#its very obvious that like. this is very moralized western christian thinking

[theghostiedyke]

Also they fully said there were multiple posts and undeniable proof of "weird" behavior around rape/incest/pedophilia. Half of the callout posts about popular transwomen on this site are the same out of context screenshots?

Also weirdo behavior to accuse one side of defaulting to marginalized identities to mask any wrongdoings but then. Literally doing just that.

obsessed with fluorosensitive making ANOTHER post about how youre "a danger to the community" but saying its not transmisogyny to say this because "most of the people saying it are black and trans". not even having the nuts to pretend that there are any trans women agreeing with them

Yeah it’s always funny seeing another person I’ve never heard of ring the alarm bells about I’m endangering “the community.” Like girl what community are we in together I don’t know you 😭

It’s also always silly when they realize they don’t have a solid foundation for their little crusade so they go “if I say my side has more people of color than the other side, it means I’ll be immune to criticism.” It’s such a weird cynical form of tokenizing that doesn’t even have a basis most times because it’s just going “well I probably have more black mutuals.” Like girl I don’t think you will if you act like this 💀

Shoutout to the one person who sent me hate anons about how it’s only white women reblogging my transmisogyny posts and when I asked what their basis for that was they said it was because a lot of my followers have anime profile pictures lmao.

Some people on here are just so weird and don’t know how to have normal conflict. When I hate someone I’m just straightforwardly mean, you don’t need to twist yourself into pretzels trying to find a way to make your disgust for women somehow ideologically pure

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Katharine Birbalsingh: The first point is that everyone had slaves. Okay, people of all colors became slaves. For economic reasons, because of war. Because slavery, as odious as it was, was simply a normal way of life.

Arabs were extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did, for about 13 centuries, compared to the three centuries European nations ran the Atlantic slave trade. Arabs marched African slaves across the Sahara Desert, and as such, they died more often. It was customary to castrate them and many died from this practice. The Arabs also enslaved over 1 million white European Christians.

The term slavery in fact comes from the word Slav. The Slavs inhabited Eastern Europe and were taken by the Muslims of Spain in the ninth century. Not to mention that Africans have been enslaving each other for thousands of years.

The second point is that slavery was not about race, and it's important. It was not about race. The only reason we think it's about race is because philosophers like David Hume in the 18th century ranked human beings and put Africans at the bottom, saying that they had no souls. The Enlightenment imposed the concept of race on a practice that had been going on for centuries in order to justify that practice. And why did they have to justify it? And this is the point. Because people in the West began to question slavery's moral validity.

The fact is the people of all colors owned slaves. Both as part of the Atlantic slave trade and outside of it. In the United States and Caribbean, black people - black people - owned thousands of black slaves. And so did the Native Americans. Nearly 20,000 of the Native Americans Five Civilized tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War fighting to keep slavery alive. 28% the black population who were free in New Orleans pledged their support to the Confederacy. All of the 13 southern states of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of black slave owners. There were more than 250,000 free blacks and nearly 4,000 of them were slave masters who owned more than 20,000 slaves.

The practice of slavery was legal after all. We need to remember that governments did not own slaves. Slave owners did. In fact, the US government fought a war to end slavery. How much should the descendants of the 400,000 Union soldiers, who lost their lives fighting to free the slaves, pay to the descendants of the slaves they freed?

Giving people lump sums of money does not work. Economists often point the Georgia Land Lottery of 1832, in which parcels of land were distributed randomly. What happened to the descendants of those who were lucky enough to be given this land? Are they the richest families in Georgia? No. In fact, within one generation after the distribution of the Georgia land, one could not distinguish between those who had been given land and those who hadn't.

Certainly my own direct experiences of working for 20-plus years in the inner city with families on welfare demonstrates this time and time again. Rather than give a man a fish, it is always better to teach him how to fish. All giving the fish does is make the giver feel better.

Reparations might relieve white people of their guilt, but it will do little else.

So back to my initial question. Why are we only discussing whether the West should pay reparations for slavery? Because while slavery was common to all civilizations, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history. Western civilization. Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all.

Rather than be ashamed as Westerners we should stand proud for having led the world out of a mentality where slavery was the norm, and we should vote against this motion.

[ Full debate: https://youtu.be/HboI2t5_M4I ]

==

No one ever talks about "reparations" from Arabs. The reasons are both multiple and obvious.

[halalchampagnesocialist]

Something just clicked in my brain and I had this thought. I've been thinking about how the Western world often looks down on the global south (usually the Middle East and African countries) for homophobia, and love to weaponise human rights as a crusader cause, and we saw this happen particularly during the FIFA WC in Qatar.

Not only does this obscure the fact that a lot of institutional homophobia in the global south is either exported through American missionaries, or even is peddled by religious scholars and regimes who are funded by or are allies with the West.

But this got me thinking about the recent anti-trans hysteria that's been coming out of the US and UK, in particular. It made me think about how the West leveraging its moral superiority over homophobia in the global south is what gives it the green light to enact its own homophobic and transphobic bullshit. The West sees itself as being 'above' it by effectively positioning itself as a beacon of progressiveness and as safe for queer people. Because of this, Christian conservatives and even secularists who push anti-trans propaganda and laws are never blamed, let alone these countries themselves. It is also framed differently, never through the lens of culture and religion like the others.

This topic, of course, has its nuances, but the hypocrisy is clearly very glaringly obvious here. Another form of pinkwashing, if you will.

[sins-of-the-sea]

Hey Master you are like a demon right? What makes a sin sinful? Like let's say lust for instance sexual activity isn't inherently bad right? Does it become sinful when it harms the person or others?

"Something to that effect. Sin is very arbitrarily defined, if you ask me. What is sinful in one culture may be seen virtuous in another. With the Lust example, there are areas where having pre-marital fornication isn't that big of a deal, whereas in others, it is worthy of honor killings and expulsion from society. I can never understand humans. But such is the truth.

"I suppose you are expecting some sort of sermon from me on the nature of Sin, but as you can see how vague and broad I offered you, what is 'harmful' for some is a kink for others. Your ideas of morality do not align with everyone on the planet. Christian and Western Pride does not look the same on a Chinese man who grew up with Taoist folklore, and such, Pride in Wang Ruixiong may not be seen as transgressional at all. I am certain there are the lot of you who do not think Guy's Lust as as gay man who exists is justifiable at all. Or Giovanni's Greed is nonexistent because of his generous nature. The nature of Sin varies, but it does have one thing in common with all of humanity:

"It harms. It hurts. It stabs in the back and twists the knife. It matters not the joy it brings, but the destruction in its wake. And for that, Anonymous, you are right. All of Sin, at their very core natures, are simply that: human nature, with drives that promote behaviors in order to survive. To hunger is natural. To sleep is natural. To want to reproduce is natural. But will you conquer nations just to take all in excess? Or slay an entire people just so their very existence can stop irking you? Look past Scriptures, philosophies, and creeds, my gray-faced guest. The answer should be obvious for you."

[jessicalprice]

not every story is a fable

(reposted from Twitter)

So in reading Christian commentary on NT parables, and its wild and ugly claims about first-century Jews and Judaism, I often find myself wondering how they got there. And I think I've discerned the process. 

It goes a little something like this: 

Christians receive traditional interpretations of what the parables “mean." E.g. the prodigal son means you should forgive people, the good Samaritan means you should help people in need. These meanings are, generally, banal.

Rather than reading the parables as stories, Christians read them as fables with a moral. They read them through the lens of that moral instead of approaching them without a predetermined interpretation.

Christians also believe that the parables must contain revolutionary, radical truths.

So now, they somehow have to resolve the idea that the stories are radical with the fact that their received interpretations are obvious/banal/the same thing plenty of other people have said.

And that goes a little something like this: 

Since (what they believe are) the morals of these stories don't sound radical to contemporary Westerners, they project that radicalness backward onto the parable's original context and audience. That is, it must have been radical/shocking at the time, to the people who first heard it.

Now they have to resolve the dilemma of how something that sounds so banal and obvious to us could have been radical and shocking and scandalous(!) to the original listeners.

Most of them aren't going to say "Jesus's Jewish listeners were incredibly malicious and/or incredibly stupid," at least out loud. So they move to: Projecting that onto Jewish culture, Jewish law, "religious law," etc. 

So then they need to make up norms/customs/attitudes that would make the parable "shocking." If they can find a source that maybe seems to say something that hints in that direction, they'll claim it says a lot more than it does and that it was normative. (E.g. Ben Sira saying you can tell things about a man from how he walks ends up meaning "the villagers would have stoned the father for running to greet his long-lost son" and of course that running to greet your long-lost son would be S H O C K I N G to the listeners.)

It's why they love throwing "ritual purity" in there so much. 

The father in the Prodigal Son story wouldn't embrace his son because he was ritually impure! (If the father was out doing farm stuff and wasn't going to the Temple any time soon, most likely, so was he.)

The kohen and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story passed by the dying man on the side of the road because they were afraid he would make them ritually impure! (The story is very clear they were headed AWAY from Jerusalem, and thus the Temple, so no.)

The Pharisee in the Temple has contempt for the tax collector and doesn't want to stand next to him because he's ritually impure! (No, if the tax collector is in the Temple, he is in a state of ritual purity.)

An anthropologist friend of mine told me that when anthropologists/archaeologists are confronted with an object from an ancient culture and they don't know what it's for, the default category is "ritual object."

Did you dig up a weird-shaped ax that doesn't seem well-designed for either being a weapon OR chopping things? Ritual object. 

Find a statue with some odd characteristics? Ritual object.

"Ritual purity" appears to be to Christian understanding of Jewish customs what "ritual object" is to anthropologists. Anything that doesn't make sense to you, put down to "ritual purity."

So, anyway, the process goes like this: 

parables must be shocking > 

they're not shocking to me > 

they must have been shocking to Jews > 

make up supposed Jewish customs/laws/attitudes that would have made normal behavior "shocking"

It’s exhausting. 

(Photo credit: Andrea Piacquadio)

[qqueenofhades]

Do you really hate this county? Or were you just ranting?

Sigh. I debated whether or not to answer this, since I usually keep the real-life/politics/depressing current events to a relative minimum on this blog, except when I really can't avoid ranting about it. But I have some things to get off my chest, it seems, and you did ask. So.

The thing is, any American with a single modicum of genuine historical consciousness knows that despite all the triumphalist mythology about Pulling Up By Our Bootstraps and the American Dream and etc, this country was founded and built on the massive and systematic exploitation and extermination of Black and Indigenous people. And now, when we are barely (400 years later!!!) getting to a point of acknowledging that in a widespread way, oh my god the screaming. I'm so sick of the American right wing I could spit for so many reasons, not least of which is the increasingly reductive and reactive attempts to put the genie back in the bottle and set up hysterical boogeymen about how Teaching Your Children Critical Race Theory is the end of all things. They have forfeited all pretense of being a real governing party; remember how their only platform at the 2020 RNC was "support whatever Trump says?" They have devolved to the point where the cruelty IS the point, to everyone who doesn't fit the nakedly white supremacist mold. They don't have anything to do aside from attempt to usher in actual, literal, dictionary-definition-of-fascism and sponsor armed revolts against the peaceful transfer of power.

