#so like it's both a reflection of how conservative poland is

[lordendsavior]

BIALYSTOK, Poland — The marchers at the first gay pride parade here in the conservative Polish city of Bialystok expected that they would be met with resistance.

But last week when Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska saw the angry mob of thousands that awaited the marchers, who numbered only a few hundred, she was shocked.

“The most aggressive were the football hooligans, but they were joined by normal people — people with families, people with small children, elderly people,” she said.

They blocked her way, first hurling invective, then bricks and stones and fireworks, she said. From the balconies, people threw eggs and rotten vegetables. Even before the march started, there were violent confrontations, and by the time the tear gas cleared and the crowd dispersed, dozens were injured and Poland was left reeling.

Much as the racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., shocked the conscience of America, the brutality in Bialystok last week has rocked many in Poland and raised grave concerns over a steady diet of anti-gay political propaganda in the country. 

In a show of solidarity with the L.G.B.T. community in Bialystok, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Warsaw and other cities around the country on Saturday. They carried rainbow flags and vowed to combat intolerance.

“One week ago, the government betrayed the people in Bialystok, gays and lesbians,” said Pawel Rabiej, the openly gay deputy mayor of Warsaw. “Warsaw is for everyone and so should the rest of Poland. Solidarity will conquer the time of contempt.”

Since this spring, when the governing Law and Justice Party stepped up its anti-L.G.B.T. language in advance of European Parliament elections, the language has only grown more heated as national elections approach this fall.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, told supporters at a July campaign event staged to look like a family picnic in Kuczki-Kolonia, a village in central Poland, that it was their duty to defend the nation from what he called Western decadence.

“We don’t have to stand under the rainbow flag,” he said.

In recent months, more than 30 localities have passed legislation declaring their region free from “L.G.B.T. ideology.” A national conservative newspaper, Gazeta Polska, distributed stickers so people could designate “L.G.B.T.-free” zones, a stunt that drew a swift rebuke from the American ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mossbacher, and others and was later banned by a Polish court.

A “L.G.B.T.-Free” sticker promoted by a Polish publication.

A group in Warsaw called “Stop Pedophilia” has been traveling the country smearing gay people with baseless claims of abuse.

For weeks, the group set up a tent in the center of the old town square of Bialystok to spread its message. Even after the violence last weekend, the group’s truck still patrolled the streets, broadcasting its claims over loudspeakers.

“What happened in Bialystok was the result of months of propaganda,” Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska said.

The anti-gay language has also been pushed by many figures in the Roman Catholic Church.

Two weeks before the march, Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda issued a letter that was read aloud in all churches in Bialystok and the surrounding province of Podlasie, asserting that gay pride events constituted “blasphemy against God.” He invoked a Latin phrase that was once the rallying cry of priests fighting for freedom against Communist rule. “Non possumus,” he wrote. “We cannot accept this!”

Dozens were injured in Bialystok. The police have identified over 100 people and accused them of attacking the marchers. At least 77 have been fined or charged. One man was accused of beating a 14-year-old boy.

In the week that followed, the violence was condemned by officials from both the governing party and the church — though both also denied responsibility for fomenting fear and hatred.

L.G.B.T. supporters in Warsaw on Saturday.

Jakub Przybysz is well acquainted with the hatred directed at gay people in many parts of the country. It is why he hid his sexuality for years.

Even before the recent anti-L.G.B.T. campaign, it was not easy being gay in this conservative town. There are no gay-friendly clubs or coffeehouses. It would be crazy, he said, to walk hand-in-hand with a same-sex partner.

“The only open life you can live is in your own apartment,” he said.

Still, when he learned that Bialystok County had been declared a region free of “L.G.B.T. ideology,” he was “shocked and horrified.”

“I don’t want to leave this country, but I wonder if there is a place in Poland where I can feel safe,” he said.

Bozena Bierylo, a Law and Justice councilwoman from the Bialystok County, said that the legislation was a response to “provocations” from L.G.B.T. minorities and their “demands” for sex education classes.

Still, she said, “any violence is unacceptable.”

Mr. Przybysz said that the anger he witnessed at the march has been fueled by language from political and religious figures.

His account, along with those of other eyewitnesses and videos, showed how quickly a mob mentality can grip a community.

The march was supposed to begin at 2 p.m., but a group of people who wanted to protest against the event were granted a permit for the same day. Extremist groups put out calls for supporters from across the region to join them.

Police detaining an anti-L.G.B.T. protester in Bialystok last week. 

They assembled on a grassy knoll overlooking the Square of the Independent Student Association, once the site of an old Jewish cemetery that was buried by the Communists after the war.

Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska, a sociologist, said that as she was surrounded by thousands of angry protesters, perhaps the most chilling thing was that there were familiar faces in the howling crowd.

“I recognized a former neighbor,” she said. “A friend recognized their doctor. A student of mine saw a counselor from her child’s school.”

“One young girl from Warsaw came up to me and asked if she could stay with me,” Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska said. “She was so terrified she burst into tears.”

They held each other as they marched.

All along the way, they were met with scorn and derision. One image that has spread around the country showed a man, his small child in a stroller in front of him, confronting the police and shouting at the marchers as he tried to stop them.

An older lady on a balcony waved at the marchers only to be met with shouts from hooligans in the crowd. “We know where you live, you whore!” they chanted.

Videos showed mobs chasing people. One ended with a young boy being stomped on by a group of large men.

Fans of the local soccer team were among the far-right protesters who confronted L.G.B.T. marchers last week.

Talk of the violence has gripped Poland in the days since, with endless hours of discussion on radio and television.

Even as political leaders and church officials have tried to distance themselves from the violence, the campaign against the L.G.B.T. community has shown no signs of abating.

Przemyslaw Witkowski, a journalist, was riding a bicycle with his girlfriend in the city of Wroclaw on Thursday evening when he spotted anti-gay graffiti and told his girlfriend it was shameful.

Apparently, someone overheard Mr. Witkowski. A short time later, a man confronted him.

“You don’t like this graffiti?” Mr. Witkowski said the man asked him.

“I said I did not,” Mr. Witkowski responded.

The man attacked him.

“He beat me badly, leaving me on the ground bleeding,” Mr. Witkowski said from the police station in Wroclaw on Friday, where he was undergoing a physical to catalog his injuries, which included a broken nose and fractures in his face. The photos of his bloody face have been widely shared across the country.

Mr. Witkowski has written about extremist groups and said he was worried for his country.

“We are unleashing things that in the future cannot be stopped,” he said. “It is happening.”

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous said: I didn’t know too much about the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton until I followed your superbly cultured blog. As an ivy league educated American reading your posts, I feel he is a breath of fresh air as a sane and cultured conservative intellectual. We don’t really have his kind over here where things are heavily polarized between left and right, and sadly, we are often uncivil in our discourse. Sir Roger Scruton talks a lot about beauty especially in art (as indeed you do too), so for Scruton why does beauty as an aesthetic matter in art? Why should we care?

I thank you for your very kind words about my blog which I fear is not worthy of such fulsome praise.

However one who is worthy of praise (or at least gratitude and appreciation at least) is the late Sir Roger Scruton. I have had the pleasure to have met him on a few informal occasions.

Most memorably, I once got invited to High Table dinner at Peterhouse, Cambridge, by a friend who was a junior Don there. This was just after I had finished my studies at Cambridge and rather than pursue my PhD I opted instead to join the British army as a combat pilot officer. And so I found out that Scruton was dining too. We had very pleasant drinks in the SCR before and after dinner. He was exceptionally generous and kind in his consideration of others; we all basked in the gentle warmth of his wit and wisdom.

I remember talking to him about Xanthippe, Socrate’s wife, because I had read his wickedly funny fictional satire. In the book he credits the much maligned Xanthippe with being the brains behind all of Socrates’ famous philosophical ideas (as espoused by Plato).

On other occasions I had seen Roger Scruton give the odd lecture in London or at some cultural forum.

Other than that, I’ve always admire both the man and many of his ideas from afar. I do take issue with some of his intellectual ideas which seem to be taken a tad too far (he think pre-Raphaelites were kitsch) but it’s impossible to dislike the man in person.

Indeed the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen reportedly once refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became very good friends. This is the gap between the personal and the public persona. In public he was reviled as hate figure by some of the more intolerant of the leftists who were trying to shut him down from speaking. But in private his academic peers, writers, and philosophers, regardless of their political beliefs, hugely respected him and took his ideas seriously - because only in private will they ever admit that much of what Scruton talks about has come to pass.

In many ways he was like C.S. Lewis - a pariah to the Oxbridge establishment. At Oxford many dons poo-pooed his children stories, and especially his Christian ideas of faith, culture, and morality, and felt he should have laid off the lay theology and stuck to his academic speciality of English Literature. But an Oxford friend, now a don, tells me that many dons read his theological works in private because much of what he wrote has become hugely relevant today.

Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, distinguished professor of aesthetics. Outside of brief pit stops at Cambridge, Oxford, and St Andrews, he was mostly based out of Birkbeck College, London University, which had a tradition of a working-class intake and to whom Scruton was something of a popular figure. He was also an editor of the ultra-Conservative Salisbury Review, organist, and an enthusiastic fox hunter. In addition he wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion, as well as finding time to write novels and two operas. He was widely recognised for his services to philosophy, teaching and public education, receiving a knighthood in 2016.

He was exactly the type of polymath England didn’t know what to do with because we British do discourage such continental affectations and we prefer people to know their lane and stick to it. Above all we’re suspicious of polymaths because no one likes a show off. Scruton could be accused of a few things but he never perceived as a show off. He was a gentle, reserved, and shy man of kindly manners.

He was never politically ‘Conservative’, or tried not to be. Indeed he encouraged many to think about defining “a philosophy of conservatism” and not “a philosophy for the Conservative Party.” In defining his own thoughts, he positioned conservatism to relation to its historical rivals, liberalism and socialism. He wrote that liberalism was the product of the enlightenment, which viewed society as a contract and the state as a system for guaranteeing individual rights. While he saw socialism as the product of the industrial revolution, and an ideology which views society as an economic system and the state as a means of distributing social wealth.

Like another great English thinkers, Michael Oakeshott, he felt that conservatives leaned more towards liberalism then socialism, but argued that for conservatives, freedom should also entail responsibility, which in turn depends on public spirit and virtue. Many classical liberals would agree.

In fact, he criticised Thatcherism for “its inadequate emphasis on the civic virtues, such as self-sacrifice, duty, solidarity and service of others.” Scruton agreed with classical liberals in believing that markets are not necessarily expressions of selfishness and greed, but heavily scolded his fellow Conservatives for allowing themselves to be caricatured as leaving social problems to the market. Classical liberals could be criticised for the same neglect.

Perhaps his conservative philosophy was best summed up when he wrote “Liberals seek freedom, socialists equality, and conservatives responsibility. And, without responsibility, neither freedom nor equality have any lasting value.”

Scruton’s politics were undoubtedly linked to his philosophy, which was broadly Hegelian. He took the view that all of the most important aspects of life – truth (the perception of the world as it is), beauty (the creation and appreciation of things valued for their own sake), and self-realisation (the establishment by a person of a coherent, autonomous identity) – can be achieved only as part of a cultural community within which meaning, standards and values are validated. But he had a wide and deep understanding of the history of western philosophy as a whole, and some of his best philosophical work consisted of explaining much more clearly than is often the case how different schools of western philosophy relate to one another.

People today still forget how he was a beacon for many East European intellectuals living under Communist rule in the 1980s.  Scruton was deeply attached in belonging to a network of renowned Western scholars who were helping the political opposition in Eastern Europe. Their activity began in Czechoslovakia with the Jan Hus Foundation in 1980, supported by a broad spectrum of scholars from Jacques Derrida and Juergen Habermas to Roger Scruton and David Regan. Then came Poland, Hungary and later Romania. In Poland, Scruton co-founded the Jagiellonian Trust, a small but significant organisation. The other founders and active participants were Baroness Caroline Cox, Jessica Douglas-Home, Kathy Wilkes, Agnieszka Kołakowska, Dennis O’Keeffe, Timothy Garton Ash, and others.

Scruton had a particular sympathy for Prague and the Czech society, which bore fruit in the novel, Notes from Underground, which he wrote many years later. But his involvement in East European affairs was more than an emotional attachment.  He believed that Eastern Europe - despite the communist terror and aggressive social engineering - managed to preserve a sense of historical continuity and strong ties to European and national traditions, more unconscious than openly articulated, which made it even more valuable. For this reason, decades later, he warned his East European friends against joining the European Union, arguing that whatever was left of those ties will be demolished by the political and ideological bulldozer of European bureaucracy.

Anyway, digressions aside, onto to the heart of your question.

Art matters.

Let’s start from there. Regardless of your personal tastes or aesthetics as you stand before a painting, slip inside a photograph, run your hand along the length of a sculpture, or move your body to the arrangements spiraling out of the concert speakers…something very primary - and primal - is happening. And much of it sub-conscious. There’s an element of trust.

Political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, defined artworks as “thought things,” ideas given material form to inspire reflection and rumination. Dialogue. Sometimes even discomfort. Art has the ability to move us, both positively and negatively. So we know that art matters. But the question posed by modern philosophers such as Roger Scruton has been: how do we want it to affect us?

Are we happy with the direction art is taking? Namely, says, Scruton, away from seeking “higher virtues” such as beauty and craftmanship, and instead, towards novelty for novelty’s sake, provoking emotional response under the guise of socio-political discourse.

Why does beauty in art matter?  

Scruton asks us to wake up and start demanding something more from art other than disposable entertainment. “Through the pursuit of beauty,” suggests Scruton, “we shape the world as our own and come to understand our nature as spiritual beings. But art has turned its back on beauty and now we are surrounded by ugliness.” The great artists of the past, says Scruton, “were painfully aware that human life was full of care and suffering, but their remedy was beauty. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation…It shows human life to be worthwhile.” But many modern artists, argues the philosopher, have become weary of this “sacred task” and replaced it with the “randomness” of art produced merely to gain notoriety and the result has been anywhere between kitsch to ugliness that ultimately leads to inward alienation and nihilistic despair.

The best way to understand Scruton’s idea of beauty in art and why it matters is to let him speak for himself. Click below on the video and watch a BBC documentary broadcast way back in 2009 that he did precisely on this subject, why beauty matters. It will not be a wasted hour but perhaps enrich and even enlighten your perspective on the importance of beauty in art.

So I’ll do my best to summarise the point Scruton is making in this documentary above.

Here goes.....

