#the upper class think a fair world is one where they lose all their wealth

[rusquared]

nothing summarizes everything quite like "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People"... almost in tears from frustration that everything, everything! boils down to that. do you care about other people or do you only consider a subset of humans to be people.

[cottagecorepirate]

My thoughts on Daisy Buchanan

I like Daisy, and not just because according to everyone else she’s “the most disliked character”. In fact, I think the reason that Daisy is disliked so much is because of misogyny.

Daisy is just as human as Nick or Gatsby. She has hopes and dreams and wants freedom and luxury. Never stopping until she gets it, she’s just like all the men in the book. The difference: she’s not a man. Instead, she’s the one that everyone says you shouldn’t be, the bad role model for anyone impressionable reading. But I suggest something different: that Daisy is strong, fearless, and clever. She knows what’s going on, knows how horrible this world is for her, how she’s seen as below everyone else because she’s a woman – even her friend, Jordan, can only get men to respect her because she’s a sports player, and even then they say she’s cheating.

According to many, Daisy is manipulative, a tease, cruel and selfish. But Daisy is just trying to survive in a world where a woman’s dream is seen as lesser than a man’s. So what if she’s materialistic? If she wants one man or five? Daisy is allowed to have hopes and dreams and aspirations, and it’s no one’s right to call them weak or silly or stupid. She’s certainly no more manipulative and selfish than Gatsby, who has not only obtained his money through questionable means, but his end goal was to be in possession of that one perfect thing he had been yet to find: a girl. How is it Daisy’s fault that for years Gatsby has spent his life dedicated to her? How is it fair that Daisy’s only choices are about a man? Surely she deserves more opportunities than that – surely everyone does.

But the opportunities for a woman to gain wealth were extremely limited and nowhere near perfect: you want to marry for wealth? Then don’t expect to like your husband. You want to have sex for wealth? Then don’t expect to be respected even a little bit by anyone. You want to have a career for wealth? Well, the options are already limited there, you won’t be able to work your way up to a management position, so the pay won’t be great anyway, and you’ll be treated like dirt by the upper classes. Daisy’s dream of gaining wealth, the same American Dream held by thousands, was simply never going to be possible unless she married Tom. The consequences she faced for making that choice were not her fault.

Daisy was not a bad person for having a relationship with Gatsby, and is still not a bad person for deciding she didn’t want to marry him, for choosing someone who better suited her dreams. Just like everyone else, she wouldn’t stop until she accomplished her dream, even though she must have known how much harder it would be because of her gender. And I think for a while she gave up figuring a way out her unwanted marriage – better to cope with the cheating and wealth she currently had then make a fuss and lose not only her money, but also her reputation. But when Gatsby came back into her life (uninvited), she surely saw another way out – a way to have money and someone just slightly nicer than Tom. Even if she would only use Gatsby for his money, she’s simply doing the same as everyone else: the whole American Dream society was built on the value of wealth above everything else.

Myrtle’s death was caused by the hedonistic lifestyle as a whole, not just Daisy. The only reason Daisy was placed in a position to cause harm was because Gatsby wanted her more than anything and Daisy had to fit her dream into the world around her, a world made by men. The only way for Daisy to achieve her dream was by playing along with the game set out by men, set out by Gatsby, making a mess, being selfish and mean. She acted in a way that assured her dream would come true, a dream of wealth and freedom, even if it meant other people had to suffer. She acted in the same way as many of the rich men of the time, and if she was a man, then would anyone really call her out for it?

And yet, by the end, she hasn’t won. She’s still with Tom, the man of her dreams who doesn’t actually like her and has nothing to do with her dreams of independent wealth. A consequence of her hedonistic lifestyle, the same way that Gatsby didn’t win? Or is it actually a cautionary tale, to stop women from stepping out of line? To tell them what will happen if you don’t act meek and submissive and selfless and that they need to ignore their dreams for the sake of others.

But for some women, their story didn’t end there. Maybe there’s another accident, or a sudden death, that allows Daisy to live out her life on her own terms, doing what she wants, being free, and giving her daughter a different life. Maybe eventually, if Daisy can’t, her daughter will succeed in a career and will become wealthy on her own terms.

I wish I could believe that was possible for many women, that Daisy was determined not to end sadly, that she was allowed to be selfish and mean in the same way that men are, because she’s human and complex, until she was given the opportunity to become a better person, and was able to get her own way without resorting to meanness. Because maybe Daisy is superficial and careless and reckless and uncaring and maybe you can read her as the villain. But maybe Daisy wanted to be nice, yet a nice woman in 1920s America would never have achieved anything.

If Daisy was nice and meek and submissive, she wouldn’t have achieved the dream she wanted and readers wouldn’t like her because she’s not strong and doesn’t stand up for herself. If Daisy went around having sex with all the men she wanted, for money or not, she would have been disrespected by society and readers wouldn’t like her for being a slut. And because Daisy is careless and selfish and harms people to get what she wants, she became a villain and readers don’t like her for not being nicer and kinder! But Daisy (and all other women) are human and this just shows that women can’t do anything right, especially not in 1920s America, even though Daisy was simply doing what she could to achieve her dream, just like Gatsby. But Gatsby isn’t the most disliked character because we expect that he would be selfish and a criminal at times, because he’s a man and that’s just how some men are. It’s not fair that the same rules for Gatsby don’t apply to Daisy, but it’s also not surprising.

Calling Daisy a villain, and pointing out her faults, is not inherently bad in itself. But if you dislike and criticise Daisy for being manipulative and selfish, then those same criticisms must be directed at Gatsby, or even Nick, as well. If Daisy is “the most disliked character”, but she’s actually very similar to the men in the book, then the reason she’s disliked isn’t actually because of her personality, or the way she achieves her dreams. It’s because she achieves them by not being a stereotypical women, by upsetting the patriarchy, bringing attention to them in a way that you would never question if seen in a man.

[astroninaaa]

Hot take a talk about technoblade:

Okay look I've been part of this fandom since August(thank god cuz i watched it all live and it woukd be a nightmare to caatch up) I bring this up cuz i want to discuss my problem with technos character. I have watched every single techno livestream that he made on dream smp and believe it or not i used to be a techno sympathiser that is until doomsday. (By techno apologist standards i am qualified to talk about his character hooray..)

Now techno like every character is flawed if he wasn't he would be boring fandom. One of his biggest flaws is being a hypocrite. That is not something you realise until you compare what he says all the time so you need to look a little deeper to realise it and i don't blame people for not seeing it.

This wouldn't be that much of a problem because that is a character flaw among with many others but the problem that his character has faced is that he doesn't develop much.

Now i hear techno apologist jump at me every single time noooo he isn't a stagnant character he has developed a lot. I am not saying that he hasn't developed at all the problem is that he has developed very little especially when you consider everything.

His goals his ideas his perception of the world what he believes him everything that makes his character him hasn't changed much and that is not a good thing from a writing perspective. Now why do i bring this up. Firstly I'm not saying this to say techno is a bad writer far from it he can be very good when he puts his mind to it. The problem with keeping a character in this state is that it's very harmful for said character first and to the story and other characters second. Look even at yourselves i can guarantee that you aren't the exact same person you were like five years ago for example because during that time you made mistakes learned from them and you grew. Just like in real life you also can't stay stagnant in fiction.

Okay so that's the main problem with technos character that he is stagnant as a character. Now this wouldn't be as big of a problem if he didn't have the role that he has.

You see techno both c! and cc! are very good at the game basically. Now why do i bring this up. The reason why i bring this up is bc of where this places techno whuch is at the very top of the chain don't try and seny it. This means that he is one of the most powerful people on the server if you are going to try and go against this point just look at lmanberg guys that's living proof of how powerful and how terrifying he actually is. I know a lot of you are gonna say but every can get stacked or play the game but you guys forget that even if you are stacked you just don't have the skill and cc! Techno of the best people when it comes to that which bleeds into his character. Saying that is like looking at the upper class than looking at the lower class saying just get rich like it doesn't work like that.

Because of his role techno is literally the 1% by rl standards which means he can a lit of things free of consequences bc no one can give him said consequences. The butcher army was ig an attempt at that but they failed miserably let's be real here.

Because he is in the 1% is incredibly skilled at pvp and can do anything bc no one can challenge him this places him on a pedestal and creates a power imbalance a very big one at that.

And that leads to his biggest problem he has practically everything as said by Techno himself and is never challenged, but that's not an interesting character. An audience gets tired for a character that always wins or loses. Because if it happens repeatedly it just takes all the suspense oh he will win immediately. He will go and slaughter them problem solved. That's it every time. Something that techno himself confirmed is then when he has a problem he just stabs it (both of these were said during the egg stream).

And if you are going to bring the things he went through to say he's changed don't cuz as long as he doesn't act on it it means nothing. Like examples Red festival killed tubbo an ally. Traumatic experience right? This is a good moment to develop his character and give us more insight. What happens? Techno tries to dismiss it and shows us his anxiety and gives us insight on his character Great! Character development? Starting to question himself just a bit or any sign of that event having an effect on him? Nope! Why? Cuz he doesn't act on it instead he tries to hide the fact that ever happened and changes to a different topic bc there is no justification there and he knows it. Nov 16th c!technos pov he just got betrayed caused some damage wished death upon his former allies and left. Quite a dramatic scene. He feels betrayed time for some good old character development. Him thinking about himself and his actions. Reflecting on them. Great moment! Problem: literally everything that shows this is done off camera and now suddenly he's retired... Okay you know what fine it's alright he would probably expand upon and did a timeskip to explain the ling time he didn't stream. I see where it's comming from. The butcher army ge gets hunted down bc actions have consequences techno and you can't just run away like that not after doing that. Great point from the butcher army. Go give him some consequences his character needs it. And then he gets executed alright a bit too far but i guess that's how it goes in this server. Techno gets his life back immediately.. well that was a bit pointless but alright a cool scene for the animatic fair. Then he kills quackity.. the butcher army lost.. this.. what? But this was the moment of consequences... and quackity didn't get it back like techno the butcer aemy lost more than techno what? Moving along he teams up with tommy aannnd the 50 withers are up and ready of course you didn't fully retire what was i expecting. And now team up with tommy perfect way to learn about dream and give more insight on lmanberg and how dream is a tyrant and everything techno is supposed to stand against. The green festival tommy chooses tubbo over techno techno feels betrayed understandable.... and then he teams up with dream lmanberg is destroyed and the underdogs are beaten to the ground loose everything they ever worked for and are taught to be scared of the anarchists?!?!?!?!

Okay now hold up a sec I'll have to stop you right there. What. did. you. just. do. Cuz there is a limit to the amount of stuff you can let a character get away with. The line was crossed months ago this is not good at all.

Also what are yoi guys talking about consequences. Lives? All 3 home? Right there pets? The ones that died were the ones he brought expecting to not live he brought them there on purpose so they don't count. He is one of the most wealthy peoole on the server (no one beats ranboo lol) what did he exactly loose? Friendships? Was that all the hardships you guys have?

Lmanberg lost their home their lives their wealth their pets their friend everything they loved and lived for everything they stood for they lost a part of themselves in the end.

Look at the last 2 paragraphs and how imbalanced that is. How are you guys blind to this How?! And why did doomsday happen? Because the butcher army failed. And if anything techno proved them that they should have punished him harder with this.

So what was the lesson of doomsday?

That you shoukd obey the people on top and never go against them or you will loose everything you love.

Great lesson guys this is exactly the lesson the rich class and every single tyrant tried to teach society and this lesson is being told by the anarchist great job....

Do you see the problem now. This is the reason techno needs a consequence bc if he keeps going like this he will become a Mary Sue. And that is a horrible direction for a character that has a lot of potential. That potential is why i liked his character that much in the beginning but now it's almost non existent. Anyway I'll end this now cuz this went on for too long. That's basically my opinion on it feel free to share your thoughts.

okay. okay. i read this like three times bc. because look

i agree in some very specific points, but i disagree in very broad manners.

(this entire......... essay is all /rp and /nm!!!!)

anyways. send me hot takes!!!

i like c!techno. i personally think he's one of the most fun characters to watch because i enjoy the mess, the crazyness, the chaos of it all. watching doomsday through c!tommy's eyes was painful. watching doomsday through c!techno's eyes was just so fucking hilarious and exciting and fun. he's just a fun character to watch. he's just Funny. i am a fan. however

for starters: ctechno is, 100%, out of the park, an stagnant character. he has little to no development throughout the story. we see no changes in how he acts. that's not necessarily a bad thing, but considering the type of character he is, watching him develop (be it to an actually full-fledged villain or towards a redemption arc) would be ideal to keep him a character people can actually support.

i wouldn't say he's a hypocrite. c!techno has a very strict moral code and he follows it with no hesitation, with no doubts. the point is that his moral code is flawed and skewed. that doesn't make him a hypocrite, that makes him someone with bad morals.

calling c!techno "the 1%" is a stretch. for one- c!ranboo has as much resources, if not more, as c!techno does. he has dozens of totems, thousands of emeralds, and probably has one of the higher counts of diamond and netherite on the server. why is that never brought up? because it doesnt matter. c!foolish has so much gold and diamonds and netherite and just everything, really, and it's also never brought up/a reason for people to be afraid of him. the dream smp isn't a capitalist universe, there's no "1%". specially bc there's, like, i don't know, 20 players? that makes c!techno 1/20 OR 3/20 if we count c!ranboo and c!foolish. but that's not the point at all: the point is that ctechno is feared bc he's skilled and has a relevant personality, not bc he has resources. c!wilbur has no shit and he's still terrifying, there's no character willing to oppose him. not because of resources, but because of who he is. when c!techno first fled from l'manburg into "retirement" he had no shit either, it took him a while to be rich again. no one attacked him either way.

why, you ask? bc he fought against c!quackity with a fucking pickaxe and won. that's why. c!techno doesn't need resources to be feared. the power imbalance doesn't come from his resources, it comes from others’s fear. and they have a reason for that fear, bc c!techno hasn't been defeated yet. that has nothing to do with "upper class" and "lower class". because, one, not a capitalist system and class disparity isn't as simple as that, and two, even without his "riches" he still wins, bc he's got the skill. if you take out the skill, him being rich means nothing and he wouldve been easily killed by the butcher army or c!tommy or whoever decided to kill him. a good example is, once again, c!ranboo: if he wasn't friends with everyone and someone decided to actually fight him like was done with c!techno, he would've died. easily. being rich in the smp is relative.

c!techno will be challenged when we have a character strong enough to challenge him in a way that matters. it's important to be smart about it. that's why i'd love to see, out of everyone, c!philza turn against him, but that's a how other discussion (WHICH I'M WILLING TO TALK ABOUT.......... everytime i make these and i add little point i dont elaborate on and then say i'm willing to talk about them and no one ever asks me to <//3 PAIN /nm /lh).

i do think he's a character that just Always Win in narrative ways and that's very frustrating. he does need to get pulled a few notches down. again, that will only happen when we have a character that can step up to him and challenge him in a way that matters (woooo c!philza you want to hold c!techno accountable for his bullshit so bad woooo........)

now, onto c!techno's trauma. he doesn't need to show it. he- he doesn't. that's........ not how trauma works, and that's one of the points that make his trauma so forgettable for the viewers. c!techno is, from inside out, a character that hardly shows his emotions, but that doesn't mean he doesn't display symptons of trauma. he does, they're just a lot more subtle than other characters's. that doesn't mean he doesn't have any or that he isn't affect by it. c!techno is, in a lot of ways, a lot like c!tubbo: both of them don't mention the shit they've gone through and don't react to it and bc of that some of the viewers don't see how important some traumatic events were in their characterisation. that's why you analyse those characters's trauma through behavior, not through easily seen displays of trauma.

i do think it's taken a little too far with c!techno. the way he reacted to c!tommy's death was...... disappointing, to say the least. c!techno is an underwhelming character in many ways. as said before, it's because he's stagnant. that definitely needs to be worked on.

about the syndicate? yeah, no. theyre not teaching others to fear them. others just Do That bc of their history on the server, but they have literally talked about how they want to better their reputation, bc they don't want to be seen as murderers or oppressors in any way. are they flawed? yes, very much. they have no indicators of what is or isn't a government and they show no regard around the importance of a difference between an oppressive and a democratic government.

they had no right to show up at c!tubbo's door and interrogate him, because they can't appoint themselves as government police. for starters, that's not how anarchy works (they should've had everyone's permission for that. they obviously don't), but also it's just... stupid. it makes it seem that they're trying to boss everyone around so that they live like the syndicate wants them to, which goes directly against the syndicate's own ideals. however, c!techno thinks he has that right. he thinks this is what he's supposed to do. he's just following his moral code - his moral code is just deeply, deeply flawed. what he says and what he does contradict each other but not for him, not to his interpretation. to his interpretation, he's following his strict moral code.

what happened at doomsday was horrible and c!techno has to be held accountable for it, yes, but, again, no character knows how to work around c!techno enough to hold him accountable for it. that's not c!techno's fault.

l'manburg just deserved better, honestly, but to be fair c!techno has been taken advantage of time and time again (sometimes purposefully, sometimes not) and he's fucked up in the head, god bless LMAOOOOOOO

i agree that things need to change otherwise he's just gonna keep being a stagnant character who can get away with everything. i do think he has more to him than meets the eye, tho. meh idk that's still just analysis!!! we have no way of knowing the intent behind c!techno's characterisation, at least not for now. i hope for the best tho cc!techno don't let me down <3

[everydayducksoup]

Because I can finally post it: here’s my absolute shithouse off-my-ass this-is-secular-school-now-I-can-write-REAL-politics-into-my-work essay. “Who Gets Eaten and Who Gets to Eat: Morality and Socioeconomic Mobility in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”

In a society where honest work just doesn’t cut it, there’s always murder- at least, for the protagonists of White Tiger and Sweeney Todd. Both works make use of fictional narratives and stylistic language to destabilize narratives of wealth as moral judgement and expose the forces in society which push individuals, especially amongst the lower class, into immoral action and emotional detachment in exchange for socioeconomic stability and advancement. With Adiga presenting the story of driver-turned-entrepreneur Balram Halwai, and Sondheim the Victorian English revenge drama of Sweeney Todd’s mass murder and cannibalistic enterprise, the ‘dark side’ of capitalism, justice, and class dynamics comes to light.

In his essay, “capitalism, caste and con-games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger”, Snehal Shingavi presents us with two common narratives about poverty- where it is either “overcome by virtue of moral fineness (so that to be rich is to deserve) or by moral corruption (so that any upward mobility marks ethical opprobrium)”(Shingavi 7). However, neither of the works presented adhere to this conflation of wealth with morality, because they take a different look at the way our society works. In Sweeney Todd,  it is constantly emphasized that vice and immorality are universal traits: in the song Epiphany, Todd sings “we all deserve to die/ even you Mrs. Lovett/ even I” (Sondheim 38), and similar judgements are made throughout the rest of the play. Meanwhile, The White Tiger expresses the opinion that goodwill is only an option for those with privilege- “here, if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxamangarh, he doesn’t even have this choice.” (Adiga 262).

