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girl4pay · 3 years

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This might be a big question but what would be the ideal way for the raven king to have ended in ur opinion. Bc it doesn’t make sense as is and thematically falls apart I feel but I can never quite figure out what the actually most narratively satisfying thing would be

lets get married. okay keeping in mind i haven't read the series in full in a couple years my core issues with trk are: i think gwenllian was criminally misused, i think adding in laumonier and blue's dad made very little sense and i think doing the gansey noah and cabeswater deaths back to back the way they were was a terrible way to handle a climax. you don't need blue's dad and you don't need laumonier. too many random new parents and men who are absolutely vestigal. gwenllian should be blue's mentor, you focus the piper plotline completely on a professional antagonism between her and henry's mom who can act as the antithesis to piper's greed and recklessness. the grey man is the reader's familiar link between Crime and Magic here, so you can still have him face the challenge of his old life threatening his new life by having to forge an alliance with seondeok to take down a shared threat.

gwenllian as blue's mentor would come with a similar but almost opposite effect to persephone's mentorship on adam: blue isn't getting stranger, she's getting angrier. this witch who knows what she is keeps getting mayo in her hair and her teachers don't understand her and her family is being evasive and the boy she loves is going to die. also a demon is clouding her perspective, but she doesn't really know that yet. more adam and blue scheming to keep gansey alive. more research and bugging relatives and desperately looking into rituals while it becomes clearer to the reader that adam is losing his agency and blue is losing her clearsightedness. gansey's panic attacks begin to attune themselves to the moments where noah is not himself as well. his chest hurts, he can't breathe - it feels like something is sucking away at his heart. at the same time adam is still trying to help ronan with waking up the dreams, and blue is getting closer to gansey and henry, trying to imagine a future that feels like her own when she has the weights of her confused identity and her fate hanging around her neck.

i would have ronan and gansey's relationship blow up here: between the hospital and aurora's death, maybe after his birthday party, ronan finds out - probably through declan, to add insult to injury and even more fucked up brother resentment - that gansey is trying to buy him a diploma. actually definitely just after the night of truth bullshit for prime outrageousness lmao. it goes nuclear. blue is, catastrophically to gansey, on ronan's side. adam is, infuriatingly to everyone, judgmentally neutral. things progress as they were except instead of henry getting kidnapped we get a very reluctant henry passing a message to tgm - things have progressed past the point that is acceptable with piper, and his mother wants to meet. also the visit with gansey's family is tense - they love her and henry, and they just can't understand what's gotten into gansey, who's distracted and snappy, and when helen confronts him, he blows up at her, saying a lot more about his worry for ronan and his fear about what will happen to him than was revealed in the initial fight. they're siblings, their relationship can handle it, but there's still an overarching sense that she doesn't really understand, because gansey is still holding his real fear of dying close to his chest.

cut to auroras death and the grey man having to leave maura with this tragedy to join seondeok - a king, joining a king, doing what needs doing, instead of just a continued trope about being made for violence or whatever that was. there scene with ronan at the bmw goes more or less the same. gansey goes off on his own because he feels isolated and like the burden of fixing all this lies on his shoulders, gwenllians weird witch pep talk goes to blue instead. here is where you would insert cool fun shit about what being a mirror actually means! all of them reunite as in canon, ronan and gansey reconcile after ronan is like you dumb motherfucker i need you here you're my brother and gansey says some self sacrificing shit and blue and adam make it clear without Making It Clear they are going to stand by him, because they still don't know he knows he's going to die.

here is where we reach the core difficulty: i think the death kiss is incredibly stupid and i don't know how i would write around it. i know how i would finish trk from here, but the kiss curse would not show up at all. i like the kiss curse as a concept but it just doesn't make any sense in the narrative of agency trc constructs and i think it limit's blue's storyline. so without considering the kiss curse: as the demon hijacks adam and tries to use blue as an amplifier to spread to other ley lines, everyone realizes the stakes. everything cabeswater has touched, everything the ley line has touched is at risk, and the ley lines are ALL CONNECTED. blue and adam have been skirting around the realization that the demon and cabeswater are like mirrors the whole book. you can't have one without the other. there is no corruption without something to corrupt. the way cabeswater focuses the ley line for ronan is how the demon has been getting power too, but it's a self contained loop, consumption instead of guidance. kill cabeswater, kill the demon. gansey asks it, realizing in a way they others don’t seem to that he and cabeswater are linked, and the others act. there's a little giving tree moment between ronan and cabeswater, which will surely not contribute to any farreaching survivors guilt that might show up in a sequel series. here is where blue being a mirror comes into play. when neeve was trying to see farther than she could, she used a mirror and it sent her there. the demon is trying to consume beyond it's bounds. a mirror sends it inwards. here blue sees the moment of violence that birthed the demon, and she's terrified and it's tragic. it's a very bildungsroman moment of grief and terror of what will come after for everyone. death of the child birth of the man etc. noah, perpetual child, gets laid to rest with cabeswater, but without cabeswater the ley line floods. here is where gansey dies: without noah fighting his hardest to keep him going, because noah loved him, because cabeswater needed him, his heart simply stops. here is where blue kisses him, because it doesn't matter any more, because he dies even though she didn't, because she's seeing without the demon clouding her for the first time in what feels like the longest time and all she can see is grief. shit gets magically weird with adam and ronan too, and it's henry who grounds them all, who is used to enforcing practicality on the unknown to keep himself safe. with his help the three of them dream something to save gansey. ta da!

i feel like this would also feed much better into the theme of the dreamer trilogy of like opening ley lines etc bcus trk completely glosses over what happens to the ley line without cabeswater there, and adds to it making sense that ronan thinks opening the ley lines is a good idea - he saved gansey with it! what more could he do! whereas adam felt overwhelmed and out of control and spends the next year trying to construct and repair his own real life conduits and safeguards on the ley line as ronan builds lindenmere. what are your thoughts did i miss anything that you were like absolutely not hate that need it to be gone

#trc

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shmegmilton · 4 years

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Can you explain how Aaron and Alexander stopped being friends and started fighting?

They were never really ‘friends.’ I assume you got that idea from the play, but I have no idea why the play tried to push that narrative. Civil? Sure, but that was necessary. New York was less than 50,000 people at the time, and they were both accomplished lawyers & statesmen who had to work and interact with each other on a daily basis. Politics is politics, look at how people are acting right now during our election.

As for your question, it’s a long line of policy & personal disagreements, mostly. They were on opposite sides of the aisle on pretty much everything. Lots of small things, but a lot of big, BIG things.

Burr was (ironically) kind of a pacifist; he kept mostly to himself, didn’t really speak much publicly & didn’t necessarily go out of his way to confront people unless he’s been pushed long enough (everyone ‘snaps’ at some point, y’know?)

But that’s why the ‘Burr is an evil mastermind’ myth is so pervasive today. Burr just… didn’t bother defending himself, or correcting anything, because he (mistakingly) had faith in the inherent goodness of people that someday people would see him for his true character. So for that reason, we don’t really have a good timeline from Burr’s perspective as to how he felt about Hamilton—but BOY howdy did Hamilton never shut up about Burr.

----

Trespass & Confiscation Acts (1782ish)

During the Revolution, the British confiscated the property of patriots that fled the city. New York did the same thing, & for a while it was this game of: ‘Oh, you’re gonna take my stuff? **draws a line in the dirt** Well, everything behind this line is mine now.” It was all very bad, and after the way Tories & Loyalists faced a lot of honestly very fucked up discrimination & forfeiture of their rights. Hamilton (like most Federalists) was pro-British, so he represented a lot of these people in court. I’m sure it wasn’t purely out of the goodness of his heart--most of his clients were loaded--but the sentiment is there. On the other hand, there are multiple records of Burr buying up property around this time, most likely confiscated Tory property, which he would usually flip or give away to people that he knew, so he was taking full advantage of this. Burr also, most likely, went head-to-head with Hamilton on a few of these cases, because Burr tended to work with the ‘common folk.’

French Revolution (1789ish to 1799ish) & Proclamation of Neutrality (1793)

Burr (like most Democratic-Republicans) was pro-French, so much so that he took in French refugees fleeing the Revolution into his home. He was very sympathetic to the cause.Hamilton was not. He basically saw it the same way that right-wing Conservatives see the Black Lives Matter movement is the best way I can explain it. He also hated it for the amount of immigrants that were now fleeing to the U.S.

Burr Gets Chosen For NY Senate (1791)

Key word: chosen. As in, he didn’t actually run. That wasn’t how politics worked back then. The Hamilton musical just fucking lied outright about that, let’s be clear. He also never switched parties. Ever. Back then you were nominated by the people who were already in government--usually by one of the powerful families like the Clintons or the Livingstons, or yada yada. So Burr didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t even really want the position either, if I recall. But back then if you were ‘called to serve,’ you were obligated to do it. Hamilton was furious either way because it meant that Burr was replacing his father-in-law, Phillip Schuyler, meaning that he wouldn’t have that extra ear in government that he wanted. Burr also had a lot of views that were considered ‘extreme’ at the time, like getting extra rights for women, immigrants & black people, but I have no idea what Hamilton thought of those individual policies other than he just didn’t like women, immigrants or black people.

1792 & 1796 Presidential Election

Burr wasn’t really that serious about either of these elections, I don’t think (in ’92 he wasn’t that well-known & barely got any support, but it’s worth noting the fact he was nominated to run at all was really impressive. He’s tied with William Jennings Bryan as being one of the youngest people to ever receive an electoral vote, at 36 years old.) In ’96 he faired a little better—he got 30 votes, which is nearly half of what you need to get the ticket nomination, also very impressive.Hamilton was super staunchly opposed to both of these runs, though, and did his typical Hamilton thing of openly campaigning about how the people shouldn’t vote for Burr, yada yada.

Jay Treaty (1794)

I highly suggest looking up supplemental information on this because it’s a bit complicated, but it was basically a treaty between us and Great Britain to reaffirm that we were going to continue to not mess with France, as well as a couple of other weird hang-ups. It was not popular, at all, especially with the Demo-Republicans. There is a specific instance (that is actually kind of insane) where Hamilton gave a public speech in defense of it, and the Democratic-Republicans in the crowd started pelting him & the other Federalists with rocks. Hamilton got SO mad that immediately challenged a man to a duel, and threatened to fight each of the Democratic-Republicans one-by-one.

Reynolds Affair (1797)

Burr had a personal relationship with Maria Reynolds; he was her divorce attorney in 1793/1794, helped her out financially, & successfully petitioned (+paid for) her daughter Susan to attend a boarding school. I believe they also stayed in his him with him during the divorce proceedings, but don’t quote me on that. He never said anything publicly that I could find, but Burr probably had a personal investment in the Reynolds Pamphlet, since it painted Maria in a really damaging light.

Alien & Sedition Acts (1798)

These were some of the most worst laws ever passed in the history of the country. Like, these were AWFUL. It not only limited immigration, but it limited the freedom of the press and freedom of speech (ESPECIALLY immigrants, my god.)

Burr was right on the front lines helping defend people in court, he actively opposed it & is probably the thing that propelled him into Jefferson’s orbit as a potential Vice President.

John Barker Church Duel (1797)

John Barker Church had accused Burr of taking bribes (which was unfounded & untrue) and they ended up dueling. JBC was the husband of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law.

Neither was injured (though, JBC apparently put a hole in Burr’s coat), but it supposed infuriated Hamilton & his associates so much that they would send out fake letters “from Burr” challenging people to duels.

The Manhattan Company (1799)

Burr was getting sick of the difficulty he was having getting loans from the Federalist-run banks and decided to do something about it. There had been several seasonal epidemics of yellow fever—caused by mosquitos but, at the time, it was thought to be caused by improperly treated water, miasma (‘bad air’) or (if you asked Hamilton) stinky evil immigrant refuges who were fleeing France and Haiti. Burr saw this and spearheaded a campaign to get a proper water treatment plant, even getting Hamilton to help him. Through some really weird loophole that I don’t quite understand, Burr was somehow allowed to use the ‘surplus capital’ for banking, which essentially turned it into a bank. The actual water treatment portion of the company was plagued with problems due to improper management and things like that. We’ll never know his exact thought process on this (people normally assume it was malicious trickery because people are biased to hate Burr anyway) & I highly doubt that Burr knew the extent of the issues (he was on the Board of Directors, but so were a dozen others--INCLUDING John Barker Church) so I don’t entirely think it’s his fault, but the fact of the matter is that it most likely exacerbated the existing problems & indirectly led to more people getting sick/dying until they finally fixed the problems.I would say that it’s completely justifiable for Hamilton to be mad at Burr, but, as we established, Hamilton hated both poor people & immigrants (two groups most likely affected by this) so he wasn’t actually mad at him for the reason a… y’know, a normal person would be mad at him. He was mad at him because Burr destroyed the monopoly that Federalists had on banks, making it easier for Democratic-Republicans & others to get loans. He was literally mad at him for making the economy fair.

1800 Election & 1804 NY Governor Election

These two are self-explanatory, I think, and I’ve already been writing way too long, lol. My hand hurts.

#Aaron Burr #Alexander Hamilton #Hamilton #AmRev #History #American Revolution #Long Post #Anecdotes #THIS TOOK SO LOOOOONG

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jeannereames · 5 years

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A lot of people on here joke about Alexander being “crazy” or “insane”, and I know some people hold the belief that he was an insane monster (I even saw an article titled “Alexander the Monster” which basically made Alexander out to be worse than the devil lol). I was just wondering what you think regarding Alexander’s mentality/sanity and why do you think some people believe that he was this crazy psychopath. Btw, I just finished reading Becoming and I loved it!!!!

First, thank you! I’m glad you liked the novel! Now, on to the question…

When people talk about “crazy” Alexander, it usually falls into two different categories. One subset is that Alexander went crazy with grief after Hephaistion died; I’ve argued against this elsewhere, so won’t again here in any detail.

