#the societal belief that all of us have power here and are in agreement

[madtomedgar]

The thing that's scaring me right now is how many well meaning gentiles just genuinely have no idea when something is an antisemitic canard and so they are internalizing and parrotting ideas that can will and do get Jews killed everywhere because it's couched in pro Palestinian rhetoric and all they know about this is that settler colonialism is bad and they are trusting any leftist or or professed leftists who are actually alt-right types actively using this horror to recruit. And all they knew about antisemitism is like. The Holocaust happened and right wingers are often antisemitic and that anti-zionism isn't necessarily antisemitism. So you have people who honestly do not know better reblogging excerpts from fucking Protocols and thinking it's good information that explains and supports the Palestinian struggle because someone replaced the word "Jew" with "Zionist," and misatributed it. And I know it sounds wrong to say that you need to learn about what antisemitism looks like and how it works in order to effectively advocate for the one group of people in history who are actually being oppressed by Jews-as-Jews, but if you can understand why you need to learn about and recognize transphobia in order to be an effective feminist, you can understand that.

Rootless cosmopolitan tropes, dual loyalty tropes, blood libel, accusations that (((they))) control the media, banks, or governments of other countries, assertions that it's all rich white privileged landlords from nyc/jersey, accusations of making up atrocities or causing their own oppression or using misplaced sympathy to silence criticism for nefarious ends or always lying doesn't stop being antisemitic just because someone used the word Zionist instead of Jews. Go read "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" so you can avoid becoming Jackson Hinkle's stooge on accident.

[cd-covington]

There ain’t nothing wrong with double negation

When you were in school, your teacher probably told you something like “two negatives make a positive,” so if you “don’t know nothing,” you do know something. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit.

Many languages have what linguists call negative concord, which is kind of like subject-verb agreement but for negation markers. In Russian, for example, to say “I don’t know anything,” you say ya nichevo* ne znayu. Russian uses negative concord, so if you have “nothing” (nichevo) you also have to have the verb negated (ne).

*standard transliteration is nichego but that’s not how you pronounce it, so shrugman

Standard English used to do this as well! Just, like, 1000 years ago. Here’s an example from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Peterborough):

418. Her Romane gesamnodan ealle þa goldhord ðe on Brytene wæron;

and sume on eorðan gehyddan, þæt heo nan man syððan findon ne mihton. And sume mid heom on Gallia læddon.

418. In this year the Romans gathered all the hoards of gold that were on Britain; and they hid some of them in the ground, such that no man could (not) find them afterward. And they took some with them to Gaul.

nan, as the note in the textbook says, is a contraction of ne + ān (NEG + one). (Old English did a lot of fun things with negation, and you could negate things by sticking ne on the front and going about your day, like nillan from ne + willan (‘to want’) means ‘to not want.’) (And yes, this is the origin of the phrase “willy-nilly,” which is derived from “will he, nill he” ‘whether he wants to or not’.)

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen described a cycle that negation follows, where over time more negation is added because it doesn’t “feel” negative enough, and then later some is taken away because it feels redundant. The canonical example for this is French. Older French varieties would have Je ne sais ‘I NEG know’ but modern standard French has Je ne sais pas, with the pas adding an extra oomph. But modern colloquial French has Je sais pas, with the ne going away. So, is modern English in the single negation phase of the cycle? Will double negation come back in the future as the standard? Your guess is as good as mine, but negative concord is already (still) widespread in colloquial English, so I’d say it’s never gone away, just been forced out of the standard.

Because in modern English, there are other factors at play in why people get mad about double negatives, all of which boil down to prejudice. If you think about which varieties of (US) English use it the most, or are associated with it most strongly, it’s Black American English (AAVE) and lower/working-class varieties in general: the groups perceived by the societal groups with the most power as uneducated. I know that I got a lot of shit about it as a kid, growing up in a White pink-collar single-mom family, because I should aspire to sound educated, not like some working-class loser. (Note: I do not hold any of these beliefs!) As it is, my natural diction tends toward the academic, which was great when I was in grad school.

Regardless. If you, a native English speaker (and I’m going out on a limb here to include the non-US varieties in this), heard someone say, “I ain’t never heard nothing about that,” you would understand that as a denial that they had heard something, perhaps even a vehement denial. You wouldn’t sit there and count up the negatives and go “negative times negative times negative … yeah, negative, checks out.” It’s not math class, for god’s sake.

Sociolinguistics studies this kind of thing, from the level of “this variation exists and it is most prevalent in this group” to “this is how this variation has changed over time” to “these are the attitudes people hold about people who use this variation,” and a lot more. Anne Charity Hudley studies African American language, and the Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University has a documentary about Black American English. (They also document dying languages and dialects in North Carolina and Appalachia, and I recommend poking around their site when you have time.)

--

If you liked this post, check out my Kickstarter, where I’ll be writing a book about how to include sociolinguistic concepts in your worldbuilding. Launch is scheduled for August 15, 2023.

[iusedtousemyrealname]

I don't think that it's correct that the modern Left is influenced by Marxist economics, per se. I think that groups in a very broad group of people who only interact with Marx through very skeptical and selective lenses (e.g. Leftists who are based in Continental Philosophy, Critical Race Theory (which is highly critical of Marxist thought on every level) and its proponents, and the Environmental/Green folk.) While there may be some broad agreement on accepting certain Marxist sociological terms, they're more foundational for the discourse and not broadly accepted as true in the original intent of the terms (I think a parallel can be drawn between Freud and psychology which uses Freudian terms and ideas but overtly rejects significant parts of Freudian thought.) Having hung around in Leftist circles for sometime I'll also say that the people who are true Orthodox Marxists in so far as quoting Marx by chapter and verse tend to get treated as bizarre weirdos who are tankie adjacent if not secret tankies waiting to show Stalinist colours (whether or not that's a fair assessment of their beliefs, I'll leave up to you.)

I also think there's three sort of things that prevent Modern Leftist/Marxist Economic Thought from getting more widely circulated in the public consciousness.

Most academic Economics departments are wildly hostile to Marxist thought and ideas, and engage with them in only the most barebones ways. (Put a gun to your average Econ PhD's head and make them try to explain the Labor theory of Value and they'll get it wrong. If you press them on if they've ever read any OG Marx they'll flail. This is an experience I enjoy inflicting on Econ Grad Students. A little treat of Sadism.) There are, and I have received this second hand, maybe five or six Marxist friendly Econ grad departments across the US, and they have a very very hard time getting their grads placed. As such the vibrancy of Marxist economic thought in English is rough, and while it's much more widely discussed overseas (Europe and Asia, notably, approach Marxist thought through a much more modern lens, but little of that gets through the language barrier.)

Those that do write about Marxism in English are either super technical and frankly uninteresting to broader discourse (I have read a couple books on financialization from a Marxist perspective, it was rough) or are fucking odd-balls who it's difficult to understand holistically (looking at you, Yanis Varoufakis.)

Finally, there's been an inversion in political thought over the years. The original OG proponents of the MARKET and its POWER from an ideological bend in the 19th century basically made an argument that there was a limitation on resources and the market was necessary to efficiently allocate resources in a time of scarcity, while Marx and the OG Left (as we'd understand it now) said there was an abundance of resources and the Rich were hogging it all. To riff on something that Deleuze and Guattari mention in passing, if you believe in scarcity there is, in fact, an underlying logic to capitalism and the market that's hard to deny. However, modern thought essentially posits that scarcity really isn't a thing anymore. 21st Century capitalist dogma says that Capitalism causes massive abundance that is potentially infinite, while Leftist dogma (and I paint with a very broad brush here) all agrees more or less that there's fundamentally a dangerous overproduction (or overconsumption) of goods and services and that there needs to be a societal level paring down of at least certain forms of economic activity.

The takeaway from that is once you accept that we live in a time of abundance then dealing with major Leftist concerns like inequity and climate change are fundamentally questions of redistribution and limitations, in other words they are problems of politics and discussing them in the context of economics doesn't make a lot of sense. However, Marxist sociological thought (notably class analysis) becomes super useful for the terminology to both explain why political solutions to what appear to be obvious problems like climate change, poverty, illiteracy, etc. are ignored and also useful to explore past failures of the Left (one of CRT's core questions: Why is it that whenever the Proletariat organize Black folk are left out?)

It's genuinely really odd how fixated modern leftism is on writings that are like 150 years old now. Like...economics is different now! Marx can only tell us so much about a world he never saw, and which operated by fundamentally different means.

[bballinspiration]

Why Abandoning NBA Season Would Do More Harm Than Good in Fight Against Racism

POSTED ON JUNE 16, 2020 BY NICK JUNGFER

Less than two weeks ago, as NBA players grappled with the killing of George Floyd, Kyrie Irving was part of a unanimous vote in favour of resuming the NBA season.

Now, well after the league and the Players’ Association had moved on from discussing whether the league would return to how it would operate, Irving has changed his mind.

He, along with Dwight Howard, is arguing that NBA players should sit out the remainder of the season in order to focus on advocating for racial equality.

Not only is this view at odds with LeBron James’s belief that players can fight for social justice while playing basketball, it’s clearly misguided.

That much was clear when Howard said there should be “no basketball until we get things resolved”, as if to suggest racism could be stamped out in a matter of months.

Perhaps Irving and Howard should consider this particularly sobering fact: the NBA can now tear up the collective bargaining agreement in September thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s widely believed they’ll do exactly that if the rest of the season is canned.

This would invite a bitter lockout, the potential loss of the entire 2020-21 season, a far less favourable CBA for the players, and the loss of about $500 million in player salaries this season alone.

The fallout of losing next season too is unthinkable. It would mean the loss of billions of dollars that players could have passed on to African American communities around the country.

And while some players might be willing to go without pay for an extended period of time, what about all the coaches, trainers and medical staff?

And the office staff. And the arena staff. And the team staff. The list goes on.

Here’s a question for Kyrie: how exactly is surrendering your platform helpful in making your voice heard in the fight for social justice?

NBA players immediately become less prominent and impactful the moment they step away from the game.

Michael Wilbon and Charles Barkley have both made this point as well, with Barkley using the term “out of sight, out of mind”.

Not only would sitting out diminish players’ ability to influence meaningful change, but there is no better platform imaginable than the NBA’s looming return in Orlando.

With hundreds of millions of people starved of sports and desperate for a distraction from the fallout of this horrific pandemic, the NBA’s viewership numbers are projected to be some of the highest ever.

What greater platform could there possibly be to take a stand?

What better situation will there ever be for an entire team to kneel during the national anthem in a moment that becomes symbolic of the movement for years to come, or for a player of Irving’s stature to stare straight into the camera during a postgame interview and admonish racist behaviour, urge people to be on the right side of history, and advocate for them to go out and vote.

And remember, players can still donate, educate and advocate from Orlando, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

They won’t be able to attend protests for a few months, but this movement has become such a colossal force that the masses will take care of things on the ground.

In times like this, celebrity figures are at their most valuable when they’re advocating for change in ways that only they can, such as mobilising their massive fan bases.

Let’s be clear, any bubble-related concerns regarding potential virus transmissions or being isolated from family members are totally understandable.

But there’s simply no logic whatsoever in arguing that players will be better positioned to push for societal change if they sit out.

It’s imperative that the show goes on.

As Nelson Mandela said, “sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

[lastsonlost]

Or even better get a divorce.

You notice how men are supposed to stay monogamous and faithful?

THE STORY:...

When I told my husband I was interviewing a writer who thinks men should give their wives a ‘cheat pass’ this Christmas, he understandably had some questions. “How would the wife find someone suitable for the occasion?” he wondered. (We were talking in the abstract, of course, and I deemed it safer to treat this as rhetorical.) I assured him that yes, it was all very unfeasible, and concluded he’ll more likely gift me jewellery.

But Wednesday Martin, whose latest book Untrue explores “why nearly everything we believe about women and lust and infidelity” is wrong, is not being flippant. “We now know long-term relationships are harder on female desire than they are on male desire,” she says. “Many experts now believe monogamy is a tighter fit for women than for men. This Christmas give your wife something she really wants. Something truly exciting. A hall pass.”

This, for the uninitiated, is an agreement between partners in a romantic relationship that one or both may sleep with other people. You’d have one if, say, you were into polyamory, which involves having “intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the consent of all partners involved.” 