That is fucking exhausting to be aware of all the time, especially with the knowledge that if we miss a single election cycle -- which is exceptionally easy to do with the way the Democratic electorate needs to be wooed and courted and herded like cats every single time, rather than just getting their asses to the polls and voting to keep Nazis out of office -- they will be right back in power again. If Manchin and Sinema don't get over their poseur pearl-clutching and either nuke the filibuster or carve out an exception for voting rights, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is never going to get passed, no matter how many boilerplate appeals the Democratic leadership makes on Twitter. In which case, the 2022 midterms are going to give us Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House (I threw up in my mouth a little typing that) and right back to the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Power Hour in the Senate. The Online Left (TM) will then blame the Democrats for not doing more to stop them. These are, of course, the same people who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton out of precious moral purity reasons in 2016, handed the election to Trump, and now like to complain when the Trump-stacked Supreme Court reliably churns out terrible decisions. Gee, it's almost like elections have consequences!!

Aside from my exasperation with the death-cult right-wing fascists and the Online Left (TM), I am sick and tired of how forty years of "trickle-down" Reaganomics has created a world where billionaires can just fly to space for the fun of it, while the rest of America (and the world) is even more sick, poor, overheated, economically deprived, and unable to survive the biggest public health crisis in a century, even if half the elected leadership wasn't actively trying to sabotage it. Did you know that half of American workers can't even afford a one-bedroom apartment? Plus the obvious scandal that is race relations, health care, paid leave, the education system (or lack thereof), etc etc. I'm so tired of this America Is The Greatest Country in the World mindless jingoistic catchphrasing. We are an empire in the late stages of collapse and it's not going to be pretty for anyone. We have been poisoned on sociopathic-libertarian-selfishness-disguised-as-Freedom ideology for so long that that's all there is left. We have become a country of idiots who believe everything their idiot friends post on social media, but in a very real sense, it's not directly those individuals' fault. How could they, when they have been very deliberately cultivated into that mindset and stripped of critical thinking skills, to serve a noxious combination of money, power, and ideology?

I am tired of the fact that I have become so drained of empathy that when I see news about more people who refused to get the vaccine predictably dying of COVID, my reaction is "eh, whatever, they kind of deserved it." I KNOW that is not a good mindset to have, and I am doing my best to maintain my personal attempts to be kind to those I meet and to do my small part to make the world better. I know these are human beings who believed what they were told by people that they (for whatever reason) thought knew better than them, and that they are part of someone's family, they had loved ones, etc. But I just can't summon up the will to give a single damn about them (I'm keeping a bingo card of right-wing anti-vax radio hosts who die of COVID and every time it's like, "Alexa, play Another One Bites The Dust.") The course that the pandemic took in 21st-century America was not preordained or inevitable. It was (and continues to be) drastically mismanaged for cynical political reasons, and the legacy of the Former Guy continues to poison any attempts to bring it under control or convince people to get a goddamn vaccine. We now have over 100,000 patients hospitalized with COVID across the country -- more than last summer, when the vaccines weren't available.

I have been open about my fury about the devaluation of the humanities and other critical thinking skills, about the fact that as an academic in this field, my chances of getting a full-time job for which I have trained extensively and acquired a specialist PhD are... very low. I am tired of the fact that Americans have been encouraged to believe whatever bullshit they fucking please, regardless of whether it is remotely true, and told that any attempt to correct them is "anti-freedom." I am tired of how little the education system functions in a useful way at all -- not necessarily due to the fault of teachers, who have to work with what they're given, and who are basically heroes struggling stubbornly along in a profession that actively hates them, but because of relentless under-funding, political interference, and furious attempts, as discussed above, to keep white America safely in the dark about its actual history. I am tired of the fact that grade school education basically relies on passing the right standardized tests, the end. I am tired of the implication that the truth is too scary or "un-American" to handle. I am tired. Tired.

I know as well that "America" is not synonymous in all cases with "capitalist imperialist white-supremacist corporate death cult." This is still the most diverse country in the world. "America" is not just rich white middle-aged Republicans. "America" involves a ton of people of color, women, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Christians of good will (I have a whole other rant on how American Christianity as a whole has yielded all pretense of being any sort of a principled moral opposition), white allies, etc etc. all trying to make a better world. The blue, highly vaccinated, Biden-winning states and counties are leading the economic recovery and enacting all kinds of progressive-wishlist dream policies. We DID get rid of the Orange One via the electoral process and avert fascism at the ballot box, which is almost unheard-of, historically speaking. But because, as also discussed above, certain elements of the Democratic electorate need to fall in love with a candidate every single time or threaten to withhold their vote to punish the rest of the country for not being Progressive Enough, these gains are constantly fragile and at risk of being undone in the next electoral cycle. Yes, the existing system is a crock of shit. But it's what we've got right now, and the other alternative is open fascism, which we all got a terrifying taste of over the last four years. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to go back.

So... I don't know. I don't know if that stacks up to hate. I do hate almost everything about what this country currently is, structurally speaking, but I recognize that is not identical with the many people who still live here and are trying to do their best, including my friends, family, and myself. I am exhausted by the fact that as an older millennial, I am expected to survive multiple cataclysmic economic crashes, a planet that is literally boiling alive, a barely functional political system run on black cash, lies, and xenophobia, a total lack of critical thinking skills, renewed assaults on women/queer people/POC/etc, and somehow feel like I'm confident or prepared for the future. Not all these problems are only America's fault alone. The West as a whole bears huge responsibility for the current clusterfuck that the world is in, for many reasons, and so do some non-Western countries. But there is no denying that many of these problems have ultimate American roots. See how the ongoing fad for right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world has them modeling themselves openly on Trump (like Brazil's lunatic president, Jair Bolsonaro, who talks all the time about how Trump is his political role model). See what's going on in Afghanistan right now. Etc. etc.

Anyway. I am very, very tired. There you have it.

[trisshawkeye]

I'm a little hesitant to weigh in on the discourse going around, since I can't speak to the Chinese LGBTQ+ experience, but what I can speak to is one of the reasons why a queer person might find the nature of the sex scenes in MDZS, and in particular the extras, interesting and relatable to their experience as a queer person.

First off I want to stress that YOU DO NOT NEED TO READ THE MDZS EXTRAS. In fact, if you think they might be triggering or upsetting to you, or just not your cup of tea, then just don't read them. You don't need to read them to enjoy everything else MDZS has to offer. Indeed, if any of the following would wig you out—slightly dub-con kissing, misunderstandings around a sexual encounter due to each party thinking the other didn't want it in the same way they did, an inexperienced couple figuring out what they like and finding out that includes mild consent-play—then maybe you might want to skip the scenes in the main novel too. It's okay to have preferences and for those preferences to not include that. If you don't want to read those sections, then I'm not gonna judge you, don't read them. There is plenty else to enjoy. Look after yourself first!

Okay, with that out the way, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about shame and sexual fantasy.

While not written to this particular audience at all, Lan Wangji is a painfully relatable character for a certain type of gifted queer kid growing up in conservative Evangelical Christian spaces. The combination of having a strict, rule-based moral code one is expected to follow, and being held up as a well-behaved, good example to others from a young age, both in terms of pseudo-academic achievement and in terms of following of said moral code, and then finding yourself and your worldview becoming increasingly incompatible with the code you are trying to live by, is one that really fucks you up. Lan Wangji is a character laser-targeted at my own set up of hang-ups and neuroses, oh boy. I love him so much and want him to be happy.

And to be fair, that's not to say the Gusu Lan sect rules are bad per se, and characters such as Lan Xichen show that it is possible to have a different relationship with them such that they inform your behaviour but still allow for flexibility and compromise. But Lan Wangji definitely strikes me as someone who took rule-following deep into his own sense of identity, and that gets very messy for him when he starts questioning how to handle moral quandaries that the rules can't easily address by themselves, or finds himself trying to follow them in a way that conflicts with how the rest of his sect are doing so.

So when this kind of strict moral purity forms a big part of your identity, and then you suddenly get attracted to someone 'inappropriate' (or indeed, anyone at all as a horny teenager who’s supposed to behave themselves), your new and growing sense of desire runs smack bang into your existential need to be someone who is Good(TM), who follows the rules, who wouldn't in their right mind to anything that contradicts them. You can't just dream soft dreams about sneaking away to kiss your crush and you both enjoying it, because even that is shameful, it's wrong, it flies in the face of everything you're supposed to be and you'd never do that. And so one way for your mind to get around this is for your fantasies to take a darker turn, to imagine that you were pushed beyond all reasonable human limits, that you lost all control, that you were drugged or manipulated, that the other person took advantage of you or somehow provoked you into assaulting them, and that way you can sort of excuse yourself, you can imagine yourself in that situation because at least then it wasn't really your fault, you can kind of keep your internal sense of identity consistent. But now you've imagined you're in that situation and you have that 'excuse', you have a kind of free rein to act out the things you want to do and it doesn't really 'count'. And all the while you're entirely aware that this is a fucked up fantasy, that it would be unforgivable if you did such a thing or such a thing was done to you in real life, and now you're worried that even imagining such a thing is a failure of your moral character, and it builds into a destructive cycle of shame and self-loathing, and it's just a real mess all round. 

Now, I think this is something that Lan Wangji worked through and came out the other side of, and he was no longer ashamed of his desire for Wei Wuxian by the time he came back in the body of Mo Xuanyu (and probably even by the time of the first siege of the Burial Mounds, though it was far too late at that point). But for a sixteen-year-old Lan Wangji to have these violent fantasies about being provoked into raping Wei Wuxian because that was the only way he could imagine himself in a situation in which he could express that desire? And then later in life finding out that consent-play holds some appeal? Yeah, I can see that, I can relate to it.

And so in the incense burner chapter? When it becomes clear they're visiting one of Lan Wangji's teenage fantasies, especially right after the adorably domestic scene that is Wei Wuxian's dream, he is absolutely embarrassed by it, he's mortified—it's obvious he still considers it to be shameful and would honestly rather Wei Wuxian didn't see this side of himself so clearly, although he loves and trusts Wei Wuxian enough not to hide it from him when he says wants to stay. And then, when Wei Wuxian sees where it's going, and finds it hilarious and honestly kinda hot, knowing that it is just a fantasy, and one that meshes well with his own consensual-non-consent kinks to boot, you know what? It's a relief! It's an honest-to-goodness relief and entirely delightful to me that he turns around and basically says, hey, it's okay, this doesn't make you a bad person, you don't have to be ashamed of this, I love you, I'm enjoying this too, I want to see where this goes, let's have sex! 

Because none of this does make Lan Wangji a bad person—none of these fantasies were acted upon except for one intensely-regretted kiss (and then only really regretted on his own part), and then later in the context of entirely consensual, mutually enjoyable sex as adults between him and Wei Wuxian. And being able to revisit those fantasies and take away the shame he's associated with them all this time is probably pretty healing for him! 