Another subset claims he became megalomaniacal, pointing for proof to his “Persianizing,” including an attempt to introduce proskynesis (the bow before the Persian Great King that Greeks viewed as due only to gods), his desire to be deified, and a penchant for dressing up as various gods (Dionysos, Herakles, and even Artemis).

That tendency isn’t just on Tumblr; similar accusations are made in academia under the maxim that, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (Lord Baron Acton)

Yet that’s the cynical take. I think how one views the world (and human nature) has something to do with how one interprets Alexander’s behavior. We must recall that Alexander lived in a society where kingship was seen as divinely bestowed, and carried with it certain religious obligations with regard to one’s subjects.

Remember, not just anybody could be king of Macedon; one had to be an ARGEAD: e.g., from a specific family (gens). They were descendants of Herakles, and so of divine descent. This is different from the Successors who followed. Alexander was raised as a prince; Ptolemy, Antigonos, or Seleukos were not. The importance of these heroic ties can be found in the stories that popped up later, making Ptolemy a bastard of Philip (and thus an Argead), or the later Seleucid claim of descent from Apollo. And we know the Molossian royal house claimed descent from Achilles.

Again, not just anybody can be a king. One has to be special by ancestry.

Being born to the purple doesn’t necessarily make one any less of a dick. We’ve plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Demetrios Poliorketes? Pyrrhos? Antigonos IV Epiphanes?) But it does instill a different awareness of one’s place in the world.

Modern cynicism forgets just how seriously ancient people took religion. On his deathbed, among the last actions Alexander forced himself to perform until he literally couldn’t get up, were morning sacrifices to the ancestors and gods, on behalf of the Macedonian people. I think that says a lot not only about his own religiosity, but his sense of himself as a conduit between his people and the gods. The proper performance of religious rites were central, not just to his success, but to the survival of Macedonia. In our modern world, it can be hard to connect to this somewhat archaic notion.

In addition, the stories of him visiting hospital tents after battle, personally writing letters to his officers, talking and joking with his soldiers, marching with them, eating what they ate, and dressing as they dressed, all point to somebody who understands the principles of leadership, as opposed to just bossing people around. Some have argued that he lost that as time went on, but he was still out marching with them in Gedrosia (despite a collapsed or partially collapsed lung), so I’d argue he did not. The helmet incident (where he poured out precious water brought to him, because the rest of his men didn’t have any) is an exemplar of his continued understanding of what solidarity meant. It may have been as calculated as hell, but that’s not the act of a madman or megalomaniac. Also, just because it was calculated doesn’t mean it wasn’t genuinely meant. He was trying to keep his men alive, not let them give up.

Did Alexander, over time, turn into an arrogant little shit? Almost certainly, given his mind-boggling achievements, and the fact the Greeks never touted humility as a virtue. But I don’t believe he was a narcissist or had taken leave of reality. Such characterizations are simplistic, played for pop approval and laughs, or because it’s too much effort to look under the surface.

I do think he was struggling desperately to figure out how to govern such a vast, international empire, and not in some Tarn-esque “Brotherhood of Mankind” way. He never (personally) lost a battle, but uniting Eastern and Western ways of rule was a puzzle he never solved. THAT was his great failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” And that’s where Dancing with the Lion will eventually head. Alexander’s story is, ultimately, not a triumph, but not because he was crazy or a Macedonian Hitler.

I’d also point out that people who oversimplify Alexander as either a demon or demented, are buying, hook, line and sinker, the moral narratives of the ancient authors, especially of Plutarch, Curtius, and Justin, but also Arrian and Diodoros. These are not neutral accounts. We must be careful of their biases.

All that said, I don’t want to excuse Alexander’s war crimes (and I don’t know what else you’d call some of what he did). But even those were not the actions of a “crazy” man. They were brutal, but considered (which may be worse).

Razing Thebes sent a message of what happens when a city foreswears an alliance multiple times. Rounding up and killing Greek mercenaries after Granikos sent a message to others serving under Darius (an attempt to peel off some of Darius’s more dangerous support troops). Razing Tyre (and Gaza) sent a message about what happens when resistance defies certain “rules of war” (Tyre’s treatment of the heralds). The burning of Persepolis was not a drunken frat party gone wrong; it was a political statement. Note ALL moveable wealth was gone and it happened just before they left, plus it destroyed the place where Persian kings were crowned, preventing one from emerging in Alexander’s wake. (Not that Bessus cared, nor Spitamenes after him). Philotas fell victim to a real conspiracy (even if he wasn’t part of it), not a CIA file (contra Badian), and the Proskynesis Affair was an attempt to regularize court procedure not institute worship of Alexander. The murder of Kleitos was, indeed, a drunken brawl, with no good excuse, but was followed by (I think) genuine remorse, even if he accepted the forgiveness of the troops because he needed to.

Even the choice to enter Gedrosia wasn’t the decision of a madman, but of one whose logistics were legendary for working…except when they didn’t, because of an uprising and monsoon behind them that was unplanned for. It was a FUBAH, not a foolish choice. He was looking for a trade route linking India and Mesopotamia. Notions that he just wanted to one-up Cyrus and Semiramis misses the point.

The so-called request to the Greek states for deification is problematic as to just what he asked, versus what was later said (remember, we’re hearing about it from Athenian demagogues who hated him). The claim to be the son of a god was not megalomania or a shot at divinity, but an affirmation of hero status; being the son of a god didn’t necessarily mean one was immortal one’s self. As for precedent, his own father had put a statue of himself alongside the 12 in his final parade, plus there’s a heroōn (hero shrine) built above Royal Tomb I at Vergina. That’s either Philip buried there (my own personal opinion), or his father Amyntas III. The Spartan general, Brasidas, received hero cult from Amphipolis after his death, but Lysander accepted it from the Samians will still alive.

Alexander outstripped every one of these by no small measure, and seen in context, his claim to be a son of Zeus-Ammon is not some bizarre, out-of-left-field assertion. If Lysander was a hero, and his father Philip, then what did that make Alexander? And the inflated “Final Plans” were about 50% invented by Perdikkas to get the army to vote them down.

Alexander did terrible things and we need to let those terrible things stand—call them out and recognize them. Yet when I look at his behavior, even in his latter years, I just don’t see the horrific corruption of, say, the Trump administration, or of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or Xi’s China. At some level, I think Alexander still saw himself, and struggled to be, a “Philosopher King.” He just didn’t know what that meant anymore.

I think, by the end, he was lost. Macedonian kings were expected to win wars and provide loot. Alexander did that to a degree no Macedonian monarch had ever before achieved. He was the Energizer Bunny of Macedonian kings. His own men (and culture) had created a monster. No wonder he felt betrayed by their “indiscipline” on the banks of the Hyphasis. “But I gave you even more than you ever dreamed of!”

Indeed, he did. That was the problem. They made him turn around. When his army “defeated” him, he wasn’t sure who he was any more, or what he was doing. I see a lot of his career after as a scramble to re-define himself. He’d conquered all this territory at a relatively young age. Now what was he supposed to do with it? Ruling is a lot less glamorous than conquering.

He’s perhaps the greatest military mind who’s ever lived (tied with Subutai, Genghis Khan’s general). He was also an exceptionally inspirational leader. But that “ruling schtick”? It got in the way. Appointing Hephaistion chiliarch was among his smarter decisions, even if Hephaistion died on him too soon. It was tacit recognition that he needed help. I’ve joked that Hephaistion’s appointment amounted to, “Here, you figure out how to make this whole thing work; I want to go conquer more stuff.”

Once he lost Hephaistion, he became a boat without a rudder. But as noted, his mourning was not beyond the pale. The only difference is that he had the money (and authority) to impose his wishes. As a former bereavement counselor, I wrote an article called “The Mourning of Alexander the Great” that deep-sixes misconceptions about mourning and Alexander’s behavior.

Was he “crazy”? No. Was he the devil? I’m sure the countries he invaded thought so. Was he a megalomaniac? Almost certainly not. Was he an arrogant asshole (especially when he’d been drinking)? Almost certainly so. But his arrogance sprang from an odd mix of massive, early success mixed with deep insecurity spawned by his upbringing.

I find him fascinating precisely because he’s not a simple read. He’s not Donald Trump. He’s not Adolf Hitler. He’s not even Caesar, or Napoleon. He’s intensely complex, which is, I think, the source of his continued fascination.

I’d advise those who read about him to allow for that complexity. Avoid simplistic readings, even while not white-washing the really ugly side of his career.

#Alexander the Great #Alexander the mad #ancient Macedonia #argead kingship #alexander's atrocities #proskynesis #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #classics #avoid oversimplifying people's behavior #asks #was alexander crazy?#tagamemnon #violence in the ancient world

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bilgisticallykosher · 5 years

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Sanders Asides: Are There Healthy Distractions? reaction

Pre-anything: I'm not expecting to love this one as much as the last episode. Nothing terrible, but the disgusting trash man intro is just a hard thing to beat.

I’m expecting this to be SvS part 2. I'm expecting some sort of reaction and conclusion to Virgil's reveal at the end of DWIT. I'm therefore looking for any sign of confidence from Virgil immediately pointing to him being Deceit. I think it's likely not going to be addressed until late in the episode. Virgil angst until he comes back. Will Deceit be wearing Virgil's current hoodie? People have theorized that since he took notes on Roman's advice, it's possible for him to be better at pretending to be someone else. Especially someone who pops in, as opposed to rising up.

I'm also anticipating Thomas to come up with a different solution to the callback/wedding thing. Namely, Logan asking him if he'd just speak to Lee and Mary Lee, and ask to celebrate another time, more privately, and if he could go to the callback. Like, there's definitely a reason Deceit threw Logan in the back where he thought he'd have less influence.

I'm also waiting on Roman angst. We needed to meet another character (there's no way it wasn't Remus) before entering Roman's room.

OH GOSH they're doing animation, right? Or, another medium? That's gotta be for Roman's room! I was thinking maybe stop-motion or fluid animation. I'd also LIKE Deceit's name reveal, but I'm not sure we'll get that.

Post-title screen. I thought this was an old TS & Friends I'd missed. I, didn't love Frozen. This is an understatement. Okay. Still really like the name Sanders Asides, it's funny. That's. Hm. Well, it looks like Virgil. In a different outfit? Intriguing. So, distractions, like distracting yourself from wedding/callback? Also, "Are there healthy distractions?" Almost like "Can lying be good?" (At least, I have misremembered the title as "Can distractions be good?" at least five times already.)

Okay I'm also focusing too much on my theory and supporting it. I know Frozen has been used as a metaphor for Depression and/or other mental illnesses, so, maybe that's why Virgil's the focus in the title screen?

WATCHING! Y'know, despite the Jewish thing, I've only ever seen two episodes of The Goldbergs, didn't really get into- YES HELLO THOMAS. What. Is this an actual ad? Why does he sound like a pirate? HA! He acknowledged it. "What the hell is that accent?" Idk, a little Remus, a little midwest?

Okay, that was the opening? Wondering if the red jacket plays any special significance, or they just saw it and bought it.

I like the effects of the A. Virgil is. There already. Hnnnnnm. I dunno, man. This is supposed to be part of the chronological series, right? Oh it's a skeleton onesie! Canon onesie for Virgil!

WOAH EVERYONE! Ooh, Roman's Beast? I wonder if that'd change depending on what show either actual, or character, Thomas is in. They're all there! Different order, too!

OH MY GOSH is this taking place twenty minutes after DWIT? IS THIS DECEIT??? I failed at not pushing my theory, whoops. I'm still suspicious. (Roman's floppy horns.)

Literally nobody believes that you didn't put all Frozen answers in, Ro. "I don't wear those anymore, they're too childish." Still waiting on Logan angst, too… probably after Roman.

"Thomas is in a bad place" Virgil looks uncomfortable, but he also didn't seem so offended when Roman pulled his "twenty minutes ago" line. Well, it's definitely Logan, "Thomas is at home." Haha. Also, Roman's hood falling down was hilarious??

Okay, screw it, I'm pushing this. Virgil did learn last episode that repressing problems isn't the way to deal with them. But I feel like Deceit would also keep pressing for them to acknowledge why he feels bad? Also, Thomas's face, wow, discomfort.

I don't get the "Thomas in the movie" joke, it's a snowflake? "Or neutral." Burn! "This weird ice cutting song." Man, where's the Critic? "Externalization" he had a little smile, guys.

Some Logan vs. Patton tension AND some Logan vs. Roman tension. "Fear will be your enemy." Virgil looked at, Thomas, I think? Damn guys, this might actually be Virgil.

Okay I watched this four times, Virgil and Logan do not shout Joan. And Thomas does it sadly afterwards. "Passage of time," This might actually be Virgil!

I just choked! Oh my gosh, you guys, he is naked my throat hurts from not screaming. I'm having trouble getting over this. This cannot be a shock to anyone, but I want to hear him say "I sleep in the buff" several thousand more times.

"Did I screw everything up" oooh, I was wrong, it's Virgil, but who cares, buff. Thomas is looking at his phone, is it not too late for callback?

WOAH going right for Patton's throat! Ahaha, the tallies were hysterical.

"Why have a ballroom with no balls?" "*snrk*" Don't lie, Thomas, that's hysterical.

Patton's sadness and "without trust issues" hmmm. Shut out [her] whole life, is this supposed to be a comparison to anyone? Logan's "hey, yeah!" Is oddly hilarious.

Is the "he" that Virgil's talking about the director? "Well she really shouldn't be letting go of anymore of her clothing." Oh my gosh.

Oh, today is April 13th! The wedding is at night, so is he already missing the callback? ICE TOILET! Remus, my god. Also, just noting, minus hair and makeup, this is some easy Remus-ing for the crew. They didn't have to deal with the whole outfit.

