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consilium-games · 6 years ago

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A Rambling and Brain-Fried Post on Hermeneutics

It's a godless and blighted hour (11AM) as I write this, and scheduling heartache has left me swirly-eyed and sleep-deprived. Lately I've absorbed a pretty specific combination of media that's led me to think dazedly about hermeneutics, basically "systems of interpretation of a work of media" such as stories. And in light of my past couple games, and a game whose premise I haven't finished chewing on, I think getting some thoughts down (and maybe even some discussion?!) might help someone. I don't know, maybe me?

Inciting Events

By now anyone reading this has heard of Undertale. Spoilers happen here. The creator of Undertale recently released a . . . possibly-related videogame called Deltarune. I say possibly related with good reason, and I don't intend to directly spoil the game as it just came out, but it gave me interesting questions about narrative interpretation--hermeneutics--more generally. I also will probably talk a bit about Doki Doki Literature Club! which you might not have encountered or played. Some high-level spoilers will occur. This post will contain zero 'fan theories', as that has nothing to do with my game-design beat--rather, academic theories on "how do people approach interpreting stories" has a lot to do with my pretentious narrativist game-design ethos!

Also of note, I've watched a playthrough of a videogame called Witch's House, and without spoiling that, it struck me that one of the puzzles will behave drastically differently, depending on whether the player reads one of the ubiquitous hints. Meaning, not only do the hints constitute a mechanic, but discerning how to trust hints becomes a game objective. And further, since "reading a hint" is an in-game action, but recalling a hint is not, the game may behave unpredictably to the player who reads a hint, doesn't save, dies, and reloads--and doesn't read the hint again.

Lastly, I've revisited some analyses of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, and it put me in mind of discussions about This House Has People In It and The Cry of Mann, and in particular: discussions about those discussions, arguments about how presenting interpretations can color people's formed interpretations. And last warning, I'm still pretty brain-fried, I'll blame that if I end up rambling incoherently.

Setting Out

There's a lot of literature about literature, and literature about literature about literature. Perhaps some day people will spill ink about ink than anything else. Fortunately, we haven't yet entered a boundless singularity of self-referentiality. So I can afford to stake out a couple terms I expect I'll mutter:

hermeneutic: a specific approach, strategy, or philosophy to understanding a work. This can be totally informal ("Christian songs are easy to write, just take a pop song and replace 'baby' with 'Jesus'") or very rigorous ("Derrida's analysis of identity puts it to blame for religious and nationalist fanaticism"), but just treat it as technical shorthand for "approach to understanding a thing".

auteur theory: mostly used in film analysis, in our backyard it means "the author of a work arbitrates its meaning". So, eg Stephen King can definitively and canonically say "Leland Gaunt is an extradimensional alien, not Satan, the Adversary and the Prince of Darkness, from orthodox Christianity". And if King says this, that makes it true and the audience should understand Needful Things in light of this fact King told us with his mouth but not with his story.

Death of the Author: by contrast, 'Death of the Author' means that once a work has an audience (the creator published it, or put it on Steam, or hit Send on Twitter, or just played a song on their porch), the audience has liberty to interpret it however they please, and the creator's word about What It Means has no more weight than the audience. Which would mean that if King tells us Leland Gaunt is an alien, and Needful Things is closer to Lovecraft than King James, that's cool--it's a neat theory, Steve, but I think it's about . . . (Note: I don't know if King has made this claim, but Needful Things does have a few weird neat textual indications that Gaunt is some kind of Cthulhu and not the Lightbringer.)

code-switching: technically from linguistics, borrowed into social sciences, in this post it means a creator of a work putting something into the work that implicitly or explicitly prompts the audience to consciously alter or monitor their interpretation. As a very simple example, suppose someone says with a straight face and deadpan delivery, "I'm a law-abiding citizen who supports truth, justice, and The American Way." Now, suppose they make air-quotes around 'law-abiding'--it rather changes the meaning, by prompting the audience to reinterpret the literal wording.

Okay, I . . . think that'll do. So hi, I'm consilium, and as a goth game designer it should come as no surprise that I like my authors with some degree of living-impairment. Interpreting a text has an element of creativity to it that the creator simply can't contribute on the audience's behalf. More than that though, there just seems something off about the idea that, say, a reader of Needful Things might read about Sheriff Alan Pangborn, and interpret the specific way he defeats Leland Gaunt as allegorical of how cultivating creativity, community, and empathy can help prevent the dehumanization of consumerism and capitalism--only for King to say "no, Alan was just a parallel-universe avatar of the Gunslinger and thus could defeat Gaunt, who was just an extradimensional eldritch predator". If King were to say such a thing after audiences have gotten to know and love Alan on the terms presented in the text, and King were to come back with "maybe that's what I said but that's not what I meant"--my response would have to be a cordial "interesting theory, but it doesn't seem supported by the text".

So, I generally like Death of the Author! But . . . but. I've taken to gnawing on this idea in this game-design blog because--of course--It's More Complicated Than That. Roleplaying games as a medium work about as differently from other media as, say, sculpture and songwriting. And despite essentially just putting bells and whistles and protocol on top of possibly the oldest human artistic medium--storytelling--RPGs have a lot of weirdness they introduce for analysis and critique.

For example, my reservations on Death of the Author! Specifically: taking "in-character, in-game events and narration" as the work of interest, and "the other players at the table" as the audience, what happens when you describe your character Doing Something Cool--based on a mistake? We need a teeny bit of "creator as arbitrator of meaning", so we can at least say, literally, "oh, no, that's not what I meant"! Otherwise, the other players' "freedom of interpretation" leads to your character doing something nonsensical and now they have to have their characters respond--they have a worse work to create within.

This gets at something pretty foundational in treating RPG stories as art: almost any other medium has a creator create a work as a finished thing, and only then does an audience ever interpret it. Whether plural creators collaborate or not, whether the work exists as apocryphal oral tradition and mutates through telling, whether some audience members take it up as their own with flourishes (such as with a joke), there still exists this two-stage process of "author creates" and then "audience interprets". Except in stories within roleplaying games as generally practiced.

In RPGs, the creators almost always constitute the entire audience (I'll ignore things like "RPG podcasts" and novelizations of someone's DnD campaign here, as they make up a vanishingly tiny minority). The audience of the work not only creates it though--they experience the work almost entirely before you could ever call the work 'completed'. Even if we falsely grant that every game concludes on purpose rather than just kinda petering out because people get bored, leave college, have other things to do, or whatever else killed your last game, players experience the story in installments that don't exist until the end of the session. So "interpretation" gets . . . weird.

Basic Hermeneutics

On a surface level, the story of an RPG usually doesn't demand a lot of depth and analysis: some protagonists, inciting incident, various conflicts, faffing about as the PCs fail to get the hint, some amusing or tense or infuriating whiffs and failures along the way, and charitably, some kind of resolution to the main conflict and dramatic and character arcs. Usually metaphors tend to be explained straight up ("my character's ability to 'blur' things reflects her own weak personal boundaries and over-empathization"), and motifs often even moreso ("guys, seriously, what happens every single time your characters see spiders?"). A lot of this comes from necessity of that very immediate, improvised, as-we-go nature of the medium! You have to make sure your audience gets what you intend them to get--because in mere seconds they'll create some more story that depends on the bit of story you just created. And back and forth.

But, quite without realizing it or meaning to, we can't really help but inject other chunks of meaning into stories we help create. Maybe even chunks of meaning that contradict others' contributions at the table. Spoiler alert: I do not have a theory or framework to address this. The Queen Smiles kind of digs into this, but this goes beyond my current depth. So, what can we conjecture or say, what scaffolding could we build, to build a more robust "literary theory of game stories"? I have some basics as I see them:

Auteur theory (creator arbitrates meaning)

This can only apply to one player's contributions, not across plural players.

Necessary, for both basic clarification and because perfectly conveying the ~*~intended meaning~*~ frankly just doesn't work as a thing you can do off the top of your head when your turn comes to say what your character does.

GMs (where applicable) shouldn't use this to defend poor description or ill-considered presentation of "cool things for PCs to care about and cool things to do about it"--just because the GM intended the cop to be sympathetic doesn't make him so, and if he's not sympathetic . . . the protagonists will not treat him so.

Dead authors (freedom of interpretation)

Players can try this out on their own characters, and should, but should ask other players about their characters if something seems odd, confusing, intriguing, or otherwise. "You keep making a point of meticulously describing your character's weird nervous tic. The exact same way every time. How come? What's it mean?"

Players of course can answer engagement like this any way they please, including stabbing themselves with the quill: "you figure it out, if your character were to ask mine, mine would supply her answer which I may or may not know".

GMs (where applicable) should really lean on this: improvise, throw ideas and themes at the wall, and frantically build on top of the audience's ideas, since those ideas clearly resonate with the audience.

Code-switching (deliberately modifying interpretation)

We all do this all the time: the dragon is not telling you to roll for your attack, after all. The GM is, by switching between narrating the world, and communicating with a player.

More subtly we do this when switching between "what our character believes" and "what we players reasonably expect". Your costumed superhero might think of herself as righteous vengeance incarnate, but you hope everyone at the table knows you think she's conceited and delusional at best, and a full-bore psychopath at worst. This hopefully doesn't mean you play your psychopath superhero any less sincerely, but it does require a bit of ironic detachment, you know something about her that she can't know about herself (beyond that she's a fictional character, of course).

Even more subtly, sometimes weird game interactions (of the rules, other PCs, other players) imply things we wish they wouldn't, but can't quite control, and often everyone knows this. "Why can't you muster up your courage one more time?!" "Because I ran out of Fate points," your character doesn't say. Instead, your fellow authors share a look over the table, and gingerly tiptoe around an obvious, character-appropriate thing, and seize on some other thing to say or do, hopefully just as obvious and character-appropriate. But, everyone switched codes, from "characters doing things for reasons" to "the rules inform our story, and we follow them because they help".

Prepaid analysis (game-specific themes or arcs)

A lot of games have some baked-in themes right off the shelf, and provide good starting points and directions of inqury for interpreting a story born out of playing them. Monsterhearts deals with teenage cruelty and queer sexuality. Succession deals with faith, one's place in the world, and how these relate to morality. Bliss Stage tumultuous coming-of-age and taking care of one another, or failing to. If you use eg Lovesick to tell a story that you can't approach or interpret in light of "dangerous, unstable, desperate romantics"--you probably picked the wrong game. You should pick a better game.

Besides these themes, many games also have more abstract ideas--arcs or processes--that they really enshrine. Exalted gives Solars (mythical heroes patterned after ancient folklore) a mechanic called "Limit Break" which mechanically funnels a Solar toward destroying themselves with their own virtue. Likewise, even if you somehow excise Monsterhearts' focus on teenage cruelty and sexuality, you really shouldn't play if you want to avoid social stigma as a theme, because most of the mechanics hinge on it.

We players often deliberately bring in some themes and ideas we'd like to play with, too. "I want to play a character whose determination will be her own undoing--and probably everyone else's." Or even just "I really like themes where physical strength is tragically and stupefyingly unhelpful". Those make for great starting points and prompt good questions to interpret stories!

I know someone with more literary theory and less sleep deprivation could add a few basic givens, but I think this at least goes to show we have ground to stand on and territory to explore. And probably more importantly, it points out some useful kinds of questions we can ask about the story of a game and how to interpret it. So, why did I ever bring up Undertale back there?

Audience Awareness

The following works have something in common: House of Leaves, Funny Games, This House Has People In It, The Cry of Mann, The Shape on the Ground, Undertale, and Deltarune. Besides "being very good", they all explicitly pose the audience as an entity within the story--but, they do it in a very unusual way.

See, the story of a Mario game is about Mario even if the player controls Mario--and though it's a subtle distinction, this also applies to eg Doom, where you play as an explicitly nameless faceless protagonist, intended to be your avatar. Even in the most plot-free abstract game, if we can salvage out a story (if perhaps an extremely degenerate and rudimentary one like 'how this game of chess played out'), the 'story' happily accommodates the audience within it.

That's not how the list I gave does things. Not at all.

Instead, the works I listed single out the audience as something else: in House of Leaves, unreliable narrators call out the unreliable interpreter reading the narrative. In Funny Games, the audience doesn't participate--but the audience watches, and the film knows this, and singles the audience out as complicit in the horrible events that unfold. This House Has People In It casts us as the prying NSA subcontractor watching hours of security footage and reading dozens of e-mails, and makes it clear that even our Panopticon of surveillance doesn't give us a complete account of reality. The Cry of Mann casts us as gibbering voices from an eldritch plane of cosmic horror. The Shape on the Ground poses as a disinterested and clinical psychological test, but it clearly has some ideas about what would lead us to take such a 'test'.

And then there's Undertale and Deltarune. Last warning, I'll say whatever I find convenient about Undertale and probably '''spoil''' something about Deltarune in the process. I do not care.

Hostility to the Audience

If Undertale itself had a personality, one could fairly describe it as "wary of the player": it plays jokes and tricks, but it knows the player is a player, of Undertale, which Undertale also knows is a videogame. It gives you ample chance to have a fun, funny, and sometimes disturbing game, with a lot of tempting and tantalizing unspoken-s hiding juuuust offscreen. But Undertale's point as a work involves giving you the chance to not do that while still, technically, engaging with the game.

