#like we say ‘Luther caused the reformation’ but that’s just wrong

[chewwytwee]

Apparently the IRS reclaimed a billion dollars in back taxes from tax cheats, and it’s because of money they got from a Biden administration act in 2022. It’s the small things that build up over a long period of time

[bqstqnbruin]

Distractions

Oof I’m glad we still have some rat king fever going on here.

But anyway, it’s now after midnight on Friday, which means my college graduation is tomorrow and I still don’t have all of my cords and medals and stuff which is sad but I’ll get them eventually, right?

This was requested, so I hope you like it! Here is the original request!

___________________

“I don’t get why you want to come to the rink and study all the time?” you hear Sam say through the phone. 

“Because I know that guys won’t harass me there like they do at the coffee shop on campus. And if they do while I’m at the rink, you can just hit them or something.”

“Y/N, c’mon.”

“Sammy, please,” you call him the name you know he hates. It might not be the best strategy to use it, but it always gets you what you want. “I pay you for gas to come pick me up, don’t I?”

“Yes.” 

“And I make you dinner once a week if you let me study there already.”

“Yes,” he groans. 

“So, then, come pick me up and I’m studying at the rink.”

“Fine.” He hangs up to hopefully come pick you up and drive you to the rink as you get your books and computer together in your bag. Your exam was coming up in your Reformation and Revolution of Europe,1500 - 1850 class, and you needed to do some hardcore studying and prepping of essays before you got so behind you weren’t able to catch up. 

Sam was happy when you had decided to go to University of Calgary for school, because it meant you would be right near him, he would know you’re safe, and most importantly for him, he would be able to keep an eye on you to make sure you were safe. What he didn’t seem to like was that you had a hard time studying unless you were at the rink, a habit and mindset that developed growing up. Your parents would take you to Sam’s practices and you stay the entire time, your mom or dad being the parent volunteer that would be the extra set of eyes in case a child needed help off the ice. You had to get your homework done somehow, especially in high school. What choice did you have?

You find your keys and run out the door of your apartment right as Sam pulls up to your apartment. “I hate two things: one, that you know my schedule so well because I get stuck doing crap like this, and two, that you’ve gotten so good at nailing down my schedule you know exactly how long it will take me to pull up in front of your door.”

“What can I say. History is all about the timeline.”

“I hated everything about what you just said.”

“Yeah, me, too. Just drive.” 

“So what are you studying for this time?” he asks.

“Ref and Rev. My exam is next week.”

“I don’t understand why you like history so much. Like, who likes history?”

“Plenty of people. It’s a good major for law school. Who likes hockey?”

“Enough people that I make more money in one year than you’ll probably see in your entire life.”

“Oh, shut up!” 

“Hey, ya know, some of the guys might be happy that you’re coming to practice today. One of the guys even said that after you came, he played the best game of his life,” Sam says, pulling up to the practice facility.

“Yeah, sure. Which one?”

“Remember Matthew?” 

You definitely did. The curly-haired, blue-eyed, lispy rat boy that was your brother’s teammate was one of the players, from your understanding, that you were supposed to either love or hate with no in between. “He’s that rat-type boy, right?”

“Maybe don’t say that too loud, Y/N/N. Most people don’t really enjoy being called ratty, even if Matthew really is a rat.”

“Fair enough,” you shrug, parting ways with him to go find a seat for yourself to study in for the day. 

The first thing you had to do was actually figure out which unit in the class the exam was actually on. You loved that your professor was so passionate about history; every day she was genuinely excited to teach the class, even if it was an 8 am, but wow was she disorganized and all over the place. The first essay you had to outline was asking whether or not the reformation did what it meant to. The vaguest possible question: did something succeed? was probably what you hated most about being a history major. You could say one wrong thing, and the entire answer goes to shit faster than you can come up with something that actually makes sense. 

All you had to do was outline the essay now and memorize it next week. Then outline the other essay, and basically fill out the four page study guide that you now realize you have. “You’ve got to be joking,” you say to yourself as the boys start coming out onto the ice. 

“Y/N, why are you all the way up there?” you hear Sam call out.

“Where else would I go?” you yell back, the guys turning to look at you, your feet up on the seat in front of you, a book and your laptop open in your lap.

“On the bench? Come here before we have to come move you.” 

You lean your head back, groaning, a smile on your face anyway. You know what he’s doing. Sam wants you close so that Matthew can go talk to you. You shove your stuff in your bag, getting up to make your way down to the bench as Sam starts cheering like an idiot. “You’re annoying, you know that?” you tell him, sitting down and trying to do your best to get comfortable with your computer and books.

“I would be a horrible older brother if I weren’t,” he says, skating away. You roll your eyes at him, getting back to the essay you were starting to outline. You finally get in the zone with the paper, hoping that you had a solid thesis and a good direction to go with for the paper. 

“So?” someone says, snapping you out of your zone, causing you to jump.

“Jesus Christ!” you squeal, nearly dropping your laptop, your book falling off your lap and onto the bench.

“Wow, jumpy much?” Matthew says, leaning over the wall to try to see what is on your computer. 

“I was clearly not expecting you to sneak up on me when I am obviously doing work.” 

“Why do you come here to study? How is all of this not distracting?”

You look up at him. The curls sticking out from his helmet, the slight lisp in his voice, the beads of sweat dripping down the side of his face. You just want him to leave right now. You just want to study. That’s the only reason you came. “What’s distracting about being here?” 

A smirk grows on his face, a devilish look in his eyes, “Oh, I think you know what would be distracting.”

“You’re right. There is a pest problem,” you return his smirk, looking back down at your laptop. You started typing, even though it was complete nonsense just so he would go away.

“See ya later, Y/N,” he says, skating off, the grin still on his face.

Every time you looked up for the rest of practice, his eyes were already on you, looking away just in time to make you think you had been imagining it. 

By the end of practice, all you wanted to do was get home and finish the section of the study guide you had started. You were waiting for Sam by his car, on your phone scrolling through Insta when you hear two voices approaching you, both of them way too familiar for your liking. You look up to see Sam and Matthew, freshly showered, Matthew looking directly at you as they came towards you.

“So, Y/N/N, Matthew actually lives closer to you than I do, so he said he would take you home,” Sam says, unlocking his car.

“I was going to get us dinner tonight though, remember?”

“Uh, get it with Matthew. I’ll eat with you another time, I just want to go home right now.” 

“Yeah, I’m down for dinner with you,” Matthew says, taking your arm and starting to drag you to his car.

Before you can protest, Sam shuts his door, you not even realizing he got in and started the engine. “Watch it Chuky, she’s still my sister. Love ya, Y/N,” before driving off, leaving you no choice but to follow Matthew to his car.

“So what were you thinking for dinner?”

“Enough food just for me,” you tell him. Yours and Sams number one rule was no dating friends or teammates. Sam was not allowed to date any of the girls on the track team with you when you two were in high school, you were not allowed to date any hockey player that had the same logo on their chest as Sam ever. Matthew was definitely no exception. But then why would Sam have even mentioned that Matthew was the one who liked you coming? And what did he mean by ‘she’s still me sister?’ “Sorry,” you tell him, shaking your head, “I’m just stressed over the exam I was studying for.”

“What class?”

“Reformation and Revolution of Europe, 1500 to 1850,” you tell him the title of the class that was slowly becoming your least favorite.

“Why would you do that to yourself?”

“I’m a history major. It fulfills like eight requirements that I need for graduation so I figured, why not? Plus, Martin Luther is kinda interesting once you get past the whole, ‘he’s the Donald Trump of his era.’”

You keep talking the rest of the way, realizing that Matthew didn’t actually know where you lived. “Where are you taking me?” you ask him, surprisingly not scared about his answer. 

“Oh, shit. I was driving back to my place outta habit.”

“I’m fine with that if you are,” you hear yourself say, not even realizing it was actually something you wanted, or at least, wouldn’t mind.

“Yeah, sure.” The smirk from before returns to his face. “You know, you staring at me while I’m driving actually is a distraction. Kinda like you sitting there on the bench looking so,” he stops, like he’s trying to find the right word, “nerdy.”

You can’t help but roll your eyes, “Should I be taking that as a compliment?”

“If you want.”

“Now I understand why Sam likes Noah more,” you tease, knowing it gets under his skin. Is this flirting with him? Should you be flirting with him to begin with?

“Oof, you know how to hurt a man, Bennett, just like your brother on the ice.”

“Why did you come up and talk to me during practice?” you ask, changing the subject.

“How could I not?”

“No one else did, not even Sam,” you point out.

“I guess I just wanted to talk a cute girl today.”

“Matthew Tkachuk, are you supposed to be hitting on one of your teammate’s sisters?” 

He pulls his car into a parking space, not even realizing you were in the garage of what you assumed to his apartment building. You hadn’t even been paying attention the entire drive where you were going, other than the fact that you weren’t going home. He turns off the car, turning to face you. “Your brother said it was ok.”

You can’t help but burst out laughing. “What, you asked Sam’s permission to flirt with me?” 

“Maybe not just flirt?” 

He starts to lean in for a kiss, your heart pounding. “Wait a minute. You’ve gotta at least buy me dinner first,” you tell him, your hand on his chest, feeling his heart pound just like yours is. The look in his eyes, the longing, shock. You get out his car before he can say anything.

“You’re just doing this as a distraction, aren’t you?”

“We all love distractions, don’t we?” you say, as he takes your hand in his, leading you to his apartment.

“So, what do we want to eat?”

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

…

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

…

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

…

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

…

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

…

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

…

Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

…

And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

…

The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

…

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

…

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[spiritualdirections]

Mercy in a time of national anger

Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit made the Apostle’s speech in their rough, Galilean accents, understandable to those from countries all over the region where Aramaic was not spoken. Ever since proud engineers tried to build the Tower of Babel, the languages of the Earth had been scrambled. The miracle of Pentecost is that through the Holy Spirit, the sin and punishment of Babel were set aside, and people began to understand each other. In fact, the Acts of the Apostles describes the early Church as having a miraculous level of unity, in which everyone lived in harmony, “with one heart and one mind (lit. “soul”).” This sort of unity is available to us, if through the Holy Spirit we set aside the sin that divides us.

But a few chapters later, that harmony gives way to jealousy and misunderstanding. The new Christian community in Jerusalem, which includes baptized converts from both Judaism and paganism, starts to divide among pagan-Jewish lines. At first, the problem is one of (alleged) discrimination—one group thought that they weren’t getting treated fairly. Later the divisions become theorized and theological—the Jewish converts wanted to impose Jewish customs and the Mosaic Law upon the non-Jewish converts. St. Paul spends much of his ministry fighting off this theological error. The Letter to the Romans explains his major arguments: Paganism is bad and you converts from paganism should rejoice at having been rescued from that. Judaism, on the other hand, includes God’s revealed truth. But the Jewish converts to Christianity shouldn’t boast about their superior heritage, since the Old Covenant was incomplete; all its religious truth didn’t actually rescue a single person from sin—for that we all need baptism into Jesus’ New Covenant. The pagan converts were apparently bragging that they’d now supplanted the Jews in God’s kingdom, and so St. Paul shut down that argument as well—we have nothing of our own to boast about, but only Jesus, and the fact that we get to suffer and participate in His Passion and sacrifice on the Cross.

Interpersonal animosity is a consequence of Original Sin. The original harmony of man and woman in the Garden of Eden, in which Adam rejoices that finally God has found him a suitable partner in Eve, gives way after the Fall to Adam blaming God for giving him “the woman”. Cain murders his brother Abel, his anger leaving him open to temptation by the devil. And so on, down to our day.

This week, we’ve been focused on how people of different races don’t love each other. Last fall, in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations and the #MeToo movement, we focused on how men don’t treat women with respect. Before that, we were concerned about how we treated immigrants. And so on. It seems that we get outraged by whatever part of fallen humanity the media causes us to focus on right now, until the next news cycle refocuses us on the sin over there. We can always find genuine, real, interpersonal animosity if we look for it, since we can always find the fallenness of humanity if we look for it.

We can hate people who are different from us. And, as the story of Cain and Abel teaches us, we can hate people who are a lot like us. A few years ago, we were focused on how Irish Christians, racially indistinguishable from each other, were killing each other. We were shocked about how Rwandan Catholics, all of whom are black, conducted a genocide against each other in the 1990s. This Wednesday, we celebrated the feast of Charles Lwanga and the Ugandan martyrs, all members of the Gandan people, who were killed by their own king for refusing his homosexual advances. Husbands and wives, who profess their lifelong love on the day of their weddings, come to hate each other in the wake of the divorce. Mothers kill their own children by the millions through abortion, from some misguided sense of self-preservation (a species of self-love). We can grow to hate or mistrust anyone who isn’t us. That’s the lesson of original sin.

Charity, the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit, is the love that overcomes our anger at injustice and the sinful divisions that follow. Without charity, without grace, our concerns shrink: from a love of all mankind, to a love of our tribe (literal or metaphorical), to a love only of those like us, to a love of this family member but not that one, to a love of ourselves above all, even above Christ. Charity is the love that tears down the walls that divide us. Charity is the readiness to give our lives for those we love, in imitation of Christ’s sacrifice.

As the sad examples of Northern Ireland and Rwanda make clear, Catholics are not free of the temptation to selfishness and even to murder. The Church has had and will always have sinners within it. And yet, in the Creed we say, “we believe in one holy… Church.” This is a dogma. It doesn’t mean that the Church includes only those who are without sin, but rather that the Church is holy insofar as we allow the Holy Trinity to work within us. Through the Holy Spirit, we are baptized into Christ Jesus and his covenant with the Father. When we genuinely act and pray in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are holy. Charity is a participation in the interior life of the Trinity.