Good point, Logan! This is not how Roman shows affection! Especially towards Disney! You guys, what if Roman is Deceit?... No, he hasn't been pushing the callback enough. But like. Beast/Prince symbolism? Hm. I'm watching him.

Wait, what the hell party? I, I'm confused, wait he's telling Thomas's friends? That doesn't sound like he's going to the wedding? Who is "he"? If he were missing the wedding, it'd be him talking about Lee and Mary Lee.

Unless he sent someone else to the wedding in his stead? So he could go to the callback? Did he send Deceit? That's. Unlikely. But misrepresenting his side? Idk idk.

"If he lied on purpose." MUSIC! Wait what's this about unsympathetic judgemental jerk? Who are they talking about??? This had better be revealed at the end. I went back, judgemental jerk used twice, and combative compatriot sounds like Deceit, what other "he" is there, but the Sides can't be seen by others, so????????

The music is still going. Rico? Oh, is that the answer? So is this unrelated to the wedding/callback? Okay, party isn't wedding. That was also an incredible act of breath control from Thomas. Standing ovation, dude.

Oooh, the grounding thing! Ice machine! Ice machine is one of my favorite Shorts characters, guys, I love him, he a loud boy. "Deodorant" *excited noise*... oh, no that's fine.

But I mean. Couldn't he do something now? Call or text an apology? Logan "have I mentioned that you called me cool yet" Sanders. Long ice powers list.

I just realized that the voting hat was Deceit's! I- oh, he's just literally off-screen. I'm. Fairly certain that I was wrong now, yes. Virgil hissy. Ha, they didn't want to do Deceit's makeup. Understandable. Oh, is this the animation thing?

"Love is an open wound" ooooh, nice. That was actually a cool re-write. In the buff. Is Thomas legit writing fanfiction now?

I do not like the holiday season, I'm Scrooge. I do love Joan, though! DARK SIDE SWEATERS I would legitimately never wear them. Ever. Because X-mas. But eyeballs and demons.

Logan angst is still incoming.

So, it was tied to the main narrative, but… Virgil wasn't addressed? So, is it just loosely tied, but not necessarily sequentially? It's real cute seeing them all hanging out together like on everyone's fanfics, and that had to be crazy to edit. And hey, the Frozen stuff was better with commentary. But I'm still waiting on SvS part two, I think. And post-DWIT "fallout," but I did really enjoy all of them together being (relatively) cute.

Sorry for being really focused on one theory. And, really, it's not like I'm disappointed with the episode. In and of itself, I liked it. It's just that I was expecting a direct continuation of the last two episodes, which this was not. And that's fine! I just, I hope we get that continuation. Like Thomas said, narrative has been building up for certain things, and they've been waiting on other aspects for a long time, so I'm sure they're even more excited to show them to us as we are to watch them. And have I mentioned editing? Must have been some job to do all that. Really great.

#new video reaction #character!thomas #sanders sides #ts spoilers #patton sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders

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justsomeantifas · 5 years

Text

its 11:59 its still technically tonight so

this is gonna be my reference point to questions abt venezuela, at least regarding things pre- May 19 2019. Its a bit scattered and it may get edited down along the road, but yeah.

short version that draws some similar conclusions: https://www.salon.com/2019/05/17/the-plot-to-kill-venezuela_partner/

one difference in scales that’s important to keep in mind: the lifespan of people is 2-7 decades. the lifespan of colonialism lasts centuries. the lifespan of media memory is a couple years, tops.

Most western narratives of venezuela start meaningfully at chavez, which is a mistake. The focus point in history around which the country flowed was the Caracazo. You probably already know about this, but a massive uprising took place in the heart of Caracas, against decades of dictatorship both formal and informal, after severe instability in the global oil market. The people were hungry, the riots were fiery, and the bullets bled. knows the death toll even now, but its estimated well into the thousands. This happened pre-chavez, and started a cascade of events which brought him into limelight that you can read about here. not gonna go into more venezuelan history, but i talk a bit more here

chavez was democratically elected, multiple times.

in 2002, after his first democratic election, he was kidnapped by US-backed troops and replaced by someone who threw out the 1999 constitution, which was as legitimate as any other made in venezuela’s colonial and violently capitalist history, seeing as it was the first (aka only, so far) of 26 constitutions actually approved by popular referendum. He was reinstated largely due to massive protests in support of him. Maduro however doesn’t really have as much of the charisma and support of chavez, which is creating problems - as well as exacerbating problems created by the economic crises ramping up just around chavez’s death. In 2015, there were elections to the National Assembly, which ended up with the Opposition winning a majority of the seats (which does show that there’s some degree of fairness in the elections, at least verifiably up til that point, yet that isnt rly accounted for when western media describes it as “undemocratic” - many of whom don’t apply the same scrutiny to their own country: such as this UN Human Rights councilor who also happens to be the crown prince of british-iraq, currently residing in the noted democracy of the Kingdom of Jordan, which has no vested interest or control over any particular export of Venezuela.).

This turnout showed most of all that maduro had alienated as many as 2 million of his supporters, who didnt end up voting (though many also voted against him - trying to act on their feeling that whatever they want, its “not this”). This decreasing support also accelerates whats known as “Everyday Sabotage” - people not trusting in the government, and look out for their own interests contra everyone else. This is a danger inherent to tying “Socialism” to a primarily state project.

However 1999 Constitution was never meant as an eternal document & it created mechanisms to call for new popular constitutional referendums to be held. That’s what the “Constituent Assembly” is about, which is what a lot of the western world is describing as him singlehandedly rewriting it (while also being “vague about its contents”), or “created by him”. Elections to the constituent assembly were boycotted by opposition, so that it would be government controlled & look like a sham in the eyes of the broader world. That being said, the assembly was called both as a reaction to losing election but also in response to intensifying crises - it was put forth (i don’t see any reason to believe in bad faith) as a way to come together and figure out how to address the needs that were driving people to protest - to address the desire for “not this”, but bc of the uncertainty, it was easily twistable by reactionaries by putting all emphasis on the former. Also timing corresponds with increasing fears of maduro straying from the path of chavez, the image of scrapping one of his strongest plays for smth unknown is risky - tho if there are other meaningful options given the situation im not sure. And the body’s got at least as much constitutional legitimacy as Guaido (Chapter III)

The 1999 constitution also enabled a recall election to be called against maduro in 2016, bc it was written with particular attention to holding public officials accountable - similar noble commitments helped to end the presidency of Rousseff & bring in Bolsonaro (who was also one of the people spurring on the investigations and whipping up a social base).

(speaking of guaido & bolsonaro)

on Guaido:

part of student group in 2007 protesting against non-renewal of coup-assisting network, who the CFR (one of the major think tanks of the cold war still playing a big role in foreign policy today) considered “most important network”

close friend of Leopoldo Lopez, the aforementioned coup plotter.

politician since 2010, won a couple small elections

Unknown to majority of general population until 2019, most venezuelans surveyed didnt know him

Plan Pais

plans to privatize state owned industry & allow investment from foreign oil companies

center-right neoliberal draped in platitudes of “stability”, “revitalization”, “security”, and “rescue” - a message seemingly deliberately targeted to become more and more resonant with increased sanctions.

/on Guaido

governing is about the expression of power. I wanna live in a world where that power isn’t expressed, but as long as the exploitation of the global working class continues unabated, id prefer some of that power be put towards helping the poor.

there is no such thing as a static state of affairs, there’s no “goldilocks zone” out in the political universe where we tweak things finely until we find whats best for everyone, only different rates of change in different dimensions. what we need to do is figure out how we can push that state of affairs in a direction so that everyday people have the power to take control of their lives. re

re: “constitutionality” - if the supreme court calls it constitutional then its constitutional. period. There’s no such thing as a supreme court as an “independent branch” of government, but there are different degrees of integration into the rest of it.

The Supreme Tribunal of Venezuela has 32 members, (a bit more than a dozen put in by the national assembly, while the PSUV held it), and the opposition holds abt 3 away from a supermajority. Each member of the court holds their spot for 12 years. If that’s “The Most Corrupt In The World” according to Transparency International, i wonder what world the 9-person lifetime-appointed US Supreme Court (2 of which appointed by trump, and save for pulling a Weekend At Ginsbergs, likely 3) is on. In fact, one of the tactics that the more radical circles of democrat voters are putting forward is to pack the Supreme Court. Because thats how shit actually gets done, or at the least how shit is prevented from being committed w the stamp of legality. FDR learned that lesson too, in trying to pass what is today known as “The New Deal”

My comparisons to trump are for specific end: these actions are exerted on levers of liberal democracy, and every single liberal democracy is susceptible to them in some ways.

whats a “dictator”? if hes unelected, the millions of people who participated in the elections dont seem to think so. if maduro is a dictator, then what is donald trump? the majority of ppl didnt vote for him yet hes still governing. macron’s popularity has at several points been less than 1/3, and the yellow vest protestors have been violently attacked - why is he not “a violent dictator with only the support of the military”? These terms are not neutral.

“their elections are highly flawed” So What? show me a country whose elections arent.

“opposition jailed” - ok but coup plotters don’t get off easy in any liberal democracy. If someone - say Bernie Sanders - said “enough is enough” and succeeded in overthrowing the current government with the help of a foreign government…. you think they’d let him go free? what if ten years later he was getting his supporters all riled up to do it again? how long you think he’d be in jail for (assuming he can survive well into his 100’s)? You think more than 13 years? Think he’d get house arrest? Some US states lock you up for posessing weed up to 10. If you stay long enough around this blog, youll find plenty of other examples of much more cruel and unusual punishments. Look at Chelsea Manning, look at Oscar Riviera… look at the US protestors saying Guaido is illegitimate

what we have to keep in mind most of all, is to show that the contradictions being exploited are inherent to Liberalism. Contradictions are just expressed most freely at the margins - the interstices

poor economic decisions happen everywhere - 2008/2009 still affecting the entire world there’s violence thats “natural”, and violence thats “intolerable”. The dividing line is whether we have anything to gain by changing things.

sanctions: started under obama, originally targeted specific individuals, used as precedent for more generalized. They’re indirect - they have a “squeezing effect”, takes already-existing problems & just makes them markedly worse. also doesn’t necessarily correlate with emigration, bc it takes a lot of money to start a new life somewhere else, and sanctions disproportionately affect the poor.

war wouldnt likely look like (many) US boots on the ground - we’ve got plenty of other places to be. It’d look like guns being smuggled to counter-protestors. It’d look like sending resources to neighboring countries like Colombia or Brazil who would then use their troops. Colombias ruling party is right wing populists - much of current president’s campaign was run on fearmongering abt venezuelan socialism - they’re raring to go. It’d look like drones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracas_drone_attack. Also means there likely won’t be a sudden trigger, its a gradually escalating stressful gradually-more-warlike situation.

If war does break out - where would the refugees go? In reality the majority would go to Colombia, but if anything significant breaks out there will be a stream of those looking to find shelter in the US, which has advertised itself as a beacon of hope - what would happen to them? some may get taken in as a gesture of showmanship, but nowhere close to the majority.

speaking of the US - imagine if trump and bolton manage to actually plot a winning coup. Do you think that that wont be his main bullwark against ppl like Bernie? you think the media and rest of the democratic party wont jump on that narrative and “begrudgingly” support a fascist because the alternative might mean supporting single payer and not-having-good-for-ratings-climate-apocalypse?

another term thrown around without regard is “once vibrant” - for whom?

most articles ive seen just take this as an axiom, and dont find any cognitive dissonance when also saying chavez reduced poverty hugely.

The answer to that rhetorical question: Citgo is venezuelan, before chavez none of the wealth went back to venezuela - thats what “vibrancy” means.

many similarities with BP (the-artist-formerly-known-as-the-anglo-iranian-oil-company)

in age of climate change & vocal ppl about phasing out oil, the more one’s livelihood is connected to oil, the more unstable ones country will be - either that, or the more instability ones country will cause.

“Oil exports fell by $2,200 per capita from 2012 to 2016, of which $1,500 was due to the decline in oil prices.”

The drop in price that affected the venezuelan economy so much in 2014 was largely by US shale fracking

in 1970’s Chile, copper was the main product of Chile - allende nationalized the mines, and in return wall street dropped the

(also worth noting that venezuela’s got non-insignificant untapped shale basins)

At least venezuela used the oil money to fund social programs instead of like, pad the pockets of Raytheon.

also oil price wars in africa highly correlated w oil (whose annual production doesn’t even combined total venezuelas)

a couple ppl have raised concerns abt my strong stance on equivocal dismissal - if there’s a difference, if there’s some way of reading your statement that says “X country that the State Dept wants to invade is an anomoly in the otherwise free world”, then that’s acting to push the discourse towards normalization & invasion. It’s not “whataboutism”, just basic consistency.

now more than ever, narratives are affected by people. They may not be ones we had a hand in forging, but the way that we propagate them actually does have measurable effects on the larger-scale political outcomes. Always look for the base assumptions, as well as the direction

sure denounce Chavez. sure denounce Maduro. denounce Kim, Xi, Castro, anyone. But if there’s no equally or proportionally loud denunciations of the horrors perpetrated by allies - the “assumed”, “natural” violence, then you’re acting to reinforce the narrative of exceptionalism.