In his 2009 documentary “Why Beauty Matters”, Scruton argues that beauty is a universal human need that elevates us and gives meaning to life. He sees beauty as a value, as important as truth or goodness, that can offer “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy”, therefore showing human life to be worthwhile.

According to Scruton, beauty is being lost in our modern world, particularly in the fields of art and architecture.

I was raised in many different cultures from India, Pakistan, to China, Japan, Southern Africa, and the Middle East as well schooling in rural Britain and Switzerland. So coming home to London on frequent visits was often a confusing experience because of the mismatch of modern art and new architecture. In life and in art I have chosen to see the beauty in things, locating myself in Paris, where I am surrounded by beauty, and understand the impact it can have on the everyday.

Scruton’s disdain for modern art begins with Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Originally a satirical piece designed to mock the world of art and the snobberies that go with it, it has come to mean that anything can be art and anyone can be an artist. A “cult of ugliness” was created where originality is placed above beauty and the idea became more important than the artwork itself. He argues that art became a joke, endorsed by critics, doing away with a need for skill, taste or creativity.

Duchamp’s argument was that the value of any object lies solely in what each individual assigns it, and thus, anything can be declared “art,” and anyone an artist.

But is there something wrong with the idea that everything is art and everyone an artist? If we celebrate the democratic ideals of all citizens being equal and therefore their input having equal value, doesn’t Duchamp’s assertion make sense?

Who’s to say, after all, what constitutes beauty?

This resonated with me in particular and brought to mind when Scruton meets the artist Michael Craig-Martin and asks him about how Duchamp’s urinal first made him feel. Martin is best known for his work “An Oak Tree” which is a glass of water on a shelf, with text beside it explaining why it is an oak tree. Martin argues that Duchamp captures the imagination and that art is an art because we think of it as such.

When I first saw “An Oak Tree” I was confused and felt perhaps I didn’t have the intellect to understand it. When I would later question it with friends who worked in the art auction and gallery world, the response was always “You just don’t get it,” which became a common defence. To me, it was reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. In reality, they make no clothes at all.

Scruton argues that the consumerist culture has been the catalyst for this change in modern art. We are always being sold something, through advertisements that feed our appetite for stuff, adverts try to be brash and outrageous to catch our attention. Art mimics advertising as artists attempt to create brands, the product that they sell is themselves. The more shocking and outrageous the artwork, the more attention it receives. Scruton is particularly disturbed by Piero Manzoni’s artwork “Artist’s Shit” which consists of 90 tin cans filled with the artist’s excrement.

Moreover the true aesthetic value, the beauty, has vanished in modern works that are selling for millions of dollars. In such works, by artists like Rothko, Franz Kline, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin, the beauty has been replaced by discourse. The lofty ideals of beauty are replaced by a social essay, however well intentioned.

A common argument for modern art is that it is reflecting modern life in all of its disorder and ugliness. Scruton suggests that great art has always shown the real in the light of the ideal and that in doing so it is transfigured.

A great painting does not necessarily have a beautiful subject matter, but it is made beautiful through the artist’s interpretation of it. Rembrandt shows this with his portraits of crinkly old women and men or the compassion and kindness of which Velazquez paints the dwarfs in the Spanish court. Modern art often takes the literal subject matter and misses the creative act. Scruton expresses this point using the comparison of Tracey Emin’s artwork ‘My Bed’ and a painting by Delacroix of the artist’s bed.

The subject matters are the same. The unmade beds in all of their sordid disdain. Delacroix brings beauty to a thing that lacks it through the considered artistry of his interpretation and by doing so, places a blessing on his own emotional chaos. Emin shares the ugliness that the bed shows by using the literal bed. According to Emin, it is art because she says that it is so.

Philosophers argued that through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as our home. Traditional architecture places beauty before utility, with ornate decorative details and proportions that satisfy our need for harmony. It reminds us that we have more than just practical needs but moral and spiritual needs too. Oscar Wilde said “All art is absolutely useless,” intended as praise by placing art above utility and on a level with love, friendship, and worship. These are not necessarily useful but are needed.

We have all experienced the feeling when we see something beautiful. To be transported by beauty, from the ordinary world to, as Scruton calls it, “the illuminated sphere of contemplation.” It is as if we feel the presence of a higher world. Since the beginning of western civilisation, poets and philosophers have seen the experience of beauty as a calling to the divine.

According to Scruton, Plato described beauty as a cosmic force flowing through us in the form of sexual desire. He separated the divine from sexuality through the distinction between love and lust. To lust is to take for oneself, whereas to love is to give. Platonic love removes lust and invites us to engage with it spiritually and not physically. As Plato says, “Beauty is a visitor from another world. We can do nothing with it save contemplate its pure radiance.”

Scruton makes the prescient point that art and beauty were traditionally aligned in religious works of art. Science impacted religion and created a spiritual vacuum. People began to look to nature for beauty, and there was a shift from religious works of art to paintings of landscapes and human life.

In today’s world of art and architecture, beauty is looked upon as a thing of the past with disdain. Scruton believes his vision of beauty gives meaning to the world and saves us from meaningless routines to take us to a place of higher contemplation. In this I think Scruton encourages us not to take revenge on reality by expressing its ugliness, but to return to where the real and the ideal may still exist in harmony “consoling our sorrows and amplifying our joys.”

Scruton believes when you train any of your senses you are privy to a heightened world. The artist sees beauty everywhere and they are able to draw that beauty out to show to others. One finds the most beauty in nature, and nature the best catalyst for creativity. The Tonalist painter George Inness advised artists to paint their emotional response to their subject, so that the viewer may hope to feel it too.

It must be said that Scruton’s views regarding art and beauty are not popular with the modern art crowd and their postmodern advocates. Having written several books on aesthetics, Scruton has developed a largely metaphysical aspect to understanding standards of art and beauty.

Throughout this documentary (and indeed his many books and articles), Scruton display a bias towards ‘high’ art, evidenced by a majority of his examples as well as his dismissal of much modern art. However on everyday beauty, there is much space for Scruton to challenge his own categories and extend his discussion to include examples from popular culture, such as in music, graphic design, and film. Omitting ‘low art’ in the discussion of beauty could lead one to conclude that beauty is not there.

It is here I would part ways with Scruton. I think there is beauty to be found in so called low art of car design, popular music or cinema for example - here I’m thinking of a Ferrari 250 GTO,  jazz, or the films of Bergman, Bresson, or Kurosawa (among others) come to mind. Scruton gives short thrift to such 20th century art forms which should not be discounted when we talk of beauty. It’s hard to argue with Jean-Luc Godard for instance when he once said of French film pioneering director, Robert Bresson, “He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.”

Overall though I believe Scruton does enough to leave us to ponder ourselves on the importance of beauty in the arts and our lives, including fine arts, music, and architecture. I think he succeeds in illuminating the poverty, dehumanisation and fraud of modernist and post-modernist cynicism, reductionism and nihilism. Scruton is rightly prescient in pointing the centrality of human aspiration and the longing for truth in both life and art.

In this he is correct in showing that goodness and beauty are universal and fundamentally important; and that the value of anything is not utilitarian and without meaning (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s claim that “All art is absolutely useless.”). Human beings are not purposeless material objects for mechanistic manipulation by others, and civil society itself depends upon a cultural consensus that beauty is real and every person should be respected with compassion as having dignity and nobility with very real spiritual needs to encounter and be transformed and uplifted by beauty.

Thanks for your question.

[phlve]

Naranjo Subtype Descriptions — 5

so5 / E5 Social: Totem

If the E4 are so intense that it makes them very different or contrasting characters, the E5, on the other hand, in their usual lack of intensity, appear to us as more difficult to differentiate between them. In reference to the passion of the social E5, Ichazo used the word totem, which I find very evocative, a good image. But the passion of the social E5 is something akin to the need for the essential, the sublime, we might say, rather than the need for what is there. Totem indicates both height and character of being a constructed object rather than a human being. The height of a totem evokes a tendency for these people to look up, towards the ideal, and to relate to the most outstanding and outstanding among people, something like Midas wanted everything he touched to turn to gold. The tragedy is that, by seeking social E5 a super value, it implicitly despises ordinary life and ordinary people. He is only interested in the quintessence of life, the elixir of existence, the ultimate meaning. But in this orientation towards the stars, he becomes someone who cares little about life down here ... He becomes, therefore, too spiritual, because impoverishment or affective, which moves away from compassion, is precisely contrary to achievement. spiritual. Thus, in this character a polarity is established between the extraordinary and the nonsensical, so that nothing makes sense until the extraordinary or magical is achieved.

sp5 / E5 Conservation: Refuge

The need to withdraw is a clear characteristic for the five conservation. But keep in mind that each subtype of the E5 has something of that: some need to retreat. In the case of the conservative, passion has a lot to do with finding refuge, erecting high walls that separate him from a world that can invade him, that can take him out of a precious little world that hides inside. The idea of self-preservation becomes clearer if we imagine them as staunch supporters of cave retreat. The E5 conservation extremely limits his needs and desires, since each wish could mean a dependency status for him. Like each conservation subtype, it is also linked to survival and the concrete, attached to objects and personal space; but like E5, which is the most mental of mental characters, it is in thought, in incessant reflection on how to survive and live by limiting external disturbances, that it finds its greatest refuge.

sx5 / E5 Sexual: Trust

We have to understand this passionate search in the sense of trusting, of being able to trust the other: the sexual E5 is looking for that person who will be for him and with him, no matter the how or what, far beyond the normal vows of an engagement or a marriage. The thought of the sexual five is that he has to be able to present himself to you with the worst of his inner world, and that you, as his partner, should maintain complete equanimity in the face of his inner monsters, since he loves you so much...

So he lives the love of a couple as a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal that does not exist in the world of humans. The sexual E5 is quite romantic - this is minus five of the E5. They can be very much like the other Fives until you hit the romantic point: then a vibrant inner life will awaken. Chopin may be a good example of this. Who else was the most romantic among composers? Chopin was more of an aristocrat. It was a bit stiff. Someone who knew him well enough - Liszt's mistress - said of him that he was like an oyster with icing sugar: he was not very open, he was not open to deep intimacy, except with one or two people in his life. Chopin came from Poland and came to France while still a teenager, but he made no new friends in France. He was at the center of high society, and his entire love life was replaced by music.

[watching-pictures-move]

Viddying the Nasties #37 | Possession (Zulawski, 1981)

This review contains spoilers.

Andrzej Zulawski's Possession is a movie I'd somewhat been dreading revisiting. When I'd seen it all those years back (on YouTube, split into two parts if I recall correctly, as the DVD had been hard to come by in those days), despite being greatly moved by the experience, I'd also found it an extremely exhausting film to sit through. It's a tortured divorce melodrama (among other things) that starts at 11 and only goes up from there. Lots of shouting and screaming, physical abuse, kicking around chairs and tables. The movie is not what I'd call an overtly pleasant experience. Watching it now (on a Blu-ray from Mondo Vision, a substantial upgrade from my original format), while I won't characterize my previous impressions as inaccurate, I was able to better appreciate how the movie modulates this tone, acclimatizing us to its fraught emotional space. The movie starts off in the realm of a normal, bitter breakup, with the husband having returned from a work trip only to learn that his wife is leaving him and struggling to make sense of it, his frustration and anger stemming as much from the fact of her dissolving their relationship as his inability to comprehend her motivations. It isn't really until the half hour mark that it asks us to dive off the deep end with it. The husband hits his wife in the middle of a fight, follows her onto the street as she tries to halfheartedly throw herself onto the path of a truck, which then drops its baggage in an almost comical bit of stuntwork, their squabble ended when the husband becomes surrounded by children playing soccer and joins in. Any one of these by itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but Zulawski assembles them into an off-kilter crescendo, and does away with any sense of normalcy for the rest of the runtime.

That this approach works as well as it does is largely thanks to Isabelle Adjani as Anna, the wife, who spends the aforementioned scene looking like a vampire in cat eye sunglasses and blood streaming down her grimacing mouth. She delivers perhaps the most bracingly physical performance I've seen in a movie, but again this is something I'd maybe underappreciated initially in terms of how finely tuned her choices are. An early scene where she fights with her husband has her manically cutting raw meat and shoving it into a grinder, as if to channel her frustrations into acceptable form of violence for women. When she takes an electric knife to her throat, she begins to spasm about like a farm animal during a botched slaughter, providing a further comment on her domestic situation. The film's most famous scene has her freak out in a subway tunnel, thrashing her limbs about chaotically but almost rhythmically, maybe like the contractions when goes into labour. Her character later describes this as a miscarriage, ejecting the side of her which is neat and orderly and "good". Adjani plays this other half as well, with a much more old fashioned hairdo (braided conservatively like a stereotypical schoolmarm), one which provides a much more tender maternal figure to the couple's son. Adjani is also well cast because of her emotive, saucer-like eyes, which she isn't afraid to point at the camera repeatedly, providing a genuine emotional grounding during both the quieter and more hysterical sections of the movie.

Her husband, Mark, is played by Sam Neill, who had been cast after the filmmakers had seen him in Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career. To understand why Neill works so well, it helps to know that Sam Waterston had previously expressed interest in the role. Waterston, while a good actor, would have come off too fogeyish as the husband. Neill brings the appropriate edge and even sex appeal necessary for the material. And like in Jurassic Park, his best known role, he brings an inquisitive quality that keeps him close enough to our vantage point to give the narrative arc some grounding. The other major human character here is Heinz Bennent as Heinrich, a new age guru who happens to be having an affair with the wife. One on hand, this character represents the counterculture from Zulawski's homeland, which he had left after trouble from the authorities when making his last movie. On the other hand, Zulawski was drawing heavily from the bitter divorce he had just gone through, and directs a sizable fraction of the movie's contempt at this character, leading me to believe that his wife in fact left him for some new age buffoon. In one of the movie's funnier scenes, he has Heinrich confront Mark over Anna's disappearance and then go into a dumbassed trance while spouting new age nonsense and basically calling Mark a Nazi. This is the guy his wife left him for? This jackass? Mark sets him up by sending him to Anna, knowing full well he could be killed, but the potency of Mark's rage (and Zulawski's, by extension), as well as the ludicrousness of the Heinrich character, keep us from sympathizing with the latter too much. Zulawski has Heinrich die with his head in a toilet, a final flush by Mark serving as one last hilariously mean-spirited gesture of contempt.