In my book Mercy, I talk about how a great part of the difference between Christian thinking and secular thinking about politics comes down to mercy, to how we respond to injustices. The mistake of what I call “justice-only politics” is to have well-developed ideas about how things ought to be (aka justice), but no concept of mercy, no real thought about what to do when circumstances and/or people get in the way of their idea of justice.

I think the national reaction to the killing of George Floyd reveals something like this. Some people think that the right thing to do is to enact reforms of the police; others think that the right thing to do is to kill the police and bomb the precinct. Some people think that nonviolent protests are an appropriate response; others think that injustice justifies robbing the local Target. Some people are satisfied when the bad cops are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted; others want to overthrow the government. Some are just so upset that they don’t know what to do. All agree that something deeply wrong happened to George Floyd, but our consensus stops there, at the level of justice.

Mercy is the virtue that comes into play when things go wrong. Once we decide that something is unjust, we still have to decide what is the right thing to do. Do we “cancel” the unjust persons, breaking solidarity with them and removing them from society? Do we send them to the guillotine? Or do we try to make things better? In an interesting Trinitarian statement, Jesus commands his disciples to “be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). So justice-only politics, or any politics without solidarity for the offender and the sinner, is not a Christian option.

Jesus also commands us to be meek and gentle, as he was, rather than angry. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Beatitudes, says that to be meek while at the same time not being a wimp (my paraphrase) is a gift of grace. For most people, to keep their anger at injustice under the control of their reason (so that it doesn’t grow to rage) is a virtue. But for the Christian, we have the grace and therefore the responsibility to go way beyond mere self-control. We are commanded to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, hunger and thirst for justice, and not to get angry enough even to call someone names—above all, to love everyone whom Jesus loves, for the reason that Jesus loves them. Jesus, when faced with the greatest injustice in the history of the universe, his own crucifixion, didn’t get angry; to the contrary, he was meek “as a lamb led to the slaughter.” He was strong—he was omnipotent—and could have resisted the injustice with power and caused his enemies to relent and submit. But he revealed to us that to be meek and loving in the face of great wrongs is to be divine.

Racism is a sin, and Jesus conquers sin. It’s a sad fact that most of our thinking about race takes place in a left-wing, Marxist, atheistic context, in which a desire for power and an awareness of otherness crowd out Christian reflections on meekness and solidarity. It didn’t used to be this way. The Civil Rights movement was once led by Christians, most notably the Protestant Pastor Martin Luther King. It appealed to the Gospel to unify people of all races. As in so much of our life, so to with regard to race, it’s a struggle to think in Christian terms. When people only talk about justice, it’s a struggle to cultivate mercy. It’s a struggle to forgive those who have trespassed against us, or people like us. It’s easy to forget what we said above, that mercy is commanded of us.

For this reason, I highly recommend that we Catholics foster a desire for mercy, pray for mercy, and perform works of mercy as much as we can. June is the month devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a symbol of his suffering for us out of his merciful love—the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart is Friday, June 19, a time when many people consecrate themselves to the Sacred Heart. Many people find that the Chaplet to Divine Mercy helps realign their hearts with Jesus’, so that they can regard people with his merciful eyes and love them with his merciful heart. Both devotions call attention to Jesus’ Passion, the steep price that he paid to conquer sin and division. We’ll find that we, too, have to pay a steep price to conquer the sin in our own hearts—that we cannot be casual or lazy about our own spiritual lives if we want to help the world to be better.

There are no spiritual shortcuts. To conquer racism requires a conversion to holiness, and a willingness to spread grace and charity to hardened hearts. Only through baptism into Christ’s Ascension can any fallen human being participate in the inner charity of the Trinity. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to transform our lives.

[thats-a-lot-of-cortisol]

I’ve been seeing (and sharing) some things about certain prophets and scriptures and such. So I’m going to share my unsolicited opinion about this. I’ll preface by saying that I’m not Black and don’t pretend to know the full extent of the harm from the racism in the Church. I’m coming at this from what I’ve heard and learned and studied; if I say something inaccurate, please let me know!

 I’ll make it as organized as I can. It’s gonna be long so it’ll be under the cut.

First of all, I know that we’re told to listen to the prophet’s voice. D&C 21:4-5 says:

Wherefore, meaning the church, thou shalt give heed to all of [Joseph Smith’s] words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them, walking in all holiness before me;

For his word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith.

(Brackets added by me).

This says that we need to heed the voices of the leaders of the Church because they’re mouthpieces of the Lord. It also says that we need to have patience and faith. To me, this means that sometimes they’ll say things we disagree with. This is often looked at as “oh you need to pray and learn to be okay with the doctrine”, which is the case sometimes! But sometimes, to me, this also means “you need to pray and figure things out for yourself, keeping the faith when your leaders decide to spread their opinions instead of or alongside doctrine”. It’s odd to me that we say that our leaders are imperfect but then refuse to truly admit when a previous leader (you know the one, though there were plenty more) were, in a word, wrong. Brigham Young was an imperfect person who supported slavery and took away Black mens’ rights to hold the priesthood. He did some awful things! And guess what? He was wrong. Ezra Taft Benson said that Martin Luther King was a communist. Guess what? He was wrong. Saying that someone was a prophet and brought forth doctrine and saying that they had wrong/harmful opinions are not mutually exclusive. We readily criticize Joseph Smith for being bad at money but we have a hard time criticizing Brigham Young for being racist and pro-slavery. Honestly, I consider Young to be worse in that regard, so I’m not sure why we’ve refused to acknowledge it for so long. A couple other people who are held up as religious leaders who did the Lord’s work include:

-Martin Luther, who was antisemitic for a large part of his life and died holding those views.

-Paul, who was sexist. (I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not the verses in question were actually his words because I’m not very knowledgeable on the topic, but they are attributed to him as of when I’m writing this so that’s what I’m going with).

Paul is well loved and respected by Christians, at least from what I’ve seen. Martin Luther was a crucial part of the Reformation. We say that those views are outdated and harmful despite the fact that those men were “a product of their time”. In the secular sphere, we say this about Confederate generals and slaveholders. We recognize the culture they grew up around but critique their views anyway because we know better now. On top of that, cultures are never monolithic, so not everyone’s going to have the same views. Heck, Martin Luther wasn’t antisemitic at first. “Their time” included people who weren’t sexist or racist or antisemitic or any other bad “-ist”. Their time period isn’t an excuse.

So why are we allowing it to be an excuse with our leaders? Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the Lord’s Church in the latter-days, was anti-slavery! He appointed Black men to the priesthood! Some examples: Elijah Abel was the first Black man to be called to the Seventy. He went on three missions. He was ordained to the priesthood! Joseph T. Ball was a branch president! He was also ordained to the priesthood. I said it earlier and I’ll say it again: Brigham Young took the blessings of holding the priesthood away from Black men. This goes directly against what Joseph Smith, one of the first to hold the priesthood in the Restored Church, did. And this stance was held up by other racist leaders until 1978.

Our leaders through the years have claimed to have been praying for an answer about this, and I’m sure they were, but they didn’t receive the go-ahead to lift the ban. I commonly hear people justifying this by saying that such a radical stance would have killed the Church because the world wasn’t ready for it. But there were plenty of anti-slavery churches who actively helped and protected slaves and free Black people at that time and afterwards. So to me, the logic doesn’t add up, and it’s never sat right with me.

But here’s the thing: we know that the Restoration is a process. We know that we learn and grow “line by line, precept by precept” as we are willing to apply what we are taught. You can pray for whatever you want, but if you’re not truly open to the answer you won’t get it. I’m sure many of us have had those times where we say that we’re open to whatever the answer is but we aren’t yet; I know I have. I, personally, think that that’s what happened. The apostles and prophets weren’t truly ready. And guess what it took? It took them realizing that a community of Saints in Brazil (if I remember correctly) who wouldn’t be able to go into the temple being built in their area raised money to build it anyway. 

In a similar vein, we know that some of the teachings used to justify those views are false.

-”Mark of Cain”: used to say that Black people were unworthy of temple covenants because they’re descendants of Cain. This is false and dehumanizing.

-”Valor in Heaven”: this is the belief that people who aren’t white are that way because they were “less than faithful” during the war in heaven. This is false. A lot of things have grey areas, but I feel like this is pretty straight forward: either you ended up on the Savior’s side in the pre-existence or you didn’t. Everyone reading this in a physical body ended up on the Savior’s side. I, personally, don’t think Heavenly Father would quantify it, either. Is someone who joined the Church later in life any less qualified for the Celestial Kingdom? What about someone who doesn’t accept the gospel until the afterlife, but gets all of the saving ordinances by proxy? Do they get stuck in a Kingdom lower than what they actually should get? “Valor in Heaven” flies in the face of our teachings and is dehumanizing.

-The Lamanites’ curse: this was a specific situation that applied to a specific group of people. Quick note: I’m wrestling with these verses myself, but this is where I’m at with them right now. This is definitely “gospel according to Jean” territory, partly because I’m not sure how often recent leaders have discussed it: we’ve been avoiding the topic all together for a while now.

It didn’t make their culture monolithic. Both they and the Nephites went through phases of righteousness and unrighteousness. The main issue was that the Nephites (who started out righteous) were actively being killed by the Lamanites. The curse was a way to tell them apart, yes, but it would have been the same whether it was “the Lamanites will have blonde hair” or “the Nephites will be dark” (to use the terminology in the Book of Mormon). Also, what does Jacob tell the Nephites in Jacob 3? One, to “revile against them no more because of the darkness of their skins” (verse 9) and two, that they were more righteous than the Nephites were at that time. Jacob gives a couple reasons for this: firstly, they loved their wives and didn’t cheat on them or participate in polygamy that wasn’t given the go-ahead by the Lord (this is what the Nephites were doing). Secondly, the hatred they felt towards the Nephites was passed down by their fathers. Their fathers were Laman and Lemuel, who actively tried to murder their brothers and even their father, and taught their children to do the same to their cousins. The Lamanites hated the Nephites because they were taught that Nephi stole the brass plates (which held genealogy and doctrine) and tried to take the right to rule from his older brothers. I, at least, can understand the logic of that, even if it’s not really what happened according to the Book of Mormon. They were acting on what they knew. It was a lasting blood feud between family, not “oh one group is Not White so they’re bad”. This, besides the fact that the Lehites hailed from Jerusalem. So, Middle Eastern. Also, “filthiness”, from what I can tell, was used as another way to say “unrighteousness”. It’s not that they were literally “dirtier”, as I think many people take it to mean.

When one group was righteous and the other one wasn’t, the righteous group sent missionaries to the other. We use it to justify racism and slavery. There’s also the fact that sometimes the scriptures say that the Lord caused something to happen when really it was more that He let it happen. He didn’t actually harden the Pharaoh’s heart, He just didn’t violate the Pharaoh’s agency to un-harden it. I wonder if the “curse” was something similar.

So all that to say: we should absolutely hold Brigham Young, Ezra Taft Benson, and the others accountable for the harm they did. They were human! And humans are never just good. It’s okay to say “we recognize that these men furthered the Restoration, but they also did and said awful things that are not acceptable.” That’s not disrespecting their roles as prophets, seers, and revelators, it’s ensuring that we don’t conflate their opinions with doctrine. Is it so hard to apologize? To not ignore the pain this caused? But until us and our leaders both start actively working to undo the racism inherent in the system, we’re not going to get anywhere.

[dogbearinggifts]

“Dad Sent Me to the Moon” vs. “Because Dad Made Me”

How Luther and Vanya Talk About Trauma, Part Nine

This is Part Nine of my series comparing and contrasting how Luther and Vanya talk about their own respective traumas, and respond to the traumas of others. This part will conclude my examination of the series itself, and my analysis of each episode’s events. I have one more installment planned, where I discuss my overall findings for each character—both how they are portrayed in canon and how they are portrayed in fandom, as well as some general insights on each that I’ve picked up along the way—so stick around for that. 

If this is the first time you’re seeing this series on your dash, you can find previous installments here: 

Part One  Part Two  Part Three  Part Four  Part Five  Part Six  Part Seven  Part Eight 

and then I swear I’ll finally go through and add links at the bottom of the page on each essay I’m sorry I’ve just been lazy, y’all are awesome for sticking with this

Episode Nine: Changes Part Two (aka Apocalypse…Now?) 

This is not the first mention of trauma in this episode; merely the first mention in this half of it. Nevertheless, it comes when Allison joins Luther, Diego and Klaus in the basement, where Vanya is being held. 

Luther: Allison, what are you doing down here? You should be in bed. Allison: LET HER GO Luther: I can’t do that. She hurt you. Allison: MY FAULT Luther: I’m sorry, but she’s staying put. Just until we know what we’re dealing with. She stays put. Now, come on. Come on. You need to rest.

It’s easy to read this scene as Luther adopting a patronizing attitude toward Allison (“Oh ho ho, I know what’s best for you, silly girl”) or adopting a vindictive one toward Vanya. However, I think both of those interpretations fail to account for the most important piece of the puzzle here: Until very recently, Luther blamed himself for all the awful things Reginald did to him. 