Like I said at the start, you don't have to read these chapters. They were not written for you personally, and you are not the target audience for them. If you're going to be at all distressed by the content then I actively encourage you not to read them, it would be a form of emotional self-harm to do so. It's not like you're missing out on anything important (or even very well-written, if I'm being honest, particularly once it's gone through the mangle of a translation that I don't personally think handles the nuances of the smut scenes very well, from what I can gather from various pieces of discussion about it). It's totally fine if you find these kinks unpleasant and don't want to touch them with a barge pole! But that doesn't make having or writing or enjoying these kinks or fantasies somehow morally wrong—it's not shameful, it's not homophobic, and please, please stop accusing the author or fans of being so just because you don't personally like it. Because you’re just reinforcing the shame-based, purity-based thinking that screws so many of us up in the first place.

(Aside: I’m not saying this is necessarily the correct way to interpret Lan Wangji’s character and motivations with respect to these scenes, since I too am a Westerner coming at all this material through the veil of translation and with very little understanding of its surrounding literary context—I’m more describing how, from my own experience as a young repressed religious queer, I found myself vibing a lot with this character and his relationship with sexual desire.)

[larktb-archive]

Hi! I'm too shy to come off anon, but I need your help understanding something. I hope I'm not bothering you!!

I don't want to interact with anyone who is a fascist, but I'm not entirely sure what makes someone fascist. Can you please explain it to me?

I know I could look it up myself, but I know that not all definitions online can be correct and I just want your perspective;;

Thanks!

Hi anon! Well, fascism comes in many forms so “sussing out who’s a fascist” is technically a little harder to do than having a simple checklist. After all, doesn’t a White Supremacist have different beliefs to a Japanese fascist? And doesn’t a Japanese fascist have different beliefs to a Wahabist? These beliefs clash don’t they? Well, yes and no. Sure the surface level beliefs are different but the underlying core beliefs of these groups are actually quite similar; it’s the specifics which are different. Even though it isn’t a “bible” on what is fascism and shouldn’t be taken as gospel, Umberto Eco has an essay called “Ur-Fascism” which contains 14 points, which can help us identify whether certain beliefs are fascist no matter the specifics of their belief system. I’ll explain the points in short and give some examples. Quick disclaimer, I am not an expert on fascism or any of the ideologies I’ll discuss by any means so if you aren’t taking Umberto Eco’s writing as the 100% correct truth, definitely don’t take mine as that either (this is how you should treat most sources tho):

1. Cult of Tradition and 2. Rejection of modernity

I put these two together because they’re kind of inseparable. This is basically the idea that there was a “glorious past” that people need to return to and modernity is a corruption of that “glorious past”. In British fascist thought, this past is generally the 19th century at the zenith of the British Empire or mid-20th century Britain. The latter is more common for people who wish to be a little more PC with their writings; instead of trying to use a by-gone era that pretty much no one alive can remember, they use a much more recent time with nostalgic ideas of “the good old days” which doesn’t seem threatening on it’s surface but is dogwhistling for a time when there weren’t as many immigrants in the country.

You may have seen the “reject modernity, embrace tradition” meme and it’s pretty much the most obvious incarnation of this idea. Similarly you may seen people online use “degenerate” as an insult. If you look at the meaning of the degenerate it means “having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline”; it’s microcosm of these ideas put into a single insult. This is why you tend to see conservatives use it more than progressives.

I’d also argue that terfs obsession with 2nd wave feminism and their utter rejection of intersectionality and modern feminism is another manifestation of this idea. 

3. Action for actions sake

This is less detectable in terms of individuals but still important to note that these people tend to support action without a cause. Sure the insurrection at the white house earlier this year was action, but it had no substance behind it. It was action for actions sake, which is why any principled leftist didn’t support it. Fascists will tend to openly just call for action but won’t be very specific about the purposes of the action; as long as they agree with the ideology behind it they’ll support it. It’s why fascists love harassment campaigns and mindless acts of terror. Take Wahabist terrorist orgs like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, it doesn’t matter if bombing an Ariana Grande concert has no point, the only point is the action itself.

4. Disagreement is treason  

This one’s pretty self explanatory, they will ostracize you if you disagree with them. Again, terfs tend to do this, and I had a long conversation with an ex-terf I called a dumbass, who basically said that she was ostracized by them and mocked for having different beliefs (hope she’s doing well actually). There’s numerous stories from ex-terfs like this.

5. Fear of difference

There’s a tendency for fascists to group people into “us” and “them”. “They” are considered to be intruders who need to be removed whereas “we” are the people who deserve to be here because it is “our” right to be here. In Zulu Nationalism, this tends to be any non-Zulu speakers who they deem to be “Shangaan” even if they aren’t actually Tsonga, it’s just a pejorative at this point. If you see vague references to the “elite” without any reference to who they are and what makes them “elite”, this is tends to be a dogwhistle for Jewish people. Western Fascists have very little issue with the workings of capitalism itself or the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, they just don’t like “them”, taking “our” stuff. Any references to “us” and “them” is pretty much a red flag.

6. Appeal to Social Frustration

Fascists will tend to brush upon actual issues faced by the poor today but will instead blame it on an outside force. You’ll see job loss being blamed on immigrants or vague “elites”. Terfs do this too. They’ll see young girls who are genuinely struggling with patriarchal issues and divert all that pent up rage towards trans people and the “q*eers” (which they do tend to use as a slur unlike what most people would have you think). 

7. Obsession with a Plot

Everything is a conspiracy! The election was rigged! 9/11 was fake! that fucking pizza place/this furniture company is a sex ring! All of these are supposedly plots by the deep state who are trying to do... something or other. You’ll notice these “Plots” don’t actually have a purpose, but the fact that there is a plot itself is the issue. This is a way of engendering paranoia in the group while also feeling that there is a constant war against you even if there isn’t. This is also why, despite news sources being pro-capitalist the right will swear up and down it’s leftist media which is controlled by “them” (usually just meaning Jewish people).

8. The enemy is both strong and weak

“Trans people have infiltrated academia and the only reason people refuse to see gender as an immutable biological concept, is because they’re too afraid of the trans cabal to say anything. But also everyone can tell trans people are crazy and haha you have a high suicide rate.” It’s contradictory that’s the point. They need to feel that they’re both counterculture but also they need to be winning at all times so that contradiction is necessary. Also the use of the word “cabal” is a pretty big red flag for all forms of fascism.

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy, 10. Contempt for the weak, 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero and 12. Machismo and weaponry

All of these are kind of interrelated so I’m grouping them together (also this is already fucking long as hell so I don’t wanna bore you any further). You’ll tend to see a love for the military or at least military aesthetics when looking through fascist blogs. Guns aren’t just a tool for fascists, they’re representative of masculinity and the necessity of violence. Pacifists and anyone who refuses to fight are weak and therefore are “degenerate”. If you do not fight, if you are not willing to fight, you cannot be a “hero” (an ubermensch or a matyr). This comes with the fetishization of violence instead of the recognition of violence being an means to an end, and the worship of individuals rather than of communities and organizations. Take Japanese fascists and their lionisation of the imperial military and their desire to once again have an actual army.

Terfs don’t necessarily fit these roles except for arguably 10 considering how much they seem to look down upon the mentally ill and those who commit suicide and surprisingly 11 since that involves the hatred of non-standard sexual activities and terfs hate non-standard sex (this is from the most vanilla bitch who is very uncomfortable with kink but understands its not inherently good or bad). I have a feeling this is more so because terfs are mainly women (there are male terfs ofc) whereas this was written for male led organizations. 

13. Selective populism

When fascists talk about “the people” they tend to mean “the people we like”. “The working class” can be translated to “this cishet white christian man from Minnesota who owns land but hey he lives in a rural area so he’s working class right?”. They’ll also tend to have “tokens” who will suddenly become the mouth piece of the entire community they’re supposedly representing even if no one in the community asked them to (i.e. Milo Yiannopoulos). 

14. Ur fascism speaks Newspeak

They speak in terms which are both inaccessible to anyone outside of their circles whilst being so simple that once you learn them it becomes easy to understand. They abhor any form of “academic” speech so you’ll rarely see them source things (unless those things happen to agree with their views, which is rare but Jordan Peterson is popular for a reason) and if they do source things they probably wouldn’t have read them fully and will rely on you also not reading them. This is to limit any critical thinking so that your brain is basically jellified into an unquestioning organ which only responds “yes” or “no” and only appeals to a higher authority without any form of reasoning involved. This is why they complain about “the lefts memes being too wordy”... because they’re used to not having to read (this is somewhat tongue in cheek but heyho if the boot fits).

And that’s the 14 main features of fascism, if anyone is displaying multiple of these ideas then they are most likely fascist, and if an organization or group continuously replicates these ideas, then they are definitely fascist. I hope this wasn’t too long but like I said... very complex topic. (Also hopefully this is written well, it’s 10 PM and I am surviving off Irn Bru energy drink). Hope this helped!

[ottomanladies]

I don't know if you can answer but why is Selim II regarded as a bad sultan? Why some historian weigh up the Sultante of Woman as the reason for the empire decadence? Are there still ottoman records without unveil?

Selim II was a sedentary sultan who had been preceded by the greatest conqueror of the Ottoman dynasty. If you look at the other great conqueror - Mehmed II - his son Bayezid II is too considered a bad sultan.

I hope you'll forgive me for this never-ending quote from Pinar Kayaalp-Aktan, but I think she captures the whole thing very well:

"Selim was forty-two years of age when he became Padishah and reigned for eight years. His relatively short sultanate drew a disproportionate amount of criticism, although his way of handling the affairs of the state was not substantively different from that of Suleyman, who delegated much of his power to the central bureaucracy in the second part of his reign. The difference between the two sultanates consisted of the nature and magnitude of the internal and external variables that impacted on the superpower status of the Empire and the remarkable adjustments by the administrative elite to counteract these crises. [...] The criticism that Selim summarily delegated his prerogatives to the Divan belies the fact that he did not disassociate himself from its workings much more than his predecessors. One significant difference was that Selim did not go on any military campaigns [...]. Selim’s personal life style was another source of opprobrium. His penchant for wine, neglect of Friday prayers, and favoring his gentlemen-in-waiting were all construed as evidence of his disrespect for royal customs. Actually, Selim was neither the first nor the worst imperial drinker in Ottoman history. The earliest evidence of Ottoman sultans imbibing wine is traced to Orhan Gazi (1324-1362) when the Genoese envoys presented him with more than a thousand gallons of Triglia wine in 1351. Bayezid I’s grandson Murad II (1421-1451) also appears to have inherited the family’s fondness for alcohol, as did Suleyman the Magnificent, who only towards the end of his life abandoned his early preoccupation with luxurious attires, music, gold and silver tableware, and wine. Nevertheless, Selim’s unabashed display of drinking at the outset of his inauguration ceremony particularly offended Islamic sensibilities. [...] As for Selim’s second transgression, poor attendance record at mosque, he was again not the first sultan to ignore this cardinal Islamic duty. Bayezid I (1389-1402) was refused by Molla Fenari to stand as a witness at the shari’a court Fenari presided in Bursa on the grounds that the Sultan had summarily given up the practice of public prayer. [...] Selim’s third vice, his overindulgent attitude towards his cronies and favorites, was deemed to produce the most serious consequences for the Ottoman state. Sokollu, who was the most notable among the favorites, drew a lot of criticism in this regard. In the 1573 relazione mentioned earlier Garzoni depicts the Grand Vizier as unduly favored by Selim and blames the Sultan with obvious neglect for promoting someone who “is hated by everybody, ... abhorred by the people, and ill-considered by the grandees.” The charge of favoritism was extended beyond the members of the Divan to include any person too close to the Sultan. [...] Putting the real or perceived foibles of Selim's aside, the lack of Ottoman military success during his reign was a recurrent source of criticism. Such accusations did not take into consideration that the Ottoman military muscle simply reached the limits of the premodem requirements of transportation and ordnance. Considering this reality, the Ottoman military record under the leadership of Selim, his Divan, and serdars did not fare as badly as was often expressed. On the western front, Chios was wrested from the Genoese and Cyprus from the Venetians. In the east, two territories the Porte previously had lost its grip on, Yemen and Tunis, were brought back within the Ottoman fold. In the northwest, a pact negotiated with Austria legitimized the capture of Szeged by Suleyman and required Emperor Maximilian to pay 30,000 ducats in addition to a yearly tribute of 2,000. On the southeast, another pact signed with Venice established Ottoman sovereignty over Cyprus and charged the Venetians to pay a yearly tribute of 300,000 florins. On the debit side, the decimation of the Ottoman naval force by a joint Christian armada in Lepanto inflicted a heavy blow to Ottoman sovereignty over the Mediterranean, though the Porte quickly assembled a new fleet that proved instrumental in recapturing the important fort of La Goletta in Tunis.”

