#polity classes

[communist-ojou-sama]

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing benign, or rationally calculating intentions to western powers, but malevolent and actively irrational ones to non-western powers, all while claiming to be jaded, and cynical toward all parties?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing a goal of benign truth-telling to western corporate media sources, while ascribing a character of total falsehood to non-western state media, such that truth can't even be mined from it by one who understands its biases?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly portraying western societies as all being pluralistic, awash with a a number of perspectives unfortunately drowned out by their ruling class, while portraying all non-western polities as consisting entirely of drones, utterly subservient to authority, with the Sole exception of voices that are pro-western and strive for the same goals in western powers, in their terms?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly placing the work of western and western-trained academics on a pedestal, and treating it as ontologically more valuable than the work of groups of global south scholars with similar qualifications, who disagree with the western consensus?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

[machineheraldbabe]

arcane, populism, and why viktor is the odd one out (yet again)

as a piltover-anti, a silco criticizer, and a pacifist, i am very very interested in how arcane presents not just the political undertones of both topside and the undercity, but the characters/dialogue through which they communicate those undertones. allow me to use some political science bro lingo to air out some thoughts.

long, long post incoming.

there are 2 ideological struggles at war throughout s1 (and i can predict that the struggle will carry over into s2): neoliberalism and populism - in their broadest terms since we're talking ofc about a fictional show dealing with surface level political machinations. by neoliberalism, i mean a focus on the social, political, and cultural structures of a polity (piltover, for our purposes) refocused into a strictly economic vacuum. and by populism i mean a unifying belief that the existing political systems of a polity fail to adequately represent their constituents, so the masses choose to rally around a specific gripe or issue, i.e., class discrimination, xenophobia toward immigrants, etc. this, in turn, forms a populist party or movement. an applicable example i can think of would be Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s.

*i know these are weighty topics with very real world implications! i just want to separate the theory to apply to our favorite fictional world.

the political struggle in question is put forward immediately by piltover, who, though presented as a technocratic state, embodies crucial neoliberal ideals emphasized especially by up-and-coming counilor mel medarda, much like how fresh-eyed american economists blew up the economic scene in the 1980s with a revival of capitalist, free market enterprise. take how she seizes the advent of hextech, for example:

she quickly sees hextech's potential yet not from the solely intellectual standpoint that jayce and viktor do - for her, it is profitable, literally and in terms of international relations. her goal is for piltover to prosper, but she has no rose-colored glasses on; prosperity means capital gain, and she's willing to override piltover's political and social systems to achieve her goal. an important caveat is that she draws the line at ambessa medarda's progression into militant authoritarianism, which deserves a whole post of its own!

piltover's populism moment will come later. first, let's unpack silco, who is probably arcane's most blatantly political figure, and a masterclass in the merits and failures of left wing, class-based populism.

silco, having been spurned by the classism and xenophobia that piltover's elite proliferate, and assisted by his rampant shimmer operation, fills the vacuum that vander's pacifism opened up. though silco's methods are unilaterally cruel (argue with the wall), the undercity clearly invested faith in him at some point, especially as vander's credibility as a guiding figure wavered over the years. he was fighting alongside vander for zaun's right to exist as their own independent body. in other words, he was uniting the undercity toward a common cause because the existing political system failed their constituents. to quote councilor shoola: "they may not be our preferred constituents, but they're still our people."

the track record of populism in our real world frequently ends in the ruin that silco himself brought upon the undercity. the kingpin is too dedicated to self-preservation, sees himself as too central to the movement, which prevents both compromise and/or a necessary armed revolt (insert your own politics about self-determination here). see italy's right wing populism party, Lega Nord, as a real-time example of this phenomenon.

but arcane makes an interesting plot decision with jayce, a very unexpected and "unwilling" contributor to piltover's abrupt dip into right wing populism. the showrunners love foils!

in arcane lore, i think it's safe to say that jayce's moniker "the man of progress" is pretty tongue-in-cheek. both he and viktor have a bemused tone about it in the run-up to his speech, and jayce is taken aback by heimerdinger's insistence that he deliver said speech. but the glowing, savior-esque imagery can't be ignored, nor can jayce's quick switch into his councilor role, no matter how reluctantly he makes it.

jayce is confronted by 2 forces that he seeks to combat in his quick tenure as councilor: internal corruption and an ineffective governing body. the latter goal is inspired almost solely by viktor, playing into jayce's naivety as a fresh-faced political figure, but this will be especially important to note later on. the innocence he offers up to mel is quickly erased, transformed instead into an uncomfortable - and inexperienced - militancy:

important in the bridge scene to my analysis is the populist "out group," or the designation populists give to those whom they actively oppose, and this opposition serves as their basis for organization. in this case, it's the undercity (keep this in mind for viktor's role!!).

jayce's combined frustrations at the unrest in the undercity and the council's (namely heimerdinger's) refusal to act, to both save viktor and to deal with the undercity's looming violence, motivates him to act like silco for a short time. unsatisfied with the status quo, he unites a likeminded individual, vi, along with the enforcers, to undercut the political system he feels is unable to represent its constituents or act in an effective manner. however, UNLIKE silco, jayce's realizes the inevitable cost the method of violence has and refrains in the end. he returns to the council and capitulates to some of silco's demands in the name of a peace piltover and zaun always thought impossible.

jinx's complete undoing of this underscores the failures of populism, especially as an extended movement over time. she wasn't accounted for. it's common sentiment at this point that she didn't attack the council for political gain. she was not invested in zaun's independence. she did it out of her and silco's twisted parental bond, and thus undid piltover's brief instance of compromise and compassion.

so...where does viktor fit into all this? and what are his implications for neoliberalism vs. populism in season 2?