Think back to his reaction upon learning he was sent to the Moon for no reason: “I wasn’t a good enough Number One? I couldn’t cut it?” Luther had just discovered evidence that something awful had been done to him, and he immediately assumed it was a result of something he did. While it’s never explicitly stated that he blamed himself for Reginald mutating him, I would say that based on how Luther reacted to the reveal on his Moon mission, it’s very likely he did blame himself. If only he’d been more careful. If only he’d paid more attention in training. If only he’d done some minor thing that allegedly would have turned the tide in his favor and prevented his near-death. 

And now here’s Allison, who narrowly survived having her throat cut, robbed of her powers and reduced to writing short messages on a notepad—and she’s looking at the woman responsible for her state and saying MY FAULT. 

To Luther, this probably bears a striking resemblance to the self-blame that was his constant companion for years. 

I think that’s why he doesn’t listen to Allison. Not because he thinks he knows what’s best for her. Not because he wants to hurt Vanya further. He’s telling her that Vanya stays put because he believes that Vanya was responsible for her condition. And honestly? He’s right. Allison has received a lot of undeserved ire for her attempted Rumoring of Vanya, but as I pointed out in my previous installment of this series, Allison had no other defense. Vanya was out of control, and Allison had absolutely no idea if catering to Vanya’s demand would allow her to leave that cabin alive or if it would simply prolong her death. What happened to Allison was not her fault. Responsibility for Allison’s state lies with Vanya and Vanya alone. 

Luther wasn’t at that cabin. He didn’t see what happened. But even without firsthand knowledge of what left Allison powerless, he’s still able to recognize self-blame when he sees it. His response to that recognition is poor and leads the family closer to tragedy, but it is rooted in empathy—not spite. 

*********

Our next trauma mention comes from Vanya, who is….technically talking to herself, although it makes sense in context. Regardless of how difficult it is to quantify something like this, I feel as if what Vanya says here is disregarded in favor of the context in which she says it—that is, fandom tends to woobify Vanya for having a psychotic break and ignore the rather unsympathetic motivations she reveals. 

Young Vanya: They’re still afraid of us. Even after all these years. Afraid of our power. Vanya: You’re not real. Young Vanya: We killed Leonard. Vanya: Because he lied to us. Young Vanya: Not about everything. Vanya: What are you talking about? Young Vanya: You know. You’ve always known. Our brothers and sister, they’re just like Dad. Driven to keep us down. A muted voice, isolated from the group, never in the limelight, never the center of attention. It will never end. Not until we act. Vanya: But they’re our family. Young Vanya: They fear you now. They’re gonna keep you in here forever. Vanya: No. Young Vanya: Do you remember what that was like? Staring at these grey walls, hour after hour, day after day while they played together? Do you want to live like this for the rest of our lives?

Much is made in fandom of the fact Vanya is trapped in this anechoic chamber, but very little is made of what she says while trapped in there. While I’d like to give fandom the benefit of the doubt, I’m inclined to believe that the dialogue in this scene is excluded less by oversight and more by design, because this dialogue surgically dismantles the popular image of Vanya as an innocent victim who is neither dangerous nor at fault for what happened in the cabin. 

First, note what she says to her childhood self about Leonard’s murder: “Because he lied to us.” No hesitation. No remorse. No attempt to justify what she did with claims of self-defense. Leonard lied to her, and so she feels she had a right to kill him. 

So many people in fandom have pointed out Luther’s childish moral code. Sometimes this is done to make him appear less sympathetic; sometimes it is done to point out how his proximity to Reginald stunted him, but it’s done quite often. However, Vanya’s moral code is equally childish—if not more so—and I have yet to see anyone point that out. 

Luther’s moral code: If it hurts people, it is an enemy. If it helps people, it is a friend. This is why he locked Vanya up: She hurt Allison, so she is an enemy and not to be trusted. It’s also why he defended Reginald all those years: Reginald saved his life and gave him and his siblings a roof over their heads and three square meals and material possessions and an opportunity to develop their powers, so he was a friend. This completely discounts Vanya’s remorse and the abuse Luther and his siblings suffered, and the harm this code does is clear. 

Vanya’s moral code: If it makes me feel special, it is good. If it makes me feel ordinary, it is bad. Good things should be held close and defended at all costs; bad things hurt me, so I can hurt them back. Leonard made her feel special for most of the series, so she defended him despite all evidence pointing to the fact he was actually a creepy stalker. Allison made her feel ordinary simply by virtue of having access to and knowledge of her powers while Vanya lacked this, and so Vanya felt justified in punishing her with verbal put-downs and abuse and—eventually—open threats and shows of force. 

One thing I’d like to call attention to, before we go any further, is that Luther’s moral code, while childish and leaving no room for reform or wolves in sheep’s clothing, is fundamentally focused on others. He believes it is his duty to protect others from danger, and from those who wish to do harm—no matter the cost to the person he believes is causing harm. Vanya’s moral code, on the other hand, is fundamentally focused on herself. She judges good and evil, right and wrong based on what people do to her and how they make her feel. Luther’s moral code leaves room for selflessness, or a form of it anyway; Vanya’s moral code is fundamentally selfish and cannot be focused outward. 

Another thing I’d like to call attention to is that in this moment, Vanya has nothing to hide and no reason to conceal her motives. She is alone, and hallucinating her childhood self. If ever there were a time to be honest, this would be it. This is when we get to see her motivations, when we get to learn how she feels about her siblings. And we do.

“You know. You’ve always known. Our brothers and sister, they’re just like Dad. Driven to keep us down. A muted voice, isolated from the group, never in the limelight, never the center of attention. It will never end. Not until we act.” 

So often she is portrayed as a lost and broken little girl who only ever wanted love. Her rampage is made out to be the final snapping of a girl who learned she would never gain the affection she craved, but that assumption is torn to pieces by the words of the very character who is so misconstrued. Vanya is not motivated by a longing for love. She never was. She is motivated by a longing for attention. 

Think about it: Leonard never made any overt displays of love, like flowers or candy, but he did shower her with attention. He listened to her more than he talked, put her center stage, wanted to know everything about her and celebrated her triumphs. When Vanya walks in on the emergency meeting and assumes she was excluded, love was never part of the equation. Attention was what they failed to give her. When she bought the typewriter with which she would write her autobiography, it was the comic book featuring her siblings in the pawnshop window that caused her to snap. The world was still fawning over her siblings; she decided it was time the world listened to her for a change. When she goes on her rampage in the next episode, she doesn’t try to find her siblings and scream at them for never loving her; instead she dons a suit and goes to play her concert. Her rampage, like everything else she does, is not a brokenhearted reaction to a lack of love. It is a blatant attempt to make the world pay attention to her and what she can do. 

I don’t think this is indicative of a character flaw in Vanya, or even her fault. Reginald Hargreeves was not an affectionate man, and his favor toward his children was measured in how much attention he lavished upon them. Luther, as the favorite, received the most; Vanya, being excluded from family life, received the least. It is natural that Vanya would crave attention more than she craves love, or even conflate the two. But it is important to accurately name her motivation. Misconstruing it as heartbroken retaliation for a lack of love fails to adequately explain her actions. 

Another thing worth noting: Vanya doesn’t argue with her childhood self’s assessment of the situation. When her childhood self says “They fear you now. They’re gonna keep you in here forever,” Vanya doesn’t bring up the lack of fear on Allison’s face or the fact she wrote LET HER GO on her notepad for all to see. You can argue that, without the ability to hear what was said, Vanya could have mistaken Klaus’ horror for fear and Diego’s anger toward Luther as anger toward her, but it is impossible for her to misinterpret what Allison wrote. Yet she doesn’t mention it, not even for her childhood self to refute it. 

Nor does she bring up the reason why she’s locked in that chamber: the near-murder of her own sister. She flew into a screaming rage because of her own selective memory, cut her own sister’s throat and spent much of the previous episode assuming Allison was dead at her hand—and that doesn’t even enter her thought process. Yes, she now knows Allison is alive, but she also knows that Allison’s powers are gone because of her. She nearly murdered Allison because Allison took her powers away; yet now she knows she has taken Allison’s powers away, and if she feels any guilt over that, we don’t see it. She only thinks about her siblings in the context of how their actions will impact her. 

Finally, her childhood self reveals a lot about how Vanya sees her siblings’ abuse: “Do you remember what that was like? Staring at these grey walls, hour after hour, day after day while they played together?” Her book (shown in a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenes, and in slightly more detail in the comics) mentions that her siblings were experimented on. She knows they went through training. Yet here, they were just playing. Nothing more than that. Playing without her, having fun in her absence. 

I cannot for the life of me understand how Luther has a reputation in fandom for insisting he had it worse than anyone when Vanya is the only one who calls persistent abuse and experimentation playing. It’s true that she was kept at arm’s length and so this misconception was allowed to grow unabated, but it’s telling that in the ten or so years since she’s left home, she hasn’t reconsidered her adolescent perspective on what her siblings went through. 

********

Episode Ten: The White Violin (aka Apocalypse Vanya) 

This episode is primarily the conclusion of all the story threads introduced thus far, and the only moment I’d like to discuss is the montage where Vanya walks through the Academy hallucinating childhood versions of her siblings rejecting her and treating her as if she doesn’t belong. 

Or, so fandom tells me. 

Here’s what actually happens. 

Vanya opens a door and finds Allison and Luther sitting on the bed about to kiss. Allison hears the noise, turns, and screams at Vanya to get out. 

She opens another door and finds Diego sitting on his bed. He looks up and says, “What do you want?” in a rude, demanding tone. 

Behind another door, she finds Klaus and Ben suiting up for a mission. Ben looks to her and says, “To go on a mission, Vanya, you have to have a power.” 

In the parlor (or a parlor—the Academy is fucking huge) she finds her father and siblings posing for a photo. She watches her teenage self beg Reginald to let her be in the photo; he persistently refuses. Her siblings stand mutely as the photo is taken without her. 

Other users have pointed out that these instances of alleged cruelty are actually normal in families with siblings, and I’m inclined to agree. Vanya interrupted a kiss—possibly a first kiss—and I would say Allison is well within her rights to be angry and upset about it. 

Diego’s reaction is a bit less sympathetic, on the surface, although not uncommon in families with siblings. She intruded on Diego’s privacy, which is annoying in families where parents respect the privacy of their children; but if Reginald believes he has a right to walk in and out of his children’s rooms as he pleases, then Vanya’s intrusion is tantamount to a small betrayal. I speak from experience—I grew up in a household where, when we moved into a house with locks on the bedroom doors, it was made abundantly clear that we were never to use them. My parents rarely knocked, and became belligerent the few times I asked them to. As a result of this, my brother and I treated privacy as sacred. We knocked when the door was closed, we knocked when the door was open, we asked if we could come in. When a much younger sibling of mine would traipse into my room without knocking, I would remain angry about it for much longer than was normal or healthy. Point is, Diego’s annoyance could be normal sibling irritation over a failure to respect his privacy, or it could be something more. Either way, it’s understandable. 

Ben’s reaction is blunt, I’ll say that much, and definitely rude. I could see how Vanya would be hurt by this. However, he’s right. At this point in their childhoods, they both believed she didn’t have a power. If she went on a mission, she’d die very quickly. What Ben says here is less bullying and more brutal honesty—and while the line can definitely blur between the two, I’d say he’s more on the side of honesty than on the side of bullying. 

Reginald is the only one who acts out of malice, refusing to let her be in the family photo. While this is par for the course for him, her siblings say nothing in Vanya’s defense; but I don’t think this is a count against them. Yes, they are all probably powerful enough to take Reginald down almost instantly, but he has conditioned them too well. They obey his authority and fear his retribution. None of them are going to risk his wrath by ruining the family photo. 

I think there are two ways to view this montage. 

These are the worst memories Vanya has of her siblings, the most blatant examples of their bullying, as evidenced by the fact they have stuck with her this long and are painful enough for her to destroy whole rooms as a result of them. 

These are not the worst memories she has of her siblings; rather, they are simply the first to come to mind. Her siblings did far, far worse things to her as a kid, but for some reason, she remembers the mildest ones as she walks through the Academy. 

Personally, I think the first option is more likely. Vanya has spent the entire series ascribing the worst possible motives to her siblings’ actions, even when those actions were either friendly or unintentionally exclusionary; and since she’s already in a heightened emotional state, it seems odd that her mind would move to the mildest memories of their alleged bullying when far worse ones exist. Additionally, the one her mind dredges up about Reginald is pretty awful, so it seems her mind would go for memories of her siblings it considers equal to that of Reginald. 

In other words, I think Vanya is an unreliable narrator when it comes to the suffering her siblings inflicted upon her, and I think this scene is evidence of that. 

I don’t think she is fabricating events out of thin air, and I don’t think she’s twisting details regarding her siblings. When she’s storming out of the Academy, ranting to Leonard about how “nothing is good enough next to their holier-than-thou, weight-of-the-world bullshit,” Vanya doesn’t fabricate snatches of conversation and pass them off as fact. She doesn’t change anything about the details of what happened. She does ascribe motive, and the worst possible motive at that. She does the same thing after Allison’s confession: Rather than presenting an entirely new version of events where Allison tosses off some parting shot (”That’s for taking Dad away from me” or some such) Vanya instead presents her own interpretation of events that directly counters Allison’s recollection of her own motives. 

I believe Vanya is doing a similar thing here. I think the events she is hallucinating actually happened. I do think she walked in on Allison and Luther about to kiss, had Diego rudely rebuff her when she entered without knocking, and heard Ben say she couldn’t go on a mission without a power. But I think her interpretation of them is wildly inaccurate—that is to say, she is assuming that these rejections of her presence were an intentional and willful rejection of her as a person and a member of the family; when in reality, they were actually something far more mundane and, while perhaps not quite benign, not actively malicious. 