Namely, the Genocide Run. By killing literally absolutely every single thing in the game that the game can possibly let you kill, the game very purposely unfolds entirely differently--and on multiple playthroughs, the game will outright take notice of multiple playthroughs, and challenge you for--in effect--torturing the narrative it can deliver by forcing it to deliver every narrative. Let's think about that for a moment:

Most videogames have some kind of excuse of a narrative, and lately, many have really good, nuanced stories to tell--and many of those even go to the (mindbendingly grueling) effort of delivering a plurality of good narratives that honor your agency as a player--maybe even a creator, as best a videogame can with its limitations.

But, what can you say about a story that has multiple endings? Or multiple routes to them? And what can you say about a story that, in some of its branches, simply goes to entirely different places as narratives? It strains the usual literary critical toolkit, to say the least.

Now, a game like Doki Doki Literature Club! approaches this exact same idea of addressing its story as manipulable by the player, of the player as an agent in the story, but in a pretty straightforward way as far as "a narrative that works this way": the narrative already describes "and then the player came along and messed everything up". All of the player's different routes serve this one overarching narrative: the game has an obsessive fixation on you and wants you to play it forever (which, given its nature as (roughly) a visual novel . . . perhaps asks quite a lot).

Undertale takes a step back from even this level of abstraction, though: the implicit and often hidden events of its world and narrative unfold / have unfolded / will unfold, and a given player's "story" consists of "what the player does to this multi-branched narrative-object". The game judges you to your face for contorting its weird timeline-multiple-universe meta-story . . . but lets you do it, to prove the point it wants to prove.

And without much controversy, we can conclude that point roughly summarizes to "playing games just for accomplishment and mastery doesn't give as rewarding an experience as immersing in the story and characters". The subtler point under that, though, comes out through multiple playthroughs: "immersing yourself in a story and cast of characters too much will harm your life and your enjoyment of other things". Undertale, were it a person, would probably look nervously at you after several 'completionist' playthroughs to "see all the content", and it explicitly describes this exact behavior to the player's face as something objectionable--even calling out people who watch someone else play on streams and video hosts.

"Just let it be a story"

Which brings us to Deltarune. I've no doubt dozens of cross-indexed internet-vetted analyses and fan-theories will arise in the next few months (and I look forward to them), but on a once-over the game seems to have one specific thing to say to the player's face: "you are intruding on a story that isn't about you". The game opens with an elaborate character-creator (well, for a retroclone computer RPG), then tells you "discarded, you can't choose who you are, and you can't choose who the character is either". It has fun with giving the player dialog options--then timing out and ignoring the input. It even tells the player in in-game narration that "your choices don't matter". The story itself doesn't even care very much about the player's character, instead hinging on the development and growth of an NPC, following her arc, without much concern for the player's thoughts on the matter. And at the very end, after playing mind-games with the player's familiarity and recognition of Undertale characters--the close does something both inexplicable and disturbing. This is not your story: it's not about you, your choices don't affect it, and it doesn't care what you think.

As an aside, it seems like quite a good game--but I think that comes in part because of this very drastic intent and the skill with which it executes that intent (ie, bluntly at first, subtly enough to almost forget, and then slapping hard enough to prompt a flashback).

And holding this alongside Undertale's stark (even literal) judgment of the player for 'forcing' the narrative to contort to accommodate the player's interaction with that narrative, it seems clear to me that where Doki Doki Literature Club! has fun with the idea of "player as complicit in something gross, and as motivating something cool", Undertale and Deltarune seem much more interested in making the player take an uncomfortable look at how they engage with narratives.

Defensive Hermeneutics

On one hand, Funny Games, The Cry of Mann, and Undertale and Deltarune stare back at the audience, judge them, treat them as an intruding, invading, even corrupting force from outside the work, criticize the audience for enjoying the work, and even call the audience out for engaging in detailed critique, like some kind of cognitive logic-bomb, or a cake laced with just enough ipecac to punish you for eating more than a slice.

But on the other, House of Leaves, This House Has People In It, The Shape on the Ground, and Doki Doki Literature Club all want the audience to participate, to scrutinize, to interact with the narrative and question it, as well as themselves. What does that first camp have in common besides wariness and hostility to the audience, and what does this second camp have in common besides treating the audience as creative of the work's meaning? I'll call it "a defensive hermeneutic".

Notionally, the audience has hermeneutics: ways of understanding a work. But, a creator can't help but have some understanding of the likely mental state and view of a(n imagined) audience, approaching the text in some way. A creator can thus bake in or favorably treat some approaches over others, and can even use this to guide criticism about their work.

That first group, which I'll call "defensive", has one striking common feature: the 'surface level' plots either don't matter, or have very simple outlines. Funny Games' plot is exactly as follows: two psychopaths terrorize, torture, and eventually murder an innocent family. The Cry of Mann shows us what looks a lot like a small child trying to mimic a melodramatic soap-opera, before Things Get Weird (and any extant 'surface level' plot goes under the waves). And Undertale and Deltarune give us the stock "hero appears in strange land, arbitrary puzzle-quests ensue, climactic final confrontation restores peace to the land". This serves as the set-dressing and vehicle for the actual plots--or sometimes simply cognitive messages--to get into the audience's minds:

"What, exactly, do you get out of slasher torture-porn movies? Why do you create the market for things like this?" "Are you sure about where your sense of empathy and identification points you? What makes you think you have a grip on reality enough to judge who's right and relatable, and who isn't?" "Don't just passively consume games like they were kernels of popcorn. But don't gorge yourself on the same dish, either--there's more out there, but you have to look for it."

In short: these works don't want you to nitpick the works themselves. Their entire message consists of second-or-higher-order interpretation. To put it another way, they want to make sure you don't pay attention to the handwriting, because the gaps between the words spell out a poem and the words themselves only create those gaps.

Participatory Hermeneutics

By this same token, I'll call the second camp "participatory": they treat the audience as a kind of creator in their own right--Borges did this a lot and with relish in his later years, and Doki Doki Literature Club! makes it a game mechanic. A creator using this "participatory" hermeneutic essentially doesn't consider their work 'finished' until the audience interprets it. This should sound familiar. The audience contributes meaning to the work, by interpreting it, and a "participatory" work counts on it. And, to contrast with the "defensive" camp: they use complex (sometimes even overcomplicated) plots, which matter and inform interpretation, and tie into the second-order meaning that the work attempts to convey. The "surface level" plots don't solely carry a tangled "interpret this" into the audience's brain. Instead, the surface plot has enough complexity to have a plot-hole, enough character depth to have problematic characters, and enough weight on its own merit to have unappealing implications. In other words: even without convoluted postmodern hoity-toity highfalutin' hermeneutic jibberjabber, a member the audience can find a story they can just enjoy on its merits.

Before anyone angrily starts defending the characters in Undertale or complaining about the directionlessness of This House Has People In It, I hope I've made it really clear, I lumped these works into these two categories based on an overall tendency and commonality, in approaching this one really abstract concept, and as with any work, any binary you can think of will have gradations if you look among "all works, ever". And, even more importantly:

I really love all these works, and I love what they do and how they do it. They all also have flaws, because flawed humans made them, and flawed humans enjoy them. That all said: the "participatory hermeneutic" has everything to offer for my purposes, while the "defensive hermeneutic" . . . might get a post of its own someday.

So What Now?

In aeons past, I wrote about feedback and criticism, and this seems like a good time to dust off that idea with a new application. In particular, that old post talks simply about players (and GMs where applicable) helping each other to contribute their best, and get the most enjoyment out of a game. Here, we'll look at some basic questions players can pose each other as creators of a work, rather than participants of a game or members of an audience.

So let's take that 'player survey' and repurpose it for Dark Humanities and getting a toehold on literary criticism:

Can you describe your approach to your character?

What do you want to convey about your character?

What was one thing you want to make sure we all understand?

How do you interpret my character so far?

What theme or motif do you think our characters express together?

What misconception or misunderstanding would you like to clear up or prevent?

What themes do you want to explore?

And just like the 'player character questionnaire', everyone should update and refine their survey every few sessions. As a given game goes on, for example, you might get to know one of the PCs so well that you never need to worry about "misconceptions or misunderstandings", regarding that character's motivations and personality and thematic implication. But, that character's connection with eg themes of parental abandonment might change, and when that topic comes up, you can devote a question or three just to asking things like "might your character be treating this person as a surrogate mother-figure?" Maybe the player never thought of it that way! Maybe the player thinks that would be a great idea! But neither of you will think about it without pausing a moment to consider things like this.

And once everyone has shared a bit about their characters' themes and clarified everyone else's, you can discuss deliberately pursuing an idea, through your characters. Obviously your characters have no motivation for this, but your characters don't even exist, so they don't have any say in the matter.

For example, cyberpunk naturally deals with corporate oppression, alienation, dehumanization, and technological obsolescence. But, when one PC regularly takes recreational drugs, and baits another into joining them, a third concocts elaborate revenge fantasies, and a fourth picks up broken people like stray cats and tries to parent them into being functional . . .

Maybe they all share a more specific theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms". The drug-user is nice and obvious--and their partner joining them in partaking perhaps has a need to belong. The vengeful obsessive might be compensating for feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability by hurting or preparing to hurt others. And the self-styled Good Samaritan and would-be Guardian Angel might be doing the opposite--just as unhealthily.

Importantly, everyone keeps playing their character, the character they made, the character they want to play. But, with some good chewy discussion about story, everyone can also look for spots where, indeed, their character might just so happen to--do something to further this sub-theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms", on top of the background of alienation, obsolescence, and dehumanization.

Academic, critical, literary discussion of roleplaying games as games seems like a sadly underexplored subject. But critical discussion of the stories themselves, the ones happening at each table, might as well be completely unknown--so here's hoping someone can build on this!

#deltarune #undertale #theory #game design #critique #analysis #postmodernism

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lit102 · 6 years ago

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, trans. Ken Liu

An invigorating and gripping book. Probably the best science fiction I have ever read & Cixin Liu is arguably the best sci fi writer alive — in both the “science fiction” and “writer” senses of that term.

The Three-Body Problem asks: If an alien civilization, desperate for survival, invaded Earth — could humanity survive? And would we deserve to? It begins during China’s cultural revolution in 1967, with a brutal act that will shape the future of the whole human race. You might say that this entire book, though packed with plot and information, is merely setting the stage for what’s to come in the next book. A physics professor named Ye Zhetai is being publicly berated in front of a crowd by several passionate young Red Guards, who want him to renounce Einstein’s theory of relativity and thus the “black banner of capitalism” it represents. When he refuses, they attack, whipping him to death with the copper buckles of their belts. The professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, has a front row seat to her father’s death. As the crowd disperses, she stares at his body, and “the thoughts she could not voice dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life.” These thoughts will haunt her throughout a stint in the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, cutting down trees in the once pristine and abundant wilderness — so full of life you could reach into a stream at random and pull out a fish for dinner, now transforming into a barren desert in front of her eyes — and at her hands. There, she meets a journalist who questions the wanton deforestation that has also touched her heart. “I don’t know if the Corps is engaged in construction or destruction,” he says. His thinking is inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a copy of which he gives Ye Wenjie to read and which changes her life. It inspires her to wonder: if the use of pesticides, which she took for granted as a “normal, proper—or at least neutral—act,” is destructive to the world, then “how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.... / It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

This idea shapes the rest of Ye Wenjie’s life. It is what prompts her to invite an alien civilization to our world, serving humanity up to them on a silver platter. She helps the reporter transcribe a letter to his higher-ups, warning them of the “severe ecological consequences” of the Construction Corps’ work. This letter is received as reactionary, and the terrified reporter claims Ye Wenjie wrote it, throwing her under the bus. All is not lost for her, however. Because of an academic paper she wrote before the revolution, "The Possible Existence of Phase Boundaries Within the Solar Radiation Zone and Their Reflective Characteristics,” she is not imprisoned, but scooped up to work on a top-secret military research project: an attempt to contact extraterrestrial life. Because it’s so highly classified, it requires a lifelong commitment, one she gladly makes: all she wants is to be secluded from the brutal world. And at Red Coast Base, on an isolated peak deep in the mountains, crowned by an enormous antenna, she finds the solitude she seeks, immersing herself in her work. It is here that, almost by accident, she harnesses the power of the sun to send a message far out into space — a message that, many years later, receives a chilling reply: “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!” This message is from one pacifist member of an powerful alien civilization, far more advanced than our own, who are facing extinction in their own solar system and desperately need to find a new home. The messenger explains that, if Ye Wenjie replies, she will allow this civilization to pinpoint earth’s location, then colonize earth.

Without hesitation, Ye Wenjie replies.

This story unfolds over the course of the book, interwoven with the present day, during which an ordinary scientist named Xiao Wang is experiencing the results of Ye Wenjie’s message. All over the world, scientists are killing themselves — and strange things are happening to him that are shaking his trust in reality and driving him to the brink of suicidal madness. Before it’s too late, he finds out that he is just one target in an intergalactic war. Through a video game called Three Body, he learns about the enemy: the aliens Ye Wenjie contacted all those years ago. These beings live on a planet called Trisolaris, over four light years away from our Earth. Trisolaris has not one, not two, but three suns, which interact in a chaotic, unpredictable, and deadly dance that alternately scorches and freezes the planet, obliterating Trisolaran civilization — over and over again. When the planet is orbiting one single sun, that’s a Stable Era: a time of predictability and peace. But when one of the other suns dances closer, drawing the planet away, the planet then “wander[s] unstably” though the gravitational fields of the three suns, causing chaos: thus, this is known as a Chaotic Era. No one knows when a Stable Era will occur, how long it will last, or what horrors each new Chaotic Era will bring with it. This brutal, unpredictable environment has shaped the Trisolarans physically, psychologically, technologically... everything. As one Trisolaran puts it, the freedom and dignity of the individual is totally suborned to the survival of civilization. It is a totalitarian society, mired in “spiritual monotony.” As one Trisolaran you might call a dissident puts it: “Anything that can lead to spiritual weakness is declared evil. We have no literature, no art, no pursuit of beauty and enjoyment. We cannot even speak of love ... [I]s there any meaning to such a life?”