viktor is neither wholly within nor wholly outside the populist outgroup - though jayce unintentionally shoves him back there in the pivotal bridge scene. furthermore, viktor also makes use of piltover's technocracy. he seems to have had a "raise yourself up by your bootstraps" history in arcane, contrary to left wing populist insistence that neoliberal ideals make this impossible.

this compounds as a double alienation for viktor, who also is straddled with the complications of his disability. a lot of his story is searching for a fellow in arms, if you ask me, and he had that with jayce until the pendulum swung, hence his return to singed.

if we stop there, viktor represents the failing of these 2 very flawed political ideologies. he fits nowhere and arcane uses him adeptly as a symbol of the failings of binaristic ideologues and systems. but let's speculate some more!

i'm convinced that viktor, due to his ambiguous 3rd party role in the story so far, will be one of the central villains (if not THE villain, if you allow me to be admittedly hopeful/biased) in season 2. consult the innumerable very well written theory/meta posts about the subject for more details, but one piece of evidence i want to focus on is this inherent physical, cultural, and ideological separateness that is innate to his character.

can we see him allying ever again with piltover, knowing that there's a split incoming? even without outside knowledge of league lore, singed's damning prediction ("if you take this path, they will despise you") cannot go unheeded. alternatively, then, can we see viktor allying with the supposed jinx-as-revolutionary side? no. personally, i see him as becoming increasingly unwillingly to compromise his a) immediate survival; and b) his ideals, especially after being endlessly sidelined in his attempts to express them in acts 2 and 3. he's also just a loner, guys.

there's some controversy on this point, but i'm convinced that the finger-printed cultists/followers we saw in the s2 trailer are devoted to viktor. starting with the shimmer addict he touched in the teaser, he is accruing a following all his own. and since noxus is here, touting their authoritarian militancy to replace piltover's outdated liberal ideals, nothing that jinx's revolution OR viktor's following does can be apolitical. to organize and to fight is survival under s2's raised stakes.

there aren't any binary spectrums when it comes to political theory in my opinion, so i am prepared to witness viktor introduce an entirely separate totalitarian narrative into arcane. where it will surely lack in militancy, it will make up for in its domination of the arcane. my biggest speculation is that, as they always do, piltover will fold and compromise at the last minute, perhaps yield to noxus, and invest wholeheartedly in taking down viktor's BBEG cultist regime. and by isolating his narrative repeatedly in s1, the writers planned this out expertly.

even if i'm wrong about viktor as third party, i like to think my observations still stand about the specific and qualifiable political divisions between piltover and zaun. the biggest hole this leaves for me is the question: will arcane ever take a stand? they seem very averse to making a blatant political statement, but i think their pervasive anti-police thread makes it clear that we're not meant to sympathize with piltover yuppies or their seasoned, jaded councilmen. let me know your thoughts!

also, as a jayce fan and a fan of arcane's overall story, none of this is meant as a CRITIQUE of him, mel, or silco. as silco said, "we all have our parts to play." i believe arcane's very greatest strength is their archetypal storytelling, and these distinct character roles are crucial to the success and vibrancy of the story.

if you read all the way to this point - ily <3

[bimboficationblues]

how is "nationalism of the oppressed" mythological

In a dual sense - 1) like all nationalisms, it relies on central myths, and 2) the idea of an innately revolutionary "nationalism of the oppressed" is itself mythical, not a useful analytical or political tool but basically a way of handwaving difficult tactical questions.

All nationalism is in some sense myth-making - it posits an underlying, intangible unity among a group of people with highly diverse and divergent interests and traits. This is part of the reason why nationalists so often talk in the abstract language of "national spirit" - abstraction is kind of the point. This intangible unity doesn't *have* to be ethnicity, it's frequently (for example) the highly nebulous concept of "culture." But the inevitable slide towards ethnicity - and I do think it is inevitable - is unsurprising.

If you identify the unifying force of a people, the thing that makes it a "nation," with something like language/religion/culture, those things are fairly fluid both in space (taking a variety of different forms across different places) and time (changing over time for any number of reasons). This is especially the case because those traits are basically "open," at least theoretically: other people can move in, learn a language, convert to a local religion, and/or learn the techniques and style of local cultural production (and in the process change the character of the culture). So the supposed unity of "culture" is very obviously made up. (It's also worth noting that, insofar as nationalism is coextensive with statecraft, we often see efforts to preserve or create a "national culture" or "national unity" that leaves out or represses certain groups and practices; figuring out what constitutes "the nation" is a highly arbitrary process.)

Ethnicity is also fake - it is a "myth of common descent" - but that quality counterintuitively makes it a more stable foundation for a nationalist political project, because it is 1) derived from something in the past, making it harder to contest or observe, and 2) an immutable trait within the myth's context. You can't identify or convert or learn your way into being a part of the ethnos, you either are or you aren't. This makes for a much more stable boundary line around who is included or prioritized within the polity and who isn't.

As for why "nationalism of the oppressed" is mythological: it is not a meaningful historical category. When people invoke it they are collapsing a bunch of different projects and movements, some of which are conservative and some of which are revolutionary. I also reject the idea that nationalism's goodness is contingent on whether it is practice by an oppressed or oppressor group and nothing else - lest we forget that Zionism was once considered a kind of "nationalism of the oppressed."

