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dragonofyang · 5 years ago

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On Love and Lions Part 1: An Analysis on Love in VLD

“I have always believed that unity is where true power comes from, and true unity can only be born of love.” --Gyrgan, Paladin of the Yellow Lion

Voltron: Legendary Defender is a cartoon on Netflix that–with the final season available to watch on Netflix–has extremely regressive and harmful messages. The S8 on Netflix carries lessons about how war is good, that men shouldn’t respect the wishes and desires of women, that violence and abuse mean even victims aren’t deserving of forgiveness. Everything about that is 100% antithetical to what VLD was about throughout the prior seasons and each harmful message is another nail in the coffin of the original narratives of peace, respect, and fundamentally how everyone is deserving of love and forgiveness, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

In fact, the theme of love in VLD is something we at Team Purple Lion wish to discuss. It’s arguably the most absolutely fundamental theme of the show. Love destroys the universe, and love saves it over and over again. And love would have rebuilt the universe, but thanks to the edits ordered by the trademark holder, the universe that should have been born from love was instead born from one girl sacrificing her life because she saw no better option. She didn’t even get to tell her only remaining father figure goodbye. What kind of message is that? In the original final season, prior to the executive meddling, we should have seen how love was such a powerful force in the universe that it could not just repair this reality, but all realities. And it’s not just romantic love, but six types of love.

Now, for those of you more familiar with our work, we’ve discussed some pretty big concepts in VLD and how they’re addressed, and there will be even more in future episodes of our reconstruction Rise and Atone. VLD engages not just with its own predecessors in the Voltron franchise, but Beast King GoLion, Labyrinth, Frankenstein, and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey is all but the story bible for Allura’s arc. The concepts we are about to discuss date back to Ancient Greece, and while love can be more than these concepts, it’s important that we have a framework through which we can discuss and analyze love as it appears in VLD without getting lost in all the examples.

In American culture, “love” is not very well-differentiated between kinds because we only use one word: “love”. While we use it across all sorts of contexts, we have to add modifiers when we don’t mean romantic love or familial love, which are the most commonly-acknowledged forms of love. VLD, being written and edited by primarily Americans living in America, also encounters this issue, but it does not focus solely on romantic love, which can complicate how to interpret love in the show. We, however, would like to argue that not only is it all love, but it doesn’t all have to be good love, familial love, or romantic love. At the end of the day the plot is driven by love in its many forms. Love is so baked into the story that it’s quite difficult to extricate, dare I even say impossible, and that ultimately is part of why we were able to reconstruct so much of what was lost in S8.

The Ancient Greeks had many words for love, but we feel it’s important to discuss the dialogue that VLD engages in with various forms of love, using the Ancient Greeks’ framework as a guide. The model gives us concrete definitions of different kinds of love, and can help us as an audience understand the various forms of love that are present in VLD. It’s important that we define the different ways we can observe love being portrayed because much of VLD relies on the writing adage of “show, don’t tell”.

So without any further ado, let’s dig into what, precisely, is love.

As stated earlier, we’ll be using terminology coined by the Ancient Greeks, specifically six categories of love that we feel are most prevalent in the show. We’ve also deduced our own examples of these forms of love when they’re taken too far or flat-out discarded, which will be discussed in a companion article.

The six forms of love are as follows:

Eros: the most famous kind of love, an intense (and often sexual) passion for another being and seeing the beauty within them. This is the love that most closely aligns with romantic love as we understand it in a modern American context.

Philia: an affection and loyalty between friends, notable for its platonic nature, it is the love that arises between friends, and can be found among family, but the modern equivalent would be the found family trope.

Storge: this is the intrinsic empathy between individuals, primarily the attachment of parents to children. This form of love was primarily used to describe familial relationships, and the patience one sometimes needs when around blood relatives.

Philautia: put simply, this is self-love in its purest form. It is acknowledging your needs, wants, and happiness without apology. The Ancient Greeks considered Philautia to be a basic human need.