This decision to separate morality from the act of gaining capital does something incredibly important: it undermines the idea of the poor as apolitical or moralizing figures, establishing their autonomy. When we acknowledge this, we can more thoroughly experience the injustices that drive these characters to violent means. Both protagonists are literally denied justice- Todd is framed for a crime by Judge Turpin and sent to the penal colony as part of his plan to steal his wife, Lucy; and Balram is expected to take the blame for his master’s wife when she runs over a young child. The statues of law are shown to be ineffective within modern society due to class imbalance- the reality is, as Balram says, “the rule of the jungle”. Both protagonists take on cannibalism (one literally, the other figuratively) as their own brand of justice outside the system that has failed them. Sweeney and Lovett sing, in A Little Priest: “the history of the world my dear/…/is who gets eaten and who gets to eat”(Sondheim 48), while Balram expresses the new caste structure of postcolonial India as “there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.” (Adiga 54)

Rather than marking the distinction between rich and poor through morality, these works employ the binary of filth and cleanliness as a signifier of socioeconomic position. From the first, Todd describes the poor of London as “vermin” and claiming that the subjugation by the upper classes “(turn) beauty into filth and greed” (Sondheim 2). Similarly, Lovett’s introduction, The Worst Pies in London revolves entirely around the spectacle of how disgusting her situation is: “is that just revolting?” (Sondheim 9). This state of perpetual impurity is both a direct result of economic equality, and a contributing factor in its continuation. Adiga  demonstrates the impact of cleanliness over filth by showing Balram successfully “passing” in middle-class society by copying his master’s habits- he stops chewing paan, starts brushing his teeth, dresses simply, changes his posture, and he is suddenly unrecognizable as the poor driver he still is. The authority given to anyone who can present well enough within the expectations of their society strips yet another layer from the connection between ethics and wealth- through appearances, Lovett’s pie shop is successful despite selling its clients human flesh. However, this effect is not only felt through the common motif of a façade, as it also serves to prove that the currency of this society is necessarily aggressive.

The White Tiger presents this struggle through the metaphor of the rooster coop:

“hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages…pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling for breathing space…on the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken… the roosters in the coop smell the blood from above… they know they’re next.” (Adiga 147)

This analogy presents the inherent violence in the situation: if you are a poor rooster, no matter how much you preen your feathers or how peacefully you stand, your neighbors will only continue to peck at you and try to climb over you, and you will still be in line for the slaughter. If you are the rich butcher, the only way you can survive is to continue killing chickens, because that is your trade, regardless of how nicely you treat them, and if you let them out of the cage you lose it all. In order to gain power in this society, Shingavi points out, one must forsake both their origins, their emotional ties; and their morality, their societal ties. For Balram, this is the killing and torture of his family by the state, which relieves him of his caste; and the murder of Mr. Ashok, which relieves him of his servitude. For Todd, it is the knowledge that “Lucy lies in ashes” and he’ll “never see Johanna” (Sondheim 44); as well as his plan to murder the Judge. The disconnection of morality and capital allows for a system wherein justice is obtained through violence, the truth revealed through con-games, and social mobility and betterment come at the cost of human lives.

However, the values of the system do not reflect directly on the people within it- Balram, Todd and Lovett are still emotional, human figures, who have the capacity for grief and empathy. Both protagonists harbor a young boy throughout the course of the story- Balram his nephew Dharam and Lovett and Todd their young employee Toby- neither of which are related to their grander schemes. Both openly grapple with the loss of their familial connections, with Balram commenting “I’ve got no family anymore. All I’ve got are chandeliers” (Adiga 97) and Todd addressing a monologue to his lost daughter in the song Johanna (Quartet): “Goodbye, Johanna/ You're gone, and yet you're mine… And though I'll think of you, I guess/Until the day I die.” (Sondheim 63) The biggest distinction between the two works comes through this aspect: Balram succeeds in separating his personal life from his business and channeling the cold methods of the system even in his charity- giving bribes in exchange for the life of a young boy killed by one of his employees- while Lovett and Todd let their emotions drive them to ruin.

In his essay, “Mayhem and Morality in Sweeney Todd”, Alfred Mollin points out the way Sondheim uses musical references to demonstrate Todd’s descent into righteous rage and madness. The use of the music of the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass, a piece which is immediately recognizable to a western audience as representing a sort of divine “judgement of the wicked and the good”(Mollin 3), shows that his intentions lie directly outside of the give-and-take of the system around him. In this sense, Balram’s parallel in the play is more in the character of Mrs. Lovett, who acknowledges the entrepreneurial potential of their situation and acts almost exclusively out of “thrift”- almost, because she is also in love with Todd. This affection goes directly against the preestablished tenant of the system, emancipation from emotional ties, and thus leads to their downfall. It is only fitting that Shingavi would refer to this tenant as a “murder”, as it is literally the realization that Lucy is alive, brought about in the third act of the play, that sets off the eventual demise of Lovett and Todd.

These narratives present the worst faces of our modern, heavily unequal society- the failures of justice, of capitalism, and even of human empathy. Through them, we can see past the façades imposed on daily life, worn by rich and poor alike in their pursuit of self-betterment. They express a more nuanced story of class inequality and the forces that control our society, recognizing that bringing about a just and fair environment is not a matter of taking out the boogeymen of billionaires or capitalism, but rather a process of unlearning and replacing systems that value aggression as social capital. The authors acknowledge the autonomy and potential for both good and evil present in each member of society and analyze how the world around it undermines them. These works remind us that- regardless of our personal stance or our actions- we function within the same cannibalistic system. Like the chickens pecking each other in the rooster coop or the public eating Mrs. Lovett’s pies- if we are not working to change the system, we are accomplices in this cannibalism.

[bowiemonroee]

The Interview

 William Monroe has been ordered court-mandated therapy following a DWI and drug possession conviction. Here is his intake interview.

PART 1: THE BASICS

What is your full name?

What? Your cheap paper doesn’t have that information already? Christ. My name’s William Monroe but I never introduce myself as such or any variation. I go by Bowie and that’s it.

Where and when were you born?

Again, more information you should have. August 11th, 1994 in Manhattan.

Who are/were your parents? (Know their names, occupations, personalities, etc.)

My father, if you can call him that, is the CEO of Monroe Pharmaceutical. Yes, the same Monroe Pharmaceutical that charges you an exorbitant amount of money for your medications. My mother, Viviane Monroe is a socialite. Her wealth is from steel. They look like they have a perfect marriage but it’s far from it. He sleeps with his secretary and hookers and she downs Valium to keep that perky little smile up. They make it work. To be fair a divorce would not only harm their social credit but their financial standings as well. As parents, she’s better than he is. She can genuinely fake interest in our lives. He can’t be bothered. She owns her awfulness. He thinks he’s father of the year.

Do you have any siblings? What are/were they like?

Ugh, my fucking sisters. The middle one, she’s following in my mother’s footsteps. She’s a “classy philanthropist”, prim and proper. The good egg, if you will. A complete angel compared to me. So selfless and kind and blah blah blah. Give me a break. She only does that stuff because it makes her feel good about herself. Where’s the selflessness in that? You can’t complete acts of kindness for the gratitude and expect to still be a good person. She also drinks her daily three bottles of wine and complains about how father never came to her dance recitals. Give me a break. And then the youngest. Her life revolves around flowing trends and making them or whatever. She’s one of those girls on instagram posting about skinny fit tea and hairy gummy bears or whatever. Companies send her thousands of dollars in products in the hopes of getting attached to some stupid picture that’ll get thousand of mindless likes. probably all the attention she needs since father never gave it to her Their lives are both shallow and purposeless.

Where do you live now, and with whom? Describe the place and the person/people.

I live with my two dogs in a Penthouse apartment near One World Trade.

What is your occupation?

I’m a filmmaker, an artist.

Write a full physical description of yourself. You might want to consider factors such as: height, weight, race, hair and eye color, style of dress, and any tattoos, scars, or distinguishing marks.

What is this? A dating profile? I’m 6’0, 181 pounds, black hair, green, like a hipster Steve Jobs as my sisters would say, no tattoos, minor scars from falling as a child, no distinguishing marks. I’m boring. What can I say?

To which social class do you belong?

The polite answer is upper class. The real answer is “the richer than you” class.

Do you have any allergies, diseases, or other physical weaknesses?

I’m allergic to pollen and red dye #40. Well, red dye is more of intolerance but whatever. I still eat it because I’m not a little bitch. Physical weaknesses? I had a torn rotator cuff when I was younger but I still have pain in that shoulder.

Are you right- or left-handed?

I’m always right.

What do you have in your pockets?

Money, Black Card.

Do you have any quirks, strange mannerisms, annoying habits, or other defining characteristics?

I’m perfect.

PART 2: GROWING UP

How would you describe your childhood in general?

Eck, I mean, I had everything I wanted, right? I’d sound like a complete scumbag if I said “oh, my childhood was sad because my parents weren’t there and they didn’t pay attention to me and I was raised by nannies and sent to a $13,000 summer camp every year instead. Poor me.” I’m sure you’d love to hear some sob story about how all of that lead me to using drugs for fun. Yeah, fuck that whiny shit. My childhood was great.

What is your earliest memory?

I don’t know how old I was probably old enough to read at least. I was at my Nana’s house and she was watching this film Festen or The Celebration by Thomas Vinterberg. I can’t recall what it was about the film but I fell in love with filmmaking in that moment.

How much schooling have you had?

I went to the Dalton School from K through 12. Then NYU for college…which hasn’t ended yet, but whatever. Perfection takes time.

Did you enjoy school?

Elementary to 12, eh. High School got interesting when I could take more visual art classes. College was better because once those well rounding core classes were done I could get to the good film classes.

Where did you learn most of your skills and other abilities?

I mean, good filmmaking isn’t taught. I can’t pinpoint where I learned things. It’s just stuff you see, like, then add to your repertoire. 

While growing up, did you have any role models? If so, describe them.

Role models? Please. Role models are pointless because people will always let you down.

While growing up, how did you get along with the other members of your family?

As kids, my sisters and I were alright I suppose. As good as siblings can be. My father and I never really got along. I guess what the feminists are calling “toxic masculinity” was an issue with him. He didn’t think the arts was a place for a male. I was meant to run a business. Wear a suit. Manage over sheep. Blah blah blah. My mother, I tried. She tried. We cohabitate. It works. The only person I’d consider myself close with is Nana.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Oh for fucks sake, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to be what all little kids want to be. A doctor. A police officer. A firefighter. Then I grew up.

As a child, what were your favorite activities?

I liked art or rather, painting on the walls and floors, reading, making models and dioramas, causing trouble, having tantrums.

As a child, what kinds of personality traits did you display?

I was an extrovert. Very loud and talkative. Charming from what I’ve been told. I could talk my way out of trouble and into extra cookies, etc.

As a child, were you popular? Who were your friends, and what were they like?

Of course I was popular. Throughout school, my best friend for a lack of a better word, was Edmond Hamilton. He was a good kid. Strong and a good listener. He was the bronze to my brains. His father was a senator and his mother a pediatric surgeon. His parents weren’t home much so we through a lot of parties at his house. He had this cousin too, Anthony. He wasn’t wealthy like the rest of us. The senator’s brother, Anthony’s father, had a gambling problem and his mother, a drinking problem. As a result, he just wanted to find people he felt he ‘belonged’ with. Well, of course we’d ues that to our advantage. We could usually convince Anthony to steal stuff for us, do our dirty work. Edmond’s a big wig hedge fund manager and Anthony’s in prison. In high school, I fucked around with Rei you know, just as something to do. I outright told her that but you know, I’m not responsible for her feelings. I also fucked around with Alana Kingsley too.

When and with whom was your first kiss?

I think I was 10, give or take, and it was with…what was her name? Victoria Calloway.

Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?

Mmm, a little personal aren’t we doc? Well, if you must know, I followed in the tradition of all the male Monroe’s before. On my 16th birthday, my father got an escort and that was that. I know what you’re thinking, how problematic it is. How a child that young can’t make a choice like that, yadayadayada. Save it. I’m fine.

PART 3: BELIEFS & OPINIONS

Are you basically optimistic or pessimistic?

Neither. Both are ridiculous concepts. You can’t generalize yourself in that way. Do I have a brighter outlook on some experiences, sure. Grimmer on others. I’d say I’m more cynical than anything.

What is your greatest fear?

Why bother with fear? Fear is what you have when you think you can’t do something or that you’ll fail. I don’t do either of those things.

What are your religious views?

Religion is awesome. Think about it. The very few have the power over the masses all because they claim to be a voice for some divinity. How genius is that? They can control these people under the guise of a better afterlife? Sign me up to be the leader of that. That and also look at the drama it incites. How would you not love it. 

What are your political views?

I don’t care either way but I was raised Republican.

What are your views on sex?

It’s a fun necessity.

Do you believe in the existence of soul mates and/or true love?

No, absolutely not. That’s just a ploy or something that society has made up in order to get people to marry and procreate in a specific set of parameters. It’s absolute bullshit.

What do you believe makes a successful life?

Realism. Being real will lead you to success. But then again, I’m also a chronic, pathological liar. But I’m real about the characters I develop.

How honest are you about your thoughts and feelings (i.e. do you hide your true self from others, and in what way)?

I’m always honest.

Do you have any biases or prejudices?

I think comics are low art. I don’t know if that counts as a bias? And I think I’m smarter than everyone so that might be one too.

Is there anything you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances? Why do you refuse to do it?

I don’t put limits on myself.

Who or what, if anything, would you die for (or otherwise go to extremes for)?

Maybe my dogs but that’s about it. No one deserves my death.

PART 4: RELATIONSHIPS W/OTHERS

In general, how do you treat others (politely, rudely, by keeping them at a distance, etc.)? Does your treatment of them change depending on how well you know them, and if so, how?

I’m polite to everyone however, our definitions tend to differ I suppose. My politeness is truth centered. I’m not going to sugar coat my words to spare your feelings. That wouldn’t help you grow as a person. All these people with thin skins need me.

Who is the most important person in your life, and why?

Me, myself, and I. Should be self-explanatory.

Who is the person you respect the most, and why?

If I have to pick someone, I’d say Lars Von Trier. Excellent filmmaker.

Who are your friends? Do you have a best friend? Describe these people.

Eck, best friends. I try not to have friends like that because again, people let you down.

Do you have a spouse or significant other? If so, describe this person.’

That’s a joke, right?

Have you ever been in love? If so, describe what happened.

I love myself.

What do you look for in a potential lover?

I don’t look for potential lovers.

How close are you to your family?

I talk to my sisters at least once a week. My parents maybe once a month. About as close as oil and vinegar. We exist in the same salad dressing bottle but like never really together.

Have you started your own family? If so, describe them. If not, do you want to? Why or why not?

I mean, not that I know of but who’s really to say. I’d assume if I impregnated someone she’d probably try to sue me for child support or something. But as of right now, I don’t have any desire to have kids or a family for that matter. If we haven’t noticed by now, I’m selfish as fuck.

Who would you turn to if you were in desperate need of help?

Rich probably. Or Mr. Franklin.

Do you trust anyone to protect you? Who, and why?

Rich, because it’s his job.

If you died or went missing, who would miss you?

Probably my dogs, Benedict and Constance.

Who is the person you despise the most, and why?

Declan Wentworth. That son of a bitch tried to embarrass me in front of the entire school by pulling my pants down during the student body elections. Jokes on him. Not only did I win president, which I didn’t even want because I was only running as a joke, but it made a rather good impression among the girls in our grade if you catch my drift.

Do you tend to argue with people, or avoid conflict?

I don’t argue. I state facts and people get butthurt. That’s not my issue.

Do you tend to take on leadership roles in social situations?

I’m naturally charismatic, what do you think?

Do you like interacting with large groups of people? Why or why not?

I wouldn’t say I particularly like it. I could go either way. But I do enjoy being in charge of them and making them do stuff so.

Do you care what others think of you?

Fuck no.

PART 5: LIKES & DISLIKES

What is/are your favorite hobbies and pastimes?

Ugh, I hate this question. People always ask this when they don’t know what else to ask. As if what I like to do says a lot about who I am. Please.

What is your most treasured possession?

My Varicam, my Minolta.

What is your favorite color?

Black and I don’t care if that’s a shade.

What is your favorite food?

The Tomahawk Ribeye from Bowery Meat Company.

What, if anything, do you like to read?

Mostly things about cults or charismatic leaders.

What is your idea of good entertainment (consider music, movies, art, etc.)?

I enjoy a good film, watching people argue, lying, etc.

Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs? If so, why? Do you want to quit?

All of the above and absolutely not. I’m no quitter.

How do you spend a typical Saturday night?

Typically Saturday night? There’s no such thing for me. I’m either out gallivanting the city or throwing some sort of getting together at my place. 

What makes you laugh?

People falling.

What, if anything, shocks or offends you?

The stupidity of others although I shouldn’t be surprised.

What would you do if you had insomnia and had to find something to do to amuse yourself?

I’d go find some shit bar to sit in. Maybe cause a fight or something. Not between me and someone. Between two other people. It’d be interesting to watch.

How do you deal with stress?

Drugs.

Are you spontaneous, or do you always need to have a plan?

Spontaneous.

What are your pet peeves?

Ignorance. Goody two shoes.

PART 6: SELF IMAGES & OTHER

Describe the routine of a normal day for you. How do you feel when this routine is disrupted?

Routine? I don’t believe in routines.

What is your greatest strength as a person?

Everything.

What is your greatest weakness?

Nothing. 

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Again, Nothing?

Are you generally introverted or extroverted?

Extroverted.

Are you generally organized or messy?

Messy is a sign of weakness. I have no weaknesses.

Name three things you consider yourself to be very good at, and three things you consider yourself to be very bad at.

Just three? Fine. Filmmaking, pissing people off, talking. There’s nothing I’m bad at so that question isn’t valid.

Do you like yourself?

No. I love myself.

What goal do you most want to accomplish in your lifetime?

I’m pretty accomplished right now so I’m good. Thanks. 

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Still rich. Still causing trouble.

If you could choose, how would you want to die?

In a blaze of glory probably. Something dramatic of course.

If you knew you were going to die in 24 hours, name three things you would do in the time you had left.

Have a final meal at Bowery Meat, do a fuck ton of coke, set my apartment on fire.

What is the one thing for which you would most like to be remembered after your death?

I don’t care if people remember me after I die. 

What three words best describe your personality?

Amazing. Perfect. Talented.

What three words would others probably use to describe you?

Again, Amazing, perfect, Talented.

[anneesfolleshq]

Bonjour et bienvenue!

Paris welcomes you, our Silver Tongue, Theodore Mercier! May we say, you’re the spitting image of Jake Gyllenhaal! Please make your presence known within 24 hours, and do have a look at our checklist before setting out into the city on your own.

                                                                                 À bientôt!