Zulawski originally conceived the movie as having another major character, Anna's ex-husband, to be played by veteran actor and director Bernard Wicki, but after the first day of shooting with Wicki, he decided to drop the character entirely. (I suppose it depends on the personalities, but I wonder how actors react to being let go early from a project. Is it worse if it's on the first day? How about if you lead the filmmakers to realize they should do away with the character altogether? I only hope Wicki got paid.) It's not hard to see what purpose this character would have served, particularly in the way that Anna "upgrades" her lovers, having traded a much older man for the younger, sexier Mark, and then trying to replace him with an evolving monstrous fuck-squid (more on this later) that she was trying to nurture and reshape into the ideal partner. The only remnants of this character in the finished film is his young wife, who appears in the climax and his goaded by the "new" Mark (the final form of the fuck-squid) to shoot into the corpses of the real Mark and Anna. The character's proposed thematic purpose might have spelled out this moment's significance more clearly, but I'm not always convinced thematic clarity is preferable to how things move and feel, and the end product does not feel incomplete or incoherent, or at least not detrimentally so. The emotions make sense, even if the events onscreen are outside the norm. (My condolences to those of you who've been dumped for a monstrous fuck-squid.)

Having been conceived after his last project was quashed by authorities in Poland, there's undeniably a political element here, enhanced by the noticeable presence of the Berlin Wall, near which much of the film is situated. (At one point the camera looks out the window and sees the police from East Berlin staring back.) The realities of the Cold War figure heavily in the characters' lives, as it's suggested that Helen (the other Adjani) is from behind the Iron Curtain (she speak of readily identifiable evil, which could be interpreted as the visible presence of an authoritarian regime) and that Mark's work is in the field of intelligence, maybe even espionage. But the movie is less interested in pointing out political specifics than in the accompanying sense of repression and division, which plays heavily into the visual style. The movie often divides its frames to separate the characters, but rarely with any sense of symmetry, suggesting a sense of emotional chaos enhanced by the bruising mixture of wide angle lenses and handheld camerawork. When we're with Mark, the movie looks overcast, bluish grey, appropriately repressed at first, although Anna's presence throws his neat, fluorescently-lit apartment into disarray. Anna's love nest, situated in the Turkish district right beside the Wall is dilapidated and unkempt, which may have reflected the squalid realities of a hastily rented apartment in what I assume is a poorer part of town, but after having excised the orderly part of herself, it seems like an accurately messy reflection of her headspace.

Now back to the fuck-squid. It's hard to go into Possession this day and age completely blind, and even back when I first saw it, it came on my radar as the movie where "Isabelle Adjani fucks a squid". I have a lot of respect for Zulawski for delivering the goods on this front and for Adjani for throwing herself into this material, not because I'm some kind of sexual deviant who gets off on this stuff (although if you are, I'm not here to judge, it's a free country, just clear your browsing history after), but because modern arthouse cinema often defaults to a mode of cold, downplayed and too afraid to raise the audience's pulse (because apparently it's undignified to force a reaction out of the audience) and it's nice to see a movie serve what it says on the tin (this is one I'd have loved to see with an unsuspecting audience back in the day). Producer Marie Laure-Reyre notes that Zulawski was very hands on with the conception of the monster, drawing inspiration from gargoyles in Polish architecture, as if to further imbue political context into the proceedings. When seeing the end product, I can only assume Zulawski broke up with his wife at a seafood restaurant (I would hope he didn't react like Mark and throw around all the tables and chairs). Of course, the design of the monster means that the movie leans heavily into body horror, and its inclusion on the Video Nasty list in the UK and its release in the US in a heavily-trimmed 81-minute version emphasizing these elements likely contributed to its psychotronic reputation early on. (I am still interested in seeking out this cut, as I can't imagine the loss of 40 whole minutes wouldn't substantially alter the film's character.) It flirts with other genres as well. Certain scenes have a clear slapstick quality. Some of these involve Heinrich, the ever-reliable target of the film's ridicule, but there is also Margit Cartensen, playing Anna's friend and Mark-hater Marge, falling on her ass like a Three Stooges bit. And there's the climax, parodying action movies with its woozy cocktail of car chase, shootout and explosions, which leads a headlong rush into the film's apocalyptic final moments.

[patriciagraceewanika]

#theewanikawoman 

Carolyn Gora was one of the first customers to visit EWANIKA after the initial lockdown ended in late spring of this year and the shop was open by appointment only. Carolyn has a personal style, an easy manner and an adventurous spirit that makes you want to know more about her. Trained both as a nurse and a lawyer, she is the Director of Professional Conduct at the College of Nurses of Ontario. With such a demanding job in healthcare, we wanted to know more about how she was managing during the pandemic – how it affected her work, her personal life and her sense of herself. She generously shared some thoughts about why she is driven to do the work she does, and how she balances that with a desire for self-expression, and a need for self-care.

What is your job and how has the pandemic affected your work?  

Our role is to provide standards and guidelines to support nurses in providing safe and ethical nursing care to the people of Ontario. Our primary objective is to serve and protect the public interest including by addressing complaints against nurses, and at the same time being sensitive to the nurses being monitored. The pandemic has been a time of unprecedented stress for nurses and on the whole healthcare system, and while standards of care and ethics can’t be relaxed, everything has to be viewed in that context. We support a mental health and addiction program for nurses, so that competent and qualified nurses who may become ill, get the help they need. We also set up a program to register as many nurses who were retired, newly graduated or who had left the system to come back and help fulfill the emergency need.

Could you share a bit about your background, how you came to do the work you do today? 

Being a child in the 60’s, I was drawn to the larger than life figures in politics - the Kennedy White house, the Pearson liberals, and the Diefenbaker conservatives. I was also deeply affected by the assassination of JFK in 63, and the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations in 68. I was in grade 5 when Martin Luther King was killed and I gave a speech about the injustice of it. The protests for freedom, to end the war, for racial rights and women’s rights during the 60’s had a significant impact on my values.

I left school in my first year of university on a personal detour, disconnected from my family, and nursing became the climb back towards self-worth. I took a two-year nursing diploma from George Brown College and worked at St. Michael’s in Cardiology and the Critical Care Unit. It was grounding to work 8-hour shifts - days, evenings and nights with 2 days off and occasionally 3 days off. A shift could be about life and death. I learned about caring for patients and treating people well, regardless of their status, ethnicity, or politics.

I decided to apply to law school. Not having obtained a university degree, I had imposter syndrome, however, I came second in class in my first year. My formative law school experiences included participating in Women and the Law and discovering a book at a conference called Sister Outsider, essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, in particular – the Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, which resonated with me and which I go back to reading regularly.

I discovered the field of professional regulation working at the College of Physicians and Surgeons as the Manager of Public Complaints, and then for the Hearings Office. We dealt with some very difficult cases, but the opportunity for me to combine my experience in health care with my legal experience to protect the public interest was deeply satisfying.

What impact has the pandemic had on you personally and how have you dealt with it?

I have been working full tilt during this period. In the early days of the pandemic I was grateful to be employed and very motivated by my work. I still am, but like everyone, I have moments of anxiety, loneliness and frustration.

I have learned from yoga to breathe and to meditate. Talk to myself. What is happening? What are you thinking?  Sometimes there is a wisdom in anxiety and if you can sit with it and figure what is driving it, you can learn more about yourself, why your buttons were pressed and you decompensated, and how to self-correct, be less reactive and build resilience. I also know to burn off nervous energy through exercise, and my favourite activity of all is kayaking.

I treasure my relationships – and took time to connect with friends. I have very close family relationships, especially with my wonderful niece who I love like a daughter and have tried to support in her life’s journey. I visit my older parents often and feel lucky to have this time with them.

And I have a routine that makes me feel good. I start the day with 2 cups of Pilot coffee and I always get dressed. I put on my clothes, footwear, and jewelry from EWANIKA, even though sometimes no one else can see on Zoom or Teams virtual meetings. It gives me a boost.

How would you describe your style and how did it develop?

Eclectic. Classic with a twist. Sporty.

My mother had an influence on my style and interest in fashion. She came of age in the 40’s and I loved the look of that era – when women wore suits, lipstick and always looked so put together. My mother and her sister both sewed and my grandmother was a seamstress in Poland. I was only 10 when she died, but I still remember a beautiful chartreuse short sleeved silk blouse she made with 50 cloth covered buttons up the back.

Perhaps because of my mother’s influence, I like to put together an outfit. There was a time when those outfits were over coordinated, but I have relaxed that. I still love a monochromatic look, dressed up with a scarf or jewelry. And I love my suits from EWANIKA’s signature line that fit women’s bodies so beautifully. I only feel dressed for business when I put on my Maria de la Rosa socks and boots with a heel.

The sporty appeal for me comes from the fact that I swam competitively from the ages of 6 to 16. My first swim club had a tradition of fresh-water distance swimming with stars like Gus Ryder and Marilyn Bell. I swam Lake Couchiching 3 and a half miles at the age of 9. By the age of 10, I had 10 Canadian records and was referred to in the press as Mini Mouse because of my diminutive stature.

The eclectic part of my look comes from the fact that my work is very serious and I have a desire for something more fantastical and whimsical as a contrast and find it in fashion. I turn to an accessory like my favourite white painted MM6 handbag, or my Mirit Weinstock earrings influenced by traditional Japanese arts.

. . . and what are some of your favourite pieces of clothing or jewelry that you brought with you to the shoot?

A khaki Sophie D’Hoore trench coat. I love the green colour, the cut, the buttons that look like candy. It is classic but with a twist. And the gold and pearl Mirit Weinstock earrings that pop and brighten and add femininity.  

Who do you dress for? 

I dress for myself, head to toe.

Interview by Rachel Low. Photos and styling by Patricia Grace

..........................................................................

From the top, Carolyn Gora is wearing a SOFIE D’HOORE trench coat and sneakers, STUDIO NICHOLSON sweatshirt, HOPE trousers, SOPHIE BUHAI silver ball earrings and pendant and an MM6 handbag; a black wool SOFIE D’HOORE dress, MARION VIDAL necklace, MIRIT WEINSTTOCK earrings and BY FAR lace up boots; and lastly the EWANIKA signature suit with a MAISON BOINET belt. All items are her own.

............................................................................................

Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, originally published in 1984 and this copy a re-issue in 2007, presents a charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches by the black lesbian poet and feminist writer. In her writings Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. Her philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. 

[27timescinema]

REVIEW - MIU MIU - NIGHTWALK

By Darta Vijgrieze

This time the Italian high fashion brand Miu Miu takes us to the darkened streets of Warsaw, Poland, where the established Polish director, screenwriter and producer Małgorzata Szumowska reveals the story of Nightwalk, #19 commission of the MIU MIU Women's Tales. The established female director has broadly explored LGBT topics in her previous work and received the Teddy Award at the 63rd Berlin Film Festival for her feature In The Name of. This short film is inspired by her queer friend, Filip Rutkowski, who expresses himself by dressing up in women's clothing. In the light of the current political climate and protests on the female rights in Poland, her work as a female director dealing with such topics is particularly noteworthy. Szumowska’s reflection on being a female director draws attention to the evident need of a change in the industry. “I had to fight all my life to do what I do”, she notes.

In the just over 8 minutes, and without any use of dialogue but with an array of visual symbolism and plenty of clothing, Szumowska tells a compelling story on gender roles and identity. The film’s ambience is established through its powerful soundtrack of Beethoven’s Symphony No.7. The filmmaker masterfully plays with the pace of the music, which so accurately supports the storyline and creates a catwalk-like atmosphere of the nightfall in the streets of Warsaw. 

Nightwalk explores the gender roles by positioning the protagonists against the backdrop of their conservative families and simultaneously examining their stories. In the dusk of the night, two strangers meet and become the mirror of each other, both mutually connecting and sharing the same issues. The short film is a cinematic exploration of identity in which the director, through the use of various techniques and an incredibly effective costume design, represents the two different backgrounds of the protagonists. As the short film reaches its culmination, the music is halted, and so is the time - the smooth handheld movements create a dreamlike sequence. Whether the walk has been a dream or reality, the protagonists both are headed towards their ultimate moment of development of their character arcs. The films’ short plot is well-structured and, while it does not contain any dialogue, engages the audience through the use of the most powerful - the visual language. 

Miu Miu Women's Tales #19 is more than a fashion film. As the director says, “It shows how you can use fashion in art and cinema tales”, it’s a way of expression on “how to show women, intolerance, queerness through fashion.” Szumowska has truly utilised the brand as a device, using clothing as the main symbol of the expression of the identity. She showcases and deals with the question of femininity through self-expression, and in her hands, the camera is a powerful device for questioning the freedom of choice in regards to identity. Nightwalk is a truly moving, aesthetically pleasing short film - a story that needed to be told.

[xtruss]

Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm!

Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social media accounts at self-described ‘ePR firm’ in Wrocław

The southern Polish city of Wrocław, from where Cat@Net runs multiple fake social media accounts.

It is as common an occurrence on Polish Twitter as you are likely to get: a pair of conservative activists pouring scorn on the country’s divided liberal opposition.

“I burst out laughing!” writes Girl from Żoliborz, a self-described “traditionalist” commenting on a newspaper story about a former campaign adviser to Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron coming to Warsaw to address a group of liberal activists.

“The opposition has nothing to offer. That’s why they use nonsense to pull the wool over people’s eyes,” replies Magda Rostocka, whose profile tells her almost 4,400 followers she is “left-handed with her heart on the right”.

In reality, neither woman existed. Both accounts were run by the paid employees of a small marketing company based in the city of Wrocław in southwest Poland.

But what the employee pretending to be Magda Rostocka did not know is that the colleague pretending to be Girl from Żoliborz was an undercover reporter who had infiltrated the company, giving rare insight into the means by which fake social media accounts are being used by private firms to influence unsuspecting voters and consumers.

Social media companies are coming under increasing pressure over fake accounts. Facebook has said it disabled 2.2bn fake accounts in the first three months of 2019, but the European Commission this week said there was a “disconnect” between such claims.

The undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an “ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions – mostly in social media.”.

A member of the Reporters’ Foundation, a consortium of Polish investigative journalists, Pruszkiewicz’s first task when she joined the company was to set up a social media avatar for sharing “social and political content” with the aim of attracting 500 followers.

After a trial period, she was given access to the company’s internal communications channels, through which the company’s employees, each of whom ran a dozen or so social media accounts, would receive guidance and instructions from their managers – what issues to engage with, who to promote, and who to denigrate.

The accounts produced both leftwing and rightwing content, attracting attention, credibility and support from other social media users, who could then be rallied in support of the company’s clients.