I do think her siblings participated, to some extent, in Reginald’s exclusion of her. In an earlier episode, we see Allison confronted with this fact as she witnesses Vanya in the security tapes, always off by herself while she and the others went about their training. Allison is surprised and saddened by this. If she participated in an intentional conspiracy to exclude Vanya, I think she would have made some excuse for it (“Well, she didn’t have a power, so what were we supposed to do? Let her play with us and get herself killed?”). Instead, she is disgusted by the actions she took as a child—actions she evidently didn’t put much thought into at the time. 

I think this is at the root of Vanya’s exclusion: Her siblings did exclude her. They didn’t fight back against Reginald’s cruelty toward her, and they didn’t make a lot of effort to try and include her in their daily activities. However, they didn’t do so out of malice, or even a dislike for Vanya. 

In some branches of Christianity, theologians differentiate between sins of commission and sins of omission. A sin of commission is a conscious choice to do something you know is wrong. You choose to steal. You choose to fudge your taxes. You choose to gossip about a person you don’t like. A sin of omission, on the other hand, is a failure to do what you know is right. You don't go to church. You don’t listen to sound advice. You don’t reach out to someone who desperately needs a friend. I may have some quibbles with Christianity now, but I think this principle is a sound one.** 

From all the evidence we have, it seems Vanya’s siblings excluded her in an act of omission. They knew it was right to include her in more than their late-night donut runs, but they didn’t. Maybe they meant to do it and never did. Maybe they were too afraid of Reginald to reach out. Whatever the case, they should have tried to make her feel like a sibling and not a stranger, and they didn’t. 

Vanya, however, sees this act of omission as an act of commission. Where her siblings know it was tragic oversight that led to a childhood of exclusion, Vanya sees it as intentional. Complicating matters is the fact Reginald’s treatment of her was an act of commission, of willful cruelty and a desire to punish her for something beyond her control. Because her siblings were closer to Reginald than Vanya ever was, and because they too excluded her, I think she came to believe they possessed the same motives as he. This isn’t true, but Vanya has believed it for so long that she now sees every act of omission as an act of commission, and every act of commission as monstrous and unforgivable—even when the person sinning against her is working off of incomplete knowledge and a desire to protect others. 

Running count of trauma mentions (cumulative of all episodes thus far)

Own Trauma: Vanya 11*, Luther 11

Trauma of Others: Vanya 5, Luther 5

*I could count the montage where Vanya wanders through the Academy as a trauma mention, but since she doesn’t technically talk about it to anyone—and in fact, no one sees it but her—it doesn’t quite fit the criteria I used to include Luther’s mutation and exclude Vanya’s book. However, I felt it was crucial to my overall analysis, so I included it in that. 

**I have nothing against it as a religion. If you consider yourself a Christian, great! I think it’s a good faith, and I’m glad it works for you. It just didn’t work for me. 

Read on to Part Ten

[mama-germany]

Submission: {IIRC, submission format is bad. This is feminists-against-feminism, hopefully unedited by Mama Germany :^), and ill end my submission with “/submission”, and the rest, if anything, is mama-germany. Also, hopefully the paragraph breaks take, and if they dont…. welp…}

Imma be real with u chief, I dunno what you want me to do with this.  I’m a Jew.  I don’t like communism.  I don’t actually live in Germany.  And I’m not reading all this.  Idk.

Karl Marx’s “On: The Jewish Question” seems a prototype for conflict theory, but has ‘the real jew’ as the 'Haves’ the in place of the 'bourgeois/rich/capitalist’ 'oppressor class’. Conflict theory, icydk, is the collectivist egalitarian pseudoscientific theoretical paradigm taught in sociology, underpinning essentially the whole social justice perspective, and directly encompassing marxist theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, critical theory, gender schema theory (and likely influenced John Money’s gender theory, and builds on gender theory), queer theory, gender critical theory, postmodern theory, lysenkoism (mostly abandoned), standpoint theory,  post colonial theory, animal liberationism, and of course, intersedtional theory which synthesizes them all together wherever they can be synthesized. Marx said the nature of jews is huckstery, he said the real lofe manifestationnof the god of israel is money itself, he said eliminating money would render the jew an equal and normal person. His whole theory, and every conflict theory since, relies on the presupposition the indovodual is irrelevant and what matters is only the aggregate disparities between groups. This turns his theoey ultimately against all boundaries of the individual, their private property and necessarily their innate natural self ownership, their right to self ddetermination. Marx viewed liberalism/individualism as egoism. His whole family was actually jewish, IIRC, he just didnt succeed like they did, he was jealous and a mooch, kind of a beta, likely an aspie if i am to go off the symptomology. He hated them, he was jealous, he wanted success and they had it and he didnt, and so he was basically spot-on like the character Cain from hebrew legend.

Martin Luther. He wrote “On The Jews and Their Lies”. He described jews as piglets suckling from their mother pig, israel, and blamed jews for pretty much everything he viewed as wrong in society. He was basically the predocessor to Hitler and Marx. And one might actually say Marx was an additional predocessor to Hitler. I sure would posot that as likely, even if by proxy of Hitler being influenced by left socialists. I mean, he literally modified the marxist “'class struggle” into his own version of “the struggle”, “MY Struggle/Mein Kampf”. Which brings us to out next german collectivist philosopher. If youre picking up the theme im putting down.

Third subject, Hitler. Self explanatory. Jew-hating anti-egalitarian ethno socialist. Obviously fits in with the last two subject entries. BTW,I have a larger point to all this random pattern listing. One more.

Slightly diverging from hatred of jews, and more toward the begining of postmodernist thought, Max Horkheimer who said freedom and justice are incompatible opposites, and argued everything are oppressive social constructs, every letter and word and phrase and interaction. He said there is no way to know what a just society is, but that we can complain and struggle against the things we dont like and dont find just. And so if you also consider he in the same sitting said freedom and justice are opposites, and this was while summarizing his academic ideas to an interviewer, we can deduce he was directly opposed to freedom, despite considering himself anti-authoritarian…. Anyways, he was bonkers, hope you dont live near Frankfurt, theyre bonkers around them parts, and i know someone who has told me firsthand just how horkheimer style bonkers that town is.

{Honorary mentions. The Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert. Although there was clearly nuance here, Prussia WAS part of the German Empire, but the german youth injunction/sinker was still set in him, to which collectivism was his driver/floatation. He was a nationalist and refused advisors compelling him into an anti-left policy. Honorary mention 2. Antifasciste Aktion, the communist vanguard formed by the german communist party, the KPD, formed to forght fire with fire, using brownshirt tactics against the brownshirts (to whom they lost).}

All four, all German. All of them. 5 if we include the Kaiser. The father of protestantism, the father of communism, the left reformer whos students sparked the “New Left” movement, and Hitler, HITLER. ALL GERMAN. Which is not an implicit racial claim im implying, but one about a sour philosophy. I refer to this as German Collectivism. It is the archetype if collectivism which germany seems particularly possessed by. These have ravaged the whole world, toppled entire nations and enslaved likely over two billion people considering just the PRC, USSR, and Nazi Germany esp with its labir camps. Luther could be viewed as the origin, certainly the origin of modern german collectivism (protestantism & lutherean conspiracy theory, left socialism, and nazism), but the purpose of germany has not changed through any of its past or present phases. It’s purpose seems to be unintentionally destroying itself in the process of intentionally trying to destroy the rest of Europe in attempt to conquer Europe and/or the world. Maybe it came from its clash with Rome, and it never left that modality of picking away at its neighbors. Perhaps its influence from the abrahamic faiths it long traded with, maybe that caused the sort of over-populate-and-make-conquest-youth-army kind of societal reproductive modality, by influence of the abrahamic faiths that did that in the middle east for millennia (with obvious great success, whereas Germany fails at the same niche). Maybe it’s because of their empire-orientation, their pre-lutherean state where they were catholic, and so the culture, thinkers and leaders became oriented toward empire. I dont know. But i do know Hitler, the Kaiser, and Marx were all three alienated children who were very disturbed, and assume Horkheimer and Martin Luther were of similar origins, it seems the common theme among these german influences. Disturbed children make for great communists, and germany has long been riddled with communists. Communists & new left communists like intersectionalists have been frequently compared to a religion, and germany was previously, according to Neitzsche who overtly shared my distain for German philosophy (to my surprise, i love him even more now), he said it seemed to him 4/5 people in germany  were part of protestant clergy. The whole state seems in an unending modality if one total hegemonic culthood after another.

The purpose for german collectivism being so consistently against jews, i assume. It is that jews are very successful on average by comparison to every other category in the west. So theyre integral to the structure of society, particularly around power. So to do the sort of semetic strategy, the strategy of Mohammad and Moses, the strategy of just toppling societies and inheriting the remains, in the west, one must (perhaps in a sidenote of historical irony) go through the jews. If they want to make their collectivist totalitarian ideology dominate, they have to go full cain, and stab their brothers - the jews. And just as stabbing Abel didnt wirk well for Cain, obviously taking out the most success oriented demographic (OF WHICH THERE ARE TWO) in your country is not going to work well for Germany. The other the German Collectivist opposes is the individualist - the English liberal, the stoic, the empiricist, the existentialist, the naturalist, the skeptic, these sorts. These sorts of ideas bring success, and so the authoritarian german collectivist requires their demise as well. The Kaiser hated types like us, the Fuhror hated types like us, marx hated types like us, Horkheimer, and Luther to a clear extent.

i should mention, im not a supernaturalist, the supernatural is all metaphor taken as superstition, im woth Neitszche. Theres certainly no supernatural, and race is a politically meaningless concept to me. But what is contained within the borders of germany…. There seems to be an eccentric kook persona, as a sort of cultural clone prevalent in germany, parallel to the American redneck or hillbilly. Theyre not all terrible people, but theyre often super fucked up like longislanders are in NY, or hillbillies from appalachia, or rednecks from alabama. Or just extremely eccentric like a german lady i knew IRL or Joerge Sprave, or oh my god, Max Horkheimer the kook. And it doesnt miss the city, theyre like that, but converted to progressive ideology. Crazy brutes from yesteryear, mostly tamed, or stubby and eccentric out the wazoo, or tall frail and vegan and metro af. And it’s not limited to the old german. Einstein, (not shitting in einstein, not calling him collectivist, but) absolute weirdo jewish german, Horkheimer, absolute nut job, jewish german, Marx, jewish family, the only correlation is they lived in Germany, like Hitler, the SS, and the kaiser. Even the nations east of them who share similar culture, look at Freud, absolutely a german collectivist type, but from Austria, which today is apparently an ethno national socialist state in all but admission. Prussia influenced the Kaiser’s collectivism. Even people i know from america who have all german ancestry and only third gen american, theyre bonkers, like ICP & Twisted clown-rap omega bonkers, and believe in shit like vampires and wicca and werewolf “lychen”. Oh, and i forgot to mention in summarizing Hitler, his wackjob supernaturalist beliefs. What is that? Why is this so normal there for so long and nowhere else for so long? It seems to spread from there more than anywhere else.

It has to be cultural, and deep seeded. It can be changed, and it needs to be. A german lady mutual of mine sees it and is clearly very weighted by it; i was hindered by it drastically, and i live in America. The nihilism, the self hatred, the narcissism, the psychopathy, the selective empathy (ie, selective psychopathy), the tribalism, the scapegoating. You live in germany, you must see it. You dont seem to like sj or right socialism. You seem closer to an individualist. A westerner despite Germany.

Would you consider it a real phenomenon? 'German Collectivism’? A label for describing the seeming german modality of collectivist government and the german philosophical origin of the majority of world’s largest, most wide spread, and deadly collectivist movements? Particularly today regarding the medium of marxian/intersectional conflict theory ideology? I can easily empirically trace intersectionalism and the french fake-gobbldigook-espousing 'intellectuals’ Peterson points at, back to the ideas of Marx (a german). What are your thoughts on it? What caused it? Why is it so historically persistent to this day? It’s still trying to domineer and control Europe via the proxy of the EU. And what the hell is wrong with so many (#notall) German children?! Or, likely, should i moreso be asking about ***the (#notall) parents***? But today, those parents were raised by nazis, or people raised by nazis. (#notall) but those nazis were raised by communists and imperialists, and those imperialists and communists were raised by communists and lutherean protestants, and those communists and lutherean protestants were raised by more protestants, and then catholics before them, and tribalist pagans before them. The hegemony is just unending waves of wacky who begat waves of wacky. Id like to see the origin of this crap fixed, see germany liberalized, just to show german collectivism undone SOMEWHERE it has been established for once, and in Germany itself no less. My first thought is just end the EU.

Is it real? What’s the cause? How do we undo it? 

[buggie-hagen]

Sermon for Reformation Sunday (10/27/19)

Primary Text | John 8:31-36

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Dear People of God,

       Today is Reformation Sunday. It is a time to pause and reflect on what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Part of our institutional history is connected to the various state churches in Europe—such as Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Part of our commemoration of Reformation today is with brats and beer—come from the German ethnic heritage. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with celebrating where we come from—no matter what your ethnic heritage may be. However, a problem does come up when we blur the lines between ethnic heritage and theological heritage. Lutheranism is not strictly-speaking a German, Swedish, or Finnish thing. This can be shown by the fact Lutherans now make up at least 75.5 million Christians in 99 different countries. This might come as a surprise, but the largest Lutheran church body in the world right now is in Africa and named the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (Mekane Yesus, a name that simply means “Place of Jesus”) with its 8.3 million members—as compared to our 3.4 million members in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. If it is not cultural ties that make someone a Lutheran Christian, what is? We get a clue in the name Lutheran itself. In the book, Book of Harmony, we learn Martin Luther’s original name was “Martin Ludher.” In the time shortly after he posted the 95 Theses, in 1517, he started signing his name in Greek as Martinus Eleutherius—which is how we eventually get his name shortened and passed on as Martin Luther. The name Luther, and by extension Lutheran, comes from a Greek word which means “freed person” or “liberated one.” So when you think of yourself as Lutherans you can think of yourselves as people who are made free.