MUN

Name/Alias: Stella

Preferred Pronouns: She/Her

Age: 20

Timezone: I’m in CST. I’m online throughout the day, but usually do replies either early in the morning ( around 6 - 8 AM ) or night time ( 5 - 9 PM )

MUSE

Chosen Skeleton: The Silver Tongue

Muse Name: Theodore “Theo” Mercier

Muse Age: 36 years old

Chosen FC: jake gyllenhaal 

Muse Occupation: lawyer

Muse Affiliation & Frequent Haunts: Choosing a stomping ground is a liberty that Theo can’t yet afford. While his still-young heart sings for the blasé Montparnasse, his business has always been rooted in Montmarte. Despite knowing that the divide between both sides of the river is trivial and superficial, Theo finds himself spending his longest hours at Montmarte, working his fingers to the bone and losing what little sleep he has time for. Montparnasse is reserved for vacations and holidays, where he drowns himself in the luxury and liminality of its culture, licking his wounds and reminding himself what joie de vivre feels like.

Direct from Le Petit Journal: It boggles the mind that such a beautiful face could be wasted on a person as miserable as Theodore Mercier. As charming as he might be in his courtroom attire, his relentless bloviating on ethics and politic is enough to put even the most dedicated jury to sleep.

BIOGRAPHY

Theo was seven years old when his father took him to see Giradoux’s Mort de Quelqu’un. It was an early foray into Unanimism, but more importantly, it was the first ( and perhaps most critical ) exposure to performing arts ( or rather, the art of performing ). There’s a balance of charisma, deception, and focus in execution of the craft that inspires Theo. Theo’s dad told him that all the best orators were also the best performers, that speaking confidently was just down the street from becoming a character. There was a certain Romance to it that captivated Theo, and captivation soon turned to imitation.

Practicing law is choosing to sentence oneself to a lifetime of being the least likable person in any given room. Being a defense attorney for Paris’s most wanted, then, is as close to a social death sentence as one can get. There’s a component of fun in it– there’s no denying as much. In the moments where Theo hits his stride, he is no longer a simple civil servant: he is the performer of a great cosmic choreography. Points of an argument are movements in a great symphony of theory, strung together by Theo’s uncanny ability to make it make sense. He’s good at what he does. He knows this. He knows that he knows it. He knows that clients roll in, payments roll out, and he goes to bed each night richer than he was when he woke up that morning.

It’s not about being liked– it’s never been about being liked. If it had been, Theo likely would not have survived more than five months in his line of work. His mode d’être is only tangential to his line of work. He is orator before a lawyer, after all. It isn’t his job to speak the law, it’s his job to speak. The fact that it has led him to such a lucrative lifestyle? Well, it’d certainly be a sin to look a gift horse in the mouth, wouldn’t it? There are times, though, between the uncorking of a bottle and the pouring of a glass, where Theo wonders if his wealth will ever afford him the ineffable: closure, fulfillment, purpose: raison d’être.

His personality is all smoke and mirrors: Theo becomes the person that the room demands. In courtrooms, he speaks volumes of philosophy and ethics. At dinners, he falls into a sea of soft-spoken voices and occasional laughter. Art galleries turn him into a critic, dissecting works from movements he knows little more than the name of. Theodore Mercier is a thinly stretched canvas, moving constantly from frame to frame, becoming and unbecoming in the blink of an eye.

POTENTIAL PLOTS/CONNECTIONS

• all I want in the world is for theo to be punched in the face, and hard. he’s a snake and a mosquito, the kind of parasite that feeds on others’ desires and desperation to become exactly what they want, even if it isn’t at all what they need.

• i’m very much entertained by the idea of theo falling under the tide of a chaotic era. he’s a stone being worn down and slowly moved by the beating current of an era. to explore his recognition that his identity is ephemeral, that perhaps there’s something still genuine in him being awoken by such an earnest era? i’d love to explore that.

• further, sexuality and romance is always an interesting wave to ride. i think that part of his identity crisis ( and part of his greed ) would certainly lapse into sexual identity. there’s a lot to unpack here: not only do i think he’s spent most of his life depriving himself of a long-term romantic relationship because he’s terrible, but i also think that a more laissez-faire culture might be encouraging him to take a personal risk, for once.

• of course he’d be connected to the art scenes ( he couldn’t not be ) and be fairly familiar with the best and worst that paris has to offer, and there’s a lot of good stuff there that i think could be hashed out individually with each writer! he’s a man of culture, but he’s a man of thecertain culture of the upper class. he’s slippery. let’s watch that bite him in the ass.

[hipandcriticalblog]

Jamm’s Top 7 Must See Netflix Series

Monday, August 28, 2017 7:50 PM by. Jae Covington (Jamm)

  We are all familiar with the juggernaut streaming service NETFLIX and its mega successful and award winning  series’ like House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black. While these shows are well deserving of all the glory that they have received, there are still a wealth of less recognized series that deserve some of the spotlight  as well. So here is my list of seven essential shows for your viewing pleasure on NETFLIX.

1. Sense 8    Let's start off with the most well known show from the list, Sense 8. The series has been making waves recently due to its fans loud uproar of disapproval following the shows cancellation, right after the release of its second season. But if you take the time to experience this epic sci-fi drama/thriller, you'll no doubt join in on all of the rage.

 Sense 8 introduces the idea that there is a more evolved species of human on the planet called sensates (get sense 8, sensate), with the ability to share memories, emotions, and all senses with other sensates. These amazing abilities combine to make a another one called "visiting". Visiting is kinda like making a projection of yourself directly into someone else's consciousness, something like a hologram. While the premise is enough to bring you into the story, the characters and their interactions with one another is definitely what keeps you engaged. The story revolves around, you guessed it, 8 characters in a cluster (you'll learn about the term from the show) from all over the world. Each character has their own unique background, talents, and personalities which vary greatly from the other characters. Like Capheus, a Kenyan bus driver living in the slums of Nairobi and Nomi, a transgender lesbian hacker from San Francisco.

    The show dedicates itself to exposing the nuance of the lives that the characters live, and introducing that same nuance and culture  to people who would never experience it. It is an extremely engaging show to say the least, full of likable characters, drama, and action. This short summary won't give it its due justice, so you should just experience it yourself.

2.       3%    Now when I first started 3% I had no idea what I was watching and what to expect. But I ended up witnessing a thrilling and thought provoking series that I highly recommend. 3% takes place in a dystopian Brazil, where the mass majority of people live in extreme poverty and in a desolate landscape, where people fight and die over resources like food and water. Meanwhile, a small chunk of the population live in a complete paradise separated from the mainland called "The Offshore".

   The main plot is people from the mainland trying to get to the The Offshore, but the only way to achieve this is through an extreme series of testing simply called "The Process". While the plot was beginning to open up, I thought I was going to get another Hunger Games clone but I was lead into something much more dramatic and thought provoking. 3% is like the Hunger Games however, only a certain amount of people can participate. But unlike Hunger Games however, instead of picking children and teenagers, all participants are 21. Also instead of an all out battle royale, the process includes mental challenges and teamwork in some cases in order to advance.

   This show delivers drama, action, mystery, and even a revenge story pulled together into a single narrative creating a must see series.

3.       The OA    Straight up, this show is weird. Usually, I can predict plot points before they are revealed while watching movies or a new series. This however was not the case for The OA. This series left me full of questions and a deep need to find out what is going to happen after the first season. Fair warning: This show will confuse you, but nonetheless, you should watch it.

   In a nutshell, the show tells the story of a blind girl who was kidnapped, but then years later returns to her hometown, with her vision once more. Unfortunately, if I go any more into detail about the story it would spoil too much...so strap in for this one because The OA will take you on a wild ride.

4.       Ozark    If you love gritty crime shows with rich character building and an intense plot, then welcome to your new favorite show, Ozark. This show grabbed me at the first episode and never loosened its grip on my attention and imagination. The series follows an intelligent Chicago financial advisor Marty Byrd, who is also a money launderer for a huge Mexican drug cartel. The basic premise of the show is based around Marty trying to launder 5 million dollars within a short time frame of a few weeks for the cartel, or the cartel will kill him and his family. The show takes a slow start in the first episode but it makes up for it drastically, with a major increase in tension towards the end of the episode.

 In order to launder this mass amount of money Marty takes his family to Ozark, Missouri, a small country lake town in order to capitalize on the large tourist population during the summer. The show is very reminiscent of Breaking Bad. The difference is this show does right when Breaking Bad starts to fall off. Personally, I started to lose interest in Breaking Bad when Walter White connects to the South American drug lord. The interplay between the two characters didn't really add any more drama to the show and I thought the drug lord played too much of a role in the plot, but with Ozark it's the opposite. Every time you see the cartel after the first episode, it's nothing but intensity. Instead of being always seen the cartel thrives in the background but reappears just enough to stay relevant without overdoing it.

   All in all, this show is simply amazing and I highly recommend it to drama show lovers.

5.       Chewing Gum   Sexual, Awkward, Hilarious, are the words that comes to mind when I think about Chewing Gum. This series takes raunchy comedy to an entirely new level. In its two seasons it has become a comedic masterpiece that is choke-full of truly laugh out loud moments. The story revolves around a young woman named Tracey, that’s trying desperately to lose her virginity despite the rules of her highly religious mother. Now one might think this plot to be simple and easy to overcome, but when you are as awkward and so out of touch as Tracey your idea of simple might change.

    The wild and outrageous situations that she finds herself in in the pursuit of sex are to die for. I must admit though, that not all the jokes land well but those are few and far in-between, and the ones that do hit hard and are memorable and will keep you laughing for minutes on end. What makes this show stand out to me however is the fact that Tracey is black. We really don’t see black women in leading comedic roles, nor do we see them actively looking to engage in sex.

This BAFTA winning series is by far one of my favorites on the air right now. It's refreshing, funny, honest, and truly worth your time to watch.

6.       Grace&Frankie    To keep the comedy wagon rolling next up is this "buddy buddy" comedy that brings "old eyes" on current issues. This series will definitely will be one that will be discussed for years to come, due to how it handles topics like; sexuality, ageism,  infidelity, and family issues. And it only helps that it's funny as well. The best way to describe this story is messy, as it follows two older married couples Grace and Robert and Frankie and Saul whom are all friends via Saul and Robert, who are also partners in their own law firm. Where things get messy is when Saul and Robert both come out as gay and in love with each other and have been over the majority of both of their marriages. So to help each other through the situation that they both found themselves in, Grace and Frankie both move in together to be apart from their ex-husbands. I needed some sanitizer writing this because it gets so messy, as this is just the basic premise of the show.

   But through all of this drama and heartbreak the series still finds the space to fit in plenty of comedy in the mix. Mainly the comedic relief falls on Frankie and hippy like lifestyle as it clashes with Grace's upper class and bourgeois status and sensibility. As stated before, the show really shines by its ability to integrate current topics to older characters, which is very seldom seen in television. I really enjoyed watching both Grace and Frankie trying to re-enter the dating scene after being with one person for over 20 years. The show also does a good job of sharing screen time with all of its characters including the children of both marriages, all of whom are complete individuals and have their own storylines to follow.

   In my opinion, Grace&Frankie is one of the best crafted shows that you will see on television. So if you haven't seen it log on to Netflix and delve right into it, you deserve it.

7.       Black Mirror    This show just might be my favorite thing on the entire Netflix platform. It might even be my favorite television show period. Yeah it’s that good. It’s definitely the most complex show on the list, and no doubt will be the hardest to describe...so let’s just get into it. First off, every episode is different so there is no continuity nor connectivity with each episode, just one recurring theme of how technology has, is, and might affect people and society as a whole. The lack of continuity was confusing at first, because the series gives no indication of it, so I was taken back at first, but the feeling faded as I got into the second episode and beyond.

    The show really plays out like a collection of movies instead of television series, due to the quality of the production and how immersive every episode is. What I truly enjoy about this series is that every episode provokes thought and the feeling of "What if that were to really happen to me/us?". A great example of when I felt this sensation is in an episode where the bee population is so low that a company created mechanical bees to make up for the low natural bee population. The problem however is when someone hacks into the artificial bee's systems and start using them to kill people who are chosen over twitter via people attaching their name to a certain hashtag. The show gets deep and when you are watching it it becomes hard to turn away and remove yourself from your captivation to it.

    I can never do this masterpiece any justice from this short description of it. You just have to immerse yourself into it to truly understand how great it is.

   So that’s it with the list of my top seven must see shows. So take a day or two for yourself, and your favorite binge buddy, grab some snacks, and start checking off the shows on your new watch list.

[giarts]

Too Many Elephants in the Room to Count: When a Conversation on Affordable Housing for Artists Refuses to Address Reality

Submitted by Bree Davies on October 17, 2019

Affordable housing for artists.

This topic is a hard one for me. I'm too invested. I know too much. I have had too many people close to me lose their housing and simultaneously, lose the place where they create art. For one of my friends, when he lost his home and his space to create art, he not long after, lost his life. Colin Ward, a fixture of Denver's Do-It-Yourself arts community, died by suicide on February 1st, 2018, fourteen months after he was evicted from his home, the internationally-recognized art space, Rhinoceropolis. After the surprise eviction, Colin's life was never the same; many of us close to him saw a direct connection between his displacement and his death.

Colin was one of dozens of artists—and one of thousands of people—in Denver to lose their homes and work spaces to surprise/unwarranted evictions, rising rents, unfair housing practices, and handshake leases that evaporated once land values skyrocketed. Predatory and classist real estate deals, often occurring in celebrated “arts districts,” have systematically removed artists from Denver's many neighborhoods.

When I saw the conference workshop Innovations in Artist Housing: Inspiration from South America to Address the “SoHo Effect, I was stoked. I thought, based on the other conversations and panels I had witnessed so far at the GIA conference, I was sure to learn something from one of many experts. Maybe I would hear from an artist in another city who overcame the housing challenge in a way I had not thought of before. Or, maybe there would be a real estate developer interested in talking about the real causes of rising affordability and what communities can do to stabilize themselves and prevent displacement. Maybe, just maybe, there could be talk of what homelessness, mental health and art have to do with each other, and the role stable housing can play in an artist's quality of life.

As I was walking into the panel's location, Redline—the gallery/studios/community space located right in the heart of Denver’s many social and homelessness services—I saw two friends walk in the building ahead of me—two artists who I had worked alongside during the mass evictions of artists and art spaces in 2016 (a knee-jerk reaction many cities across the country had to Oakland’s heartbreakingly deadly Ghost Ship Fire.) These artist friends of mine were people who had gone to city council meetings to implore city officials to do something—anything—about the crisis; they were people who had spent long nights strategizing around the legal rights of artists; they were artists who spent hours researching fair housing laws and real estate transactions along Brighton Boulevard, the strip of the city that is, on paper, an “arts district,” but has been the epicenter of visible artist displacement. I was hopeful; maybe my friends were joining the conversation, allowing conference goers from around the U.S. to hear firsthand from artists living through an affordability crisis in Denver.

But the presence of my artist friends at Redline was merely a coincidence. The panel on artist housing did not include a single artist, let alone an artist impacted by—or blamed for—the “SoHo Effect.” Instead, the panel physically resembled many urban planning panels I've had to painfully sit through—upper middle class white people who want to talk about housing, mostly in terms of real estate values and sexy urban design. They did not want to talk about the realities just outside the windows of the room I began to feel trapped in.

Most disappointing were comments from local developer Mark Falcone. His story was one I’ve heard over and over in the world of development and real estate investment—a wealthy guy who came up in the New Urbanism movement of the 80s and 90s, a time when “center city” infill was going to be the savior and the suburbs were to be scoffed and shamed (even though many of us Gen Xers and Millennials grew up in these so-called bastions of bland, because our parents bought houses in the suburbs—generational results of white flight and/or sometimes because the burbs were affordable, etc.) He showed us lots of renderings and photos of big, shiny object projects he had worked on, talked big game about the rise in an interest to “move back to center cities” (as if there weren't people—mostly black and brown folks—living there all along,) and on and on. Downtowns are like, revitalized now, everyone.

I am a privileged, housing-stable artist who has spent countless hours trying to get to the bottom of my city's current housing crisis. Because of this, I have been privy to dozens of conversations in rooms where mostly white men with generational wealth get to talk about “building cities” without any mention of their own privilege, the impacts of land value and who decides its value, their role in land speculation and what it does to communities, what historically racist housing and land policy did/does to generations of families and their rising inability to grab ahold of that mythical concept of home equity, how gentrification is systematic and not elusive, and so on.

One of the most popular (and tired) tropes in this great game of hot potato known as “who's fault is gentrification?,” is that artists are to blame. But, in this progressive space and in this progressive conference looking at money in art, I did not expect the “artists start gentrification” line to be uttered by a developer who has played a crucial role in the land acquisition (and gifting of that land,) to our modern art museum, not to mention partially funding and building said museum. To more accurately quote Falcone, artists are “the tip of the spear” of gentrification. The developer-favored assertion that artists are to blame for existing is very convenient, as it serves to distance real estate investors from the truth: artists almost never own the land they live on. They aren't the ones buying up huge swaths of lower income communities in a gold rush-like speculative fashion. They aren't the ones who have relationships with politically-adjacent powers-that-be who make these land acquisitions super easy. And artists certainly aren’t the ones out here re-naming neighborhoods in an effort to sell a lower-income communities out from under peoples’ grandmas.

This is not to remove artists—and in this context, I mean mostly white artists—from their role in how cities change, not always for the better. My artist friends Luke and Trevor who once lived at Rhinoceropolis, created a zine called RIP Art (which is not available online, but I did photograph it and post it, page by page on twitter, where you can read it.) It is the best takedown/breakdown of the artist’s role in gentrification that I’ve ever read.

At one point, Falcone said that in Denver, rents/housing consume “only 26% of a household income in Denver” and that people in his very office have proclaimed that they think they could squeeze Denver folks even harder and that the percentage of a person’s income going to housing “could be 32% in no time.” I was grateful and audibly relieved when another skeptical conference attendee commented that this was just the “planation mentality” in action, as the elites with power and land decide how the rest of the people “below” them live. Another conference attendee asked Falcone about some of the imagery in his presentation — alongside a bunch of statistics just how messed up housing issues are, Falcone used a photo of a tent city, an increasingly common sight in cities like Denver, where our community members experiencing homelessness often live. I didn’t catch a straightforward answer from the developer — but he seemed to brush off that part of our community’s life or death issue to talk about the “missing middle,” a part of the housing crisis urban planner professionals like to obsess over.

Just outside the door of this panel, in another studio space across the gallery at Redline, there was a gathering—it was a group of artists, many of whom are experiencing homelessness, working on their art. Redline is one of the few institutions in this city that is part of this “billion dollar economic arts boom” that actually works with artists at every level of their career, regardless of where they land on the economic spectrum. Housed or not, artists have a place at Redline. I wish this panel had made a place for these artists, too.

Posted by Bree Davies on October 17, 2019 at 08:48PM. Read the full post.

[danguy96]

My Ideas For A Dream Retool for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Musical

As some of you may know, in addition to currently working on my own retelling of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was recently talking about the recent Broadway retool of the CatCF Musical which opened up in London in 2013, and in addition to expressing displeasure at how the transition from London to Broadway didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped it would have, I was also sort of mentioning how I had this sort of idea for a “Dream Retool” which would sort of rework the musical like the Broadway version did, but also sort of be a combination of both, rework things from the London version back in, and even re-include the characters of Marvin Prune and Miranda Mary Piker, both of which I decided to re-include for my version as well. 