For the socialist or the revolutionary, nationalism should be considered a kind of tactic; it is not a good in itself. Any revolutionary or liberatory movement is going to have to make decisions about what they want the movement to look like - its positions, rhetoric, propaganda, goals, etc. Nationalism is a historically popular means for doing things like rallying people to your cause, establishing basic principles for statecraft, cultivating a new political and social culture, etc. This is basically Frantz Fanon's argument in Wretched of the Earth - consistent with his arguments in his previous book, Fanon rejects the notion of a prepolitical national unity. He does not want to wade around in the primordial soup for a "true history" for colonized countries to return to or emulate. But nor does he reject nationalism as a strategy for combating colonialism on the field or in the body. Rather, he wants a class-driven national culture that is emergent from within the process of anti-colonial resistance and that ultimately gives way to an internationalist, universalist humanism once its purposes have been achieved. It's an extremely qualified kind of argument. I don't totally agree with it, but it's an argument that I can wrap my head around and endorse in the broad strokes, because above all it is talking about nationalism as a means towards something.

The kind of people who bastardize Fanon and try and recuperate him into their insipid microwaved politics have this entirely fictional idea of nationalism as an innately revolutionary end, that if you put nationalism in the hands of the right people it will automatically gravitate towards liberation and will not introduce the same kind of problems that the nationalism of colonial powers or capitalist countries has. This is just demonstrably not true (*gestures vaguely at cross-pollination between black nationalisms and black conservatisms, the historical relationship between nationalism and liberal statecraft, the success of right-wing religious or ethnic nationalist movements like Hindutva or Ba’athism in post-colonial countries, etc.*), and is basically just weird, idealist nonsense about how being oppressed makes you morally virtuous.

It also has the effect of obfuscating class politics - ironic, since the people that most frequently utter this line are ML(M)s. There are quite a few "nationalisms of the oppressed" that presume the working-class of a country or a group has more in common with its local bourgeoisie or professional-class counterparts (frequently the spearheads of nationalist movements, if we wanna talk about "class character") rather than the working classes and oppressed groups of other countries.

What the "nationalism of the oppressed" myth does is effectively evade hard strategic questions. Instead of asking "how will this help the cause? what problems might it introduce? does this conflict with long-term goals and are the short-term victories going to be worth it?" it just assumes from the outset that none of those questions are worth asking. It assumes that nationalism is an automatically better foundation for a movement than humanism, or cosmopolitanism, or internationalism.

[fallowhearth]

Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.

But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.

Patrick Wyman, Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future Substack, 2024

[fatehbaz]

Coral today is an icon of environmental crisis, its disappearance from the world’s oceans an emblem for the richness of forms and habitats either lost to us or at risk. Yet, as Michelle Currie Navakas shows in [...] Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, our accounts today of coral as beauty, loss, and precarious future depend on an inherited language from the nineteenth century. [...] Navakas traces how coral became the material with which writers, poets, and artists debated community, labor, and polity in the United States.

The coral reef produced a compelling teleological vision of the nation: just as the minute coral “insect,” working invisibly under the waves, built immense structures that accumulated through efforts of countless others, living and dead, so the nation’s developing form depended on the countless workers whose individuality was almost impossible to detect. This identification of coral with human communities, Navakas shows, was not only revisited but also revised and challenged throughout the century. Coral had a global biography, a history as currency and ornament that linked it to the violence of slavery. It was also already a talisman - readymade for a modern symbol [...]. Not least, for nineteenth-century readers in the United States, it was also an artifact of knowledge and discovery, with coral fans and branches brought back from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to sit in American parlors and museums. [...]

---

[W]ith material culture analysis, [...] [there are] three common early American coral artifacts, familiar objects that made coral as a substance much more familiar to the nineteenth century than today: red coral beads for jewelry, the coral teething toy, and the natural history specimen. This chapter [...] [brings] together a fascinating range of representations of coral in nineteenth-century painting and sculptures.

With the material presence of coral firmly in place, Navakas returns us to its place in texts as metaphor for labor, with close readings of poetry and ephemeral literature up to the Civil War era. [...] [Navakas] includes an intriguing examination of the posthumous reputation of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel who first claimed that coral should be classed as an animal (or “insect”), not plant. Navakas then [...] considers white reformers [...] and Black authors and activists, including James McCune Smith and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and a singular Black charitable association in Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of the century, called the Coral Builders’ Society. [...]

---

[H]er attention to layered knowledge allows her to examine the subversions of coral imagery that arose [...]. Obviously, the mid-nineteenth-century poems that lauded coral as a metaphor for laboring men who raised solid structures for a collective future also sought to naturalize a system that kept some kinds of labor and some kinds of people firmly pressed beneath the surface. Coral’s biography, she notes, was “inseparable from colonial violence at almost every turn” (p. 7). Yet coral was also part of the material history of the Black Atlantic [...].

Thus, a children’s Christmas story, “The Story of a Coral Bracelet” (1861), written by a West Indian writer, Sophy Moody, described the coral trade in the structure of a slave narrative. [...] In addition, coral’s protean shapes and ambiguity - rock, plant, or animal? - gave Americans a model for the difficulty of defining essential qualities from surface appearance, a message that troubled biological essentialists [...]. Navakas thus repeatedly brings into view the racialized and gendered meanings of coral [...].

---

Some readers from the blue humanities will want more attention, for example, to [...] different oceans [...]: Navakas’s gaze is clearly eastward to the Atlantic and Mediterranean and (to a degree) to the Caribbean [...], even though much of the natural historical explorations, not to mention the missionary interest in coral islands, turns decidedly to the Pacific. [...] First, under my hat as a historian of science, I note [...] [that] [q]uestions about the structure of coral islands among naturalists for the rest of the century pitted supporters of Darwinian evolutionary theory against his opponents [...]. These disputes surely sustained the liveliness of coral - its teleology and its ambiguities - in popular American literature. [...]