       This is relevant because the word Lutheran shares a common Greek root with our reading from the Gospel of John today where Jesus teaches us about freedom, where he says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” It is the truth, that is, the word, that makes us free. Specifically, Jesus means the word of the radical good news, that in him we are made free from sin, are made children and heirs of God, and that in Christ we have forgiveness, salvation, and are reconciled to God the Father—entirely out of God’s all-gracious heart. As is usual, there were those who resisted Jesus’ word. They said, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will be made free’?” They believed by virtue of their birth status, meaning their ethnic heritage, they were free and had nothing to worry about. As usual, Jesus tells things like it is in teaching, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” The truth is, our ethnic heritage, our deeds, our feelings, all our abilities cannot and do not save us. We all our rot-gut sinners from birth. No one is exempt from this judgment—for we all are sinners who do sinful things. The language of slavery Jesus uses here teaches us that we are utterly stuck and cannot save ourselves—as long as we are a slave there is no permanent place for us. There is no place we can call home and be safe. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is death.

If this sounds harsh it’s because it is harsh. And it must be. Without knowing how dire our bad situation is, we could never come to appreciate how good the good news is. As Jesus proclaims, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” God’s word of good news to us is that we are justified by grace. This means God’s heart is oriented to us in compassion and love so much so that has chosen to forgive our sins, to reconcile us to himself, on the basis of his mercy alone. God’s word of good news to us is received by faith alone. Meaning that God is the one who causes us to trust in him, and when God makes a promise we have what God promises. And God does this solely through the work of Christ—him crucified on the cross and risen again—to bring us new life. And finally, the new covenant, the gospel, is that God chooses to not remember our sins or hold them against us, as the prophet Jeremiah declares. When it comes to being made free, it’s not about what we can do to satisfy God, but about what God does of his own choosing—to save us from ourselves.

       We are heirs of the Lutheran Reformation. It is not an occasion for us to esteem ourselves as better people than Catholics and all other Christians. It is a time to be thankful that God has addressed us with the radical good news of freedom in Christ. Free to worship God without fear. Free to have hope when all the world tells us to not have hope. Free to be just as God created us to be. Free to look all our problems in the eyes and say, “God has broken your shackles, and I am no longer obligated to your schemes to break me down.” Free to let go of our own idols we cling so tightly to, and to cling tightly to Christ. (pause) Martin Luther never wanted there to be a Lutheran Church. He’d rather we call ourselves Christian, or evangelical—evangelical, not in the sense of the American political landscape, but in the biblical landscape—meaning “centered in the good news.” When we commemorate the Reformation, it is not pointing to ourselves and imagining how amazing we our—because we’re not. No, the Reformation is an opportunity to point away from ourselves and to point to the Christ. He’s the one who sets the world free and will make all things as they should be. Christ is the one who takes away your slavery status and gives you a new status—a child of God. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. And, that’s a promise God makes for you, and keeps for you. Thanks be to God.

[actuallyyangxiaolong]

So this morning during my political theory class, I learned about Locke and his ideas about government and found myself agreeing with a lot of his points and marveling at the way in which his theories shaped our current political systems and climate. And then, in my gender studies class, I learned that he believed that people of color (and black people specifically) (racism tw:) were the result of human beings mating with chimps. As anyone who spends a lot of time in the morally black and white tumblr space does, I freaked out about the opinions that I had held of Locke just an hour earlier and spoke to my professor.

Effectively, what she had to say (and what everyone on this site needs to hear) is that there is a lot of room for morally grey attitudes when dealing with historical figures (in fact it is a necessity). In pretty much every single instance of a historical figure, they are unbearably bigoted in one way or another because they are a product of their time. At this time, all of the prevailing theories about race by scientists and experts (despite it being a social construct) were the most racist bullshit unimaginable, but because these people were relatively educated for their time and were supposed to be the experts, their ideas were taken at face value. People had no real cause to discount experts in an era in which education was limited and society was highly stratified, so they sort of just agreed with whatever the prevailing ideas of the era were and that was that. (after all, most of us likely would not argue if we thought a scientific study was wrong, because we tend to believe in science unconditionally).

My professor also said that we can acknowledge how the bigotry of an era might have shaped their ideas, without discounting the good aspects of a historical figure’s ideas and actions. For instance, I noticed that Locke, in a two-sentence throwaway line, justified slavery despite the fact that his entire book is about the freedoms of life, liberty, and property (property in this instance being anything that you put labor into acquiring). Of course, slavery is absolutely antithetical to that, and anyone who was writing these theories about government and our inherent liberties today would look at slavery and know that it is an absolute abomination against all of these ideas. And yet, he found a way to justify completely contradictory ideas because the racism of the era was so entrenched that it somehow made sense to say the exact opposite of what he theoretically stood for. This theme is present in a lot of the writings and ideas of historical figures, and the further back in history you go, the harder it is to find anything that we would consider morally right.

You do have to acknowledge the ways in which the standard bigotry of a time may have influenced someone’s works (for instance, I doubt that he was thinking about black people when he wrote dozens upon dozens of pages about equality and having the right to life and freedom, nor white people when he wrote about slavery), however you can acknowledge the good parts of what they did and the way that it positively shaped history and even our current society. For instance, his ideas about the separation of powers and tyranny being bad (surprisingly not a belief held by everyone in his era) and that we all have fundamental rights by virtue of being born are really good and incredibly influential, while obviously, the racism was terrible. This can be applied to every influential person (Justinian's code was really influential and a lot of it was amazing, but the antisemitism was terrible. Luther’s complaints against the Catholic church and the massive way in which the protestant reformation shaped the world was also incredibly important and influential and meaningful to a lot of people, but the antisemitism and sexism was again horrific. Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and Mary Wollstonecraft were all super influential people who did some good stuff but who were also characterized by the bigotry of their time, etc.).

So, you really can’t apply your own morals to historical figures and completely discount their ideas and actions based on that, because there must always be nuance and the knowledge that their ideas may have been influenced by the prejudice of the era. While we could not justify many historical attitudes today, these people had no reason to question the entrenched ideas or go against convention (hell, even I had no cause to question my bigoted ideas until I found tumblr). We are all products of our time, our experiences, our family, and those who influence us, and historical figures are no different, but that does not mean that anything that happened before the year 1990 has no merit or that it was inherently 100% garbage just because the people who came up with ideas were impacted by their prejudices.

TLDR-  Tumblr’s black and white morality cannot be applied to any field of study and cannot be applied to the real world. There is always nuance.

[rwdestuffs]

Done dirty: Blake.

So……… Her best disguise is putting on a bow?- That’s like Superman showing up to the daily planet in a pair of glasses, still in his full suit, and introducing himself as Superman while trying to claim that he’s not at all related to the Superman who regularly bench-presses planets!

Oh Blake Blake Blake Blake… What the fuck is up with your character?

You wanted to go to Beacon so that you could reform the White Fang, and there’s not really anything that indicates that this would be at all effective outside of taking it back by force?

It’s blatantly clear that the introduction of Ghira and Kali are retcons, along with the fact that her father created the WF, and the fact that she’s essentially the princess of Menagerie. The biggest reason for this is that there’s no evidence that “Belladonna” is a common name. So there would be nothing stopping an informed person  (Like someone whose family had supposedly been at war with the WF for years) to ask, “Like… the Blake Belladonna that’s the daughter of the chieftain of Menagerie who is also the creator of the White Fang?”

Another reason would be Blake’s lack of a tan. I stand outside for eight hours a week, and I get a tan. But Blake lives on this tropical, sunny island, and she’s about as pale as Ruby?- That makes no sense. Then again…

……… Most of the other denizens of the place also don’t have tans, so I guess the point is moot……… or it would be, if we didn’t see other people with darker skin tones.

So yeah. Blake not having a tan?- I don’t buy it. The island is sunny, and there’s a lot of open space. There’s no reason for the people there to not have a tan.

Then again, Sun’s last name is “Wukong” and they portray him to be a white guy, so I guess there’s no real reason for anyone to have any appropriate skin tones.

Blake’s story makes no sense. Like I alluded to in the intro, thanks to the retconning that happened, Blake’s disguise being at all effective is total nonsense. Say what you want about the Clark Kent disguise, but I doubt that you’d think that the geeky guy who had trouble opening a bottle and works for a news company would be the same person who just beat up Darkseid and his Parademons.

Not to mention that Blake’s parents come out of left field.

THIS is the only indication that Blake had at least one parent in the White Fang, but the way it’s worded doesn’t imply any parents. Kali and Ghira are neither foreshadowed, or mentioned. If you never saw Volume 4, you would be forgiven for believing that Blake was missing either one or both of her parents. Most of the fans believed it, due to there being no indication that Blake still had parents. Now, granted, this could be from a belief that she thought that she had driven them away, and she didn’t deserve to have them anymore, but there wasn’t any mention of it.

Blake is hardly her own character. She has one of the more generic backstories of the main cast, and the characters she interact with are far more interesting than her. Say what you want about Sun, but at least we know what his interests are. Blake’s love for books isn’t mentioned as often as it could, and is only really given a spotlight in the spinoff show. Blake being a bookworm is an interesting idea. We could have mentions of her wanting to have rather stayed back at Beacon instead of being out in Vale because she wanted to read some books instead of “Checking out the competition,” but no. We don’t get that.

(As a side note: How exactly did Weiss know about Sun stowing away?- There were no mentions of other team leaders arriving, so Weiss’ desire to go to the docks makes no sense. (My idea from the Done dirty: Sun edition is right there, if anyone wants to make a fix-fic for that)).

Blake then decides that it’s safer to hang around the stowaway thief that followed her around instead of……… anywhere else. You know what?- Tukson could have been a character that Blake knew. Like… an honorary uncle or something, and she could have run to him. Not only would have it made Tukson a character that we would actually care about when he gets axed in volume 2, but it also could have built Blake’s relationships better.  And she’d be in a bookstore.

Enough with the tangent, let’s start at her trailer where, much like Yang and Junior’s bar, she receives little consequences for her actions on the train. Admittedly, she feels regret for her actions (which is more than I can say for Yang), but really?- That’s not exactly a whole lot.

Her introduction to Volume 1 is also jarring and weird. She knows all this unkind evidence about the Schnee Dust Company, and Weiss thinks… nothing is suspicious about that? The rest of her time in the volume involves picking the person who is basically her antithesis as a partner, and doing the aforementioned things I listed above.

Volume 2 is where we get her obsession arc, and… it’s actually pretty good. We see her wanting to fix a problem, and we see her passion behind it. And we see the results of her finally getting some rest and having a nice time. But Volume 2 also has the Mount Glenn scene, where sh is questioned on how she plans on helping the Faunus.- She has no answer. And this is realistic. Sometimes, people with a passion for a major cause have no real idea as to what they need to do. But in the case of Blake, this makes little sense. She’s had years to think of how to do this, and this is all she has to show for it?

Not to mention her tirade of only wanting to use non-violence is stupid. People like to think that Martin Luther King Jr was all peace, and that everyone agreed with him because he was peaceful. But that’s not true. MLK was imprisoned because of his beliefs, and it took a lot of time and effort for his teachings to make some headway. Contrary to (an unfortunate) popular belief, the Civil War was indeed over slavery, and equal rights. And contrasting the name, the Civil War was anything but civil.

So when the writers go around, spouting that “only nonviolence is okay” then they clearly haven’t read a history book.

Not to mention that Blake (much like the rest of her team, and Oobleck), feel no remorse for all the White Fang members they trapped and killed when they were fighting on the train. “Violence isn’t okay, unless the opponent is a minority.”- That’s the sort of message that the writers are conveying. Unintentionally or not, they seem to be saying that minorities need to suck it up, and take the abuse if they want equal rights, but if any of them are being unruly, then it’s okay to attack them. I didn’t see any member of that team trying to disarm and entrap them. They seemed to be fighting with intent of “kill or be killed” and they chose “kill.” Quite a lot actually. I don’t know how many of those WF members were on that train, but I’m willing to bet that it was a lot.

Volume 3 is just there to show that life isn’t a fairy tale, and Blake gets stabbed. But her reacting apprehensive to Yang is interesting. It shows that her mentor went down a similar path, and she wants reassurance that Yang isn’t going down the same path. It’s understandable, but the way that Blake so easily trusts Yang is… off-setting to say the least.

Volume 4 and 5 is where Blake is so out of character, I’m surprised that she didn’t change her name.

And speaking of name changes, you know how I mentioned how Blake is the daughter of the White Fang founder?- Well, as it turns out, she NEVER CHANGED HER NAME!- This is what I meant when I said that it felt like a retcon that her parents were WF founders, and that she was basically the princess of Menagerie.

Not to mention that Blake slaps Sun around. I get that he was putting her on edge, and his company was unwelcome, but she’s an abuse survivor. That sort of behavior should horrify her. She would be worried that she might be turning into another Adam.