Just make sure after you take a breath, you denounce Saudi Arabia & Yemen, Israel for Palestine, the conditions which brought Argentinian/Brazillian, Brazilian coup, the US for Puerto Rico, the conditions which have murdered dozens of journalists in Mexico per year…

what people want most of all is stability. “A debate over whether it is mismanagement and corruption by the Maduro government or the sanctions that are the author of the crisis is largely irrelevant. The point is that a combination of the reliance on oil revenues and the sanctions policy has crushed the policy space for any stability in the country.”

government’s errors and tensions

fixed exchange rate -> black market

took 5 years to address changing relation between dollar & BsF, all the room between those two curves left a huge room for intensifying crises, though since it also corresponds with the death of chavez, it sorta makes sense.

antidemocratic actions and remarks by maduro

scattered responses filled w half-solutions

diversification needed, but how do you diversify an economy filled with rampant poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy…

(nominally begrudging) support for mineral extraction 12.4% of territory opened to extraction - “Special Economic Zone” as a method of managing decay

this is also what much of the reality of “economic diversification” looks like

not enough socialism. (even fox agrees!) Venezuela shows the limits of Social Democracy in countries living outside of the Imperial Core - esp the dangers if you’re in the crosshairs already bc of oil

started out as populism, gradually grew as confronted more. shows shaping influence on political organs from actions of foreign actors - if you’ve survived a coup before, you’re gonna become paranoid about any more of them - especially when the coup plotters say “hey lets do more coups”

also shows the weakness of only having a small number of charasmatic faces representing the movement - if one dies and theres no clear and popular replacement, then you’ll lose ppl who were largely brought in by the charisma, weakening your political project, and creating cracks for reactionary forces to take advantage of - especially in times of transition.

bourgeoisie still control a majority of the economy. Capitalist businesses are internally unaccountable, and in this age of intensified global trade, one can punish countries for straying from the pack by moving business & focus away. If you’re looking for dictatorships, look at the thousands of private companies run as dictatorships daily

capital flight is a real effect, precisely because socialism is fundamentally and irreconcilably against the self-interest of the bourgeoisie. not necessarily against the interest of the humans-who-are-also-bourgeois, but of the impersonal self-sustaining force of capital.

Have you ever pulled something out of an electrical socket, and seen a quick spark? The reason that occurs is bc of what’s called an induction current, which is a fancy physics word for flowing electricity not liking to suddenly change its flow. If you accidentally touch that spark, you might feel it, but youll live to tell the tale. But if you only take the plug out halfway & touch it, that’s a different story. Capital flows similarly.

my country (lithuania) has been facing sky-high emigration since the collapse of the USSR (with an added boost after 08-09), we have also consistently had one of the highest suicide rates in the world (#7), a minimum wage of about 3 Euros an hour (after a recent increase), as well as one of the highest prison populations in Europe (discounting Russia & Belarus… which like….)

when are we gonna be invaded? when will the US media talk about our pain?

oh wait, they did. We cried all pretty for the TV cameras, then they got a bozo nobody really knew of to denounce the government, who they called dictatorial (though it was far from ideal, massive bureaucracies dont tend to mix well with single-person-decision-making). And to be fair, the fact that the government was unpopular wasnt entirely undeserved. But what was promised to us was the idea of “Freedom”, “Free Enterprise”; to “Get Rid of Corruption” and institute “Real” Democracy". They said we’d be integrated into the glorious capitalist west, and we understood that to mean that we’d be in the position of a Germany, or at least an Austria or smth. But they never meant to integrate us into the imperial Core, we have always been seen as part of the Periphery - the “assumed” violence that “naturally” happens.

Then we got to where we our today. Some of the stuffs more available, but expensive. Most of the bureaucracy’s still around, it just helps fewer people. We stand as an example of what to expect, in one of the best case scenarios, you would join our emigrees now making up a significant percentage of underpaid house-servants aka maids across the EU.

if we want the people of Venezuela to be healthy, safe, and fulfilled, then:

speak out and pointing to the effects of US sanctions is incredibly important. They’ve already killed 40,000 people in the last year, and 300,000 more are in extreme danger (and millions more in long-term risk).

what does it mean when you simultaneously sanction trade with a place but also demand they let you give them humanitarian aid?

if there is to be action taken by the international community, then the US has forfeited its right to speak. They threw it away once in 2002, and obama rhetorically picked it up and dusted it off so that trump could throw it in a bigger dumpster, thats also on fire. However we also still live in a world deeply shaped by US Hegemony, so the opinions of its close trade partners & closest-knit media buds should be seen as influenced as such. Doesn’t mean that theyre wrong on everything too, but they still feel the magnetic pull of the US economy and ecosystem (as well as their own potentially imperial interests) and the effect of that force cannot be discounted.

transitioning our economies away from oil & away from globalized neoliberalism which only values peripheral states by their exports - dissolves tensions of how to produce in unproductive terrain

socialize medicine in the US, so that drug companies run by dictatorships can’t control their lives & ours. healthcare is especially reliant on imports, sanctions affect especially strongly.

normalize the ideas of Socialism, without taking the easy way out of “oh no dont think of Venezuela, think of sweden or denmark”. None of them are Socialist, but to avoid the complexities of Venezuela is to imagine that US attempts at socialism wouldn’t involve significant capital flight. If we don’t consider that, if we don’t have solid actionable plans to deal with that, while also facing the inherent complexity of changing material conditions, then we’re gonna waste whatever shot we get.

redirect conversation normally centered around government towards support of the tens of thousands of small business co-operatives, where people live their daily lives in a democratic manner.

on The Communes:

“delegating responsibility throughout all members, and bringing important decisions to the whole to work through and find the best possible solution… They create “collective criteria” together; agreements stipulating whether individuals have power over certain decisions or whether it is up to the whole group. However, he assures that these “are not rigid, they can change at any moment.” The cooperative I lived with in Venezuela had regular organizational meetings where they informally came to agreement and were even able to come back to re-evaluate decisions that didn´t seem to be satisfactory for the whole group in this same way. Decisions and decision making, in this way, are viewed as a process not contained by meetings and discussions in board rooms, but are always being analyzed and made better by the process of putting them into action, and not only by thinking them out and writing them down.”

- the “Self Government of the Producers” - aka what it looks like for cooks to govern.

they have communal councils as well - neighborhood councils in the same vein that so many (rightfully) find inspiring in Kurdistan . They preexisted chavez, but they were able to proliferate and be given legal recognition through him. I understand that legal recognition can act to ‘name’ a body & pin it to smth that doesn’t match its requisite variety - how dynamic it is, but imo as its currently legislated it recognizes a good amount of the autonomy that they had already been excersizing. - liable to change government recognition of co-ops has drawbacks too, and correlates negatively with that coop’s success

"A good example of this intention is the de-emphasis that cooperatives in Venezuela put on advertising or “marketing” products, and instead push to find more people to become part of the cooperative, and choose the services or products they provide based on community decisions about what is needed. A cooperative I worked in […] was originally a family owned and operated theater group that traveled around the country performing theater pieces that highlighted social and environmental issues. When they joined the […] cooperative, the larger co-op did an analysis and decided they wanted a natural fruit juice concentrate producer and gave the group a loan to acquire capital and start producing. They have been doing this for only a couple of years now but have already paid back the loan to the larger cooperative and are bringing extra money in to support themselves, better their services, and supply extra funds to the larger cooperative for community projects such as the recently [2012] built community health center…

The cooperative services I experienced and learned about in Venezuela were health, dental, food, and a separate example of trash services. A dental cooperative […] provides quality dental services (I know because I used them) almost every day for affordable prices. You don´t have to be a member of the cooperative, and you don´t have to make an appointment. It takes only a couple of hours, and emergency situations are treated with urgency. The health center, built with funds provided by all the associated cooperatives[…], works the same way. Anyone can go there, the services are subsidized by the cooperative so they are affordable, the clinic and workspaces are clean and well taken care of, and the quality of the service is great. Worker-members of the cooperative receive health care at the facility without charge except for the massage and acupuncture services that they also provide at a really low price.

[…] food services are priced to provide more access to food for the community in which it exists. The original and persistent intention is to make the best situation for people on all ends of the process. The producers are part of the cooperative and are part of the group that decides the prices that growers get, as well as the prices that the food is sold for. This means that both farmers and workers at the market decide what to charge a person, which ultimately affects how much money the growers receive, as well as if the food is affordable for the people who need to eat who live in the city. In a normal capitalist market system these parties are separated and put up against each other, raising prices for consumers and lowering them for small producers, excluding those people from getting enough money to afford all the necessities that are typically only provided at a high price.

One communal council, a parallel governing organization of community members linked to investment funds from the national government, in the city of Merida, Venezuela organized themselves to get funds to buy a trash collection truck. The truck at the time was used for a specific waste removal project that removed waste from their community regularly but was not a traditional collection service. However, they did have plans to expand the project to start their own collection service, and this would be provided by the commal council, an anti-capitalist organization which does not require people to pay for the service. Although this is not a “co-operative” as some hardliner co-operative enthusiasts might point out, it is a horizontal anti-capitalist organization widening access of necessary services to the larger community run by community members; following cooperative values of equity, inclusion, and solidarity I believe this to be an example of cooperative economics and action. It appears to me that economic inclusion is much more likely to widen only when those who are being excluded are included in the process of organizing the services and are in control of the economy.“

until the communes, workers cooperatives, and the like are strong enough to rule themselves, having Maduro in power is the only option given to us which doesn’t trigger the control of reactionaries. People make their own history, but not in situations of their choosing - the exact outcome isn’t predetermined, but there’s only a limited number of poles - gravitational attractors - towards which that trajectory is heading at any particular time.

if maduro acts to squash the power of the communes, then thats a different situation. but until that point, we outside of the country must work to center any discussion on these bodies - they are the heart of the country and of whatever social revolution has occurred/is further possible. They are filled with lessons for us to learn from, and show how rich and dynamic the organized populace can be if they are allowed to control their communities. (ex of dealing with gang violence from @ 22:50)

This is all said with recognition that many chavistas have acted against communes, the bureaucratic machine acts to co-opt much of their energy, its linguistically obscured the concept of "ownership” with that of “control”, and that the state has changed its messages over time. But the heart of the communes is what’s a priority, and they have acted against the government overstepping its bounds & mis-identifying them. But whats important is that there’s a feedback process in the gvt to actually allow them to assert their autonomy. Liberals will do their utmost to close those channels.

If Guaido and the Popular Will take control of power, be assured that whatever gains made in organizing the everyday people of Venezuela will be at the top of the chopping block. How effective that suppression turns out to be is undetermined - it might turn out to strengthen the communes, but that outcome would be damage control, not something to try and bullseye.

Effective Propaganda knows that its more effective to control what’s left out than control what’s put in. Keep that in mind, and study trajectories and forces.

other links:

https://next.podbay.fm/podcast/1363342644/e/1551711604

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voc08vh9cJY

https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/a-cowboy-in-caracas/

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/the-tragedy-of-venezuela/

https://www.multpl.com/venezuela-gdp

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/fivethirtyeights-venezuela-problem

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-venezeulas-middle-class-is-taking-to-the-streets/

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bjkmq8/fiery-protest-leader-leopoldo-lopez-faces-13-year-sentence-in-venezuela

https://potent.media/minimum-sentencing-for-marijuana-possession

https://www.thoughtco.com/core-and-periphery-1435410

https://popularresistance.org/building-the-commune-radical-democracy-in-venezuela/

http://www.antiwar.com/regions/regions.php?c=Venezuela

#venezuela #reference #imperialism #chavez #maduro #socialism #capitalism #extraction #oil #war #emigrant #communes #cooperatives

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naruhearts · 5 years

Note

OKAY SO I've just spent the best part of an hour scrolling through your blog and reading a bunch of your destiel meta and I HAD to message you... I was one of the many people who STRONGLY believed destiel had a chance of being canon after season 8 (more like season gr8 am i right), but throughout the years I slowly lost all hope. However, S14 has made me 110% invested in the show again and YOUR META IS GIVING ME HOPE FOR DESTIEL, which is TERRIFYING. Your writing is wonderful and I'm STRESSED.

Got back from Washington late last night!

Oh my gosh @alovelikecas, your message really made my day and I’m SO glad you enjoy my meta xox (even when most of my meta looks like, to me, sloppy-ass writing, haha! I’ll probably make an end-season meta post after 14x20 — if I have the time — that touches upon SPN’s current and repeating themes since Season New Beginnings S12/Dabb Era, not to mention I have, like, some more unfinished meta in my drafts >.>)

Yeah I mean, I didn’t join Destiel land until Summer 2016, and before that, I was late to the Season 11 party, so I basically had no narrative context for anything, and I’ll copy-paste what I said here:

Looking back, one significant thing I recall? S11 gave me a sense of Destiel’s true narrative validity (as not a ‘fanon’ ship but organically developed in the canon) when I perceived it as a season that was ‘missing something’. Keep in mind I had no idea about Destiel yet while watching S11 at the time.

I was literally asking myself — repeatedly — why Dean/Amara seemed to contain odd narrative holes, considering A. Dean explicitly said that the non-consensual attraction he felt for Amara was NOT love and “it scares him”, B. Amara told Dean that ‘something stops you - keeps you from having it all’, C. Djinn!Amara stated that she can: ‘feel the love [Dean] feels, except it’s cloaked in shame,’ and D. Mildred’s iconic ‘You’re pining for someone’ —> which did not logically correlate with A and C, meaning: since Dean doesn’t freely love Amara and thus isn’t possibly pining for her — with female love interests as currently non-existent (I remember crossing off the dead/gone girls on a piece of paper lol) — who the hell was he pining for, then?

Originally posted by elizabethrobertajones

Obviously, without writing long-ass paragraphs of meta about it again in this post, S11 made sense as soon as I watched it within the Destiel context (especially after I read up on some grandiose pieces of Destiel meta (@charlie-minion was the very first person who inspired me to write meta; I followed her once I joined the fandom Oh my god, here we go, holy crap this subtext – I’m invested in this godforsaken ship because they’re in love with each other and I’m not getting off any time soon. The rest is history.

I’m aware that I do come off as positive (and I’m still Destiel-positive; whatever happens in 14x20 this week may or may not change that), but I hope you don’t mind if I use your lovely ask as an additional opportunity to clarify my meta standpoint: no one’s saying Destiel WILL become text.