The short answer to "why do some historian weigh up the Sultanate of Women as the reason for the empire decadence?" is: misogyny. The long answer is provided by Leslie Peirce: 

“The rise to power of the imperial harem is one of the most dramatic developments in the sixteenth-century history of the Ottoman Empire. From almost the beginning of the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, who came to the throne in 1520, until the mid-seventeenth century, high-ranking women of the Ottoman dynasty enjoyed a degree of political power and public prominence greater than ever before or after. Indeed, this period in the empire's history is often referred to, in both popular and scholarly literature, as "the sultanate of women."' The women of the imperial harem, especially the mother of the reigning sultan and his leading concubines, were considerably more active than their predecessors in the direct exercise of political power: in creating and manipulating domestic political factions, in negotiating with foreign powers, and in acting as regents for their sons. Furthermore, they played a central role in what we might call the public culture of sovereignty: public rituals of imperial legitimation and royal patronage of monumental building and artistic production. If the prominence of the imperial harem is a notable feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Modern historical accounts of this period have tended to represent the influence of the harem as an illegitimate usurpation of power that resulted from a weakening of the moral fiber and institutional integrity of Ottoman society and that in turn contributed to problems plaguing the empire toward the end of the sixteenth Century. Difficulties in interpreting the rise of the imperial harem stem in large part from the fact that its power became manifest in the post-Suleymanic period. Traditionally, the reign of Suleyman has been regarded as the apogee of Ottoman fortunes and the period initiated by his death in 1566 one of precipitous decline from which the empire never fully recovered (despite the fact that it survived until the end of World War I). In this view, the personal incapacity of Suleyman's successors, in contrast to the vigor and ability of their ancestors, opened the door to the "meddling" of harem women, who did not hesitate to exploit their influence over "weak-minded" sultans to satisfy their "lust" for power and wealth. But the power of Ottoman royal women was too broadly and publicly expressed and too embedded in the structure of imperial institutions for it to be simplistically dismissed as illegitimate. Modern treatments of this period have not recognized the politically partisan nature of much of the contemporary critique of female power, such as the proclamation of Sunullah Efendi. Recently, new work on this period in Ottoman history has challenged the very notion of post-Suleymanic decline, bringing about a long-overdue reevaluation of developments in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Even some of these recent works, however, continue to repeat the unexamined theme of the dynasty's dissipation."

(bold highlighting is mine)

As for your last question, every day new documentation could be discovered. Like, every single day. Sometimes papers are not stored correctly, sometimes they're dismissed as useless by archivists and therefore forgotten in the storage room, sometimes they're not translated or interpreted correctly. History is an evolving science; we'll never reach the day in which we'll tell ourselves: okay, we've studied all the sources, there's nothing left to do.

[500wordtheology]

Detour: The Good Place Conclusion

    Please forgive me, I’m about to break protocol. Normally this blog is dedicated to theological topics and I strive to keep each post at around 500 words. Today’s post will certainly be theology related, but it is extremely unlikely I will be able to keep it brief. Should you want to skip this post, feel free to click here to advance to the next blog entry.

    The TV show “The Good Place” has now concluded. If you haven’t seen it, close this window and go watch the first season. It’s great. Possibly one of my favorite single seasons of any TV show ever. Genius creative work, and brilliant comedy and heart.

    I cannot say the same for the final season, and especially the final two episodes. That is what this blog post is about, and in case it wasn’t obvious:

    COMPLETE SPOILERS FOR “THE GOOD PLACE” AHEAD.

    I will not recap the show’s four seasons here, nor even the episodes being discussed. This is written for those who have already seen them. Instead let’s jump into exactly how, unfortunately, the conclusion of the show failed both morally and creatively.

    Please understand I do not write this as some stuffy critic. I lived the life of a stuffy critic in my younger days, and while it is a lovely boost to the ego, it is empty and dumb. I’ve learned that much at least. The reason for my critique here is because we as human beings need to KNOW this stuff. We need to not be tricked into shallow thought.

Where It All Falls Apart

    The Good Place made a number of mistakes with the final two episodes. Let’s discuss the errors and try to make clear where things went awry (and how/why they were hand-waved away).

    The penultimate episode, “Patty,” introduced the idea that an undisclosed amount of time in Paradise would cause you to become a boring, intellectually-stunted zombie. Apparently even the greatest thinkers who ever lived who managed to get into the Good Place only ever wanted milkshakes and orgasms, and instantly abandoned all big questions about the Universe for simple Hedonism. (And yes, it’s very true that Hedonism is empty and meaningless.)

    This outcome makes very little sense, and I am unsure if it was a result of running out of episodes (which would be a shame, because the early bits of the final season were often dull and it would have been far better spending more time exploring these later concepts instead of cheap laughs at the expense of stereotypical, hollow characters introduced and then thrown away) or if it was simply bad and unimaginative writing. Considering the fantastic writing of Seasons 1 and 2, and sometimes 3, this is extremely puzzling. At any rate, it shows a serious lack of creativity.

    Here is an important truth that was almost totally avoided in these final episodes: The question “Why?” does not disappear simply because you can conjure up a Coke and some sunglasses any time you want. Those questions remain. They might even move more to the forefront of the mind. Why are things the way they are? Unanswered, unexplored. Not just unexplored by the writers, but unexplored by the characters like Patty who were set up to have been in the Good Place for an undetermined amount of time (but “long”).

    This is the ultimate problem with exploring Philosophy without also exploring Theology alongside. Interviews with the creator of the show consistently have him bringing up things like Buddhism or Hinduism, but strangely absent are Monotheistic religions. Why is this? For starters, I expect it is because many of the loudest voices in the modern Western world do not care for such concepts. They don’t like what it entails. If we are not in charge of our own ultimate destiny, which is the case when God exists and has made you with a purpose of his intention, our ego gets a slap in the face.

    And it should, because that is what our ego deserves when it is out of order, but that is another post.

    Anyway, it is possible this choice was made to avoid ruffling feathers of media and the societal elite. It is easier to play it safe, even for a show that tackled some very large concepts like morality.

    It is also possibly because studying such religions requires a great amount of work. Heaven, in Christianity, is not a fluffy cloud where you get everything you ever wanted (like margaritas and monkeys in go-karts), where you sit and play a harp (or guitar) all day and also, hey look, your childhood dog is there. That is a foolish, childish caricature of Heaven, but unfortunately has become widely accepted as true simply because people refuse to go study further. So mistruths are believed due to ignorance. Cartoonish ideas are thought to be accurate, because non-cartoonish ideas are hard and sometimes extremely uncomfortable.

    It’s more than a shame.

    Not only is Heaven infinitely better than such a stupid caricature, but it isn’t even the final destination! New Earth and bodily resurrection comes after. However that is Christianity, and The Good Place makes its own version of heaven instead. A cartoonish one. Fine. But even ignoring that, the problem The Good Place’s ending faces is in the mantra “Death makes life meaningful.”

    Here’s the kicker: That’s not untrue. And because it is not untrue, we can quickly and easily get extremely confused. In fact, go read some reviews of the final episode from a number of popular websites and you’ll find they herald this truth. Because in our earthly life, it is right to say death makes this part of our existence precious.

    The problem, and it is a HUGE one, is they then transpose the earthly lesson onto eternity. Ignorantly (and forgive me for this is not an insult but a statement of why they claim it, they simply don’t KNOW and I realize even saying such a thing is unpopular) they claim that eternity would be “like this life but longer.” And yes, if that was eternity they might have a point. However even within the universe The Good Place has created that is not accurate! We are shown concepts like The Time Knife, and IHOP, and Janet, and the Judge. These things alone make eternity not simply Earth-life-but-forever. And here arises a major problem, because the writers suddenly go from thinking reasonably large to thinking utterly small, right at the end when thinking big is so important.

    Creativity is boundless. The Good Place was certainly not short on creativity! At least… up until the end. At the end what you had was creative bankruptcy. A nihilistic conclusion that there is no real meaning - except this conclusion gussied up with terms like “peace” and “love” before folks walked off to their annihilation. It is, in fact, the gussying up that I have the biggest problem with. It is a flat-out lie, paraded as some virtue.

    This is detestable. Tricking the viewer into believing such ridiculousness as “if you’re ready to die, you should do it and your suicide is a good thing. The best thing, even. The only way to be happy forever.”

    I am sorry, but this is not only trash, it is dangerous trash. I hope I do not need to go into detail as to why.

Retirement for All

    Let me jump slightly sideways for a second and point out something extremely telling: The “solution” that everyone got on board with at the end of it all was The Eternal Shriek.

    Think about that for a second. That is what their solution was. The thing that in Season 1 and 2 seemed (rightfully) so horrific.

    Now immediately one might say “Oh, no, that is not the same at all! The Eternal Shriek was a forced thing, the pretty gate in the forest was a willful decision.” 

    Really? 

    WAS it?

    This is the response the writers want you to have, and it is one, again, of shallow thinking. This is the trick of the pretty forest scene and the constant throwing around words like “peace” and “calm” and “love” at the end. What we learn from the show is that the Forest Gate ends up being everyone’s ONLY ultimate option. Tahani, after mastering demonic/angelic architecture, will be left with the same ending. She will “be ready” but only because she has no choice but to eventually be ready. It is no longer a choice, but, as Eleanor says in the show itself in Season 2 “It’s a crappy deal, but it’s the only one we get.” Even after all they’ve learned (and have the potential to learn, let’s never forget that aspect) they play God (but far worse, because they are not God) and give humanity the *same deal* they say is crappy and lament how it is the only deal they got.