But aside from that, there’s another problem: The narrative doesn’t seem to want to say that Sun was in the wrong here. Instead, it plays off the abuse for comedy, and we’re supposed to sympathize with Sun, fairly similar to how we’re supposed to sympathize with jaune for his Volume 2 behavior. At least Sun faces punishments though, but again, the narrative seems to want to say that Sun doesn’t deserve it, and some of the audience is saying that Blake is being irrational because he’s trying to help.

And then Blake basically only gets back into the fight when Sun gets hurt. The narrative was treating Sun like Blake’s prop. At least she didn’t get him killed…

But Volume 5 shows that it’s more the characters that Blake interacts with, rather than Blake herself that is interesting. Ilia?- Her backstory is way more interesting and sympathetic than Menagerie Princess’ backstory. Sun?- His motivations to help out Blake and get some payback is more interesting than Blake’s.

Blake literally describes her friends in one word.- Y’know, most people don’t do that. They would go on and on about their friends. The least the writers could have done was have Blake explain why she chose those words. But no. We don’t get that even.

She sets her house in fire, and gives a speech that seems really lacking in self-awareness. I get that the idea is that Adam’s actions would reflect poorly on the Faunus, but from a narrative standpoint, there’s no real worry. There’s no mention of how “If this guy acts up again, we’re going to bomb Menagerie.” Blake wouldn’t even have to know that. She could just be unwittingly saving her home from an attack that would perpetuate the cycle of violence. There should have been interviewers sent over to Menagerie to at least get Ghira’s word that they don’t condone Adam’s actions.- But I think that last part can be blamed on the CCT going down.

Blake forgives Ilia for nearly bringing her back to her abuser and being complicit in her parent’s murder, but the other guy (I forget his name) isn’t?- The guy lost his brother!

And then there’s Blake’s fighting style of how she went from dual-weilding her sword and sheath, to her holding her sword with two hands. Blake’s fighting style used to be interesting an unique. She was the only one outside of jaune and Pyrrha to use two different weapons. But unlike jaune and Pyrrha, Blake’s weapons were both for offense.

The writers’ lack of understanding racism is dragging Blake down into the realm of mediocrity. Soon she will join Renora in this regard.

She once said that “life isn’t like a fairy tale”

So,  why does she keep going on her spiel about nonviolence being the only answer?- It feels as if she knows that life isn’t a fairy tale, but she isn’t going to stop living in one.

Because it feels like she wants validation.

Or, alternatively, her abuse at the hands of Adam has made her detest violence so much, that she can’t stand it being used to get one’s way………

Which contradicts her beating up Roman to get her way of stopping the White Fang.

Blake’s consistency is like one of her shadow clones. Once you try to grasp it, it dissipates.

[gothprentiss]

i'm constantly fascinated by how weird criminal minds is with religion

sidebar if ur reading this bc this does look insane: i'm not religious but i was raised by slavic catholics and i am in the humanities and have an odd relationship with it so here we are

like, all crime shows (whatever their degree of copaganda) have astoundingly flat morality, even when it's their entire schtick that they don't, and typically religion and its attendant ethics are like, ornamental there. e.g. i loved luther, which is definitely a show about an Amoral Cop, and that thought process about morality was still always immensely situational, and i'm pretty sure it had like, some kind of unsatisfying bits about john luther's relationship with belief. like at some point zoe luther says "he believes life is all we have" and it's like, okay? i get it? all crime is theft? and then what.

and then criminal minds, probably not on purpose, did two episodes (lucky, demonology) that were straight up like satan intervenes in the lives of men and walks among us causing chaos and havoc and specifically targeting priests, and this is its own form of evil which is transferrable and inexplicable by our normal methods. you kind of get snatches of this in the rossi vs psychic ep as well, iirc, but i found that ep just highly fucking weird

and then just like, as far as i am aware, never touched on the concept again? fucking phenomenal. dip your toe into the pool of a totally different and potentially insoluble form of moral realism, then just dry it off and never think about it again

arguably the show's two most pronounced moral viewpoints, which get held in some form of tension because that's, like, the central dilemma you get to have when you're making copaganda, are the very deontic It Is Right And Good To Do Your Duty, which absolves you from all the problematic elements of said duty, and if you make the conditions of that duty better (cf JJ being involved in not torturing female prisoners as much???), then gold star for you, you little reformer! and on the other hand the very consequentialist It Is Right And Good If The End Result Is, which similarly absolves you from a whole lot of stuff, and also gives you some leeway around the letter of the law, because the outcomes of the Well-Intended and Good law might be wrong! the former values devotion, which is arguably why characters like strauss get a redemption arc; the american ethos is shallowly anti-authoritarian but that can only hang out with copaganda for so long. the latter values the individual more, and tends to hang its hat on particular character arcs. and while these questions are, technically, in tension (is goodness pre- or post-?), there's a pretty easy verdict for cm, which is It Is Right And Good To Do Your Duty Under The Auspices Of A Just Law, Which Guarantees Good Outcomes; that's why you bother with anti-authoritarian lines at all, because you need to be able to reroute the blame up the chain of command.

what happens, imo, when you introduce a third category of thought about good and evil is that you totally break that thought process. partially that's because the sort of quasi-religious will to good that we see in the show (you know, in the way that the current center of american christianity tends to be more political than theological, church and government rather than god) is actually totally insoluble with the possibility of another source of goodness, despite the way that the characters are, to varying degrees, thought to be religious. the way that they're religious is evidence of that; it's not a source of morality so much as a symbol of it. (e.g. i think it's dope as hell that we never get a verdict in demonology on emily's views on religion, because it means that faith can't come to signify.)

in lucky you get that odd moment where derek gets his beliefs challenged-- if you don't believe in satan, how can you believe in god? which seems like a corollary of, if you don't believe in evil, how can you believe in good? there's room there to think about theodicy, but they didn't take that path, presumably because it's not a very deep show. but that's not a particularly striking take on theodicy; e.g., there are lots of ways that a person with any sort of either well-developed personal belief or massive set of grievances with the church might respond, and none of them need to involve, i don't know, william james or david hume or something.

here, and also in demonology, it's interesting that the presence of thought about the problem of evil doesn't make the episode into some sort of religious moral allegory; instead, it makes religion an allegory for the work. if the kinds of killers involved in the show are more or less limit cases for criminality, its psychopathology, and its ethical contours, then displacing that particular thought process, even in just a handful of episodes, to a literal demon makes the grand psychomachia part of the show's argument, rather than macrocosmic to the show's microcosm. or, in other words, the interventionist existence of satan in the ep isn't actually making a bigger argument about good and evil in the show's world, it's making a very small argument, directed at derek morgan, about the existence of evil. unsub, devil, literally doesn't matter in that setting.

demonology, on the other hand, is like... funky. because of its many ambiguities (did tommy, matthew, and patrick kill a priest? probably not, but they never tell us; what do we do with the counternarrative father silvano and matthew benton's parents spin, about matthew as a conduit, about possession as catching, about emily as the source of his troubles? what's the nature of the 'possession' the show stages, which certainly has elements designed to make it seem plausible, even real?), you can't say it's in the service of a particular character's thought process on evil. even emily's take on the church, which the episode would seem to make central, doesn't change-- her orientation toward matthew never does, and that's central to that relationship.

presumably one of the things making this episode fucky is the fact that they were trying to not piss off religious people by doing an episode with a priest as the villain, which is hilarious because demonology's one of the bottom 5 eps of the show on imdb, despite, on one hand, literally seeming to vindicate the priest both in terms of the truth of his faith and the truth of his beliefs about possession, and, on the other hand, literally implying that demons are real and active in the world, which is way more catholic than most catholic practice today.

but regardless, you end up with an ep that's like: evil is arbitrary and transferrable. you might catch it just by brushing against someone, just by loving them enough to look in their eyes. it's, in some ways, testing out a particular interpretation of realism, insofar as the arbitrariness of events and life are part of what conditions theodicy. 'why doesn't life make sense' and 'why does the central source of good and order and existence permit evil' are, like, the same thought process, from different angles.

and so that feature of the ep, + the fact that you never learn what makes john cooley react the way he does to father silvano, or what compels the strong reactions during the exorcism, or what prompts emily's nosebleed, all leave the final scene as a potential sign that emily's now been possessed, which is BONKERS. they constantly talk about sarin and vx; nosebleeds aren't symptoms of organophosphate poisoning or exposure. certainly they wouldn't be the first symptom to manifest.

but if you put that aside, what you have is one of the few eps that truly considers the possibility that a member of the team is, in a meaningful way, a source of and participant in something evil. like, there's an obviously cruel moralizing that happens around both abortion and drug addiction here, which isn't particularly surprising, because the show had already proven that it was terrible at thinking about addiction with reid. but beyond the typical, like, law and order normative nonsense, it also entertains the possibility that those two facts aren't really uniquely bad; after all, it's whatever happened in galicia that's the origin of this, and if matthew is meant to be seen as a conduit, then there's an odd equivalence made between human contact and vile murder. like if you think about it at this length, there's almost a moral nihilism to it: no human action is worth perceiving as inherently evil in light of the active intervention of evil on earth, because free will doesn't mean total agency.

it's also, like, the exorcist episode, which i think does some work there. the exorcist has an air of parable to it: you're witnessing a spectacle of good winning over evil, and its fallout. if you're looking to it for didactic purposes, it's essentially just reaffirming your own will to good: look how awful evil is! look what it does to those who are not on their guard! look at how it exists in our fallen modernity! and in some ways, that's what a crime procedural also is: you get the sort of titillating spectacle, and with it, a reaffirmation of the value of law & order. it's all just different genres of evangelism. a parable within a parable, each serving different purposes, is kind of hard to pull off, though, which is why the episode's ending never reads as fully intentional to me. the counterreading is that emily's stressed, in the winter, constantly moving between cold dry air outside and warm dry air in heated interiors (which can produce nosebleeds); that john cooley just felt himself getting swept up in the case; that father silvano was on the track either of murderers or of pilgrims who were merely innocent bystanders disturbed by what they saw, and how it coincided with their first attempts to renew their own faith; that silvano's claims about eye contact and conduits are just another stage in the lengthy historical development of doctrines of demonology; that this was all just a terrible, tragic case whose ending has a clear moral, warning on one hand against the sorts of sins and wrongs that disturb you, and on the other against presuming a higher moral authority than the law. even the vatican doesn't, after all!

the flip side of that is, of course, that you've got another stage in the deferral of blame up the chain of command, because father silvano sure is on the receiving end of a lot of the episode's sympathies.

anyway, the final thing here is that this sort of arbitrary, insecure morality is an interesting feature of all of emily's early season character episodes-- you don't really get another character whose huge and violent backstory revelation places decisions they made at the very center, decisions which you can't say were really made with the full agency to consent, but decisions which reflect their own judgment and personality at that time. there are definitely some elle parallels, but those are of more external origin. i'm not, like, moralizing about her decisions, but there's a clear causality there, and it's more on her, and less subject to consolation or exculpation than you typically get. 'it's not your fault' isn't a possible line for emily in demonology or in lauren + valhalla; in the former, it's because those aren't meaningful terms to think in ("it's like the end of the dead... 'i think he died for me'"-- element of consequentialism here, but also to die for someone is an odd state of culpability, in which the agency is entirely on the part of the deceased, but that doesn't remove the object of the sentence from its center. helen of troy didn't personally, if idiomatically, launch 10,000 ships, but the trojan war was conditional on her existence. you can have this neat causality without intention in fiction. it makes it a better ground for thinking about culpability than politics and life, where things are always messy and manifold.). in the latter, it's because she literally is the agent of so many aspects of her own destruction* (*eh). arguably, what allows that to happen is the fact that it was under the auspices of a different government organization. what was it, cia? one of the ways that copaganda works with federal law enforcement is to position the fbi, cia, etc. as the ultimate enforcer of law in their particular domain. you can be anti-cop, but only by insisting on a bigger, coppier cop.

anyway i guess my point is that i think all thought about good and evil is a little bit bankrupt if it doesn't consider the fact that a lot of the discursive parameters of that thought process exist as a byproduct of religion. the way we think about the individual, which is central to this thought process, is shaped by the particular discourses of the individual our societies have, and a vast majority of those, and the unthinkable differences between them, stem from faith. how does your personal philosophy of good and evil and order-- bc these shows insist on the three, and center them-- deal with an inherently disordered world? again, in that sense, the religious aspects are just an allegory for the job; what's being investigated there isn't some kind of truth of religion, but rather the particularities of these characters, and how they relate to the world around them. it makes for episodes which are, on some level, more interesting in their thought than other episodes, but also episodes which punt the obvious questions they raise, even as a way of thinking about these characters and their jobs. i'm genuinely convinced that demonology is one of the better episodes of the show (definitely moreso than lauren + valhalla, which i kind of love but think are just exhausting and overblown), and i think it's because the number of things they were trying to do in it kind of fucked it, but in the right way. that's not true of lucky, which is just like, wading through a series of tropes, and in the process just massively disrespecting derek morgan.

[g-hanbax]

Q&As: Divisions in Christianity

8/9/18

Q:  What can you say about the divisions of denominations within Christianity and the whole of Christendom?  

A:

Ecumenism

       A short info: 3 biggest bodies in Christianity or basically general Christianity --EO (Eastern Orthodox), RC (Roman Catholic), and PRO (Protestant).