Xenia: while many might not consider this to be a form of love, it is hospitality, or as we define it, love between a host and their guests. Specifically, this would be the care a host gives to their guests in both physical (food, gifts, etc.) and non-physical (respecting rights, protection, etc.). Hospitality is massively important because if you are good to someone while they are in your home, they will be equally good to you if you visit theirs.

Agape: this is a Greco-Christian term, ultimately, and is a little more difficult to understand because it can be confused with other forms of love. At its core, though, it is a pure and unconditional love such as that between spouses, families, or God and man. It shouldn’t be confused for other forms of love such as Philia because unlike the other forms of love, which only focus on one aspect of humanity, Agape is the unconditional and universal love for everyone. It’s sexless, unlike Eros. At its core, it’s the love born of goodwill to all people, regardless of circumstance.

While these are only six categories, there are many ways of interpreting love, especially since there are so many avenues to see love–in good and bad forms–in VLD. These categories are also not inherently hierarchical, and are not presented in any particular order. Agape is the main exception, being more convoluted in its nature, and thus is discussed at the end. It also narratively serves as part of the culmination to the plot, so it carries a greater weight in relation to the alpha plot of the whole story.

Now, let’s examine how they present in VLD. As an official reminder, please remember that all analysis of VLD is done from a ship-neutral stance and we are not proposing any endgame romances. The sole purpose of this article is to discuss observable portrayals of love in its various forms, and to analyze both the text and the metatextual messages resulting from them.

Eros: Passionate Love

Eros… arguably this is the most contentious form of love presented in VLD, if only because of all the ship wars that occurred in the fandom. Eros drives the shipping communities of fandoms across the world, because it often stems from on-screen chemistry or the potential of the fleeting seconds where a spark flies but does not catch in canon. The beauty of Eros is that it ripples quietly through fiction, or it can be a tsunami ready to devour the story. It’s the quiet whisper of two women sharing a private moment, to the shouted declarations in the heat of battle. Eros thrums through fandoms in a desperate tempo for seeing a love as passionate as you can feel in characters who may never share more than a glance.

Plato actually had quite the influence on the word “Eros”, because “Eros” or erotic love, was largely regarded as a type of madness brought upon a person by seeing someone whose beauty strikes your heart with an arrow (Cupid’s arrows, anyone?). Eros is the love that drives you to despair if the object of your affections is cruel or uninterested, and it burns like a fire. “Falling in love at first sight” is the key concept here, and you can see it reproduced in fandoms across the world, though many cultures have their own names and terms for it. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott define “Eros” in A Greek-English Lexicon as “love, mostly of the sexual passion”. Plato, however, redefined the word to include a nonphysical aspect. He discusses it in Symposium and says that while (physical) Eros can be felt for a person initially, with contemplation you can and will fall in love with a person’s inner beauty, which for Plato was the ideal, since he specifically emphasized the lack of importance of physical attraction. In fact, Jung–who coined the Anima and Animus–has a similar approach, with an emphasis on unity within the self by accepting your internal Eros which manifests as your feminine Anima/masculine Animus.

In the text of VLD, Eros is remarkably subdued. This is partially due to its rating. Being a Y7-FV show, VLD can’t really have explicitly sexual content. Sure the implication can exist, but a lot of times sex has to be carried through metaphor if a story is to address it at all. Take the juniberry as an example. It’s a three-petal flower of a deep rose and softer pink, delicately topping a green stem, with a yellow pistil. In much of literary history, flowers represent female sexuality and beauty, and they are common representations of youth across genders.

Now, in strictly biological terms, flowers as a sexual symbol is a 1:1 accuracy in analysis, because the flower is the reproductive organ of a plant. I’d like to analyze the juniberry from a biological perspective, because understanding the anatomy of a flower can help us understand its role in literature as a metaphor for sex. The whole point of the flower is to be able to spread pollen across individual plants, whether by wind or by pollinators such as bats or bees, and breed to produce more plants. The actual reproductive organs of flowers are called the stamen and pistil, respectively. The stamen produces pollen, while the pistil collects pollen in its ovule to fertilize and create seeds. A stamen is a very slender filament, topped with what’s called an “anther”, which is where the pollen is actually released. The pistil, meanwhile, has a thicker base with a long body, usually topped with a few tendril-like structures called “stigma”.