My second desire, from the standpoint of Victorian studies, is for a more specific account of religious traditions and coral. While Navakas identifies many writers of coral poetry and fables, both British and American, as “evangelical,” she avoids detailed analysis of the theological context that would be relevant, such as the millennial fascination with chaos and reconstruction and the intense Anglo-American missionary interest in the Pacific. [...] [However] reasons for this move are quickly apparent. First, her focus on coral as an icon that enabled explicit discussion of labor and community means that she takes the more familiar arguments connecting natural history and Christianity in this period as a given. [...] Coral, she argues, is most significant as an object of/in translation, mediating across the Black Atlantic and between many particular cultures. These critical strategies are easy to understand and accept, and yet the word - the script, in her terms - that I kept waiting for her to take up was “monuments”: a favorite nineteenth-century description of coral.

Navakas does often refer to the awareness of coral “temporalities” - how coral served as metaphor for the bridges between past, present, and future. Yet the way that a coral reef was understood as a literal graveyard, in an age that made death practices and new forms of cemeteries so vital a part of social and civic bonds, seems to deserve a place in this study. These are a greedy reader’s questions, wanting more. As Navakas notes [...], the method [...] is to understand our present circumstances as framed by legacies from the past, legacies that are never smooth but point us to friction and complexity.

---

All text above by: Katharine Anderson. "Review of Navakas, Michele Currie, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America." H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. December 2023. Published at: [networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20017692/anderson-navakas-coral-lives-literature-labor-and-making-america] [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[germiyahu]

Similarly to the "Jesus was Palestinian!" crowd, I find this phrasing (and I've seen it in so many fandoms and other contexts about portraying Bibical characters I'm not just picking on the thing that it's popular to critique right now):

Kind of annoying? Like "Middle Eastern Jewish" is baffling to me. Is it because the average person thinks Jews are white Americans and they need to specify Middle Eastern = Brown which isn't even always the case, especially when we decenter American conceptualizations of race. But it also very cleanly lops of Middle Eastern-ness, and therefore this implicit Person of Color-ness from Jews as a class?

Some Jews can be Middle Eastern, and therefore brown/indigenous/poc/valid/worthy of protection, but it's not automatic and it's certainly not universal, so any time a Jew is granted this special status it must be verbalized so as not to confuse people. They might think the Jew you're talking about is a colonizer otherwise!

Or is it a way to imply (if not outright say) that there has never been a Jewish state in the region? Any Jews from Jesus' time were just denizens of the Middle East broadly? They had no country of their own, they just existed nebulously scattered throughout among other tribes and tongues and nations? Like if the Hasmonean Dynasty ruled over a polity called Israel I would see how the average Tumblerino would obviously want to avoid alluding to that when talking about New Testament characters/historical figures. But it was called Judea, well Iudaea in Latin. Some Israelis refer to the Hebron region as Judea now but this is not something that most anti-Israel people on Tumblr know about. So it has to be an aversion to admitting that there was a Jewish state in the Levant no matter what it's name was?

And less than 2 centuries later the land was renamed Palestine anyway. They don't even call Biblical characters "Palestinian Jews," at best some people used to call Jesus a Palestinian Jew, but I don't even see that anymore really. He's just "Palestinian" now. So you can be ahistorical when it's Jesus but not for anyone else in these books? Why? What's the point? What's the story what's the vision?

I'm definitely reading too much into this specific post, the worms in my brain sing so sweetly to me, but when these spaces are filled with so much casual disregard and disinterest in Jewish people, their culture, their history, their rights, their dignity, their lives... well maybe it's time to stop just slapping on "JOOISH!" to get sjw points while you're canceling the thing that is cringe.

[jeahreading]

Honestly my Poor Science friends, like today, had my constitution book with me(Since I had a pol Science exam today) and almost everyone was amazed and mildly terrified of me(since 3 out of 4 of the students in my opt we out doing some other work i was sitting in the psych class and i was reading the Mode of promulgation and learn the Preamble, the psych teacher thought i was reciting some sort of scriptures of mantra but in fact, i was just babbling the preamble lol). Almost everyone in Class asked to see my copy once and it was fun seeing them totally lost as to wtf was actually happening in my head.

A friend in science asked to see my book. She was like "How tf do you find this shit interesting" and I went on a rant about how some part of the consti are so fun to see like double jeopardy, emergency etc. She genuinely looked so lost and disinterested, i think about people who find fascination in physics and maths and i can never understand them, i always felt lost and afraid in that territory and they find fun in that, and i see them lost and afraid of social science, polity, consti etc and where i find a world of amazement and it's so fascinating to me.

For sure, my friends in science won't be able to sit still in a class where we're learning FPTP and PR with single transferrable vote, while i won't be able to sit still in a class which is teaching sets and trigo

[wtfwhy]

HOW I WOULD REWRITE THE TEEN WOLF MOVIE

First of all its a slice of life comedy 

No villain just normal problems, but maybe background Monroe issues

Each character has a running gag or a funny arc 

Scott:

Runs his own veterinary business but accidentally placed his building in a place with primary cat people. He can not treat cats because they go crazy around him (he tells the humans he's allergic to cats). So the whole movie is him talking to real estate agents about buying a new building and selling his current one. The process is painfully slow. (but the new place is in beacon hills were this all takes place)

Kira: 

Is still not in the movie but a bit after 6b she came back from the skinwalkers and she and scott get married. During the movie she's actually having a girls weekend with the skinwalkers because they became good friends 

Lydia:

She and Stiles have twins (like 10 years old or something) and a newborn baby. Stiles convinces Lydia to take a break cause she's so stressed and to go visit their friends (so thats why shes in bh) during the movie she'll be having a conversation interrupts by taking a phone call. Its the twins' school. She is the leader of the PTA. This happens multiple times throughout the movie. (minor detail of her being super successful, getting that feilds medal, and being like the second Stephen Hawkins basically)

Stiles: 

Is at home taking care of the newborn, we cant hear his voice but Lydia talks to him on the phone.