I already discussed this idea with @thevideonasty, @roristevens, and @catcfmusicaluniverse, so I thought I should share it with the rest of the people I know who are fans of Roald Dahl, Musical Theatre, and this particular musical and the story it’s based on.

Now, this is mostly just me throwing out ideas and then giving out the order of when the musical numbers should take place and how they would be staged, so I hope you like my ideas, even if they sound a bit like a pipe dream and admittedly aren’t completely realized, and I also apologize if some things seem a bit unorganized.

First off, before I get to the main parts of this post, I would like to sort of get a few bullet points out of the way:

- As I said before, I was thinking of having elements from the London version return, so while there may be some things from the Broadway version, elements from the London version will sort of win out in the end, such as (SPOILERS) Wonka disguising himself as a “Tramp”, and it not being revealed until the end, rather than fully giving away the plot in the first scene and having him disguised as a candy shop owner, like in the Broadway version.

- Also like the London version, I would probably have it take place in England (it is based off a story written by an English author, after all, and Matilda wasn’t stripped of it’s “English-ness” when it was transferred to Broadway, and I also would mostly do it because I kind of wanted Christian Borle to play Wonka with an English accent, since he can pull one off pretty well in my opinion)

- The bratty kids (six this time instead of four, with the addition of both Marvin Prune and Miranda Mary Piker) would probably be played by actual kids, but if I did have to use adult actors to play them, I would probably have them be played by young adults who can look “youthful”, but they would be casted with 18 or 19-year olds to early to mid-20 year olds (26 or 27 at the oldest), and I would probably do it to emphasize the “childhood innocence” aspect, kind of like what the English opera “The Golden Ticket” did.

- Though, if I were to cast young adults as the bratty kids, I was still thinking about which theatre actors I would choose to play Marvin and Miranda respectively. Maybe those who are more familiar with Musical Theatre could maybe give me suggestions as to who they think would fit the roles for the hypothetically casting of Marvin and Miranda (they would be portrayed similar to how they are going to be portrayed in my retelling, so keep those character descriptions and physical references in mind).

- Both of Charlie’s parents would be still alive, like in the London version and in the book, in order to distance itself a little bit from the Gene Wilder film, where Mrs. Bucket was a widow

- There would be one or two songs from the Gene Wilder film along with Pure Imagination, but I was also wanting to go back to focusing on the musical’s own score as well in order for it to feel like it’s own thing.

- The scenery porn, a defining part of the original production, would definitely be something I would bring back (especially for the “It Must Be Believed to Be Seen” number, and pretty much most of Act Two), though I would possibly include a few minimalist elements from the Broadway version, but it would probably be mostly used in Act One, mostly to give a contrast between the “real world” and the Factory, up to the point where we get the large gates of the Wonka Factory.

- The Oompa-Loompas would be brought to life via a mix of the trick costumes in the London version, and the puppetry used in the Broadway version.

- The Everlasting Gobstopper would be introduced in the Inventing Room like in the London version, and serve the same role as it did in the London version, unlike the Broadway version where it wasn’t introduced until near the very end in the Imagining Room (it kind of felt tacked on the way they did it there).

Now, here’s how I would fit in both Marvin Prune and Miranda Mary Piker in a retool of the musical, and how their numbers would go down:

Firstly, Marvin's musical number would come after Violet's, and I think would take maybe take a few cues from the new "What could possibly go wrong?" (Mike's new intro song, replacing "It's Teavee Time"), with it being performed by a small crowd representing people who've come to celebrate the victory of the boy celebrity, Marvin Prune (if you're familiar with my fanfic concept for a retelling of the story, my interpretation of Marvin Prune is a sort of jab at child stars and upper-class yuppies), and while his parents start announcing how they're so proud of their boy and how they should prepare themselves to meet their stunning boy... Marvin's appears in what would surely be one of his defining character moments by storming in (wearing a lavender night robe and maybe even a curler in his hair) and telling people to get out because he needs his "beauty rest", complaining how he only got the ticket by accident, complaining about he would hate to share the spotlight with that "gum-smacking bimbo" (yeah, there's sort of an implied rivalry between him and Violet, seeing as how they're both child celebrities for different reasons, but both are very prideful, even if Marvin's faults lie more in his vanity), and how he doesn't want to go because he considers the prospect of going to Wonka's factory to be a "cavity-inducing nightmare". But his parents (not wanting to waste any opportunity for good publicity) fuel up Marvin's ego through song, and convince him how this could be an opportunity to increase their popularity and wealth, and Marvin soon accepts going (even getting an "instant costume change" into his regular clothes halfway through the song), and the song becomes one big ego trip for Marvin, gloating about what he can supposedly do, but it's pretty obvious he'd rather just be famous for being famous (think sort of like Gaston's song from Beauty and the Beast, complete with French sounding violins and accordions, only Marvin's a bit more foppish and prissy than Gaston, and sort of becomes a butt monkey later on). 

When Marvin arrives on the red carpet, he has rose petals thrown at his feet as he dances down the carpet, blowing kisses to his "fans" while also occasionally looking in his silver hand mirror (and, like Violet, there’s a very small encore of one part of his intro song as he makes his entrance). When he finally gets close to Cherry and Jerry, Marvin sort of breaks the fourth wall by shushing Cherry in order to signal the audience to keep applauding, before he decides it's enough (if you've seen the filmed version of Shrek the Musical, and what happens shortly after the "What's Up Duloc?" number, you probably know what I'm talking about). When he finally does allow Cherry to ask him a question, he starts something along the lines of "All I just want to say is that I'm just so overjoyed that so many of you wonderful, slightly-less-significant people have all decided to tune in to this event to bear witness to something truly greater than yourselves; that being, Moi. Furthermore, I...", but he stops right there when he sees Veruca, instantly becoming smitten with her, and he immediately starts flirting with her, but she just tells him to buzz off and threatens to punch him. Even so, he still turns to Cherry happily and says to her in a not-really-a-whisper, "I don't know about you, but I can hear ze wedding bells ringing already, no?" (remember that Marvin is French here), before Cherry moves on to her usual bit of giving commentary before the next child arrives.

Next, Miranda's introductory number would probably come before Mike Teavee's, but it would definitely come after Marvin's. A lot of the number would actually sort of be inspired by/be a shout-out to Matilda the Musical, because Miranda's first song would sort of be this mix of a twisted Alma Mater song, and "The Hammer" (complete with there being brief moments in the song where Miranda almost loses it), her talking about she also found the ticket by accident and truly doesn't want to go on the tour, but figures she might as well go because it may be worth some educational value (the song would also probably have some inspiration and cues from the “Ascot Gavotte” from My Fair Lady, and the “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank” from Mary Poppins, in terms of how the song sounds extremely stuffy). We would also be introduced to her with seeing Cherry Sunday in what's supposed to be a study in Miranda's parents' manor, but after she says her first line ("Jerry, I'm in England!" or "I'm in England again, Jerry!" if Veruca is still English and not Russian), a thunderclap is heard (complete with a lightning effect), and she immediately says "no, I'm not in Transylvania" or something to that effect, and before Miranda's song begins properly, we can see her sitting in a chair and reading a large book, with the book obscuring her face until she puts it down, and we finally see her face, and the song begins properly shortly after that (with Cherry looking freaked out and forcing herself to keep smiling throughout the whole song). Needless to say it would probably have the most downbeat parts out of all the Bratty Kids introductory songs.

Right before Miranda arrives on the red carpet, another thunder and lightning effect happens, and Jerry asks if it's going to rain, before Cherry corrects him and says that it means that Miranda Mary Piker is here (though, as a callback, she kind of sounds a little nervous when she says it). Just as Cherry asks how Miranda is feeling and if there's anything she wants to say, Miranda grabs the microphone out of her hand, and goes on a somewhat long statement about how she's not excited about this tour at all and how she won't enjoy a single nano-second of it, and says that even though she's just met them in person and all of them haven't arrived yet, she hates her fellow tour members already and doesn't plan on making friends with anyone, and she wishes to get the day over and done with so that she can get back to her studies. She ends the statement with a somewhat curt "Thank you", and hands the microphone back to a somewhat stunned Cherry, who regains composure a few seconds later and goes back to normal.

That's sort of it with their roles in Act 1, but in Act 2, I have an idea which would remedy being able to have both "Juicy" and "When Willy Met Oompa", by placing the latter after the former during the next room they're in (the one where Marvin Prune meets his fate), and still have enough time for Marvin himself to have his own Oompa Loompa song.

Now, the endgame I came up with my version of Marvin in my own is sort of inspired by Jimmy-C-Lombardo's version, with a few changes: https://www.deviantart.com/jimmy-c-lombardo/art/Marvin-Prune-and-the-Perry-Plum-Faeries-427902555 The room they visit is sort of like the one in that fan chapter, but the room they're visiting is an almost rainforest-like greenhouse/garden, in which Wonka houses certain plants he uses for ingredients for many of his confections by extracting certain parts of the plant which are safe to use, as well as extracting the essence and nullifying the effects of the plant for the parts which aren't completely safe, which is used for stuff like sour candy. The Perry-Plum Fairies are still there, but Marvin sneaks off not just to catch a closer glimpse at them, but to also snag one as a gift for Veruca, so that she'll finally love him (as you can see, Marvin claims that he's thinking about Veruca, but really, he's mostly thinking about how he'll be rewarded by Veruca, and he also wants to show off that no creature on Earth can find his looks irresistible, be it man, beast, or fairfolk). When he gets sprayed with the Perry Plum Gas, he's sprayed by more than one fairy with it, and not only does he start to develop actual prunes on his body, but he also accidentally ends up falling into several of the different deadly plants, which cause him to literally break out in spots and stripes, start developing allergic reactions (including almost passing out and becoming short of breath), having a bit of his hair fall out, and, I apologize for the not-so-culturally sensitive pun, considering Marvin is French (though, Dahl probably would've used it, if he could), even starts croaking like a frog. He's escorted out of the room via wheelbarrow, taken to not only be plucked, but to be operated on because the effects of the plants could be deadly if treated right away. When we see him walk out of the factory, the prunes and stripes and spots are gone, but he now has several scars where the prunes once were, and the rest of the surgery to undo most of the effects of the plants and Perry Plum Gas was so intense, left his once-handsome face scarred and looking like a slightly less ugly version of the unmasked Phantom of the Opera (the stage musical, that is, but it's somewhat on both sides of his face), and Marvin is in complete hysterics about this, with him even having a paper bag with eyeholes over his head to hide his appearance (with him even slightly croaking in-between his sobs).

Now, how this would work for a retool of the musical, this is how I see it (it’d be similar to how I would portray it in my own upcoming retelling as I described above, but again, with some changes to suit the scene if it were in the musical): When they arrive at the Greenhouse Room, Wonka describes all of the different types plants to the group and how their effects can either be used to make candy or be very deadly, he of course goes over the Perry Plum Fairies (which are mostly represented as pink balls of light, like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan, except when behind a certain prop which has projections of the rest of what is supposed to be the rest of the greenhouse, partially in silhouette, which the actors can go can behind, which'll prove a key role here), and he even explains to the group about certain rare types of bees he keeps which help pollinate the plants, but are also dangerous if you upset them. After someone (most likely Miranda) asks if the Fairies have been brought over from this "supposed" Loompaland as well, Wonka answers her with a short backstory similar to that in the fan chapter (only, again, changed slightly), and Marvin then sees this as an opportunity to distract Wonka by asking how he exactly he got the Oompa Loompas to come work for him (we still have the line about how the Oompa Loompas are a “long-lost, ancient tribe”, but like the London show, it appears early and we don't get the full backstory, yet), and than begins "When Willy Met Oompa", as Marvin sneaks off to catch a Perry Plum Fairy in order to impress Veruca (hypothetically, he would go behind the prop which projects the rest of the Greenhouse, and in certain parts of the "When Willy Met Oompa" song, we would occasionally see funny background events with Marvin's attempts trying to catch a fairy, and accidentally ending up being chased by those deadly bees, sort of like that part with Henry D'Ysquith being chased by bees in "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder"). When the "When Willy Met Oompa" song is over, everyone finally notices that Marvin's run off, and we finally see him manage to get catch a fairy, but it spits Perry Plum Gas in his face, and soon other fairies do the same, and Marvin mentions how he got stung by three or four of those bees and stumbled through some of those exotic plants, causing Mr. Wonka to become worried, before Marvin starts showing symptoms and signs of what those things do, and as Marvin breaks out in prunes, stripes, spots and becomes more gross looking (through the magic of certain projections and stage effects, with some pantomime and shadow puppetry thrown in as well), the Oompa Loompas begin a song I would title "Tango de la Perry Plum Fairies" as Marvin somewhat dances alog with his own demise (sort of like "Veruca's Nutcracker Sweet"), while stumbling into even more deadly plants, before finally becoming exhausted and terribly sick, and collapses. We then see Marvin in a wheelbarrow (he's covered in a blanket, except for his arm, not only to leave how bad he looks up to the imagination, but to also give the grim feeling of seeing a dead, covered body being taken away in a stretcher, though we do still hear Marvin speak out somewhat, including him stretching his one arm out to Veruca as the wheelbarrow moves past her and he calls out to "Do not worry or mourn for me, mon amour!"), and Wonka orders the Oompa Loompas to operate on Marvin at once in order to try to save him, and Marvin is rolled offstage via wheelbarrow.

For Miranda's fate, it would basically be very similar to how it was originally going to be, mixed a little bit with the way I described it here: http://danguy96.tumblr.com/post/149509647497/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-patchwork-fic Before you ask, the literal "laughing gas" is actually is a type of gas which helps run the machine, and the laughing is sort of a side effect of that (though, I was starting to think maybe Wonka could get a throwaway line about wondering if it was right to place the Spotty Powder Room right next to the Laffy Taffy Room, as a sort of reference to the actual candy). As to how it would work in the Musical, here's how I picture it: The tour group arrive at the Spotty Powder Room, and Wonka explains how the powder is made and what it's used for (making kids appear to be ill by giving them a fake fever and fake spots), and in this version Wonka explains that he's basically only going to sell them around certain parts of the school year, but that doesn't stop Miranda from branding him as being a "criminal", and this being her final bit of "evidence" that she uses to accuse Wonka of being an "assassin of the moral fabric of society". This is the final straw for Miranda, as she goes off on how "horrible" her day was, and how she's been "tossed around" the factory, humiliated and mocked, and, "worst of all", she's been "subjected to irritating song after irritating song from those little midgets!" (she does say that she "doesn't really mind" the possible demises of the other kids who've met their ends thus far, as she counts the possibility of them dying just mean that there's "just a few less maggots in the world" now). Full of rage, she decides to take matters into her own hands, and grabs her father's cane in order to use it and her own strength to destroy the Spotty Powder machine. As she goes down into Spotty Powder Machine room (the separation between the main Spotty Powder Room and the room where the machine is located is represented as a "see-through door", which is how the tour group sees Miranda's fate instead of just hearing screams, and the Spotty Powder Machine itself is this somewhat large prop with a hole like a gaping maw near the back of the stage or upstage itself), and starts whacking at all the sputtering pipes in the room, she eventually gets a face full of the literal "laughing gas" like substance, which thus begins her song number (I'm not sure what it be like or what genre it would be, and I'm up for any suggestions, but I'm thinking that since Miranda's intro song would sort of be a mix between an Alma Mater song and "The Hammer" from Matilda the Musical, her demise song could be something of a twisted school sports cheer song, like a messed-up answer to "Grand Old Ivy" from "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying", cheering about how Miranda deserves to be ground into powder, how she was a cold bully and how her parents are also to blame for her becoming such a "no fun allowed" little tyrant, and, just for fun, in between her uncontrollable laughter, she yells out to the Oompa Loompas to stop singing and help her). As Miranda's song comes to an close, she falls down into the opening of the Spotty Powder Machine, with her father soon following behind her as he tries to save her, much like how Veruca's father shared his daughter's unknown fate. After the song, Wonka then assures them that there may be a chance that they'll be okay if they're just stuck in the tube which leads to the part of the machine where the Spotty Powder is actually ground, and that the Oompa Loompas will "probably" be able to get them out, and that they should just move on with the tour for now. Also, before Miranda storms off into the machine's room, I would love it if there were a joke when after Miranda's dad says that Wonka could "ruin the school systems of countries all over the world", Wonka replies with, "Believe me, at the current rate and direction the modern world is going, they don't need my help with that." I just think it'd be pretty funny. I was thinking the staging of the Spotty Powder Machine being this sort of "maw" upstage which Miranda falls into could be similar to something like a mix between Mrs. Lovett being thrown in the oven in productions of Sweeney Todd, and how the big version of Audrey II had people get eaten by it (I just have the image of Miranda kicking her legs as she gets "eaten" by the machine in the final parts of the song). It may be similar to Veruca's father's demise, but I kind of have it set in both my retelling and the hypothetical retool of the musical that Mr. Piker seems to be on board with Miranda on doing something, but he just wants to report Wonka to the authorities and courts after the tour with “a very strong letter”, while Miranda wants to take things into her own hands (and says that she’ll see to it that Wonka’s factory is demolished, and even implies she’ll try to find a way to have have him executed via hanging), so she grabs her father's cane, and marches into the machine room (sort of showing how she's "surpassing" her parents in her extremism, and as she storms into the room her father cries out "Miranda, please, let the adults handle this!", with her shouting back "I AM an adult!").

That’s all for how I would use Miranda and Marvin in the musical. Now, at last, here's the hypothetical list of musical numbers in my dream retool of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical, and how both Acts would play out:

Act 1

- Overture (containing bits of the overture from the 1971 film, but with the “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” part probably being reworked as “Don’Cha Pinch Me, Charlie”, as well as songs like "Simply Second Nature", "The Amazing Tale of Willy Wonka", a bit of the 1971 Oompa Loompa song, "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen", among others)/"Creation Overture" (some of the original stuff from that will still exist in some form)

- "The Candy Man” - Willy Wonka and the Ensemble

It and the Creation Overture are sort of mixed a little bit, but while Wonka does sing a bit of this, we actually don't physically see him onstage or even hear him say his name, and even he lampshades how the audience knows who he is, but chastises them for being impatient and how they "just have to wait, like everyone else", which is even funnier if you already know he's the Tramp character. It’d sort of be like the extended version of “Arabian Nights” from the musical version of Aladdin, where the Genie appears in the opening, but he doesn’t make his “official” appearance until near the end of the first act.

- "Almost Nearly Perfect" - Charlie Bucket 

While "Candy Man" does start off the show, I think it would be important to re-include this number, though before it starts, Charlie strikes up a small conversation with "The Tramp" (who is named "Mr. Know" here, which, as you could guess, is a play on the first four letters of his last name, backwards, and it’s also another thing from “The Golden Ticket” which I borrowed), who asks Charlie if he built that clubhouse in the junkyard, which is one of the first clues as to why Wonka secretly chooses Charlie to be his successor.

- "The Amazingly Fantastical History of Mr. Willy Wonka" - Grandpa Joe and the Other Grandparents 

I wanted to include this instead of "Willy Wonka! Willy Wonka!"  or “Charlie, You and I”, because it does the job of being exposition a lot better, it gives the other grandparents a bigger role, and the tale of Prince Pondicherry is good foreshadowing to what happens to those who ignore Wonka’s warnings.