    You might also say “Oh, no, the Eternal Shriek had all that awful stuff like having your soul scooped out with flaming ladles.” Yeah? What of it? You’re not conscious anymore (otherwise Michael wouldn’t have lamented “no more me” when he had his existential crisis) so the desecration of your esense and the atoms of your body are as meaningless to you as if someone dumps your cremated ashes in the forest vs. in the ocean. Or, yes, even in a rubbish bin.

    Note the throw-away joke of the creature Derek has become. In his final speech (before getting rebooted again against his will) he mentions the heat death of the Universe. Let’s not ignore that. We are left by the writers (manipulated, really) with warm fuzzy feelings as one of Eleanor’s golden particle-thingies lands on a person who then does something decent instead of cruel. But what is not shown (because it would harp on our buzz) is that man will die. Michael will die. They will be annihilated and then, eventually, all humans will die, the earth will die, the universe will die, Derek will die, Janet will die, the Good Place will die, the Judge will die, and the final pretty gold sparkle will no fall on some new person to help them improve, but instead cease to Be entirely and have absolutely no meaning at all. It will all amount to exactly the same in the end as if the Bad Place guys ran things.

    To use the pretty analogy of the show, “The wave will still be water and return to the ocean,” but then the ocean will disappear entirely for no reason or purpose and even the wave and water will be worth nothing. (They don’t note this second half, because that second half doesn’t make you feel good. Yet it lurks there, undiscussed and ready to pounce and surprise.)

    This is the stark, awful truth of a purposeless universe and existence. It is an awful thing, but it is the truth if that is the worldview we’re exploring. (A reminder this is not the truth of God, though. God loves you, and you do not exist for no reason. A necessary reminder because when we start to really dig in and explore nihilism it gets “real dark real fast.” We need to hold onto the Light at such times.)

    At any rate, what then seems to separate the Eternal Shriek from the Forest Door is only that the last fleeting moments are located in a peaceful looking (though ultimately doomed) place. The results end up being identical. The final option of The Good Place ends up being the worst-possible-option of The Bad Place: Annihilation. This is the “solution” the writers came up with. The one they themselves made fun of in previous episodes (rightfully so, because it is terrible.)

    And yes, it is that big and important. The *foundation* of ideas is precicely where they either stand firm or topple and crush everyone around them. We must dig deep when it comes to what we think and believe.

Selfishness and “Love”

    Here I will break and tackle another awful, awful thing these final episodes support: Complete selfishness as somehow compatible with Love.

    Jason is not all that bright. But generally he seems to have a good heart, particularly for those he cares about. Yet after completing a single perfect round of a video game, he chooses to leave the not-a-woman he loves forever. To abandon her, because he just doesn’t feel like sticking around anymore.

    What?

    But okay. It’s Jason. I was willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of the character, who is a few crayons short of a box.

    Then Chidi does the same thing.

    WHAT?

    This is utterly absurd. Here the writers want to write what they want to write, rather than be honest. It is one of my biggest convictions that an author must be honest. He or she may nudge things in certain directions, but if the author of a story ever forces a character to do something against their character, that is not only poor writing but completely dishonest. It is the lowest form of storytelling to do such a thing. And we find it here.

    Chidi, by his own admission, has a sense of calm and peace. Chidi is just fine. Yet he knows his choice to kill himself (annihilate, really, because we need to be crystal clear on that) will hurt Eleanor deeply. It will cause her extreme pain. He still chooses it.

    My friends, that is not love. That is also not Chidi.

    Love sacrifices for the beloved. And in this case, Chidi wouldn’t even be sacrificing much if he stayed, because we’ve already established he is at peace and internally calm. So rather than maintain this feeling, or even work to be better IF other feelings arose in the future, he checks out on Eleanor. Quits on her. Deserts her. (Leaving her a hedonistic even if hilarious calendar, no less. Fun joke but morally what the fork.)

    Loving relationships in our modern age have taken a severe hit. One reason may be that we think this is how you should treat someone you love. “Me first” has become the battle cry of the age. 

    No, my friends. Love first. Always.

    I anxiously await Heaven and New Earth. But also I love my wife, family, and friends. If I must stay here to support them, I will. Even if “there and then” is better, it doesn’t matter. I love them. I will remain for them. (I will even eat kale and exercise if it means I get to remain here to support them a little longer than if I only ate bacon and browsed Twitter from bed all day.)

    Beyond that, I will remain because God has me here for a purpose. But since The Good Place did not deal with such topics, resorting instead to vague concepts of “helping people is good, so totally do it” and the like, I will even abandon this particular train of thought for this discussion. Even if it was ONLY my wife, family, and friends, they are worth it. Love is big enough to cause me to keep going for them.

    Yes, Eleanor was noble in letting Chidi go. But Chidi was completely ignoble for going when he knew, without a doubt, she wanted him to remain. That she was not ready.

    I think this may be one reason after thousands of years (or whatever a Bearimy is, they keep it vague on purpose and that is very clever of them) Chidi and Elenor are still calling each other “boyfriend and girlfriend.” They REFUSE to commit. Why? Because a husband does not walk out on the wife he loves and we know it. We all know it. Deep inside we know that is not what a husband is meant to do. That would make Chidi a horrific husband. But walk out on a girlfriend? Eh. Sure. Not great, but okay. The world says that’s not so serious. Walk away, dude, no one will care.

    Sorry, Good Place writers, I care. I care deeply.

Why?

    Here is where we get to the meat of it. WHY do I care? (Especially as a number of people point out to me “it’s just a TV show.”)

    I care because I have SEEN what real love brings with it. Bliss. Not hedonistic happiness, but JOY. Ecstasy beyond frivolous ideas like orgasms. Delight beyond mere milkshakes and talking pandas. Glory. Perfection. Eternal Good with no end.

    It is better, and it is worth striving for.

    What happens when we accept and perpetuate ideas like “It is totally fine to abandon people you love as long as it is in your own best interest” is that it degradates our concept of love itself. Love becomes lesser and watered down. This is the same with divorce. Divorce is never easy. Sometimes it is necessary. But it SHOULD never be easy. And honestly? It SHOULD never be necessary. It’s because of our sin that the necessity arises. Here we see the problem not with eternity, but with eternity WITH sin still permitted. Yes, eternity breaks when we are simply “us” but “forever.” (Even if it is slightly-better-than-on-earth “us.”)

    Going back to the idea of love, when we chip away at love and redefine it to mean something lesser we open the doors wide for awful things like what Chidi did and what Jason did. Selfish things. And newsflash, for anyone who didn’t already know, WE WANT TO BE SELFISH. It is in us. We desire to look out for number one, and always have number one be us. This is why the great command is “Love God, and Love your neighbor as yourself.” Because we already know how to love ourselves. Loving ourselves is “I don’t feel like being here in paradise with you anymore, bye.” We are called to do better than that.

    Real love is epic, you guys. Real love is flippin ridiculously good. It redefines GOOD itself. We shouldn’t settle for the “this is nice” false love that is tossed around these days as if that is the bar. That is a garbage bar! Raise that puppy to where it belongs!

    When you experience the utter glory of God and his love, it changes everything. The cheap love the world peddles becomes laughable. But not just laughable: sad. After I watched the finale and read review after review online where people heralded this idea of “eternity would be boring without death” I cried. I laid on the floor and cried for a world that doesn’t know God. That thinks this is all there is, or that boredom could ever come about from true paradise. Forgive me, but what shallow thinking that is! What despair, without even knowing it.

    Alas, this is what people are taught. Let us never forget that Story does not just entertain us, it teaches us. It molds us. This is, sadly, the emptiness The Good Place ends up teaching as its last lesson. “Do good, because it’s good (don’t ask why), but then abandon doing good if it means you get what you want.” Hedonistic Nihilism is the conclusion they offer, spit-shined so you don’t think too hard about it or feel too bad. Yes, feel a little bad, they want you to do that. But not bad enough to really think about how the hope and golden particles of light in a peaceful forest are a trick to shy away from ultimate meaninglessness and selfishness behind it.

    This is the final moral of the show, and it is desperately sad. This is the emptiness of Philosophy without God. And when it is sugar-coated like they sugar-coated it, it is a cyanide pill that tastes great and goes down smooth. 

    You know, until it kills you.

[evilelitest2]

"because a lot of folks on this site for example are buying into conservative mindsets even as they battle conservatives" Can you elaborate on this a bit more? It is interesting.

Ok so you know how in the build up to the American Civil War a lot of white Northerners were fiercely opposed to slavery but were still extremely racist in terms of their world view, they basically were right for the wrong reasons.  A lot of leftists here seem to doing the same thing, they oppose conservatism but don’t actually doubt many of the core principles of conservatism.  This is especially obvious when looking at tactics or methods 

1) Accepting Right wing Framing of Issues.  @randomshoes actually made this observation to me, but I’m going to steal it for this post here

Basically when the Right frames an issue, its often this massively simplistic binary narrative like “Capitalism good, Communism bad” or “The West is totally a real thing and it is good and anything on western is bad” or “Christianity=good, nonchristain=bad”  And so many leftists, rather than challenging the binary just accept it but invert it.  So I see people being like “Lets downplay the crimes of Joseph Stalin” rather than “actually making it capitalism vs. communism is a massively simplistic way of viewing extremely complicated political movements that emerged over centuries”.  Or people going on to these extremely nasty anti Christian movements rather than just accepting 

The most extreme version of this is that I sometimes see leftists support literal conservatives because they happen to be opposed to Westernization, like I see leftists justifying ISIS or even Japanese Ultra Nationalist.  

2) The desire for everything bad to be traced back to a single unified source.  If you ever have the misfortune to watch Right wing News like I do, their world view is one where everything they don’t like from socialism to Islamic fundamentalism to Crime to Hollywood to racial minorities  are all one mass that they just call “enemies” ussually led by George Soros or some other antisemitic stereotype.  Because a core part of rightist thought process is an embrace of intellectual simplicity and rejection of complexity.  They like nice simple narratives with clear bad guys and good guys and where they don’t have to imagine things in a more nuanced or complicated manner.   

So it is super infuriating when the left buys into it

Both me and @randomshoes have met leftist who honest to god believe that there is some council of rich white men who are sitting around table being like “ok so the 15th meeting of the Oppressors meeting has met, what are some new ways we can make the world shittier for black people?”  There is no secret cabal of oppressors out there, there are systems, that is why its called “systemic oppression”.  There are people who want to spread or take advantage of that oppression (see entries, Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, the Entire Republican Party) but the systems go beyond just the right.  For that matter, they go beyond capitalism itself in many ways. 

To use one concrete example, so many people at my college were 100% convinced that capitalism invented patriarchy and racism which like....no, capitalism doesn’t exist until the 17th century (ish) while racism goes back to like...all of recorded history.  Even if we specifically mean “racism based on skin color” well that was invented by the Spanish in their conquest of the Americas and Spain was very much not a capitalist power.  Meanwhile patriarchy like...have you studied the ancient greeks.