Jackson:

Is just constantly hanging out with lydia the entire movie, her sidekick, her goon

Malia: 

Life way more put together than in the real movie. She works as like a camp ranger nature person or whatever, has weekly dinner with Mr. Tate, and is overall living her best life. Shes currently single but like every guy her age in beacon hills is trying to get with her. Shes also internet famous. She has simps. She lives in beacon hills but has traveled to a few different countries, including france 

Parish:

Is no longer a cop because he found his true calling in modeling 

Sheriff:

Retired and tired. Lydia is staying with him during her visit. He's just really happy about being a grandfather

Derek:

Same basically, a cool dad, so similar to tyler heclens (idk sp) portrayal of clark kent that a joke about that is made

The scene where he talks to coach is there so that coach can not recognize him and then derek is like "oh sorry, how about now?" (he walked into the corner of the room, clenched his fists at his side, and started glaring like he was about to kill someone) and coach is like omg yeah i remember you, hows it been? 

Also he is married to braeden and she is elis step mom

ALSO he has 11 kids including eli, he is tom baker cheaper by the dozen.

Eli: 

Stiles' biggest fan, just like that one post✊ (i saw a post about that being why hes like stiles and it annoying derek and its one of the funniest things ever, i dont remeber the poster sorry) calls all of the original pack uncle or aunt. He and Malia besties. His arc is he has a boyfriend or girlfriend and is trying desperately for no one to find out because they all babysitted him and are notorious for telling embarassing baby stories to his friends and previous partners. He's the oldest sibling.

Chris:

Literally just chilling, planning a tropical vacation, is married to Melissa 

Melissa:

Still works at hospital, overly mushy with chris, especially in front of peter 

Peter: 

Same as usual but 10x more dramatic. Lives on Melissa's coach. Theres a few random times in the movie hes being interviewed like hes in the office. He's the only one that this happens with.

Issac:

Only speaks in french, but there are subtitles for the audience. Only speaks English to Chris even though Chris knows french. Malia and him are friends from when she visited france.

Liam:

Professional lacrosse player, is in the lacrosse nfl (i have no idea if thats a thing) hangs out with mason and on his off time he leads an anger management class

Mason: 

Politician, the only thing stopping him from being president is his age. Corey uses his powers to steal incriminating evidence against masons evil political opponents. They are married. 

Theo:

He's a trailer life vlogger, very successful online. Regularly hits up scott and liam for no particular reason (its because hes lonely) its never mentioned but there's a brief shot of his trailer and on one of the walls there's a picture of the pack with a picture of theo tapped to it. And/or just a picture of stiles* Bonus points for hearts. 

He goes to liams class as a demonstration on how not to beat someone up when you're angry (liam and theo usually end up fighting anyway)

Allison: 

Either not in it or inexplicably alive. No mention as of how or why or when she came back. At one point there is a very clear reference to her death so the audience knows it wasn't reconned or something 

OR ( my sister's idea) Chris Ouija boards her every friday night and they chat

Deaton: 

Just doing completely unrelated shady shit, which all ends up being something super anti-climatic 

This is my vision

*to clarify, i dont ship them, its just that how obsessed theo was with void stiles lives rent free in my head

[morigarden]

coughs king: short and clean-shaven, he's baby 17/teen: he's a baby and you cannot tell me otherwise that he didn't just let his hair grow out war: hair grown out, a helmet that resembles Athena (stole from class of the titans) After Cyclops: he thinks of polities, mercy and many other things, he feels restless and hopeless, reckless. with this he leaves his armour behind, his cape turned to a drapery on the side- his hands worn, he helps row now that like 90% of his crew is dead- after circe: look i know the musical kinda skips parts here and there but I'm keeping the 1 year in my head, at some point he loses his royal cape, , and clothes are more worn beggar: malnourished, tired ya know how it is i do have a calypso / murder happy ody cuz both are kinda similar,

[diamondperfumes]

It is fallacious to say that Dany will burn Volantis and move on without looking back. Dany does not just learn the lesson that compromising with oppressors is impossible in Meereen. She also learns specific and concrete ways to build proto-democratic institutions of political, civil, legal, and social equality. Thus what she sets off in Volantis will not just be a military revolution against the slaveowing nobility spread across the continent. It will also be a religious, civil, and sociopolitical war to change the structures embedded in the political economy of each slaveowning polity. The people who revolt, as in the slaves, freedmen, and class traitors to the slaveowning nobility who ally with the slaves and freedmen, will have the examples Dany has left behind in Meereen to study and follow. Moreover, the most important benefit of Dany's revolution will be paving the way for the downtrodden of each polity to create their own institutions. Dany will not just be burning without looking back, she will be ensuring that the freedmen have the actual tools they need to build those institutions. The leaders of these respective regions are best positioned to govern themselves, and once Dany helps get rid of their thorniest enemies and give them the tools to effectuate lasting change, they will have to take over.

Is that not what Dany's detractors also want, to see the people rule themselves? It is kind of ironic that the same people who detest Dany for their speculation that she will not care what happens to Volantis, Meereen, and the rest of Essos after she leaves, also criticize her for ruling Meereen despite being non-Ghiscari. It is also funny because Bran will be King by the end, and that is not going to happen because of a democratic vote. In other words, because of Dany, there will be an actual opportunity for transition to representative governance and more political equality among the masses in Essosi states, but there won't be such a transition in Westeros, which will preserve feudal monarchy. Yet somehow Dany is criticized for that too? What politics do ASOIAF fans truly embrace, in the end? Do they want to see a ruler who empowers the people to lead themselves? If so, then why get angry at Dany intending for this to be the case?