Trisolaran society, meaningful or not, is teetering on the precipice of doom. The Trisolarans can dehydrate and rehydrate their bodies, turning them into empty husks that can survive the uninhabitable Chaotic Eras — thus, through both perseverance and blind luck, they have endured up to this point. However, they have never been able to solve the “three-body problem” — they cannot predict the three suns’ movement and thus stay one step ahead. (I’m pretty sure the problem is fundamentally unsolvable.) And there’s an even bigger problem on the horizon... literally. Soon, their planet will fall into one of the suns. Trisolaran astronomers discover that their solar system once held twelve planets — the other eleven have all been consumed by the three hungry suns. “Our world is nothing more than the sole survivor of a Great Hunt.” The Trisolarans have little time left and no hope of survival — unless they can find another planet that supports life. That’s when they receive Ye Wenjie’s message. To them, Earth is the Garden of Eden — stable, prosperous, overflowing with life... like the pristine Chinese wilderness before the Construction/Destruction Corps arrived. The Trisolarans build a fleet and set off for Earth. ETA: 400 years. And they do one more crucial thing: they construct and send what they call sophons to earth, or particles endowed with artificial intelligence that can transmit information back to Trisolaris instantaneously and interfere with human physics research to the point of stopping it completely, essentially freezing scientific progress. They are preparing the ground for their arrival. Through the sophons, the Trisolarans see all — the only depths they cannot penetrate are those of the solitary human mind. And did I mention that Trisolarans communicate their thoughts to each other instantaneously, and there is no such thing as deception? Humanity’s edge is our ability to lie and deceive — an edge that the sophons all but obliterate. All our plans are laid bare to them. And so the intergalactic chess game goes on.

All this, essentially... there is so much of it and it isn’t even the plot of the book; it’s just setup, it’s just the premise, it’s just the question Cixin Liu is asking. If such a thing happened, what would humanity do? What unfolds thereafter is his answer. When humanity finds out that the Trisolaran Fleet is on its way, this knowledge is enough to alter our fate forever. An organization called the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, or ETO, arises, with Ye Wenjie as its guru — an organization that seeks to further the Trisolarans’ aims on earth. Battling the ETO: the governments of the earth, desperate to find a way of defeating the Trisolarans and saving the human race. One faction within the ETO, the Adventists, hopes that the Trisolarans will kill us all; humanity, to them, is not worth saving. Another, the Redemptionists, worship the Trisolarans as gods and hopes that they can coexist with errant humanity and, through their influence, elevate — redeem — them. Ye Wenjie is a Redemptionist, and this is essentially her message: “Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.”

The Three-Body Problem is full to bursting with stunning, unforgettable visual images: like nothing I’ve ever seen or even imagined. Liu's genius lies in his ability to take complex scientific concepts — the kind I am barely aware even exist — and with simple yet vivid language, paint them into breathtaking pictures that will sear themselves into your mind. There are images in this book that deserve to be as iconic as the monoliths from 2001: both vast and microscopic, cosmic and intimate. Many of the most cosmic are set in the Three Body video game or on the planet of Trisolaris itself. Through Three Body, Liu takes us through the history of Trisolaris in an abbreviated yet totally absorbing form: while the player tries to understand this alien world, in order to save it, we learn about it along with him. We stand in awe in front of a vast computer made up of millions of soldiers, waving colored flags, signals washing through them in colorful waves — until they, and everything else on Trisolaris, are sucked into space by the gravitational forces of three suns rising in awe-inspiring alignment over the planet. We see the Trisolorans unfolding a microscopic, eleven-dimensional proton into one, then three dimensions in their sky...

Yet Liu’s skill isn’t limited to these vast, cosmic scenes. He can just as evocatively depict simple and moving ones: such as when a pregnant Ye Wenjie spends time among villagers deep in the mountains:

This period condensed in her memory into a series of classical paintings — not Chinese brush paintings but European oil paintings. Chinese brush paintings are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colors. Everything was warm and intense: the heated kang stove-beds lined with thick layers of aura sedge, the Guandong and Mohe tobacco stuffed in copper pipes, the thick and heavy sorghum meal, the sixty-five-proof baijiu distilled from sorghum — all of these blended into a quiet and peaceful life, like the creek at the edge of the village.

Liu has a vast amount of information to convey throughout this book, and of course he sometimes simply turns to the audience and starts lecturing us, dropping all attempts to “disguise” himself in fictional conventions — such as when one character explains something to another. This kind of conversation, naturally, takes place a lot — but sometimes Liu simply has too much to get across for even such methods (themselves a kind of shorthand) to make sense, and he needs to take even more of a shortcut. But he also knows how to end these long, “dry,” lecture-y scenes with a flourish of beauty that never fails to take my breath away. At times, Liu’s prose can come to feel almost sentimental — it seems to reflect the romantic idea that in the simplest of human societies lies a fundamental goodness... Is this the idea behind the book? Ye Wenjie, the individual driving everything, has a heart hardened to ice by the brutality of the world. Her time with the villagers, and I think her experience of motherhood, thaws it a little — but later, when she confronts the Red Guards who killed her father and sees not a shred of remorse in them — sees that, indeed, they too have been brutalized by the world, and are wrapped up in their own suffering while at the same time asserting its insignificance — “History! History! It’s a new age now. Who will remember us? Who will think of us, including you? Everyone will forget all this completely!” — the dewdrop of hope for society in her heart evaporates and she devotes her life to the ETO from then on. As a Redemptionist, her “ideal is to invite Trisolaran civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, and sinless world.” These aren’t her words, but those of her comrade in the ETO, Mike Evans, who will betray her by splitting off to become an Adventist. What sounds like unconscionable sentimentality — when was Earth ever “sinless”? — is just the cover for the deepest, blackest cynicism of all.

Earlier, I mentioned that the Trisolarans unfold an eleven-dimensional proton into one dimension, then three dimensions, in their sky. They are trying to unfold it into two dimensions, a surface they can write on, so they can turn it into a computer, “re-fold” it to its true, microscopic size, then send it to earth as a sophon. One and three dimensions are mistakes. In one dimension, the proton is an infinitely thin line — one which solar winds scatter into sparkling strings that fall like rain into the Trisolaran atmosphere, drifting with the currents of the air until they attenuate into nothingness. The effect is purely visual and psychological: As one Trisolaran explains to another, the strings have the mass of a single proton and can have no effect on the macroscopic world. However, when they accidentally unfold the proton into three dimensions, it’s a different story. Geometric solids explode across the sky, gradually forming into an array of eyes, which gaze “strangely” upon the planet below. (Not unlike the “eyes” of the sophons, come to think of it.) The microcosmos, it seems, contains intelligence — an intelligence that is, itself, fighting for survival. The eyes conglomerate, forming a parabolic mirror, which concentrates the sun’s light on the capital city of Trisolaris — doing serious damage before the Trisolaran space fleet destroys it. Thus destroying an entire microcosmos — and any intelligence, any “wisdom,” any civilization expressed therein. This is a fleeting moment, but — having just finished The Dark Forest — perhaps key to everything here. The universe is abundant with life, at both the macroscopic and microscopic level, and life wants to live.

#the three-body problem #cixin liu #ken liu #read in 2019 #january 2019

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fierceawakening · 7 years ago

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1/? erinc1978/assholeanon again -- will try to respond to your questions as best I can. As a general point, I think I understand better now where you were coming from in terms of how you approached writing various parts of Steel and Promise, and I'm sorry for having been such a douche about it.

It’s Book Anon again. Cut for length, discussions of consent, some nonexplicit sexual content, and spoilers.

Re: 6/ – I think there were a few things that had me thinking Teran was saying that everything kind she’d done was purposeful manipulation. Some of this may well be incorrectly remembered through anxiety haze, but IIRC part of it was her general attitude during the conversation, that struck me as generally sort of triumphant and preening – along the lines of “ha, I got you to fall for me, aren’t I clever.” (cont’d)

Re:6/ contd - I think another was Cailyn saying something to the effect of “so what about the ‘you’re a jewel among stones’ business”, and Teran IIRC didn’t deny that was part of the manipulation. So I took it as being broader than the s/m. As we learn that Teran was trading torture to own Cailyn, that confirmed it for me emotionally – that she couldn’t have been sincere in her regret over upsetting Cailyn by merely wrecking her clothes if she had no qualms about buying her outright.

As a general note, I’m really sorry that my deactivating killed your archives of my asks. It didn’t occur to me that would happen. Should’ve sent everything as a message in the first place and then I wouldn’t have spammed your ask box. I didn’t remember there was another option until Tumblr cut me off and said, “Whoa, you need to wait an hour until you send any more asks.”

On the personal note - “safe” was a terrible choice of words for a complicated internal state that I was wrong to externalize, and I feel really bad for causing you more pain over this. I absolutely do NOT mean to suggest you are an Unsafe Person in any kind of general sense, and I give you my word that I will not say or imply to anyone, online or off, that you are not a safe person to be around.

As one last note - I understand why you feel jerked around, and I wish I could take back my actions and that I’d just discussed the book like a normal person in the first place instead of jumping to conclusions, but I can’t do anything more at this point than apologize. Just let me know when you want to be done with this interaction so that I don’t overstep your boundary (i.e. I give you a last response and then block). I found code to block websites via my OS, and when you’re done, I’m done.

Okay, so I don’t know if this helps at all, but I’ve been avoiding mentioning personal stuff because of the whole “safe/unsafe” deal which I didn’t want to feed into, but I feel a bit like I have to wade into it to make some of this make sense.

It’s true that some things about Teran are things I’ve experienced or are based on me. One of those things is that… when I joined the BDSM community around me at the tender young age of 21, I didn’t know too much about myself or where I fit in that bunch of overlapping letters. But I knew I was interested, specifically, in SM–I’d spent most of my young life fantasizing about people who liked pain, but I didn’t think they really existed, or thought they had some kind of Freudian complex that meant even if I knew what I was doing I’d harm them emotionally by enticing them into indulging in something that was bad for them. When I was a youngin you really couldn’t find much that positively portrayed people with pain fetishes.

But the thing was, when I got into the community? Intense masochists aren’t crazy or unhealthy and dating them doesn’t make you evil. BUT they’re rare. Most people are interested in sensation play but not really in intense SM stuff–and even more common than that is an interest in (usually mild/bedroom-only) D/s.

So finding partners, or at least finding partners that are actually complementary to me on that score? Is hard! They’re out there–there’s at least one in every community I’ve been in–but they’re relatively rare.

In part because they’re rare, in my experience a lot of them were older, and actually a lot of them were in relationships. Of the “masochism was completely unacceptable when I married my wife, but I couldn’t stand it any more so I asked her to beat me, she said YIKES NOOOOO but eventually agreed I could go to play parties if I don’t actually side date anyone and hide the marks” sort. (This is one reason I disagree with antis about age gaps. One of the first people I ever beat? Three times my age. Did he harm me? Well, I did end up hurting my shoulder by not realizing I was new to this and should have slowed down… SHIT SHIT SHIT THE ANTIS WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!)

It’s kinda lonely, and is part of the reason I haven’t dated anyone since my last partner. They’re hard to find! At least if you actually want, you know, a relationship.

So that was the thing. Teran found one, he was actually single and interested, but he got sick and died. And she went back to the dark channels to look for another one, and couldn’t really find one, because as assholey as the nobles are, the dark channels are much more like… what most people were and what I wasn’t really looking for.

So Teran knows that almost anyone is gonna disappoint her, and either she can 1) keep having random dates with people hoping she chances on someone who is orientationally masochistic and be vaguely frustrated until she does or 2) try to see if she can train someone to become what she wants. (Especially someone who IS inherently submissive and wants to serve, which Cailyn is.)

So she does 2). Without making it clear what she’s doing, because she’s kind of a jerk. And because “oh, I’d like to alter your sexuality, you good with that?” is a big ask.

Doesn’t make it okay that she did that and wasn’t honest about it, and I’m not saying it is. Pushing someone’s soft limits can be okay–that’s why they’re soft limits–but not realizing someone might be just a little upset upon finding out that’s pretty much why they picked you? UH. TERAN NO.

From Teran’s perspective (which, again, TERAN NO) she expected Cailyn to figure it out. She never came out and said “this is an experiment,” but she talked often about how Cailyn’s experiences of pain and desires were shifting. So she thought Cailyn would figure it out, and assumed (again, TERAN NO) that Cailyn coming back over and over meant Cailyn was fundamentally okay with it. She knew she was being manipulative, but she didn’t realize how awful she was being. Which is why she was surprised when Cailyn was like “HOLY SHIT AM I AN EXPERIMENT?” as if this was 1) news and 2) bad news.