I could go on through literally dozens of examples of this, but the left can be just as guilty as “all of my problems can be traced to one issue” as the right, though unlike the right at least the left has real actual problems.  

3) Utter lack of Nuance.  Again if you spend time on right wing media, you notice that they tend towards dramatic demononization vs. idealizing of public figures.  Anybody in their circle is good, and those that aren’t are pure evil.    because again....complex thinking is literally antithetical to right wing thinking.  It would be really really nice if the left could avoid this...but nope.  

This can be the sort of Moral Cholesterol thing that I’ve talked about before (and thank you @archpaladin for coining that term), where people are like “oh i morally agree with this movie therefore it is good” or the inverse which is just the most simplistic way you can possibly view art.  Or it can be how certain elements of the left views historical figures.  

You see this the most with equivocation, I have met leftists being like “oh the US interment camps are equatable to the Rape of Nanking” which like...no....one is bad one is far far worse.  

I could write a whole series of post on this one its 

4) Embrace of Conspiracy Theories, Pseudo History, Pseudo Science etc

The Right thrives on conspiracy theories, because again...facts don’t care about feelings but I get really testy when I see the left embracing these tactics as well. Again, the right is worse at this, I’m not equivocating, but lets remember Anti Vaxxers were a left wing bullshit theory. Actually the entire “new Age” movement is rife with grifters, conspiracy theorists, and associated bullshit.  

I mean on tumblr you will see posts talking about how China really discovered American (nope), how Beethoven was African (nope), how a Jewish lobby controls Washington (ugg) or 

I mean just a few days ago, a classmate of mine was claiming that Christianity invented patriarchy and mentioned the example of “like with overthrowing cleopatra” which like....nooo on every possible level

This goes from annoying to outright sinister when you take into account that some leftists are willing to serve as apologists for certain horrific regimes, like I keep finding Mao apologists on this site.  

5) Mob tactics.  Again, the Right is so much worse about this since they deliberately artificially create mobs for the purpose of mass harassment (cough Gamergate cough) but the left is pretty guilty of this as well, I refer to you that entire contra points fiasco as one example.  

6) Not Checking Sources.  I swear to god, if I could get everybody on tumblr to change just one thing about their behavior it would be

.....to get ride of the nazis...

but somewhere on the list would be this public service announcement 

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING CLAIMED ON TUMBLR.....DOUBLE CHECK IT FIRST

the amount of times i see people just spreading utter bullshit that was just posted on this site which a basic google search could stop is just...ugg

7) Nostalgic.  I see a lot of leftists engaging in primordial ism, romanticism and “appeals to nature fallacies.  Again you will find a lot of leftists indulging in “oh things were better before modernity” nonsense

8) Fetishistic of violence, especially revolutionary violence, ignoring the consequences that tend to emerge from that.  Still better than the right obviously

9) Finally dehumanization.  This one i’m a bit understanding of, after all the Alt Right are basically evil, and the Republican are a death c ult at this point, but even so quite a few elements of the left are just a bit too gleeful.  And the thing about that militant mindset is that while it might be directed against bad people at first, it quickly can get corrupted.

Take RadFems for example, a group who I’ve always thought were a great example of anti intellectualism, militancy and violence from the start, with their almost Manichean attitude towards men.  The thing is that this approach didn’t really hurt any men ,not really but it was this “with us or against us attitude” that lead many of them to go on to become TERFS.  

This “the enemy must be destroyed” attitude is like a poison which sort of consumed yourself in it, and leads to hurting those who can’t fight back.  

In Short, the left frustrates me when it behaves like the right, who are utterly awful at their core. 

[obsidianarchives]

My Heaven is a Republic

I’m not a religious person. A huge reason why is my grandmother, a deeply critical woman who moved to Detroit during the Great Migration. She would often call out the Black churches in Detroit for their hypocrisy: always a poor congregation and a rich pastor. She was spiritual, though. She believed in God, and because of her I went to several Catholic elementary schools. And like many queer kids who went to religious schools, I left them as a self-proclaimed atheist, having experienced firsthand the disingenuousness of a religion that taught love and forgiveness but, in practice, hated difference. I was bullied mercilessly and had teachers who belittled me. I saw clearly that none of the lessons in chapel or religion class seemed to be practiced by anyone, save a few tender adults. 

Then I got older and noticed that queers and women were reviled by the people I knew who were church-going. I was the only teen in high school not in a church youth group, and the only one who spoke up loudly about reproductive rights, gay rights, and the dangers of capitalism.

It’s no wonder that I had my own spiritual texts. 

The first was Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which I read at 10 years old in a book club that my sister attended. We both loved reading, and as my mom was a comically neglectful parent, my sister looked after me, which is why I was the lone child at a book club of old Detroit radicals at Detroit’s Unitarian church. We both read Parable of the Sower in one night.

The book changed me. Detroit in the ’90s felt a little like the apocalyptic Oakland of the novel. Empty crumbling ruins. The yearly fear of homes ablaze on Devil’s Night. The puzzling undercurrent of why the suburbs had street lights but my neighborhood did not. 

For me, it was barely fantasy to imagine the world of Parable, a world of ecological and economic nightmares spun from greed and disregard of Black and brown neighborhoods. When Lauren, the main character, turns from her beloved father’s Christianity to a grassroots spiritual movement of her own, it struck a chord.

God is change

Pretentious little nerd that I was, I knew there was a reason people throughout history had religion. It could explain what happened around you, what happened to you, what happens after you die. As an anxious child, I fretted over death and the unknown. As a sensitive child, I fretted over the destruction of the rainforest, of the dwindling elephants killed for ivory. I knew that these were big feelings to grapple with, but also that saying it was God’s plan seemed like an empathy cop-out. I didn’t do drugs or drink as a teen (though I would later), but I deeply understand Marx’s assertion that “religion is the opium of the masses.” It’s so much easier to think that something or someone else will fix your woes and pain. Religion is a better drug than the shitty brick weed I smoked in college, but I imagine it results in the same numb feeling of “not my problem.” 

All that you touch

you change.

All that you change

changes you.

In high school, I was in a youth volunteer program that was heavily political. Because my sister attended, and she watched me and my brother, we would tag along. I owe my entire political education and radical mind frame to this time. I learned the history of my city and country, about the political power of art and gardening, about food and environmental justice, about gender and racial inequality. Nearly all the adults who ran the program were queer, as well as several of the older teens I admired. I started to notice homophobia more in the world, and was troubled. We were taught to be youth leaders, to advocate for social change, to think of a new way of living — as we saw all around us how capitalism failed my hometown, gutted its beauty and resources, mowed down its Black and Chinese neighborhoods to build freeways for white suburbanites to travel more easily through the city. Change is inevitable, and we learned to be the change we wished to see in the world. 

The only lasting truth 

is change

Empires fall. That’s what world history teaches us. What is perhaps less obvious is that change is slow. The US is still not post-segregation, post-lynching, or post-homophobia. It can be overwhelming, the cycle of two steps forward and one step back. But change happens regardless, it is constant, and, most importantly, it can be shaped communally and personally. 

I’m not immune to the fact that my other spiritual text — the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, like Parable of the Sower — also interrogates Christian-based teachings. The books are dense with Western art and religious imagery, allusions, and symbolism, but the most impactful part for me happens on the last page of the last book, The Amber Spyglass:

“We have to be all those difficult things, like cheerful and curious and brave and kind and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in our different worlds, and then we’ll build...the republic of heaven”

Lyra, the main character, is home from her adventure, having saved the multiverse. In doing so, she has preserved Dust, the physical manifestation of the intentional good things conscious beings create. Dust is not finite, it can be created, through hard work, through treating people kindly and patiently, through learning and growing. I use this as my moral (golden) compass to guide me every day. I maintain a calm, kind, public vibe, even when I'm angry or frustrated. I compliment people freely. I donate to strangers’ GoFundMes. I offer to drive for friends and coworkers. I practice active listening. I challenge people when they say fucked up things. I’ve become a Professional Mentally Ill Queer Weirdo through my podcast, The Gayly Prophet. This is hard work, especially for someone like me, with depression and anxiety, where it would be so very easy to be dismissive and apathetic and withdrawn from the world. But that’s not the kind of world I want other people to live in. I hear from listeners every day that my openness has changed their lives and their relationships with themselves — this is the kind of world I want to live in. 

I don’t do any of these things looking for some reward in a cartoon afterlife. The reason I try to live a moral and just life is that I believe the meaning of my life is to shape a better world. To build the republic of heaven.

We do not worship god.

We perceive and attend god.

With forethought and work

We shape god.

In the end, we yield to god.

We adopt and endure,

For we are Earthseed,

And god is change.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

What are your thoughts on accusations that atheists are "culturally Christian?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Christians

Cultural Christians are nonreligious persons who adhere to Christian values and appreciate Christian culture. As such, these individuals usually identify themselves as culturally Christians, and are often seen by practicing believers as nominal Christians. This kind of identification may be due to various factors, such as family background, personal experiences, and the social and cultural environment in which they grew up.

I'm willing to accept that there are aspects of Western countries that are derived from or influenced by Xianity.

There are certainly many fine things that emerged under Xianity. Art, sculpture, literature, music, various institutions. But I would argue that those things can be attributed to people operating in a world that was pervasively Xian, not to Xianity itself. It's sort of like saying that the US owes 5G to Donald Trump because 2019 is when it started rolling out.

If only because non-Xian societies produced comparable cultural artefacts and institutions without knowing anything about the Dark Lord Yahweh. We need look no further than China for thousands of years of music, art and education. The idea that Xianity can be credited with these things when Xianity was simply the law of the land is lacking in self-awareness.

Political democracy is derived from Greek thought, our numbering system is derived from Arabic, and Liberalism itself is culturally British - via John Locke - in its modern form, and Greek and Chinese philosophy in its ancient forebears.

It's kind of a bizarre claim to make. Every time the culture was changing, or tried to, Xianity was there to oppose it. Printing press? Abolishing slavery? Street lighting? Desegregation? Interracial marriage? Same-sex marriage? Rock and roll? Xianity has nothing to say on these any more - mostly, anyway - but they came in spite of Xianity, not because of it.

That's not to say I don't appreciate the contribution of a conservative (small c, "preserve the existing good") counter-balance. We currently live in a time of "progressivism" so intractable and regressive it's advocating segregation, hiring and enrolment based on race, denying evolution and making gay people straight.

But Xianity didn't say "here are the very good reasons why this isn't a good idea, why we should go slowly, or why we need more information before deciding." They said "tEh bIbLe SaYs" and "bUt gOd!!" and "yOu'Re gOiNg tO HeLL!"

I don't really mind or care if individual atheists say they regard themselves as being "culturally Xian." Apparently Richard Dawkins does. But the idea that all atheists are "culturally Xian" is presumptive, arrogant and seems to be a way to take unearned credit, along the same lines as claiming morality comes from religion.

And I'm not even sure what the point is. Even if I agreed - yes, I'm culturally Xian - so what? What are they going to expect or demand as a result of this? What do they think we owe it? Deference? Refraining from criticizing and mocking Xianity? It does nothing for the god question.