“The aim is to build credibility with people from both sides of the political divide. Once you have won someone’s trust by reflecting their own views back at them, you are in a position to influence them,” said Wojciech Cieśla, who oversaw the investigation in collaboration with Investigate Europe, a consortium of European investigative reporters.

“Reading these communications, you can see how the leftwing and rightwing accounts would receive their daily instructions, how they would be marshalled and directed like two flanks of the same army on a battlefield.”

A majority of Cat@Net’s employees are understood to be disabled, allowing the company to derive substantial public subsidies from Poland’s National Disabled Rehabilitation Fund. According to the Reporters Foundation, the company has received about 1.5 million zloty (£300,000) from the fund since November 2015.

“Many of them are really good people – they are compassionate, they do charity work and engage in social activism in their spare time, but their disabilities mean that their employment opportunities are limited,” Pruszkiewicz told the Guardian. “For them it was just work and that’s it.”

One of Pruszkiewicz’s responsibilities was to operate anonymous accounts with instructions to promote content produced by TVP, Poland’s state broadcaster, which is widely reviled by critics for its extreme partisanship and hate speech directed against minority groups.

‘It would be great if you posted positive comments about the government’s subsidy for TVP and the television licence fee,’ read an email from her manager.

An internal report seen by the Guardian details how the fake accounts were used to denigrate legitimate criticism of the broadcaster. According to an analysis by ISD Global, a London-based thinktank that studies global trends in extremism and polarisation, Cat@Net accounts created up to 10,000 posts in defence of TVP, with a potential reach of 15 million views.

Another beneficiary of Cat@Net’s influence operations was a recently elected member of the Polish parliament for the leftwing Democratic Left Alliance party. Cat@Net’s leftwing accounts promoted the politician’s candidacy to the European Parliament in elections held in May this year, with at least 90 different accounts circulating and responding to his social media posts. The company’s rightwing accounts would then oppose the leftwing accounts, generating conflict and traffic, thereby drawing attention to the candidate.

“If [he] is followed only by our accounts, this is really suspicious,” wrote one employee during an internal discussion of the campaign.

Accounts were created that would concentrate on the aviation and defence industries, and target key decision-makers involved in the awarding of major government defence contracts.

The accounts were used to undermine public support for the Polish government’s decision to place a major order with the American contractor Lockheed Martin for the F-35 fighter jet, promoting instead the Eurofighter Typhoon produced by a consortium that includes Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo – which has a Polish subsidiary, PZL Świdnik. Cat@Net employees were reminded by their managers that “the F-35 is our enemy number one” but “don’t be too pushy with the Eurofighter, otherwise they will know they are being trolled”.

It is unclear whether the organisations and individuals on whose behalf the fake accounts were lobbying were aware of Cat@Net’s practices. Internal documents suggest the company received most if not all of its commissions from an external PR company, which may have been outsourcing the influence operations without its clients’ knowledge.

PZL Świdnik said it “conducts its business activities in an ethical manner in all respects” and any supplier of services to it is required to comply with its code of ethics. It denied engaging in any wrongdoing regarding communications practices relating to disinformation, hate speech, or attempts to influence political decisions.

“The big question is how regulators everywhere are going to respond to the challenge posed by this kind of activity,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a London-based expert on disinformation and author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

“They might argue that none of the content that was shared was illegal – it wasn’t hate speech, it wasn’t inciting violence, it wasn’t war propaganda. But what it exposes is just how flimsy and ineffective our regulatory framework is, and how vulnerable we are to more dangerous actors using similar techniques.”

In a statement posted to its website, Cat@Net strongly denied it was a “troll farm”: “The company’s field of activity is the outsourcing of marketing operations to social media. We communicate accurate information, speak for our clients, and promote their products and services like any other agency of its kind.”

— Guardian US

[friend-clarity]

Leftism poisons literature: Atwood’s  Handmaiden’s Tale

I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family.

I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—a harem simply means the "women's quarters." It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can't leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.

After a 30-month courtship, I married the glamorous, wealthy, very Westernized, foreign student whom I first met at college when I was 18. We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he had never even mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children, that most Afghan women still wore burqas or heavy hijab, that I would be pressured to convert to Islam, and would have to live with my mother-in-law.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and had no rights. I had become the property of a polygamous Afghan family. I was not allowed out without a male escort, a male driver, and a female relative as my chaperones.

This marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

Gilead's system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the MGM/Hulu versions does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in most Islamic countries, a fact that Atwood and her admirers are too politically correct to notice.

Gilead Resembles an Islamic Theocracy, not Trump's America Phyllis Chesler

The Handmaid’s Tale is Margaret Atwood’s canonical 1985 novel of theocratic totalitarianism, spiked, along with other dystopian classics like George Orwell’s “1984.” Atwood’s book takes place in a world where a clique of Christian fundamentalists have overthrown the United States government and instituted the rigidly patriarchal Republic of Gilead. Environmental calamity has left many people infertile, and an unfortunate class of women who can have children, the Handmaids, are stripped of their identities and consigned to reproductive slavery for the elite.

It's become fashionable to draw comparisons between the popular television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Donald Trump's America.

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood's 1985 work, The Handmaid's Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump's America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood's saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid's Tale to Trump's ascendancy. She writes: "It's hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power."

Gilead-inspired handmaid outfits have become popular at anti-Trump rallies as far away as Poland.

... At the anti-Trump pro-women's rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again" and "The Handmaid's Tale is not an instruction manual."

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

Gilead most reflects what is happening not in America, but in most Islamic countries.

However ... [t]here's another contemporary parallel that also gets scant attention. Gilead's system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the MGM/Hulu versions does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in most Islamic countries, a fact that Atwood and her admirers are too politically correct to notice.

Obscuring one's individual identity, masking one's face, sequestering women at home, may have been true of many previous cultures and regimes. However, in this day forced niqabs (face veils) and burqas (head, face, and body bags) are mainly realities for women in Muslim countries and communities in the West. In Iran in July, three women were sentenced to a total of 55 years between them for protesting against the veil.

In July 2019, an Iranian court sentenced Yasaman Aryani (left), Monireh Arabshahi (center), and Mojgan Keshavarz to a total of 55 years in prison for protesting against the veil. In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood does mention Islam twice (to exonerate Muslims as the suspected mass murderers of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office in Gilead (p.174) and again in a reference to the "obsession with harems" on the part of allegedly Orientalist Western painters who did not understand that they were painting "boredom" (p.69). Atwood's quintessential Bad Guys are Caucasian, Bible-thumping, right wing, conservative, American Christians.

Where else but in the Islamic world do we see forced face veiling, forced child marriage, women confined to the home, polygamy (a "wife" and a "handmaid" under the same roof), male guardians and minders, cattle prod shocking, whipping, hand amputations, stoning, crazed vigilante mobs stomping and tearing people apart, and tortured corpses publicly displayed on city walls or hanging from cranes in order to terrify the populace? Or the torture murder of homosexuals? This is how Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, the Islamic Republics of Iran and Afghanistan, the tyrants of Somalia and Saudi Arabia, interpret, correctly or incorrectly, Sharia law.

How could all the reviewers not see what I so clearly see? Perhaps here's how.

A Kabul Bride's Tale

I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—a harem simply means the "women's quarters." It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can't leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.

"I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family." After a 30-month courtship, I married the glamorous, wealthy, very Westernized, foreign student whom I first met at college when I was 18. We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he had never even mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children, that most Afghan women still wore burqas or heavy hijab, that I would be pressured to convert to Islam, and would have to live with my mother-in-law.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and had no rights. I had become the property of a polygamous Afghan family. I was not allowed out without a male escort, a male driver, and a female relative as my chaperones.

This marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

I experienced what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think—even more so than in Small Mind Town, USA.

Read more about the author's captivity in Afghanistan in her acclaimed 2013 book.

I was terrified when I first saw women wearing ghostly burqas—ambulatory body bags, sensory deprivation isolation chambers—huddled together literally at the back of the bus. My Afghan family laughed at my over-reaction, which was considered abnormal, not their practice of burying women alive.

My dreamer-of-a husband kept assuring me that the dreadful burqa and my captivity would both soon pass. He lived to see this dream come true for about 15 years for the middle classes until it was shattered again, perhaps forever.

Many Afghan women have mothers-in-law who beat them and treat them as despised servants. Mine never hit me or ordered me to cook or clean, but she tried to convert me to Islam every single day and tried to kill me by telling the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruits and vegetables. I got deathly ill.

Poor woman, she was a deserted and much maligned first wife. She feared me, envied me, hated me—as a woman, an infidel, a Jew, an American, and mainly, as a "love match," something considered too dangerously Western. Afghan mothers-in-law do collaborate in or even perpetrate the honor/horror killings of their daughters and daughters-in-law. So do rural India-based Hindu mothers and mothers-in-law, Muslim mothers and mothers-in-law world-wide, and Sikhs, to a lesser extent.

I got out of the wild, wild East and I moved on. But I never forgot the way it was. I always understood that as imperfect as America and the West might be, it was still a much better place for women than the Islamic world. Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power, owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid.

I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this. Perhaps my radical Western feminism was forged long ago in pampered purdah in Kabul.

The Real Face of Gilead

Islamic or Islamist totalitarianism today and as I knew it nearly 60 years ago in Kabul is the more obvious face of Gilead than the one imagined by Atwood more than 30 years ago.

Like the handmaids and domestics in Gilead, the captive population in Orwell's 1984 is monitored around the clock through "telescreens" that can view every room, each person. The telescreens broadcast Big Brother's orders and conduct daily "hate" sessions. People are always anxious and paranoid; everyone has permanent enemies.

Today, Orwell's Thought Police sound a lot like the Afghan Taliban or like Iran's or Saudi Arabia's Virtue­ and-Vice squads, who arrest men and women for the smallest sign of "individuality" or difference, and who harass and arrest women for showing a single strand of hair, or a glimpse of ankle. Here's Khaled Hosseini's fictional description of life in Afghanistan under the Soviets in The Kite Runner:

You couldn't trust anyone in Kabul anymore—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend...the rafiqs, the [Afghan] comrades, were everywhere and they'd split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn't...A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Poleh-charkhi...Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their own home, people had to speak in a calculated manner—the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they'd taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.

And here he is describing Afghanistan in the Taliban era:

In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadiums, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here...the savages who rule our watan [country] don't care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzanajan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and naan. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days...If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly!

Hosseini's descriptions are right out of 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale.

Two memoirs set in Iran, Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran and Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No, describe the savage curtailment of private life and thought—and of life itself—by radical Islamists.

Two compelling accounts of life for women in Iran's Islamic Republic. According to Nafisi, Khomeini's goon squads closed news­papers and universities and arrested, tortured, and executed beloved teachers, prominent artists, intellectuals, and activists, including feminists, and thousands of other innocent and productive Muslims. The squads constantly harassed women on the street and at work. If a woman failed the dress-code standards even slightly, or by accident, she risked being arrested, probably raped, probably executed.

In Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian describes the in­describable "Mrs. Moghadam," the newly-installed head of the Jewish girls' high school. Mrs. Moghadam tyrannizes, terrifies, and shames the Jewish girls. She tries to convert them to Islam. However, her true passion is more Talibanesque. She informs the innocent girls that, although they do not know it, they are "diabolical," "abominable," "loathsome," "lethal," capable of "drowning everything in eternal dark­ness," capable of bringing the "apocalypse" by showing a single strand of hair. To Hakakian's credit, she presents a rather dangerous turn of events as a dark comedy.

Mrs. Moghadam is definitely an Aunt Lydia, the lead female tormentor of the Handmaids, right out of Gilead, circa 1985.

Many Western feminists mistakenly see the face veil and head scarf as symbols of anti-racism.

As Muslim women are being tortured, honor-murdered by their families, or stoned to death, sometimes for refusing to wear the veil, many Western multiculturally and politically correct post-colonial feminists are deconstructing and wearing the face veil and the head scarf as symbols of anti-racism and as a form of respect when they visit Muslim countries. Such feminists are also silencing and demonizing all other views in academic journals, in the media, and on feminist internet groups.

I've written about this many times. Therefore, while I know that violence against women still remains a burning issue in the West, I agree with Allison Pearson's recent article in The Spectator: "The appalling vanity of Western Feminists who think Margaret Atwood writes about them."

Atwood depicts an all-female power structure in which the handmaids are kept in line by cruel female "Aunts," led by Aunt Lydia, who casually apply cattle prods and tasers, who blame them as evil sluts, punish them with group condemnation, bouts of solitary confinement, exile them to the "Colonies" to die cleaning up toxic waste, etc. Such behavior seems to contradict feminist views of women as morally superior to men and as more compassionate and intuitive.

Aunt Lydia (left) and the al-Khansa Brigade of ISIS Like men, women are human beings and as such are as close to the apes as to the angels. Women are also aggressive, cruel, competitive, envious, sometimes lethally so, but mainly toward other women. I would not want to be at the mercy of a female prison guard—or a female concentration camp guard—in the West. But let's not forget the Wives of ISIS—the all-female al-Khansaa Brigade who whipped, beat, and mutilated the breasts of girls and women when their heavy black burqas slipped. Displaced ISIS women continue their anti-woman reign of terror.

Misogynist thinking and actions exist in America today but not only among right-wing conservatives. It is also flourishing among our media and academic elites. Such thinking is flying high under the banner of "free speech," "multi-cultural relativism," "anti-racism," and "political correctness." Dare to question this elite's right to silence and shame those who challenge their views—i.e., that the West is always to blame, that jihadists are freedom-fighters, that the Islamic face veil is a free choice or a religious commandment, that polygamy encourages sisterhood, that Islam is a race, not a religious and political ideology—and, as I've noted many times, one is attacked as a racist, an Islamophobe, and a conservative, and swiftly demonized and de-platformed.

While MGM/Hulu's TV series is dramatically compelling, part soap opera, part horror movie, part Warrior Queen fantasy, the series is radically different from Atwood's 1985 novel. For example, Atwood's narrator, Ofglen, is not an increasingly daring, crazed, female assassin, as Elizabeth Moss brilliantly plays her. She is hardly heroic at all; under totalitarianism, heroism, collective or individual, is quickly ferreted out and destroyed. It exists but is rare.

Contemporary viewers are hungry for multi-racial characters, interracial and same-sex couples, "badass" women. Hulu gives them to us. Hulu's Canada is a multi-racial, politically correct refuge for Gilead's escapees; same-sex couples and feminists are government leaders. This is not true in the novel. On the contrary, in her 1985 Epilogue, Atwood has Canada rounding up and returning all Gilead escapees.