Confused yet? Or just wondering how all the logistics would work, never mind how on earth to broach the topic with your significant other? Martin, when we meet at a boutique hotel in South Kensington during her visit to London from the US, has plenty of answers. Starting from the premise that we’re only now beginning to understand women’s sexuality properly, she explains that contrary to popular opinion, women tire of their sexual partners faster than men, and need just as much sexual adventure and novelty as their male counterparts – if not more. To support this theory, she draws on a range of relatively recent scientific and social scientific studies, as well as interviews with experts on female infidelity in a range of fields and plenty of “untrue” women themselves.

“In one study [men’s desire] tapered off slowly over seven years, whereas female desire plunged in the first one to four years,” she says. “We might have said before ‘oh well, that’s because women like sex less than men do, but now the new data are helping us understand it’s not that women like sex less than men do, it’s that men are better at wanting what they already have and women struggle more with the same old familiar partner over and over.”

Martin, whose 2015 book Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir became a New York Times bestseller, is not alone in her espousal of such ideas. This year has seen, if not an explosion, then at least a creeping insinuation into our culture of the idea that monogamy might not be the only approach to long-term relationships. Two of the most talked about BBC dramas of the autumn, Wanderlust and Killing Eve, had at their heart characters who rejected traditional relationships. In the former, a married couple who try out consensual non-monogamy to reignite their dull sex lives; in the latter, an attractive female assassin whose potent bisexuality and rotating cast of bed partners is almost incidental to the action. And that was just the BBC. Meanwhile we’ve had an MP, Labour’s Jess Phillips, recommending that schoolgirls should be taught about orgasms.

Martin believes the MeToo movement has also been behind the shifting sands. “Female sexuality used to be women being sexy for men,” she says. “That was how it was in Hollywood; that was how it was wherever men had power. It was very heteronormative and male-focused. Now, thanks to MeToo – and activists and journalists – we‘re seeing female sexuality is its own thing, not an extension of male desire.”

MeToo has given women a louder voice in the arena of sexual politics. And since female sexual autonomy is, argues Martin, a feminist issue, closely interlinked with the power and autonomy women have in the workforce and in politics, the significance of this online movement should not be overlooked.

But Martin, a married mother-of-two and stepmother-of-two originally from Michigan, whose background is in anthropology, conceived of the idea for the book before MeToo became a hashtag. She struggled with monogamy herself in her 20s; more recently, she realised there were data indicating that she was not alone.

“What’s so exciting is there’s relatively new science and social science that flies in the face of the holy triumvirate of beliefs about male versus female sexuality: the first being that the male libido is stronger than the female libido; the second being that women are more naturally monogamous; and the third being that women are the enforcers of monogamy and are more cosy and domestic than men,” she says.

“All this exciting research had come out over the last years, picking apart every one of those supposed truths, but a lot of it hasn’t really crossed over. So I saw it as an opportunity to make the science and social science kind of relevant and fun.”

To this end, her chapter “Bonobos in Paradise” begins with a look at the work of primatologists regarding the sexual behaviour of female simians. We learn that “our primate sisters are sexual adventuresses, driven by the thrill of the unknown and unfamiliar. And not a few of them like to get busy with other females.” 

A few pages later, Martin has segued into reportage from the front line of female sexual exploration: women-only sex parties, known as Skirt Club, and attended by women who identify as largely heterosexual, many of whom are married to men.

What she witnessed there didn’t only show female sexual fluidity in action in humans; it also busted another myth, she says – that women cheat for emotional connection.

“These women are going there to have one-off, more or less anonymous encounters with women,” she says. “There could be no more vivid illustration of the data about female sexuality than Skirt Club.”

Attending such an event won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But, Martin believes, there is a universal lesson to be learnt. “I think people have to get creative if they want to stay with each other in the long term, and admit monogamy is hard,” she says. “I think when we admit that, it will provide such a wonderful relief to a lot of people.”

Admitting it is one thing; deciding what to do about it is quite another. And so we return to her idea of a hall pass. Is she really serious? And how would it even work? 

“Ok,” she laughs. “So here’s the deal: consensual non-monogamy, I don’t think people in the mainstream know enough about it... but that suggestion stems from a YouGov study that shows one in five British adults said they had had an affair

“That’s an awful lot of people struggling with monogamy and believing their only option is to remain monogamous and unfulfilled or have an affair and pray it doesn’t blow up your marriage. What if,” she posits, “we looked at struggling with exclusivity after a number of years as simply the baseline, and gave people a whole range of solutions?”

She acknowledges consensual non-monogamy would not be the way forward for everyone. “[For] some people that would drive them absolutely insane and it would be a terrible idea,” she says. For those people, she suggests alternatives, such as trying to inject the spark back into the sex life you already have. 

“The real gift would be to give your spouse permission to have the conversation,” she says. “Why is it better to get a divorce and move on when you simply decide ‘I don’t fancy him any more’, or the spark is gone... What a trail of destruction you might save yourself from creating if you said instead: is there something we can do here?”

Marriages, by this reasoning, could be saved. And something even bigger could occur: a societal shift in power relations between the sexes.

“If we have a pleasure revolution and start to put female sexual pleasure at the centre of our sexual universe, there’s a case to be made that that could change relationships outside the bedroom as well,” says Martin. “I hope so. We’ll have to see.”

Untrue : why nearly everything we believe about women and lust and infidelity is untrue by Wednesday Martin published by Scribe Publications RRP £14.99. Buy now for £12.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514

Non paywall source

[babylon-crashing]

shamanic armenia

... from Michael Berman’s Shamanic Journeys Across the Caucasus (2009, pages 21-32)

If the Scriptures are rightly understood, it was in Armenia that Paradise was placed. – Armenia, which has paid as dearly as the descendants of Adam for that fleeting participation of its soil in the happiness of him who was created from its dust. It was in Armenia that the flood first abated, and the dove alighted. But with the disappearance of Paradise itself may be dated almost the unhappiness of the country ; for though long a powerful kingdom, it was scarcely ever an indipendent one, and the satraps of Persia and the pachas of Turkey have alike desolated the region where God created man in his own image (taken from Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Leslie Marchand (cd.), London, 1976, vol. V, p.157).

What can we say about Armenia?  “There is no other country like her. She has played a unique and perhaps indispensable role as a buffer between Asia and Europe, a mediator between two seemingly irreconcilable civilizations and ways of life. And her dark beauty is eternal” (Surmelian, 1968, pp.23-24).

Located in the southern Caucasus, Armenia is the smallest of the former Soviet republics, and is bounded by Georgia in the north, Azerbaijan in the east, Iran in the south, and Turkey in the west. Frequently referred to as one of the cradles of civilization, it is also considered by many to have been the first country in the world to officially embrace Christianity as its religion (c. 300).

Armenia, like neighboring Georgia, is in a region which is a crossroads between Asia and Europe, and has more often than not been conquered by the dominant regional power of the day, starting with the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, through to the Ottomans and finally the Russians. As a result, an Armenian diaspora has thus existed more or less throughout the nation's history, with emigration having been particularly heavy since independence. So much so, that an estimated 60% of the total eight million Armenians worldwide now live outside the country. Nevertheless, once again like Georgia, the country has managed to hold onto a unique cultural and linguistic identity which is reflected in its folklore.

As a consequence of Soviet era policies, the number of active religious practitioners in the country is relatively low, but the link between Armenian ethnicity and the Armenian Church is strong. An estimated 90 percent of citizens nominally belong to the Armenian Church/ an independent Eastern Christian denomination with its spiritual center at the Etchmicidzin cathedral and monastery.

It is all too easy these days to paint a totally negative picture of life under Soviet communism, especially when it comes to the matter of religious freedom, but in the case of Armenia it would be an injustice to do so for:

Soviet communism protected the Armenian people from Turkism ... Moreover, despite its internationalist posture, communism built up a nation in Soviet Armenia from individuals and groups of widely differing geographic origins. The power to withstand, and the sense of nationhood, have to be balanced against the totalitarianism and Stalinism which were part of the state ideology, although less visible at the start (Walker, 1997, p.140).

As for the current status of religious freedom, although the Armenian Constitution as amended in December 2005 provides for freedom of religion, the reality of the situation is that the Armenia (Apostolic) Church, which has formal legal status as the national church, enjoys some privileges not available to other religious groups. Societal attitudes towards some minority religious groups appear to be somewhat ambivalent too, with reports of societal discrimination directed against members of these groups.

Only registered groups may publish newspapers or magazines, rent meeting places, broadcast programs on television or radio, or officially sponsor the visas of visitors, although there is no prohibition on individual members doing so. And to qualify for registration, religious organizations must, “be free from materialism and of a purely spiritual nature,” and must subscribe to a doctrine based on, “historically recognized holy scriptures.” In the case of religions based on ritual observance rather than “holy scriptures” though, were an application for registration made, it is unclear what scriptures could be presented to the Office of the State Registrar to satisfy such a requirement.

We find what is now Armenia referred to in the Old Testament, with the Book of Genesis relating how:

Noah's Ark, as the waters of the flood subsided, came to rest, not “on Mount Ararat” as is commonly misstated --- the Armenians call this Mount Masis, a name (Masios) used by Greek geographers to denote a range to the south-west --- but, “upon the mountains of (the land of) Ararat,” i.e. a country known to the ancient Assyrians as Urartu (Downing, 1972, p. ix).

The region of Ararat was then invaded by the Armenians after the Urartian kingdom, plagued by Assyrian and Cimmerian attacks, fell to the Medes in 612 B.C. The most momentous event in the national life of Armenia, however, and the event which was the chief determining factor in the early history of the country, was the change of religion made by the adoption of Christianity, which was finally established by Tiridates (A.D. 286-342).

By this the Armenians were entirely severed from the pagan Persians and brought into close contact with the Greeks, whose representative was then the Emperor of Byzantium. As a result of this religious agreement, a treaty was concluded in 319 between Tiridates and Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, by which the two Christian monarchs bound themselves to defend each other against all pagans.

The adoption of Christianity meant, to the Armenians, a revolution in their whole view of life, a severance from their ancestral beliefs, though these beliefs have left traces in Armenian folklore which are visible even to this day. These beliefs and the folklore arising out of them were regarded by the Christian clergy as a poisonous flower grown up in the fields of paganism. The historians of the period have chronicled the efforts of the clergy to exterminate every relic of the old faith. Temples were pulled down and churches built in their stead; images and other monuments were broken in pieces; heathen books and records were destroyed; pagan festivals were turned into Christian ones. We learn from Faustus of Byzantium that laws were even made against the use and the singing of pagan songs (Boyajian, 1916, p. 151).

Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches took the place of the old religions in Europe and across western Eurasia, this applied mainly to the urban centers.

Beyond the borders of Rome's control, in the most northern and eastern fringes and on the western isles, and in the rural environments amongst the "country folk" or pagani, the old religions continued, pejoratively designated after them as Paganism. Even when officially Christianized, the religion of the Pagans remained an assimilation, merely an overlay of the newer cults, or it passed unnoticed under other names, with its myths and beliefs adapting and surviving primarily in less objt'ctionnble forms such as folktales and bizarre or quaint festival rites (Kuck, Staples, et al., 2007, p.3).

And this is very much what occurred in the case of Armenian paganism too. Not only can reminders be found in the traditional dances, songs, and rites still being performed, but also in the folktales still being told. Even after so many centuries of Christianity in Armenia, elements of paganism live on in the country to this day. Moreover, the origins of Armenian paganism could well date back even further into the distant past, when shamanism would have been practiced in the land.

Their concept of the soul, for example, would indicate that this was likely --- the belief that departed bad souls could pursue the living, resulting in their soul loss:

Since it was believed that the soul left the mouth in death, it lived on apart from the body and was invisible. It could assume physical shape somewhat smaller than the body, or an animal shape, the most important of which was a bird ... Even inanimate objects, such as trees, were associated with soul beliefs, and the poor health of a tree symbolized that the human owner was in danger, too.

Departed souls could appear as good or evil. Good ghosts were associated with angels and holy beings; bad ghosts were considered to be the souls of sinners ... In the shape of animals or men these unclean souls appeared before men and brought misfortune to them. Such departed bad souls constantly pursued the living and were eager to take them along. To prevent this, the living flattered the dead with attention and honored them with a Funeral. They provided a hokeh-hatz (funeral dinner) with abundant food for the mourners. If, however, flattery was ineffective, the evil force of the soul might be destroyed by eating part of the dead man's heart, which was, and still is, considered the seat of the soul.