Diagram by the Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants [ID: A simple cross-section diagram of a flower. Three petals are visible on the far side, with reproductive organs drawn in the center. There is also a stalk and sepals at the bottom. Along the sides of the cross-section there are labels. On the left, a category called “Stamen” is labeled, with “Anther” and “Filament” pointing to two parts of the thinner reproductive organ. “Receptacle” marks the base of the flower, and “Peduncle (flower stalk)” marks out the stem. On the right, we have the label “Petal” and three labels under the category “Pistil”: “Stigma”, pointing to the top portion, “Style” pointing to the stem-like feature, and “Ovary” pointing to the rounded bottom. The label “Sepal” marks the leaf-like structure just under the petals. End ID.]

Now, when we look at the juniberries we see in canon, we can see that at no point are any drawn with stamens. They all have a single pistil growing from the center, and they’re topped with three stigma, meaning that all juniberries drawn on-screen are female juniberries.

Juniberries are a quintessential symbol of Altea, and they represent home to Allura, as well as what she’s lost. However, they also represent how Allura’s relationship to her own femininity is not some mystical thing determined by forces beyond her. Colleen gifts Allura a juniberry that was selectively bred from flowers she had available, and it’s identical in every way (that we can see) to the juniberries native to Altea. The message, though it’s subtle, is quite clear: Allura is in control of her femininity and can define herself however she pleases (“highlands poppy” versus “juniberry”). After the sexual undertones that threaded her relationship with Lotor, this is a very important message to convey, especially since a patriarchal story would punish Allura for the metaphorical sex in physical ways, such as how the season 8 on Netflix does.

Allura isn’t simply a vessel for male desire, nor is she a strong female character who doesn’t need a man. Her story is about finding agency separate from male expectations, without forsaking her own femininity in the process. Like the juniberry, she is feminine, but she is able to define herself, and the dark entity masquerading as Lotor reminds her of that with their conversation about calling the juniberry a “highlands poppy”. That’s what makes Lotor so dangerous to a traditional patriarchal values system: he reminds Allura that she has a choice.

It’s important to note that during their interactions Lotor never gives Allura a choice in the sense that he, a man, is allowing her one; he simply steps back and encourages her to make the choices to which she is entitled and to act on her emotions and desires. She is an agent of her own free will, and Lotor, being first her Shadow, challenges her to be smarter, quicker on the battlefield, and then as her Animus he challenges her to look inward and become in-tune to her own inner wants and needs. The other Paladins can offer some aid in that, but none of them strike her anxieties or hopes the way that Lotor can, being the crown prince and heir to her sworn enemy, and being half-Altean and half-Galra. He is, in a fundamentally physical way, the union of two races that were at war before Altea’s destruction, and to a survivor of that war, that forces Allura to question the beliefs she held in the beginning of the story. The stakes of success and failure are much higher with Lotor in the picture, and it’s easier to focus literary tension on two characters than five or six, so as a result of that persistent tension, we as the audience are given plenty of chemistry between two characters to spur Eros.

As we discussed last year in “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away”, Keith was meant to have a gay relationship with another Paladin. We refuse to write conjecture on what his endgame romance was meant to be, however it is important to discuss Keith’s Eros in a metatextual sense. For example, let’s look at Keith and Shiro. Keith is a legacy character that dates all the way back to 1984 Defender of the Universe. His romantic subplot was relegated to excised footage and extremely subtextual if it managed to squeak past the axe. Shiro was able to be queer, however, due to the fact that he’s a DreamWorks-owned character who is new to the franchise, meaning that there isn’t a legacy that needed to be upheld.