Media and academic elites are playing partisan politics with Atwood's original vision.

Atwood the divine novelist is absolutely entitled to depict whatever she wishes. But the current crop of reviewers as well as the filmmakers are playing partisan politics with her original vision and are refusing to see other and larger global dangers contained in her work.

Women's freedom and women's lives worldwide are under the most profound siege. To focus solely on the United States or on the Caucasian, Judeo-Christian West is diversionary. It scapegoats one country, one culture, for the far greater crimes of other countries and cultures.

Phyllis Chesler, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies and the author of eighteen books, including Women and Madness, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, An American Bride in Kabul, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Notes:

[1] Commercial surrogacy has been outlawed in India, Thailand, parts of Mexico, Malaysia, and South Africa, as well as in many European countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK. Hence, the campaign to legalize commercial surrogacy in America has gathered momentum.

[2] Contemporary surrogacy has now become a way of slicing and dicing biological motherhood into three parts: an egg donor, who undergoes painful and dangerous IVF procedures; a "gestational" mother who faces all the risks of pregnancy, childbirth, and potentially negative and lifelong medical and psychiatric consequences; and an adoptive mother or father. This vivisection of motherhood makes it impossible for a birthmother to win custody for any reason.

[presssorg]

European elections 2019: What do the Results mean for the EU?

European elections 2019: Power blocs lose grip on parliament The big centre-right and centre-left blocs in the European Parliament have lost their combined majority amid an increase in support for liberals, the Greens and nationalists. Pro-EU parties are still expected to be in a majority but the traditional blocs will need to seek new alliances. The liberals and Greens had a good night, while nationalists were victorious in Italy, France and the UK. Turnout was the highest for 20 years, bucking decades of decline. Just under 51% of eligible voters across the 28 member states cast their ballots, compared with fewer than 43% in 2014. Although populist and far-right parties gained ground in some countries, they fell short of the very significant gains some had predicted. The centre-right European People's Party (EPP) remains the largest bloc and analysts say it is likely to form a grand coalition with the Socialists and Democrats bloc, with support from liberals and the Greens. In the UK, the newly-formed Brexit Party claimed a big victory, and a strong performance by the Liberal Democrats came amid massive losses for the Conservatives and Labour. The European Parliament helps shape EU legislation and the results will play a big part in who gets the key jobs in the European Commission, the Union's executive.

What do the results mean for the EU?

Based on current estimates, the previously dominant conservative EPP and Socialists and Democrats blocs will be unable to form a "grand coalition" in the EU parliament without support. The EPP was projected to win 179 seats, down from 216 in 2014. The Socialists and Democrats looked set to drop to 150 seats from 191. Pro-EU parties are still expected to hold a majority of seats however, largely due to gains made by the liberal ALDE bloc, and particularly a decision taken by the party of French President Emmanuel Macron to join the group. His Renaissance alliance was defeated by the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen. "For the first time in 40 years, the two classical parties, socialists and conservatives, will no longer have a majority," said Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE. "It's clear this evening is a historical moment, because there will be a new balance of power in the European Parliament," he said. There were major successes for the Greens, with exit polls suggesting the group would jump from 50 to around 67 MEPs. Follow the latest results via the European Parliament website But gains for nationalist parties in Italy, France and elsewhere means a greater say for Eurosceptics who want to curb the EU's powers. Matteo Salvini, who leads Italy's League party, has been working to establish an alliance of at least 12 parties, and his party set the tone winning more than 30% of the vote, according to partial results.

Beyond the status quo

This outcome reflects a tendency already apparent in national elections all over Europe: rejection of the status quo. Look at the beating meted out to France's centre-right and centre-left, to Angela Merkel and her Social Democrat coalition partners, plus the slap in the face delivered to the UK's Conservative and Labour parties. Europe's voters are looking elsewhere for answers. They're drawn to parties and political personalities they feel better represent their values and priorities. Some are attracted by the nationalist right, promising a crackdown on immigration and more power for national parliaments, rather than Brussels. Italy's firebrand Deputy PM Matteo Salvini is a successful example, as is Hungary's Viktor Orban. Other voters prefer a pro-European alternative, like the Green Party and liberal groups. They also performed well in these elections. Read more from Katya

Who were the winners and losers?

In Germany, both major centrist parties suffered. Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats dropped from 35% of the vote in 2014 to 28%, while the centre-left Social Democratic Union fell from 27% to 15.5%. The right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) performed worse than expected - projected in exit polls to win 10.5% - while still improving on its first results in 2014. In the UK, the newly formed Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, secured about 32% of the vote, amid gains for the Liberal Democrats and significant losses for the Conservative and Labour parties.

Amid mixed results for far-right parties across Europe, Ms Le Pen's National Rally party - formerly the National Front - was celebrating victory in France over Mr Macron's party, securing 24% of the vote to his 22.5%. A presidential official described the outcome as a "disappointment" but "absolutely honourable" compared to previous results. In Hungary, Viktor Orban, whose anti-immigration Fidesz party took 52% of the vote and 13 of the country's 21 seats, was also a big winner. "We are small but we want to change Europe," Mr Orban said. He described the elections as "the beginning of a new era against migration". In Spain, the ruling Socialist party (PSOE) took a clear lead with 32.8% of the vote and 20 seats, while the far-right Vox party won just 6.2% and three seats - coming in fifth. In Greece, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for an early election after the opposition conservative New Democracy party won 33.5% of the votes to 20% for his Syriza party. The right-wing ruling Law and Justice party did well in Poland, winning 45% of the vote, and 27 of the country's 51 seats.

Why was the turnout so high?

EU citizens turned out to vote in the highest numbers for two decades, and significantly higher than the last elections in 2014, when fewer than 43% of eligible voters took part. Turnout in Hungary and Poland more than doubled on the previous poll, and Denmark hit a record 63%. Analysts attributed the high turnout to a range of factors including the rise of populist parties and increased climate change awareness.

How does the European Parliament work?

It is the European Union's law-making body. It's made up of 751 members, called MEPs, who are directly elected by EU voters every five years. These MEPs - who sit in both Brussels and Strasbourg - represent the interests of citizens from the EU's 28 member states. One of the parliament's main legislative roles is scrutinising and passing laws proposed by the European Commission - the bureaucratic arm of the EU. It is also responsible for electing the president of the European Commission and approving the EU budget. The parliament is comprised of eight main groups that sit together in the chamber based on their political and ideological affiliations. Published at Mon, 27 May 2019 13:25:20 +0000 Read the full article

[junker-town]

10 teams to keep an eye on before the 2022 World Cup

Yes, we’re including the United States in this list.

The 2018 World Cup is now in the rear view mirror, but the buildup for the 2022 World Cup isn’t all that far away. There’s continental tournaments between now and then like the Copa America, European Championships, African Cup of Nations, and CONCACAF Gold Cup, and then it’s right back to World Cup qualifying.

That means it’s time to start figuring out what nations to watch over the next four years as we build up to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and we have a few broad categories to put teams into: the defending champions, the teams that could surge forward, the teams that need to bounce back after disappointing in 2018, and teams that missed out on the World Cup in 2018 entirely.

The defending champions

France did amazing work in the World Cup all the way to their run to the title — and the scariest thing is that it never even quite felt like we saw the actual best version of this team thanks to Didier Deschamp’s more conservative tactical nature. They’re young enough in a number of key positions and deep enough across most of the pitch that they absolutely should be a favorite again in 2022 — but that’s something we’ve said about the last few World Cup champs, and each has deeply disappointed in their next World Cup outing.

France will need to be much more focused and vigilant to avoid the pitfalls that the likes of Germany, Spain, and Italy have fallen into in the last decade, but with a team anchored by 25-or-younger players like Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappe, Samuel Umtiti, Raphael Varane, Thomas Lemar, Colentin Tolisso, and Lucas Hernandez — and that list only scratches the surface of France’s young talent — they should have all the talent and then some to be in excellent shape come 2022. But seeing how this team grows and evolves over the next four years will bear close monitoring, because they will need to show that sustained hunger and drive that got them here in the first place if they’re going to avoid falling apart at the last full measure like their predecessors have.

The teams who could step up in 2022

Belgium

Belgium made it all the way to winning third place in the tournament, a feat that is by no means something to take lightly. But it’s also easy to think that this team could have even more potential in the tank, especially after there were regular criticisms throughout their World Cup run that Roberto Martinez’s tactics and squad choices — specifically leaving out the versatile and high-quality presence of Radja Nainggolan — may have left Belgium playing somewhat below their actual level.

And given how disorganized and incoherent Belgium looked at times, there’s a lot of merit to that statement. But it also has to be borne in mind that a lot of Belgium’s better players — including Nainggolan, Dries Mertens, Vincent Kompany, Moussa Dembele, and Jan Vertonghen — are all on the wrong side of 30, meaning they likely won’t play a big role if any at all in 2022. Now, Belgium has had quite the talent pipeline in recent years, but they’re going to need to not just maintain their level, but beat it — and they’re going to have to get that pipeline into high gear if they’re going to make another push for the final and improve from where they were this year.

Nigeria

Nigeria were a fun team in this World Cup, and it took a big late charge from Argentina to knock them out of the tournament. They had a handful of core players like John Obi Mikel, Odion Oghalo, and Elderson Echiejile who are too old to be around by 2022, but most of the rest of the squad will still be around by then, including exciting and talented younger players like Kelechi Iheanacho, Alex Iwobi, and Kenneth Omeruo. They have the potential to be even more fun if they keep working and growing together over the next four years, and could make a lot of noise in Qatar as a result — should they qualify from the always tricky AFCON field, of course.

Mexico

Mexico are in something of an odd place, with some core players starting to age out of a useful place for the 2022 World Cup, but with others not quite ready to take their place just yet. But they do have a lot of talented players who will be in their prime once the next World Cup rolls around, like Hirving Lozano, Tecatito Corona, Jesus Gallardo, Carlos Salcedo, and Orbelin Pineda. If they can find the right way to build around that core with some veterans like Jonathan Dos Santos and Raul Jimenez, find a reliable hand in goal, and figure out how to find some reliable pieces to fill in the gaps, they could finally get past their first knockout round hurdle and maybe even become a force to be reckoned with. At the very least, they have the makings of a fun team, especially if El Tri hire a manager willing to cut loose and take some risks.

The teams that need to bounce back

Germany

There’s no beating around the bush: Germany were bad in this tournament. They should have dominated a group that included Mexico, Sweden, and South Korea, but instead they finished dead last and looked awful along the way, with their only win coming at literally the last second against Sweden. Their attack was shut out by both Korea and Mexico, their midfield was leaky as a colander, and their defense couldn’t stop a stiff breeze.

That’s nothing at all like the Germany side we’ve come to expect over the last decade or so, and certainly not even a pale shadow of the team that dominated the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. They’ve got the youth talent to bounce back in a big way, but they need to start integrating it now to see what they have, what they need, and start figuring out how to avoid a second straight disappointment.

Argentina

Argentina looked old, slow, and largely disinterested all tournament long, and even once they turned on the jets against France in the first knockout round, they couldn’t keep up physically with the eventual champions. That was not how the script for what was maybe Lionel Messi’s last World Cup was supposed to go, but that’s how it went.

Argentina have been in a seemingly constant state of turmoil for awhile now, with a mass player revolt forcing some degree of change after the Copa America Centenario in 2016. But Jorge Sampaolo continued Argentina’s long-held trend of leaning on more veteran players and too often eschewing bright young talents who could give the team much needed energy, with players like Paulo Dybala, Giovani Lo Celso, and Crisitan Pavon absolutely screaming for a more important role and having things Argentina desperately needed — like energy, drive, and an ability to change ideas on the fly — too often being left out in the cold in big moments. Argentina need a manager willing to bring in these talents who have something to give, and who can take some of the workload off older, overworked shoulders if they are going to make major strides as a national team in this cycle.

Poland

Poland aren’t exactly a national team well known for being a top-end squad, but they do have talent in their team and they have shown in the past that they can hang with the big boys in Europe. But because of the way their talent often plays together — with too many players in positions or roles they’re unfamilar or not best suited for — their value ultimately with worth less than the sum of their parts, not more.

That’s a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Yes, Poland likely won’t have Robert Lewandowski at anywhere near the level he’s at now by the time 2022 rolls around, and several other key players will be aging out as well. But they have a good young core with players like Piotr Zielinski, Arkadiusz Milik — if he can stay healthy, that is — Jan Bednarek, and other younger talents scattered around Europe. What they need is a manager with the vision to bring them together into a more cohesive unit in the national team and take advantage of their talents, not one who continues to try to force octagonal pegs into triangular holes. If you want to watch a national team that has real boom-or-bust potential, keep a close eye on Poland, because they can be very good and a lot of fun — but unless they make some real changes, they will continue to be a bang-average team with the potential to disappoint again instead.

The teams who missed out on 2018

Italy

This was a failure to qualify that made waves around the world, but surprised very few calcio fans who have spent the last decade-plus watching the Azzurri get older and older, with fewer and fewer ideas, much less real chances given to players who can make a real difference. Their qualifying cycle was nothing short of disastrous, especially after their tepid showings at Euro 2016 and the 2014 World Cup. It was a chance to re-establish themselves and to bring some new blood in to kick ass and take names — and instead, they kept on with business as usual and fell even shorter of expectations than normal.

Like the other teams in this section of the list, the Italian national team setup needs wholesale changes from top to bottom, and it’s not clear if the changes they’ve made since their failure to qualify will be enough. Their league system’s failure to consistently develop young Italian talent to a high level is catching up to a terrifying level, and even with the expanded field that’s coming to the 2022 World Cup, there’s no guarantee that Italy will make the tournament as things stand. They need to start showing meaningful change and development soon if they’re going to give their fans any sort of confidence.

Netherlands

The failure of the Netherlands to qualify is kind of a sad reflection of the way the Eredivisie has fallen in quality and importance over the last few years. They used to regularly have teams making noise in the Champions League, but now we seem to have to count ourselves lucky just to have a Dutch team make a decent Europa League run. The Oranje setup has seen a similar fall from grace over the years, and the team that whimpered their way to a qualification failure was a far cry from the ass-kicking, take-no-shit team that barnstormed their way to the 2010 World Cup final.

The warning signs were there — their hideously poor Euro 2012 showing, having to kick back into gear in the 2014 World Cup to claw their way through the knockout rounds to third place, and failing to qualify for Euro 2016. But the way the Netherlands just kind of drifted through their World Cup qualifying games was shocking to many, and they need to find a hungry young core of players to bring some fire back into the national team if they’re going to even have a prayer of making it back to form to reach the 2022 tournament.