... The belief that the soul of the departed needs special care exists even today. Special prayers for the peace of the departed are still said in church and until recently were chanted in individual homes on Saturday nights over the faint glow of incense. On the Monday after Easter the great celebration of Merelotz [Memorial Day] occurs. In Armenia whole families spent the afternoon at the cemeteries of their departed (Hoogasian-Villa, 1966, p.61).

As for the folktales, they can be divided “into wonder tales ... and realistic tales of everyday life ... although this is a rough distinction at best for there are wonder tales with realistic elements in them, and realistic tales not altogether devoid of the marvelous” (Surmelian, 1968, p.11). The tale presented here is of the former type.

Epithets are frequently used in the stories. In The Girl Who Changed Into A Boy, there are the examples of “the King's daughter” and “the old woman's daughter.” We never learn their names, only the name of the horse.

Another feature we find is that formulas are repeated, a popular one being “Whether they traveled a long or short time, only God knows.” Frequently, the following disclaimer appears too: “Whether it happened or not ...” or “there was and there wasn't...” As for the story endings, many are a variation on … “Three apples fell from heaven --- one apple for the storyteller, the second for the person listening to the story, and the third for the whole, wide world.” Another common ending formula is “They attained their happiness. May you attain your happiness, too” (Marshall, 2007, p.xxviii).

A comprehensive introduction by Aram Raffi to the religious beliefs and practices that prevailed in Armenia in pre-Christian times can be found in Armenian Legends and Poems and, as a starting point, it is presented below:

The principal god of Armenia was Aramazd, whom the Armenians called “the Architect of the Universe, Creator of Heaven and Earth.” He was also the father of the other gods. The Armenians annually celebrated the festival of this god on the 1st day of Navasard [which, according to the later calendar of pagan Armenia, was in August], when they sacrificed white animals of various kinds — goats, horses, mules, with whose blood they filled goblets of gold and silver. The most prominent sanctuaries of Aramazd were in the ancient city of Ani in Daranali, the burial-place of the Armenian kings, as well as in the village of Bagavan in Bagravand. Aramazd had an attendant incorporeal spirit, named Tir or Grogh (“writer”), whom he sent to earth to watch men and record in a book their good and evil deeds. After death, human souls were conducted by Tir to Aramazd, who opened the book at each soul's record, in accordance with which he assigned a reward or punishment. In a village near Vargharshapat there was a temple of this god, where the priests interpreted dreams after consulting his oracle. The influence of Tir was great in Armenia, for he was a personification of hope and fear. There are traces of the cult of this god in the Armenian language. It is still usual to hear, used as a curse, the expression, “May Grogh take you!” The son of Aramazd was Mikr, Fire. He guided the heroes in battle and conferred wreaths on the victors. The word nu'himi (“temple”) is derived from Mihr; also some Christian names. One of the months in the ancient Armenian calendar (Mehekan) was named after him. His commemoration-day was celebrated with ... great splendour at the beginning of spring. Fires were kindled in the open market-place in his honor, and a lantern lighted from one of these fires was kept burning in his temple throughout the year. This custom of kindling fires in the spring is still observed in some parts of Armenia.

Although the Persians and the Armenians were both worshipers of Mihr, the conceptions and observances of the two nations differed. The Armenian sacred fire was invisible, but the Persian was material and was kept up in all the temples. For this reason the Armenians called the Persians fire-worshipers. But the Armenians had also a visible fire-god, who, although material, was intangible --- the sun --- to which many temples were dedicated and after which one of the months (Areg) was named. Long after the introduction of Christianity, there was a sect of sun-worshipers existent in Armenia, who were called “Children of the Sun.” A small remnant of them is still supposed to be found, dwelling between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Traces of sun-worship are also evident in the Armenian language and in the Armenian literature of Christian times. Some sayings and phrases are still in use which contain references to sun-worship, such as the expression of endearment, “Let me die for your sun!” and the oath, “Let the sun of my son be witness.”

One of the most famous Armenian goddesses was Anahit, who answered to the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana. As a daughter of Aramazd she was the benefactress of the whole human race; “through her the Armenian land exists, from her it draws its life; she is the glory of our nation and its protectress;” and for her the ancient Armenians felt intense love and adoration.

Many images and shrines were dedicated to her under the names of “the Golden Mother,” “the Being of Golden Birth,” etc. Every summer there was a festival in her honor. On that day, a dove and a rose were offered to her golden image, whence the day was called Vardavar, which means “the flaming of the Rose.” On the introduction of Christianity, the temple of Anahit was destroyed and her festival became the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ; it falls in the last days of the year according to the ancient Armenian calendar; but the name “Vardavar” still remains and doves are still set flying on that day.

The sister of Anahit was Astghik (which means “little star” in Armenian), the goddess of beauty, a personification of the moon, corresponding to the Phoenician and Sidonian Astarte. Strange to say, the Persians had no goddess of beauty, but the bright sky of Armenia, its numerous valleys, the torrents running down from snow-capped mountains, the lakes, the cultivated fields and meadows tended to strengthen the sense of beauty, and, therefore, Armenia had a goddess of beauty, who was not to be found in the pantheon of the neighboring country.

The Armenians assigned Astghik a husband worthy of her. He was Vahagn, deified on account of his valor. In ancient songs, he is credited with a miraculous birth. The fires of heaven and earth, and the sea crimson in the light of dawn, travailed to bring him into being. ... Vahagn was called Vishapakagh (Uprooter of dragons), as he cleared the Armenian land of monsters and saved it from evil influences. His exploits were known not only in Armenia, but in the abode of the gods. Having stolen corn from the barns of King Barsham of Assyria, he ran away and tried to hide himself in heaven. From the ears he dropped arose the Milky Way, which is called in Armenia the Track of the Corn-stealer.

The third daughter of Aramazd was Nane or Noone. She was the goddess of contrivance. It was believed by the Armenians that contrivance was a necessary power for a woman, because, in the management of the household, she had to make big things out of small ones, and circumstances were already against her on account of the vicissitudes which Armenia was constantly undergoing.

Sandarnmet, the wife of Aramazd, was an invisible goddess and a personification of the earth. Aramazd sent rain upon her, which brought forth the vegetation on the earth. She came to be a synonym of Hades and was very frequently referred to as such in theological books and in the hymnary of the Christian Church.

Besides these gods of their own, the Armenians also adopted alien divinities. When Tigranes brought a number of Phoenicians to Armenia as prisoners they brought with them their god Ammon, from whose name [some say] comes the word Ammonor, “the day of Ammon” --- the New Year. Assyrian, Arab, and other emigrations also led to the introduction of foreign deities. An Armenian king, when he brought home captives, also introduced the gods of those captives, whose images were placed in the temples beside those of the native gods that they most closely resembled. Even Indian fugitives brought the brother-gods, Demetr and Gisanes, whose images were not like those of the other gods of Armenia, for the images of the gods of Armenia are, as a rule, small, whereas these were very tall, with long black hair and black faces. There was also a great immigration of Jews into Armenia, and this influenced the Armenians in the direction of monotheism. Besides the principal gods, there were also secondary ones. These were spirits, corresponding to angels, who acted as guardians to different classes of natural objects: --- Kadjk (which means “brave ones” in Armenian], who occupied the mountains; Parik, who presided over flocks; and many others.

Water was honored in Armenia as a masculine principle. According to Tacitus (Annals, vi. 37) the Armenians offered horses as sacrifices to the Euphrates, and divined by its waves and foam. Sacred cities were built around the river Araxes and its tributaries. Even now there are many sacred springs with healing powers, and the people always feel a certain veneration towards waters in motion.

There were gods who lived in the waters and destroyed harmful monsters of the deep. There was also a god who breathed out a mysterious atmosphere which destroyed malignant creatures. … All the gods of this class were friendly to agriculturists.

There were also “Haurot-Maurot,” the name of a flower (Hyacinthus raccmosus dodonei) first mentioned by Agathangelos. The Arabs incorporated them in the Quran (ii. 96) as two angels sent down to live in Babel in human circumstances.

Alk, who dwelt in the waters, was a very harmful devil. He used to live in the corners of houses and stables, and in damp places. He had eyes of fire, nails of copper, teeth of iron, and the jaws of a wild boar. He carried a sword of iron in his hand and was a bitter enemy to pregnant women, near whom he sat at the time their child was born.

There were nymphs, who were guardians of women. They wandered through gardens and amid streams, but were invisible. They attended weddings and frequented bathrooms and the women's quarters in general. These nymphs and spirits were innumerable. Every woman was supposed to have a guardian nymph. The nymphs were supposed by some to be immortal and endowed with perpetual youth; others described them as mortal though they never grew old. There was also a group of male spirits who were regarded by some as mortal, by others as immortal. They wandered with the nymphs through forests, gardens, and other open places. They were imagined as very tail, with features like those of men; some were half-man and half-animal. Some were called Parik, “dancers” others Hushkn parik, “dancers to a melody in a minor key.”

In some places, even now, a belief in these nymphs (or fairies) survives. Many stories are told of their beauty, their marvelous dancing, and their wondrous music. They are never called by the name of “nymphs,” but are spoken of by the people of the country as “our betters.” Still in some parts of Armenia, in May and October, a festival is held annually in honor of them, generally by the women in the Public Baths. They assemble early in the morning and remain till late at night, dancing, eating, and bathing. Before the people thought of building temples, they worshiped their gods in forests and on mountains. One of these forests was the Forest of Sos. According to tradition, the son of Ara the Beautiful, Anushavan, who devoted himself to the worship of this sacred place, was called, after the forest Sos. The priests derived oracles from the rustling of the leaves in this holy wood.

Besides temples, which were numerous in Armenia, there were, all over the country, altars and shrines, as well as images and pictures.

To sum up, the pre-Christian religion of Armenia was at first “a kind of nature-worship, which developed into polytheism (Boyajian, 1916, pp.l27-13'l). A great many curious ceremonies are observed by the Armenians in connection with such family events as births, marriages, and deaths. A wedding takes a whole week to celebrate, and when a wealthy farmer dies all the inhabitants of the village are publicly invited by the priest in church to the funeral feast. They have also retained a great many strange superstitious practices, and believe in the existence of a variety of supernatural beings possessing propensities and powers both benevolent and malevolent. In the long winter nights, when the snow lies thick in the streets and on the housetops, the women fancy they hear in the howling of the wind the shouts and laughter of these tricksy beings. And the young women and girls, when the day's tasks are done, gather round the grandmother, who relates strange creepy stories of the pranks of the djinns, or charming romances dealing with peris, magicians and enchanted palaces, while the grandfather, sitting cross-legged in his fur-lined pelisse in the corner of the divan, tells the boys tales of the Armenian heroes of old (Lucy Garnett, Turkish Life in Town and Country, London, 1904, pp.176-82).

[alexsmitposts]

The Insanity of Sustainability “Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato. This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. They may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans. Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years. All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet. In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words. Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t. We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory. As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.” Sustainability. What does it mean? It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both. Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide. In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992. The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”. In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This is precisely what Bill Gates needs to introduce digital IDs – most likely injected via vaccines, beginning with children from developing countries – i.e. the poor and defenseless are time and again used as guinea pigs. They won’t know what happens to them. First trials are underway in one or several rural schools in Bangladesh – see this and this. These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world. Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies. The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”. See also Michael Moore’s film“Planet of the Humans”. Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity. As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology. To enhance your belief their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed along with their “sustainable” buzz-words. *** The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (take a look at this). *** Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not. Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability. Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018). Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here. These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations. Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights. The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie. Petrol industry - BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable. Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. Yet at least 60% of oil and tar along the sea shore and beaches have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie. BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability. In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced. Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another. Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. Its simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate. Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it. In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6. “Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow. The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility. So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

[thefaithletters]

Confronting Our Values: To a Troubled Muslim Community

Dearest whose trust in the Muslim community has been lost after an immensity of love,

On this day, nearly fifteen hundred lunar years ago, our Prophet Muhammed ﷺ was born. His birth changed history. His legacy, and our religion, was built on the foundation of our Prophet's character before he received revelation: honesty and trustworthiness. 

Yet, our ummah is plagued by corruption, deceit, manipulation, and hypocrisy. These qualities are in every human society, to some extent. It's normal that some Muslims will have these qualities (after all, most Muslims don't choose their religion but rather treat it like cultural inheritance). But to find these qualities in the ones who have put themselves in positions of being entrusted to revive the message in the hearts, of people, who are elevated for that role, and who are privy to the spiritual hunger and thirst of vulnerable people --that is among the greatest fitnahs.