Keith’s queerness, however, still acts as a spur to fuel the potential for Eros, and helps build tension between him and his fellow male Paladins. And I specify male Paladins because during season 2, Keith and Allura go off in a pod by themselves to see if Zarkon is tracking either of them. During the scenes with Keith and Allura together, it’s important to note the background music is remarkably flat and lacking in romantic cues. In prior iterations of Voltron, Keith and Allura are implied as endgame (DOTU), have the beginnings of an on-screen romance (VForce), or straight up just fuck on the page (such as in the comics). It stands to reason that this scene should at least imply some form of passionate chemistry here, but largely it’s two friends confiding in one another and trying to find reassurance as they confess their fears. Keith doesn’t have a moment to admire Allura’s beauty the way we see Lance and Matt do, and Allura doesn’t blush like how she does with Lotor or Lance. Without markers for any kind of Eros, the scene is a quiet moment of contemplation away from the stress, only to be broken by Shiro telling them to get back because the Galra Empire found the Castleship again.

So then where do we see passionate chemistry for Keith? At the risk of starting the ship-war again, his chemistry largely exists with Shiro and Lance. Shiro, narratively, functions as his Mentor, someone to guide and believe in him, who then gives up his position of leadership (sort of) so that Keith can grow. Bringing Shiro back prematurely makes it harder to see, but in a traditional Hero’s Journey, the Mentor figure teaches not-quite-enough to the Hero before disappearing, and the Hero grows on their own and becomes their own person. Naturally, this makes Keith and Shiro have tension, especially since Shiro was brought back prematurely due to marketing, so their relationship dynamic had to change to accommodate Shiro’s return. Lance, however, constantly baits and teases Keith, and Keith frequently rises to it and they argue. They butt heads and don’t have that sense of camaraderie that Keith and Shiro do, so right off the bat there is more obvious tension between the two of them. Eventually, Lance and Keith learn to trust each other, and in season 8 we finally see them settle their rivalry as they prepare to face Honerva. So while Keith’s dynamic with Shiro is more focused on camaraderie and growth, Keith’s dynamic with Lance is more focused on pushing each other to be better warriors and teammates.

Philia: Friendly Love

In VLD, we’re shown that friends can be found anywhere if you’re willing to put down the blasters and try to make them. We’re also shown that just because you’re on the same side of the battlefield, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re best buddies. Commander Lahn pledges his loyalty to Lotor after his base is saved by Voltron, and Keith and Lance butt heads so often you’d think one would sooner drop the other into a black hole. However, we should never discount the power of friendship, or rather, we should never discount the value of platonic relationships. This includes everything from friendship, to the found family trope, to the mystical bond the Paladins have with their Lions. Philia is the companion’s love, firmly rooted in platonic–and often intellectual–admiration.

Philia, as defined in A Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott, is “an affectionate regard or friendship, usually between equals”. Where Eros is the fiery passion between sexually-attracted adults, Philia is the platonic love between people who respect and trust each other. This is the love that flows like water, endlessly filling and refilling your emotional needs with good company, good advice, and generally just a good presence. Friendships are the ports we anchor ourselves at when the seas become too rough, and in VLD, where space is the most dangerous frontier and most of the universe is your enemy, friends are more important than ever for our Heroes and Heroines.

[ID: A screenshot of S4E1 “Code of Honor” with Allura, Lance, Coran, Shiro, Pidge, and Hunk sharing a group hug with Keith. Coran, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura are all crying, while Keith, Shiro, and Lance are smiling. End ID.]

Everywhere you look in VLD, you’re sure to find some kind of camaraderie between friends. Lance, Pidge, and Hunk make the Garrison Trio (or as I like to call them, The Planck Constant), and they get into shenanigans together. In fact, it’s entirely likely that had Lance and Hunk not decided to follow Pidge up to the roof, they never would’ve found Shiro, and subsequently Blue Lion. Later, when Voltron has allied with Lotor as the new Galra Emperor, they reprogram a sentry to become the eternally-fantastic Funbot. If you want a prime example of the fun that could be had between friends, those three are quintessential to the definition of Philia. They’re the first Youths you meet in the story, and it’s through their eyes we watch as a far-off intergalactic war comes to Earth at last. The show has us follow them as the audience, and we watch as they meet up with Keith, save Shiro, and then find themselves going from Earth to Kerberos in less than five minutes, and then by the end of their day, they’ve awoken Allura and Coran and are on Arus, thousands of lightyears away from their home.