The general Destiel meta community (all subfactions: Destiel-positive, -negative, -neutral, and in-between) is not the Most Holy Canon Word, and we aren’t SPN writers, and again, we can’t actually speak to the veracity of Destiel as guaranteed-gonna-go-textual, but we — a diverse pool of critical thinkers from all walks of life: particularly those who have some degree of experience in literary academia/English literature studies (fun fact: I was actually pursuing a Minor’s in English until I changed my mind - my first love’s Health Science/Biology, which I stuck with, but here I am doing lit-crit analysis on the side *wink*) — can speak to the veracity of Destiel as a real, palpable, and ever-substantial long-running romance narrative aka the love story between Dean and Cas IS THERE. I see it. We all see it. We didn’t pluck it out of the random ether one day. It naturally evolved across the show’s overarching narrative like some vast spiderweb, linked together by numerous character arc amalgamations of Dean Winchester and Castiel as separate individuals who were then brought together — who brought themselves together, by the sheer force of free will and choice — and are now inherent parts of the other’s story (and respective character progression).

I say this too many times to count: the entire point of writing meta? Personally, it enables me to appreciate the literary gorgeousness of Dean and Cas’ relationship as, first and foremost, a tentative alliance offset by the very moment Cas raised Dean from perdition (it’s a poetic beginning). Their alliance then inevitably proliferated into a rocky — at times, necessarily turbulent — friendship, then a deep profound bond…one that crossed platonic boundaries since S7/8 and is, ultimately, indelibly rooted in romance. Together, Dean and Cas build up each other’s strengths, complement each other’s flaws, and narratively motivate the other to self-introspect — to become the best version of themselves that they were always meant to be: self-actualized entities who let go of their painful, horrifying, psychologically/emotionally destitute pasts.

These above reasons and more are why I think Destiel belongs right up there on the shelf of Ye Olde Classics, similar to epics by John Milton, Shakespearian tragic dramas, Homeric characteristic cruxes, and the great Odyssey journey: a legendary journey, fraught with circumstance, that finally ended with Odysseus (now an enlightened man) returning to Penelope, the love of his life.

Channeling the scope of Homer’s Odyssey, Destiel is an incredible storytelling feat of obstacles, both internal and external, romance tropes, mirroring, foreshadowing, and visual cadence/emotion, enhancing SPN’s already character-driven main plot in that Dean and Cas try to make it back to one another; like Penelope, their love holds true despite everything. If Destiel were an M/F couple, we all know their love story would be absolutely undeniable to the GA.

I do understand the bitterness S14’s fostered in some viewers, though. I do understand that Dean and Cas seem distant (and yeah, it’s a noticeable difference compared to S12/S13), but I believe the Destiel subtext is still heavy and holds steady.

Right now, at this point, there remains multiple personal issues for the characters to solve, you know? Dean and Cas aren’t talking properly; their love languages stay mistranslated, although we’re persistently shown that they still understand each other on a certain level that no one else can, and the visual narrative keeps framing them as on-the-nose solid counterparts: a domestic-spousal romantic unit independent of Sam.

Originally posted by incatastrophicmind

They want to be there for the other. They need to quash the final remnants of their respective internal loathing (Dean’s self-worthiness, Cas’ self-expendability) before they’re able to give the other 100% of their time, efforts, attention, and love (as flawed and complicated but compellingly beautiful as it can possibly be). During the times Dean and Cas do try to talk shit out, extraneous issues continue to get between them.

As other friends/meta pals discussed with me, S14 is like S10 in that it’s confusing the cast/audiences. And exactly: S8, besides S11/S12/early S13, also belongs in the close-to-canon serious Destiel narrative transition! I can discuss the showrunning/writer problem of SBL (Singer + Bucklemming; @occamshipper hits the nail on the head) that tugs subtext – especially subtext linked to Destiel – back and forth, sometimes in the weirdest nonsensical ways, but I won’t go too far into it here. I agree, however, with the recent idea that Jensen does seem a bit confused as to where he should bring Dean emotionally this season (don’t get me wrong, I do NOT believe Dean is OOC; OOC is a completely different concept vs expected character behaviour). And if Dean’s consistently romance-coded past interactions with Cas are any indication, Jensen would also — in the same vein as all of us — want Dean and Cas to start getting their shit together. Long-running fictional characters like Dean and Cas, conceived over 10 years, are so well-written to the point where you, the author, can predict what they’ll do even if you just plop both of them inside a room and give them no direction, and I personally feel that nowadays Jensen is prevented from achieving Dean’s further internal growth/unsure how to act in the moment because of some dumb SBL scripts saying one thing while his character’s heart says another. Wank aside—

Season 15 should hopefully convey a much more logical subtextual perspective e.g. unbelievably amazingly cohesive Season Destiel 11 that aired after choppy S10. Not all hope is lost!! I also want to clarify that I personally LOVED Season 14 in general. It’s been mostly Emotion-centric constant, with Yockey, Berens, Perez, and Dabb usually making my top-rank SPN writer list.

Currently the narrative’s still allowing pretty significant (imho) wiggle room for the lovers to fracture apart and get back together, where their miscommunication comes to a dramatic head. We just saw Dean and Cas argue over Jack’s well-being in 14x18 and 19. Dean — besides putting Cas at the top of his You’re-Dead-to-Me-Because-You-Lied-but-I-Still-Love-You-Goddammit hitlist (for clear spousal-coded reasons) and taking Cas’ actions to heart (he’s the person he trusted the most who lied to him) — no doubt blamed himself for what happened, and Sam was, like I said, the mouthpiece of truth. TFW were all culpable. They all failed Jack in some way, shape, or form.

I’m not expecting anything for 14x20, but I’m nervous either way! Thanks for sticking with my long answer

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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In yet another sign of our tortured political moment, the most meaningful civic discussion currently raging is being waged not by our elected officials, spiritual leaders, novelists or celebrities, but by two writers engaged in what may appear to be an intramural intellectual quibble in niche publications.

It began last week when Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, took to the journal First Things to point out what he believed was wrong much of American conservatism, a bundle of self-contradictory tics embodied, he argued, by National Review writer and dedicated Never Trumper David French. It didn’t take long for French to jab right back. A host of other pugilists, including New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, soon entered the arena, framing the argument in personal, sometimes quasi-slanderous terms.

…

Even worse, today’s social justice warriors, Ahmari continued, see any dissent from their dogmas as an inherent assault. “They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human,” Ahmari wrote, “lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” This means that no real discussion is possible—the only thing a true conservative can do is, in Ahmari’s pithy phrase, “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

…

Almost immediately, French delivered his riposte. Ahmari’s call to arms, he wrote in his response, betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both our national moment and our national character. “America,” French wrote, “will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.”

Which means that civility is not a secondary value but the main event, the measure of most, if not all, things. Bret Stephens agreed: In his column in The New York Times, he called Ahmari—who was born Muslim in Tehran and had found his path to Catholicism—“an ardent convert” and a “would-be theocrat” who, inflamed with dreams of the divine will, had failed to understand that it was precisely the becalmed civilities of “value-neutral liberalism” that has made his brave journey from Tehran to the New York Post possible.

…

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

…

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

…

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

…

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

…

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

…

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American.

Which is why American Jews, too—whether they identify as liberals or conservatives—would do well to take this squabble seriously. The liberalism that American Jews have defended so ardently, the reason so many of us ended up voting for the left and supporting organizations like the ACLU and cheering on firebrands like Bella Abzug, was geared to secure precisely the values and rights that Ahmari champions, without which it would have been impossible for us to survive, let alone thrive, as immigrants to a white, Christian-majority culture.

A religious minority cannot expect to last very long in a society, like the one the progressive left advocates, that is allergic to tradition and intolerant of dissent. Only in an America that takes faith seriously, that respects and empowers community, and that shudders at any attempt to censor wrong beliefs and incorrect thinking, can Jews hope to thrive.

#liel leibovitz #tablet magazine #sohrab ahmari #david french

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

While the mainstream press has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, digital media appears to be stuck in a Wild West phase. It seems that Facebook is constantly running into trouble, from reports of data being mined without our consent to moral panics about foreign agents hacking Western democracy and hate crime caused by fake news. Yet as the world’s largest social media platform faces a series of crises, the opportunity has opened up to discuss its regulation.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made a bold move onto this terrain on August 23 in a major intervention in which he announced “a series of radical ideas to build a free and democratic media for the digital age.” In a speech in Edinburgh, he outlined his vision of democratizing both the publicly owned BBC and commercial journalism. He called for taxes on tech giants and internet service providers in order to help level the playing field between the digital monopolists and public-service media.

This call for media reform was a paradigm shift — particularly at a time when the power of firms like Facebook draws rising skepticism. Today privacy violations, the panic over Russian troll farms, and concern over social media’s impact on mental health have all dented public trust in Facebook, and indeed its previously spectacular share price growth. And if in 2010 the film The Social Network cast Zuckerberg as a flawed yet forgivable genius, his recent congressional hearing was met by memes portraying him as a grasping tycoon with a robot smile.

For years governments have seemed scared of challenging the tech giants, refusing either to tax or regulate the new platforms which presented themselves in a near-magical aura. But Corbyn’s speech represents a breakthrough in the public debate on new media. Once apparently the domain of free-spirited libertarians, Silicon Valley is fast becoming a chief concern for states and governments. As social media monopolies are increasingly politicized, other proposals like introducing democratic oversight over the biggest platforms can offer a way to take control over sites that have become public utilities in all but name.

The Internet Ideology

If Britain’s Labour Party and others are finally breaking with the glorification of Silicon Valley’s libertarian ideals, it is also worth asking why this did not happen sooner. Facebook’s promise for dissenting voices has long been its capacity to bypass traditional media. Social media is, seemingly, a gift for whoever wants to challenge the establishment bias of traditional outlets. From the Left’s perspective, it has been credited with an important role in the rise of both Corbyn in the UK and democratic socialists in the US, able to break through the veil of media silence, or attacks. Yet this has, in its own way, also fed the myth that the Internet is a non-hierarchical, decentralized space; an idea which the digital monopolists frequently hide behind.

The mystique of the new tech giants allows them to skirt around the regulation governing traditional press. A founding myth of the Internet depicts a world in which start-ups grow out of dorm rooms and garages to become global platforms, advancing the creativity and connectivity of humanity. The ideological force driving this narrative is the idea that freedom of expression online is sacred — a principle enshrined in US law. But this also means that social media is not regulated like other media. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ensures that providers of an “interactive computer service” will not be treated as the publisher of content held by the service. Zuckerberg invoked this very point in July when he eschewed Facebook’s responsibility for controlling posts on the platform that denied the Holocaust.

Nonetheless, recent controversies have suggested that Facebook is anything but “neutral.” In a bid to combat so-called “fake news,” Facebook hasproudly taken a lead from US intelligence agencies in removing “inauthentic” pages, groups, and accounts. Yet in a context where less than a handful of private businesses dominate social media, Facebook can take decisions that shape the world’s biggest public sphere, with zero democratic oversight. Banning a far-right conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones may draw cries of “good riddance.” But banning the Latin American network TeleSUR, pro-Palestinian pages, and pro-Kurdish content gives a new and yet familiar imperialist slant to Facebook’s pronounced humanitarian and democratizing ideals.

At the same time, recent changes to Facebook’s newsfeed — reducing content considered to be passive, rather than interactive, in a bid to sustain use of the platform — has troubled activists who have come to depend on Facebook for publishing alternative views. These changes have underscored the site’s other monopolizing practices, such as forcing mobile users to reach content outside of Facebook via an internal browser; the browser is so slow that users frequently turn back, the better to interact on the platform itself.

A Monopoly Interest

It is, then, increasingly clear that Facebook is far from a neutral space in which users’ timelines are organically shaped by their networked interactions. Facebook is a publisher; it’s just a giant monopolistic one, driven at base by market incentives. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, at its core, the tech giant’s “business is mundane: They’re ad brokers.” Indeed, as liberals focus the debate on user privacy and data harvesting they obscure the capitalist logics driving these practices, and what the alternatives might look like when data and global connectivity are free from private control.

It is spurious to respond to legitimate criticisms of Facebook by saying we can simply opt out if we don’t like it, or, like the Adam Smith Institute claims, that what Corbyn is saying amounts to a call to waste public money on building a “knockoff” alternative. Precisely Facebook’s biggest strength (also for users) is its critical mass; we use it because “everyone” is there and because we don’t want to — and in some cases, can’t afford to – “miss out.” Facebook functions as a public utility by sharing a mass of information and connecting as many users as possible. Its critical mass makes it a natural monopoly and that alone is bound to undermine users’ freedom of choice. But far from it thereby simply serving a public interest, it is governed by a business model centered on advertising, decisive to everything we see and do on the platform. This incentive drives the addictive logic behind the algorithms which determine whether you see more kitten pratfalls, a meme about Palestine, or a post from an old friend.

Despite Silicon Valley’s humanist pretentions, fundamentally Facebook is about getting as many people using the platform as often as possible. The longer you stay, the more ads Facebook can deliver. The more Facebook can collect data on your interactions, the more targeted, and thus valuable, those ads can be. If an already saturated Western market and the costs of self-regulation (assumed to be better than overbearing, and slow, state enforcement) might affect Facebook’s share price, it remains true that every single active user in the US and Canada was worth $97 to Facebook over the last year, or $23 in Europe. If you didn’t already know, for tech giants like Facebook you are the product — and that’s how much you’re worth.

Just like a traditional publisher, Facebook is clearly shaping what its 2.2 billion active users see. But instead of paying to produce content, Facebook gets it free from its users and other publishers. And instead of real editors, it depends an army of algorithms that are fine-tuned to keep you hooked.

A Socialist Social Media

Facebook falls far short of realizing the Internet’s true potential. Its capacity for global connectivity and the power of big data — which could be used for advancing human progress in infinite ways — is mobilized for one simple purpose: profit.