I am concerned about how desensitized we are becoming to news of this nature. I notice it in myself, and I see it in friends: a spiritual fatigue that doesn't want to be spoken about. 

And it breaks my heart.

When there's a lack of consistency or agreement between two beliefs (or values) or a belief and behavior, the mind enters a state of cognitive dissonance. This state of unrest feels heavy and unsettling, and people are naturally motivated to alleviate this discomfort by changing their behaviors, adopting a new belief or idea, seeking new information that offers an alternative paradigm, or deciding to reduce the importance of one of the beliefs or values that are in disharmony. This seems like the state of the majority of young American Muslims today. 

The more dangerous trend I see emerging is what I consider spiritual fission. In this state, people can no longer identify or point to the countless directions in which their faith has been shattered. It's a chaotic state, and it's too uncomfortable to confront directly so it naturally leads to numbness and apathy regarding anything religious or an inability to engage with such topics deeply.

Our religious institutions and spiritual leaders are largely responsible for the young generation's disconnection from their mosques and communities (parents play a significant role, too, but that's a topic for another time). It's stories like the ones that came out recently that have caused many people deep despair in spiritual communities. 

We are all flawed people. The issue isn't that a Muslim committed a major sin or was fallible to his desires. The real issue is the lack of truthfulness in how it's handled by many involved. Deceit is what erodes trust, and trust is the foundation of faith and community. When it is revealed to a spiritual leader and the community members who closely work with him in a leadership capacity that he is no longer able to uphold his responsibility, the right thing to do is proactively step down and acknowledge a struggle and need for improvement.

Of course, none of us have heard of this type of honorable handling of such situations happening in our communities (I really hope I'm wrong here). Why? Money and ego. 

Sadly, many of our spiritual leaders are financially reliant upon their image and reputation as people of God among the community. This means that a religious leader who becomes exposed for a betrayal of his position may suddenly lose all his income and face an overwhelming fear of instability and anxiety about the future. So the survival instinct kicks in (especially if family is involved) and the man no longer sees the moral and ethical layers of the situation. 

Money and religion should never mix. Easy to say, complex to implement. I know. Yet, necessary and true, nonetheless. 

Another primary reason so-called spiritual leaders don't step down or come forward truthfully when they've betrayed their positions of trust is probably that they don't want to lose their status in the community. Being a celebrity imam can become so ingrained into someone's identity that it becomes almost like an addiction to attention or power. This is also connected to a larger societal shift in values (studies show an upward trend of youth who say they want to become famous). It's even more connected to the shift in values hierarchy we have as a larger Muslim community. Authenticity, truthfulness, integrity...those are all secondary to knowledgeability, charm, and "success." 

Until we become a people who hold honesty and trustworthiness among our highest values, our leaders will continue to reflect us. 

As we continue to remain obsessed with image and reputation in the community independent of actual virtue or character, we continue to cultivate a culture of hypocrisy and double-lives. People only hide the sins that aren't yet accepted by the community. It's only a matter of time before the scope widens. 

I have nothing juicy to say about the recent news regarding Usama Canon. Like many of you who had only love and admiration for Usama Canon and the community he founded, this week's news have been tough for me. I participated in Ta'leef's Refining the Core program earlier this year and met Usama Canon in 2016 when he came to Maryland to give a talk. He was one of the few people who took the time to answer a question I had with careful consideration and respect. I left that talk feeling a sense of hope. And then when I started learning about Ta'leef and participated in their community, I continued to carry with me the hope for our community to be healthy, respectful of all people, and authentically striving for goodness. For the good that he's done, and if this in fact his way of acknowledging the harm he's made and making amends, I pray for his wellbeing. And if this is Ta'leef's uplifting of accountability and honoring their positions of trust, I pray for their success and healing. 

Like many, I wish I were surprised by this. Sadly, I know this kind of stuff happens. I’ve witnessed misconduct and heard about it from friends. I’ve tried to speak up about the betrayal of authority and unhealthy behaviors, but the disappointing reactions I got were discouraging. I talked to the spiritual leader who I had witnessed inappropriateness from, and his response was gaslighting. It was a complex and spiritually fatiguing experience. In the end, I just removed myself from the community. Though I didn’t experience abuse, my faith was deeply tested and my heart hurt. I almost lost my religion. I was lucky to be able to notice and protect myself from anyone taking advantage of me. I can’t imagine the pain actual victims endure, and it saddens me that the community cares more about the celebrity abusers than the “nobodies” who are abused (often the most vulnerable members of our communities who don’t have powerful families, financial resources, or impressive professional titles).

I've had my faith and hope in this community shattered a few times, and every time God somehow found a way to remind me that there are still beautiful people out there who are true seekers. They aren't the ones with the followers and fans and financial ties to their religion or spirituality. More often than not, the modern-day companions of the Prophet (the ones he referred to as his brothers and sisters he hadn't yet met) are those who keep their good deeds concealed and remain patient in the face of oppression. Their words aren't tweet-worthy and there are no fun perks to being their friends. They treat their family members and parents better than anyone else. They are known for their honesty and trustworthiness. On the day our Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born, I pray we are all able to take a moment to be truthful with ourselves about the state of our hearts. Where are we not truthful? What steps must we take to embody more honesty and trustworthiness? Where is our faith hurting? How are we in community? What are our own hierarchies of values? How can we be better believers?

Salam.

P.S. I share these thoughts selfishly because they continue to occupy my mind. I release them here so that I no longer carry the burden of their release. I’m not spiritually superior for writing this. Most know my deep struggles with my faith.

[the-truth-behind-redacted]

Dome’s Way Home

Dear Locket, Entry 5

While it's not exactly the most thrilling for me, it's now blatantly clear to me that there is more than the Sp-Tem(s) exist in this place. I also have reason to suspect that they are sentient on some level. Of course, the word I could be looking for is sapient but I have no way to check even if it is. The flashes of explosions break the field of vision and the calls of many different things echo above. It's very clear to me this is a war front and not some happenstance battle of two giant beasts. What worries me is that I'm slowly moving forward to that locations though it's angled off from my path.

However, the main fear I have about this is that war is an organized institution, or however you would describe it, and it requires some form of societal structure. I'm not saying it has to be advanced or even something like ours but a group with a unified reason to fight against another is near textbook war. This should go without saying that I am by no means at this point an expert of how things work here so for all I know this is a territory battle between two apex preditor groups that just because of the very alien way of these beings has caused me to confuse it for war. Hell, what the fuck do I know?

Way before I reached my current position where the battle is as clear as it is now, I decided to do a few other tests. The first one was just for documentation, however embarrassing it may have been, of testing sexual functions. I covered in either my first or second entry that many psychical functions don't affect me. This being the need for sleep, lack of fatigue, food and water, and the need for restrooms. Also, besides the auto weapon, no physical strain has been happening to me. This left one obvious bodily function that I needed to test while inside this undefined place.

To make a very uncomfortable story short, the answer is yes. I did feel an increase in body temperature during the progress as well as self-lubrication. Climax also happened with the excretion of climaxal fluid. Thought this was a humiliating process an interesting thing to note after is that I did feel a form of physical fatigue after climax. This, however, has made it clear that my bodily functions are still working, they just seem to be in a form of suspended animation until some very exact stimulus activates them. Why sexual stimulation is one of them, I don't know but it's very strange to me. That is to say, slightly more strange than literally everything else that's been going on.

Now on to the real reason why I'm writing this entry, I have found some semblance of a civilization in this deranged world. I call it a semblance because all that's left seems to be shattered domes that I can only guess served as some sort of shelter. This is built in the center of a mass of intersecting paths which only seems to suggest that these paths weren't built. They just seem to have been here beforehand. That would explain why these paths just stretch on endlessly without any seeming purpose or reason of existence.

There's something unspeakably horrific about this. It all seems so humanoid. Of course, it's not like any human structure I've seen but once more drawing back from old history, there was a group of people known as Esca-to. They were a group of nomadic people who lived in frigid temperature. I'm not quite sure how one would live in the cold without technology but they survived there for hundreds of thousands of years, supposedly. Then again, there wasn't a climate on Gee-Gerotous that could be considered cold. It is pretty temperate all over.

Anyways, the Esca-tos lived in the upper Northern Hemisphere of the planet Earth where it was mostly fridged. There was a lot of ice and snow that covered everything. Well, because of the climate in these areas, there weren't as many basic building resources. So instead of wood or clay, they used compactable snow. These igloos basic structure featured a dome of compacted snow with a relatively small crawl space for a person to get in.

Now, this information is the only common beliefe from what we have. Ancient historians disagree about much of this, especially the condition to why Igloos were the common form of housing, if they were even the common form of housing, if the Esca-tos were even the pioneers of this form of housing, and much more. Hell, there isn't even an agreement if the word Igloo was even used to refer to these housings. This is just the current working theory. It's hard to be 100% about anything if you don't have an active site to investigate, which brings me to this ruin (though I don't think snow would preserve well over thousands of years).

The site was massive, and I'm still quite impressed with how many different paths intersected in this one area to create as much space as it has. Many of the domes have caved in over time. In total there are 13 large domes and it's hard to tell how many smaller ones existed. It seems that before whatever was here simply abandoned this site, many of the smaller destroyed domes were piled together. Of the small domes that still exist there are about 15, only slightly more than the big ones. I guess the ones that weren't destroyed when they left are now the ones that caved over time.

It's important to mention that the terms small and big are absolutely relative terms to each other. I'm a decently sized woman, 5'8 (173cm), and the "crawl spaces" open up to well over my body size. If I was to estimate the size of the entire platform this was made on is about 5.5km*6km. The size kept within each of the large domes are larger than what most usual household sizes are from my world. Each large dome could house many families with enough space to segregate each family with walls to allow privacy. However, looking at some of the basic structures found in the domes that haven't completely collapsed suggest that they were used to only house one being.

The most intact large dome had only the entrance collapsed and some of the very center of the ceiling which fell into the housing. It took quite a while to move much of the mysterious crystal substance which seemed to compose everything in this world. Upon entering the first thing I saw was a bed structure. For the first time ever it was something that wasn't purple! Drape over a rectangular base was a golden "fur." Touching it wasn't comfortable at all. The fibers were like needles and I did puncture the tip of one of my fingers. If I die from an infection because of this, I'm going to be pissed. Well dead but I'm going to be pissed while I die that is if suffering doesn't consume me which it most likely will.

Carefully pulling it off saw what was underneath. The case was hollowed out and there was some kind of comforter. It was seamed together with a hardy pelt. It did bend and flow like a pillow but it wasn't quite as soft. I made a knife as a tool from my weapon, which only took a bit of focus, and cut it open. I pulled out what looked to like scales. Their color was a glistening velvet, green, and sea blue. They were surprisingly malleable. Each segment was lined and seamed together.  Honestly, it looks now a bit more like a sofa than a bed but it really doesn't share a similar look. Maybe if I flipped it but it's just a crystal flat surface. I don't understand its design.

I glanced around the room and much of the furniture was very much overside for me. Many of the chairs were like the oversized bar stools that go up to your waist. These were quite a bit larger, going up to my chest. I lifted myself up onto one and looked at the desk. There was an assortment of little nick-nacks. An object I recognized was an object to represents the physical property for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Known to us as the Casacal's Formation, named after the physicist from the group that uplifted our civilization to our current technological level, it has a set of objects evenly held together and lined up, in which one pulls one side of the formation letting it go and collide with a part that is resting which will cause the other end to launch out, pull back, and hit the resting part of the formation causing this to happen until one stops it or friction drags to a stop. Here, its called "Newton's cradle."

Another object was some weird singularity. Contained in a black tinted glass container, there is a swirling mass of energy that expands, contracts, and then condenses again in a flash of light before separating into two other masses of energy colliding and begin the cycle again. On the base on which the glass sphere containing the singularity it's labeled as "Matter Apperation Separation Cycle." It certainly doesn't seem to be scientific like Casacal's Formation as it didn't seem to be any kind of natural source causing the separation and recombination of the energy contained inside. There is also a warning on it saying to be careful when handling. I can only assume because the energy could cause massive damage if broken. I decided to put this in my bag in case I need a makeshift grenade.