We see the Paladins go from a rowdy group of teenagers with Shiro as the head to a group of five Heroes and Heroines capable of saving the universe. Lance helps Pidge get all the GAC coins she needs for a video game, and he’s always got the team’s back with his sniper rifle. Hunk always is ready to lend a hand, even when he’s scared of flying Yellow, but when the Taujeerans are in danger of falling into the acid as their planet breaks apart, he’s right there holding them up while the team gets the arc ship ready for takeoff. Our Paladins are the embodiment of the power of friendship, trust, and perseverance, and it’s that tenacity and dedication that should have carried our six Paladins to victory and brought the Purple Paladin back into the light he thought had forsaken him. Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, and White, together in a bond of pure platonic love. There’s an old phrase I’m sure you’re all familiar with: “blood is thicker than water”. The power of Philia and found family in VLD challenges that notion in the original S8 when Lotor is offered his vindication. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

Pick any two of our main protagonists and you’re sure to find a thread of Philia connecting them, because when you fight together as one, you inevitably become closer as the trust builds between you. In fanfic terminology, this is the root of the found family trope: strangers and friends finding themselves in a gripping adventure together, and discovering that they’re stronger together than they could be apart, and coming to see these people as more than colleagues or acquaintances. They become your family and people to defend, and the people you trust to have your back when it’s time to face down an enemy together.

That’s part of why Keith leaving for the Blade of Marmora is so fractious. He’s growing into a leadership role and obviously accustomed to it, but with Shiro’s premature return, there’s some growing pains as the incumbent leader and the former leader unintentionally butt heads. Keith needs to be in Black Lion without Shiro to complete his growth, but without a way to easily integrate him back into the team without messing with the legacy, Keith has to go. And like with any good friend, when you have to say goodbye, it’s a bittersweet affair. The team doesn’t want him to go, but in-canon he feels he can do more good with the Blade, but the meta reason is that his Hero’s Journey has been arrested. But, like with any good friend, the team is able to reunite with him at a later date and he integrates back into the group. They are wiser to the world, harder, but they are together again. And they need that unity when it’s time to face Honerva and go into battle for not just their universe, but all realities.

Storge: Familial Love

In English, we have many concepts of love, but generally we only treat the single word of “love” as a word for “love”. As a result, we tend to use other words to modify the type of love we mean, which can get things kind of sticky if you talk about X type of love but don’t specify that it’s X type and not Y type. With familial love, it can be relatively understood without being specified, but as you can see by my explication here, I still have to modify the word “love” with an adjective to describe the next kind of love I will be discussing. Storge, the familial love.

A Greek-English Lexicon defines Storge as “love, affection, especially of parents and children”. Storge, unlike Philia, is not a platonic admiration for a companion in the family, however it does denote respect. Storge is also not the idealized unconditional love of Agape (which we will discuss toward the end of this essay). Storge is the instinctive love for those in your family, especially between parents and children. I also argue the key aspect of Storge is that your family–for all the times you want to tear out your hair–will love you for the rest of their lives. And you’ll love them, because they’re people who have your best interests at heart, even if they don’t always express that well.