But what’s the alternative? Well, Corbyn’s proposals centered on redistributing profits from the tech giants and towards public-service media are a bold start. His vision of a British Digital Corporation is wedded to the UK’s paternalist tradition of social democracy, where “independent” journalism is thought to be a public good. But Corbyn’s speech also went a little further than this, suggesting an alternative that “could develop new technology for online decision-making and audience-led commissioning of programs and even a public social media platform with real privacy and public control over the data that is making Facebook and others so rich.”

Like the BBC itself, a social-democratic alternative to Facebook will face challenges. Facebook has enormous political influence and an industrious capacity to avoid tax. Determining what market Facebook operates in and providing a definition of what a digital monopoly actually is, present big legal challenges to taxation. Moreover, when the logic of capitalist competition is applied to media, public alternatives will struggle in an aggressive market for popular attention. Alternatives to Facebook already exist, but none have achieved the critical mass to make them viable. Even if Zuckerberg’s monopoly is broken up, the capitalist incentives driving the media environment could sustain Facebook, or platforms like it, indefinitely by constantly revolutionizing the means of addiction. It seems that without tackling these incentives head-on, the effect could be to create a tiered internet, with a healthier public sphere for some while leaving the most vulnerable to suffer the most pernicious effects of an online obsession.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #jeremy corbyn #Social media #facebook #mark zuckerberg #monopoly #oligopoly #democratic socialism #socialism

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vamonumentlandscape · 3 years

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Staunton and Sweet Briar College

Last week we drove up Lee-Jackson highway yet again on our way to Staunton. We were all eager to take a bit of a break from our usual Civil War related endeavors to see the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and House Museum. One of our good friends also got to come along for the adventure so that added extra fun to the day. The first thing we did was interview Andrew Phillips, the museum's head curator. He has done quite a lot for us two this year. Earlier in the school year, Tomi actually interviewed him for her virtual internship. All of us were excited to meet Andrew in person and talk about the direction of the museum.

Phillips has been at the Presidential Library since 2012. He came into the job without much knowledge of Wilson as he was a trained Civil War historian. Despite seeming like an unlikely candidate for the position, he was exactly what the organization needed. His extensive knowledge of the time when Wilson was in the home and of slavery is something the museum was lacking. Wilson was actually only at the Staunton home for sixteen months, so Phillips decided that it was time to use that to their advantage. His thoughts are that the museum needs to tell the whole story, from birth until the end of his life, with more of a focus on the events of the time he was alive. He did not mince words when he said that “...you will be disappointed when you go downstairs [in the museum].” The exhibits are over twenty years old and the museum has never undergone any renovations to change them. The exhibits are “very nitty gritty on Wilson” and Phillips wants to focus on the pivotal moments within his presidency. Phillips says that the events that happened while Wilson was president were “incredibly consequential” and wants to provide the context for visitors to understand this. By 2026 he and his team wish to overhaul the museum to be a space for education for the important moments that were hallmark to Wilson’s presidency. By expanding the exhibits, the staff can create more in-depth exhibits. Women’s Suffrage, World War I, the Jim Crow Era, and so much more will be covered in more detail than ever before in the museum. The staff at the museum has drive, passion, and ambition to complete these goals, but the only thing they are lacking are the funds. They have applied for multiple grants, but have not received what they need. If you would like to learn more about how to become a member or to help out Phillips and his cause, click here: https://www.woodrowwilson.org/ways-to-give .

Even though the big steps have yet to be taken, Phillips has already had to make major changes. “When I first got here, in 2012, they were still calling the enslaved people servants. They were misinformed and I had to change that,” he said, speaking of tour guides and how they addressed the enslaved population of Wilson’s first childhood home. The guides were trained initially to use the term “slave” and then later “enslaved person” by Andrew. Phillips said that he and his staff spent at least one year changing this narrative. “The guides wanted to learn and were more than open to the change, but these kinds of things take time.” His next steps are attempting to learn the names of the three leased enslaved people from the church Wilson’s father preached at. “I want to give these people names. We know what they did for the family, but I want to give them their names.” After the tumultuous summer of 2020, he could not stand for the poor exhibit on African Americans to continue to stay up. Phillips claimed that it was “too neutral” and was “sensitive to a position that Civil Rights is bad and showed two sides of the coin.” He and his staff took a huge leap in creating all new signage to create a more honest narrative about how African Americans were treated by the Wilson administration and the country. “We are constantly trying to improve,” said Andrew and we could not agree more. Speaking with Andrew about all the changes that have taken place and that will soon take place was so inspirational. We cannot wait to come back one day to see how much the museum is transformed!

The Woodrow Wilson Museum is an older institution that presents the life and legacy of the man that led the United States during one of the most challenging periods in world history. We first encountered an exhibit that follows Wilson before he became the 28th president. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University before becoming the president of Princeton University, where he incorporated many progressive reforms. He was also governor of New Jersey between 1911 and 1913. We were able to see some reproduced and original artifacts that belonged to Wilson. We were also able to read about his two marriages. He only married Edith Bolling in 1915 after Ellen Axson died in 1914 while he was in office. In the first few rooms, we saw how he campaigned against Republican presidential incumbent, William Howard Taft, and third party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. As we learned in our interview with Andrew, the museum is no longer misguiding visitors about the actions taken by President Wilson. Though he enacted major reforms like the Revenue Act of 1913 and the Federal Reserve Act, he also allowed segregation to continue within the federal government and throughout the entire country. We saw the newly added yellow Civil Rights panel that did not shy away from being completely frank about Wilson’s personal views. He was a racist man, but again, we saw some pretty consequential things come out of his time in office, such as the passage of the 19th Amendment, which finally gave women the right to vote in elections across the country. This Amendment was only possible after the lobbying of famous suffragists like Lucy Burns, Carrie-Chapman Chatt, as well as the many others that came before them. Though the United States remained neutral through much of the Great War (World War I), we were able to see why and how Wilson convinced Congress to declare war on the Central powers in Europe. The exhibit in the basement about the war was our favorite part of the museum. As the museum mentioned, Wilson was a master negotiator in setting up the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but the U.S. Congress did not ratify it as Wilson refused a Republican compromise. It was the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and the world would yet again enter a deadly conflict only a little more than a decade later. Woodrow Wilson was anything but a decent person that sought equality for all, but we must study his life and presidency at places like the museum and library in Staunton. If we want our country to be better for all Americans, then we must remember and learn from the mistakes of our former leaders. The history within truly matters and we are looking forward to newer interpretation once the anticipated renovations are completed. If you are able, we highly recommend a visit not simply to say you went to a presidential site, but to learn from Wilson’s successes and errors.

After we walked through much of the museum, we went on a tour of the home where Woodrow Wilson spent the first few months of his life. Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow started their family in the house known as the Manse in Staunton. The family owned and defended slavery through the end of the Civil War, and Joseph was a Presbyterian minister and chaplain for the Confederacy. Though not much is known about the enslaved persons that worked at the Manse, it does seem that an effort is being made to present what they did in the house while enslaved by the Wilsons. A question was posed by another visitor that was on the tour with us. “What is the difference between saying enslaved person and slave?” The tour guide responded that this was the phrasing that most Virginia museums are using. While this may be true, there is more to it than that. Dr. Sherayko stepped in to offer the whole reasoning behind this choice in language as heard at Monticello and Appomattox. Saying “slave suggests an identity of subservience to others and nothing else. Stating “enslaved person” instead suggests an identity of personhood first, not just the condition they had forced upon them. It is important to understand this shift in language as the stories and personhood of those that were enslaved matter too. We hope that when asked similar questions in the future, the tour guide responds with this explanation. Overall, the house tour was a quality look into a historic home and showed how the Wilson family lived.

On our way back from Staunton, we made a pit stop at Sweet Briar College. The 3,250 acre campus is in the heart of Amherst with beautiful mountain views. We drove all the way back to where their top notch equestrian team practices to see Monument Hill. It is a small cemetery to the founders of the college’s daughter that has expanded to include members of their family and faculty who have passed on. Looking out from this point is an absolutely stunning view of the campus. The tall angel statue for Daisy Williams, founder Indiana Fletcher's daughter, stands tall overlooking the campus as a guardian. We drove around the campus after viewing this solemn, serene area and came across a small cabin in the backyard of the president's home. It is the only surviving slave cabin on the property. What once was the home to enslaved people of the William’s plantation has been used as office spaces, storage, and other uses by the college. But in 2012, with the help of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Lynn Rainville, the cabin was re-interpreted to capture the history of the 170 year old structure. There were signs telling the history with old photographs, maps, and even the names of those who lived in the cabins. The most important piece of signage was the recognition of descendants of those who once lived, worked, and who are buried there today. It was a small, yet powerful exhibit that is worth the visit.

#Staunton #virginia #sweet briar college #monument #history #important

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Indian media have gone easy on Modi. That's changing because of the pandemic Given how decomposed the corpses were, officials in Bihar suspected they had come from further upstream — possibly from Uttar Pradesh, the highly populated state where Gaur is based. So he sent a team of 30 reporters to over 27 districts to investigate. After hours of searching, the team found more than 2,000 bodies floating or buried along a 1,100-kilometer (684-mile) stretch of the Ganges, which is considered a holy river to most Hindus. Dainik Bhaskar, one of India’s biggest Hindi-language newspapers, published its story last week with the headline, “Ganga is ashamed.” “I have never seen anything like this in my 35-year-long career,” Gaur told CNN Business. For weeks, India has been engulfed by a brutal second wave of Covid-19 infections, with millions of new cases. There have been nearly 300,000 Covid-related deaths recorded by the Health Ministry since the pandemic began, even though the actual figure is likely much higher. While the human toll of the disease has been immense, journalists like Gaur are not just covering the tragedy of the situation. They’re also fighting for transparency and accountability from a government that has tried to clamp down on criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his handling of the pandemic. As the crisis unfolded, Modi was initially slammed by the international press for not doing enough to prevent the catastrophe, and for downplaying the number of fatalities. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who is a close ally of Modi, has been accused of intimidating citizens and journalists reporting on oxygen shortages in the state. New Delhi has even asked Twitter to remove tweets about Covid-19, including some that were critical of Modi. “People have been telling me not to fight with the administration,” said Gaur, who has not only written about alleged data-fudging by the administration, but has also criticized the authorities for the insensitive manner in which the uncovered bodies were finally cremated. The state has now started patrolling the river, to prevent dumping of bodies. “State officials have tried to stop our coverage several times in the past few days, and have even threatened us with a court case,” he added. Since that first article, his paper has continued to count bodies in the Ganges and hold politicians accountable for the crisis — not just in Uttar Pradesh, but in other parts of India as well. Shoe-leather journalism The spiraling crisis has overwhelmed India’s health care system in several states. Beds, oxygen and medical workers are in short supply. Some patients are dying in waiting rooms or outside overflowing clinics. At cremation grounds, bodies are piling up faster than workers can build new pyres. While the situation is improving in bigger cities now, rural parts of the country might continue to struggle. Critics of the government — from opposition politicians and judges to regular citizens and even a prestigious medical journal — say that despite the scale of the tragedy, the country’s leaders have focused more on image management rather than tackling the disaster. The government, meanwhile, has said that it wants to stop individuals from spreading fake or misleading information. To get the real story, many media outlets have increasingly been doing some traditional shoe-leather journalism. This reporting has surprised many readers: India’s vast media have become increasingly subservient to Modi’s government since the Hindu nationalist was first elected Prime Minister seven years ago. The ruling party has used a range of tactics, ranging from forcing advertisers to cut off outlets that are critical of its policies to shutting down channels, to ensure the press is reshaped into its cheerleader. “Mainstream media, particularly broadcast media, really glosses over the Modi government’s failures, even while appearing neutral,” said Abhinandan Sekhri, CEO of Newslaundry, an award-winning independent news website that focuses on media and journalism. But papers like Dainik Bhaskar “have not pulled their punches and have really gone after the government” with their coverage of the pandemic, even as some prominent TV channels remain as “sycophantic as ever,” he added. In Modi’s home state of Gujarat, three of the top local language newspapers — Sandesh, Divya Bhaskar and Gujarat Samachar — have consistently questioned the official statistics on the second wave through their coverage. Divya Bhaskar reported in mid-May that nearly 124,000 death certificates had been issued in the prior 71 days in Gujarat, about 66,000 more than during the same period last year. The state government reported that only 4,218 were related to Covid. Most recent deaths have been attributed to underlying conditions or co-morbidities, Divya Bhaskar said, citing doctors and families of victims. The newspaper said its journalists dug out the data by going to districts and municipal corporations. Similarly, Sandesh, a Gujarati newspaper that dates back nearly a century, has been sending its reporters to mortuaries, hospitals and crematoriums to count the dead so the paper can publish daily figures. And, on May 9, the Gujarat Samachar newspaper criticized a decision by the Modi government to press ahead with a planned $2.8 billion renovation of Parliament, with the headline: “Even as people are fighting life-and-death situations, public servant becomes dictator.” Have Indian media owners really become bolder? This type of accountability reporting hasn’t been the norm at many leading Indian media outlets for the past few years. But it is hard to sell the government’s narrative to readers as Covid-19 cases continue to rise uncontrollably across the country. “The pandemic concerns 99% of the population. They [media owners] are also shrewd businessmen and they know that toeing the government line at this point makes no sense,” said Mahesh Langa, a Gujarat-based journalist with the English language The Hindu newspaper, which has also written about the large-scale of under-reporting of deaths in the state. But pushing back on Modi may also be bad business for newspapers, as government ads are a major source of revenue, especially as the pandemic-related economic slowdown has hit other advertisers hard. And while firewalls exist to isolate business interests from the editorial operations, those barriers can sometimes come under pressure during troubled times. Prominent Indian media groups also have interests in other industries, according to a report by Reporters Without Borders, which said most of the leading companies are owned by “large conglomerates that are still controlled by the founding families and that invest in a vast array of industries other than media.” For example, the family that owns the Dainik Bhaskar Group also has businesses in sectors ranging from real estate to power. Reliance Industries, the conglomerate headed by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, owns Network 18, which includes the CNN-News18 TV channel, a CNN affiliate. Promoters of many TV channels and newspapers need to stay in the good books of the ruling party, said Sekhri of Newslaundry. They “tread on eggshells” when it comes to the government because they need favorable regulatory policies for their various businesses, which can range from telecom to oil, he said. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for many media platforms to be servile when there is mounting public anger against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Sekhri added. “They realize their reporters will get beaten up if they go on the streets,” and not report the truth, he said. But telling the truth can get journalists in trouble. “India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists trying to do their job properly,” according to Reporters Without Borders, which ranks the nation 142 out of 180 regions on its World Press Freedom Index. “In the last decade, 154 journalists in India were arrested, detained, interrogated or served show cause notices for their professional work,” according to an analysis by Free Speech Collective. “Sixty-seven of these were recorded in 2020 alone.” There’s also the mental toll that doing such reporting takes. “If you are not mentally strong, you will not be able to stand the scenes that unfold in the field,” said Dhaval Bharwad, deputy chief photographer for Divya Bhaskar, which is also owned by the Dainik Bhaskar Group. Despite the challenges, many Indian journalists appear ready to continue trying to get to the truth. In the capital, Delhi, the magazine Outlook India created a stir on Twitter last week, when it used the cover of its new issue to criticize the government for inaction, styling it in the form of a missing persons poster. “This is not an act of bravery on our part,” Ruben Banerjee, the editor-in-chief of Outlook, told CNN Business. “We are just objectively reporting. There is a sense of abandonment in the country. “ — Jyoti Jha contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #changing #Easy #Indian #Media #Modi #Modi:LocalmediahavegoneeasyonIndia'sPrimeMinister.That'schangingbecauseofthepandemic-CNN #Pandemic