There were three other objects on the desk. Two of the items seemed to be a computer. At least that what I think it is. Another object is a complicated assortment of in grove details, crystals that aren't purple (I'm sure God doesn't even know where the fuck those came from), and a broken set of what appears to be wires. Looking at what I would assume to be the computer tower, there's a massive empty section inside plus a bunch of other things that look like this world's tech. There's another object that looks like what I would think are fans. They are weird inserts with tubes running into them that have slits that air could pass through.

I don't know for sure but it all seems to be intact. All that appears to be damaged is what I would guess to be an internal power source. Near the possible internal power source and a possible computer tower is what could possibly be a monitor. It is really fucking big and very flat and has some kind of thin film screened over what reflects back as, what else, purple. I can see myself in its reflection and boy have I seen better days. This isn't important!

This old thing (I assume it's old) has really sparked my interest. Hopefully, somewhere around here there are instructions about this thing or at least manufacturing notes. Actually, wouldn't manufacturing notes be rarer than basic instructions of the product? Oh god, I'm beginning to treat this journal like it's a person that can answer my questions. I'm losing it. FUCK, focus you, dumb bitch. Alright, beyond the rest weird furniture that is around this place there doesn't seem to be anything else of interest. There are still quite a few other locations for me to check out. For now, I'll cut this and do another entry on the rest I find in the other caved in domes. I'll also check the crystal piles as well.

[ceramicfiver]

Summary of "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center" by bell hooks

Notes I took while reading Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks, May 2014

Chapter one: "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory"

Black women have been forgotten in feminism in favor of upper-class, white women feminism. In order to upend oppression, it's vital to listen to the voices of the most oppressed and put their concerns at the core of the movement in order to identify the origins and effects of oppression, which will then allow rightful liberation. Being oppressed means the absence of choices.

Chapter two: "Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression"

My favorite chapter so far. First, hooks destroys the former definition of feminism "the belief that men and women should be equals" by questioning to what men should women be equal to? Upper-class, white men? Unfortunately because of this definition much of feminism has been characterized as liberal reforms to alleviate upper-class white women's concerns while neglecting lower-class black women. Instead feminism should be defined as "a movement to end sexist oppression."

Another way liberal ideology dominates feminism can be addressed in my favorite quote so far on page 30:

"Focusing on feminism as individual commitment, we resist the emphasis on individual liberty and lifestyle. Such resistance engages us in revolutionary praxis. The ethics of Western society informed by imperialism and capitalism are personal rather than social. They teach us that the individual good is more important than the collective good, and consequently that individual change is of greater significance than collective change."

Instead of the individualistic "I am a feminist" we should say the collective "I advocate feminism" to adequately represent the political struggle as opposed to personal lifestyle.

Chapter three: "The Significance of Feminist Movement"

Here hooks emphasizes the importance of this new definition. Instead of attacking men in a supposed women vs men battle, we should instead focus on the root of sexism, namely systemic oppression. Secondly, societal issues should not be ranked in importance but rather should be recognized as intersecting oppression that share a root cause. It's silly to say sexism should be the first issue to destroy when racism and classism may remain. Likewise, when addressing racism and classism it's vital to not ignore sexism.

Chapter four: "Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women"

Sisterhood should not be racist or classist. Sisterhood should permeate sexist institutions, dominating individuals, and internalized sexism.

It should have dialogue with all women, not uncritical agreement, not exclusionary to non-feminists or the Other, and not characterized by hateful attacks. "Rather than bond on the basis of shared victimization or in response to a false sense of a common enemy, we can bond on the basis of our political commitment to feminist movement that aims to end sexist oppression."

The label feminist is not enough, there must be a continuous dialogue within feminism. "Since we live in a society that promotes fads and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change." (My comment: perhaps once we have our own grassroots built organization these fads will become permanent structures to counter capitalism's institutions.)

Dialogue should breach ethnocentrism, racism, and classism.

Unconditional solidarity, recognizing that we all have differences in opinion (and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, etc.), is vital for revolution.

Chapter Five: "Men: Comrades in Struggle"

Feminism shouldn't be anti-man, it should be anti-sexist oppression. The former alienates men, people of color, and lower class people who have united in to oppose white supremacist capitalism. For example, many blacks see racism as more powerful than sexism. The latter fits into this well, targeting the ruling class patriarchal domination too.

Anti-man sentiments led to female separatism from society. These lifestyle choices do not effectively combat patriarchy. Lifestyle is not politics. "Separatism has led many women to abandon feminist struggle ... As a policy, it has helped to marginalize feminist struggle, to make it seem more a personal solution to individual problems, especially problems with men, than a political movement that aims to transform society as a whole."

Focus on feminist lifestyle exploits people of color and lower classes. To be able to afford not having to deal with men probably means you're privileged, and exploiting others for your material gain. System change does not come from lifestyle change, it comes from solidarity and struggle to end sexist oppression.

"While [men] do not need to blame themselves for accepting sexism, they must assume responsibility for eliminating it ... in exposing, confronting, opposing, and transforming the sexism of their male peers."

"When [a man] beats or rapes women, he is not exercising privilege or reaping positive rewards ... The ruling-class male power structure that promotes his sexist abuse of women reaps the real material benefits and privileges from his actions. As long as he is attacking women and not sexism or capitalism, he helps to maintain a system that allows him few, if any, benefits or privileges."

"Separatist ideology encourages us to believe that women alone can make feminist revolution -- we cannot." Just as how white people struggled in solidarity with blacks against white supremacy, men can struggle in solidarity with women against patriarchy.

Chapter Six: "Changing Perspectives on Power"

[the-christian-walk]

CHRIST-CENTERED GIVING

Can I pray for you in any way?

Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com In Christ, Mark

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Acts 4:23-31

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

One of the biggest complaints you hear in today’s society is the matter of disunity and inequity. It seems like we can’t come together in agreement on anything and there is more than a growing sentiment that we’re becoming a nation of those who have against those who don’t.

These feelings seem to start in politics and then move on from there to infect and infest the general populace. We would be led to believe it’s a racial or social equity problem when the truth is that it’s really a Jesus problem, meaning that we have more and more become an apostate nation, self centered instead of Christ-centered.

If you don’t believe that, ask yourself this question:

Where do people turn in these times when they seek answers and solutions to the societal problems we face today?

If we’re honest, the answer isn’t Jesus for if it was the answer, we wouldn’t even be asking the question for we wouldn’t have issues if we were all like minded because we were all Christ-centered.

Before you discard this thought as impossible, I present to you evidence that it’s not just probable but completely doable because history shows us it is. Consider what happened in New Testament Jerusalem after a large group of people decided to place Jesus first in everything. We read about it in the closing verses of Acts, chapter 4. Look again at those words here:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

When a person chooses to place their belief and hope in Jesus as Savior, they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. No one is ever exempt from this anointing and we see what happens when a collective group comes to Jesus and are of one divine Spirit, a Spirit bestowed upon them by God. The scriptures tell us that the Jerusalem Christians were “one in heart and mind”, and one means one. There was total agreement among the people because they were all Christ-centered and not self centered or centered on worldly influences.

This Christ-centered unity spilled over into the way the believers behaved, especially in the way of charity and generosity. We read where there were “no needy persons among them” and no means just that. There were zero people in need. Let that sink in for a moment and then ask yourself if this isn’t a kind of culture you would like to be a part of. People weren’t waiting for the government to step in and offer solutions or resources. No, God had provided the people all they needed and the people saw that what they possessed truly belonged to God, not themselves. And with that realization, the people shared everything they had. Those who had much made sure that others who didn’t were helped.

How far did this extend?

It went far beyond just giving some food to someone or throwing out some token money to the poor. For the scriptures tell us that some of the richest people in Jesus’ day, those who would be able to own homes and land, would sell their property and give the proceeds to the apostles so it could be distributed to those who had need.

Friends, THAT’s sacrificial giving, selfless giving grounded and driven by a Chris-centered attitude.  

Friends, THIS is what happens when a society focuses on Jesus and Jesus alone. For when they do, then God’s grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit works powerfully in the hearts of everyone, resulting in a society that is beautiful and united and refreshingly charitable.

It’s a kind of world that’s totally obtainable but it’s going to require everyone to focus their minds attention and heart’s affection on Jesus and Jesus alone. It’s my prayer that we get there one day.    

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com

[copiosis]

The World Says Your Job Sucks. Even If You Love It.

The world is changing. Fast. Conservatives, liberals and their political gladiators squabble over those changes. Free healthcare (or not), "women's right to choose" (or not), Citizens United and living wage jobs are the spoils. The future is side wants is the prize.

Each side's political leaders persuade their supporters promising "Jobs for all", and "rebuilding the middle class", and "Protecting existing jobs from competition". Or "raising minimum wage standards for low-skilled jobs". To me, these are synonymous with jail sentences.

That’s right. I’m talking about your job. Whether you like it or not, the world would prefer its absence. Like that guy you can’t stand being around, your job is not only annoying. It’s probably killing you.

Why aren't politicians promising to end the need to work "jobs" at all? Do they (and the rest of America) not see how much better life would be without them? I do.

I'm not alone.

A small Faction advocates ending, not jobs, but all kinds of "working". Once and maybe still considered fringe, that may change given the future we face.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence and automation are already having their way across many job sectors. That's increasing. When companies like Pepsi say they are aggressively pursuing automation, and trucking companies see billions of savingsin self-driving trucks, you can bet, the workday's days are numbered. Meaning, jobs are on their way out.

Instead of fighting the inevitable, we could analyze if jobs are essential or not. And if not, what could be better than people working jobs.

Faction members say jobs are neither essential nor valuable.

But mainstream America still sees benefit from them. Despite their problems and obvious downsides. Downsides most people know. Downsides I'll share in links below.

Post Industrial Revolution Jobs Are Soul Crushing

This Faction, of which I am a part, says jobs crush souls. They're divisive, making competitors of your fellow humans. They make people sick. They waste lives in return for a paycheck.

People on their deathbed agree with me.

^^ What many who died regretted about life while dying. Read the whole article here.

Sure, some love their jobs. But they are the minority. Thirteen percent of people like going to work worldwide.  Many of those have adapted to their jobs. Meaning, they tolerate it. They don't really like it. How do I know? Offer them $10 million. See if they'd keep doing what they do for "work”.

Job lovers used to be the majority. But it wasn't jobs people worked back then. Before the the industrial revolution and mass production, people specialized. Not the specialization we see today. Where one person does one thing contributing to a assembly-line like production process.

They specialized around things they were passionate about and thus experts at. Or they had the aptitude (the natural talent, i.e. passion) to become good at it. They took pride in their work. And their output reflected that. That's why some of their output is still going strong hundreds of years later. In architecture, machinery, hardware and more, their work is their legacy.

Today, not so much.

I believe even if you love your job, you'd gladly give it up were a viable, engaging option available (and there are). Something more compelling that doing what you do. What compels most to work is need. They need things working gives them.

But work isn't the only way to get those.

Nearly all people give up working in the end. We call it "retirement".

Some give it up when a miracle happens: like winning the lottery. Or tragedy: a crippling injury or near-death experience.

So what should humans do with this thing most of us don't want to do?

The Faction says humanity should support people following their passions. The pursuit of leisure, and Maslow's idea of "self-actualization” should our focus. These pursuits not only vastly enrich humanity as a whole and the individual too. They also can solve all our pressing global, societal and environmental problems. But first, we as a civilization must organize said civilization away from "the daily grind".

That is possible.

Besides, it's passionate people who create humanity's breakthrough solutions. Not the ones complaining about what they do for a living. Imagine what could happen if everyone were passionate about what they're doing. Rather than flipping burgers, crunching numbers, and working in rendering plants. Unless those things are your passion.

^^Photo: Photo: Wahyu Setiawan on Unsplash

Jobs keep people so busy, affording enough time and energy to complain about problems. With more free time, people could be solving more problems they see. Create fewer problems too.

Jobs As A Belief Habit

Believing jobs are what people really want is a hard habit to break. For some, breaking the habit causes an existential crisis.

^^Someone indoctrinated to the “need” of jobs. Is it common sense? It is common. Sensical? I don’t think so.

But generally, satisfaction people get from workingcan be had (in greater levels) through passions. There's nothing a job provides that a passion can't in the right context.

People prefer not going to work. It's obvious when you listen to how people talk about work at work.