United States

You could copy and paste a lot of what was said about Italy into this description of the United States’ failure to qualify — tired ideas, a lack of high-level player development, and a need for massive overhaul. But that the USMNT actually has some good young players like Christian Pulisic and still failed to qualify over a bang-average team like Panama in CONCACAF was utterly humiliating, especially since that failure to qualify came because they couldn’t even get a point against Trinidad and Tobago. That’s just... honestly, “awful” is nowhere near a strong enough word.

There is a lot of pretty decent young talent here, but the issue that the USMNT has faced for almost a decade now is that they almost universally fail to take the next big step forward in their development to become actually good, national-team-viable players. But the U.S. can’t afford to mess around with average-on-a-good-day veterans and pet projects of different managers — they need to craft a national team with a cohesive identity fast and start helping it to find success in CONCACAF play. This is a national team that needs confidence and a solid, cohesive core, two things they haven’t had in a long time. They’ll bear close watching to see if they can make the right decisions over the next couple of years to put themselves in position to succeed, because there is a very real chance that the wrong decisions will set this program back a long, long time.

[newyorktheater]

In the history of Broadway, twenty-six plays have had runs of more than 1,000 consecutive performances, none before 1918, and none after 1986. Jordan Schildcrout looks at 15 of them in “In the Long Run” (Routledge, 224 pages), a satisfying read that tells us the plots, the behind-the-scenes stories, and the larger cultural meaning of these once wildly popular comedies. (Almost all of them were comedies.)

Some of these plays are still frequently produced, and/or were made into classic films (whose fidelity to the original script varies widely.) But a sizable percentage of these plays remain familiar now only to theater aficionados, and even then mostly just for their titles: Abie’s Irish Rose, Tobacco Road, The Voice of the Turtle. Their chapters are the most engaging chapters in the book.

While a half dozen of the longest-running plays won The Tony Award for Best Play, and two won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a surprising number were critically panned. “People laugh at this every night,” critic Robert Benchley said about “Abie’s Irish Rose,”  “which explains why a democracy can never be a success.” Dorothy Parker was kinder to “Lightnin’,” the first play to reach 1,000 performances. The play “kept my mind off the war and my bills,” she wrote in 1918.

Whether or not these plays pleased the critics, they drew in the public at large. To run for 1,000 performance, a play has to attract an audience made up of more than just regular theatergoers. This helps drive home one of the author’s main insights: These plays tapped into their cultural moment. By analyzing the appeal of the most popular plays in each decade, Schildcrout, a professor of theater at the State University of New York at Purchase, tells us something about the public’s mood in each era.

“Abie’s Irish Rose,” for example, was a sentimental comedy in the 1920s about a Jewish boy who marries an Irish-Catholic girl, much to the consternation of their comically bigoted fathers. Schildcrout writes: “The white nationalist and anti-immigrant forces that intensified in this decade often employed stereotypes to demean those they believed did not belong in America; nevertheless, some audiences clearly enjoyed the affirmation that came from seeing their cultures represented, even in stereotypical ways, on the Broadway stage.” In this way, the play reflects the author’s big tent theory of popular playwriting – that they are so open to interpretation that theatergoers of opposite world views can both see them as simpatico: “Does the play rely on cartoonish and possibly offensive stereotypes, or does it contain a sincere plea for ethnic and religious tolerance? The answer, of course, is “yes.” It does both. This ideological ambiguity initially may have allowed the play to appeal to a wide audience…”

“Life With Father,” which did please the critics and the public alike — and remains the longest-running straight play in Broadway history — was a comedy set in the 19th century about demanding if loving Father who insists on the supremacy of his authority in his family, but whose wife and children always wind up getting their way. Schildcrout writes: “The individual’s relationship to authority was a vital subject when Life with Father was first produced. In September 1939, two months before the play opened, Hitler invaded Poland, and the United Kingdom, France, and other allied nations soon declared war on Germany. More than a few critics couldn’t help but see the play in relation to the rise of fascism.”

His analysis is less persuasive when discussing the popularity of two plays from the 1960’s, Jean Kerr’s “Mary, Mary,” and Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.” He labels both “conservative and trivial,” which he argues was a factor in their appeal, offering audiences an escape from the turbulent decade. But both plays were launched in the decidedly less turbulent first half of the decade.

  P = Pulitzer Prize for Drama, T = Tony nominated, T* = Tony winner

His attempts to tie these plays’ popularity to their historical moment may not always feel spot-on — if it were easy to figure out why a show was a hit, wouldn’t there be more of them? But each chapter illuminates these plays in a myriad of other ways.

Some of these are just delectable tidbits. Marian Seldes appeared in the entire 1,793-performance run of “Deathtrap,” yet in that time also continued teaching at Juilliard, finished a memoir, and wrote a novel. How did she do all that? Her character is killed off in Act !, and she had time to kill (so to speak) until the curtain call. (This also gave her plenty of opportunities to second-act the other shows on Broadway.)

Some chapters demonstrate the breadth of theatrical knowledge and analytic power of the author, who also has worked as a dramaturg. In discussing Albert Innaurato’s “Gemini,”  a play about an Italian-American working class senior at Harvard who is attracted to both his upper-class Radcliffe girlfriend and her brother, Schildcrout writes at one point: “Gemini rewrites the 19th-century melodrama of the ‘tragic mulatto,’ a character presumed to be doomed because, being part white and part black in a racist society, such a person could never ‘belong’ or reconcile their mixed heritage. But Gemini is satisfied to carry on with its unresolved dualities of ethnicity, class, and sexuality…. Francis learns that he can be, as it were, ambidextrous. He can have both his Italian-American working-class heritage and an Ivy League education, and he can hold his love for Judith in one hand and his desire for Randy in the other. “

The author offers an especially rich paragraph in his discussion of “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” a second play by Neil Simon, the only playwright to have had three Broadway plays that lasted more than 1,000 performances (and 26 plays on Broadway in total!)  Some critics scoffed at Simon’s oft-expressed admiration for such great playwright as Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill (James Wolcott: “Neil Simon’s long day’s journey into night begins and ends at brunch.”) The author responds: “Brighton Beach Memoirs is more productively compared with other popular Broadway plays…”– and then does so with half a dozen examples of the longest-running plays (like Life With Father,  Brighton Beach Memoirs is “loosely autobiographical coming-of-age story rendered in the comforting glow of nostalgia” etc”) — a riff that feels like a reward for our having just read about all these plays in the book. It  is also fitting: “Brighton Beach Memoirs closed on May 11, 1986, and it is, as of this writing, the last Broadway play to run over 1,000 performances.”

In the last two decades, the top 10 list of longest-running Broadway shows is entirely comprised of musicals (which, you might have noticed,  are not included in “In The Long Run.”) Almost 100 musicals have had runs of at least 1,000 performances on Broadway.

“So what happened to the long-running hit play?” The author devotes the last chapter to that question — ten pages of reasons, which include higher costs and ticket prices, an increase in tourists who don’t speak English, the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theaters, the fact that the shows by the four non-profit Broadway houses generally have fixed runs, a falling-off of arts education, etc. — and to the hope that such a play might someday return: prime candidate “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Jordan Schildcrout obviously wrote that chapter at a time when Broadway was still open for business. For those of us reading his book during this peculiar time of extended intermission, “In The Long Run” offers us a chance to feel as one with the Broadway theatergoers of the last century, and enjoy what they enjoyed.

In The Long Run Book Review. 15 Longest Running Broadway Plays In the history of Broadway, twenty-six plays have had runs of more than 1,000 consecutive performances, none before 1918, and none after 1986.

[businessboostertoday]

Different interest groups use Brexit for their financial gains

People do not like change

After the vote to leave the European Union the population of the United Kingdom became the target of a multitude of fake messages and claims. One side claims the Brexit will put the majority of British workers out of work. Others claim the national health system (NHS) will save a lot of money are illegal immigrants will not be able to use the health system for free. Some “remainers” warn of the military becoming so weak that it can not protect the nations waters. The police and border control is supposed to become helpless in fighting crime.

Is Britain rally defenceless after Brexit?

Interesting enough, the United Kingdom has the most sophisticated intelligence and surveillance service in the European Union. This includes GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. The well equipped and trained investigation units of Scotland Yard are often ahead of time. The British armed forces have some of the best trained and equipped units.

The people of the United Kingdom and its allies fought a seemingly hopeless fight during the first years of the second world war. Just to remind you: In May 1940 the British had 362 aircraft available to fight more than 1200 enemy aircraft. Nevertheless, they were able gain time to increase the fighting strength to 701 serviceable aircraft in September 1940. Eventually the Battle of Britain went down in history as one of the most honourable fight by a small aircrew consisting of British pilots, common wealth pilots and foreign volunteers.

It is really the European Union that will suffer a considerable loss as it will not have the valuable intelligence data available that is the result of joint British and American efforts. No other country belongs to the intelligence cooperation consisting of 4 nations that is based on the extensive intelligence resources of the US and the UK.

Britain will lose access to a large market

The European union is trying to gamble its gains higher than necessary by threatening British companies and foreign investors of losing access to a market with 446 million citizens. The fact that continental companies will lose access to 60 million customers. Due to the European initiative of the last decades European companies on the island and on the content have sourced parts and services from all member states.

Therefore, a Brexit will have losers on both sides if the political establishment in Brussels decides to take an unreasonable stand to damage the economy of both sides. It is politically uncanny to blackmail British companies and foreign investors. This can backfire as investors recognize that a less bureaucratic UK might be a better place to be than on the mainland. The complexity of producing products and managing a business in the future European Union might be by far costlier as the European bureaucratic system invents new rules and taxes.

The chaotic and imprecise GDPR regulations show how a bloated European Union becomes victim of its own complexity. Companies around the European union have been confronted with regulations that are hurting trade and are actually against the will of customers. A few over motivated thinkers with conflicts of interest have created a technically unrealistic demand towards companies. It is as if the EU does not want entrepreneurs to create jobs.

Instead of businesses focusing on creating jobs and expanding their business models to create a healthy trade system, bureaucratic rules try to stiffen growth in the European Union.

Continental Companies are trying to gain an advantage

As we read in the news some big corporations are trying to gamble a better position by threatening to move their factories to the eastern European countries. When you reflect upon these threats, it actually is a warning for all workers unions in western European countries. These companies will move jobs from the UK, France and Germany to countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, Romania or Hungary. Hence, the European and British factory works will loose on the Brexit aftermath, if we critically listen to what the core message of the corporate threats are.

As companies gain tax deductions and beneficial exclusions of regulations, they will try upscale the benefits they are negotiating. Countries like Ireland hope to gain a substantial amount of jobs that would be transferred from the UK. High wages and housing issues in Ireland will present issues for leaving companies so that the opportunities in the Eastern European countries will be more attractive to the moving companies. Lower wages and weaker worker protection will make countries like Poland and Romania the winners of the EUs gamble on Brexit.

Overall outlook

As politicians and corporations gamble around Europe’s future, the European economy and employment market will go into a spiral of uncertainty. If the European political establishment overstrain their luck, they will provoke one of Europe’s worst recessions. The radical forces in European countries will succeed to weaken conservative forces and feed a hatred driven radicalization of society.

The post Different interest groups use Brexit for their financial gains appeared first on Business Booster Today.

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2StIPKu via IFTTT

[lewepstein]

For Whom the Bell Tolls,Part ll

THE ONLY THING NECESSARY FOR EVIL TO TRUMPH IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING

This is a famous quote from seventeenth century “conservative” English philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke.  I believe it speaks powerfully to our current era, but it also describes the ways that marriages, families, and even larger political and religious organizations lose their moral compass and begin to tolerate different types of abuse.  When we see this happening, I believe we are compelled to take some kind of action - not just to feel and reflect, but to take a stand.  This is as true when we are called upon to confront an emotional abuser in a family as it is when we need to make our voices heard on issues of national importance.  In such instances, not acting would mean enabling a perpetrator and ignoring an evil.  After practicing therapy for forty years, I can say with some conviction that the questions, “What is your position?” “Where do you stand?” and “What do you believe is right given your values and commitments?”  are more central to the change process than is the time worn therapy standby, “How are you feeling?”  

There are times in our personal lives and also in what we might call our “public lives” as citizens that not only is some kind of action called for, but   not acting could leave us feeling disempowered and with the uneasy sense that we are tolerating something that we know to be wrong.   This was certainly true for me in the early months of the Trump presidency when I was initially in shock and then a little at sea.   I’ve since found that becoming politically active, which I had not been for a long time, is allowing me to participate in something larger than myself.  It is giving me the opportunity to contribute in my own small way to ameliorating some of the evils unfolding around us.

I will later describe the ways that I have become politically active, but I first need to acknowledge how challenging it can be to remain involved amid the torrent of disturbing daily events.  The Trump regime feels as if it were designed to wear us down with its assault on the truth, its sordid, tabloid dramas and its never-ending turmoil.   How tempting it can be to close one’s self off from this ugliness and simply shut down.  How easy to become overwhelmed and burnt out.  The underlying question for those of us who see ourselves in any way part of the resistance to this abomination of a presidency seems to be: How do I sustain hope in the face of the uncertainty and the polarizing fear that is continually generated by this administration?

Another relevant quote from Edmund Burke is, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” It has been helpful for me to take a closer look at history in order to make sense of what we are witnessing in these times.  I have found this to be both illuminating and terrifying.   In my last post, I used the Ernest Hemingway novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” as an example of how nations that call themselves “democracies” can at times make a decision to appease the bully down the block and not come to the aid of their natural allies.  The bells had apparently not tolled loudly enough for the populations of Europe and America and their leaders during the period before World War II.  And although concentration camps like Dachau were in full operation by 1934 and Hitler’s war machine was poised to invade its neighbors, the democracies of the world, under pressure from their most powerful corporations like the Ford Motor Company and IBM (who were doing a thriving business with The Third Reich and continued to do so during the war) made a calculated decision not to come to the aid of the Spanish Republic in that prelude to the Second World War. The result of that kind of isolation and inaction during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s proved catastrophic.   Within two years of the defeat of the anti-fascist forces, four hundred thousand were murdered through forced labor and executions in a network of concentration camps set up by General Francisco Franco.  During the next five years, six million Jews along with other “undesirables” were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.  In the end, more than fifty million civilians and soldiers died as a result of World War II.