And frankly, this is more than what any other character does in the text. Not only has no other character put pause on their war of conquest, glory, vengeance, or power, to save oppressed people and rebuild their nation for no other reason than to fight oppression (as opposed to Stannis, who learns of a very convenient prophecy that would put the Realm he wants to rule at risk, but who is still actively pursuing his war and finding the most beneficial alliances to serve his war), no other character has given the people tools to govern themselves, create their own economic and legal institutions, and disseminated the tools to fight for themselves. This is a fact, though I welcome disagreement with text evidence countering my point.

It is also not guaranteed that Dany will stay in Westeros. Those who want her to die in Westeros are contradicting themselves by claiming she's going to "abandon" Volantis and Meereen––if you want Dany to pursue change in Essos, why do you also want her to die in Westeros? Given the imagery and foreshadowing in Dany's arc relating to the Great Empire of the Dawn, it is highly likely that Dany returns––"to go forward you must go back"––and rebuilds the one empire in the entire lore that ever embraced true unity and peace, until the first Long Night.

[realunderlake]

Fantasy Ideology Part 1: Magic

I don't know if this is anything, but sometimes I like to think about the ideological and social impacts about elements of fantasy worldbuilding.

Like, take magic for example. There are generally different ways it's presented in fantasy fiction. Sometimes, it requires an innate aspect of being to use (a la the force in Star Wars, or however the heck harry potter magic works.) Sometimes this innate aspect is heritable, and sometimes it is completely random. Other times, magic is something that requires rigorous study. And yet, we seem to have one broad conception of magic in most fantasy media: Wizards sitting off in their tower, doing spells and stuff. Most settings don't think about how magic would impact the world that much, and instead make the world a bland, medieval Europe pastiche.

But lets look at magic from a social perspective, taking the classic DnD approach of "A wizard can be taught magic, though it generally takes a long time, and they should start from adolescence." You know what Magic is then comparable to? Because it's not a university professor... It's a Knight. For much of human history, aristocrats were warriors, because learning to be a *good* warrior, who used the most high tech stuff (whether that be chariots, or the couched lance) took a lot of effort, and you had to start pretty young, similar to how magic works. Thus, the social consequences of magic should be obvious, magic should be something that is used by the upper classes of a society, as they are the ones that are able to invest the time and energy into mastering it.

Perhaps however, as technology advances, magic becomes more widespread. Rather than having to painstakingly craft your own equipment, you can get it mass produced. Rather than working on outdated theories of physics (Aristotelian perhaps) you can observe the effects and costs of magic in a much more scientific way, increasing the effectiveness, and perhaps lowering the barrier to entry. Magic would be less blacksmithing, and more welding.

But in an instance like that, the ruling classes would not simply give up this power that they have, unless they have a reason to do so. Perhaps a king supports an up and coming magical bourgeoise to counteract the power of the magic-wielding noble class, for example. A good example of this is in the webnovel Mother of Learning, where the social forces have driven magic to be more equally available, after a devastation of the magic using ruling class through a combination of calamitous war, and the magical equivalent of the black death. In this gap of experienced mages, most of the polities have begun to allow "middle class" non-mage families into magical academies to bolster their ability to fight in the next continent-spanning conflict. This in turn has led to a backlash by the magic-wielding aristocracy, who have engaged in power struggles with the central government of the kingdom in which the story takes place, with many of these "Nouveau Riche" mages taking the side of the monarchy which has formed an unsteady alliance with these more progressive voices.

In any setting that puts some thought into how magic works in it's society, magic should be, by necessity, controlled by the ruling class. Whether that be because the ruling class are the only ones with the means to produce mages due to the required investment, or because those with the power to warp reality itself have decided that they, quite reasonably, want to be in charge.

Most wizards are written as weirdos off in towers because of Lord of the Rings, and because of cultural assumptions from Europe. But crucially, Europe never actually had wizards, and Gandalf was an angel, not a mortal man.

Even in settings where magic is not something trained, but instead something innate, there would be some method by which mages interact with society on a systemized level. Having them be simply random hermits makes no sense. Ars Magica, the TTRPG, for example, has a situation where most mages have a magical "gift", but said gift also makes it impossible for them to be liked or trusted by normal people. Despite this handicap, the Order of Hermes in that setting controls a good amount of political clout, with powerful Covenants being able to ignore the rulings of kings, and the Tribunal of Transylvannia basically co-ruling much of the Kingdom of Hungary with it's actual king.

These interactions of magic with class dynamics has interesting implications for the developments of ideologies. Will access to magical education be seen as a proletarian struggle in the development of socialism? Will Aristocracy persist for longer periods due to the inherent bias of the elites literally having magic? Can liberalism exist in a society where some people can warp reality with a snap of their fingers? Will it do *even better*, due to the radical individualist message meshing with the individual power held by magic?

Interesting Questions.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir

Published: Apr 4, 2024

Across the United States, thousands of parents have consented to having their children’s puberty stopped with a class of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. Known colloquially as “puberty blockers,” these drugs overstimulate the pituitary gland to the point of preventing it from sending signals to the ovaries or testes to start producing the hormones responsible for puberty.

Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses. The doctors who’ve advised them say that puberty blockers are known to improve mental health — that they are even life-saving — and that they are fully reversible and just give kids “time to think.” None of this is true.

Major American medical associations say that “gender-affirming care” for kids is “medically necessary” and “life-saving.” Health authorities Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the U.K. disagree. Last month, the National Health Service of England decommissioned puberty blockers as a treatment of adolescent gender dysphoria. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” the NHSE explained.

Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percent of kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.

How many parents would consent to puberty blockers under these circumstances? Very few, if any.