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opedguy · 3 years

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Trump’s Popularity Drops

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), April 27, 2021.--NBC’s most recent national poll shows that former President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 32% from about 40% around the time of the election. Republicans have moved on from Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and mob scene, not to mention Feb. 10-13 impeachment trial that ended in acquittal. Trump’s hounded by the media, egging him on to talk about another future run for president. NBC’s new poll proves that Trump is done politically, despite making a lot of noise since leaving office Jan. 20. Trump’s unfavorable rating is now at 55%, suggesting he should go quietly into the night while the Republican Party figures out what to do next. President Joe Biden, 78, who beat Trump Nov. 3 by over 5 million popular votes, has a favorability rating of 50%, with only 36% viewing him as unfavorable, far more reasonable numbers for any viable politician.

Trump’s reelection campaign crumbled under the weight of the Covid-19 crisis, that seemed to get worse by the day, something Democrats capitalized on during 2020. Whatever toll the pandemic took on the economy, Trump’s communication team, led by 32-year-old Hope Hicks, was overmatched by Democrats who made mincemeat out of all his accomplishments. Trump spent four years defending himself against fake accusations of Russian collusion, all conveniently set up by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Trump 2016 rival. Democrat’s used Hillary’s paid opposition research to accuse Trump of Russian collusion. Whatever the truth, it took a toll on Trump’s approval ratings that kept sinking over his four years in office. By the time he left, his approval rating was abysmal, only getting worse by the day as the U.S. media continued their death by a thousand cuts.

Today’s NBC poll shows, beyond any doubt, that Republicans, Democrats and independents want no part of a second act for Trump, including another run for president. Whether he’s still the most viable candidate in the GOP, that doesn’t say very much about the future of GOP leadership. When you look at Biden’s only 50% approval rating, he’s not fooling anyone, making blunder-after-blunder in U.S. foreign policy. Never before after only 100 days have thing headed south so quickly. Biden has insulted Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, telling ABC’s George Stephaopoulos March 16 that Putin was a “soulless killer.” When it came to Xi, Biden accused the Chinese Communist Party of committing genocide on Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. Biden’s done so much damage to U.S. national security, he’s practically started a new war.

Trump presided over one on the most disruptive stretches of recent U.S. history, watching everything that he worked for over four years crumble before his eyes. He had everyone in the vast U.S. media and political establishment jumping on his back. Hope Hicks did virtually nothing to combat the media narrative that blamed Trump for the deadly coronavirus, despite the fact that China was clearly at fault. Biden and his running mate Vice President Kamala Harris thought nothing of denigrating vaccines under development, telling voters not to trust any vaccines developed on Trump’s watch. Once Trump lost the election, Biden and Harris were all in on the vaccines, giving Trump zero credit for pulling off an unprecedented feat of getting the world’s biggest vaccine makers to step up and deliver Covid-19 vaccines. Republican leadership in the House and Senate must step up and inform the Trump organization that he will not be representing the GOP in 2024.

While Biden isn’t likely to be the Democrat nominee, no one thinks that Trump can resurrect the GOP after its abysmal loss Nov. 3. Whether there was voting fraud or not, the NBC’s poll shows that Democrats, Republicans and independents all hold Trump responsible for losing the election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) needs to stop pandering to Trump, visiting Mar –A-Lago, focusing on what he can do to win more GOP seats in the 2022 midterm election. Going back to Trump only makes the GOP look like it has no real future plan. Trump abysmal approval rating shows that a mixed bag of voters don’t see him as a viable candidate now or in the future. Republicans must pick some new leaders and run with them.

Since Trump’s defeat Nov. 3, the mainstream press has done everything possible to destroy the Republican Party. Ignoring Biden’s embarrassing foreign policy failures, the media continues to cover up for Democrats, no matter how bad things get. If Republicans have any chance to retake the Senate and House in 2022, it will because Wall Street has sold off, not buying Biden’s tax hikes and economic proposals. If the economy heads south, Biden could catch the blame, knowing that he’s really not playing with a full deck. Everyone can see-and-hear Biden with their own eyes-and-ears. They know he can’t really deviate from his teleprompter without exposing his cognitive decline. Judging by all the tax hike proposals, Wall Street’s going to rebel sometime soon, with what looks like a bull market evaporating. When that happens, Republicans will get a shot at salvation, just not with Trump.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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rhetoricandlogic · 7 years

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Sleeps With Monsters: Science Fictional Democracy in Malka Older’s Infomocracy

Liz Bourke

Tue Jun 6, 2017 11:00am

I’m really late to the party when it comes to Malka Older’s astonishing debut Infomocracy. It came out last year to no small degree of fanfare and acclaim. It was a finalist on the Locus Best First Novel list as well as featuring in several “Best of 2016” lists.

I can’t believe I missed it. On the other hand, this does mean I don’t have nearly as long to wait for the sequel. (Null States, forthcoming in September.)

Infomocracy is a science fiction thriller. Set in a quasi-utopian future (utopian, at least, to the extent that no one has experienced a war in twenty years), it’s all about an election. An election that involves the whole world, for almost the entire world is now divided into political units of one hundred thousand people, called “centenals.” The system is mediated and overseen by a theoretically neutral entity called the Information. The Information is a search engine on steroids, providing real-time curated near-instant information to almost everyone about almost everything. (It also appears, as far as I can tell, to control a global currency.) Every ten years, every centenal elects a new government, which may be locally based, mid-sized, or a giant global contender for the “supermajority” of centenals. That centenal then is administered by whatever government they have individually chosen.

(As an inhabitant of a parliamentary democracy, in which we expect—or at least hope for—an opposition to hold our government to account, and where if the government loses a significant parliamentary vote, it tends to trigger a new election, this is a rather horrifying vision of how government could work. Your choice after the election is apparently to either put up or move. But it is interesting.)

In this setting, the narrative follows four significant viewpoint characters as they navigate an election season in which somebody—or possibly several somebodies—are trying to steal the election, and in which one of the competing governments is dog-whistling about war.

Ken is a young campaign researcher (an undercover campaign researcher) for Policy1st, a government that believes in fairness and transparency and putting policy first (naturally). He discovers that one of the other governments, Liberty, is quietly and deniably speaking to old nationalist sentiment, dog-whistling about revolution and expansion. Liberty is one of the front-runners for the supermajority in this election. Many election-watchers are concerned about the supermajority, for it has been held by the same party, Heritage, since the beginning of the microdemocracy system, and if Heritage continues to hold the supermajority, some people fear that it may become a tyranny by default.

Ken’s life intersects with that of Mishima, an Information agent and special operative/analyst who sees patterns in the data. (She has a “narrative disorder.”) The Information is like a suped-up Google crossed with the UN: not a government, it seems to try to keep the other governments honest. Mishima is trying to make sure that nothing disrupts the election, but her analysis—that Liberty is undercutting the democratic norms by playing to old expansionist and warlike sentiment—is not taken seriously by her superiors. But when cascading disasters and enemy action takes its toll on the election process, Mishima and Ken will be in mortal danger—and at the heart of efforts to make sure there’s an honest vote.

Ken and Mishima and the election system itself are the main characters of Infomocracy. Rounding out the cast are Domaine, a sort-of-anarchist activist who doesn’t believe that the system as it stands is sufficiently democratic, and wants to destroy or reform the current system; and Yoriko, a taxi-driver in Okinawa who gets caught up in the political machinations, but really just wants to get on with her job and raise her children.

Older’s world is an international and inclusive one, and her characters are compelling and believable, intensely human in their fears and desires. (And Mishima is utterly badass and a bit terrifying). Infomocracy‘s setting is a fascinating what-if for democratic political development. Older constructs a taut thriller around the disruptive forces acting on an important election. Some parts of it are less well-thought-through than others, but it is still a stunning debut. I look forward very much to seeing the sequel.

#Malka Older #Infomocracy #mahreviews

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askmerriauthor · 7 years

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You want to tell them about what we've been doing recently? I thought last session was pretty good.

You’re just saying that because your sub-plot kicked into gear last game and you got to enjoy the narrative spotlight for a while. :3c

That said, some other folk have been asking about the tabletop game, so why not?

Each Friday with my local group of friends (@ihavenoideahowthisworks here included in that number) I’ve been running a Pathfinder game, as I’ve had the DM bug recently. I tend to roll heavy with “Rule of Cool” and “Rule of Funny”, so I err on the side of fun rather than sticking strictly to the hard numbers in the books. Lots of house rules, lots of alcohol, good times all around.

The current party, all freshly 10th level as of last session, consists of:

Shaemus Sigmindson, a Chaotic-Good Half-Elf Rogue and the party’s friendly neighborhood backstabber. Due to him hastily putting on what turned out to be a Cursed Ring and a few other magical hijinks, he’s now really good at climbing any and all surfaces at a rate of 60′ per round. So he pretty much never touches the floor if he can help it and Xenomorph-scurries all around dungeons to literally get the drop on enemies.

Abby Noh Rahmael, a Chaotic Neutral Tiefling Magus. Despite being highly fiendish in many literal ways, she’s the bubbly, wide-eyed heart of the team. She has a particular knack for getting along with monsters, which leaves her heartbroken when the party inevitably kills them. She’s recently adopted a young Cloaker and is raising it as a Monstrous Animal Companion.

Valka, a Neutral Evil Human Kineticist. He’s a people person… with a drinking problem. Valka is a former pirate/mafia smuggler who’s since become landbound for reasons unknown, and boy howdy does he make the land work for him. He’s the party’s personal canon capable of putting out massive volumes of damage via Earth and Fire elemental attacks, Korra-style. The hard part is getting him to cooperate, not fly into vengeful murderous rages over the tiniest of slights, or do really anything without first being paid.

Wenden Jardecha, a Neutral Good Human Warpriest. Acts a whole lot like a Paladin despite not actually being one, primarily due to his method of worship. He follows the goddess Sarenrae - a deity of forgiveness and righteousness, though she draws a line as to when evil people are beyond redemption. Wenden prefers to enforce that line with a sword. He’s also proven himself really good at crowd control by locking down Boss-Level enemies with status effects.

Henc Jardecha, a Neutral Good Human Arcanist. The younger brother of Wenden. Henc is a know-it-all spellcaster who likes to hang in the background mostly being unobtrusive, maybe casting a little Prestidigitation here and there for dramatic effect. Until he suddenly decides to Summon a horde of powerful monsters and start tossing around Lightning Bolts when the whim takes him. He has all of the Knowledge Skills and then some, and boy howdy does he love to rub those high info rolls in everyone’s face.

The game began with an Episode 0 where the party played pre-generated base characters not their own. They delved into a Goblin-infested ruin after getting word of a mysterious monster living there that had been terrorizing local farmlands. They met a Kobold Sorceress outside who joined the group and sort of helped them along, discovered a Goblin Chieftain who was weirdly upset with his role of leadership, and eventually faced off with the monster in question - a young Black Dragon. Despite nearly dying in the process, the party managed to drive off the Dragon… only for the Sorceress and the Chieftain to reveal themselves to be a pair of Kobold thieves in disguise. They’d been casing the joint before the party showed up and, after using them to get rid of the Dragon, pilfered a small box from the treasure hoard and made their escape.

Following that, Episode 1 kicks in. The plot so far is that the group - a team from the Pathfinder Society of Adventurers - has been dispatched to the coastal city of Sandpoint upon hearing reports of Werewolves in the region. Their investigation has taken them to Fangwood Keep - a module I’ve heavily edited and customized - and brought them into conflict with a horde of Hobgoblins that had taken over the castle. After teaming up with a small militia of irregulars the Hobgoblins had kicked out of said keep, the party took back the structure and discovered that it was actually built from the ruins of an Elven wizard’s tower. However, nothing was really clean-cut about the whole ordeal. The party kept finding strange markings set everywhere, oddly mutated creatures, and even Goblinoids altered into far more powerful states wielding unusual magical weapons. When they finally cornered and confronted the leader of the Hobgoblin tribe, it was revealed that the tribe had been hired by an unknown benefactor to take the Keep so that he could explore its secrets. After a bit of quick decision-making and some fisticuffs between the Tiefling and the Hobgoblin Leader in an honor duel, the Hobgoblins actually cut a deal to leave unmolested and escape back to their own territory.