   I think of Christendom this way: The *true* Church is the body that holds firmly to the statements of the Apostles’/Nicene creed [1] and a *true* Christian is a person who truly follows Christ Jesus [2]. So whether you go to an Eastern Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, or a Protestant church {baptist, evangelical, pentecostal, lutheran, etc; just make sure it’s not a cult}, if you fall into these categories ([1] & [2]), then you're a Christian who belongs to the Church. There's no perfect unison to which all particular fields and areas of Christianity can rise and be practiced, for a particular thing can only arise through an emphasis of another, like the valuing of discipleship among evangelicals from the emphasis of the great commission, the valuing of theological practice from the emphasis on proper theology derived from history by Orthodox Christians, the valuing of traditions from its view of apostolic lineage by Catholics, etc. We all need each other, and if we follow scripture that we must be of one mind and spirit, and be humble about our differences, then we will live peacefully and effectively in our missions for Christ. (see Philippians 2:1-4)      

         Going back to the unison part, since it is nearly impossible to be consistent and perfect for "one” body to perform all tasks, different body parts are then made, to which one emphasizes something/s and does them better than the other; the eyes can’t smell. It’s not really the desire of God to cause essential division in the church, since we are united by the creed, we can say that we aren’t really divided as how we think we are. Also, because of trying to fulfill and live out Christianity, the consequence of the church has turned into a divided body. God may have allowed the risk of divisiveness for the purpose of spreading out the “Word”. Remember, we all still worship the same God, majorly have the same scriptures, and most likely, have the same mission – to preach the Truth and to lead others to God.

         I think what Martin Luther really did was that he didn’t try to reform the “church” but the “movement” within the church at that time by making a counter-movement that resulted to the reformation. We all have differences and we can’t do anything about it, we can’t just debate till the end of time on who holds the best/perfect/most accurate doctrine in general, since these ideologies, philosophies, and theologies have been fully established and we simply have no power to push them down to the ground. All we can do is to live by them and with each other (of course, we must seek Truth), we only argue for the sake of growth, rebuke and correction.

        We ought to learn from each other, from the specialty of one to another, we must be willing to accept our differences and be united in faith and mindset through love. Practically, the fact of diversity leads to a necessity of unity; our differences should make us closer, our differences should make us more open for each other, our differences should bring us together. We all know the truth in Christ found in scripture and church history, we all got a piece of that; so in smaller and non-essential matters, we must not take it heavily bur rather, lightly. Let us always be reminded of what Augustine said, “In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In All Things Charity.” (see 1 Corinthians 1:10)     

       I call myself an evangelical Christian for title’s sake, and since I attend a conservative evangelical church. But my mind is more of a “free-thinking Christian” whatever that means, because for me, it doesn’t necessarily mean I call myself an evangelical then I will just close my mind to evangelicalism. I accept many EO and RC beliefs that are peculiar for protestants, because it’s not about “religion” but relationship, right? (that’s what evangelicals always say.) I’m basically open for truth and I love to seek truth, with all its broadness and depth because I’ve come to know the Truth.    

All in all, I just don’t want us to build walls around and between each other, because as I see it, we aren’t really divided by destructive things. We are divided by thing that allow us to focus on essential things. We don’t really have borders but rivers, where we set to see each other from our side to the other openly if we truly follow Christ. And we have love and charity to act as our bridge to cross and welcome one another from land to land. 

 God bless! 

 PS: I’m not promoting universalism, that’s a different thing, since that would then be fundamentally contradictory and obviously wrong. I’m more of a “let us be united despite our differences” & “Let us have open minds despite our closed doctrines.” I’m not denying the division and the differences; rather, in trying to be united and be more effective for the world through Christ, the best way to treat it is to not make them barriers but sources for intellectual discussions to sharpen each other and grow in knowledge and in truth. 

[theresgloryforyou]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-lower-taxes/

Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

Democrats Vs Republicans On Taxes

Why Do People Think Lower Taxes Help the Economy?

While Republicans believe in balancing spending cuts with tax cuts across the board, Democrats believe in cutting taxes for the middle and lower class, while raising them for the upper class. They believe in a higher marginal rate, with income tax being higher for those who make more, as opposed to the Republican views that taxes should be equal percentages for all income levels. In the 2012 Party Platform, 56% of republicans opposed raising taxes on those who earned over $250,000. This isnt to say that Republicans do not believe in focusing relief on the middle and lower classes; they do, however, believe in relief for all Americans, and not in raising taxes on the upper classes.

What Do Republicans Believe In

Do all Republicans believe the same things? Of course not. Rarely do members of a single political group agree on all issues. Even among Republicans, there are differences of opinion. As a group, they do not agree on every issue.

Some folks vote Republican because of fiscal concerns. Often, that trumps concerns they may have about social issues. Others are less interested in the fiscal position of the party. They vote they way they do because of religion. They believe Republicans are the party of morality. Some simply want less government. They believe only Republicans can solve the problem of big government. Republicans spend less . They lower taxes: some people vote for that alone.

However, the Republican Party does stand for certain things. So I’m answering with regard to the party as a whole. Call it a platform. Call them core beliefs. The vast majority of Republicans adhere to certain ideas.

So what do Republicans believe? Here are their basic tenets:

Conservatives Dont Hate Socialism They Hate Equality

They want to take away your hamburgers, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka in February. This is what Stalin dreamt about America will never be a socialist country! The Conservative Political Action Conference audience cheered. The video played on my phone as I waved at Danny, the homeless man who begs for food every morning at the Newark Penn Station, where scores of poor people sleep in wheelchairs or lean on crutches or stand by the delis to ask for change.

These folks need more than hamburgers. They need jobs and homes. Yet, as the 2020 election season starts, Trump has branded progressives as socialists who will steal property and bring tyranny. The presidents fearmongering contrasts with the actual Green New Deal that some Democrats support but failed to pass in the GOP-controlled Senate. Its a fear driven by ideology. Republicans paint the poor as undeserving, marked by cultural or personal character flaws. Whereas Democratic Socialists believe people have the ability to run the economy and society to meet their needs. Why this difference in perception? It is because Republicans arent afraid of socialism they are afraid of equality with people they see as inferior.

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To Fund The $35 Trillion Budget Plan Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

To Fund The $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan, Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

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The 10% cuts were “across the board,” as he liked to say, implying they were of equal value to all. The dollar value of the cuts was, of course, far larger for those with larger incomes. Moreover, the tax law changes that accompanied the rate cuts made it easier for individuals and corporations to “write off” various forms of income and spending to lower their tax bills further. The tax rate for capital gains, money made from successful investing, would come down from 28% to 20%.

Reagan did not get everything he sought in this initial foray against high taxes and progressivity. The Senate trimmed the third year of the tax cut from 10% to 5%, and it would take a second bill, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, to pull the marginal top rate all the way down to 28%.

But Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 constituted the strongest move away from progressivity in the income tax since the tax was initiated in the Civil War.

They were the culmination of rising anti-tax sentiment in the late 1970s, when some states adopted tax limitations by popular referendum. That spirit was kept alive in the decades to come by groups such as Americans for Tax Reform, led by activist Grover Norquist. Starting in 1986, Norquist has challenged candidates for office to sign his “taxpayer protection pledge” not to raise taxes. The great majority of Republicans have signed.

Reagan Pared Back Progressivity

Reagan was able to reverse what had been a decades-long commitment to at least the look of progressivity. He could do it in part because his 1980 election coattails enabled his party to capture control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century. Moreover, while Democrats still had a House majority, their ranks included scores of members from Southern and Midwestern districts that had also voted for Reagan.

When the budget resolution passed in that summer of 1981, 63 House Democrats joined all 190 Republicans in backing it. And when the tax package came to its critical votes in July, dozens of Democrats sided with Reagan and the Republicans rather than their own leadership.

In 1982, Democrats added to their majority in the House and negotiated some revenue increases with the Senate and the White House. And in Reagan’s second term, momentum built quickly for a tax overhaul that would combine still lower marginal rates with new business taxes and a paring back of tax preferences and other “loopholes.” The new overhaul’s main appeal to Democrats was that it exempted far more middle- and lower-income earners from the income tax altogether.

Career anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, here in 2018, called the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cut “Reaganite” the ultimate compliment from the founder of Americans for Tax Reform.hide caption

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Gop Real Estate Owners Make Out Big

Besides the laws benefits to real estate pass-throughs, real estate in general was hugely favored by the tax law, allowing property exchanges to avoid taxation, the deduction of new capital expenses in just one year versus longer depreciation schedules, and an exemption from limits on interest deductions.;

If you are a real estate developer, you never pay tax, said Ed Kleinbard, a former head of Congresss Joint Committee on Taxation.;

Members of Congress own a lot of real estate. Public Integritys review of financial disclosures found that 29 of the 47 GOP members of the committees responsible for the tax bill hold interests in real estate, including small rental businesses, LLCs, and massive real estate investment trusts , which pay dividends to investors. The tax bill allows REIT investors to deduct 20 percent from their dividends for tax purposes.;

Who We Are

The Center for Public Integrity is an independent, investigative newsroom that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.

Its Not Easy Being Green

Democratic socialism is not a Marxist fever dream; its a call for help. Its less socialism than humanitarian aid for a people in crisis. Millions of Americans are in dead-end jobs, slipping behind on bills, deep in debt and scared of climate change.

Something is wrong with capitalism, Martin Luther King Jr. told his staff in 1966. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Saying the economic system causes pain means moving beyond the conservative image of the poor as flawed, personally or culturally, or the liberal image of them as unlucky victims of a more or less functioning meritocracy. To honor our human potential, capitalism must be dismantled, its pieces taken apart and recombined into a new world.

Climate change is one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said at the rollout of the Green New Deal. To combat that threat, we need to be as ambitious and innovative as possible. In its 14 pages, the plan envisions a World War II-scale mobilization of millions of workers. They will repair roads and bridges, build smart grids, upgrade industry to be zero carbon, build green public transit, remove carbon from the air, clean up waste sites, and clean up the poisoned land and waterways. When they come home, those workers can rest in new, green housing, and if sick or injured, they can go see a doctor, using a Medicare for All card.

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Most Welfare Recipients Are Makers Not Takers

The first myth, that people who receive public benefits are takers rather than makers, is flatly untrue for the vast majority of working-age recipients.

Consider Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, which currently serve about 42 million Americans. At least one adult in more than half of SNAP-recipient households are working. And the average SNAP subsidy is $125 per month, or $1.40 per meal hardly enough to justify quitting a job.

As for Medicaid, nearly 80 percent of adults receiving Medicaid live in families where someone works, and more than half are working themselves.

In early December, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, We have a welfare system thats trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work.

Not true. Welfare officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families has required work as a condition of eligibility since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996. And the earned income tax credit, a tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, by definition, supports only people who work.

Workers apply for public benefits because they need assistance to make ends meet. American workers are among the most productive in the world, but over the last 40 years the bottom half of income earners have seen no income growth. As a result, since 1973, worker productivity has grown almost six times faster than wages.

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Lower Taxes, Higher Revenue

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

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Orrin Hatch Tom Coburn And Richard Burr On Health Care

More recently, senators Orrin Hatch of Utah, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Richard Burr of North Carolina have headed up the Republican fight on health care. Their proposal was named the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment Act, and is based upon the principle of providing more flexibility and purchasing power to the individual. It shares some important similarities with the Affordable Care Act, such as the requirement to allow dependent coverage through the age of 26, and the inability of insurance companies to provide lifetime limits. When the three senators released their proposal, Burr stated The American people have found out what is in ObamaCare broken promises in the form of increased health care costs, costly mandates and government bureaucracy. We can lower costs and expand access to quality coverage and care by empowering individuals and their families to make their own health care decisions, rather than empowering the government to make those decisions for them.;The group stated that their proposal is designed to be roughly budget neutral over the first 10 years, leaving the financial burden on the American people at nothing. Coburn commented that they created this proposal because Its critical we chart another path forward. Our health care system wasnt working well before ObamaCare and it is worse after ObamaCare.

What The Needy Deserve

The second myth is that low-income Americans do not deserve a helping hand.

This idea derives from our belief that the U.S. is a meritocracy where the most deserving rise to the top. Yet where a person ends up on the income ladder is tied to where they started out.

Indeed, America is not nearly as socially mobile as we like to think. Forty percent of Americans born into the bottom-income quintile the poorest 20 percent will stay there. And the same stickiness exists in the top quintile.

As for people born into the middle class, only 20 percent will ascend to the top quintile in their lifetimes.

The third myth is that government assistance is a waste of money and doesnt accomplish its goals.

In fact, poverty rates would double without the safety net, to say nothing of human suffering. Last year, the safety net lifted 38 million people, including 8 million children, out of poverty.

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An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

Almost immediately after Mr. Trump signed the bill, companies and their lobbyists including G.E.s Mr. Brown began a full-court pressure campaign to try to shield themselves from the BEAT and GILTI.

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Chip Harter was the Treasury official in charge of writing the rules for the BEAT and GILTI. He had spent decades at PwC and the law firm Baker McKenzie, counseling companies on the same sorts of tax-avoidance arrangements that the new law was supposed to discourage.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings roughly 10 a week at times with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

The Organization for International Investment a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT.

The groups lobbyists were from PwC and Baker McKenzie, Mr. Harters former firms, according to public lobbying disclosures. One of them, Pam Olson, was the top Treasury tax official in the George W. Bush administration.

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

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How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

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Us House Democrats Seek To Roll Back Trump Tax Cuts For Wealthy Corporations

WASHINGTON, Sept 13 – Leading Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday proposed a substantial roll-back of former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, including raising the top tax rate on corporations to 26.5% from the current 21%.

