing them - “they’re nuts, the men study the torah every day and the women are baby machines”. if this series truly would’ve wanted to show this pov (which would think esty escaped a cult) we would conclude that yael is right. but she’s not, and it’s something we see a lot in the show.

this is long and this concludes to the point that i don’t think this show uses a trope of “escaping the cult”. it clearly has criticism about the hasidic community, which is pretty justified in my opinion, but it’s not seen as a cult. i would also like to mention that this series is based on a book by a woman who also left the satmar community. i haven’t read it so idk how accurate to her story the series is, but the themes are first and foremost introduced here by someone who actually lived there.

this was long and if you’ve actually read all of this i’m really happy!! i hope this is good enough of an answer. kinda messy and i probably forgot a few things, but my main point stands. i do get however why there are people who don’t like this show, but i personally think it’s very well done, so. yeah. that’s all