The other thing Teran does that is unquestionably horrible is the bargaining to own Cailyn. Whether it’s clear from the text or not (and I can’t really go back and reread in depth now to find out if I was too ambiguous about this), what I meant to say was that Teran wants Cailyn to freely consent to stay with her, and asks for it. When Cailyn says no, she initially respects it, but then the Councils (at the behest, of course, of Ben, who is the actual skin-crawlingly terrible person who gives no fucks whatever about consent so of course he would dream this crap up) basically say “you know if you do this for us you won’t have to worry about that cute girl running away from you *wink*” and… Teran goes for it, even though part of her knows she shouldn’t.

So again… I’m not trying to say I meant for what Teran did to be Okay Because She’s Lonely. It’s not okay. But I didn’t mean that she was a completely uncaring person. I meant that she was a very damaged person who gets what she wants through manipulation because why not when almost everyone despises you anyway, someone “liking” you means they want to rape you and force you to carry their kid, and the one guy who actually loved you was perfectly fine with heavy D/s… and died horribly anyway?

I appreciate you saying that you didn’t mean “safe” the way I took it. I just… if you actually think I am okay with real world dubious consent and was saying it’s fine, then… I actually deserve to have people warned about me. And the thing about it is… if you actually are a person who is abusive, or manipulative, or real-world wobbly on consent, you’re the last person to know it. Abusive and manipulative people make excuses for themselves to themselves, which is why it’s so hard for them to change.

So while my gut reaction to your comments is “I didn’t say that! I don’t endorse that! The thing I wrote isn’t that!” there’s part of me that feels that I can’t argue… because I’d always say/think that I’m safe even if I’m not. Which puts me in the awkward position of “That sounds wrong, and also insulting and hurtful! But that’s exactly what I would think if it was 100% correct!”

Which is where the scrupulosity spirals come from.

So the only thing I can really say and do is… again, give you as much of a platform as I can given the energy I have at any given time, and make sure people who aren’t me see it, and have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether I am accurately assessing myself as “someone who attempts to be positive and safe for friends and lovers” or not.

#steel and promise #spoilers #my writing #Anonymous

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johnl · 3 years ago

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Best summation of where we are at just now -a twitter thread by @martyrmade

I think I've had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they'll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they're not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts - that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan's July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff - who were on TV saying they'd seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn't - all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn't make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov't when it didn't happen.

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele's source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution - agencies, the press, Congress, academia - gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov't destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.

It's hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov't as a conspiracy... Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don't stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov't official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they'd be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true.

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn't just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Re: "fake impeachment", we now know that Trump's request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden's $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a "mistake" - but, ya know, the election's over, so who cares?

Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr's laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn't have been banned.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange - the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc - but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr's laptop would've been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would've been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.

Even the courts' refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They'll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he'll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?

It's a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were "protests", but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It's a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.

They knew it was unconstitutional, it's right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn't see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn't implied, it was direct.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov't is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might've kept him alive.

#@martyrmade

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mes-reparations-iphone · 4 years ago

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myhauntedsalem · 4 years ago

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Can Ghosts Communicate Through Our Dreams?

Have you ever wondered if ghosts or spirits can communicate with us through our dreams?

Inside each and every one of us is a little bit of curiosity for the unknown. Whether or not we choose to explore it, we cannot deny that there are mysterious forces at play around us each and every day.

Some people follow their instincts and explore the parameters of the unknown world. Pushing the boundaries of the veils hidden between light and dark. For fun, knowledge or a more sinister cause, some seek answers and assurance from sources outside our realm of being.

Sometimes, these beings seek to contact us.

How exactly can we hope to communicate with apparitions that live in the peripheral? How could they let us know that they are still here among us? Do they have a specific message to give, an instruction to pass down, or are they looking for reassurance that they haven’t been forgotten?

Throughout history, people claim to have been contacted by ghosts through their dreams. Many people push these encounters aside as an over-active imagination or simply a vivid dream but the answer isn’t nearly as simple as that no matter how much they want to convince themselves otherwise.

How are we supposed to know the best ways for an inconceivable being to communicate, when we can hardly agree on whether or not such a being exists in the first place? This is why it really isn’t that far-fetched to imagine that spirits can contact us through our dreams. It would make sense for them to come to us in our most relaxed, peaceful state.

Spirits contact us through dreams for many different reasons. They might be helping console a grieving family member by letting them know they are okay, they might be offering help or guidance or even passing on instructions for a task left unfinished. Remember that it is extremely rare that a ghost is out to try and hurt us.

Losing a loved one is something extremely difficult to come to terms with. We might not even be aware that we are longing for a sign that they are okay and at peace. Spirits, however, pick up on this. Once their human body has passed on, they are left with their spirit alone and not many options on how to communicate with us.

Dreams are the most common way for ghosts to make contact. While we are asleep, we are at our most comfortable state. Our conscious mind is at complete rest and is more relaxed and giving less resistance to outside forces. Spirits find it easier to enter our consciousness at this point and do not need to put up much of a fight to get through.

As we are used to dreaming, we are more comfortable seeing something out of the ordinary during our sleep than in the waking day. Seeing a loved one appear to us while we are asleep is definitely much more comforting than having them appear to us in the middle of the day. Our minds are more open to processing and receiving this information in our dream state and we are more likely to pay closer attention to the details when we are in a dream.

Spirits will usually communicate with symbols, signs, scenes and words. This can be totally confusing at first, but everything is there for a reason and everything would have been chosen for a specific purpose. They would want to give a very definite, very precise message but have limited resources, time and energy to do so.

How Do Ghosts Try To Communicate Through Our Dreams?

There are also many different ways that spirit might be signaling to us that they are trying to make contact. If you are experiencing these dreams and notice one or more of the below happening, you can assure yourself that somebody is trying to make contact with you.

You hear your name being called – we all turn around now and again after hearing our name to see nobody standing there. This can often be a spirit using all their energy to get our attention. It almost sounds as if it has been called in your head and you can’t find the source of the sound. Don’t ignore it. Rather, try and focus on this voice when it happens. There may be more to the message.

You sense a presence – you can feel someone watching you, someone follows you into a room but it isn’t an ominous feeling. Spirits can make their presence felt. It won’t be a suffocating feeling or one that feels dangerous, instead, it will just be a feeling of someone else occupying your space, even if you can’t see them. Don’t be afraid; just be happy that you have someone by your side, watching over you.

Objects move around – sometimes spirits are able to move small objects around. If you see a small item fall or move out of the corner of your eye with no explanation, it could be a spirit trying to make contact. Hopefully, it is nothing expensive that ends up breaking but what a better way to get your attention. Lights flicker – spirits are able to manipulate electricity and energy. They manage to alter the flow of electricity and make lights flicker. As scary as this might be at the time, just remember that it is coming from a loved one, who just wants you to know that they are there.

Spirits, apparitions and ghosts try different methods to get their message across. The most direct and effective way is by contacting us through our dreams. They are able to talk or give signs of what they need to say and we are often able to remember this information. Pay attention to these dreams, and any other signs that may be happening around you. Follow your instincts and don’t doubt what you suspect. There might be a very important message waiting for you or it might just be that little bit of comfort you need in order to get closure.

Spirits are all around us. They are stuck between our earth and an afterlife. They are lonely. Watching your family move on from your passing is an experience we can’t even begin to comprehend. There might have been unfinished business that they left behind or a chapter they left open. It is completely understandable why they would want to try and make contact. Comforting a lonely wife they left behind, giving wisdom and direction to a lost son or even just making their presence known, spirits have a purpose to play in our world.

#Can Ghosts Communicate Through Our Dreams?#paranormal #ghost and hauntings #ghost and spirits #haunted salem #myhauntedsalem

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msclaritea · 7 years ago

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~Napoleon, Nietzsche & TFP~

A Study In Holmesian Iconoclasm: Masks & Images P.2

This is the final part of a series that looked into the canon story The Six Napoleons, resulting in mary-resurrects-lucretia & sherlock-on-the-ocean-when-neitzsche-wept. In the story, someone is running around, smashing Napoleon busts. Strange enough, but even more so when you find out that this has all happened before. Arthur Conan Doyle was masterful, it seems, at embedding real-life people and true tales of History in the Holmes stories. Iconoclasm is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of usually religious icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons…In Political and revolutionary iconoclasm, revolutions, and changes of regime, whether through uprising of the local population, foreign invasion, or a combination of both, are often accompanied by the public destruction of statues and monuments identified with the previous regime.

During the French Revolution, the statue of Napoleon on the column at Place Vendôme, Paris was the target of iconoclasm several times: destroyed after the Bourbon Restoration, and during the Paris Commune.

Napoleon loomed large as a political figure in the 19th century. The artists of subsequent periods were a mix of elevating his image…or smashing it. Napoleonic Iconoclasm is an actual known trope, as he evolved into a mythical figure during the Romantic Period.

“Such a fact must tell against the theory that the man who breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens of the same bust.“

The Adventure of The Six Napoleons touches on true political history, and the image of Napoleon intertwines with the enduring quality of Holmes. Moriarty was not called ‘The Napoleon of Crime’, for nothing. He was created as a nemesis to Holmes; his mirror image, for his eventual death. But whereas Moriarty died, Sherlock Holmes, like Napoleon, was ‘banished’, only to return, and be celebrated, while once again, taking control of ACD’s career.

“Privately, he has become something of a villain, over time, tyrannically taking control of Doyle’s writing, and his endlessly-replicated heroic figure invited smashing.” This quote, from The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes: "Shattering the pedestrian image of reason is Holmes’s great iconoclastic gift.“ "His reasoning is obsessive, impulsive, unpredictable, astonishing.” Holmes displays much enthusiasm and dramatic flair in The Six Thatchers, and “When the blow of the riding crop shatters the image so long sought, and reveals the pearl inside, all subsequent explanations seem a footnote. That blow is this story’s symbolic representation of reason’s power, and that single gesture sums up the transvaluation (re-evaluating of the values) of reason’s image that Sherlock Holmes has wrought.“ It’s part of my theory that BBC Sherlock is engaging Holmesian Iconoclasm; in a literary sense, breaking the man down to his most basic parts, taking him into dark places in an experiment of re-integration, using the teachings of Nietzsche in Season 4, as a way of aligning his moral code for the world we live in now. What ARE the sum of his parts?

The Question: Sherlock and Theseus’s Paradox by Dennis O’ Neil

"An Ancient Greek named Theseus…builds a ship. Over time the ship needs repairs and pieces of it have to be replaced and finally everything has been replaced. Not a single splinter of the original craft remains. Which brings us to what is known in some circles as Theseus’s Paradox. We ask: Is the ship our man Theseus ends with the same one that he built years earlier?”

In The Beginning: Birth & The Bi-Part Soul

Below is an excerpt from a thesis The Influence of Duality and Poe’s Notion of the Bi-Part Soul’ on the Genesis of Detective Fiction in the Nineteenth-Century by Stephanie Craighill. It is a lengthy, beautiful piece on the genesis of the creation of what we refer to as the Mirrors. Like Nietzsche, Poe and Doyle held strong belief in Duality/Dualism/Balance, and used that belief, NOT just when structuring characters, but the stories themselves.

"Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin; the creative and the resolvent." Poe‘s explicit reference to the double‘ directly intertwines with the theme of duality which resonates throughout the Gothic novel and the Romantic Movement in nineteenth century fiction; this paradigm is evident in texts such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Faust, Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein…This motif has been extensively examined by scholars and has been defined using numerous but vague classifications which include the fictional double‘, the evil twin‘, the alter ego‘, the antithetical self‘, the fragmentation of self into dual‘ and the twin soul‘. Dupin reproaches the Prefect of the Parisian police for being too cunning to be profound‘,

(which mirrors the game of chess where what is complex is mistaken for what is profound‘. The detective, also, rebukes the Prefect‘s wisdom‘ for being all head and no body‘ which relates to the detective‘s earlier supposition that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic‘ The Prefect‘s reasoning is too fanciful‘ to be successful. It is through the combined use of both aspects of the Bi Part Soul‘, the head‘ and the body‘ and their associated faculties of the imagination and reason, that the detective was able to outwit his opponent.)

Duality is implicit in the structure and characterization of The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘. It is visible in the tale‘s twin plot, the divided self which is the narrator and Dupin, the doubling of the criminals, victims and detective and most prominently the detective‘s creative and resolvent‘ Bi-Part Soul‘. Dupin‘s dual psychology is associated with moral ambiguity and a blurring of boundaries which, consequently, has shaped a compelling psychosomatic template for a genre of multifaceted and complex detective protagonists. Holmes‘ inherent dualism is summarised by Iain Sinclair and Ed Glinert who state that: Holmes is the classically divided man that the age required: alchemist and rigorous experimenter, furious walker and definitive slacker, athlete and dope fiend. He could, as the mood took him, be Trappist or motor mouth … Holmes is forever lurching between incompatible polarities. From the beginning Holmes was a double figure, first in himself as the mixture of scientist and poet and even more significantly in the double figure of Sherlock Holmes Doctor Watson‘. Conan Doyle‘s implicit doubling of Poe‘s detective trilogy extends further; like Dupin who doubles the criminals in The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ and the thief Minister D. in The Purloined Letter‘, Holmes represents a doppelgänger for his arch nemesis, the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty. Moriarty only directly appears in two of the sixty Holmes accounts; in the short story The Final Problem‘ and the novella The Valley of Fear, though he is mentioned in a selection of the other narratives. In these two accounts we learn that Moriarty shares a number of common characteristics with Holmes. He is of similar physical appearance, has a phenomenal mathematical faculty‘, is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker‘ and a scientific criminal‘ Moriarty conforms to the same Bi-Part‘ mould as the detectives Holmes and Dupin; he is both reasoned and artistic. In The Final Problem‘ Holmes refers to Moriarty as the organiser of half that is evil. Moriarty could characterize an inversion of the values embodied by Holmes‘ and, as a result, the criminal represents the detective‘s doppelgänger who is equipped with an identical skill set but motivated by an evil purpose."