It is common for drugs to enter pediatric use after evidence of their success in adult medicine. The opposite happened in gender medicine. It was the failure of “sex reassignment” in adult men to achieve satisfactory cosmetic outcomes and improve life functioning that led a group of clinicians in the Netherlands to propose starting the “reassignment” process in childhood.

Their hypothesis was as technologically appealing as it was ethically dubious: since males could not reverse the effects of testosterone-fueled puberty to pass as women, it would be beneficial to these men to have their puberty bypassed altogether.

The Dutch recognized the dilemma but thought they found a way around it. Relying on their experience using puberty blockers to treat a condition known as central precocious puberty (CPP), they argued that blockers were fully reversible and thus part of the diagnostic process. If it turned out that the kid wasn’t “truly trans,” the drugs would be discontinued and puberty allowed to resume.

Their argument was dubious from the get-go. First, CPP has an objective diagnosis, based on a blood sample, whereas gender transition is based on the adolescent’s feelings and experiences, which are subject to change. In a political climate such as ours, in which mere exploration of the reasons for rejecting one’s body can be labeled “conversion therapy,” differential diagnosis becomes impossible.

As Dr. Jason Rafferty, author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current policy statement on “gender-affirming care,” has put it, “the child’s sense of reality and feeling of who they are is the navigational beacon to sort of orient treatment around.” The AAP statement has been witheringly critiqued, and Rafferty and the AAP are now defendants in lawsuits by former patients.

Second, in CPP puberty suppression is by definition temporary; the goal is to delay puberty to its appropriate developmental window. In gender dysphoria, a “successful” prescription is where puberty is bypassed altogether. The assumption about reversibility, never tested and highly questionable form the start, proved to be the ethical foundation for the entire Dutch experiment, and it quickly crumbled. Over 93 percent of adolescents who are put on puberty blockers for gender issues continue down the medical pathway to cross-sex hormones. Some go on to surgeries.

Gender clinicians do not see this suspiciously high figure as a reason to rethink their approach. They see no possibility of iatrogenesis — a medical intervention that unintentionally induces harm, in this case by causing gender distress or confusion to persist artificially. On the contrary, they regard the high persistence rate as proof of their own remarkable diagnostic abilities.

More modest and scientifically-minded clinicians and researchers see things very differently. “Blocking puberty,” writes Sallie Baxendale, a professor of neuropsychology and author of an important new study on puberty blockers, “prevents the critical rewiring in the brain that underpins the ability make complex decisions. Puberty blockers may give children time to think but they simultaneously rob them of their developing capacity to do so.”

What is likely happening is that an ongoing youth mental health crisis whose origins predate and have little to do with gender is being misdiagnosed and mistreated with harmful and experimental drugs. Puberty blockers are the definition of a “quick fix” solution.

Researchers incorrectly refer to what the Dutch did as an experiment. In an experiment, falsifiable hypotheses are proposed, alternative interventions are tested, outcomes are monitored and competing explanations for observed results are thoughtfully ruled out.

The Dutch did nothing of the sort, according to a comprehensive scholarly examination of their study. Further, the only attempt to replicate that study, which was done in the U.K., failed. The researchers had to be forced to disclose their disappointing findings. Any scientific-minded person willing to put in the effort and read the literature will come to the same conclusion: Pediatric gender medicine is an industry built on fraud.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the Dutch pseudo-experiment with puberty blockers “escaped the lab” and became entangled in a fast-growing international social movement for transgender recognition. In the U.S., the drugs are being prescribed at numbers far exceeding anything the Dutch could possibly have imagined. Most adolescents referred to pediatric gender clinics are teen girls who have no history of dysphoria in childhood but who do have other mental health challenges that predate their distress with their bodies.

American medicine is no stranger to scandal — lobotomy, “recovered memory” and OxyContin are just a few examples. What makes pediatric gender transition unique is that it has been framed as a nonnegotiable civil right and defended by powerful civil rights groups, the Democratic Party and their ideological allies in the mainstream media.

A key reason for the divergence between U.S. and European medical authorities, as I’ve explained in a previous essay, is the latter’s greater willingness to follow principles of evidence-based medicine, including reliance on systematic reviews. Jack Turban, a prominent American gender clinician, revealed in a deposition that he seems not to know what a systematic review of evidence is.

Another reason is that in the U.S., doctors who practice child “transition” demand and often receive deference as the experts on the evidence for their practices; abroad, such clinicians are seen as having conflicts of interest. When the National Health Service of England appointed the highly respected Dr. Hilary Cass to lead its review of its youth gender service, it did so precisely because she was “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.” Sweden and Finland delegated the evaluation of evidence to experts with no personal involvement or stake in pediatric gender medicine.

Parents should never have been put in the position of having to decide whether to “allow” their kids to go through puberty. Those who would put the onus on parents are letting charlatans in the medical profession off the hook. Puberty is difficult for all teens, and it is not a disease. Puberty blockers offer teens in distress — especially girls with history of sexual abuse, autistic kids and gay kids — false hope by casting puberty as optional.

Puberty is a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, responsible for the development of the body’s major organs and systems and not just its external sexual features. Puberty blockers rob children of their right to an open future.

[lemonhemlock]

If the North was only truly independent after King Bran granted them it, then how did Dany steal their independence?

Also, thank you for answering my other question.

You're welcome!

I never said she did. I think people fundamentally misunderstand the mechanics at play here. From King's Landing's (read: Cersei's) perspective, Dany is an invader in a territory the Crown considers as part of the same polity it has authority over: Westeros / the Seven Kingdoms.