Democrats on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee said they will debate legislation this week that would achieve the changes as part of their broader, $3.5 trillion domestic investment plan.

In an attempt to finance the new spending, the Democratic-led committee will debate a proposal to raise $2.9 trillion in revenue over 10 years, according to a document circulated among members of the panel.

Besides increasing corporate taxes, wealthy individuals would see a jump in their income taxes as well as higher capital gains and estate taxes.

Even if the legislation as proposed passes Congress and is signed by Democratic President Joe Biden, corporate taxes would still be lower than they were before the enactment of the tax cuts pushed through by Republicans in 2017. But the top individual income tax rate would revert to its pre-2017 level.

The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee has scheduled work sessions for Tuesday and Wednesday to debate tax policy and other matters under its jurisdiction to be included in the $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, which would require a simple majority to be passed in the Senate.

REPUBLICANS OPPOSED

Republican Senators Push Social Security Medicare And Medicaid Cuts After Supporting Ineffective Tax Cuts

Republicans Target Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

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The economy is recovering from the depths of the pandemic in large part due to the massive relief packages that Congress passed in 2020 and 2021. Just in time for this recovery, Senate Republicans are pushing for cuts to vital programs. According to news reports, five GOP senators are proposing a commission that would come up with proposals to balance the federal budget within a decade. Given that four of the five sponsors of this idea have signed on to the tax pledge to never, ever under any circumstances raise taxes, they are looking for programs to cut. They consequently take aim mainly at cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These targeted programs are already and will continue to prove crucial to the financial and physical health of millions of Americans that have suffered from the pandemic. Many workers, especially older ones, have lost their jobs permanently and will move into early retirement with permanently lower benefits and little or no savings outside of those benefits. Millions of Americans, again particularly among older ones, experience long-term consequences from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel virus. Those hardest hit by pandemic will need strong, expanded retirement and health benefits, not cuts to an already basic system.

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Adolf Hitler and the Nazi: Right-wing or left-wing?

Many consider Nazism to be a form of Fascism, implemented for Adolf Hitler’s own ideals, including elements of both the right and the left. However, leftists often label the “fascist” as the right, or even see Hitler and the Nazi Party as a far-right group.

Of course it’s not.

Looking at the German economy under Hitler, it was clearly a command economy, regulated in preparation for historic expansion; and the reason why Hitler wanted to promote the development of the private sector was only for one purpose, which was to produce weapons for war.

To counter the argument that Adolf Hitler was a rightist, I will begin this article with arguments that answer two big questions:

1. After coming to power during the Great Depression, what did the Nazi Party do to deal with the economic problems facing Germany?

2. When World War II broke out, how did the Nazi Party manage the German economy, especially in the face of a major economic rival like the United States?

The policy of the Nazi Party in the early days

In fact, Nazism did not have an overarching economic system of thought. The policies of Hitler and the Nazis were really simply doing what they thought was necessary for the economy. Germany under Hitler did not have a clear economic policy, because this was the time when Hitler wanted to increase his influence, avoiding favoring a certain faction. All Hitler did was hit the German national pride.

However, the 25-point program (25-point Program) in the German Labor Party platform, as stated earlier by Hitler himself, is a rare “evidence” that Hitler was a socialist, especially a socialist. point 13 is extremely leftist with the desire to nationalize monopolistic corporations — 13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts) .

Besides, Nazi Party is an abbreviation of National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi), Germans now refer to the period when Hitler took power as Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (National Socialist period). meaning) or Nationalsozialistische Gewaltherrschaft (National Socialist autocracy). The word Socialist in the name says it all, but I still don’t understand why the left always thinks the Nazi Party is a far-right party?

When he became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler realized that if nationalized, state-owned enterprises would not be able to produce large quantities of weapons, so he needed help from the bourgeoisie to invest and produce equipment. military equipment on a large scale. Therefore, Hitler turned his back on social ideals and carried out a bloody purge in 1934 of his opponents, including Gregor Strasser, a leftist with anti-social, anti-reformist writings. Capitalism, anti-Westernization.

Great Depression

In 1929, when the Great Depression broke out and spread around the world, Germany was one of the countries most affected.

After World War I, the German economy was in ruins like buildings bombed during the war. They have to rely on American loans and investments to grapple with their economies. However, when the Great Recession hit and those investments were withdrawn, the German economy, already in decline, collapsed for a second time.

Germany now: exports fall, industry stagnates, businesses go bankrupt, unemployment rises, even agriculture fails.

The Nazi Party took power and ran the German economy

The recession of the early 1930s was a good opportunity for the Nazis to seize support from the masses. Although the world economy is slowly recovering, the fall in birth rates as a result of the war has made the labor market scarce. At this point, the Nazi Party knew that something had to be done.

On March 17, 1933, Hitler fired Hans Luther, a right-wing man credited with stabilizing the German Mark during the 1921–1924 hyperinflation era, to appoint Hjalmar Schacht to the position of Central Bank governor. Germany (Reichsbank). Hjalmar Schacht was not a member of the Nazi party, but was a staunch Hitler supporter. Schacht plans to boost government spending to stimulate demand in the economy, while using a variety of deficit management methods.

After the recession, most German banks fell into disrepair. The Nazi government decided to regulate the financial markets on its own through investment and lending packages, and at the same time lowering interest rates. In addition, farmers and small businesses are supported by the government to return to production development and improve productivity and profits. That is also why the Nazi Party received so much support from the countryside and the middle class.

The three key investment areas of the Nazi government at that time were construction, transportation, and armament. Of course, they all serve one purpose only: to prepare for war.

The Reich Labor Service (RAD) was founded to address youth unemployment, but in reality RAD was the cradle for the spread of Nazi ideology and was militarized during World War II. The result was that state investment tripled from 1933 to 1936, reducing unemployment by two-thirds (Nazis were committed to work regardless of ability for the job or even the job didn’t require extra work. people), and the German economy started to get better. But, progress thanks to the “economic wizard” Hjalmar Schacht’s coercive measures is only positive in the short term.

Unemployment decreased, but people’s purchasing power did not increase due to low income. Schacht’s witch seems to “run out of magic” when the trade deficit continues to take place, imports are still higher than exports, while inflation is always lurking to explode at any time.

The Reich Food Estate, which was set up to coordinate agricultural products and production towards self-sufficiency, was a huge failure, and even in 1939 there was still a shortage of food, making farmers increasingly displeased. believe.

Social welfare became a place of forced charity, with guns ready to be pointed at people to force them to “donate” to it, thereby enabling the Nazi government to use all the tax money on the cause. armed reconstruction.

New plan: “economic dictatorship”

As the world witnessed positive changes in the German economy, many people began to praise Schacht and see him as an “economic wizard”. However, the state of the economy inside Germany is even worse than it was in Weimar’s time.

Schacht wanted to concentrate all his efforts in society on building a giant war machine. In 1934, Schacht began to take full control of German finance, implementing a New Plan to solve existing economic problems: control the balance of trade by regulating what was imported and not imported into Germany, and at the same time focused on developing heavy industry and military. The German people at this time had to live under Hitler’s dictatorial rule both economically and politically.

During this time, Germany signed many trade agreements with the countries of the Balkan peninsula to increase foreign currency reserves, and make these economies dependent on Germany.

In 1936, implementing a four-year plan

Schacht knew that at the current rate of arms, Germany’s balance of payments would soon be in crisis, so he decided to increase the production of consumer goods for export. Many people agree with this approach, but the powerful elites in the government want to return to the original goal of armed. One of them, none other than Hitler, was calling for the German economy to be ready for war in the next four years.

Hitler could not wait to see the day Germany expanded, ignoring calls from businesses to stop the arms race. To fulfill that ambition, Goering was appointed minister in charge of a four-year plan that focused on promoting an arms race and establishing a fully autonomous economy. Manufacturing is now regulated by the government, three key areas are boosted development, imports are controlled, and substitutes are designated for production. The German economy is now more tightly controlled than ever.

But here’s the thing: Goering was the commander-in-chief of the air force, not an economist, and it was Goering’s economic ignorance that led the “economic wizard” Schacht to resign. Although inflation did not rise to alarming levels, economic goals (such as oil and military) could not be achieved. The main raw materials for production were in short supply, the people were starving, piracy was rampant, the policy of an arms race and economic autonomy failed to work, and Hitler seemed to bet it all on the game. Dai Duc.

Germany failed in World War II, but the German economy failed just before the start of the war. Goering pulled the whole German economic ship off the cliff, and the only thing that was seen growing was Goering’s “arrogance index”. The planned and tightly controlled economy has reduced people’s incomes, increased hours of work, widespread bribery, factories filled with Gestapo agents, and reduced economic efficiency.

Economic failure in war

Hitler wanted war to expand his territory, and the German economy was reformed just to serve that ambition. However, even if Germany captured Poland, the German economy at that time was not really ready for war. Germany was still very weak, and needed a few more years to build before it could confront the Soviet Union.

Germany easily captured Poland because Britain and France turned a blind eye. The Nazi cavalry commander Siegfried Westphal once said that if the French attacked in September 1939 on the German front, “they could only hold out for a week or two”. Strategists at the time had subjectively believed that Hitler would start the war years from now, that Hitler would protect the economy from economic war until Germany was truly ready. But they were wrong. In 1939, Hitler concentrated all social resources on his war machine.

However, the German military is not stronger. Production of major weapons (such as tanks) remains stagnant due to management failures, industrial inefficiencies, and production shortages. All because Hitler tried to regulate the centralized economy, causing many areas to overlap, and production became a place to compete for power.

Bridge next to the bourgeoisie when the US entered the war

In 1941, the US entered the war with the most advanced equipment and huge production resources from all over the world. At this time, Germany is still struggling with its production. Hitler appointed Albert Speer, the architect he most admired, to the post of Minister of Armaments and Arms. Speer was free to do whatever was necessary to get the German economy ready for all-out war. Speer decided to “untie” the industrial capitalists so that they could freely produce, but still set up a Central Planning Board to manage, avoiding the capitalists from moving away from Hitler’s goals.

As a result, the supply of equipment and weapons skyrocketed despite the Allies’ continuous bombardment and intense bombing. However, modern economists argue that even if Hitler had implemented this policy from the start, German production would have been incomparable to that of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.

In 1945, Germany was defeated but to be more precise, German manufacturing was defeated by Allied manufacturing.

It was the economic story of Nazi Germany — the story of the frenzied spending plans of Hitler and the Nazis. The story of a Socialist-style planned economy that leftists (including leftists in Germany at the time) called “the far right”.

So is Capitalism or Socialism what gave birth to the dictator Hitler? You must have the answer.

All credit goes to trantuansang.com.

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The Call of Squire Jorg Monday, May 10, 2021 The Five Gospels German reformer Martin Luther set out to execute the first major translation of the Bible into the German language. First he had to find out how Germans really talked. He disguised himself and with a newly grown beard and the name 'Squire Jorg,' snuck out into the marketplace listening to how common people spoke everyday German. Then he went back to his room and with a copy of a Greek New Testament began translating the New Testament into German which brought God's Word to the German masses. There are people in your life who need to hear the Word of God translated into a language they can understand. It's not enough to just tell them what God's Word says. You have to translate into the language of their everyday life. Find the connection of relating God to their heart, their needs. Luther didn't just translate, he listened to them. Often, we throw out God's Word without really listening, seeing, loving as God loves. Want them to hear? Listen. Want them to see? Look. Want them to know God's heart? Get to know their heart. Become a Squire Jorg and your translation will be a success.

Today's Mission Seek to find an unsaved person today and witness to them simply with love, by offering to help, by meeting their need, by being gracious to them.

2 Timothy 4:5 5 But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. You’re going to find that there will be times when people will have no stomach for solid teaching, but will fill up on spiritual junk food—catchy opinions that tickle their fancy. They’ll turn their backs on truth and chase mirages. But you—keep your eye on what you’re doing; accept the hard times along with the good; keep the Message alive; do a thorough job as God’s servant.

Frame of mind You think to yourself that you’re not in the right frame of mind to get some particular thing done. And if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s most likely true.

But it’s not like you’re forever stuck in any specific frame of mind. When your frame of mind is not what works best for you, change it.

Rather than giving yourself an excuse, give yourself an improvement. Exercise the control you have over your own thoughts, and get yourself mentally to where you wish to be.

It’s your choice where to direct those thoughts, what to notice and what to ignore. It’s your choice how to assign meaning to whatever situation you’re in.

You know what gives you energy and what drains you, what encourages you and what causes dismay. Use that self awareness to fill your mind with encouraging, energetic, creative, productive thoughts.

Make you, your mind, your focus, and your actions work for you and for the betterment of your world. Choose and create an optimum frame of mind that puts you at your best.

A Free Mind A free mind is a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing. Most people spend much of their time looking for reasons to be offended. An open mind is never offended because it is free of any attachments.

It is never the self that is offended but always the illusion that the self has of itself that is affected by insult! If you can really understand this, deeply grasp it’s truth, live it each day, then pain will be no more.

Next time you ‘feel’ offended look closely within yourself at yourself and ask yourself what was offended? If you remain aware you will see that it was only an image of yourself which you had become attached to, and that image did not resonate with the image contained in the insult. If you weren’t attached, if you didn’t identify with the wrong image of yourself then there would be no offense taken. You would then remain free and therefore happy.

Have a blessed day and week. May Yeshua the Messiah bless you, Love, Tele-Evangelist, Debbie