Context: Paralleling the Works of Nietzsche and Sherlock

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

Thus Spake Zarathustra: Sherlock On The Ocean:

"The above piece was written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley. Perhaps most famous is Henley’s closing statement: “I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul.” The poem is a declaration of the triumph of the human spirit - the refusal to bend to a universe Henley called “a place of wrath and tears. Holmes was an unprecedented sort of hero. Emerging from a culture enthralled by scientific progress, he was a superhero who relied almost entirely on his powers of deduction…Holmes was and is the sensationalized personification of Henley’s captain of the soul. His powers of deduction are presented as the triumph of reason, a triumph open to all of humanity if we’d only try a little harder. In this way, Sherlock Holmes is Nietzsche’s “superman” (a term coined in Thus Spake Zarathustra, written a few years before A Study in Scarlet). He is the moral, observational and logical evolution of mankind.

The Übermensch is Nietzsche’s concept of the ideal, and it can translate to overman, superman, above human, and probably some other things. The Übermensch doesn’t have incredible physical abilities. Instead, his power is mental and spiritual. The greatest power in the world, according to Nietzsche, is freedom, and I’m about to make a huge and tragic over-simplification of Nietzsche’s theory as to what that means. It is that complete human freedom is achieved by radically breaking with all forms of guilt, shame, and external authority. It combines many qualities of a completely naïve and fearless toddler with those of an experienced and wise elder."

Sherlock: Isn't that...one of those Law things?

"In the first or second episode a minor character calls him a sociopath, and the show really delves into the question of what actually makes Holmes and Moriarty (a really evil criminal who is as good at crime as Holmes is at solving crimes) different from each other aside from pure occupational interests. The sociopath comment was my first clue. Critics of Nietzsche’s philosophy have always contended that his Übermensch would really be a sociopath who just looks out for number one. What is useful in making the connection between Sherlock Holmes and Nietzsche’s work is that I think the Holmes series provides a picture into how the Übermensch doesn’t necessarily play out as a sociopath.“

"He can’t stand the boredom of the day to day, the absurd. And it is just like any good German existentialist to value present experience over the longevity of life. Furthermore, he is completely open about his habit with Dr. Watson, who is initially very concerned. His openness about it shows that Holmes gives no credibility to prescriptions other than his own as to what constitutes a good life.

His passion happens to be for forensic science, or the “science of deduction,” as Holmes calls it. The key, though, is that he throws everything he has got into what he truly cares about, leaving no room for time wasters like social obligations, civic engagement, parties, etc. Dr. Watson even finds that Holmes isn’t aware that the Earth revolves around the sun, since it has no use for his forensic studies.”

“There is an old illusion—it is called good and evil. Around soothsayers and astrologers hath hitherto revolved the orbit of this illusion.

Once did one believe in soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, "Everything is fate: thou shalt, for thou must!”

Then again did one distrust all soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, “Everything is freedom: thou canst, for thou willest!”

O my brethren, concerning the stars and the future there hath hitherto been only illusion, and not knowledge; and therefore concerning good and evil there hath hitherto been only illusion and not knowledge!" Thus Spake Zarathustra

”On Nietzsche: While most of his contemporaries looked on the late nineteenth century with unbridled optimism, confident in the progress of science and the rise of the German state, Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental crisis in values. With the rise of science, the Christian worldview no longer held a prominent explanatory role in people’s lives, a view Nietzsche captures in the phrase “God is dead.” However, science does not introduce a new set of values to replace the Christian values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw that people need to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives, and if they could not find it in science, they would turn to aggressive nationalism and other such salves. The last thing Nietzsche would have wanted was a return to traditional Christianity, however. Instead, he sought to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful affirmation of life.“

The Gay Science: Nietzsche’s first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ […] Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

This was one of the themes of Shakespeare’s No Fear Sonnets 1-60, some of which have been found embedded and acted out in the show. 59 is heavy with this theme and found in The Six Thatchers. “Not only does Nietzsche posit that the universe is recurring over infinite time and space, but that the different versions of events that have occurred in the past may at one point or another take place again, hence "all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet…” And with each version of events is hoping that some knowledge or awareness is gained to better the individual, hence “And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me and a woman will be born, just like Mary—only that it is hoped to be that the head of this man may contain a little less foolishness…”

The Antichrist, originally published in 1895

MARY: Hm. Now you’d think we’d have noticed, when she was born. JOHN: Hm? Noticed what? MARY: The little 666 on her forehead. JOHN: Hmhmhm, that’s The Omen. MARY: (lifts her head to look at him with a frown, stays like that though John’s entire answer) So? JOHN: Well, you said it was like The Exorcist. They’re two different things. You can’t be the Devil and the Antichrist.

“Nietzsche writes scathingly about Christianity, arguing that it is fundamentally opposed to life. In Christian morality, Nietzsche sees an attempt to deny all those characteristics that he associates with healthy life. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our sexuality, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness. Furthermore, Christian morality is based on the promise of an afterlife, leading Christians to devalue this life in favor of the beyond. Nietzsche argues that Christianity springs from resentment for life and those who enjoy it, and it seeks to overthrow health and strength with its life-denying ethic. As such, Nietzsche considers Christianity to be the hated enemy...Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious."

Sherlock: This hospital is full of people dying, doctor, why don’t you go and cry by their bedsides, see what good it does.

Nietzsche claimed that the Christian religion and its morality are based on imaginary fictions. Concept of morality is falsified. Morality is no longer an expression of life and growth. Instead, morality opposes life by presenting well–being as a dangerous temptation. Priestly agitators “… interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for 'sin,’…The sacred book formulates the will of God and specifies what is to be given to the priests. Priests become parasites.”…All things of life are so ordered that the priest is everywhere indispensable; at all the natural events of life, at birth, marriage, sickness, death. Not to speak of 'sacrifice’ (meal–times)…Natural values become utterly valueless. The priest sanctifies and bestows all value. Disobedience of God (the priest) is 'sin.’ Subjection to God (the priest) is redemption. Priests use 'sin’ to gain and hold power.

Sherlock: …And contrast is, after all, God’s own plan to enhance the beauty of his creation. Or it would be if God were not a ludicrous fantasy designed to provide a career opportunity for the family idiot.

*Interesting footnote about the first part of this statement. Goethe, from whom Nietzche gets the word Ubermensch, apparently actually invented the Color Wheel. THIS video shows how he used light, shadow and a color to enhance the beauty of another.

“The Truth’s Boring!”

“Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth. That we should think there is only one right way of considering a matter is only evidence that we have become inflexible in our thinking. Such intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying “no” to life, a condition that Nietzsche abhors. A healthy mind is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of considering a matter. There is no single truth but rather many.”

“Because You’re an Idiot”

"Nietzsche thought that the word idiot best described Jesus. According to Walter Kaufmann, he might have been referring to the naïve protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s book The Idiot. “The fable of Christ as miracle–worker and redeemer is not the origin of Christianity..Jesus did not want to redeem anyone. He wanted to show how to live. His legacy was his bearing and behavior. He did not resist evildoers. He loved evildoers. Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practised was not a proper representation of Jesus’ teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did, in particular his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians had constantly done the opposite of."

Human, All Too Human: On Becoming

JOHN: Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this. SHERLOCK (not looking round): Hmm? JOHN: Being back. Being a hero again. SHERLOCK: Oh, don’t be stupid. JOHN: You’d have to be an idiot not to see it. You love it. SHERLOCK (turning to face him): Love what? JOHN: Being Sherlock Holmes. SHERLOCK: I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.

"Nietzsche wrote that Heraclitus "will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction”. Nietzsche developed the vision of a chaotic world in perpetual change and becoming. The state of becoming does not produce fixed entities, such as being, subject, object, substance, thing. Ephesus, who in the sixth century BC, said that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming." Sherlock, at this point, is still in a state of becoming.

"Reptile!"

"But wherever ye would ascend with me, O my brethren, take care lest a parasite ascend with you! A parasite: that is a reptile, a creeping, cringing reptile, that trieth to fatten on your infirm and sore places. And this is its art: it divineth where ascending souls are weary, in your trouble and dejection, in your sensitive modesty, doth it build its loathsome nest.”

“Enemy” shall ye say but not “villain,” “invalid” shall ye say but not “wretch,” “fool” shall ye say but not “sinner.”

And thou, red judge, if thou would say audibly all thou hast done in thought, then would every one cry: “Away with the nastiness and the virulent reptile!” Thus Spake Zarathustra

Why All The Pain? The Birth of Tragedy

“Artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.”

"Apollo was the god of light, reason, harmony, balance and prophesy, while Dionysus was the god of wine, revelry, ecstatic emotion and tragedy.

Nietzsche uses this duality for discussing the artistic process which relate to either Apollo or Dionysus. Apollo and Dionysus symbols of this duality which he further distinguishes with the terms of “dreams” and “drunkenness.” For Nietzsche, dreams represent the realm of beautiful forms and symbols, an orderly place of light and reason. Drunkenness, on the other hand, is that state of wild passions where the boundaries between "self" and "other" dissolve. (This may strike as odd, but Nietzsche seems to make the assumption that, when dreaming, one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming and so still able to separate appearance from reality. I believe that he would claim those who are entirely caught up in their dreams are experiencing Dionysian ecstasy, not Apollonian beauty.)"

Meet Nihilism

”The nihilist believes in nothing, has no loyalties and has no purpose in life. Some are left with only an impulse to destroy.“

EURUS: Am I being punished? MAN (offscreen, faintly): You’ve been bad. EURUS (almost sing-song): There’s no such thing as ‘bad.’ MAN (offscreen): What about good? EURUS: Good and bad are fairytales. We have evolved to attach an emotional significance to what is nothing more than the survival strategy of the pack animal. We are conditioned to invest divinity in utility. Good isn’t really good, evil isn’t really wrong, and bottoms aren’t really pretty. You are a prisoner of your own meat. MAN (offscreen): Why aren’t you? EURUS (raising her head and looking directly into the camera as she speaks the words slowly and clearly): I’m too clever.

"Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that morality does not exist as something inherent to objective reality; therefore no action is necessarily preferable to any other. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is not inherently right or wrong. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value."

Eurus is most definitely a Sherlock mirror; a Bi-Part Soul. She doesn’t even know 'if something’s beautiful or not; only right’. Eurus is pure Nihilism. A Brain without a heart; an actual calculating machine, attempting to show that making a supposed 'morally-right decision can actually create the opposite result, so that moral codes don’t matter. She used tests, like sherlocks-paradox, tests he has been put through before. As we witness, Sherlock succeeds.

This is still the same journey many have pointed out, just using the Nietzschean Method to do so. Growing from a great man…a Superman into a good one; flawed and very much human, with a Moral Code to match.

"Friedrich Nietzsche believed that the corrosive effects of nihilism would end up destroying all moral constructs, religions, and metaphysical convictions...that nihilism would be the most corrosive force in history.”

Fun Note: On Mustaches & Military Kinks

“Nietzsche lived with the mustache most of his adult life, and it represented for him the military life. He served briefly in the military, and always held certain admiration for military discipline. In him we get a sense that the military attitude is very important towards living a proper, fulfilling life. If you ask most people what does Nietzsche look like, what they will immediately say is: ‘oh that’s the guy with the huge mustache’. And if you ask: ‘well, what about the eyes? the nose? what about the chin? what about the hair?’ They will probably draw a blank. And Nietzsche himself points out that when you see someone with a big handsome mustache, what they see is: the mustache. It is a mask, it allowed Nietzsche in effect to hide.”

To conclude, through the eyes of Nietzsche, the show is smashing the previous images of Sherlock Holmes, using the Philosopher’s works, in addition to Freud and Josef Breuer, to take him through a journey of self-discovery, and yes, love. Given the strong hints to a troubled childhood and suppression of feelings, the philosophies of these men, together, are employed, just as presented in When Nietzsche Wept. This meta cannot even begin to cover the full scope of Nietzshe’s works or his strong influence on the blueprint of Sherlock Holmes. His presence is found throughout canon; sometimes, in the form of other characters. I will say that Nietzche’s ideas are many, profound and important. Considering his influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes, who has in turn, been so important to 21st century, in many fields, Friedrich Nietzsche should always be held in high regard. Not bad for a guy who in the good old days would have been labelled a Heretic, and burned at the stake. So maybe he’s right; we can be better.

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. Ecco Homo

(Don’t you just love some of his book titles?)

Read also the-reptile-in-221b & sherlock-denying-the-devil

@brilliantorinsane @simpleanddestructivechemistry @shylockgnomes @possiblyimbiassed @raggedyblue @rinkagaminesstuff @artfulkindoforder @radogost @asherlockstudy @fellshish @multivariate-madness @madzither @yorkiepug @loveismyrevolution @consultingidiots @tjlcisthenewsexy

Full text of Thus Spake Zarathustra

X X X X X X X X X X X

#Napoleon Nietzsche & TFP Meta #Threads #1895 #The Ubermensche #Josef Breuer #Freud #Nietzsche/Sherlock Parallels #Holmesian Iconoclasm #I'm Done!