Coran, Coran, the gorgeous man himself is Allura’s second father figure (after Alfor), but he’s the only father figure for Allura in the show that’s alive. Coran’s protectiveness of Allura is well-documented. He was furious when she got captured saving Shiro, he warns her to be careful healing the Balmera, he worries for her in Blue, but at no point does he actually prevent her from making her choices. He wants her to have a full life, a happy life, or at least as happy as one can be when you’re one of the only survivors of a war. He’s a father through and through, and even if Allura is Alfor’s daughter by blood, Coran is the one who supports her during the most difficult stage of not just her life but the universe’s life. He loves her, he consistently reminds people to respect her and to think of what’s best for her. Not just as a princess of Altea or the heart of Voltron, but as a daughter. Alfor was her father, but he died before he saw her face the trials in the plot. Coran, however, he gets to see her grow into a woman even greater than what Alfor could have ever imagined. The audience might find him a little frustrating (such as in S8E1 “Launch Date”), and Allura takes his protectiveness in stride, but at the end of the day Coran is a gorgeous man with his heart in the right place, even if his execution is a little off the mark on occasion.

The Holt parents are also good examples of Storge. We see Colleen and Sam fight to tell Earth about what’s been going on, as well as finding their children. Colleen herself is a solid mama bear that anyone would want to have fighting for them in their corner, and we can see she gives no fucks about protocol when she’s told she can’t stay on Garrison grounds with her husband.

[ID: Colleen Holt glaring, her husband Sam behind her looking equally annoyed. She glares at Admiral Sanda (off-screen) as they argue. The subtitle reads, “You’ll get me the clearance.” End ID.]

While Colleen doesn’t hesitate to ground Pidge for running away to space, the fact of the matter is that she and Sam fought like absolute hell to protect their kids in the ways they had available to them. Storge is the love parents have for their children and these two human characters are the perfect examples of it, even if Pidge chafes a bit under being grounded. Sam and Colleen’s love for Pidge and Matt and Coran’s love for Allura are the perfect avenues to explore how Storge is love, even if it’s frustrating, but they also serve as an excellent foil for how that love can be horribly twisted.

Philautia: Self-Love

In S1E1 of VLD, when our human protagonists meet Allura, Sendak is barreling through open space to their location and hellbent on capturing the Blue Lion. Allura is able to talk to Alfor–or rather, his hologram–to seek guidance in the upcoming battle, and he says, “You must be willing to sacrifice everything to assemble the lions and correct my error.”

With VLD, there’s this idea of sacrifice, of giving your life for the greater good, but when discussing acts of love, we also need to talk about acts of love for yourself. We see many instances of characters sacrificing themselves for the greater good, the belief that their death will bring an eventual victory to the Paladins of Voltron and free the universe. Allura throws Shiro into an escape pod so he doesn’t have to suffer the abuse again, but in the process becomes a prisoner herself. Ulaz gives up his life to save the Paladins and keep the Blade of Marmora base secret. Thace sacrifices himself so that Galra Central Command can go offline and the plan can move forward. Keith nearly kills himself trying to break through Haggar’s barrier at the battle of Naxzella before Lotor intervenes and destroys the ship with a blast from his Sincline ship. Sacrifice is a massive part of the show, and needless sacrifices are always undone, but what message do continuous sacrifices leave us with as the audience? It leaves us with Alfor’s lesson: you must sacrifice everything to correct my mistake.

When you’re writing, one of the most basic things you must do to drive a plot forward is change something significant. In the beginning of a story, Character A might think Character B is wrong and has no idea of what it takes to do something, but then Character B later on needs to surprise Character A by proving they can do that thing or that they don’t need to. It forces Character A and the audience to rethink their initial assumptions, and it encourages tension and dialogue between characters that otherwise might not exist. It’s an internal motivation, and one that audiences will pretty much always find more gripping and compelling than a simple monster-of-the-week scenario. VLD is no different. “All Galra are bad/Altea is good” leads to meeting the Blade of Marmora and Alteans who took over their universe. The challenge to a character’s worldview is what makes turning these initial ideas on their head so satisfying.

So what could challenge the idea that you have to sacrifice everything? Especially to correct the mistakes of someone else?

Love. Not for others, not for family, not even for the greater good.

But for yourself.