Worse, it seems to be what we might call an Appeal to Utility - an admission that Xianity isn't true, but it's useful. Lead is useful, but I don't want it in my paint. Like when believers surrender the truth argument and say, well, my faith gives me peace and community or whatever. Meth makes people feel happy too.

But what does it say about Xianity when, as already mentioned, not only has Xianity not guided us through our own betterment, but has opposed it, and we've had to fight and ultimately, disregard it? Why is it that Xianity does not reliably produce cultural advancement? Why is that at least since the Enlightenment began, all cultural development has been without Xianity, and in spite of Xianity trying to hold it back?

One obvious and likely answer is that cultural development was never a goal or intention of Xianity, it was tolerated only in as much as it could be used to glorify their god and reinforce their authority. That's what they expected science to do. The Enlightenment, science and the pace of cultural development made "god" and Xianity unnecessary.

And why is it that society is abandoning Xianity in droves, and Xians feel compelled to change Xianity to make it fit non-Xian values? Why are Xian values and ideals - at least, the ones Xians want us to know about - lead by secular ones?

What's that saying about science? Xianity ignores it, opposes it, then pretends it knew it the whole time.

I would argue thanks, but we'll take it from here.

[vanitygrxxx]

Vanity. Seems like a dated word and an old concept that has never been more prominent before today. What does vanity mean in a world of social media, cellphones and perpetual exposure? What does vanity mean in a world of lax morals and little dignity? What is dignity? What are morals? What are lax morals? Are they a bad thing? Who sets the bar? Everything is up for debate. Is it immoral to be so into yourself? Why is it frowned upon by some but glamourised by others? And if today’s world is characterised more and more by shameless vanity should we just all embrace it? Or should we be more critical of it? Is it an inherent thing that we learn to suppress due to societal standards or are we conditioned into it through societal pressure?

These are a few of my concerns and questions on the matter of vanity and to be honest I haven't been able to answer any. And to be even more honest every answer seems right. Depending on one’s point of view of course. In my case, my background and upbringing are a somewhat unorthodox mix of traditionality and forwardness that have made my confusion on the subject even more intense. My parents were raised in the rural town of Sparta, Greece. Greece, where I’m from, has always been a deeply traditional country that even though considered part of the western world, it has deeply rooted middle eastern influences that can be considered as more conservative. It has also been characterised throughout the years by a core dispute between communist and right wing parties and their respective followers which is still very prominent. Therefore the country itself is a nation defined by a series of conflicts and contradicting mentalities. However, the ‘westernisation’ that we espouse as a nation calls for an open-mindedness and progressiveness that Greeks were not eased into. And that has definitely created a sort of conflict for my peers and me. Because we are a generation that has grown up with the ideals and ethics of our parents and grandparents, family being a very strong institution in Greece, but with the need to keep up with current trends and norms and be more open to change. Moreover, carrying the weight of an ancient civilization that has shaped the entire humanity, we are expected to honour that heritage by adhering to expanding our intellectual capacities and disregarding superficiality. Therefore, it strikes me as odd and troubling when I see any greek girl my age posting pictures on instagram of her face accompanying it with a misspelled inspirational quote in english just to project a certain image of herself and simultaneously downplay the vanity angle by easing it with a ‘meaningful’ message. This is a common occurrence that is truly baffling to me which highlights the vast disparity between truth and image. This is also a recurring theme in many ancient greek written works such as the Odyssey; the concept of «είναι και φαίνεσθαι», the difference between reality and appearances.

On the other hand however, I wonder, am I just being an overly critical, contemptuous, angry person? I could cut people some slack. At the end of the day is vanity so bad? It has existed since the dawn of time and has been the driving factor behind many achievements I am sure. After all how can we distinguish vanity from self-love, ambition and confidence? They say be comfortable with your looks, love the skin you're in, but when does loving yourself become a little too much? These are questions that constantly trouble me and to which i have tried to give answers multiple times but to no avail.

Greek artist’s alter ego Anna Goula shown above is a trash pop singer who mocks contemporary Greek performers.

The most obvious and early tale of vanity is that of Narcissus. Enamoured by his own reflection but not being able to realise his feelings towards himself, he was burned by the flame of his own passion. This myth gave its name to what we now know as narcissism, the overt admiration of ones self and looks and their self-idealisation. Vanity, on the other hand, started off as a term referring to the futility and ephemeral nature of life and material things, however it has mostly become synonymous to narcissism and egomania in current times.

One very prominent example of how the social and cultural dynamics surrounding vanity have drastically changed over the past  few years is the rise of the Kardashian aesthetic and the reign of instagram culture. Kim Kardashian has almost single-handedly rendered shameless vanity an acceptable if not desirable trait, and has even managed to capitalise on it by not only using it to expand her followers which in turn translate into more money but by also publishing a book full of her selfies, titled ‘selfish’ and rightfully so. I think that current instagram culture has a lot to give when it comes to insight on the matter and probably more so when it comes to ordinary people rather than celebrities.

Kim Kardashian’s aforementioned book.

I am also interested in how female artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin explore the female image and sexuality in their photography, which could provide insight coming from either a pro or anti vanity point of view. I also once attended a talk by Juno Calypso, a young photographer who explores the issue of vanity, self-worship, the futility of beauty and its attainability at any cost, through her site specific performances and photographs. Her pinky pastel aesthetic also alludes to stereotypical explicit femininity and seamlessly blends the past with the present. I would certainly like to look at artists like that whose strong aesthetics are a source of debate and inspiration.

Juno Calypso’s Honeymoon Series.

I would also like to look at Yorgos Lanthimos, the only famous Greek director who is currently the pride and joy of Greece due to his accolades. Even though I have only watched some of his movies in fragments, I was surprised by his distinct aesthetics and concepts when I saw a magazine editorial he shot with Taylor Hill. The young model is posing in her underwear in her grandmothers utterly traditional home, resulting in an unusual but very real and gritty visual, that speaks volumes to Lanthimos’ greekness. I would definitely want to explore his earlier movies more in depth, more so because of his exploration of greek social and familial dynamics rather than his exploration of vanity, but at the end of the day aren’t they both related?

Lanthimos’ shoot for V magazine.

Last but not least, I would like to look at how vanity is related to fetish and explore their relationship to fashion and cinema. Looking at collections and runways from the 90s by Thierry Mugler, the sheer theatricality of the models, the way they have been directed to essentially perform instead of simply carry out a catwalk and of course the clothes, inevitably bring to mind dominatrix-y aesthetics. Of course latex also plays an important role in forming that aesthetic and is a big part of the fetish notion which is worth looking into.

Thierry Mugler’s fashion shows.

I believe that all the works I have done so far have more or less included the element of vanity and body ideals in one way or another. Combining latex with traditional victorian hoop skirts was a way for me to explore the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary and examining the dynamics between the conservative and the sexual. I also tried to explore that relationship in my manifesto project, where I looked at my upbringing and more specifically my rural roots and the agricultural background of my family and tried to explore the gap between the aforementioned traits to the more ‘liberal’ and modern upbringing I had in the city. I also tried to explore that relationship in two linked performance/photography pieces I did last year, combining again my traditional background to my sexuality and self-admiration; one was set in my grandmother’s house while the other one was set in a temporary stay sex hotel in Athens. I feel like my experience so far with latex and pvc will prove useful, at least as material exploration and experimentation are concerned and will pave the way for me to explore further the notion of vanity and fetish through their material realisations.

My ‘Portrait of a millenial’ project, set in Priamos sex hotel in Athens. I placed objects like family photos, christian icons and doilies from my grandmother’s house and did traditionally ‘grandmother’ things like crossword puzzles as if I were in my own home.

Second part of my ‘Portrait of a millenial’ project. I made a revealing burlesque costume and wore it around my grandmother’s house to highlight the difference between the sexual and the flamboyant and the religious and traditional.

[arcticdementor]

“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This, one of Lady Macbeth’s most famous lines, is cited by Elizabeth Winkler in her recent Atlantic essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” as a thrilling instance of a woman’s resistance to femininity. Winkler then goes on to compare Lady Macbeth’s anger to women’s #MeToo “fury.” “This woman,” Winkler says of Lady Macbeth, woke her out of her “adolescent stupor” by “rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status.”

Of course, what Lady Macbeth is actually about to do is help her husband murder an innocent man, the king, in cold blood while he sleeps under her own roof. Unless one aligns female empowerment with sociopathic behavior, this isn’t really a triumphant moment for women’s liberation. Nor would any reading of the text other than a willfully perverse one count her as one of Shakespeare’s admirable characters. When she celebrates Lady Macbeth as one of Shakespeare’s heroines simply because Lady M has the desire to do something horrific, there is indeed something adolescent about Winkler’s attitude.

…

But what I find more troubling is the assumption that forms the foundation of Winkler’s thesis: the belief that men don’t really like women, at least not enough to think and write about them with understanding and empathy; not enough to see the value in female friendships and feminine bonds of love and fidelity; and certainly not enough to find strong, tough, funny, clever women believable, admirable, and desirable. When I consider the men I know, male friends and relatives, colleagues, fathers of my children’s classmates, Winkler’s failure to entertain the notion that a man could have written the compelling female characters that populate Shakespeare’s plays is more than merely baffling, it is an insult to men, both past and present.

I have written elsewhere about how contemporary feminism needs the idea of an oppressive patriarchy in order to define women as victims of oppression, and as such it seeks to attach to men a primal stain of (toxic) masculinity so that third-wave feminism is righteously justified in all its complaints against them. Fighting “The Patriarchy” is feminism’s raison d’etre, and without this enemy the cause itself is in jeopardy (see Feminism’s Dependency Trap in Quillette). It seems as though Winkler’s take on Shakespeare is yet another iteration of feminism’s belief that men have a blind spot for women’s humanity. The irony of the current feminist orthodoxy, however, is that it is women who fail to see men’s position clearly. A further —and funnier—irony, if one has a palate for the absurd and the tragic, is that most men, for their part, are usually so chivalrous, so solicitous of women as people, that they sympathize with women’s crusade against them, and by and large assent to women’s complaints. They must really like us!

…

But what troubles me is that women commonly fail to appreciate the internal struggle men have with their sexual instincts, and instead condemn them for having these instincts at all. In other words, consciousness raising feminism rightly asserts that men shouldn’t treat women like objects for their use, but it does so while being unconscious of men’s humanity, and as a consequence, both minimizes and punishes the male sexual instinct that causes men to see women sexually in spite of men’s civilizing efforts not to.

What contemporary feminism fails to adequately grapple with is nature itself, and as a result, feminist attitudes towards men, and particularly towards male sexuality, are compassionless and punitive (not to mention humourless—and human sexuality is so often very funny!). With a blind spot for men’s experiences, consciousness raising feminist attitudes towards male sexual energy are unlikely to inspire mutual respect, and instead work to engender resentment, anxiety, and unhappiness.