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thewestmeetingroom · 4 years ago

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TWMR Ep 48 No Body-Mind Left Behind

SPEAKERS

Alex Locust, Jheanelle Anderson, Beau Hayward, Alisha Krishna, Janine Al Hadidi,

Facilitated by Day Milman

Janine

Hello, and welcome to the West Meeting Room. We are broadcasting on CIUT 89.5 FM at Hart House. My name is Janine and for this week's episode, we'll be sharing a recording from November 19, 2020 of a panel discussion about Disability Justice titled No Body/Mind Left Behind. This event was a partnership between Hart House and the annual Diversity and Equity conference from U of T Sport and Rec and the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education. My colleague Day Milman facilitated this conversation between U of T students, recent alumni and special guest, Alex Locust, where they explored how Disability Justice creates a framework for society that benefits everyone. More information about this event, and all of its panelists will be available in our show notes. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Day Milman

Welcome, everybody tonight. My name is Day Milman. I am the manager of Learning and Community at Hart House, which is the community center of the University of Toronto. And I am so excited to be here as part of this event tonight. Thank you so much for joining us for what promises to be a rich intersectional conversation grounded in lived experiences of people with disabilities. Tonight we'll explore Disability Justice and how this lens can radically alter how we navigate the world and support each other on this journey. Tonight's conversation is a panel discussion between U of T students recent alumni and our special guest Alex Locust, also known as The Glamputee. So Alex is a certified rehabilitation counselor and a proud multiracial glamputee spreading the word about social justice one workshop at a time. Whether on the runway, or in a counseling session, Alex aspires to emulate the tenacity of the trailblazers before him and fiercely advocates for equity in all community spaces. Thank you, Alex, so much for coming tonight. And I'd also like to invite our panelists to introduce themselves tonight starting with Jheanelle Anderson.

Jheanelle Anderson

Thank you Day, I'm Jheanelle, I am a recent graduate, just completed my MSW at the Faculty of Social Work at U of T. I sit as a co-chair of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, in Hamilton. Yeah, and I'm a research assistant with the Center for Research and Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims. Really excited to be here tonight and have this discussion, much needed discussion. Thank you.

Alisha Krishna

Hi, everyone. My name is Alisha Krishna, I use they them pronouns. I have lived experience with learning disabilities, mental illness, physical disability. So identifying as disabled is my identity. I'm a first year law student at U of T and also the treasurer of Students for Barrier Free Access, which is a levy funded group on the U of T campus. And we're run by and for disabled students, advocating for the removal of barriers in education. And I also am very excited for tonight.

Beau Hayward

Hi, all my name is Beau Hayward, pronouns are he and him. And I am part of the Diversity and Equity team as the Equity Initiative Student Lead, a student leader and I'm looking to work with the university and develop some accessibility around athletics and physical education. And very excited to have this conversation with Alex and the rest of the panelists.

Day Milman

Thanks, everybody. Thanks so much for being here tonight and for sharing your energy and your experiences. So let's just start off with a question for Alex. In a previous conversation, you said to me that Disability Justice is like a north star in the work that you do. Maybe not everyone here is familiar with Disability Justice, and I'm wondering if you could just start off by giving us a bit of a grounding in what Disability Justice is and how it plays out in your life.

Alex Locust

Absolutely. I am just so happy to be here. And after our conversation last week, I was just like, humming and so it's just always wonderful to be in conversation with other people with disabilities and so I'm really happy to share what Disability Justice means to me and explore that in relationship with each other. I also just want to quick pause and offer an invitation if the other panelists are interested in just offering an image description for those who who are tuning in and don't have the ability to see us right now. I'm biracial, as Day mentioned, I've got my big curly mane back in a, in a little ponytail, very much in my pink paradise with my "She's All Fat" shirt that I'm very happy to be wearing. Lots of lots of scruff, it's been a long week. So just offering that really quickly, just so, you know, model access, right, that's a huge part of Disability Justice is that collective access piece, but as a north star for me, you know, I came into an understanding or awareness of Disability Justice through Sins Invalid, in the Bay Area, Patty Burn as the director of Sins Invalid, the performing arts group of queer and trans, black and brown disabled people performing beautiful pieces about about their bodies, their minds, their sexuality. And what I came to learn was that Disability Justice was an evolution of disability, civil rights, much like, you know, reproductive justice is an evolution of reproductive rights, you know, environmental justice, right, these frameworks that are acknowledging that, champions, changemakers, these advocates, came before us and really broke open a dialogue, broke open space, to acknowledge that, you know, in this case, disabled people were not being afforded the rights that they deserved. And then Disability Justice is acknowledging that rights are great, you know, as a bare minimum, but when we're thinking about what liberation feels like, what freedom feels like, we have to attend to the nuances within the community. You know, there are black and brown disabled people, there are queer disabled people, you know? As a as a black, queer, disabled person, I feel very seen by that. And, you know, it's about exploring the liberation of disabled people from an intersectional lens, and from one that's by led by the most impacted, right, so Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, LeRoy Moore, Sebastian Margaret, Eli Claire, the late Stacey Park, right, these amazing people came together and proposed these 10 Principles of Disability Justice, which are saying, you know, this is how we collectively, everybody, not just disabled people, you know, Disability Justice isn't just for disabled people, it's for everyone. That's, I think where that title really speaks to me, it's no body left behind. It's not about how you identify or what your label is. This is this is for all of our freedom.

Day Milman

Yeah, absolutely. That's where the title for this conversation came in was. "No body, no mind left behind" was directly from the principles which were developed by Sins Invalid, which you can look up. And I'm wondering if we can ask some of the other panelists to sort of talk a little bit about their experience and how Disability Justice works in their lives.

Alisha Krishna

And I can go first, just image description, I'm in my bedroom in Toronto. I'm Indian, Canadian, I have long black hair, I'm wearing a hoodie. And I have glasses as well. Discovering Disability Justice, it's taken me a long time. So I've been with SBA for three years. And I've really been in this for three years. And it's never a finished process. Like I still go to events that we host and workshops and stuff, and I still always learn something about myself and the way I relate to people. But in terms of what I have learned, instead of what I have yet to learn, what I hold on to most is the fact that, you do as much as you can, and that's okay. They tell you this in law school a lot, where it's very high pressure and people have a lot of trouble with this and I understand it completely. But living as a disabled person, you actually just do what you can, and it turns out that disabled people are so good at negotiating these boundaries, that what you end up doing is amazing anyways, right? Just objectively speaking, so there's there's a lot to be said for taking care of yourself, taking care of others around you. Others like being able to ask for help when you need it. And looking at the long term sustainability of things, I think that's really powerful, and I think that underpins a lot of what I try to do in my practice, but what I think everyone is attempting to do, at least in my law school Disability Justice circles.

Jheanelle Anderson

So, Disability Justice was quite a new concept for me. And, you know, it was like, Alex framed it, liberating, you know, engaging in that work. Prior to that, you know, I held on to a lot of internalized ableism, I am a black, immigrant and disabled woman. And, you know, a lot of my journey to Canada was traumatic, but also resulted in me having to lose a leg to come here, in a sense. And then, you know, over the years, I developed a chronic illness. And, you know, just drawing back to what Alisha said, just being able to not see yourself as a burden. Moving away from what society has, like, you know, ingrained in me growing up as a kid with disability, trying to, like, not look different, or trying to prove myself was always that constant struggle. Um, but, you know, learning and confronting that internalized ableism, you know, I, I should be valued, you know, we should move away from this deficit view of disability, because, like, it's the external factors that exacerbate how I like, I'm able to participate in society. So that's definitely one way. Disability Justice has, like, influenced me. And in my work, you know, I am a member and co-chair of the Advisory Committee for the Disability Justice Network of Ontario. And it's exactly what, as Alex described it, you know, Disability Justice is not just for disabled folks, it is for everyone. You know, everyone benefits from accommodation, everyone benefits from accessibility. It's not just for disabled people. Mutual aid, you know, what came from this Disability Justice movements, you know, care mongering, is a response to the shortages from COVID. You know, that mutual aid, again, disability, like ran by disabled folks. And just like another point, I'll just mention the site with COVID, it really did lay bare, all the disparities, all the inequities, but more so, you know, what disabled folks have been advocating for was always like, looked as at as a burden. Like, no, we can't do that, you know, you know, it factors in, because probably because they can't surveil employees as well. But it was always a barrier for institutions to implement these things. But then with COVID, you know, the capitalists are like, oh, or money. So, you know, these things that disabled folks have been advocating, and getting shut down for has now been implemented, like at the switch just like that. So, you know, these are things that are addressed, and can be addressed with Disability Justice. Thank you.

Beau Hayward

Thank you so much, Jheanelle, I think that you, you know, with remote education and remote work, coming to the forefront due to COVID. Luckily, I just started going back to school, so I was able to kind of get right into the swing of things that way. But definitely think that because people are isolated due to COVID, it brings attention to these things that disabled folks have been working towards for a long time. I'd like to ask Alex a question. Alex, we talked about this previously, but on your website, it said, you have a quote saying that "it's high time we leave disability awareness and etiquette conversations in the past." Moving forward, the Diversity and Equity Sports and Rec, we're looking to implement like a ski day, which I know we talked about last time and we're doing like a bocci team event and we're just trying to implement some new sporting initiatives, so intersectionality and leaving behind that disability awareness and etiquette, do you have any suggestions for us moving forward?

Alex Locust

Yeah, you know, hearing that that quote of mine, again, I realized that that quote was kind of almost like a self-drag, you know, I used to, when I was doing the workshop years ago, have a section called, like, disability etiquette, or I would, you know, market what I was doing is like a disability awareness training, you know, so, I was a part of, you know, Jheanelle talked about internalized ableism, like, I was a part of that machine. And I think what I realized over time is like, why am I perpetuating this idea that disabled people are people that we should, like, become aware about? How are you unaware? What, I just want to know, like, how anybody can be in a state at this point in time, you know, and be like, I didn't know that disabled people existed, I didn't know that we needed access features. You know, I mean, in the US, the ADA was signed days after I was born. And so I'm like, I'm the ADA years old, you know,, when people say, "Oh, you know, this place is inaccessible, we're having a hard time" I'm like, times ticking, like, it's been three decades, you know, and, and that's just for legislation. So, when you hear people quote the census data or things that are like disabled people are like a quarter or a fifth of the population in the US, it's like, disability is such a normal, inherent part of the human experience, that to categorize the need to like become more inclusive as an awareness effort, or etiquette is so othering and it's so divorced from like, the reality of what's going on. It's just almost, it's kind of playing into this game that people can keep, like, saying. Well, I had no idea, you know, like, I need you to get an idea. I saw someone in the chat mentioned, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha work, and Leah has, you know, that that conceptualization of like, that you need to figure it out, because you're going to become disabled someday, if you get old enough. The four of us, we're already at the party. You know, people are outside waiting in line, you know, we got the VIP passes. We're already in, we're in the booth, right? To your question, about moving past etiquette, past, awareness, like we, we just need to baseline, like, focus on efforts, like, you know, Alice Wong's accesses love campaign, like, everything should just be accessible period, that should be the bare minimum, we shouldn't be putting out events, we shouldn't be doing gatherings, we shouldn't be creating community spaces that are inaccessible anymore. It's just, it's, you know, unforgivable. And I think for people tuning in, if you are non-disabled, and you're looking to like, earn that ally-ship card, this is a time to be like, "Hey, friend, you're hosting a really cool party. I don't see any mention of access here" or like, "hey, this gathering looks really amazing. Can you put some access features in in the description?" How are you showing up for that, and then to elevate beyond just the bare minimum access, you know. Disability Justice invites us to lead by the most impacted. So if you're starting a space from scratch, are disabled people involved in the planning or their voices, you know, if you're doing community advisory boards, if you're having people contribute, if there are no disabled people present, it's very likely that you will not succeed at making it as accessible as it needs to be. And I just think that, you know, representation matters. You know, we talked about that last week, like not just at the beginning, but throughout the process. If you're doing a ski day, having disabled ski instructors, if you're, you know, in a fitness center having disabled personal trainers and coaches. I think they're really communicate to the people you're inviting into this space. It's not just this like you know, little feather in your cap that you're like, Look, we did it, like "wink", we got we got the logo or you know, it's like, no, we will not survive as a community unless we integrate the lived experiences of the people that we're trying to reach out to and last piece about, you know, that Leah inspired me, in that piece, they have a piece, like Surviving the Trumpocalypse and like Wild Disability Justice Dreams, they talk about relationship building with the disability community, right. And so, you know, Beau, you're embarking on these really amazing opportunities where you are a disabled person leading that. And I think that that can communicate to other disabled people that that might be a more trustworthy opportunity than, you know, an institution or an organization, all of a sudden being like, we're doing a Disabled Sports Day. And I'm like, I've never heard of you, I don't see any disabled people involved, you know, and then they do everything they're supposed to. And disabled people don't show up. And they're like, what's that about? And, you know, it's like, we don't trust you, even like you haven't earned that sense. So it's like, this is a years long process. And I think people want overnight results. And that's just not how it works with people who've been harmed routinely and systemically by institutions.