- "A Letter from Charlie Bucket" - Charlie Bucket, Mr. Bucket, Mrs. Bucket, the Grandparents 

As I said before, even though this retool would probably have a couple of shout-outs to the Gene Wilder film, Mr. Bucket would still be alive in my retool, and he actually would have an important moment or two with his son later on, along with his wife.

- "More of Him to Love" (Broadway Version) - Mrs. Gloop, Augustus Gloop, Mr. Gloop 

Virtually unchanged from how it was performed in the original London and New York versions, though I sort feel that it would be more like the Broadway version in terms of both how it’s sung a bit more energetically and in terms of the choreography (I like it when it sort becomes like a cuckoo clock when Augustus starts singing), but the lyrics would be a bit more like the London version, complete with the small cameo by Mr. Gloop. I’m thinking that maybe all of the bratty kid’s intro songs won’t all be performed in a small TV set prop like in the London version, though, since my vision for Marvin Prune's song is kind like this big number with his parents and his "fans", as we’ll get to soon enough.

- "When Veruca Says" (Broadway Version) - Mr. Salt, Veruca Salt 

I still don't know if Veruca and her father will be Russian or English (though, I will say I like the London version of this song more, mostly for how you can just imagine Mr. Salt’s exhaustion with Veruca, and how the child playing Veruca just has a so much energy displaying Veruca’s cute-yet-psycho attitude), but what I do know is that I have this idea where Charlie often goes from his house to visit "Mr. Know" at the garbage dump, and we switch from Charlie seeing the winners on his own TV with his family, and him and "Mr. Know" seeing the winners on “Mr. Know's” ramshackle TV, and this would also give more off a sense of time passing between the Golden Ticket findings, as well as Charlie and Wonka secretly getting to know each other.

- "The Double Bubble Duchess" - Mr. Beauregarde, Violet Beauregarde, Ensemble 

I didn't know which one would be best to put in at first, “Double Bubble Duchess” or it’s Broadway replacement, “The Queen of Pop”. At first, I sort of ended up having to pick "Double Bubble Duchess", since I find it to be catchier than "Queen of Pop", and because it better showcases Violet’s motor-mouth bragging. On the other hand, I will admit that “Queen of Pop” has grown on me, so it probably depends on which I feel would be more suited.

- "(No One Quite Like) Marvin"/”C’est Marvin”- Marvin Prune, Mr. Prune, Mrs. Prune, and Marvin's "fans"/the Ensemble 

It's a tentative title, but I just keep imagining Marvin's intro song being sort of like Gaston's song from Beauty and the Beast, and the title of the song sort of shows that. Hell, I’ve sort of been reworking the lyrics of Gaston’s song in my head to better fit Marvin, and I even picture both songs ending like the original extended version, the original demo, or the one in the BatB 2017 remake (I was even picturing Marvin also claiming that he can “make up these endless refrains”, when really his parents started up the song to begin with to convince him to go on the tour, much like in the 2017 version of “Gaston”), with it ending with some of Marvin’s “fans” trying to spell his name, but some of them are sort of idiots, and end up giving up to sing the last “Marvin!” in the song (though, I would also kind of like it to have a few elements of “C’est Moi” from Camelot in it as well, since it’s another kind of “I Am Great” Song). I was also thinking it’d be a bit “glam rock-ish” as well in some bits.

- "Miranda's Alma Mater" - Miranda Mary Piker, with Mr. and Mrs. Piker and the Ensemble singing certain parts 

Again, it's a working title, but I still have the idea of Miranda Mary Piker's intro song sounding like a twisted school Alma Mater anthem, mixed with "The Hammer" from Matilda the Musical, complete with a bit of rhythmic gymnastics near the end, with a riding crop of hers becoming a gymnastic ribbon (and again, mixed with some of the stuffiness of “The Ascot Gavette” and “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank”, with maybe Miranda even having a little “talk-singing” in certain places, à la how the actor playing Henry Higgins usually “talk-sings” in productions of “My Fair Lady”).

- "It's Teavee Time!" - Mrs. Teavee, Mike Teavee  

Again, I at first sort of didn’t really know if should’ve gone with “It’s Teavee Time!” or it’s Broadway replacement, “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”, but I soon decided on "It's Teavee Time!", since it's more connected to Mike and his family’s situation than the other song.

- "If Your Mother/Father Were Here" (Broadway Version) - Mr. Bucket and Mrs. Bucket 

Before the song begins, Mr. Bucket has a short talk with Charlie about how he also had high hopes and dreams with becoming a renowned inventor, much like how Charlie had high hopes of winning a Golden Ticket, but he learned how hard real life was, but he says that it was still worth it because he fell in love with Mrs. Bucket, had Charlie with her, and even though he had to trade his big dream for a smaller one, he's still happy because of his family, and he still has hope that things will get better soon. It's also revealed in this scene and in the song that Charlie's dad's name is actually "Charles" (Grandpa Joe says to Mr. Bucket, right before he talks to Charlie, "before I knew my grandson, I knew another boy named Charlie who was just as imaginative and creative as he was, and who also just as big a dreamer as he was, and I think he needs to talk to his son"), and that Mrs. Bucket's name is actually "Charlotte" (when Mrs. Bucket comes in, Mr. Bucket calls her "Lottie", which is obviously short for Charlotte), and I think this would be pretty clever.

- “Don'cha Pinch Me Charlie" - Charlie Bucket, Grandpa Joe, Grandparents, Mr. Bucket, Mrs. Bucket, Ensemble 

No disrespect to "I've Got a Golden Ticket" (which I personally think was done a bit better in the Broadway retool than it was in the Gene Wilder film, mostly, because it’s sung better, and the lyrics and scenario are changed which makes it more clear that while Charlie has a literal Golden Ticket, Grandpa Joe has a metaphorical one), but I just think “Doncha’ Pinch Me Charlie” is more fun, and I just love how the entirety of the Bucket family eventually joins in, with the other three grandparents even getting out of bed as well.

-"It Must Be Believed to Be Seen" (Broadway Version) - Willy Wonka, Ensemble 

Practically unchanged from both versions, though the lyrics would basically be the London version’s, while a chorus would join Wonka in finishing up the song like in the Broadway version, and I would sort of like it near the end of the song, the Factory sort of “comes back to life” by lighting up and becoming more colorful. Also, right before the part where Wonka gives the last "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen", the ensemble/crowd form a large "W", and Wonka parts the crowd just when he calls out the Golden Ticket winners' names, and it ends with the usual "Do come in" as he slams the doors to the factory.

Act 2

- Entr'acte (consists of "The Candy Man", "The Amazingly Fantastical History of Willy Wonka", snippets from each of the bratty kids' intro songs, “If Your Mother/Father Were Here”, "Don'Cha Pinch Me, Charlie”, "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen", and, finally "A Little Me", and, like the London version, Wonka rises out of the conductor's pit on a platform to reveal that he was conducting the Entr'acte in a Looney Tunes-esque fashion)

- "Strike That! Reverse It!" (Broadway Version) - Willy Wonka, Ensemble 

Pretty much similar to both the London and New York versions, but it obviously adds Marvin and Miranda, with Marvin's part including him continuing the running gag of him flirting with Veruca, and Wonka asking him if he could do any of the stuff he's been known for bragging for, but Marvin "coincidentally" feels like he has some back pain and "mild indigestion", while Miranda's part includes Wonka almost mistaking her parents for her "grandparents", and Miranda basically filling in the singing part of her portion with another small rant about how she doesn't plan on being excited about this tour, and how she knows Wonka is gonna stealthily insult her like the other kids, leaving Wonka silent for a few seconds, until he says, "well, you're certainly going to be a barrel of laughs", and even mutters "going to grow up to be a real Maggie Thatcher, that one is", before moving on.

-"Simply Second Nature" - Willy Wonka, Ensemble 

I wanted to re-include this, because it humanizes Willy Wonka and explains his philosophy a bit more, and I think "Pure Imagination" works better as an Eleven O'Clock number in this show.

- "The Oompa Loompa Song" and "Auf Wiedersehen Augustus Gloop" - Willy Wonka and The Oompa-Loompas 

I decided on combining both the London and New York versions, by starting it off with the Oompa-Loompas’ recurring song from the '71 film, like the New York version, and then having the rest of the song be like how it was in London, complete with the big tap-dance number ending it. An example of what I mean is shown here.

-"Juicy!" - The Oompa-Loompas, Willy Wonka, and Mr. Beauregarde 

Nothing really much changes from the London version, but there may be some dialogue from the New York version leading up to it, but Violet still has a demise song, and I was even thinking that as a little background joke, Marvin Prune would kind of start tapping his feet and sort of enjoy the song a little, but when Violet is used as a disco ball, he gets swept up in the heat of the moment, grabs Veruca, and drags her out to a part of the "dance floor" to dance with her, much to Veruca's annoyance, complete with a rose in his mouth as a gag (though, he and everyone else are brought back to reality when Violet explodes, though Wonka does try to assure the tour group that the Oompa-Loompas with manage to patch her back together, even if she may not be completely normal after being literally stitched back together).

- "When Willy Met Oompa" - Willy Wonka and The Oompa-Loompas 

As I said before, I would have it that this song would come after "Juicy!", and that it would be triggered by Marvin Prune asking Wonka about how exactly he met the Oompa Loompas, all as a way to distract Wonka so that Marvin can catch a Perry Plum Fairy to impress Veruca. I would also like to mention that this song was supposed to be in the London version as well, but it was dropped during rehearsals, but reinstated into the Broadway version.

- "Tango de la Perry Plum Fairy" - Marvin Prune, the Oompa-Loompas 

I'm sure you'll recall the idea for this song, and how it would be this big pesudo-romantic tango number, which just keep getting faster and faster until Marvin passes out from sickness and exhaustion, ending with a big "Ole!" from the Oompa Loompas, and Marvin is carted away in a wheelbarrow, while being covered in a blanket to hide his deformity. Also, I would like to mention, that in my version of the show, Marvin and Miranda are probably going to be the only kids on the tour to bring both of their parents.

- "Veruca's Nutcracker Sweet" (Broadway Version and a Broadway Bootleg with the Ballet) – Veruca and The Oompa-Loompas/The Squirrels

Nothing much is changed from the London version, but if Veruca is Russian, I would like to combine the full London lyrics, and maybe include that little part near the end which sounds like a Russian dance, as well as maybe some bits of the ballet from the New York version, but Veruca and father (and possibly her mother as well, since I am planning on some of the kids to bring both of their parents in this retool) still go down a chute, and Veruca isn't torn apart (I know that it turns out that she still cries out to her father for help off-stage, even though she’s just been decapitated, and that Wonka said that the Oompas will patch her up because “they’re a whiz with a gluestick”, but still, what the hell was up with that?), and a bit of dialogue from the book is used as well, with Veruca listing off her pets before she goes in. Also, near the end, I was thinking of changing the final verse a bit to make it a bit foreboding, and have it be "Veruca Salt, the wicked witch, will soon develop a nasty itch/We'll soon hear the twit screeching 'MINE, ALL MINE', as she burns down below where the sun don't shine!!" (I decided to leave out the "mauled by squirrels" thing, but I did add in a reminder that she's on her way to the furnace, though, Wonka says that on Tuesday it’s “lit only every other hour... though I’m not exactly sure which hours it’s lit”).

- "The Spotty Powder Cheer" - Miranda Mary Piker and The Oompa Loompas 

As I said before I thought it would be funny if her introduction song would be somewhat stuffy, uptight Alma Mater song, while her demise song would be some energetic, twisted school cheer/fight song that's usually found at sporting events, mixed a bit with a sort of maniacal counterpart to “Grand Old Ivy”. It also sort of ends like both the end of the reprise of “Brimstone Stone and Treacle” from the Mary Poppins musical as well as how Mrs. Lovett meets her end in Sweeney Todd (a character disappears through a prop and, as was the case of “Brimstone and Treacle”, a fog machine is used for the special effects).

- "Vidiots” (Broadway Version) - The Oompa-Loompas, Mike, Willy Wonka, Mrs. Teavee 

It's pretty much unchanged from the London show, but I was thinking of combining lyrics from both the London version, and the New York retool, which uses some verses from the original Oompa Loompa song for Mike in the original book.

- "Pure Imagination" (Broadway Version, but it’s heavily retooled to take place when they enter the Chocolate Room) - Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket 

I decided on making "Pure Imagination" the Eleven O' Clock number again, because while I do like "The View From Here", it just doesn't have the same impact as "Pure Imagination" did, and I still think "Simply Second Nature" does a better job explaining Wonka's philosophy. Plus, I think it’s worth it to save up such an iconic song until near the very end.

- "A Little Me" - Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket, The Oompa-Loompas, Mr. Bucket, Mrs. Bucket, Grandpa Joe and the rest of the Grandparents 

I was thinking on having this number not happen immediately after "Pure Imagination", in order to pace things better, as well as explain the small plot-hole of how Charlie's parents and grandparents were brought to the factory, and maybe even learn about the kids' fates (we don’t really see them onstage, but in a somewhat clever callback to Charlie's time with "Mr. Know", Wonka and Charlie use a TV-like device to tune into Cherry and Jerry talking about the kids and how some of them have been deformed, been literally patched back together in Violet's case, and, in Miranda's case, have been driven insane into a perpetually laughing dolt, and we hear them all off-stage, but that's if I go with that, because I have mixed feelings on even my own idea).

-"It Must Be Believed to be Seen (finale reprise)"- Willy Wonka 

Pretty much almost completely unchanged from the London version, and I feel ending things on a mysterious, yet somewhat optimistic reprise of Wonka's act one finale song is much more charming than ending it with a reprise of "Strike That, Reverse It", like what the New York show originally did, or just ending it on a somewhat less climatic note like what happened after the Previews. 

Though, I do have this thought in my head which thinks that maybe there could be something like the Peter Pan musical, in that it's set as distant finale epilogue when Charlie is much older (his grandparents are still alive, thanks to Wonka's Wonka-Vite, which has better results than how it did in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and I think all four of them would still sort of be willing to take it to see their little Charlie grow-up as Wonka's apprentice). Charlie goes to check up on Mr. Wonka in his office one day, but finds that Mr. Wonka is gone, leaving a letter that says he's basically taught him everything he knows, so now he must go, but says that isn't the end, for they "will meet again one day", which then leads to the reprise of “It Must Be Believed to Be Seen”. I don’t know, because this retool already seems like it would be pretty long, and I may save this idea as epilogue for my own fanfiction retelling of the story, but I was just trying to solve the issue of Wonka making Charlie the owner of the Factory right then and there, as opposed to at least showing Charlie some of the ropes before taking off (I was even thinking Adult!Charlie could whistle a brief reprise of “The Candy Man” before the “It Must Be Believed to be Seen” reprise). Oh well, I still kind of like the idea, and I just kind of would like this show to sort of end with more of a bang with closure. I hope you don’t mind those ideas.

And then we would have the usual bows music, combining elements from the bows of both the London and New York versions, though I think that each kid and their parents should bow separately in their own way, with the music changing slightly to fit each family's theme when each have their own turn to bow (for example, the bows music briefly sounds like German folk music when Augustus and his family give their bows, Marvin comes into the bows rather flamboyantly as the music changes to have French sounding accordions and violins, Veruca takes a bow like ballerina, Miranda curtseys, etc.), and, like the New York version, the bows end with a small, final reprise of the "The Candy Man", thus finally ending the show, and then the outro music plays.

I know that's a lot to read, but I would still like your thoughts on all of it, and I hope that it at least gives you something to imagine for a dream production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I hope you don't think it's too overstuffed, because there's just so much stuff you can do with a story like this, and I hope things won't get too carried away with the added stuff. Again, tell me what you think, and I hope you all liked my ideas, and I hope you’ll enjoy for future upcoming project with my retelling the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory itself.

@adventures-of-the-candy-man, @mask131, @jamesandtheblog, @fantastic-nonsense, @everythingwonka, and @ everyone else is or might be interested in this, I hope you like it, and I would very much appreciate feedback, comments, likes, and reblogs, if you would be willing to do so. 

[wickedgxmes]

YASMIN YILDIRIM TASK 01: Character Development

The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.

THE BASICS

Full Name: Yasmin Melek Yildirim

Nicknames: Yas, Mina

Face Claim: Esra Bilgiç

Age: 30

Birthday: September 18th

Gender: Cisgender Female

Pronouns: She/Her

Romantic Orientation: Panromantic

Sexual Orientation: Demisexual

PHYSICALITY

Details About Appearance That Differ From FC: (i.e. hair color, hair length/cut, height etc.) N/A

Perfect Vision or Glasses?: Perfect Vision

Scars/Birthmarks?: {TW Self Harm} Yas’ body is littered in scars. Faint tally marks from the each life she had taken back when she used to work as a mercenary lines her back, while deeper cuts she has inflicted more recently upon herself lay scattered haphazardly across her hips and any place she can hide them.

Tattoos?: Yasmin has one very fair tattoo of two stars laid across her collarbone. A reminder of all of those nights ago when she would find herself sprawled out upon some abandoned rooftop dreaming of what could have been.

Piercings?: Yas has two piercings in each of her lobes

Posture: Yasmin has excellent posture, very rarely being caught with her shoulder slumped or her head not being held high

Dominant Hand?: Ambidextrous

Activity Level?: Very Active. Although Yasmin may be a duchess, she spends a great deal of her free time still training with the Tower Spies to ensure she never loses the edge that she once had back when she was a spy

Physical Strength: Average

Speed: Above Average

Agility: Above Average

Accuracy: Above Average

Stamina: Average. Although Yasmin used to have above average stamina, it has slowly decreased over the years given how much of her time is now devoted to life at court rather than life as a spy.

Can They Swim?: Not all too well. Although she may be able to keep herself somewhat a float, growing up in the desert, means that she is hardly a strong swimmer.

Clothing Style: Yasmin’s personal style is far more comfortable and simplistic than one would assume from the duchess of artists. If she were to choose her own attire for herself, it would most likely consist of billowing pants and a cloak. But, as the acting duchess, Yasmin’s attire has much more colorful and regal, modeling a different outfit per occasion as she shows off the designs of her own people.

Accessories: A poison ring and a dainty pendent around her neck of the sun. It almost seems cheap around in neck in comparison to the elegant gowns and garments she wears on the daily, but the necklace was a gift she had received during her life on the streets. One of the only belongings she still has from that time in her life.

Any Allergies?: N/A

How Well Do They Sleep?: Yasmin has a hard time falling asleep at night. Being far too paranoid for her own likely, she often spends the nights dreading the worst and having grown up on the streets, it is hard for her to feel at peace in the lavishly decorated bedroom of the duchess. Often feeling as though she is more of a stranger in her own chambers than belonging to it or to it her.

Any Additional Details?: (Do they have a favorite physical feature about themselves? Are they part of the disabled community? Do they have any health issues? etc.) Yasmin’s left side is ever so slightly quicker than her right do to an injury she acquired on a job back when she was working as a mercenary that she never fully recovered from

MANNERISMS

Accent?: Yasmin has a refined manor of speaking. She has worked to remove any inflections from her voice if she can help it, but occasionally her prim facade will falter as her past comes seeping back into her voice.