The most significant parallel between Europe in the 1930s and many countries in the world today, including the United States, is the crescendo of racism and xenophobia being stoked by demagogues on the right.  On both sides of the Atlantic, nativists and nationalists are promoting hatred and particularly fear of immigrants.  Many of today’s immigrants are the victims of Exxon-Mobil and the other energy cartels that have greedily extracted carbon from the earth and sowed confusion to cover up the climate crisis that they have created - an environmental disaster occurring in slow motion that contributes to the crop failures, wars and most importantly to the minions of immigrants who can no longer survive in their countries of origin.  In the U.S, those seeking asylum are often from Latin American countries and remaining in those countries of origin would be a death sentence.  But how different are the conditions that bring them to our borders than those of  my own grandparents at the turn of the 20th century when the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom impelled them to escape Czar Nicholas’s scapegoating of Jews and policy of ethnic cleansing?

In 2018, once again, the values of international cooperation and the search for common ground are being shouted down by neo-Nazis chanting  “blood and soil.”  From Charlottesville to Berlin white supremists and nativists have been emboldened and are on the march.  Take note when Donald Trump tweets about Mexican “criminals and rapists” coming across our borders, when he characterizes African nations as “shit hole countries” and the ways that he has attempted to ban travel from predominantly Muslim nations.  He recently retweeted a false rumor about a Muslim immigrant in Europe alleged to have committed a crime against a native-born citizen.   He has also used his bully pulpit to publicize acts of violence in South Africa against white land owners. This marginalizing and instilling fear of the different and dark skinned “others” and their threat to the white race is taken right out of the Hitler play book.  

A friend of mine recently returned from a cruise on the Rhine.  In Nuremburg, his guide of Turkish, Kurdish descent described to him, “the techniques that the Nazis used to scapegoat, isolate and demonize the ‘other’ peoples, promising to make Germany great again.”  It is hauntingly similar to the rhetoric and practices of the Trump regime.  The fact that Trump openly embraces Vladimir Putin is telling in that the former KGB agent is the most powerful nationalistic, authoritarian, enemy of democracy in the world today.  In his Russian police state, elections are a sham, gays are persecuted and journalists are regularly assassinated.   The collusion that has taken place between Donald Trump’s indicted inner circle and the Russian network of oligarchs and trolls to rig the 2016 election demonstrates the vulnerability of our democracy in the face of a determined effort by our enemies to create a Manchurian Candidate.

The threat to our freedoms is very real.  The formula for diminishing our democracy and creating a more authoritarian state is quite simple.  All it requires is a president with authoritarian impulses, a portion of his party that has decided to trade its core principles for some judicial appointments and a tax cut for their wealthy donors and a cynical willingness of these elected party members to shed any commitment to democratic norms in order to remain in office.   But mostly it is about a political base performing a fear based tribal dance with racist undertones and falling into a tribal trance  - expressing a  willingness to follow their  “great leader” where ever he may lead  - even if it obliterates the rule of law and turns our democracy into a police state. If we again compare this phenomenon to Germany in the 1930s, a portion of that population were also under Hitler’s “spell.”  They were “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” many of whom had a portrait of the Fuhrer next to a picture of Jesus on their mantles.

History teaches us that it is extremely difficult to revive democratic institutions and freedoms in a nation once a repressive regime has seized  power. Fascism is almost impossible to root out from within.  Some political dominoes have already fallen as military “strongmen” have come to power recently in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Turkey, Egypt and the Philippines. Every one of these leaders has used as his rallying cry the threat posed by immigrants and “the others” and each of them has received the praise of President Trump.  Is there any question as to where our present  administration is headed?   It is critical that we take note of what each of these leaders has done in his rise to power and compare his actions to what we are witnessing every day in the words and policies of Donald Trump:

Each leader has scapegoated immigrants and minorities as a way of  consolidating his base.

Each has used polarization and fear to achieve power.

Each has attempted to control his nation’s narrative around what is the truth.

Each has perpetrated attacks on journalists and demonized the members  of the media who have been critical of him.    

Each has shown contempt for the rule of law when it applies to him and has signaled that he is above the law.

Each has made threats about jailing his opposition or has actually harassed and jailed his opponents.

Each has put loyalty to himself and his regime above all other criteria for appointments.

Each has practiced nepotism and some have made appointments of family members to positions of power.

Each has made attempts to extend executive powers, circumvent the legislature and rule by decree.

Each embodies an over-riding theme that involves ignoring and undermining democratic norms.

Each elevates the power of the police and the military and speaks about “law and order” as the central organizing principle of society.

Getting back to the question, “What is to be done?” about this slow-motion coup that has been taking place in the era of Trump, the following are some suggestions:

The first order of business is not actually about doing, but about one’s state of mind. We cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency by those who tend to minimize the danger of what is going down.  As we continue to observe any phenomenon, there is the tendency to “normalize” what is occurring.  The fostering of the notion, “that’s just who Donald Trump is” - can enure us to his craven nature, his malignant narcissism,  his outrageous policies and his authoritarian agenda.  Maintaining our resistance is based on sustaining our intolerance in the face of the bombardment that we are experiencing by this profoundly reactionary regime.  The fact that our free press is still standing and that Trump’s poll numbers are slightly down should give us some comfort but it should not distract us from the fundamental truth that any leader who sees himself as above the law will stop at nothing to hold on to power.

The 2018 midterms may be the most important election in our lifetime.  This may sound alarmist and hyperbolic but I believe it to be true. Midterm elections have always been a referendum on the president and the party in power.   Because of the Faustian bargain that the Republican Party has made - a deal with the devil that trades our safety, our freedoms and their integrity for a few perks and a job - there must be a thunderous and resounding rejection of this regime and everything that it represents.  The message must be powerful and clear to all Republicans - if you opportunistically stick with Trump - you may get some of the votes from his base - but you will continue to lose majority support, and your job.Most important in the 2018 midterms  make sure that you are registered to vote along with everyone you know.  This is not an election to sit out even if the local races do not seem that important. Turnout and numbers really matter.

Vote Democratic right down the line.  Do not split your ballot. Do not vote for a third-party candidate as a protest vote.  Too much is at stake in this election to take those kinds of risks. I am not someone who unconditionally votes a party line.  I have been openly critical of some of the practices and positions of the Democratic Party.  But, at this point in history the Democratic Party is the only counterforce to Trump and his Republican collaborators.  If the Democrats do not take control of at least one branch of the legislature or if voter turnout is weak, power will remain firmly in Trump’s hands and our nation will continue on its trek toward authoritarianism.

Support progressive organizations and candidates in every way that you can.  We are not being called upon to travel to the Spanish Republic to take up arms against a fascist army as Hemingway described in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”   Our fight is far less dangerous and much closer to home.   There may still be time to defeat Trump at the ballot box if we mobilize now.  With minimal effort and little cost to ourselves we can use our computers and smart phones to make small but important contributions to candidates at all levels of government.  Many who are running for political office became inspired to become the alternatives to the Trump regime following the presidential election of  2016. They have joined a grass roots movement of citizens and candidates who may be new to politics but are united in their desire to retire the old Democratic Party machine.  Most are not just anti-Trump but also support a progressive agenda that includes universal health care, free tuition at public universities and a minimum wage that allows people to rise above poverty.  Call it “socialism” or just common sense - these are the types of mainstream reforms that the Democratic Party had always fought to achieve before they became “the other corporate party”  - the party of millionaires and the “educated class” that somewhere along the way lost its working-class base along with its nerve and its soul. Many of the new candidates, call them populists or socialists are breathing life into a moribund organization and are the essence of the coming “blue wave.”

The following are organizations that I support. They depend upon small contributions and raise money to support progressive candidates around the country. They organize phone banks and texting parties to help get out the vote in primaries and are mobilizing now for the midterms.  They also knock on doors, go to town meetings, demonstrate publicly, go to court to fight against Republican efforts to suppress minority voter turnout and meet with our currently elected representatives to make sure they are fighting hard for the things that most of us would like to see changed.  What I have come to understand is that the $5 or $10 contributions that I regularly make to organizations that are fighting for me and my loved ones is a small price to pay for what I am getting in return.  It feels better than spending my money on another article of clothing from China or something produced in a sweat shop in Bangladesh.  It is better used than the money I spent on that overpriced dinner in the upscale restaurant the other night.  For the organizations that I am choosing to support, it boosts their budgets along with their morale as they do battle in the undeclared war being waged against our democracy:

Indivisible: Go to “Indivisible” on the internet and you will get an idea of what the many local chapters are doing to resist the Trump agenda, elect local champions and fight for progressive policies.  Action by action and day by day Indivisible members are making calls, showing up, speaking with their neighbors in thousands of chapters around the country.  It is truly a grass roots organization dedicated to building the “blue wave,” working to stop Trump and fighting to save our democracy.  You can join and participate on any level.

Our Revolution:  These are the Bernie Sanders people who have spent the last two years committed to direct action. They are also creating grass roots political power with hundreds of thousands of members across the country and around the world.  They are organizing to get a new generation of progressive leaders voted in - ones who support Medicare for all, tuition free public college and getting big money out of politics.  

The Poor People’s Campaign: This organization is the living legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. It is a national call for moral revival challenging the evils of racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation.  It is an organization worth supporting because its appeal is non-partisan yet it has tremendous resonance with those who identify as Christians - people who may have heard mostly from Christian fundamentalists and the religious right.

The American Civil Liberties Union:  The ACLU was once a narrowly focused  organization that mostly took on cases of free speech and defending the rights of the accused.  When Trump took office, they broadened their mission and defined themselves as part of the “resistance.” Their court fights and organizing for direct actions around the country have  been highly successful.  Their massive petition drives have helped reunite thousands of immigrant families who have been torn apart. Their current mission is an all-fronts confrontation with the Trump administration and its  attacks on people’s rights.

The Nation Magazine: Go to TheNation.com/TakeActionNow if you would like to do something to fight for change.  Every Tuesday The Nation will send you three actions ranging from five minutes to as much time as you are willing to invest.

The time is now.  The danger is clear and present.  The requests being made of us are minimal given what is at stake.  The title of Hemingway’s novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”  is part of a quote from the English poet John Donne.  His words resonate today as clearly and loudly as when they were first composed in the 17th century.  The struggle against fascism that culminated in the Holocaust and The Second World War in the 1930s continues in today’s world as we once again confront the demonizing of  immigrants and the dark skinned “others.”   The resurgent evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism have been activated by a president who subscribes to those beliefs.  Bells are tolling for us and we are all being called upon to take a stand.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

[republicstandard]

Populism is the Future for the Alt-Right

The infamous Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which took place last August, was intended to help unify the various political factions of the dissident right. But as we all know things did not go to plan. The authorities not only revoked the permit for the rally at the last minute, but they also funnelled attendees into the path of Antifa and other violent left wing protesters which caused conflict on the streets which was shown on news bulletins all around the world.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817585113717094,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7788-6480"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

Various members of the pro-white community suffered numerous problems both on the day and in the weeks and months afterwards. Some had their homes broken into; others were de-platformed on social media, whilst others are still currently battling in the courts. And in a historic first several websites had their domains seized and were forced into the dark web for months. To put it simply, the Charlottesville rally was an unmitigated disaster for the pro-white movement; but I also think it was the reckoning that the movement badly needed.

The following months after the rally were a mixture of infighting, self-reflection and change. It was clear that the momentum that had built up during 2015, 2016, and the first 8 months of 2017, was gone. Looking back it is clear that prominent members of the pro-white movement should have been more active in reorganizing and leading during this crucial period. However at the same time I recognise the very difficult situation many of these people were in and how little spare time they had.

More controversy later followed. Pro-white political candidates like Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little descending into meltdowns the likes of which have not been seen this side of Britney Spears shaving her head and beating a car with an umbrella. There are so many twists and turns in their stories that it would require an entire article just to write about them; and who has time for that?

Britain is in the process of leaving the EU, Trump has become the President of the United States of America, and anti-immigration Governments have been elected in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Czechia.

My conclusion from everything mentioned above is that the pro-white movement has energy, online presence and some potential, yet it is floundering due to its own faults and is simply not going to change anything anytime soon.

My sympathies with the populist movement grow by the day, not just because of their ability to get elected into power, but also because they have a large number of coherent and well thought-out policies that can actually be implemented in the near future. Not to mention the fact that they actually have political parties and a long list of financial backers with deep pockets.

It is easy to forget but in the last two years the populist wave has achieved many things. Britain is in the process of leaving the EU, Trump has become the President of the United States of America, and anti-immigration Governments have been elected in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Czechia.

I think that a pro-white movement of some kind is always necessary; simply because all other races have their advocacy groups and so logically whites will need their own as a counter and to represent their interests. It is the tragedy of identity politics that this is so, as we move from high-trust societies to ones which are weighted towards groups who can leverage moral authority through state infrastructure, such as diversity quotas and the risible affirmative action program. I also think that such a community is necessary because it helps shift the Overton Window to the right. Whether you agree with the Alt-Right or not, nobody can deny the influence it has had in moving certain topics into the public sphere over the past two years.

My main issue is that I still have no idea why people in the Alt-Right and other pro-white groups have not done more to support the populist movements. I read a lot of white nationalists on social media continuously claim that: ‘Elections don’t matter, if you vote your just feeding the system. We need to let everything collapse and rebuild from scratch.’ This way of thinking is patently absurd for a number of reasons; I think it stems from a mindset of wanting to be as edgy as possible and maintaining a ‘distance’ from the so called ‘normies’.

Obviously these same people would rather see Matteo Salvini, the new interior minister of Italy, continue to turn back migrant boats then allow them to dock at Italian ports. Yet at the same time they claim voting doesn’t change anything, even though Salvini’s policies are reversing Italy’s pro-immigration agenda. This mentality of rejecting the democratic process and working only in overtly pro-white activism needs to end. Even if you don’t agree with democracy, this is the system you have to work in and you must act accordingly. Rejecting the process and simply not voting will only bring victory to your enemies, because I can guarantee that the left will turn out in droves, and they certainly don’t play fair either.

Throughout the 2015-2016 election campaign of Donald Trump identitarians and civic nationalists worked together online to help him get elected. There is no reason why this should not continue, and it was silly from a tactical perspective when these two groups diverged so much after November 2016. In Poland, Hungary and now Italy, what could be described as ‘pro-white’ factions work in harmony with civic nationalist entities on a daily basis – and this partnership achieves results.