Alisha Krishna

I also just want to add something to what Alex, you were saying before about, about everyone eventually becoming disabled. I think awareness of disabled people is premised on this idea that non-disabled people can do everything all the time, which is not true. What you were talking about accommodations being for everybody, I think that's fundamentally true. Because in this world of capitalism, and all the productivity requirements, and things like that, the requirements that are required of anybody are ridiculous half the time. Case in point, most of my childhood was spent sitting in a desk for eight hours. Who decided children would be fine sitting in a room for eight hours all day for years on end? right like that, that makes no sense to me now, and I probably would have asked for an accommodation to like, move around, or switch classrooms or something like that. But for any child, it's the same story. So it's not like, my disability is something to be aware about it's just that the entire situation is ridiculous. And I think understanding that lets you see accommodations, both asking for them and implementing them, in a different light, for instance, by asking them I mean, some people don't feel like they can ask for accommodations, like they're, they're burdening people or like, asking for too much, but you are actually entitled to that, like, both legally and as a person. So yeah, that's what I wanted to add in there.

Alex Locust

You know, Alisha, you're, you're really highlighting the, the social model, right? The disabling features of society, it's so easy to focus on like a physical impairment, right? Or something visible even on non-apparent, right, we're talking about chronic illness and mental health disabilities learning disabilities. But when you focus on that impairment, you're like, individualizing, you know, when other people focus on these things, you're individualizing it and so I hear what you're saying can feel like, I, Alex, I'm asking for too much. Right? Or like in the USA, ADA is phrased as like a lot of like reasonable accommodation was just shitty, right? Why are there unreasonable accommodation? And so to flip that script, and to say, how is this society creating these inaccessible experiences? Again, when we look at the intersection of these things, you know, TL Lewis has done beautiful work around how racism, you know, anti-blackness can create a sense of disability, right? And so if we think about like, intelligence, and the pressures of the norms around intelligence, and the racial stereotypes around intelligence, if you have a black child who can't sit for eight hours, you know, it's this compounding of people making gross, you know, assumptions about black people's intelligence and their worthiness in the space. And so then, of course, that child is deemed as special needs, right? Or they need remediation, or they have an issue, they have a learning disability. And it's like, what would it be like, just like you said, if it the school day was broken up, if it was, you know, on their own time, I can say, you know, I think, somebody mentioned, you know, COVID and working like, right now working from home with the emotional labor that I do, I get so zonked at midday. I have, (I'm not sending this to my co-workers...) I eat lunch, I take a nap. And then I just like get up early, now. Do you know what I mean? Like I just do work, I get up, at 6. I go to bed at like 10 or 11. And then I'm so much more capable of doing the work that has been assigned to me. Rather than being like I have to work 9 to 5, that means I'm a good worker. It's like, my brain needs rest, my heart needs rest. And that's not about disability, that's just this situation is not accessible.

Jheanelle Anderson

I just wanted to add something around like disability awareness. I feel like where it lands is like an inspiration-porn, kind of, at least that's where I feel like awareness is. We mentioned representation. And I think a majority of the representation for disabled people, if there is ever any, i s either tokenized, and barely ever shows disabled people as people. We all look different, you know, the intersectionality of it all, like, you know, sexuality, race, etc. So it's barely ever represented like that, like, you're a person. It's more of like, just an inspiration; a disabled person doing what they have to do, because of the structural factors around that, they're limiting them, that people like, go like applauding and just like, "Oh, my God, if they can do it, what's your excuse?" Horrible. I do want to commend Holland-Bloorview Kids Rehab, they have a campaign out, where it's, they're arguing for our presentation, like, they're advocating for representation. Kids need, like, I wish when I was growing up, I saw like myself represented in media, and just, like a person. Like, that's what we are, you know, why can't we just exist the way we are without being like, made a poster child, an inspiration, poster child. You know, just that representation, just as humans, is very important. And I think there's that one aspect of it, and we talked about it last week, where the movies... there's a movie out called "Witches" with Anne Hathaway, where they portrayed disability, deformity, as like, inherently associated with evilness, and scary. And I think, you know, that kind of pushes back, strides that, you know, people have made for kids to feel comfortable in their bodies. Or for a kid to see a body that looks different, to not feel scared of it, or to not look at it as weird. And you know, I think society has , like social media, this is like a constant thing where I know on TikTok, there was like, a viral challenge where they showed, like, parents during COVID, showed like a image of a disabled person to their kids saying that this is their new teacher, and recorded kids reaction for laughs and like, we need to move beyond this, you know?

Alex Locust

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I you know, the pop culture-junkie representation is such a part of how I process the world around me. And, you know, I can't remember if I mentioned this last time we talked, but, you know, my roommate was watching Howl's Moving Castle, and it has Mr. Turnip, who's like, basically a scarecrow that just hops a lot. And I'm like, why am I feeling more represented by an animated scarecrow than I typically do? In most media? You know, what I mean? And, as a kid, I was really drawn to Tigger, you know, cuz he hopped a lot. It's a reach, either to me, like, I'm going to these characters that aren't even human, just to feel seen. And I think that's why Sins Invalid, like, struck such a deep chord in me because their approaching the work from an intersectional lens. And so it's not just about disability, it's about how the queerness and disability come together. How do race and disability interplay? You know, generally, you're talking about inspiration porn, and it's like, man, I'm just trying to get bare minimum, like good disability representation. I'm not even out here being like, Can we get good queer disability representation? Am I gonna see a queer BIPOC disabled person, like, slow down, even though I mean, like, I feel like that's how much I am at a point where I don't feel like we're afforded these things typically, but then there's really amazing work like Superfest which celebrates international perspectives of disability, right? And it's a film festival for and by disabled people. So it does exist, right. It's just like, these things don't get caught up in the mainstream. And then, like you said, these mainstream images continued to reinforce either inspiration-porn or this vilification of disabled bodies in a way where it plays out in society. You know, I went to a wedding, it was two years ago, and you know, it's a queer wedding, I'm having a good time. I'm drinking, it's an open bar, right]? I danced, had a great night, the next day, somebody walked past me, and he was like, "hey, you're my hero." And I'm like, for why? Right? Because I was dancing and having a good time? Like, is that how little you think of disabled people that you're like, "Whoa, he's like, having a good time and enjoying himself." I'm like, No, I'm drunk, like, Who are your heroes, you know?

Jheanelle Anderson

And you're not locked away in a closet somewhere, like being hidden from the world because of your disability!

Alex Locust

Right, laying in bed.

Day Milman

Alex, we chatted awhile ago, just about, you know, when we go on to your website, for instance, which I encourage everybody to do that, you know, there's no separating out of your professional work as a mental health counselor, or your work as, you know, an activist or a person who puts workshops on. And I wonder if you could just chat a bit about that decision, to not separate all these different parts of yourself out.

Alex Locust

It's been a very intentional process, it feels very precarious, to be honest. The more that I immerse myself in the working world, the more that I hear how people talk about work, right? And they're like, "in my personal life", or "in my professional life", and I think, the pandemic examples that we're talking about... you know. I mean, literally, these lives are happening there together. Working at an AIDS nonprofit, where we're, we're trying to, like, center racial justice, we're having uprising around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and all of these black lives that have been lost. You can't ask black people to just come into work and be like, no, this is your work life, leave your personal life out. And so I'm really working to integrate those selves to model the importance of, of exploring how those things impact each other, how they can nourish each other. I live both and at the same time. Your energy is not allocated separately. They cause an impact on each other. I know, Alisha, during the planning call, brought up really great themes around sustainability and longevity of the work, how do we take care of ourselves. And I think the more that I explore my activism as like, art, as self-expression, as healing, unless it was like work, you know, it's just like a part of the way that I exist, I think I take it more seriously as something that needs tending that needs respect and needs reverence. And also for myself, to not overdo it because then, you know, I can't I can't show up long term. Disability Justice is inviting us to do this work sustainably. So how do I listen to my body and my mind, and my foot is such an interesting alarm bell, right? If I stand on my foot for too long, it starts to hurt. And it will get to a point where I need to sit down. And and I think, to me, that's what Disability Justice is teaching us, it's like, my, my foot is being like, "Girl, sit down, stop, you know, take a breath, slow down." And if I listened to that, then why am I not listening to like, I'm tired, I need to go to bed early. I can't take another gig this week. I facilitated too many times in one day, you know? I think there are so many invitations there and I'll just close with, you know, my exploration of pleasure activism, you know, adrienne maree brown, proposing this theory or this way of embodying activism as this irresistible practice. We should find activism to be deeply pleasurable, like, I think work, you know, professionalism is so devoid of pleasure. It's so devoid of joy most time, you know? I'm starting to zoom calls, I'm playing disco, if you're with me, it's not gonna be like a really dry day because this is hard work, you know? And so we have to have fun. I partake in substances, right? I have sex. I'm a person, and I want to experience those things. And so as an activist, I want to, I want to talk about my sexuality, I want to talk about how I employ harm reduction in order to let off some steam, but do so in a way where it works for me, and I'm taking care of myself. And I think if we act like those things don't exist if I, if I do those things, and it replicates this idea that professionals are people who come in, and they're wearing nice clothes, and they say nice words, and they don't ruffle anybody's feathers, and it's like, No, I want to go into a space and be like, you know, obviously don't lead with , I had a slutty weekend, but like, if we want to talk about it, and that's related to how I'm finding agency and autonomy in my queer, you know, BIPOC, disabled, body, that feels very ripe for this conversation.

Alisha Krishna

I also just want to add what you said about the professional thing, I'm obsessed with this lawyer out of BC right now, she's indigenous and amazing Myrna McCallum. She is spearheading this awareness movement in the legal profession, called trauma informed lawyering. And a lot of it has to do with like, knowing how trauma manifests, and people just interacting with the legal system. But a lot of it comes from the fact that people tend to separate their, like personhood and professional life. And there are created barriers between, like effective representation. And like you, if you put up this wall of like, I'm wearing a suit, I'm behind a desk, I'm, you know, like here to just do my work and just leave. So it's really about bringing yourself back in to the space and it actually just makes you a better professional. Because you're able to, like, deal with, like, interact with your clients in a much more fruitful way. And I yeah, I just, I really responded to what you're saying, Alex,

Day Milman

One of the themes that we've been sort of touching on a little bit here, and there is just sustainability. And I wonder if anyone else wants to talk about that aspect of their experience and how you're learning to navigate working with sustainability in mind in terms of your own energy and what you can bring to this work.

Beau Hayward

I'll talk a little bit about productivity and maintaining a good healthy work cycle, we're talking about we we've been discussing having some check ins, about particularly physical, physical health, during the, during the pandemic, and for people with disabilities and without. And you know, I think we've been given this opportunity where we are working and studying from home where we can really identify the hours in the day while more productive and, and put those two best used. And so I know for myself, it's been really good learning experience, being able to learn remotely and utilize these hours of the day when I'm most attentive, and, you know, dedicated to that, and then when there's time to do physical work to get in shape and stay in shape, um, you know, devoting that time to that task. So, I think it's really interesting that we get this opportunity, and hopefully, that'll carry on past COVID, whenever at the end of this virus is, but hopefully we can take those lessons and move forward with them.

Jheanelle Anderson

For sure, everyone mentioned it's really like being attuned to your body. And, like really recognizing and being aware. Um, you know, for me, when I'm burnt out, or when I'm tired, I get really irritable. If I start noticing that I'm irritable, I say like, I need to take a break. Like, stay off social media, you know, minimize your intake of my intake of news, and just do nothing. And I think Alisha last week, I mentioned it, just reframing this whole idea of the lazy day or laziness. But yeah, just have rest and being comfortable having rest being comfortable relaxing, like for the longest time I've always felt guilty because I was like, Oh my god, I have so much to do or like oh my god, I don't have anything to do I need something to do. So you know, that's that whole like capital system just kind of ingrained in our psyche of like, our bodies being tied to or bodies or value being tied to like how like our labor and how how much we can use it. So just being comfortable, like not judging yourself for needing rest. It's normal. So like, I binge watch some shows like Netflix has girlfriends and Sister Sister. Yeah, so I'm just like reliving my childhood. And just not judging myself for that. So it's definitely being aware. It's like, you know, Alex mentioned like, you know, physical like physically, like, you know, when it you have to stop. But, you know, mentally it's like we don't draw boundaries. And you know, I think Bo just mentioned how how the lines have been blurred now more than ever, with remote work, where people just feel like they have access to you all the time. So it's just really dry, saying no, just having hard boundaries, and do what works best for you really.

Alisha Krishna

I think also, I second everything that has been said, but I think also, maybe my context is different because I come from, like community like SBA is run by a board. So I'm always in working with other people. One of the tenants of Disability Justice is recognizing wholeness. I interpret that to mean, like, you always, well, it's in the they've written it, but like, you always have worth, and it's sort of led to this unique understanding of ability and talent and capacity. And I think recognizing that opens you up to a whole set of resources that you may not have realized you had. So then you can sort of rely on other people, while meeting them in the middle sort of thing, and you don't have to take on everything by yourself. And so you can, you know, take that brass when you need it and feel like you're not letting anybody down, because you are you've shared the work.