Languages: English, Turkish, Arabic, Latin, Spanish etc. (She knows a fair deal of many languages. Some better than others.)

Do They Curse?: On occasion. But, rarely, if ever, in public.

Favorite Word?: Found

Least Favorite Phrase?: “I love you”

Good Habits: Yasmin carries a smile that has a way of putting those around her at ease; She has a way about her of making anyone she is speaking to feel important whether it be a foreign duke or members of her staff or people she bumps into on the street; she is incredible detail oriented and will go out of her way to ensure the wellbeing of her people whether they are strangers to her or not

Bad Habits: Has a bad tendency of chewing or biting down on her lip when in deep in thought (something she is trying to work on); {TW Self Harm} digs her nails deep into her skin (the palms of her hands), pinches herself or mindlessly scratches away at herself often until it leaves a mark or she draws blood

Any Specific Ticks?: fidgets with the hem of her sleeves or twiddles anything in hand (knife, pen etc.)

FAMILY & UPBRINGING

Which Dukedom Do They Reside In?: Kum Diyari (Sandspell)

Birthplace?: Kum Diyari (Sandspell)

Social Class: Yasmin was born into poverty, but overtime she was able to climb her way up to becoming part of the upper 1% as she takes her place amongst the nobility.

Biological Parents/Parental Figures: Leyla and Altan Yildirim

Additional Family Members: (Siblings, Cousins, Aunts & Uncles etc.) TBD (I’m still deciding :O)

Pets?: TBD (Also still deciding 0:) )

CONNECTIONS

Notable Past Relationships?: The thieves she grew up around; the spy who took her in/trained her to be who she is now

Person You Can’t Seem To Forget?: Kaan (her first love/the man who robbed her and left her for dead)

Person You Can’t Seem To Forgive?: Her father for never once allowing her feel safe as a child

Any Additional Connections Your Character May Be Looking For?: (Feel free to link a connections page if you would like to make one) {I’ll put together a connections page at a later date but all of the things ;D }

STATUS & OCCUPATION

Current Occupation: Duchess of Kum Diyari (Sandspell)

Dream Position: A traveling performer or maybe that of a painter. As much as Yasmin grew to resent her father for embracing the nature of a starving artist to the point where he life was put in danger, there was once a time when Yasmin wanted nothing more than to paint and travel the world. She’d fall to sleep dreaming about the day where she may be able to run off and see the world.

Past Jobs?: Yasmin, growing up, was a thief, before becoming a Spy/Mercenary for Kum Diyari & the Crown

Spending Habits: Frugal. Yasmin is very strategic when it comes to budgeting, preferring to spend her own delegated allowance on that of her people or on a smart political move rather than expenses for herself.  Her lavish dresses are typical borrowed from that of local artists of Sandspell so that she can help promote their work. Yas is not apposed to spending, but she often fews each purchase as that of a calculated investment. She also keeps very few personal belongings, having a hard time feeling that anything, right down to her position truly belongs to her.

In Debt?: No.

PSYCHOLOGY

Intellect: Above Average

MBTI Type: INFJ

Enneagram type: 1. The Reformer

Moral Alignment: Chaotic Good

Temperament: Calm and mild tempered

Element: Earth

Introvert or Extrovert?: Introvert

Emotional Stability?: - Presents themselves as calm, composed and collected whilst dealing with anxieties and negative thoughts

ASTROLOGY

Zodiac Sign: Virgo

Birth Stone: Sapphire

TRAITS & PERSPECTIVES

Drives/Motivations: To ensure Kum Diyari remains a prosperous place of knowledge and artistry. To live up to the perfect image of ‘duchess’ and the ‘beacon of hope’ her people look to her are

Hopes: For the wellbeing, wealth and prosperity of Kum Diyari; To allow the youth of Sandspell the ability to chose their own paths rather than feel forced in one direction to due to necessity

Fears: Of inadequacy as a leader

Dreams: To one day feel as though her choices are solely that of her own; to act upon her deepest desires

Sense of Humor?: Witty one liners, soft spoken/cooed whispers, & alluring smiles as if to say the joke she just made is a secret between two

Biggest Achievement: Earning the faith and trust of that of her people/being viewed as the heart of Sandspell

Biggest Regrets: Sacrificing the parts of herself she once held in the highest esteem to be the leader she feels is expected of her to be & giving her heart to someone who didn’t deserve her love let alone her trust

Most At Ease When?: Painting, Getting lost in the treasure trove of knowledge kept in the tower, listening to those around her speak of their greatest passions (especially those of her people), sneaking off to the edge of her Dukedom’s coast to watch the sun rise or set upon the horizon

Least At Ease When?: In crowded gatherings in which all of the attention is directed to her; in settings where she is expected to ‘perform’ the role she plays far too well

Talents: Strategizing, painting, debating, holding intellectual conversations, dancing, playing multiple instruments, speaking multiple languages, one on one combat etc.

Shortcomings: Situations that require a great deal of vulnerability; Has a tendency to withdrawn herself emotionally in favor of thinking strategically

Have They Ever Committed A Crime?: (If so, did they ever get caught?) Yes. She has committed quite a few crimes although she prefers to brush over her past. She was caught once by what would later become her mentor at the tower. A spy for Sandspell who saw potential in her and took her under their wing rather than turning her in.

Are They A Team Player?: She is for the most part. Although, she does have a tendency to keep her cards far too close to her own chest.

Can They Play an Instrument?: Yasmin is skilled in quite a few instruments ranging from the violin to the flute to the piano etc.

Braid Hair?: Yes

Tie a Tie?: Yes

Pick a Lock?: Yes

Cook?: Yes

Drink?: Yes

Use Drugs?: Yes

Are They Prone to Violence?: No. She will fight if provoked, but Yasmin tries to avoid conflict when possible.

Prone to Crying?: Not in public. Behind closed doors however is another story.

Believe in Love at First Sight?: No. Yasmin used to once upon a time, but nowadays, she’s not even sure if she believes in love anymore.

FAVORITES

Color: Red

Animal/Mythical Beast: Unicorn

Food: Baklava

Beverage: White Wine

Flower: Desert Rose

Scent: Eucalyptus and Mint

Mode of Transportation: Horseback (Technological wise though either Enchanted Carriages or Bullet Trains)

Season: Spring

EXTRA

Link to her Pinterest: https://pin.it/kQVHuMR

[gibsongirlselections]

When Half of NYC’s Tax Base Leaves and Never Comes Back

The separateness in New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America’s eastern edge, stands out. There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational poor. They depend on each other, but with COVID who needs who more has changed.

It’s easy to stress how far apart the rich and the poor live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown. The rich don’t ride public transportation, they don’t send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays far enough apart to keep it all together.

But that misses the dependencies which until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem. The traditional view has been the rich need the poor to exploit as cheap labor—textbook economic inequality. But with COVID as the spark, the ticking bomb of economic inequality may soon go off in America’s greatest city. Things are changing and New York, and by extension America, needs to ask itself what it wants to be when it grows up.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition. A classic failed state scenario.

New York City is home to 118 billionaires, more than any other American city. New York City is also home to nearly one million millionaires, more than any other city in the world. Among those millionaires some 8,865 are classified as “high net worth,” with more than $30 million each.

They pay the taxes. The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York. Personal income tax in the New York area accounts for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space.

Now for how the other half lives. Below those wealthy people in every sense of the word the city has the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, which includes 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance.

That all costs a lot of money. The New York City Housing Authority needs $24 billion over the next decade just for vital repairs. That’s on top of a yearly standard operating cost approaching four billion dollars. A lot of the money used to come from Washington before a multibillion-dollar decline in federal Section 9 funds. So today there is a shortfall and repairs, including lead removal, are being put off. NYC also has a $34 billion budget for public schools, many of which function as distribution points for child food aid, medical care, day care, and a range of social services.

The budget for a city as complex as New York is a mess of federal, state, and local funding sources. It can be sliced and diced many ways, but the one that matters is the starkest: the people and companies who pay for New York’s poor are leaving even as the city is already facing a $7.4 billion tax revenue hit from the initial effects of the coronavirus. The money is there; New York’s wealthiest individuals have increased their net worth by $44.9 billion during the pandemic. It’s just not here.

New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has seen a bit of the iceberg in the distance. He recently took to MSNBC to beg the city’s wealthy, who fled the coronavirus outbreak, to return. Cuomo said he was extremely worried about New York City if too many of the well-heeled taxpayers who fled COVID decide there is no need to move back. “They are in their Hamptons homes, or Hudson Valley or Connecticut. I talk to them literally every day. I say. ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook. But they’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking, if I stay there, they pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge. So, that would be a bad place if we had to go there.”

Included in the surcharge are not only NYC’s notoriously high taxes. The recent repeal of the federal allowance for state and local tax deductions (SALT) costs New York’s high earners some $15 billion in additional federal taxes annually.

“They don’t want to come back to the city,” Partnership for NYC President Kathryn Wylde warned. “It’s hard to move a company… but it’s much easier for individuals to move,” she said, noting that most offices plan to allow remote work indefinitely. “It’s a big concern that we’re going to lose more of our tax base then we’ve already lost.”

While overall only five percent of residents left as of May, in the city’s very wealthiest blocks residential population decreased by 40 percent or more. The higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out. Even the amount of trash collected in wealthy neighborhoods has dropped, a tell-tale sign no one is home. A real estate agent told me she estimates about a third of the apartments even in my mid-range 300 unit building are empty. The ones for sale or rent attract few customers. She says it’s worse than post-9/11 because at least then the mood was “How do we get NYC back on its feet?” instead of now, when we just stand over the body and tsk tsk through our masks.

Enough New Yorkers are running toward the exits that it has shaken up the greater area’s housing market. Another real estate agent describes the frantic bidding in the nearby New Jersey suburbs as a “blood sport.” “We are seeing 20 offers on houses. We are seeing things going 30 percent over the asking price. It’s kind of insane.”

Fewer than one-tenth of Manhattan office workers came back to the workplace a month after New York gave businesses the green light to return to the buildings they ran from in March. Having had several months to notice what not paying Manhattan office rents might do for their bottom line, large companies are leaving. Conde Nast, the publishing company and majority client in the signature new World Trade Center, is moving out. Even the iconic paper The Daily News (which published the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” when New York collapsed in 1975 without a federal bailout) closed its physical newsroom to go virtual. Despite the folksy image of New York as a paradise of Mom and Pop restaurants and quaint shops, about 50 percent of those who pay most of the taxes work for large firms.

Progressive pin-up Mayor De Blasio has lost touch with his city. After years of failing to address economic inequality by simply throwing free money to the poor and limiting the ability of the police to protect them, and us, from rising crime, his COVID focus has been on shutting down schools and converting 139 luxury hotels to filthy homeless shelters. Alongside AOC, he has called for higher taxes on fewer people and demanded more federal funds. As for the wealthy who have paid for his failed social justice experiments to date, he says “We don’t make decisions based on a wealthy few. Some may be fair-weathered friends, but they will be replaced by others.”

What others? The concentration of major corporations once pulled talent to the city from across the globe; if you wanted to work for JP Morgan on Wall Street, you had to live here. That’s why NYC has skyscrapers; a lot of people once needed to live and especially work in the same place. Not any more. Technology and work-at-home changes have eliminated geography.

For the super wealthy, New York once topped the global list of desirable places to live based on four factors: wealth, investment, lifestyle and future. The first meant a desire to live among other wealthy people (we know where that’s headed), investment returns on real estate (not looking great, if you can even find a buyer), lifestyle (now destroyed with bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, and theaters closed indefinitely, coupled with rising crime) and…

The future. New York pre-COVID had the highest projected GDP growth of any city. Now we’re left with the question if COVID continues to hollow out the city, who will be left to pay for New York? As one commentator said, NYC risks leading America into becoming “Brazil with Nukes,” a future of constant political and social chaos, with a ruling class content to wall itself off from the greater society’s problems.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

The post When Half of NYC’s Tax Base Leaves and Never Comes Back appeared first on The American Conservative.

[ashley-incharge]

Info Sheet on Ashley

Archetype — The Joker 

Birthday — June 5th

Zodiac Sign — Gemini

MBTI — ENTJ - the Commander

Enneagram — Type 8 - the Challenger

Temperament — Choleric

Hogwarts House — Slytherclaw

Moral Alignment — Chaotic Evil according to the test lmao

Primary Vice — Vain

Primary Virtue — Fortitude

Element — Fire

Overview:

Mother — Emily Armbruster

Father — Richard Armbruster

Mother’s Occupation — Actress

Father’s Occupation — Doctor, recently fired

Family Finances — upper class, wealthy. probs Bonfamille level

Birth Order — oldest

Brothers —  Tyler Armbruster

Sisters — Brittany Armbruster

Other Close Family — 

Best Friend — Ashley Q., Ashley T., Ashley B.

Other Friends — tbd

Enemies — Ashley Spinelli, Peach Clearwater

Pets — horse named Garnet, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Poppy

Home Life During Childhood — fine. Raised by the nanny in wealth. 

Town or City Name(s) — Swynlake

What Did His or Her Bedroom Look Like — Glamorous, spacious. the room is colored a tasteful shade of pink, big windows, a walk-in closet of course. A private bathroom is attached to that including large jacuzzi tub. Her bedroom itself has a four poster bed piled with a ton of pillows. A white dresser is on the right side of the room. The left has a bookshelf featuring a row with only diaries from each year with a glass door to it and a lock, only to be opened by Ashley.

Any Sports or Clubs — Drama Club.

Favorite Toy or Game — MASH

Schooling — Secondary

Favorite Subject — English and History

Popular or Loner — Popular

Important Experiences or Events — getting the nanny hired, getting her first pony at 10, birth of her siblings, daddy getting fired

Nationality — British

Culture — English? idk posh English

Religion and beliefs — Anglican Christian

Physical Appearance

Face Claim —  Lili Reinhart

Complexion — pale white

Hair Colour — blonde

Eye Colour — blue-green

Height — 5′ 6″

Build — slim

Tattoos — none...yet

Piercings — ears pierced once

Common Hairstyle — hair down naturally. Sometimes ponytail, but really Ashley tries to style herself differently every day.

Clothing Style — High end posh fashion, unattainable glamour. With necklaces and bracelets and shiny earrings.

Mannerisms — putting her hands on her hips, pinching the bridge of her nose

Usual Expression — a smug little smile on her face

Health

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — No, she’s pretty healthy

Physical Ailments — None

Neurological Conditions — a little case of OCD probably.

Allergies —  shellfish

Grooming Habits — Showers properly every day, spends a good hour doing her hair, her make up, everything to get ready for the day.

Sleeping Habits — Typically goes to bed around midnight every night.

Eating Habits — Health food nut. Sometimes over the top with the healthy foods and dieting.

Exercise Habits —  dog walks every weekend, horseback riding through the week,

Emotional Stability — not too stable

Body Temperature — warm

Sociability — Very social

Addictions — shopping

Drug Use — None

Alcohol Use — Occasional

Your Character’s Character:

Bad Habits — gossiping, besmirching people’s names, bullying

Good Habits — keeping to a schedule, donating money to the less fortunate from time to time, practicing piano

Best Characteristic — confident as hell

Worst Characteristic — aggressive/mean. bully.

Worst Memory — The day daddy got fired

Best Memory — Winning an award for a piano composition

Proud of — her music, herself. Her friends.

Embarrassed by — losers

Driving Style — Assertive

Strong Points — confident, charming, independent

Temperament — Choleric

Attitude — sometimes positive attitude

Weakness — scandal in the family, impatient, blunt, overly critical

Fears — her father’s scandal ruining everything, losing the money, ending up a pauper, spiders, werewolves

Phobias — arachnophobia, lycanthrophobia, astraphobia, cacophobia

Secrets — hasn’t told the other Ashleys about her dad. She’s afraid they’ll think she’s terrible by association.

Regrets — not being able to convince her mom to return home and handle daddy

Feels Vulnerable When — anyone sees past the glam and the facade she puts on for the world. She’s an attention starved girl. She doesn’t want anyone to notice that.

Pet Peeves — people taking a decade to get a thought out, attention hogs, people who try to make conversation when you are reading

Conflicts — man against man (Ashley vs. Richard) and man against self (Ashley’s own terrible behavior)

Motivation — to keep her family together. To stay in the place she feels is home.

Short Term Goals and Hopes — to get daddy to stay in Swynlake and find a new job.

Long Term Goals and Hopes — Graduate with merit and go to Pride Uni with her best friends. One day become a musical star.

Sexuality — Bisexual?

Exercise Routine  — every afternoon horseback riding

Day or Night Person — Day/Night but never morning

Introvert or Extrovert — Extrovert

Optimist or Pessimist — Optimist

Likes and Styles:

Music — Pop. Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Madonna, Miley Cyrus etc.

Books — Tuck Everlasting, Ella Enchanted, Anne of Green Gables, Gallagher Girls, all Sarah Dessen novels, The Princess Diaries, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants

Magazines — Vogue, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair

Foods — yogurt, vegan chilli, cauliflower steaks with roasted red pepper & olive salsa

Drinks — iced tea

Animals — horses, dogs, killer whales

Sports — volleyball, horseback riding

Social Issues — animal rights issues, women’s rights

Favorite Saying — “Scandalous”

Color — Pink

Clothing — high end fashion

Jewelry — glamorous necklaces, earrings, a tiara for her birthday.

Games — MASH, truth or dare

Websites — twitter, facebook, instagram

TV Shows — Gossip Girl, The Flash, Pretty Little Liars, Glee, Switched at Birth, that 70s show

Movies — To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Easy A, The Princess Diaries, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Pretty in Pink

Greatest Want — To be the most popular girl in Swynlake

Greatest Need — for daddy to be hugely successful once again

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home — small mansion

Household furnishings — to be shared later, in detail. 

Favorite Possession — the jacuzzi tub

Most Cherished Possession — Poppy, her dog

Neighborhood — The Woods

Town or City Name — Swynlake

Details of Town or City — you guys already know. It’s small. She’s a native.

Married Before — lol no

Significant Other Before — no

Children — As if. She’s still a teen

Relationship with Family — it’s alright. aloof.

Car — a pink Nissan Figaro

Career — Student

Dream Career — World renowned pop star/musician

Dream Life — Famous and rich and one of the most admired people in the world.