From Jon's perspective, the North is rebelling against the Crown's authority and asserting its independence, at least at de facto level - a new status crystallized by naming a King in the North a.k.a. him. He then goes on to swear fealty to Daenerys, essentially disavowing the North's already disputed independence claim and bringing it under Daenerys' political control, swearing fealty to her and naming her his (and, thus, the entire North's) queen. Jon turns himself into Dany's vassal.

Now, D&D, from my memory, didn't really insist upon the status difference between Jon and Sansa. But if Jon was the King in the North, Sansa was the Lady of Winterfell. (?) You would think that they wouldn't separate those two titles because of logistics, as the King would thus be left without a castle to call his own or settle as his capital. But, after bending the knee to Dany, I was unsure of Jon's status (and I think his character was, as well). What title does he now carry? None, pretty much, he reverts to being Jon Snow the bastard, I guess.

But Sansa remains the Lady of Winterfell, even though, logistically speaking, the actual rule of Winterfell seems to be split between her and Jon. They make strategic decisions together and northerners still heed Jon's commands or look to him for leadership, but she seems to be, at least on paper, the officially designated noble person in charge politically. And she takes a different view to Jon. From her perspective, she disagrees with accepting Daenerys' authority over the North and uses evasive language, whenever possible, to avoid asserting her fealty to Dany. She prefers for the North to be considered an ally and an equal in this equation and is working towards that objective.

Now, an 'alliance' would be a diplomatic way to word it and perhaps vague enough to mask the exact difference between a collaboration involving a monarch and their vassal and a collaboration involving two equal parties, but it can very quickly turn into a proper occupation if diplomatic relations break down. Practically-speaking, Daenerys has her large armies on Sansa's land, effectively occupying it. So, coming back to Sansa's perspective, they used to be independent for a whole 10 minutes (or, at the very least, working towards that goal), before Dany swooped in and now they've exchanged one non-Northern monarch for another. Which she is trying to rectify.

In any case, I would very much class the North as a contested territory in this scenario regardless of perspective.

[beardedmrbean]

Archaeologists have uncovered dozens of ancient Egyptian tombs and numerous artifacts, including a remarkable set of objects made from gold foil.

An Egyptian archaeological mission coordinated by the Supreme Council of Antiquities unearthed 63 mud-brick tombs and some simple burials at the Tel el-Deir necropolis in New Damietta, a Mediterranean coast city in the country's north.

The tombs are thought to date to ancient Egypt's Late Period, which lasted from 664 to 332 B.C., the country's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced in a statement.

Among these, researchers uncovered a "huge" tomb containing burials of people who appear to have been of high social class. Inside, archaeologists found a collection of gold foil artifacts in a variety of different forms, such as those shaped like religious symbols or figures.

The archaeological mission also uncovered a pottery vessel containing dozens of bronze coins from the later Ptolemaic era during the excavation, as well as a group of local and imported ceramic artifacts. The latter shed light on trade links between the ancient city of Damietta and other settlements along the Mediterranean coast.

The Ptolemaic era began following Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt—then controlled by the Persians—in 332 B.C. A Hellenistic polity known as the Ptolemaic Kingdom was subsequently established in 305 B.C. and ruled Egypt until 30 B.C., when the region was conquered by the Romans.

Another intriguing find during the excavation in New Damietta was ushabti statuettes, small figurines used in ancient Egyptian funerary practices. They were placed in tombs in the belief that they would act as servants for the deceased in the afterlife.

The layout of the newly discovered tombs at Tel el-Deir has been seen in other ancient Egyptian tombs of the Late Period, the ministry said.

Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the latest discoveries at the Tel el-Deir necropolis highlight the fact that ancient Damietta was a center of foreign trade during different historical eras.

Earlier this month, archaeologists announced that a collection of ancient Egyptian artworks and inscriptions had been uncovered hidden below the waters of the Nile.

A joint Egyptian-French archaeological mission identified works in an area of the iconic river, near the city of Aswan, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.

The settlement that existed in this location in ancient times was strategically significant, marking the southern frontier of pharaonic Egypt.

[metamatar]

[...] I do not know of any fictional narrative in Urdu, in roughly the last two hundred years, which is of any significance and any length (I am making an exception for a few short stories here) in which the issue of colonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational encounter between the English and the Indian has the same primacy as, for example, in Forster’s A Passage to India or Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. The typical Urdu writer has had a peculiar vision, in which he or she has never been able to construct fixed boundaries between the criminalities of the colonialist and the brutalities of all those indigenous people who have had power in our own society. We have had our own hysterias here and there – far too many, in fact – but there has never been a sustained, powerful myth of a primal innocence, when it comes to the colonial encounter. The ‘nation’ indeed became the primary ideological problematic in Urdu literature only at the moment of Independence, for our Independence too was peculiar: it came together with the Partition of our country, the biggest and possibly the most miserable migration in human history, the worst bloodbath in the memory of the subcontinent: the gigantic fratricide conducted by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communalists. Our ‘nationalism’ at this juncture was a nationalism of mourning, a form of valediction, for what we witnessed was not just the British policy of divide and rule, which surely was there, but our own willingness to break up our civilizational unity, to kill our neighbours, to forgo that civic ethos, that moral bond with each other, without which human community is impossible. A critique of others (anti-colonial nationalism) receded even further into the background, entirely overtaken now by an even harsher critique of ourselves. The major fictions of the 1950s and 1960s–the shorter fictions of Manto, Bedi, Intezar Hussein; the novels of Qurrat ul Ain, Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Hussein – came out of that refusal to forgive what we ourselves had done and were still doing, in one way or another, to our own polity. No quarter was given to the colonialist; but there was none for ourselves either. One could speak, in a general sort of way, of ‘the nation’ in this context, but not of ‘nationalism’.

Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Nations, Classes and Literatures. Emphasis mine