…

An obvious oversight in Winkler’s grad school approach to understanding Shakespeare is that while she is correct to assert that Shakespeare wrote female characters with whom he clearly empathises, she might have at least once considered that he also does the same with men. In what follows, I want to look briefly at one of Shakespeare’s most reprehensible male characters, the magistrate Angelo from Measure for Measure. I want to think about him carefully, not merely to look at how he uses his power to mistreat women in Weinstein-esque fashion (although he does indeed do this), and not simply to condemn him for his misogynistic sexual anger (although his behavior is very wrong). But, rather, to try to understand his internal struggle with his own lack of self-sovereignty, the crisis that his desire elicits: the sudden, inescapable, and unwanted pressure that his sexual nature exerts over his better judgement which overturns his self-autonomy and will.

…

In contemporary expressions of male predatory sexuality told from the perspective of women, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, now a popular television show, men are viewed as powerful, threatening, and in a real sense empty of humanity, a kind of monolith of authority. Shakespeare’s Angelo is very different in that when his sexual appetite is awakened, he realizes that he is in fact almost entirely powerless. He doesn’t want to want her, and is confused and overwhelmed by how his sense of identity and autonomy have been absolutely overturned by this woman, who intended to do nothing of the sort. It is in part his astonishment at his own sexual desires, and in part his disgust with these desires, that make him so fascinating.

“What’s this? What’s this?” he asks himself as soon as Isabella takes her leave after pleading with him to have mercy on her brother’s life, “Is it her fault or mine? / The tempter or the tempted who sins most, ha? / Not she, nor doth she tempt; but it is I.” In this moment Angelo encounters for the first time his own sexual nature that he would really and truly prefer to be without. Unacknowledged in himself previously, Angelo judges harshly others’ sexual desires (that is why he has arrested and condemned to death Isabella’s brother). In some ways, he is the #MeToo movement’s goal: to have an impartial bureaucratic system of rules rather than any actual humans arbitrate the morality that governs sexual behavior. His lack of humanity is what might make his authority fair, if it weren’t so brutal. And it is his encounter with his own messy humanity that causes him to realize that the self he has constructed, the chosen identity he wanted for himself, has collided with a nature about which he can do little to change. We are, all of us, in some ways, not at home in our bodies.

I am obviously not endorsing Angelo’s course of action. He is the slimy villain of this play, there is no doubt about that. And I am obviously not excusing any man’s sexual coercion of a woman. These are serious criminal and immoral acts. It isn’t at all Angelo’s submission to his desires that I find instructive here, but rather the internal self-abasement he feels at having them in the first place, a self-abasement that is transformed into self-disgust because he suddenly realizes how little control he has over his lust. “Blood, thou art blood,” he says. “I have begun, / And now I give my sensual race the rein.”

Again, and I feel like I need to keep repeating this here lest I be misunderstood and used to excuse sexual aggression, Angelo does not have control over his nature, but he does over his behaviour, and it is his refusal to find himself up for the task of contending with his nature that makes him a villain. What feminism doesn’t understand, and probably doesn’t want to understand because it might create compassion for male sexuality, is the internal struggle of men against their own appetites. Men must possess and exert a strong and powerful will, not over women to pressure them into unwanted sex, but over themselves so that they don’t. The male will, what Simone de Beauvoir called transcendence over immanence, might be a very real quality because from adolescence onwards men must be well practiced in it.

…

You might be asking, “Ok, men have powerful sexual desires that their masculine assertiveness must work to control. What now?” I am asking myself this same question, and of course there is no easy answer. The history of civilization is, in many respects, our struggle with the intractable problem of human sexuality: the conflict of our Nature and our Reason. Some cultures have taken the tack that it’s better to try and eliminate men’s oppressive sexual nature by hiding their oppressors, and so we can see the burka, for instance, as an attempt to minimize the constant gnawing pressure of male sexual instincts, with greater or lesser success. In the West, other codes have been adopted. Christianity’s influence, the ideas of self-sacrifice, service, and human dignity, have mixed with barbaric European warrior cultures, which resulted in the codes of chivalry. This approach to our sexuality has worked, not perfectly, but pretty well, actually, all things considered. Yet now the ground of Western civilization is shifting, not from influences outside us, but from within, and the assumptions of chivalrous attitudes are the very things being taken to task. What’s next? Women’s revenge? (I’ve read Hamlet—revenge seems like a bad idea.) An unsexing of the selves? (I’ve read Macbeth; this one seems like a bad idea, too.)

…

Just as Angelo fails to respect his own sexual nature until it overpowers him, the near-nun Isabella also fails to contend with her nature as a woman. She is disgusted with her feminine sexual nature, it seems, which is why she desires to enter into the strictest order of nuns in the first place. Isabella’s relationship to her own sexuality is complex, but at bottom what she lacks is the strength and willpower needed to confront and handle her sexual power over men. She doesn’t know what to do with her sex appeal. Like Angelo, what she has been unwilling to face is her own nature. Since she isn’t up for the task, she seeks to retreat absolutely from the challenge: become a nun of the strictest order. Without men to desire her, in herself she becomes sexless. In Isabella we are faced with the flip-side to Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here,” which is, in that play, too, a rejection and denial of nature, not, as Winkler wants to believe, of woman’s submissive social status. By vilifying the male sexual desire for women, consciousness-raising feminism seeks to relieve women of the burden of confronting the part of their own sexual nature that comes into being as a response to male desire.

…

If contemporary feminist orthodoxy insists that masculine sexual energy is, in itself, “toxic” and must thus be written out of social discourse, women will not have to contend with their own powerful sexual nature as the inspiration and location for the masculine imagination. But women’s condemnation of men’s sexuality will not inspire women to understand themselves sexually, nor is it likely to help men understand women. No woman should lose her sense of agency and self-integrity, but is it really such a horror to accept that we’re not entirely autonomous creatures, that we’re, in fact, meant to understand ourselves not merely as individuals, but relationally? The failure to contend with our natures because it is easier to retreat into our own self-willed dream of autonomy seems less like moral progress, and more like a lonely lack of courage.

So what is the answer to the intractable battle of the sexes? Hopefully it will continue to be a somewhat awkward answer, one that we will have to fumble through together. But if we do not treat our natures with honesty and understanding, with affection, humour, and generosity, then I am unconvinced that we will become less resentful, more just, or in any way happy about our human bodies.

[jewish-privilege]

...It’s this baggage that often complicates American Jews’ attempts to reflect on their relative privilege. In the current environment, many Ashkenazi Jews—i.e. those tracing their heritage through the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe—struggle to acknowledge their whiteness and role in broader systems of racism because anti-Semitism from the Left and Right distracts them, clouding their judgment, creating little space for them to exercise the vulnerability necessary for reflection.

Two recent examples illuminate the ways Jews are being squeezed by anti-Semitism from both sides of the political spectrum, complicating efforts at introspection. When Emily Bazelon wrote in The New York Times Magazine in June about the ways whites are finally noticing their whiteness and associated privilege, she was inundated with responses from right-wing Twitter trolls insisting that she was not white, but Jewish. The very same day, leftist activist Shaun King tweeted an article from the Israeli daily, Haaretz, about a Jewish group in Israel protesting an Arab family that had moved into a Jewish neighborhood. Rather than pointing out Jewish racism, he called the protesters “white supremacists” who only wanted “white Jews” in their neighborhood, ignoring the racial diversity within the accompanying picture as well as the Mizrahi (North African and the Middle Eastern Jewish) names of the Jewish organizers. In both of these cases, critics defined Jews for their own purposes.

Right-wing anti-Semites see Jews only as insidious ethnic people whose Ashkenazi members try to assimilate, muddling the purity of the white race. ...For some right-wing Americans, the existence of Israel is not just okay, but good, both because this is where the Jews “belong”—an anti-Semitic version of certain Zionist tropes—and also because Israel’s strident nationalism represents a type of ethnic purity white nationalists would like to see in Europe and the United States. Others are just straight-up Jew-haters who would be happy for Jews to go to the gas chambers.

Besides the obvious problem this brand of anti-Semitism presents for Jews, it also inspires a backlash of Jewish victimhood that undermines any attempt to reckon in a thoughtful and rigorous way with simultaneous Jewish privilege: Jews can’t be racist, the thinking goes, because they aren’t allowed to be white. Any time an Ashkenazi Jew begins to sort through their role in American white supremacy, the flurry of anti-Semitic noise in response causes many Jews to revert to victim mentality—a mentality which makes it very hard to think clearly about the full range of social justice. As the late Rabbi David Hartman wrote in his seminal 1982 essay, “Auschwitz or Sinai,” the person who sees the Holocaust in every anti-Semitic barb begins to think that “We need not take the moral criticism of the world seriously, because the uniqueness of our suffering places us above the moral judgment of an immoral world.”

Meanwhile, on the Left, Jews are seen as a religious minority within the superstructure of European Christian colonialism that has dominated the globe since Columbus. Yes, Jews have faced oppression, this narrative acknowledges, but they are ultimately a European byproduct: They are white people with a little flair—a belief system draped over the same racial material. When King tweeted about the “White Jews” who protested against the sale of a home in Afula (inside the Green line) to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, he was following in this tradition, and in so doing erasing Jewish peoplehood. This was not Jewish racism against Arabs, in his view: It was white colonialist racism.

Jewish history, in fact, profoundly complicates the idea that all conflicts can be boiled down to modern Western European “white” Christian imperialism. But this trend on the left is increasingly strong. The term supersessionism has traditionally referred to the primacy of the New Testament for Christians, its teachings taking precedence over the Old Covenant between God and the Jews featured in the Old Testament. Recently, Bryan Cheyette, an English professor specializing in textual representations of Jewish identity, suggested that the insistence on a specifically postcolonial lens for evaluating oppression is a new kind of supersessionism: Kicked off by venerable postcolonial studies founder Edward Said, who believed Palestinians were the new Jews, it is now carried forward by progressives such as King, or Women’s March founders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, the latter of whom recently said Jews who feel unwelcome among today’s progressives “are going to have to come to terms with being uncomfortable,” because the Palestinian cause is too important—akin to South African apartheid. Implicitly, the story of the Palestinians and the story of African Americans are part of the same story of injustice, and the injustice against them has superseded Europe’s Holocaust. Cheyette instead suggested we move away from seeing these histories as exceptional: supersessionism “makes it impossible to find connections in the past and our most urgent present between different forms of dehumanization—Orientalism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia—and between shared forms of suffering (not least as refugees) alongside an often-violent agency.”

The 20th century demonstrated the tremendous capacity humans have to disregard and extinguish others’ lives, and the 21st century has yet to break that pattern. It is possible to recognize the persecution and violence, in modern memory, of Jews while recognizing the racism that exists within Jewish communities. It is also possible to recognize the deep and violent history of marginalization, oppression, and enslavement faced by African Americans and other people of color in America; and to see that both Israelis and Palestinians have been traumatized by wars, military occupation, and terrorist campaigns.  The existence of each of these traumas does not delegitimize the others. In her intellectual history of intersectionality, gender studies professor Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro argued that in making an intersectional shift, one begins to take subaltern communities as seriously as the mainstream. But doing so also means recognizing that “one is neither purely an oppressor nor purely oppressed”—a lesson both Jews and their critics have yet to internalize...

Read Joshua Ladon’s full piece at The New Republic.

(h/t @pointmerose)