Love Life — she’s figuring it out

Talents or Skills — can play piano, sing, skilled rider

Intelligence Level — High but not Nerd level high

Finances — A lot of money

Your Character’s Life Before Your Story:

Past Careers — None. Student

Past Lovers — Richie Anderson (a boy who spent time on her mom’s set as well), Natalie Green (smooched once)

Biggest Mistakes — didn’t wear purple on purple day, didn’t catch dad drinking around the house

Biggest Achievements — horseback riding awards, prizes for her music

[filiplig]

Ferugson, Niall - Empire

page 4 | location 58-61 | Added on Thursday, 1 January 2015 23:56:31

Once there was an Empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world’s population, covered about the same proportion of the earth’s land surface and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British Empire was the biggest Empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the north-west coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history. It is the main question this book seeks to answer.

 page 31 | location 472-474 | Added on Friday, 2 January 2015 03:39:15

The Spaniards had found vast quantities of silver when they had conquered Peru and Mexico. The English had tried Canada, Guiana, Virginia and the Gambia, and found nothing. There was only one thing for it: the luckless English would simply have to rob the Spaniards.

 page 39 | location 597-599 | Added on Friday, 2 January 2015 04:33:55

Alcohol is, technically, a depressant. Glucose, caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, were the eighteenth-century equivalent of uppers. Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush – a rush nearly everyone could experience.

 page 53 | location 812-815 | Added on Tuesday, 13 January 2015 18:41:58

Having begun as a trading operation, the East India Company now had its own settlements, its own diplomats, even its own army. It was beginning to look more and more like a kingdom in its own right. And here was the key difference between Asia and Europe. The European powers could fight one another to their hearts’ content: the winner could only be European. But when the Indian powers went to war, the possibility existed that a non-Indian power might emerge as victor. The only question was, which one?

 page 76 | location 1162-1166 | Added on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 17:19:41

In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents. The title of Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire in Every Quarter of the Globe (1814) said it all. They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten the French and plundered the Indians. Now they ruled supreme.

 page 96 | location 1468-1473 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 21:08:15

Given the choice between expanding British territory in America and retaining the French sugar island of Guadeloupe at the end of the Seven Years War, William Pitt favoured the Caribbean option since: ‘The state of the existing trade in the conquests in North America, is extremely low; the speculations of their future are precarious, and the prospect, at the very best, very remote’. The problem was that mortality on these tropical islands was fearful, particularly during the summer ‘sickly season’. In Virginia it took a total immigration of 116,000 to produce a settler community of 90,000. In Barbados, by contrast, it took immigration of 150,000 to produce a population of 20,000. People soon learned.

 page 98 | location 1488-1493 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 21:11:41

Annual returns from slaving voyages during the last half century of British slaving averaged between 8 and 10 per cent. Small wonder that slave trading struck Newton as a ‘genteel occupation’, suitable even for a born-again Christian. The numbers involved were huge. We tend to think of the British Empire as a phenomenon of white migration, yet between 1662 and 1807 nearly three and a half million Africans came to the New World as slaves transported in British ships. That was over three times the number of white migrants in the same period. It was also more than a third of all Africans who ever crossed the Atlantic as slaves.

 page 102 | location 1556-1560 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 21:21:28

The original Spanish word for a sugar plantation was ingenio – engine – and producing sugar from cane was as much industry as agriculture. But this was an industry in which not just sugar cane but human beings were the raw materials. By 1750 some 800,000 Africans had been shipped to the British Caribbean, but the death rate was so high and the reproduction rate so low that the slave population was still less than 300,000. One contemporary rule of thumb devised by the Barbados planter Edward Littleton was that a planter with a hundred slaves would need to buy eight or ten a year ‘to keep up his stock’.

 page 121 | location 1845-1849 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 22:05:31

By contrast, within a few decades of having lost the American colonies, the British abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout their Empire. Indeed, as early as 1775 the British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had offered emancipation to slaves who rallied to the British cause. This was not entirely opportunistic: Lord Mansfield’s famous judgement in Somersett’s case had pronounced slavery illegal in England three years before. From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.

 page 122 | location 1862-1865 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 22:07:27

The British had been attracted to Asia by trade. They had been attracted to America by land. Distance was an obstacle, but one that with fair winds could be overcome. But there was another continent that was attractive to them for diametrically different reasons. Because it was barren. Because it was impossibly remote. Because it was a natural prison. With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna – the eucalyptus trees and kangaroos – Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars.

 page 124 | location 1894-1897 | Added on Thursday, 15 January 2015 22:12:16

loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.

 page 186 | location 2839-2843 | Added on Monday, 19 January 2015 20:41:55

The astounding thing is that for the better part of two centuries not just Bengal but the whole of India was ruled by just a few thousand Britons. As someone remarked, the government of India was ‘a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their leave and without their help’. The British were also able to use India to control an entire hemisphere, stretching from Malta all the way to Hong Kong. It was the foundation on which the entire mid-Victorian Empire stood.

 page 188 | location 2868-2871 | Added on Monday, 19 January 2015 20:45:25

If the British wished to abolish the slave trade, they simply sent the navy. By 1840 no fewer than 425 slave ships had been intercepted by the Royal Navy off the West African coast and escorted to Sierra Leone, where nearly all of them were condemned. A total of thirty warships were engaged in this international policing operation.

 page 192 | location 2935-2939 | Added on Monday, 19 January 2015 20:55:35

Commission calculated that, out of an army of 70,000 British soldiers, 4,830 would die each year and 5,880 hospital beds would be occupied by those incapacitated by illness. Since it cost £100 to recruit a soldier and maintain him in India, Britain was thereby losing more than £1 million a year. Given that a similar force might have cost around £200,000 stationed in Europe, the extra £800,000 had to be regarded as a kind of tropical service premium. This was a very circumlocutory way of saying that no more British troops should be sent to sicken and die in India.

 page 208 | location 3189-3193 | Added on Wednesday, 21 January 2015 17:46:36

In 1867 there were around 13,000 public sector jobs paying 75 or more rupees per month, of which around half were held by Indians. Without this auxiliary force of civil servants who were native born, the ‘heaven born’ would have been impotent. This was the unspoken truth about British India; and that was why, as Machonochie himself put it, it did not really feel like ‘a conquered country’. Only the Indian rulers had been supplanted or subjugated by the British; most Indians carried on much as before – indeed, for an important class of them British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement.

 page 235 | location 3598-3603 | Added on Thursday, 22 January 2015 16:48:14

Curzon himself once admitted that British rule ‘may be good for us; but it is neither equally, nor altogether, good for them’. Indian nationalists agreed wholeheartedly, complaining that the wealth of India was being drained into the pockets of foreigners. In fact, we now know that this drain – the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony – amounted to little more than 1 per cent of Indian net domestic product a year between 1868 and 1930. That was a lot less than the Dutch ‘drained’ from their East Indies empire, which amounted to between 7 and 10 per cent of Indonesian net domestic product in the same period.

 page 255 | location 3901-3904 | Added on Friday, 23 January 2015 19:09:19

No sooner had they occupied Egypt, than the British began reassuring the other powers that their presence there was only a temporary expedient: a reassurance repeated no fewer than sixty-six times between 1882 and 1922. Formally, Egypt continued to be an independent entity. In practice, however, it was run as a ‘veiled Protectorate’ by Britain, with the Khedive yet another princely puppet and real power in the hands of the British Agent and Consul-General.

 page 276 | location 4231-4234 | Added on Saturday, 24 January 2015 17:02:43

Another Northcliffe employee regarded ‘the depth and volume of public interest in Imperial questions’ as ‘one of the greatest forces, almost untapped, at the disposal of the Press’. ‘If Kipling be called the Voice of Empire in English Literature’, he added, ‘we [the Daily Mail] may fairly claim to [be] the Voice of Empire in London journalism’. Northcliffe’s own recipe was simple: ‘The British people relish a good hero and a good hate’.

 page 295 | location 4511-4513 | Added on Saturday, 24 January 2015 17:41:14

What Vietnam was to the United States, the Boer War very nearly was to the British Empire, in two respects: its huge cost in both lives and money – 45,000 men dead84 and a quarter of a billion pounds spent – and the divisions it opened up back home.

 page 310 | location 4750-4752 | Added on Sunday, 25 January 2015 16:51:54

The Liberals could credibly have either a commitment to defend France and conscription, or a policy of neutrality and no conscription. The combination they preferred – the French commitment but no conscription – was to prove fatal. Kitchener acidly remarked in 1914: ‘No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world’.

 page 318 | location 4866-4871 | Added on Monday, 26 January 2015 16:29:41

In reality, the First World War came about because politicians and generals on both sides miscalculated. The Germans believed (not unreasonably) that the Russians were overtaking them militarily, so they risked a pre-emptive strike before the strategic gap grew any wider.93 The Austrians failed to see that stamping on Serbia, useful though that might be in their war against Balkan terrorism, would embroil them in a European-wide conflagration. The Russians overestimated their own military capability almost as much as the Germans did; they also stubbornly ignored the evidence that their political system would crack under the strain of another war so soon after the fiasco of defeat by Japan in 1905. Only the French and the Belgians had no real choice. The Germans invaded them. They had to fight.

 page 354 | location 5415-5418 | Added on Monday, 26 January 2015 17:49:32

Britain’, he declared, ‘is the result ... of the capitalist exploitation of the three hundred and fifty million Indian slaves’. That was precisely what Hitler most admired: the effective oppression of an inferior race. And there was an obvious place where Germany could endeavour to do the same. ‘What India was for England’, he explained, ‘the territories of Russia will be for us’.

 page 366 | location 5603-5604 | Added on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 17:31:40

In all, more than five million fighting troops were raised by the Empire, almost as many as by the United Kingdom itself. Considering Britain’s desperate plight in 1940, it was an even more laudable show of imperial unity than in the First World War.

 page 378 | location 5783-5788 | Added on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 17:55:26

Exhausted by the costs of victory, denied the fresh start that followed defeat for Japan and Germany, Britain was simply no longer able to bear the costs of Empire. Nationalist insurgency and new military technology made imperial defence much more expensive than before. Between 1947 and 1987 British defence expenditure had amounted to 5.8 per cent of gross domestic product. A century before, the proportion had been a mere 2.6 per cent. In the nineteenth century Britain had financed her chronic trade deficit with the income from a vast overseas investment portfolio. That had now been replaced with a crushing foreign debt burden, and the Treasury had to meet the much larger costs of nationalized health care, transport and industry.

 page 380 | location 5826-5828 | Added on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 18:01:32

What had been based on Britain’s commercial and financial supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and her industrial supremacy in the nineteenth was bound to crumble once the British economy buckled under the accumulated burdens of two world wars. The great creditor became a debtor.

 page 392 | location 6011-6017 | Added on Wednesday, 28 January 2015 17:39:21

The institutional locus of Cooper’s new imperialism, however, was none other than the European Union: The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralized absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state ... A cooperative empire might be ... a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal. The lightest of touches will be required from the centre; the ‘imperial bureaucracy’ must be under control, accountable, and the servant, not the master, of the commonwealth. Such an institution must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy as its constituent parts.

 page 395 | location 6043-6046 | Added on Wednesday, 28 January 2015 17:42:54

Like the United States today, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface. As we have seen, its empire began as a network of coastal bases and informal spheres of influence, much like the post-1945 American ‘empire’. But real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism. That was how so much of the atlas came to be coloured imperial red.

[cabiba]

by Dr. Ricardo Duchense

Some white men are identifying with the Alt Right as they realize that the goals and norms celebrated by our social order are underpinned by multiple deceptions, suppression of debate, anti-scientific notions about human equality, and unjust opposition to white identity in the midst of outright celebration of minority group rights.

But it is not easy to dissent. The playbook of the establishment is very simple and very effective: claim that questioners of diversity are driven by plain hatred, that they are poorly-educated hicks who can’t stand losing their white privilege, and are too parochial to understand the progressive cosmopolitanism marvelously spreading through the West.

Nevertheless, the establishment is having difficulties keeping men away from the Alt Right due to the widening gap between its ideals and the sickening realities engendered by these ideals, between the ideal of equality and black crime statistics, between the ideal of multicultural harmony and the reality of Islamic terrorism, between the ideal of freedom of expression and the suppression of criticism against Islamization, and between the ideal of gender equality and the feminist acquiescence to migrant sexual assaults.

Still, one can’t help wonder why the vast majority of white males are still entrapped in these ridiculous ideals. The standard answer is that whites have been brainwashed since birth and the media still has a near-monopoly over the news. The establishment controls the narrative concerning all those realities that don’t square with their ideals. They know how to narrate black crimes as instances of discrimination and enduring inequalities. They know how to portray Islamic terrorism as acts committed by a minority rather than by “most peace-loving Muslims.” They know how to portray the shortcomings of diversity as “challenges” that can be minimized through further sensitivity training and the education of children against xenophobic feelings. They know how to ignore countless stories that run against the narrative while playing up stories that demonstrate its success.

This argument is lacking. Many whites know what’s going on and yet they prefer escapism, secure careers, or a comfortable network of politically correct friends and family members, even when they have a chance to take risks. The majority seem to welcome their own demise. One has to wonder if Alt Right men even have the vigor, vitality, and commitment of the 1960s generation. Everyone knows that contemporary White men are emasculated. Feminism is blamed. My view is that white men are the weakest in the world today because they inhabit the most comfortable, easygoing civilization. Prolonged luxurious living, where food is easily obtainable, as the ancient Greeks understood, breeds indulgent men, malleability, and softness. This weakness is a natural consequence of the cyclical nature of history.

Cyclical Decline

Chateau Heartiste and Return of Kings abound with articles of accusations against feminism. The current article by Heartiste is The Innocent Victims of Feminism are Boys. But feminism is a symptom of a wider decline in Western civilization. Western decline has long been written about. Oswald Spengler’s interpretation is the best-known. But even though Spengler spoke about the rise of pacifism, loss of youthful vitality, senescence, and the dissipation of strong identities and moral values in large metropolitan centers, many have a hard time making sense of his biological metaphors; specifically, his talk about the youth, maturity, old age, and eventual death of civilizations, as if they were organisms.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), writing when the West was still rising, and taking the decline of Rome as his main example, identified three main cyclical phases in the trajectory of civilizations:

1. Anarchy and savagery 2. Order and civilization 3. Decay and a new anarchic barbarism

Vico’s novelty was to suggest that the underlying mechanism behind these recurrent cyclical phases was the changing psychological state of human beings in response to different realities facing them in civilizational development. When humans face anarchy and savagery, they accept the necessity of behaving in ways that are useful for protecting themselves. They achieve this by creating order, which leads to civilized behavior. But once they achieve comfort through civilization, they focus more on amusements, growing dissolute in luxury and incapable of the discipline and seriousness required to sustain a civilization.

These underlying psychological dispositions were long understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans as common-sense observations about how the demands of survival and living without comforts nurtured strength of character, whereas a life of luxury and easy acquisitions encouraged effeminacy and licentiousness. Ancient Greek literature is full of objections to the pernicious luxury of the Orientals, the older civilizations surrounding them: their harems, eunuchs, and their corrupt intrigues. The very concept of the “Orient” came to mean opulent meals, indulgence, wantonness: effeminacy.

But the thinkers of the modern era, the ones who came up with a lineal view of history, starting with the Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, rejected this cyclical view, and argued instead that all societies pass through a series of “progressive” stages: from primitive savagery to agricultural civilizations to a final stage of commerce. It was their view that the last stage of commerce would bring peaceful relations among nations and commercial riches, and thus the necessary conditions for the full development of human potentialities.

The logic of this idea was accepted in varying ways by most modern European thinkers. Marx’s innovation was to reject the idea that commercial capitalism would be the last stage. The subsequent rejection of the unilineal theories of cultural evolution that Franz Boas initiated – the celebration of primitive ways of life, which is currently a cornerstone of multicultural thinking – remains a variation of progressivism, since it asks Westerners to treat less-developed cultures with equal respect while calling for everyone to be integrated into a liberal modern world order dedicated to the elimination of poverty, warfare, and inequalities. All these arguments, from Adam Smith to Marx to Boas, are of the view that humans can be improved through changes in cultural development. Even the environmentalists have been unable to escape supporting innovations that cut back on pollutants and create nature-friendly technologies.

We have underestimated the cyclical argument and the simple truth that prolonged comfort, peacefulness, relaxation, and a lack of stress and tension weaken the human character. I am going to leave the theory of historical cycles for a future post, and here show that long ago, before the age of feminism, there were some astute observations about the emasculating effects that luxurious living had on the male character. I already alluded to the Greek association of Persian or Oriental luxury with effeminacy (which academia now dismisses as part of a “racialist discourse” intrinsic to the origins of Western civilization).

Greek and Roman Effeminacy

The Greeks themselves were later to be viewed by the Romans as over-intellectualized and over-refined in their tastes. As the Romans began to enjoy abundant wealth for the first time following their victories over the Carthaginians, with the upper classes developing an appetite for the refined tastes of the Greeks, and wanting their male children to learn about Greek rhetoric, art, and philosophy, Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) warned Romans of the weakening effects that Greek ways would have on their traditional toughness. Cato, although a Roman noble, was known for his “rusticity, austerity, and asceticism.” He hated the permissiveness and hedonism that came along with luxury. Plutarch observes about Cato:

His enemies hated him, he used to say, because he rose every day before it was light and neglecting his own private matters, devoted his time to the public interests. He also used to say that he preferred to do right and get no thanks, rather than to do ill and get no punishment; and that he had pardon for everybody’s mistakes except his own.

The Greek historian Polybius (200-118 BC), who bore witness to the ways in which Imperial plenty affected the lives of young Romans, noted how:

…some of [the young Roman men] had abandoned themselves to love affairs with boys and others to consorting with prostitutes, and many to musical entertainments and banquets and all of the extravagances that they entail … infected with Greek weaknesses.

Sallust (86-35 BC) would attribute the collapse of the Republican form of government to the corrupting influence of wealth and the resulting abandonment of traditional values:

When toil is replaced by an attack of indolence, and self-control and fairness by one of lust and haughtiness, there is a change in fortune as well as in morals and behavior.

By the time of Livy (64 or 59 BC-AD 17), we have a historian who believed that the decline of Roman morals was irreversible, lamenting in the Preface to his monumental history of Rome that:

…with the gradual decline of discipline, morals slid, and then more and more collapsed, and finally began to plunge, which has brought us to our present pass, when we can endure neither of vices nor their cures.

Don’t Blame Feminist Women

Some years ago, Chateau Heartiste had a post with the strange title Feminism Responsible for the Fall of Rome. It was strange in that no one has ever spoken about feminism in ancient times, but this post, which consists essentially of a long quote from a comment by some unknown person, could find no other way to account for this commentator’s observations about the dramatic changes that took place in the relation between the sexes in Roman times following the arrival of luxurious living. The commentator goes overboard in his efforts to draw parallels between our times and Rome, but is correct in noting that relations between men and women changed drastically, going from a very patriarchal culture in which family life was revered to a situation in the first century AD in which women had more say over financial and family matters, and the upper classes were uninterested in children:

~1 century BC: Roman civilization blossoms into the most powerful and advanced civilization in the world. Material wealth is astounding, citizens (i.e.: non slaves) do not need to work. They have running water, baths and import spices from thousands of miles away. The Romans enjoy the arts and philosophy; they know and appreciate democracy, commerce, science, human rights, animal rights, children rights and women become emancipated. No-fault divorce is enacted, and quickly becomes popular by the end of the century.

~1-2 century AD: The family unit is destroyed. Men refuse to marry and the government tries to revive marriage with a “bachelor tax,” to no avail. Children are growing up without fathers, Roman women show little interest in raising their own children and frequently use nannies. The wealth and power of women grows very fast, while men become increasingly demotivated and engage in prostitution and vice. Prostitution and homosexuality become widespread.