Alex Locust

Absolutely, I really appreciate that. You bringing in recognizing wholeness, you know, Jheanelle, speaking to like, anti-capitalism, you know, as another Disability Justice principle, which, by the way, I really didn't know you were talking about like the capitalists like having their money or freaking out and I just love this idea of like a bunch of like, older white men being like our body. But, you know, I just want to as Alisha brought in like that, that lazy idea or interrogating and pushing back against from that intersectional lens who's called lazy, right? Who gets to get away with being lazy, right? Is it like, you know, white, affluent influencers on Instagram, like in their mansions being like, I'm having a lazy day, you know, it's like, okay, cool, like you're being glorified for that, you know, black and brown people are vilified if they need to, like, rely on benefits in order to make ends meet, because the systems have created these inaccessible spaces for them to like, thrive, right. And then so they're like, lazy because they're depending on the system. It's like, that's why Disability Justice is about interdependence is because the system, the state creates a state where like, we have to depend on each other because that's not going to give us what we need. So, I think just, it's not just about laziness and being like this ablest concept, it can also be racist, it can be classist. And, you know, both speaking to like, what works for your body, what you need, it's like that, I think it's so important. It's not that you should be working out because you should be working out, it's like, does that feel good for you? Do you like want to feel that in your body, then that's how you should approach this. And that's not anti-capitalist approach. It's like, Where's their value and what you want to do not because you should be doing it, so you're productive. You know, how do you especially in the time, right, like Beau, so beautifully put, it's like, the things that we're learning now should carry us through this pandemic. So many people are clawing to like, I wish it was back to normal, I want to go back to how it was. It's like, girls of color coming from inside the house, that's how we got here. You know, so like, we can't go back there. We need to take what we learned forward and really challenge, like, why a pandemic struck, and we're like, I need to learn Spanish, now's the time! You know, it's like, if you didn't know it, then like, just focus on you, like, take care of yourself. And then maybe you can get those payments. But like, I think, yeah, the wholeness that Alisha brought up like, I've had to reckon with that in my house. Feeling like I don't contribute as much because I'm like, I'm not doing things in the garden, or it's harder for me to clean. But then I'm like, I'm like a reservoir of emotional labor. Like, try me a process. Anyway, you know, so that's also a value and if we move away from like, only these things are valuable or that there's like a hierarchy. Then it breaks up in this like, this entire constellation of ways that everybody can be in community and like, contribute and be collective as opposed to like this independent like, I'm gonna do everything and I'll take care of myself because that's, that's how I get through at the end of the day.

Day Milman

Yeah, I think that U of T has a particular kind of culture around valuing overwork, performative busy-ness, and that kind of thing. I wonder, you know, I wonder how students and Jheanelle, you just graduated last year, you know how you managed to navigate that and put Disability Justice principles, forefront in trying to navigate those kinds of things, and the systems that we have in place at U of T.

Jheanelle Anderson

So, for me, I, like other than getting over like those, like Alisha mentioned, a feeling like badly for requesting accommodations. I also think that the culture and like having professors who are also like, I say, disability aware, but you know, like accessibility aware, are just really thoughtful, and accommodating professors, because I like I was fortunate in my Faculty of Social Work. They were pretty accommodating, they were very understanding, they understood like, accessibility means they understood the pressures of school, and think a lot of other departments are like that. So the culture of like you mentioned, like performative, like busy-ness, the culture of pressure, that, you know, if you're not like studying, you're doing nothing, like your worth is tied to how wrapped up in schoolwork you are, how late you're staying up. So, I had a really great experience, you know, dealing with accommodations, which helped break that barrier down for me with asking, because it was just embedded in the culture of the faculty. And the professors were also very thoughtful, recognizing, like, not only disability needs, but that's the whole point too, is that, you know, these accommodations weren't just for students with disabilities, like, you recognize us school, junior masters, or just doing any degree is very stressful. There's also your life outside of school, like, there are lots of demands on you. And like, maybe you have to hand that paper in like a like a week or so later. But it's just like developing that partnership to work. Just so you know, you can complete the tasks that you need to do.

Beau Hayward

I think, I'd like to just say that my experience at the university has been incredible. I mean, I do a huge shout out to everyone at Accessibility Services, who has made this, you know, going back and get, you know, pursuing higher education possible for me. Also, when I brought it to the attention of my accessibility advisor that I wanted to play sports, she directed me to Robin and getting a position and being able to speak on panels and having these opportunities. The university, I believe, is doing a great job of unexpected, like Accessibility Services and diversity and equity. It's all this collective effort is just really great. And I'd like to say that my experience has been fantastic. And not say that, obviously, things can always improve, because they definitely, definitely can improve. And that's, that's what we're working towards.

Day Milman

Alisha, do you want to add anything to that?

Alisha Krishna

Yeah, yeah. So first of all, Jheanelle said something along the lines of like, you have a life outside of the university. And I, that's totally the truth. But in my personal context, so I actually did both my undergrad and my, like, I'm doing my law degree, both at U of T. So I've had wildly different experiences. The undergrad here is very large. So you kind of feel like you're lost. I was in the cinema faculty, and I learned a lot of valuable self-advocacy skills. So we actually do like workshops on this. The, the Accessibility Services, they're great. But sometimes the way they interact with students requires a certain kind of articulation that I feel like is not inherent to many disabled students, like, especially ones who are just coming to terms with it. So like, I know people who are just accessing accommodations right now and they, they explained to me like what they're going to ask for and they sort of couch it in like this explanation and like justification for it. Like, in my experience, that has been exactly the opposite of what you need to do, you sort of need to go into your appointments with doctors, accommodation, people, anyone who's asking you anything and sort of be firm and what you know, to be true, just from your lived experience you, like, obviously explain if they ask you to explain and provide documentation, whatever, but there's no reason to sort of, like need to provide a justification. And I feel like, that took me a really long time to learn.

Jheanelle Anderson

I'm also like, just an extension of like, within the school, I was part of my degree, I needed to do field education. And I think that was something that was lacking with regard to attitudes towards disabled people. And, you know, just accessibility, like, yeah, on paper there is like, you know, this former Yeah, if you need accommodations, but like, the attitudinal barriers that I've experienced when I was doing my field placement was huge. And I somewhat felt, you know, a lack of support. Because maybe people just didn't take it as seriously as other forms of oppression, which is, like, I think is a constant theme for like people with, like disabilities, like people will just gaslight you and like, wasn't like that. So, like, you know, that's just something else to like, consider with, like, the culture, not like, just at U of T, but just like, by extension, like the world, lets me just like during my field placement, and not feeling accommodated. Or just like, you know, my first field placement was in a hospital, and because of my experiences in a hospital and conveying that, you know, I felt like, they, you know, the educators are judging me, thinking that I can handle it, because of my previous experiences. So just kind of like, telling me what I can handle, like that paternalization, happens a lot. And then, you know, not being taken seriously, when you like, call out the ableism. So there's like, that kind of twofold thing where one like the culture of like, not accommodating people or not considering, like, the pressure that like your actual, like life outside of school, but also like minimizing or dismissing, like, your experience of ableism. But, you know, I will say that I had a really great accessibility counselor. And I wish I went to her about like, my concerns, because like, you know, she went hard for me after and was able to implement, like, um, like, workshops on ableism, on disability, for field educators, because I think that's important, as well.

Day Milman

Absolutely, yeah, this has been a really amazing and rich conversation that's given us lots to consider. And I think Disability Justice is it's just such a robust framework, that for me is a non-disabled person has really kind of opened my eyes up to how nested all these different forms of oppression are. And so, you know, for me, I'm just so like, my mind is really just working through constantly like how I can incorporate these principles into my work and the platform that I have as a facilitator at U of T. And so maybe, you know, we can end up on that question is just how is Disability Justice in the forefront for you, as you move forward as organizers on campus? And how can we kind of hold accountable? That same principle for, you know, the administrators and the deans and all the folks that were, that are decision makers at U of T?

Alisha Krishna

Yeah, I think so. There are a lot of things that you have two students that have been advocating for of the admin, most notably better mental health supports for students. And, and especially, I mean, I don't know if the conversation is as live as it was a little while ago, but the mandated leave of absence policy has also been very contentious. I think a lot of it comes from on the admin side, and this is pure speculation, I have no like, background knowledge of this or I'm not speaking for anybody when I say this, but I think a lot of it is coming from fear of liability. Especially the lap, like, essentially, it's just like, you're not UMTS problem, you're someone else's problem, but you're not U of T's problem. And I think it clearly has not worked. And they're clearly liable for things now, like, maybe not legally, but at least morally speaking, like, the recent tragedies that have happened on campus, no one's gonna look at them and say: yeah, you did, like, all you could do you did your due diligence. That's not. So I think there, I think more attention needs to be paid to student demands, and in a way that doesn't see them as inherently conflicting. Like, we're not student activists are not inherently against the admin just because like, we often come into conflict like that, but it's not. We don't have to be we don't want to be really, that would be the perfect thing would be for me not having to do this. You know.

Day Milman

Thank you. Anyone else want to add to that, before we wrap up? Janine?

Janine

Thank you so much. This was first of all, so informative. Secondly, a fresh of breath of air. Sorry, bilingual brain. But I just, I wanted to sort of ask you guys more about this concept of self care and community care, and how you guys have engaged with community care during this time, whether it's advocacy, for accessibility, kind of helping out people in the community, but also taking that time for yourself. So what was that looked like for you guys to have that balance of being part of the community and being active in the space, but also having that downtime for yourself and taking care of yourself, because I can imagine it, it gets overwhelming. Sometimes just hearing a lot of stories, especially during COVID.

Beau Hayward

I think, for myself, taking care has been maintaining some semblance of a schedule, that's just my personal way of keeping myself in line. Just you can see the calendar in the background, I just, you know, kind of have everything regimented. And that's, you know, obviously, not everybody's thing and also finding a way to stay active in the house. For a lot of physically disabled people staying physically active, super important. So well, it's important for everybody, but it's important because at least in my case, body deterioration, atrophy happens really quickly. So maintaining that level of fitness definitely as has been a stabilizer,

Alex Locust

I can add,you know, that that question of self-care, taps really into what I find Disability Justice to be another invitation to look to interdependence. Right. And, and how can I, you know, you mentioned community care, right? Like, how can I get out of my own head that like, I have to be the like, first and last off on like, how to take care of myself? How can I turn to community and offer these this care mutually, I mean, there are certain things that I'm trying to practice about, kind of my own boundaries, my own limitations, you know, like a shout out to Day and Robin for having patience with I put like a email, an auto reply on my email that's like, hey, just going down, give me like a week or two to reply to you, you know, which I had never done before. And I feel like it really communicates, it's just being transparent, right? Because I couldn't have just been like, I'll reply in a week or two. And not tell people, that's what I'm doing. Because, in essence, a lot of people reaching out to me, has not paid me yet to earn that kind of response time. So you know, but, you know, there's also that that piece where you're modeling like, Hey, we need to make, I think somebody mentioned like social media breaks, like making it known, like, I'm not just available, like, I'm going through a lot, you know, and I'm trying to take care of myself and reorient my focus and my energy. So when you let other people know that your practice I think it helps them reorient with you, as opposed to just kind of keeping it inside. And I'll just offer one last thing that I've seen. Several people do really beautifully, particularly around like surgeries, or intense like medical procedures as well, like create the disabled people in Excel sheets was just like, like, just you'll see some real magic and it's like, you know, this community care thing where it's like, who is able to bring me a meal to is down to hang out, you know, I had a friend where their experience meant that they were like, you know, it was during COVID. They got top surgery and so like, who wants to do zoom calls, you know, like, we'll do karaoke nights, you know, and, and so people just like fill in what you can do. And I feel like if we were more as a culture and a practice of it, that's a beautiful response to like a medical procedure but like what if you're like, you know, Alisha's gonna go through like exams, you know, what if it's like, a bad breakup? What if it's, you know, these kind of circumstances where it doesn't have to be I just moved, you know, how do we kind of create this thing where it's like, I need help. And I'm asking for it. And that doesn't mean we could actually means I'm really strong to name that I need help. And to ask for that, I would love to see more practices like that.

Alisha Krishna

I also have one other thing to add very practically, I started doing this year in like mid-September, I actually have an app on my phone that tracks my hours and it tracks my hours for each like class I'm taking each project I'm taking is the greatest thing I've ever done. Because if I'm feeling behind or something and I like cognitively, I just can't do it anymore, I can still look back at my like week of work and be like, I put in all that time already. Like this is totally valid for me to take a break now. And it's really, it lets me do things that I would never have done otherwise.

Day Milman

So I'm just gonna say, let's call it a conversation for the ages. I loved being part of this. And I really just want to give each and every one of the panelists, my heartfelt thanks for all the energy, your honesty and for sharing what you've learned, and for being vulnerable. I know that's really tough. But I think it does a lot of good for people to see how you are navigating these experiences in life and, and making a party out of it and making yourself shine and sparkle. And yeah, so thanks to Beau, and to Alisha to Jheanelle, and thank you so much to Alex for bringing your special brand of magic and gorgeousness to this conversation and to the world that we're in now. And I just want to say thank you so much, and wish each and every one of the people who attended tonight, you know, kindness to yourself and patience and just to take some of these learnings that we've had tonight and apply them to your own life as we move forward into the winter and to a bit of the unknown.

Janine

Thank you so much to all of our panelists for sharing their insights with us. And thank you to our partners for holding space for this essential conversation. Special thanks to the Hart House Student podcasting team for producing today's episode. You are listening to the west meeting room on CUIT 89.5 fm. We're here every Saturday at 7am. And you can find all of our episodes on our Hart House stories page on SoundCloud. We'd love to hear from you. We're on Instagram at hart house stories and twitter at hh podcasting. Thank you so much for listening, take good care of each other and we'll be back with you next week.

#disability justice #community #accessibility #ableism #students #livedexperience #care #selfcare

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