No matter how much propaganda you spread or how many immigrants arrive, the likelihood of a pro-white candidate let alone a party being elected in our lifetimes is very slim. Even in South Africa, where whites face rape, torture and murder on their own farms, the majority of whites still vote for mainstream parties. Indeed many liberal whites in Cape Town still deny that the farm murders phenomenon even exists.

The majority of white people by their very nature seem to be instinctively repulsed by ethnic nationalism to some degree, and in any given white country only a small minority of people seem aligned with pro-white causes. This is why I think populism is the way forward, because it provides a form of nationalism which not only solves most of the West’s problems, but is also amenable to the mentality of the average person in the street.

Brexit and Trump’s election were implicitly white events; framed as such more by the actions of the nay-sayers than the advocates. Despite all the media programming, these countries are the product of European peoples, and they still are the majority populations in thes lands, for now. Yet, not one of the major figures in either of these causes made it an explicitly white event- a very wise tactical choice. Populism allows you to save the white man and his family without actually saying that you are saving the white man and his family. Yes; sometimes the populists cuck and you identitarians may cringe with resentment, but if that cuck lowers immigration by 50% then there is no reason not to get behind him.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817587730962790,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-5979-7226"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

In the modern world, where an Englishman can be locked up for saying something controversial or a parent can have their child taken by social services simply because they have a bruise on their arm, a certain flexibility is needed. You need to achieve your goals without ever stating what your true goals are. The left have always done this; their centre-left candidates are quite often secretly communist, yet they will never admit that. You need to enter movements and help push through legislation that is similar to your beliefs or which will help lead to the implementation of your goals. Populism is the ‘big tent’ that allows you to do this.

Purity spiralling will get you nowhere, and cutting yourself off from the political process or people who even slightly disagree with you is stupid.

In other words, it is time for the Alt-Right to be pragmatic, as well as idealistic.

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech. Make a donation towards our running costs by clicking here.

The Republic Standard Web Shop is now open! Every piece of merchandise you buy is a victory against the nerds.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2t7u1T8 via IFTTT

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

Nationalism in heart of Europe needles EU

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Hungary has built a formidable southern border fence to keep migrants out

Grinning cheerfully as he swipes his mop neatly across the glass front of an optician’s shop, Sandor the window cleaner tells me he doesn’t think much of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party.

“They may say the economy’s thriving but we don’t feel it,” he says. “The one thing they do right is to keep the migrants out.”

Not far away, at Hungary’s southern border, the wind whips across the steppe, flattens the grass and whistles right up against the vast metal intricacy of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s border fence.

Few try to cross it these days. Even so a security patrol crawls, rather menacingly, along its barbed perimeter.

What is, for some, all about internal security, also represents this country’s decision to prioritise national interest above that of the EU. It’s a symbol of defiance.

It’s also a vote winner.

Politics and the migrant crisis

“By the end of 2014 the popularity of Fidesz had dropped dramatically and they tried everything. There was no stone left unturned to get this popularity back,” says Mark Kekesi, a human rights activist.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption The 2015 migrant crisis created a deep split between EU neighbours

In spring 2015 the wave of refugees and migrants entering Central Europe via Hungary came as a kind of heavenly gift to Mr Orban and many other politicians in the region. They could exaggerate the potential immigration threats and then appear as saviours.

Hungary, of course, wasn’t alone in its opposition. It decided, along with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, to reject EU migrant quotas, angering Brussels and earning the so-called Visegrad Four (V4) a reputation as the union’s troublemakers.

Image copyright EPA

Image caption The Visegrad Four are defying an EU agreement on migrant quotas

But their resistance has shone a light on a profound and dangerous division within the club. Not so much a stand-off between East and West but between the older, established member states and the former communist countries which joined in 2004.

Read more on this topic:

Resentment in Slovakia

In the eerie, blue flashing light of a grimy factory in southern Slovakia, welders in overalls bend over huge chunks of metal. One lifts his protective mask to reveal a lined face.

During the socialist era, journalist Tibor Macak says, there was more security, more certainty.

And now? “Living standards aren’t the same as those in other member states. In Germany they earn four times what we get. If we’re talking about the European Union, it should be equal.”

There is resentment, a sense of injustice here – although Slovakia represents the very least of Brussels’s problems.

Its leader Robert Fico stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his Visegrad counterparts and declares: “I belong to a union of prime ministers who do not wish to see Muslim communities being created in our countries”. But that’s about as far as his anti-EU rhetoric goes.

Conscious perhaps of the relative prosperity that EU membership has brought (French and German car manufacturers are among the foreign investors here), Slovakia is, officially at least, open to closer EU integration. Slovakia is the only member of the V4 in the eurozone.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption The Slovak national radio building in Bratislava

Inside the peculiar upside-down, concrete pyramid that houses Slovakia’s national radio station, Tibor Macak says: “Now is the big question: what happens if (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Emmanuel Macron put reform on the table? Slovakia in the majority supports that – it’s very clear.”

Not so its Visegrad neighbours Hungary and Poland. There, further EU integration is viewed with suspicion and resistance.

Polish patriots

In Poland’s rural east, the women of Zambrow gather every week to practise the old village songs. Boots tap, long skirts sway.

Jolanta shrugs back her flowered shawl and says: “The most important thing is to prioritise the interests of our fatherland, to support the interest of the Polish people.”

She recently became a local councillor for the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). “Most importantly it was patriotism that drove me towards PiS, the patriotism I inherited from my grandparents and parents,” she says.

PiS, endorsed (in part) by the powerful Catholic Church, has won popular support thanks to generous child benefits and a decision to lower the retirement age. As one mum told me: “All the other parties make promises but they don’t deliver. PiS kept their promises.”

But PiS have enraged the EU and left their country horribly divided.

Image copyright EPA

Image caption Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski espouses traditional conservative values

The party’s attacks on press freedom, on access to abortion, its decision to continue logging in the ancient Bialowieza forest, in breach of EU law, horrify many Poles.

But it was the government’s shake-up of the Polish judiciary which brought people out onto the streets in protest and stirred the European Commission into action, triggering Article Seven against a member state for the very first time. The article deals with adherence to the EU’s rule of law values.

Renate Kim, a journalist based in Warsaw, said “I went to the United States for the elections and when I listened to people, how they believed in what Trump promised them, it was exactly the same as here – ‘we’ll make Poland strong again, we’ll make Poland great again’.”

“People hear ‘we’ll be a big country with lots of pride, we won’t listen to Brussels and the leftist Brussels politicians’ and they like that, because they feel proud of their country again.”

No wonder, perhaps, PiS MP Dominik Tarcynski said last week that the Polish government would not back down over the reforms, which the EU Commission and independent experts argue flout the rule of law.

Brussels is unlikely to withdraw the country’s voting rights – it needs unanimous the approval of all member states and Hungary has signalled support for its neighbour.

Viktor Orban’s increasingly authoritarian rule, his shift towards a self-styled “illiberal state”, also flies in the face of EU values.

There are voices within the EU which hint at hitting both Poland and Hungary where it hurts most – by reducing their EU funding.

This week Ms Merkel issued a veiled threat with regard to the next EU budget.

“In the next distribution of structural funds,” she said, “we need to redefine the allocation criteria to reflect the preparedness of regions and authorities to receive and integrate migrants.”

The post Nationalism in heart of Europe needles EU appeared first on dailygate.

[pamphletstoinspire]

Catholic Physics - Reflections of a Catholic Scientist - Part 76

Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?

Story with images:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/catholic-physics-reflections-scientist-part-76-harold-baines/?published=t

The Israelites Gathering Manna (Clerck) from Wikimedia Commons (Caption for image)

“Miracles always relate to the faith. That is why a belief in miracles is not a vacation from reason, a little holiday from the tedious demands of rational responsibility. Not only is it reasonable to believe that miracles can and do happen, it is unreasonable to think they cannot and do not occur.” ― Ralph M. McInerny, Miracles — a Catholic View

"The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern into which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern."  -- C.S. Lewis, Miracles

INTRODUCTION

Some 22 years ago when I was being catechized, preparing to enter into the Church, I was much troubled by the Eucharistic phenomenon, transubstantiation.  As a physicist, I could not understand how the wafer could become the flesh of Christ and the wine His Sacred Blood.  The wise old priest who was instructing me asked: “Do you believe in the miracle of Christ’s Resurrection?”  I answered, “Yes, of course — that’s why I’m going to become a Catholic.”  He then said, “Well, if you believe in one miracle, why not a second, or more?”  And that answer made a lot of sense to me.  

So the first property of a miracle is that it is related to faith in God, as an act or sign from God.  Miracles are presumed to be rare events, supernatural — that is, not wrought by natural law.  Certainly not all rare events are miracles.  Winning the lottery is a rare event.  But if you needed that win to pay for a cancer medication, then you might consider it a miracle.  We’ll see below what evidence the Church needs to certify a rare event — a medical cure or other phenomenon — as a miracle.  

And finally, I'll try to show, in both a personal and broader context, that science does not create roadblocks to a belief in miracles -- if we assume God exists, is omniscient and omnipotent, then he can, as C.S. Lewis suggests, feed a new event into the pattern of natural law, bring down manna from heaven to feed the Israelites.

HOW THE CHURCH JUDGES MIRACLES

I'll not discuss specific miracles ; the various types and categories are well covered on the internet (see the given links):

Old Testament

New Testament -- Jesus

New Testament -- Apostles

Historical -- Marian Apparitions

Historical -- Eucharistic Miracles

Historical -- Healing Miracles

The Catholic Church has to be very cautious in endorsing miracles.  Should a Church approved miracle turn out to be due to natural, rather than supernatural causes, or -- worse yet -- to be the product of fakery, the Church will wind up egg on her face.  The supposed miracle will be cited by non-believers as additional evidence against the truth of the Church's theological and moral stance.

A general protocol for approval of "Private Revelations" is given by the Sacred Congregation for Propagation of the Doctrine of the Faith (SCPDF).  The first stage is approval by the bishop of the local diocese; he may seek the aid of a committee of experts. Further approval is given by the SCPDF, either using a permanent commission, as in the case of healing miracles required for canonization, or an ad hoc commission.

These agencies can return three verdicts on whether the event is truly miraculous, not to be explained by natural laws: yes, no, can't decide (translating from the Latin).  Whatever this judgment, and the final judgment of the SCPDF, might be, it should be emphasized that other than those miracles which are part of Doctrine or Dogma (e.g. the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary), the faithful are not required to believe in miracles, although they are encouraged to do so.

Different Types of Miracles

Stature of San Juan Diego, who saw Our Lady of Guadaloupe - Marian Apparitions (paraphrased from the linked source) - [Caption for linked image]

1) There must be moral certainty, or at least great probability, that something miraculous has occurred, something that cannot be explained by natural causes, or by deliberate fakery.

2) The person or persons who claim to have had the private revelation must be mentally sound, honest, sincere, of upright conduct, and obedient to ecclesiastical authority.

3) The content of the revelation or message must be theologically acceptable, morally sound and free of error.

4) The apparition must yield positive and continuing spiritual assets: for example, prayer, conversion, increase of charity.

Not all Marian apparitions have been approved. The most noteworthy example is that of Medjugorje.

Eucharistic Miracles

Eucharistic miracles occur when the host, previously consecrated, either issues blood or is transformed into human tissue.  One of the oldest (8th Century A.D.) occurred at Lanciano Italy.  The host was transformed into cardiac tissue, and subjected in 1970-71 and 1981 to histological analyses.  The results corresponded in blood type (AB) to that found for the Shroud of Turin.  Remarkably, the tissue remained uncorrupted for the 1100 years after the miracle occurred.  

The most recent in Legnicka, Poland occurred in 2013 when a host was dropped and then found to bleed.  Examination by pathologists confirmed that it was most likely cardiac tissue.

These results are hotly contested by atheists who claim that they are either the result of fraud or that the internet reports of their occurrence are made up (including several in Buenos Aires when Pope Francis, then Archbishop Bergoglio, supposedly certified the miracle.)  Given the reluctance of Church officials to certify miracles which might be revealed as fraudulent or natural (see the section on Healing Miracles below), it seems unlikely that this objection is valid.  Whether all internet reports are totally accurate is another question.

Healing Miracles for Canonization

The process of canonization requires that the candidate for sainthood be responsible for at least two miracles.  The miracles must be the result of prayer to the saint - to - be and only to him or her.  Moreover, the miracle must involve a disease or injury that medical authorities say is totally without hope of cure. A committee of doctors (not all of whom need be Catholic) must examine the medical circumstances of the cure and certify that it is indeed miraculous.

A good example is that given by the canonization of Pope St. John Paul II.  Three months after his death a French nun suffering from Parkinson's disease (the same affliction that Pope St. John Paul II suffered from) prayed to him and woke up one morning in perfect health, even though she had been unable to move her legs before.  The second cure, after his beatification, was that of a Costa Rican woman who had been told by her doctors that her brain aneurysm gave her only a month to live.

We emphasize that the evaluation process for such miracles and for other miracles at shrines, such as Lourdes, is extremely rigorous.  A group of doctors have to certify that there has been no previous medical treatment that could give a cure -- that is, 0 % chance according to conservative diagnosis for a cure.  There is no way to argue that fraud is involved in these cases or that something outside of "natural law" has not occurred.

CAN A SCIENTIST BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

Very briefly, the answer to that question is YES!  Let me explain in detail. In the first place, it should be evident from the material above that the Church applies rigorous and scrupulous standards in evaluating miracles. Mother Church does not want to be embarrassed when fraud or natural causes are proven to be the cause of what are supposed to be miraculous events.

Secondly, if I were to answer no, I would have to assume that science explains everything, that "Naturalism" (or materialism or scientism) is the only explanation for all things and processes; in other words, I would accept that the so called laws of nature are just that, prescriptive, rather than descriptive attempts to give a mathematical picture of some aspects of our world.  I would have to assume there is no "veiled reality" in quantum mechanics, and that a physicist who told me "I understand quantum mechanics" is neither a liar nor a fool.

If I believe that God is omnipotent and omniscient, I also would have to wonder why God could not, as C.S. Lewis proposed, feed new events into nature to create what seems to us to be a miracle.  The so-called laws of nature, to repeat, are descriptive not prescriptive.  God can't make 2 + 2 = 5, but he can curve space so that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle do not add up to 180 degrees.  

Accordingly, my faith in miracles does not contradict my belief that science is a wonderful tool to understand the world, to help us appreciate the beauty described in Psalm 19A:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.  

Indeed, to take this a step further, to realize that the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in science is itself a sort of miracle,

From a series of articles written by: Bob Kurland - a Catholic Scientist