Blaming feminism for this change in Rome is anachronistic. Feminism is an ideology that emerged in the contemporary West as an expression of decline, but in Rome the decline happened without this ideology. Feminism has accentuated decline in our times, and celebrates it. But blaming feminism, or Cultural Marxism writ large, independent of any other factors, misses the fundamental cyclical nature of history. The Great Depression raised the vitality of men, and produced the “greatest generation” and the baby boom, but this was a temporary check on an otherwise declining trend that began in the nineteenth century.

Rise and Decline of Europe

When Rome fell apart, Germanic barbarians revived the West and brought in new blood, vitality, aggression, and expansionism, culminating in Charles the Great’s empire. This empire broke apart with the intrusion of new barbarians in the ninth century, combined with the decentralizing dynamic of vassal-lord relations. While the more brutalizing aspects of the nobility were “civilized” with the spread of chivalry and the Christian “Truce of God” after 1000 AD, Europeans were still full of zest for glorious actions, testified in their Crusading marches from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese rounding of Africa at the end of the fifteenth century, and the Spanish crossing of the Atlantic, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

Through these major epochs, Europeans came to de-emphasize the martial virtues associated with feudalism, and as they turned to commerce, new virtues came to gain precedence: commodious living, orderly existence, and the Protestant emphasis on hard work (notwithstanding the excessive brutality of the religious wars and the interstate rivalries resulting from nation-building during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777), noted this transformation from the martial temper of medieval times to the “sociable, good-natured, humane, merciful, grateful, friendly, generous, beneficent” qualities of the moderns. This was a relative contrast; the eighteenth century was hardly merciful and soft by today’s standards; this was the age of worldwide colonization and the imminent brutal Napoleonic wars. The point is that the violent aggressiveness of earlier centuries, which still prevailed in the religious wars and found its expression in Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature, was declining and being replaced by a new form of civilized vitality, industriousness, and an intense desire to master the laws of nature.

In 1836, just a year before the great Victorian Age began, when Britain was known for its military vitality and its consolidation of the greatest Empire in history, John Stuart Mill was already lamenting the fact that:

…there has crept over the refined classes, over the whole class of gentlemen in England, a moral effeminacy, an ineptitude for every kind of struggle. They shrink from all effort, from everything which is troublesome and disagreeable . . . They cannot undergo labor, they cannot brook ridicule, they cannot brave evil tongues: they have not the hardihood to say an unpleasant thing to any one whom they are in the habit of seeing … This torpidity and cowardice, as a general characteristic, is new in the world … it is a natural consequence of the progress of civilization, and will continue until met by a system of cultivation adapted to counteract it (“Civilization – Signs of the Times,” in Prefaces to Liberty: Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1959]).

One wonders what J. S. Mill would have said about the preoccupation of our current manosphere, such as Return of Kings, with clothing, color, fabric matching, and complexion. Victorian men cared about clothing, but with the intent of reinforcing the ideal of the proper British man as being self-sufficient, an adventurer, and scientifically-minded, which they felt was damaged with clothing of rich color; only dark colors, straight cuts, and stiff materials could project hardiness and endurance.

The key in J. S. Mill’s observation is that “torpidity and cowardice” are a “natural consequence of the progress of civilization” and of the comforts brought by bourgeois affluence. The expectation recently articulated in a Counter-Currents article that reading about Rome’s glories can teach current White men to regain their valor and heroism is pure wishful thinking. White men today will never build up their “resolve as great as that of the Romans” by reading about the Romans. The Romans built their character, before and during the time of Cato the Elder, by living at a point in the historical cycle when anarchy and savagery demanded hardness, by working extremely hard as farmers, by living in a very patriarchal culture that had harsh laws and expectations, and by undergoing intense military training and warfare. The Rome of Cato was a civilization at its peak; the West today is senile and childless, its families in decline, preoccupied with appearances, and overall too lazy and comfortable.

Decline is irreversible. The relentless occupation of the West by hordes of Muslims and Africans is an expression of White male decadence and effeminacy. Only out of the coming chaos and violence will strong White men rise to resurrect the West.

Ricardo Duchesne is a Canadian historical sociologist and professor at the University of New Brunswick.

Robert says:April 11, 2017 at 7:33 am

That is an accepted state brought about by the evil influence of a powerful, and hostile minority which is physically undetectable.

Societies can be sabotaged. We have a virus in our system for which the only cure required to break the spell is the courage to speak the truth while it is still permissible, or should I say legal, to do so.

The Alt-right is here.

Andrew says:April 13, 2017 at 7:06 pm

#1 – The problem is – that humans are covetous. In order for them to focus (after a century of brain-washing – through media), you must destroy their idols (if not physically – you must destroy their romantic image, and prove that they are tyrants – in reality).

#2 – Now…physically – we have no means of defeating war-mongers. But…why are they always in power? It is because they are lauded by gullible societies – who believe that they (the elite) have god-like power. // The secret is: the elite are good liars and good war-mongers, but the weakness in their armor – is what they don’t want exposed about their Satanic life-styles. This includes the following:

-Blood-drinking (look up “adrenal-chrome” – which is the chemical released from the brain to the blood, when a human is being killed)

-Cannibalism (it’s scientifically proven that consumers of human-flesh get a disease called “kuru”)

-Education-Revisionism (every-thing we’re taught is a direct-lie or half-truth; and it all directs us away from any blame of the Jesuits or Zionists)

-Fiat-Banking (we’ve been learning about it (for years) – thanks to G. Edward Griffin & Ron Paul)

-Media-Manipulation (every-thing in movies or on t.v. is a lie; and it all directs us away from any blame of the Jesuits or Zionists)

-Paedophilia (the continental-governments (monarchies), corporations, media, & military are rife with this gross behavior; and it’s all based on the ancient-mystery religions & the “Talmud” – both out of Babylon)

-Murder (of course – goes with the blood-rituals & cannibalism; but these people are also known to “suicide” whistle-blowers; and you might check out Randy Quaid’s press-conference (years ago) about “star-whacking” in Hollywood)

-Voting is no more a solution – than a cure-all drug from a pharmaceutical-company (if cure-alls & votes served their purpose, both the corporations & politicians would be out of a job)

So (my point is) – expose what they don’t want you to expose. Stop (so much) lingering on the representatives in D.C., and begin informing people about the “Illuminati”-connections. (They are the ones sabotaging our world, while we’re distracted – by what’s on media & the D.C.-drama.) // Time’s wasting folks; and its up to our generation to conquer these issues. Our parents’ generation are retired (many of them) – just wanting to relaxing in the sun-set; and the younger people just want to party and stay stupid (and my apologies – to the few exceptions who give a damn).

So – that’s it: our enemies (lying about us) – have turned us into slaves; and we need to merely tell the truth (about them) – to be set free again. (It may induce Martial Law – when they have no exit of refuge, but I’d rather lose my freedom fighting for it – instead of being a vulnerable duck on a pond (waiting to get shot).)

My regards to the “Cess-Pool”-family. Andrew (4-13-17) (5:06 p.m.)

Beth says:April 15, 2017 at 9:19 am

Very interesting. It’s refreshing to hear about other things besides Feminism as the reason for our decline. I’m going to recommend this article on social media. Thanks.

[zoe-truong]

P3A

Proofreading, Word Choice, and Conciseness

Society never fails to remind me how counterintuitive it is for me to be studying and writing blog after blog over ethics and compassion when I am pursuing a degree in business. Seeing the competitive atmosphere at career fairs or even in class seems like I am walking straight into a corporate hell where no sentiment of empathy can survive in the river of greed. I say forget that! I’m going to keep learning about ethics anyways, because not only does the university make me, but also because the world needs it.

Ever since I was young, I felt that I had a decent understanding of what it means to be morally right. My goal was to be objective in any situation. Rather than push my agenda I listen to what others have to say, regardless of how polarizing their stances are. I say this as though I’m well versed in all things ethics; however, I was never introduced to such intense levels of truth and suffering until college. Nothing quite prepares you for a large university full of students with very different ideals and beliefs. Sometimes these ideals coexist, but sometimes they explode into arguments, hateful rhetoric, and clearly divisive lines. Every person is guaranteed their freedom of speech —with the right of criticism— so I can only witness when students consistently use their morals to underline their stance. This is what hurts the ideology of ethics around the world. It’s not that people don’t have moral compasses, it’s that they don’t know how to properly use them.

Do I feel that ethics is a fair thing to be taught in schools and universities? Absolutely. The solution isn’t educating the masses of what constitutes ethically right or wrong behavior. There is no proper standard of ethics, because “we experience morality more as a choice that we can always change as circumstances call for it,” [I]. What one person analyzes is a living creature’s basic rights, another person may interpret a completely different way. People are shaped by their environment, and no standard can account for every possible outcome. So this is where it’s important to not try to define ethics but to try to apply ethics.

“Most of us have made choices that serve self-interest without regard to the needs or welfare of others,” (II) because is it so wrong to put yourself first? Definitely not a crime, but to forgo the consequences of your choice without a single thought violates ethical reasoning. In my microeconomics class, we learned a concept called Pareto efficiency. It is a state of allocating resources where “there is no other allocation in which some other individual is better off and no individual is worse off,” [III]. Who would’ve imagined that an economic concept could actually have some philosophically deep applications? The point is that the massive spread of views over what is ethically correct exacerbates this idea of Pareto efficiency. The challenge is understanding the weight of each side of the outcome. A city might see the construction of a new baseball stadium as an investment that pays off with tourism and business revenue, while its opposing citizens may see it as an unnecessary expenditure and hike in tax dollars.

So, am I in over my head to imagine I can bring ethics to an inherently unethical environment like the financial world? People tend to see stock market investors as the pinnacle of evil, since most are in the upper echelon of wealth. How can a person seek financial gain without being unethical? Pareto efficiency inadvertently appears even in stocks. While investors have their own trading haven on Wall Street, they are furthering the divisions of wealth in the country. If you’re a smart investor, you know how to play the market and can earn a lot of money with little work. Risky investors push further up the income ladder at the expense of the working class. It’s clear that “professionals play a key role in sustaining violent ideologies,” (IV). There needs to be a new norm in business, and I believe it can only come about from an education steeped in ethics. While it’s typical of a liberal arts students to be more educated in ethical reasoning, the subject is omnipresent throughout the university. Even in the smallest assignments of some of my business classes, blatant indicators of bad morals are highlighted in case studies. These are the anecdotes that prepare students to tap into that critical thinking. Look at what corruption has done to companies like Enron and Lehman Brothers. Wells Fargo is currently plastered with a mark of shame for its workers’ deceitful practices, facing punishments across the nation by losing contracts with countless of cities. Learning from the past is more than identifying failure. Think of the morally neglectful mind it took to ruin the lives of so many people. As David Foster Wallace says, “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t,” (V). Wells Fargo has more than just illegal practices hanging over its head. Recently, the company was dropped by multiple cities as their banking partners. Why? Well, their lending practices have shown to be very Pareto efficient, because one of their investment projects happens to be the Dakota Access Pipeline [VI]. This is a prime illustration of how people can utilize their ethical reasoning. On the surface it seems to be just another investment, but anyone who knows the controversy over the pipeline can see this is a statement of their code of ethics. Influential companies have to understand that dipping their toes in the waters of polarizing issues is going to garner backlash. Wells Fargo sees it as an investment, but these cities like Seattle are consciously deciding that their investment is actually support. Every action or non-action is a statement, and the world is watching. This just proves that the university’s requirement for an education in ethics can do more than just improve a person’s understanding of morality, it could also be the deciding factor of a successful company. When you’re cognizant of the outcomes of your decisions, you have the choice to do what’s ethically reasonable or face the consequences. I know I’ve simply listed off countless examples without unfolding ethics in my own life, but there’s a reason. I wasn’t affected by these scandals and troubles directly, but their lessons broaden my perspective of the world. I can’t expect to think critically about the right choices when I haven’t even learned what are the wrong choices.

There’s a phrase ingrained into the side of the tower at UT that reads, “Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Will Set You Free,” [VII] In this case, the truth is empathy. Whether it is in business, in arguments, or in life, when we finally stop to think about why our opponents are fighting against us or how our decisions affect other people, then we will have achieved this truth. It’s not by establishing the bounds of what is good or bad, it’s by playing the devil’s advocate. If you can stop and think about what the opposition is saying by reasoning out their stance, then you are exercising your ethics. Having this ability will help us break free from the idea of stagnation. Just because humans throughout history have eaten meat, doesn’t mean we can’t change that. Just because the United States has had two political parties for years, doesn’t mean we can’t think outside of our party lines. Just because everyone else in the business sphere is out there to become the richest investor, doesn’t mean I have to forget my ethics. It’s not impossible to bring ethics into business either! A popular brand of shoes, Toms, runs its business by being philanthropic. Altruism is a common indicator of a selfless, morally upright company, and Toms exemplifies this by donating one pair of shoes to a child in Africa for every shoe it sells. The company probably can’t achieve extremely high revenues because of this, but they can show their support for those less fortunate. While I don’t expect to be an entrepreneur and start a business, I can take this idea of altruism with me. Just like there are Wells Fargos of the world, Toms is a shining example of what it means to defy the ideologies of capitalism. Now, the problem is just synthesizing this selfishness into a life on Wall Street. Finance fascinates me, but is it really a passion of mine? Moreover, does it really benefit society?

These are worries that I have all the time. Other students in my accounting class or MIS class spill out technical terms I’ve never heard of, displaying their thorough research in the world of business as though they’re ready to step on to their entry-level jobs at Goldman Sachs. Stock market and finance still interests me, but are my attempts to follow through with business simply contrived? Like I said before, our environment shapes our outlook on life. It’s no mistake that I didn’t start thinking about a job on Wall Street until my parents mentioned how I could be the next Maria Bartiromo. For those of you who don’t know, Maria Bartiromo broke barriers as the first person to report live on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Since then I showed interest into the market to satisfy my parents, but at some point I became intrigued by the delicate workings of the financial sector. However, compared to my peers it’s obvious that my passion does not hold a candle to their knowledge. So I wonder, is it meant for me? I’m not sure yet, but it’s okay. That’s the beauty of college. Most students are just as unsure as I am, walking into their classes in hopes that maybe, just maybe something will click. The only clicks I hear are the ones of the chalk tapping onto the chalkboard, but the words written out are more important than any click in my brain. The truth is that it’s not going to just click. My passion won’t spring forth from nothing. What’s knowledge without learning? I can’t expect for the interesting facts to spill out on my lap, ready to add to my arsenal of information. Passion takes spirit whereas results take work. John Henry Newman discusses this topic excellently, in that “this process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose…. is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object,” [VIII]. There’s a never ending realm of opportunities to take advantage of, and I intend on exploring and paving my own path.

Plan II has taught me that the only thing more powerful than intellect is the will to stretch the limits of my awareness and discover things that make me uncomfortable. Earthlings made me uncomfortable. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye made me uncomfortable. Brené Brown’s discussion over the indispensable nature of vulnerability made me uncomfortable. For once, I appreciate being uncomfortable (warning: comfort readings may be skewed due to terrible Austin weather). I’m thankful not because I’m a sadist, but because I recognize the value behind the discomfort: emotive ethics. Unlike philosophical ethics, this is the type of ethics that pulls right at the empathetic part of my personality, along with a waterfall of tears. It’s the elephant in the room. After being subjected to the Earthlings, I learned how this elephant would be an abused tool for entertainment in the circus industry were it not metaphorical. The documentary depicts scene after scene of violent, inhumane torture of creatures with a cry that couldn’t pierce even the most deadened factory workers. It seems absurd of me to see the value of something so torturous, but it’s because I know that the videos honor the words on the tower. I know the truth of what hideous actions happen behind slaughterhouse doors, and it’s set me free from thinking that there’s anything justifiable about our carnistic culture. I witnessed that “just as the factory farmers have no problem killing animals to provide for the meat industry, any person’s experience would affect how they see things in life,” [IX]. Without seeing for myself how cruel this industry was, I couldn’t say a single word on the conditions of these animals. Just because my life doesn’t align with the truth of these lessons, doesn’t mean I can’t learn about them. It reminds me that this is just another part of the core purpose of the university: “expanding knowledge and human understanding,” [X]. All I have to do is take this emotive ethics from world literature into my realm of business. I can’t separate these courses; they are technically different but not mutually exclusive. In fact, every moral lesson from every class I take shows that there is a unity within the educational sphere. Jazz Appreciation revealed the long history and culture of African Americans and their contributions to the music world. This same discriminatory history reveals itself in The Bluest Eye. Unweaving this network of connections by reading more, learning more, and challenging myself more is conducive to connecting my ethical reasoning to my future.

Finance is important to me, and I don’t know it all now. However, I refuse to let history repeat itself and fall into the monotonous realm of soulless analysts. I want to lead, to inspire, and to teach that not only is financial literacy indispensable, it’s exciting. I want to use my compassion to help people, not just earn money, but feel empowered. I don’t strive to be the next Carl Icahn, but maybe I can be the next Bill Gates. All it takes is a little compassion and a lot of discomfort and I’ll be stumbling onto the path that’s right for me.

Word Count: 2,310 Word Count without quotes: 2,148

Footnotes: [I] Maureen Dowd, "Moral Dystopia," in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 3:937, previously published in New York Times (New York, NY), June 17, 2012, SR1. [II] Deni Elliott, "What Ethics Is; What Ethics Is Not," in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 1:166, excerpt from Ethical Challenges: Building an Ethics Toolkit, 19. [III] “Pareto Efficiency,” University of Toronto, accessed Feb. 11, 2017, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/2x3/tutorial/PE.HTM [IV] Melanie Joy, "The Mythology of Meat: Justifying Carnism," in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2017), 2:396, previously published in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (n.p.: Conari Press, n.d.), 98. [V] Bill Chappell. “2 Cities To Pull More Than $3 Billion From Wells Fargo Over Dakota Access Pipeline,” last modified February 8, 2017, http://www.npr.org/ sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/08/514133514/two-cities-vote-to-pull-more- than-3-billion-from-wells-fargo-over-dakota-pipelin. [VI] David Foster Wallace, "Kenyon Commencement Address," speech, May 21, 2005, in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 1:135.   [VII] “Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Set You Free,” in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin,TX: Jenn’s 2016), 1:95. [VIII] John Henry Newman, "Discourse 7. Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill," in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 1:143, excerpt from The Idea of a University (London, UK: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907).

[IX] Zoë, October 26, 2016, comment on “Earthlings,” Zoë’s Corner, Feb. 13, 2017, http://zoe-truong.tumblr.com/post/152352573085/earthlings-part-1.

[X] "The Core Purpose of the University,” in Composition and World Literature, comp. Jerome Bump, (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 1:90.

Media Citations:

[1] Freedom of Speech: http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-campus-policies-limit-free-speech-58974

[2] Stock Market Investors: http://lerablog.org/business/economy/finance/investing/stock-market-investing-tips-for-beginners/

[3] The Tower: https://photos.brockbatsell.com/keyword/tower

[4] Paths: http://www.dfiles.me/multiple-paths.html