Digging deeper revealed the presence of an odd pocket space where the Elven wizard’s inner sanctum lay, filled with Fae and other odd creatures from the First World who had somehow become trapped there. Some were hostile, others were friendly, but they all just want to go home. In delving further in, the party uncovered evidence of the strange man who’d hired the Hobgoblins performing foul experiments. After making their way to a buried chamber deep within the ruins, they finally came face to face with him… so to speak. Not only was the stranger disguised entirely in a suit of fiendish living armor, but he was accompanied by two Black Dragons: the same young one that the first party had faced in Episode 0 and its mother, a terrifyingly powerful sorceress Dragon. While their intentions for being in the Keep remained unclear, it all seemed to be part of the Strange Man’s experiments and research.

In the brief conflict that followed, the Strange Man readily offered a bribe to the party to simply turn around and leave without confrontation. As the value of the bribe rose steadily to over 100k Gold Pieces, Valka happily accepted the deal (Shaemus was incredibly tempted and left his decision up to a die roll). The Dragons weren’t happy about the Strange Man using their hoard as collateral though and decided to just kill the party instead. Wenden ended up taking the worst of it and was briefly slain, though oddly the Strange Man exercised magic that kept him from dying even as his associates continued to fight…

While the party fended off the Mother Dragon to varying degrees of success, Wenden ended up being visited by his goddess Sarenrae and one of her Astral Deva heralds in a near-death-experience vision. It was there the herald explained that the Strange Man they’d encountered was once a follower of Sarenrae as well. And that he still is, to this present day, a Paladin. He’s completely turned his back on his faith and has been doing everything he could think of to get the goddess to cut him loose of her influence, yet for reasons unexplained Sarenrae has refused to let him go. Thus Wenden is given a divine quest: aid those the Strange Man has harmed, destroy his blasphemous Fiendflesh armor, and put a stop to his experiments. However, the catch is that they cannot, under any circumstances, kill him - there’s too much risk of dark forces just waiting to snatch his soul and put his dangerous knowledge to use.

So, last we left off, the party had driven off their foes, so to speak. The Strange Man cut the battle short when it became apparent the group was a genuine threat. After halting time through some arcane scroll, he marked the group as part of his experiments and equipped them with a strange, magical deck of cards they’ve yet to fully understand. With the Strange Man and the Dragons escaped for the time being, the party is left in possession of Fangwood Keep and a number of its First World occupants all relying on them to find a way home to their native plane. As if that wasn’t enough, it also turned out that the Strange Man awakened some of his other test subjects on his way out, unleashing a pack of highly intelligent, magically capable Barghest Lycanthropes onto the land to give the party something to worry about rather than chasing him.

#pathfinder #rp stuff

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newstfionline · 7 years

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The Syrian Side of the Story You Never Hear

By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, May 2, 2017

Like a badly written series of romance novels, the plot template remains fixed while just the names of the characters and places rotate through the template. The story of Syria that Americans and Canadians ingest from the mainstream media is the same simplistic narrative of good and evil told by Washington about each new enemy. Every action committed by the Syrian government is evil and every reaction by Washington is good. Guilt can be assumed and assigned to Syria without investigation because the antagonist in the story is always guilty and can always be blamed. America is always the innocent observer who is shocked by Syrian brutality and feels compelled to respond to protect the innocent victims and defend the world.

But the story of Syria in not so simple, and history shows that the assignation of guilt should be much more judiciously distributed.

Democracy Versus Dictatorship: It Might Have Been a Democracy. Accounts of Syria’s history always include the 1970 coup because it fits the desired narrative. Air force general Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, led a military coup that overthrew the civilian Ba’ath party dictator, Salah Jadid.

But, though that was to be the last coup in Syria’s history up to now, it was by no means the first. The first coup in modern Syrian history took place eleven years earlier. But the narrative was very different.

Syrians under French colonial rule had long longed for democracy. The Sykes-Picot Agreement had given Syria to France in 1916. But, prior to implementation of Sykes-Picot, Syrians had had a brief taste of democracy. The taste was over, though, by 1920 when Syria was officially given to France in the Treaty of Sevres.

President De Gaulle resisted Syrian demands for independence and democracy, but, by 1943, he yielded to the pressure of the Syrians and the British and permitted Syrian elections. Syrians overwhelmingly elected Shukri al-Quwatli and the National Bloc with their message of independence. Three years later, after an anti-demonstration massacre, the French were out of Syria.

With France out and a democratically elected leader in, the U.S. could have nurtured democracy in Syria. Instead, they took it out. American agents Stephen Meade and Miles Copeland assisted the Syrian military in a coup that would take out al-Quwatli and install the pro-American Colonel Adib Shishakli. But for that US coup, Syria may have grown into a democracy instead of the dictatorship it is today.

That coup led to a confusing series of coups in which the US frequently changed sides. In 1956, as Syria moved closer to Egyptian President Nasser and his vision of a United Arab Republic that would be more neutral in the cold war than America could bear, Eisenhower initiated Project Wakeful, an unsuccessful covert action for another regime change in Syria. It was followed a year later by Operation Wappen in 1957. America feared that Syria’s government was leaning to the left. So, in order to “assure a pro-Western orientation on the part of future Syrian government,” in the words of a State Department internal document, Operation Wappen was initiated. It was intended to return the former right wing dictator Adib Shishakly to power. It was a humiliating failure. The CIA’s Rocky Stone took over as the Damascus station chief and initiated the plan for a coup. Syrian officers with whom Stone was working went to Syrian intelligence and turned in the CIA officers whose side they were supposedly on. The CIA agents were caught in the act, revealed and thrown out of Syria.

In 1963, the Ba’ath party would seize power in another coup. Another coup would follow in 1966 to be followed by the 1970 coup that brought the Assad dynasty to power.

Syria strove to be a democracy. But rather than midwifing the birth of democracy in Syria, America aborted it. That US coup took out the democracy and set in motion a series of coups that led, by a convoluted route, to the dictatorship that America wants to take out of Syria today.

Syria’s Dictator: Ally or Enemy? Even after the Assad dictatorship was entrenched in Syria, history could have proceeded differently. Relations between Hafez al-Assad and the west could have been different. As early as 1994, Assad had met with President Clinton for encouraging talks on a Syrian-Israeli peace. Five years later, in December of 1999, Assad let it be known that he was willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

In a remarkable story told by Patrick Tyler in his book, A World of Trouble, Assad sent his foreign minister to Washington to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton. But when Barak’s plane opened its doors, Barak would not come out: he panicked and told assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, “I can’t do it.” Indyk was stunned that Barak was backing out at the last second before the meeting. Barak had changed his mind, and Assad’s attempt at a peace fell incomplete on the tarmac. The Syria dictator had been willing to attempt a thawing of relations with the west: history might have seen him become an ally, but it took the path of enemy instead.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, says that, when Bashar al-Assad followed his father as Syrian dictator, he asked for a resumption of talks with Israel. It was the Americans and Israelis who turned him down.

Two years later, in 2005, Syria and Israel began to actually draft a peace treaty. When the Israeli-Lebanese war ended, Israel felt the Americans out about continuing down that path. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush said no. Once again, it was the west that blocked Assad from coming over as an ally.

Bashar al-Assad kept trying to initiate cooperation with the States. Zunes says that, because he was anxious to receive international legitimacy, Assad was willing to give security guarantees and full diplomatic relations to Israel in exchange for a peace agreement. In his 2009 article entitled “Syria Calling,” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that then Senator John Kerry, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and who had just met with Assad, said that Assad “wants to engage with the West . . . . Assad is willing to do the things he needs to do in order to change his relationship with the United States.” Hersh says that Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, told him that “Syria is eager to engage with the West”.

Hersh says that Israel and Syria had at other times engaged in talks. He even says that they had reached “agreements in principle on the normalization of diplomatic relations.” He says that Assad continued informal talks with Washington into the Obama administration. Zunes said in a personal correspondence that blame for the failure of those talks lays not with Assad but with ““[t]he new hard-right Israeli government that consolidated power in 2009”. Nothing could happen, Zunes said, “without the return of the Golan, which Netanyahu refuses to do”.

Syria tried to engage with the west and change its relationship with both America and Israel, but the west repeatedly pushed the Assads back into the position of enemy.

Gas Attacks: War Crime or False Flag? The latest call for regime change in Syria comes as a result of the Trump administration’s judgment that Assad crossed a red line by using chemical weapons on his own people. But, once again in the American constructed narrative, it is possible that guilt has be assumed and assigned to Syria without investigation because the antagonist in the story is always guilty and can always be blamed.

There are several reasons to be skeptical over the guilty verdict handed down to Bashar al-Assad.

The first is that for the first time, in a reversal of policy, the Trump administration had just announced that it was no longer insisting upon the removal of Bashar al-Assad. Secretary of State Tillerson said that the “status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” Also for the first time in the war, Assad’s forces are finally winning. Crossing the one clear US red line by using chemical weapons is the one way Assad could force the US to turn the tides of the war and recommit to removing him from power. Former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford says that “Assad may be cruel, brutal, but he’s not mad. It defies belief that he would bring this all on his head for no military advantage.” If Assad used chemical weapons right after finally being taken off the American hit list, then Ford is wrong, and Assad is mad.

The second reason is that, despite American and Israeli claims to the contrary, the available evidence says that Syria fulfilled its promise to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile in 2013.

The third is that the US case against Assad is that, though the extremist Syrian rebels do have chemical weapons, they couldn’t have used these chemical weapons because they were dropped from the sky and only the regime forces have airplanes. However, Theodore Postol, MIT professor emeritus of science, technology and national security, a leading analyst on military technology and former scientific advisor at the Department of Defense, says that his analysis of the evidence shows that the chemical weapon was not dropped from an airplane but exploded on the ground. Postol concludes that “. . . there is absolutely no evidence that the crater was created by munitions designed to disperse sarin after it is dropped from an aircraft. . . . The data cited by the White House is more consistent with the possibility that the munition was placed on the ground rather than dropped from a plane. . . . Analysis of the debris as shown in the photograph cited by the White House clearly indicates that the munition was almost certainly placed on the ground. . . .”

The fourth is that Postol has shown that the crater identified by the US as being the one where the sarin gas hit the ground after being dropped from a plane couldn’t be the source of the sarin gas that killed the victims of the gas attack. He says his analysis of photographs of the crater site, the cite where the victims are located and wind and weather data reveal that the location of the victims is inconsistent with the crater cite offered up by the White House. His conclusion is that the version of the gas attack described by the White House that points to Syrian regime culpability--sarin gas dropped from a plane, landing on the ground and making a crater, and killing civilians in a nearby hamlet--never occurred. It had to have occurred in a different way. Supporting evidence comes from a photograph taken only four hours after the sarin gas release that shows a person standing by the crater that is alleged to be the dispersal cite without any protective clothing. If the poisoning happened the way the White House says it happened, the site would, at this time, be highly toxic, and the person, Postol says, “would be subjected to the severe and possibly fatal effects of sarin poisoning.” The conclusion again is that “the nerve agent attack described in the WHR [White House report] did not occur as claimed.” It had to have happened in a way different from the way that points accusingly at Assad.

What is that different way? According to former US intelligence analysts (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), in agreement with the Russian and Syrian version of the story, “Our US Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian “chemical weapons attack.” Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died.” Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, says that most of his sources--including members of the team that monitors global chemical weapons and people in the U.S. intelligence community--are also telling him that that is what probably happened.

Former CIA and Army Intelligence Officer Philip Giraldi reports that “US monitors, who had been warned by the Russians that an attack was coming, believe they saw from satellite images something close to the Russian account of events, with a bomb hitting the targeted warehouse, which then produced a cloud of gas.” Investigative journalist Gareth Porter reports that a former US official knowledgeable about the chemical weapons event said that Russia informed the US that Syria planned to strike the warehouse 24 hours before the strike. The source, according to Porter, “is in direct contact with a US military intelligence officer with access to information about the US-Russian communications.” Russia also informed the US that the Syrian military thought the warehouse housed chemicals. Furthermore, Porter reveals that “an internal administration paper circulating in Washington . . . clearly refers to ‘a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition dump in the eastern suburbs of Khan Sheikhoun.’”

And finally, a white paper written by the White House’s National Security Council--interestingly, it was not written by the US intelligence community but by the White House (investigative journalist Robert Parry reports that a source told him that CIA Director Mike Pompeo personally told Trump that the CIA believed that Assad was likely not responsible for the chemical attack)--claims “that the chemical agent was delivered by regime SU-22 fixed-wing aircraft.” However, reporting on the weapons dropped over Syria from the SU-22 aircraft, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter says that “it is physically impossible for a chemical weapon to produce the impact IR signatures detected by the US and linked to the Khan Shaykhun attack.” Amazingly, Ritter points out that the very evidence used by the White House to prove Syria dropped chemical weapons from a plane, proves instead the Syrian/Russian version of the story that Syria dropped conventional weapons from a plane.

So, the Syrian story is not the simple narrative of good and evil offered up by Washington and the mainstream media. There is another side to the story. But for American meddling, Syria might have been a democracy instead of the dictatorship it is today. But for American indifference and neglect, today’s Syrian dictator could have been an ally. And if intelligence and investigation preceded the assumption and assignation of guilt to the current antagonist of the story, Assad may be found to be not guilty of the chemical attack for which he was recently bombed.

#Syria #Syrian conflict #Bashar al-Assad #Syrian history

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