On Monday, people are trying to get over the end of the weekend. Why do weekends go by so quick? No one ever said "Thank God, it's Monday!"

By Tuesday they're hoping Wednesday (hump day) comes quicker than it feels like it's coming.

By Wednesday, people already are talking about being on the week's downslope.

Come Thursday, they breathe a sigh of relief: just 24 more hours before "TGIF"!

When Friday does come, people are excited. No, not about what they're doing. About what they're going to do come evening and on the weekend.

On Saturday, they're happy. But then...

On Sunday there's the general agreement that Monday looms and everyone's got to go back to work. Reluctantly.

I know this because I felt this way. I'm sure the stats don't over exaggerate the crowd I belonged to when I worked a job.

Work as it is construed today is not what humans are meant to do. I mean, we are doing them, so I guess we're meant to. For now. But jobs are catalysts. Jobs sometimes offer so much negative stress they propel people in the direction of their passions. Some do that. I'm one of them. Many others tolerate the stress instead.

Today, thanks in great measure to my wife, I'm following my passions. But I'm not unique. Every human being has a passion. That's what you're here for. Not work a job you don't like, tolerate, or become acclimated to.

^^Seriously.

The Transformational Power Of Passionate People

Ever notice that people following their passions are, well, passionate? They're not working. They're not watching the clock. They're not dreading Monday, or any other day of the week. They're enriched. They're in the flow. They're engaged. For them, time flies. Where did the time go? They ask!

People following their passion also produce excellent output. In many, many cases, that output inspires people. A lot of people. Even the strangest passion fulfills the actor and benefits the world. Including this guy,who eventually became a millionaire and was Knighted by England. For what? Creating the strangest art I've ever seen, or not seen:

Many passionate people are millionaires, world changers, leaders or all of these. Some are so humble and their work so obscure, you don't know them. Like Snowflake Bentley, whose passion changed our view of snow. No, not Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, the weather phenomena:

Someone following their passion views the week much different than a working person. Passionate people have six Saturdays and a Sunday in their week. Not the Monday-to-Friday working stiff drudgery. The rest of their lives are unlike most of us too.

What would it be like to have every American following their passion instead of working for a living? That's the question I asked at Copiosis six years ago.

Today Copiosis still going strong, promoting a better system than what we've got today. One that can easily allow every American...every human...to follow their passion.

Imagine how much better the world would be. How many better products we'd have. How many millions of passionate people we'd have. And a more healthy world we'd be living in.

A utopian fantasy? Some are beginning to say such "fantasies" are sorely needed. The faction I belong to believes this. Given the shape of our world these days and where it looks like it's going.

The Future Is Not Work. Nor Jobs.

The future is here. It emerges from the present. In this emerging future there are no jobs. Humans don't need to prepare for it like some cataclysmic apocalypse. Instead, we could be rushing head long towards it. As though it holds all our answers. Which it does.

Universal Basic Income, aka Andrew Yang's "Freedom Dividend"is a nice interim measure. It will help with humanity's thumb-twiddling. We still hold on to the past as though it's the present. Even though our entire planet is showing us our old ways are destroying us. The planet too. A Freedom Dividend can help us “bridge" here, where jobs dominate, and “there", where they've become mostly extinct.

^^A UBI could be a great bridge to a great future.

It could be a great catalyst. What could it catalyze? A great leap forward. Into what?

A future where you'll be inspired, rich and passionate about what you're doing.  Because what you're doing aligns with who and what you are.

That's a future I'd say anyone would want. Unless you're still stuck in that habitual thought that "people need jobs.”

They don’t. And the future agrees with me.

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: Amid polarization and chaos, the court charts a path toward peaceful pluralism

This article is part of a SCOTUSblog symposium on the Roberts court and the religion clauses.

Mark Rienzi is president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents parties or amici in many of the cases described below, including Bostock v. Clayton County, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia and Tanzin v. Tanvir. Rienzi is also a professor of law at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

This term had it all: blockbuster opinions, a presidential impeachment trial and a global pandemic that closed the court, necessitating historic oral arguments by telephone. It was a stormy year for the nine justices who — like the nation they serve — were often deeply divided over important questions and dealing with chaotic circumstances.

Amid the turmoil, there was one area of the law in which the justices seemed to be weaving together a set of precedents that could nurture some long-term peace. The term’s religious liberty decisions touched on a wide variety of subjects: teachers at religious schools, religious exemptions from federal mandates and state constitutional provisions rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry. But all of the court’s religion-related decisions harmonized around the principle that, despite all our honest and deep-seated disagreements about important questions, robust protection for religious dissenters is essential to our living together in a pluralistic society.

The court’s move toward anchoring a pluralistic approach within the law of religious liberty is part of a long-term trend. For example, just last term, in American Legion v. American Humanist Association, a seven-member majority emphasized that “the Religion Clauses of the Constitution aim to foster a society in which people of all beliefs can live together harmoniously.” And the court looks set to extend the trend next term, when the court hears another major religious liberty case on the merits, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

* * * *

The court’s first discussion of religious liberty this term came in its decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court interpreted Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit employment discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity grounds. In the course of responding to religious liberty arguments, the court recognized that applying that rule to religious employers — many of whom have deeply-held beliefs related to sex and marriage — could be problematic. The court explained that the Constitution’s free exercise clause “lies at the heart of our pluralistic society” and that the justices were “deeply concerned with preserving the promise of the free exercise of religion.” The court also pointed out Title VII’s “express statutory exemption for religious organizations” and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which “operates as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws.”

To be sure, the court emphasized that the exact interaction between these overlapping protections and Title VII was not at issue. But the heavy focus on religious liberty in a case that did not present the question strongly suggests that the six-justice Bostock majority understands that the Constitution and federal law provide strong protections for the rights of religious entities to act in accordance with their beliefs. And the three dissenting justices were, if anything, even more emphatic in emphasizing the rights of religious groups in the context of broad Title VII protections.

The court’s next case to touch on religion was Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, in which it rejected a Montana state constitutional provision that excluded religious schools from participating in public programs. The state provision was part of the wave of “Blaine Amendments” originally enacted in the 1800s as a way of keeping Catholic immigrants from setting up their own school system (and escaping the then-Protestant character of the public schools). The court rejected Blaine Amendments as “born of bigotry” and having a “shameful pedigree,” leading to discrimination that is “condemned” by the First Amendment.

Espinoza is a powerful victory for pluralism, in both historical and present-day terms. Historically, Blaine Amendments were created precisely to force an immigrant minority to conform to the majority’s religious and cultural views. And in the modern era, Blaine Amendments were being used in Montana and elsewhere to tell religious groups that relinquishing their religious character was a prerequisite to equal participation in society. Espinoza rejects both the historical provenance and the modern usage of such laws, and it precludes such government-imposed conformity as “odious to our Constitution.”

The last two merits decisions this term concerning religious liberty came on a single day. The first was Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, which concerned the ministerial exception rooted in both religion clauses. There, a 7-2 majority ruled that nondiscrimination laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act cannot constrain the freedom of religious groups to choose the teachers who will pass on the faith to children. This is true even if the school does not rely on an overtly religious reason for its employment decision, and it is true even if the teacher lacks a religious-sounding title or special religious training. Rather, “[w]hat matters, at bottom, is what an employee does.” If the employee has religiously important duties like teaching the faith, then the government cannot interfere in the employment decision, even if the employee also has many other secular duties. The Constitution protects religious autonomy, even if the group’s values do not conform to those of the governing majority.

As in Bostock, the dissenters (this time Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) did not seem to disagree about many of the key religious liberty points. They acknowledged the ministerial exception as “extraordinarily potent” and reaffirmed their support of the court’s 9-0 endorsement of the ministerial exception for a Lutheran teacher in the 2012 case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Their disagreement concerned not so much the law but “disputed facts” in a “context-specific” analysis. Thus, the opinions in Our Lady show all nine justices recognizing the importance of allowing religious groups to make employment decisions in accordance with their beliefs, even when those decisions implicate weighty societal interests like nondiscrimination. This constitutional holding mirrors the broad agreement suggested in Bostock’s discussion of religious autonomy in the context of Title VII.

In Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the court’s analysis focused on statutory issues rather than constitutional ones. But again the court ruled in favor of the religious party, here Catholic nuns who object to complying with the federal contraceptive mandate. The court firmly rejected the states’ argument that federal agencies, when issuing regulations on the scope of the mandate, should not have considered the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That argument, which had been accepted by some lower courts, treated RFRA as solely a judicial remedy and not a directive to be implemented by federal agencies. The Supreme Court disagreed, noting that it is “beyond dispute” that Congress intended RFRA to apply to “all Federal law, and the implementation of that law,” and that the agencies were right to consider it. Little Sisters thus echoes Bostock’s observation that RFRA is a “super statute” requiring federal agencies and federal laws to yield when they burden religion without a compelling need.

* * * *

The decisions in Bostock, Espinoza, Our Lady and Little Sisters show a court systematically building precedent on the foundational idea that religious freedom can help people in a diverse, pluralistic society live together in peace — even amid deep disagreements over fundamental issues. Properly understood, religious liberty protections can help society avoid zero-sum disputes in which one side of a polarized debate must win a complete victory, while the other must be completely vanquished or excluded. Although the justices do not always agree on each application of these principles to particular factual scenarios, they do seem largely in agreement on the principles themselves, which is good for both the court and the country.

That general agreement on first principles may explain why the court already has several significant religious liberty cases on its docket for next term. For example, in Tanzin v. Tanvir, a case held over from last term due to COVID-19, the court will consider the claim of Muslim petitioners arguing that RFRA allows them to collect a damages remedy from officials who violated their rights. In Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, the court will consider whether state governments can avoid facing religious freedom and other First Amendment claims by ceasing challenged conduct during a lawsuit to avoid punishment. And the court will have at least two petitions (Small v. Memphis Light, Gas & Water and Dalberiste v. GLE Associates) presenting the issue of whether it should revisit its 1979 decision Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, which sharply curtailed religious accommodations for employees. All of these cases provide an opportunity for the court to continue its project of enforcing both constitutional and statutory protections designed to allow for a pluralistic society in which people with varied beliefs can coexist in peace.

In that regard, Fulton may be the court’s most consequential case of the term. The case presents issues of profound consequence not just for religious foster-care and adoption providers, but for the meaning of the free exercise clause. The case involves Catholic Social Services of Philadelphia, which pioneered care for orphans and foster care in the city. It’s been doing that work for more than a century, and today it partners with foster parents like Sharonell Fulton to care for children. But in 2018, city officials began using their monopoly power over foster care to exclude CSS and foster parents like Fulton from taking in more foster children. City officials took this step because CSS cannot provide written “home study” endorsements for same-sex couples, but instead does something commonly done for secular reasons: provide a referral to help a family find the right agency for them. Even though no same-sex couple ever requested an endorsement from CSS, the city stopped placing children with any of the agency’s families, told CSS how it ought to interpret Catholic teaching and changed its rules to prohibit CSS from continuing to work with the city.

The court granted certiorari to consider not only whether Philadelphia’s actions violate the First Amendment, but also whether to revisit its 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision, which promised a more administrable standard for free exercise claims, has instead splintered the lower courts over its interpretation. Last year, in a statement respecting cert denial in Kennedy v. Bremerton, four justices openly criticized Smith as a decision that “drastically cut back on” free exercise protections. In Fulton, the court could overrule Smith, or it could rule for the foster parents while declining to apply Smith. But it is difficult to envision the court embracing an understanding of the First Amendment that allows the government to exclude a religious agency from social service work for children in need — a cause championed by the church for centuries — just because the agency follows what the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges called “decent and honorable” religious beliefs about sex and marriage. It would be far more consistent with the court’s recent decisions to hold that the free exercise clause ensures space for people to have different beliefs about important issues like sex and marriage without being punished by the government. Doing so would continue the court’s long-term trend of protecting the freedom to differ. Here, that would mean a world in which same-sex couples are free to foster, churches remain free to follow their faith and neither needs to vanquish the other to live an authentic life — and help children.

By next summer, we may well be looking back in appreciation on these two terms as a time in which broad majorities of the court made clear that — despite the storms raging across the political landscape and the chaos of the pandemic — a robust understanding of religious liberty can be an essential peacemaking mechanism, one that offers the prospect of de-escalating the culture wars and truly preserving “a society in which people of all beliefs can live together harmoniously.”

The post Symposium: Amid polarization and chaos, the court charts a path toward peaceful pluralism appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/08/symposium-amid-polarization-and-chaos-the-court-charts-a-path-toward-peaceful-pluralism/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[briberrioswriter2020]

Social Boundaries: Privitization and Deindividualization

The Gay Rights Movement flourished through its ability to maintain social connections without being in agreement with a particular agenda, and also through its acceptance of variety and individuality united for the common good. Examining the Gay Rights Movement is one way to understand the function of social boundaries in sex politics. First of all, individuality does not function well in social boundaries. In Temporarily Yours, Stein explains that “In order to create a social order, deviants are established and punished.” (Stein 20) Within the anecdotes told in Stranger Next Door and Temporarily Yours, one finds that many people believe abnormal sexuality should not exist, but since it does exist, it must be kept private, and if ever it is not private, it must be publicly shamed.  

Social boundaries are created not by physics or any government body, but by people's interactions with each other. Boundaries also mean that one cannot be an individual, one must be part of a group, and one must follow the arbitrarily established rules of the group.  In Temporarily Yours, Stein explains how, “OCA activists view individuals as essentially evil, self-serving, and destructive.” (Stein 96) Individuality makes it more difficult for the set of rules within a boundary to be enforced because individuality allows disagreement and deviance to be acceptable. Social boundaries with which sex politics is concerned also require that if abnormal sexuality must exist, it must stay hidden. Berstein's chapter, “The Privatization of Public Women” explains this thoroughly, stating, “here showing too much is vulgar.” (Berstein 71) Furthermore, the chapter explains how the sex industry has moved to the internet. Social boundaries behave in such a way that one group will always be more powerful than the other, and therefore one group marginalizes the other group; Stein explains this marginalization as “People do things because they wish to protect an image of who they are in relation to the group which they believe they are a part.” (Stein 8) Because of social boundaries, people have a desire to eradicate others in order to fortify their own sense of self.  

Sexuality can be divided into two parts; that which follows the conservative paradigm of heterosexual, cisgender sex within the confines of marriage and for the purpose of procreation, and that which does not. Several of the issues addressed in the two readings are related to the social construct of normative gender roles. In Temporarily Yours, Stein encounters Sally Humphries, who “just wants to be a woman in the old-fashioned way.” (Stein 96) Because Sally is comfortable in her assigned gender role, and with a lack of individually (she also explains that her life revolves around following the rules of the church), she is unwillingly to accept a shift in the social boundaries, going as far as to fight against social change. In Stranger Next Door, Berstein explains that it was thought the social taboo of prostitution would disappear after it became acceptable for women to be in the workplace, only to find that this was not the case. Heteronormativity, as one sees most poignantly in Timbertown in Temporarily Yours, creates the boundary which places homosexuals as deviant and wrong, which according to the social boundary paradigm, means that they must be eradicated. Examples of heteronormative behavior in the readings include in Temporarily Yours, when Stein tells the story of a man berating the public display of affection between two lesbians as inappropriate.  

Heteronormativity also seems to induce a fear of an enemy that does not exist; while there are very few known homosexuals in Timbertown, the townspeople still fear that they could be lurking anywhere, flaunting behavior that should be kept private. In Timbertown, a pair of heterosexual speakers went against the paradigm, to the outrage of the citizens, who claimed, “they called into question the belief in natural gender differences and promoted a vision of non-procreative sexuality without apologies, thereby diminishing the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.” (Stein 21) In Stranger Next Door, Berstein does not so much focus on the taboos of prostitution from the Christian conservative perspective, but does explain that “In contrast to the casual and informal exchanges that had previously transpired in coffeehouses, taverns, and pubs, large numbers of women now found themselves sequestered in a space which was physically and socially separate, and affixed with the permanently stigmatizing identity of 'prostitute.'” (Berstein 24) In the cases analyzed in Stranger Next Door, heteronormativity alone does not seem to be the oppressive force, but rather a societal stigma against the commerce of sex as something deviant from the conservative paradigm.  

These social boundaries are asserted through a number of outlets. While by definition, social boundaries are not creating by any governing body, they can be asserted by the government through lack of protection under the law. For example, in Timbertown, the Gay Rights Movement only moved to the forefront because there was opposition against a bill that would give homosexuals equal protection under the law. Because this was not law previously, the government asserted the social boundaries through lack of protection. However, the main force that was asserting the boundaries was the Oregon Citizens Alliance, a Christian right organization that opposed the measure to provide homosexuals with equal protection under the law. As Stein explains, “Christian conservatives in a small town simultaneously publicized the existence of sexual diversity and tried to stamp it out.” Thinking about Sally Humphries however, one notes that the activists groups are influenced by an outside force as well. For Sally, her actions are a result of her faith, which she turns into an activist group to promote what she believes is the social agenda of God. The church is enormously influential in the assertion of social boundaries, as well as the media. In Stranger Next Door, Berstein explains how the fight against prostitution has moved away from the prostitutes and towards the men purchasing sex from the prostitutes. Through the media, these men are outed as criminals, with their faces placed on billboards and their names listed in databases of known johns. The social boundary, in this case, is asserted by the media and is enforced through the public shaming of deviants.  

The main social process that is central to these social boundaries is marginalization. If the majority deliberately oppresses the minority, the minority will not have a voice, and either remain hidden or cease to exist, which is exactly what the majority wishes to happen. The majority refuses to change their beliefs because traditional, conservative people are afraid of change, and they prevent change from occurring as much as possible through legislation and by creating social taboos. In Temporarily Yours, when one learns about the criminalization of johns, one wonders if it really is socially taboo to be purchasing sex from prostitutes or if it is only socially taboo because of the deliberate public shaming that occurs.  

In Stranger Next Door, these boundaries are painted as the direct cause of cruel and unusual punishment. In Sweden, there are laws that make it a crime to be a john but not a prostitute. Deviant sexuality is punished more harshly than those selling deviant sex. Boundaries are inevitable, but they should exist in such a way that does not make individuality impossible. For example, the unity of the Gay Rights Movement was reliant on the fact that there are a variety of types of gay men from different races and socioeconomic classes, but they were all invited to accommodate for the common benefit. In fact, it is the promotion of individuality which makes these boundaries contested. Individuality means that the boundaries are not a strict division into two groups with certain rules, which can lead to less marginalization. While groups of opposing viewpoints can and should exist, it needs to be more acceptable for people to be part of many groups. In Temporarily Yours, Stein talks about the effect of boundaries on Sally, stating,  

“In the modern world, work is split into many little tasks, each performed in a different place, among different people, at different times. In each setting, we merely play a role, one of the many roles we play. None of the roles seems to take hold of our whole selves, none seems to embody what we truly are as whole and unique individuals. Not so for Sally. Everything she does is an outgrowth of her faith.” (Stein 96)  

If society were to act entirely as Stein suggests, as members of many different groups with many different roles, there would be less marginalization of the minority because there would be less of an “us vs. them” dynamic where the society is divided by the binary of normal and abnormal. Conclusively, the social boundaries expressed in Temporarily Yours and Stranger Next Door are very similar, and if their binary dynamic were to be eradicated, the marginalization of minority groups would decrease.  

[andrewdburton]

Does the world of personal finance need more politics?

Earlier this week at The Washington Post, Helaine Olen wrote that the world of personal finance needs more politics.

Olen specifically calls out FinCon, the financial media conference I attended last week. I love FinCon. She doesn't. She's disappointed that so many members of our community emphasize personal action and responsibility instead of directing our efforts toward changing the systemic and societal issues that make it difficult for some people to succeed.

She writes:

Spending a few days at FinCon 2019 shows the limits of the nonpolitical approach to improving your financial life…Over and over again, the systemic problems facing Americans are simply accepted as a given and unfixable, and tossed back onto the individual for him or her to solve.

Rarely mentioned are the political system’s many contributions to common economic troubles.

Olen is concerned that there are larger societal and systemic issues that hold some people back and prevent them from achieving financial success. I agree.

I disagree, however, that FinCon is the place to address these issues. And I disagree that we, the financial media, should turn our attention from the personal to the political. In fact, I find the notion absurd.

Personal finance is personal. It's right there on the label.

Politics at FinCon

I don't know how many times Olen has attended FinCon. I've attended every year so far (and have already registered for next year's tenth installment). From my experience, she's wrong that attendees accept systemic problems as “given and unfixable”. We don't.

This year, I had a memorable conversation about privilege with Julien from rich & REGULAR. I spoke with several people in the FIRE community about how we can make the principles of financial independence more accessible to everyone, especially those with lower incomes. (We talk about this all of the time. So much, in fact, that I'm tired of the topic.) In past years, I've had extensive conversations about the challenges women face in mastering their money.

Here's another example: In 2015, the Debt Free Guys attended their first FinCon. Kim and I (and several others) enjoyed hanging out with John and David at the hotel bar. They confided that they were afraid about coming out to their readers. “Do it,” our small group told them. They did. Four years later, they're killing it, and LGBT financial blogs now have a powerful impact.

Financial bloggers talk about systemic and societal issues often. But we talk about these things amongst ourselves, one on one or in small groups, not in hundred-person breakout sessions or, worse, as a 2500-person body in the Hilton grand ballroom.

Why not? Because these conversations are nuanced. They're sensitive. Nobody agrees on any of this stuff. Even two people who have very similar political viewpoints will disagree on solutions. (Case in point: The current Democratic debates.) Imagine what it'd be like trying to do this with hundreds of people from across the political spectrum. Tackling subjects like the “student loan crisis” is best done in small groups, not as a FinCon collective.

FinCon founder Philip Taylor says that past sessions at the event have explored Universal Basic Income, women and money, minorities and money, and more.

This year, there were sixteen attendee-organized sessions with political themes, including an “equity and justice” meetup. Plus, the National Endowment for Financial Education sponsored a community service project.

FinCon in not a political event and never has been. Too, nothing about personal finance is inherently political. Sure, some folks put a political spin on the material they present, but that's an individual choice. And the political spin Dave Ramsey employs is different than, say, the spin Helaine Olen would use.

That's the biggest reason I'm glad FinCon doesn't include politically-charged topics in its official schedule: We are a diverse group with diverse beliefs. Olen writes as if there are universally agreed-upon solutions to the systemic and societal barriers confronting Americans. There aren't.

It's this lack of agreement that causes so much friction in our current national discourse. What does she think would be accomplished by holding these sorts of political discussions at FinCon?

The Political and the Personal

In Olen's article about FinCon, she argues that personal finance has failed. She believes the solution is to move from the personal to the political:

We are facing staggering levels of income and wealth inequality, while facing staggering costs for housing, health care, education and so on. If better personal finance could fix this one by one for more than 300 million Americans, we would know by now.

Here's the thing, though. We do know by now that better personal finance can and does fix things one by one for Americans. I'm not sure why Olen believes that it can't.

I've been writing about money for more than thirteen years now, and I've had hundreds (thousands?) of readers contact me to tell me how they've turned their lives around after deciding to take charge of their finances.

Government doesn't help GRS readers get out of debt.

Government doesn't help GRS readers negotiate pay raises.

Government doesn't help GRS readers increase their saving rate.

No, GRS readers do these things themselves.

Each year, I meet one-on-one with dozens of folks from the GRS community. Without fail, these people are taking action to master their money — and their lives. They're not waiting for somebody else to solve their problems. They're seeking solutions themselves. And while not every reader finds success, most do.

I believe strongly that the focus of my work is (and should remain) personal, not political. I don't believe turning my attention to systemic and societal problems would solve anything for anyone. But by helping individual readers find ways to improve their lives, I can help many people.

If I were to write an article bemoaning the state of student loan debt in the United States, it wouldn't solve anything. I'd just be adding to the noise. If we at FinCon were to hold a panel discussion on student loan debt, we wouldn't solve anything. We'd just be adding to the noise. Frankly, it worries me that Olen believes we should be adding to the noise instead of offering readers tools and solutions that they can apply to their individual circumstances.

It's not my job to change the system. It's my job to give readers the tools they need to thrive within the world we've created. If Olen wants to fight the system instead of teaching readers to better their lives, that's fine. She can do that. I genuinely wish her well. But I'm not sure why she thinks it's necessary for everyone else to have the same goals that she does.

Here's the thing, though. As the 1960s feminist movement made clear, the personal is political. That is, how we live our lives should be consistent with our political (and spiritual) beliefs. Even though I don't discuss politics overtly here at Get Rich Slowly, I hope that my choices and actions for the site subtly reflect what I believe, in a way that leads by example rather than shouts from the rooftops. I hope that I'm “walking the walk”, not just “talking the talk”. That's my goal, anyhow.

Here's an analogy borrowed from my buddy Jim Wang.

A doctor's job is to maintain (and restore) the health of her patients. It is not a doctor's job to battle insurance companies or the pharmaceutical industry. She may have concerns about these aspects of the medical-industrial complex, and she may have a deep desire to see things change, but changing the system isn't why she spent 15+ years in higher education. She did that so she can improve the lives of individual patients.

Likewise, my job is to improve the financial lives of individual readers. It is not my job to solve the student loan crisis, to fight high taxes, or to rail against our modern corpocracy. I may occasionally bitch and moan about how shitty our healthcare system is, and I may secretly wish our corporcracy would die a fiery death, but I generally try to steer clear of politics because my job is to help you build wealth. Period. The end.

Whose Side Are You On?

Another problem that Olen doesn't mention is that there's no unanimous agreement over how to address the problems with our socioeconomic system. There's not even agreement that the things she views as problems are problems. (Conversely, I'm sure other folks would consider some things pressing issues that she'd dismiss as unimportant.)

Olen complains, for instance, that Americans face “staggering” costs for housing, health care, and education. But she doesn't acknowledge that there's no consensus on how to address these problems.

My conservative readers would suggest one possible course of action. My liberal readers would argue in favor of another. People like me who are generally centrist would prefer a third alternative. Which way is right? How can we possibly know? How would arguing about this at Get Rich Slowly (or any other money blog) possibly improve society?

It wouldn't and it won't.

But Get Rich Slowly can make the world a better place by showing people how to pay off debt, start saving, and achieve financial freedom despite the societal and systemic structures that surround us. I can make things better by helping people become more resourceful, helping them develop the skills they need to build wealth. And then these people can teach others.

Over the years, I've received many messages from readers thanking me for keeping politics off this site. While I'm a human being and have my own opinions and beliefs, I do my best to keep the blog itself as neutral as possible. All readers are welcome: gay, straight, black, white, religious, atheist, libertarian, socialist, whatever. I don't care.

This seems like a good time for a Taylor Swift GIF to express my stance:

Because GRS is a safe space, we're able to have civil conversations about topics — taxes, divorce, Taylor Swift — that would provoke heated nonsensical debate on other sites. (Earlier today, I was reading an article about taxes from my local city's newspaper. The comments were ridiculous. Like five-year-olds with larger vocabularies and less civility.)

Besides, the GRS readership isn't exclusively USian. We have many Canadian readers among us. (And my business partner is Canadian.) Lots of people in the U.K. read this site. I've had beer with readers in Turkey, Hungary, Ecuador, Germany, Switzerland, and France. (Well, in France we drank wine and in Switzerland we drank whisky. You get the idea.) If I were to shift my focus to politics, what good would that be for these folks?

About three years ago, Brad Barrett and Jonathan Mendonsa launched the Choose FI podcast. These two men have polar opposite political perspectives. But because they keep the politics out of their show and out of their friendship, they've achieved huge success. They're focused on helping people, not on changing the system.

Breaking Bread

On the final morning of FinCon this year, I met Joshua Sheats for breakfast. Sheats is the whipsmart host of the Radical Personal Finance podcast. His mind works at a million miles per minute, and our conversations always make me think. Whenever we meet, I take notes. Even at breakfast.

Joshua and I share drastically different political and religious views. Yet every year at FinCon, we break bread together. We engage in a deep, respectful discussion about the world we live in. It's one of my favorite parts of the conference.

We're only able to do this, though, because we're meeting each other as two individuals. While we disagree on certain fundamental issues, we share a passion for helping others get better with money, and we both believe strongly that ultimately it's up to each individual to improve her own life.

“Are you and Kim married now?” Joshua asked this year, pointing to the ring on my finger.

“No,” I said. “But we're committed to each other.”

“How does that work from a practical financial perspective?” he asked. “My world view is based on the Bible. I understand how Biblical marriage works. I don't understand how a secular partnership like yours would work.” I explained how we manage our shared lives.

Joshua wasn't challenging me. I didn't feel threatened. We weren't shouting at each other. We hold radically different viewpoints, but were able to engage in a civil discussion because we entered the conversation as two individuals with mutual respect.

In Olen's world — in a world where FinCon and money blogs focus more on political issues — this kind of thing would be less likely to occur. Instead of engaging as complex indviduals, attendees would engage as adherents of one or another political movement. When this happens, people stop thinking of others as real human beings. We end up with the sort of political discourse that is already destroying our society. It's as if Olen wants Finconners to give up their mutual admiration and respect in order to become a mirror of existing American culture. That seems insane to me.

We at FinCon come from myriad different backgrounds. The conference is racially diverse. It seems fairly gender balanced. (I don't have precise stats.) There's a large contingent of Christian bloggers. There are many atheists. There are Republicans. There are Democrats. In a way, it's almost as if the conference itself is a microcosm of American society…but without the bickering. It's wonderful.

I don't think FinCon could be this tiny five-day utopia if politics were a prominent part of the discussion. If politics were a central focus, we'd risk shattering this fragile, precious thing, this sublime soup of mutual love and respect.

“I'm taking my son to the Museum of the Bible this morning,” Joshua said as we finished our breakfast on Sunday. “Do you want to join us?”

“I can't,” I said. “I have another meeting.”

But I was deeply grateful that Joshua would ask me to accompany him, especially since he knows my political and religious beliefs. He wasn't trying to proselytize. He was simply trying to engage and share. I'm honored he would want me to be with him.

These sorts of interactions are only possible, though, because FinCon doesn't do politics. The moment that politics become a primary focus, I believe much of the FinCon magic will disappear.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, what bugs me most about Olen's argument is this: By trying to convince readers that societal and systemic issues are too large and too powerful, she strips individuals of agency. She denies them the ability and power to change their own lives. She encourages a passive, reactive mindset instead of an active, proactive point of view.

This seems like a miserable worldview. It robs people of dignity and hope. It's a tacit argument that “you can't control your life; your life is controlled by larger forces”. I don't believe that. I don't want others to believe that.

The fundamental premise of this site is: Regardless the hand you've been dealt, it's up to you to take action to improve your life. You can't wait for somebody else to make things better for you.

At the same time, I agree with Olen. There are problems with our current socio-economic system. And while we may not agree how to remedy these problems, talking about them is important.

But I don't think FinCon is an appropriate venue. Nor is Get Rich Slowly.

I love the idea of a new event dedicated to this discussion, a conference where financial journalists discuss systemic issues and politics and how they relate to personal finance. If this were deliberately inclusive, intentionally designed to include all points of view and to foster respectful discussion, I think it could be awesome. I'd attend.

But it seems misguided to come to an existing event that works, one that's valuable precisely because people can escape politics for a few days, and then complain that it ought to be more political.

Why politicize the non-political?

Whoa! While researching for this article, I found a short 2006 piece I published about the politics of personal finance. In it, I wrote: “Personal finance is non-political. It helps everyone when another person avoids debt, learns to save, and becomes financially independent.” I'm pleased to see my position has remained consistent all of these years!

The post Does the world of personal finance need more politics? appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/personal-finance-politics/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[click2watch]

The Bigger Picture Behind Bitcoin’s Latest Price Rebound

Bitcoin’s out-of-the-blue bounce over the $5,000 mark this month has prompted some predictable pontificating from price-obsessed people within and outside the cryptocurrency community.

Investors who are long-cryptocurrencies have gleefully pronounced that the Crypto Winter, which began when bitcoin’s bubble burst at the end of 2017, is now mercifully over. The most optimistic are forecasting a rerun of bitcoin’s fall 2015 bounce from its prior post-bubble collapse, which sent it not only back above its 2013 high of $1,150 but all the way to a December 2017 peak of $19,500.

At the same time, bitcoin skeptics have pointed to the seeming lack of fundamental news behind the price rise and declared it meaningless. Typical of the genre, Matt Novak at Gizmodo penned an angry screed titled “Bitcoin Surges 15% Overnight Because Nobody Learned Their Lesson After the Last Crash.”

One of Novak’s insights: “To be clear, bitcoin is absolutely worthless by any real measure. It’s fake money that’s about as practical to use in the real world as Monopoly bills.”

Readers won’t be surprised to hear that I disagree with Novak’s simplistic rant. But I’m also turned off by the knee-jerk cheerleading from crypto traders whenever bitcoin’s price bounces.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with reducing the measure of bitcoin’s worldwide importance to a price metric that’s denominated in a fiat currency that its advocates hope to replace. It pushes the debate into an inane all-or-nothing binary set of predictions: bitcoin is either going to zero or “to the moon.”

What matters is that 10 years after an unidentified software engineer created it, this decentralized system for recording sequences of transactions continues to do its job, block after block, with no authority in charge, no user able to alter past transactions, and no person or entity able to shut it down.

The more this goes on, the more it reinforces the powerful vision behind bitcoin: a peer-to-peer, disintermediated system for exchanging value around the world. And in that context, we can also think of bitcoin the cryptocurrency – differentiated from bitcoin the system – as a unique, provably scare digital asset that expresses the overall value in that vast potential.

Bitcoin is valuable because it exists

A point that’s lost on critics like Novak is that the longer bitcoin simply survives – in the face of the $90 billion valuation that stands as a de facto bounty for hackers to try to take it down, compromise its security or corrupt it – the more its overall value is confirmed.

Bitcoin is progressively proving itself to be an unstoppable, digital system of global exchange, one that functions outside of the traditional national government-mandated system of currency and banking. That status is what gives bitcoin its value.

Of course, the global impact of the bitcoin value exchange system, and therefore its worth to humanity, will be significantly enhanced if adoption advances to a much wider scale and it is used frequently in the world’s transactions. And, yes, a great deal of development work is still needed if it is to ever reach that point.

(Some recent technological leaps such as the Lightning Network and the emergence of decentralized, non-custodial asset exchange technologies offer hope that this scaling challenge can be achieved, though nothing is guaranteed.)

However, widespread adoption in payments is not necessary for bitcoin to have value. To understand why that’s the case, it’s useful to think about gold, to which bitcoin is often compared.

The power of common belief

Similar to bitcoin, gold is a mutually agreed store of value that, for all intents and purposes, lies outside the control of nation-state governments and banks. It’s not widely used as a day-to-day currency, but it does enjoy a widespread, shared belief in its value.

Where does gold’s value come from? The answer is somewhat tautological: it comes from that same widely held belief, from a shared understanding in gold’s capacity to function as a depoliticized global system of exchange that’s free of manipulation. Sure, we tend to think of gold in terms of its material qualities: that it’s durable and that it’s shiny in a way that connotes beauty. But its lasting worth really derives from the more esoteric notion that human beings have for a long time deeply held a shared belief in its value.

That belief has turned gold into a system for protecting property, a system used through the centuries by refugees, dissidents and investors for moving and storing value and for hedging against lost spending power. That we now have a digital version of this concept, one that’s designed for the borderless, internet-shaped world of the 21st century, is a big deal.

When dealing with debates over bitcoin’s value, it’s also worth going a little way down the rabbit hole of thinking about what money actually is. Not everyone agrees on a definition, but I think it’s useful to think of money as a societally agreed system for storing and exchanging value. The system has to have certain properties for people to reach this agreement – it must fungible, durable, transferable, divisible, etc. – but it’s the agreement itself that gives it its value.

Here, too, is where many of bitcoin’s detractors get lost.

Fixating on the misplaced idea of money as a thing, they exclaim that bitcoin can’t have any value as it isn’t backed by anything. This, of course, also misses the fact that it is backed by the energy and other resources that miners spend to do the computational work needed to secure the bitcoin ledger.

But the bigger point is that bitcoin’s value, as with all forms of money, comes from the existence of a wide agreement in its potential use as a store of value and medium of exchange.

In bitcoin’s case, the agreement is arguably one that involves 35 million people, if Cambridge University’s latest survey of authenticated users is to be believed. This large level of participation is essentially why bitcoin holds a much greater value than the altcoins that are forks of its code.

So, this is why bitcoin at $5,000 is important, not because it’s a sign of that new investors are coming to push up its price again, but because it validates the core proposition of bitcoin’s resilience and promise.

Bitcoin puzzle via Shutterstock

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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