To quote Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Philautia is the love in which you put yourself first, not because it’s selfish, but because it’s self-care. Self-love is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an appreciation of one’s own worth or virtue” and Philautia has been recognized for millennia as a basic human need by the likes of Maslow and the Ancient Greeks. Recognizing your own needs and worth is a fundamentally radical decision, especially if you are in a position where you’re expected to prioritize the needs of others before your own.

S1E1 of VLD offers us pretty much every worldview that gets challenged later on in the series, except for Alfor’s. We see Alteans can be equally cruel, that Galra are not all evil. Voltron is a great protector, but it is also a great weapon, and Keith even calls it an alien warship in the very beginning, highlighting the danger Blue–and consequently Voltron itself–poses by merely existing. Philautia is not the exertion or prioritization of your desires, but the assertion of your needs. It can easily swing too far into selfishness and vanity, but making yourself heard is never a bad decision, and for those who are marginalized, women, trans people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, nonwhite people, it is an act of defiance. The sins of people in positions of power are not the burden for their victims to bear. If protesting is too much or too burdensome, simply taking the time to care for oneself is enough, because you can’t pour water out of an empty cup. Alfor’s plea to Allura was always meant to be overturned with the finale, especially since she’s facing down the antithesis of everything she believed in season 1. Honerva is selfish, manipulative, abusive, and an Altean woman. Alfor would ask Allura to give up everything she has left to destroy Honerva, but in the original and unedited season 8 Allura would have taken that plea and turned it on its head.

VLD’s Princess Allura is the first and only iteration to be a nonwhite girl and voiced by a black woman. Having her sacrifice herself is an extremely harmful message to little girls of color everywhere because it’s not the burden of girls of color to save the world. Their duty is to love themselves and know they’re able to be as brave and kind and intelligent as they’d like. Princess Allura’s arc is about a girl learning to not shoulder the burden of violence, but instead choosing to relieve herself and choose healing and creation, and in turn, her reward would be the literal universe at her fingertips.

And Allura isn’t the only character to learn to love themselves. Lance, as well, learns to become comfortable with himself. At first he’s comfortable and cocky and immature in Blue Lion, but then as the seasons progress and he finds Red to be more of a challenge, he learns he has to follow through with his actions and decisions. He learns that to fly Red, he can’t hesitate and just has to roll with the punches. He dubs himself “the sharpshooter” of the group, and at first he gets laughed at, but then he saves Slav from being trapped in prison once more by firing and making a near-impossible shot. He doesn’t have to forge ahead and fight recklessly, he simply has to see an opportunity and take it.

All our other Paladins learn to become more comfortable with themselves, as well. Hunk becomes more confident in being the voice of reason, and becomes an A+ diplomat in the process. Pidge is able to open up and be honest with her team about her secrets and fears, and in return is blessed not just with that weight off her shoulders, but the knowledge that her team is her family just as much as Sam and Matt are. Keith, too, learns that he doesn’t have to go it alone all the time. He’s able to relax and trust his team, and rather than burdening himself with doing everything, he’s able to rely on the skillsets of the other Paladins and make them a stronger team by focusing his attention on directing them, as opposed to commanding them.

Another interesting example of Philautia is Lotor himself, who at no point is uncomfortable with his mixed heritage, even when he’s called a “half-breed” or when one of his parents blames half of his heritage for his failings. The main reason that it’s not as blatant is because by the time the story begins, he’s been at peace with his heritage and his place in the Galra Empire for a long time, and thus does not play a significant role until he has his breakdown at the end of season 6.

This form of love is quite possibly the most frustrating, if only because so much of its payoff was in season 8. We should see Allura not give up her life in the name of sacrifice, but rather choose to become a goddess in the name of love. We should see Lance become unshakably confident in his abilities when it’s time to face the biggest bad guy of the series. The final season was meant to be a season won through love, and self-love is quintessential to that victory, because it gives viewers the message that your acceptance of yourself is vital to the world. It’s an important lesson for little girls everywhere to know that their worth doesn’t lie in how much of themselves they can give away, but how much of themselves they cultivate and grow, because if you trust in yourself and choose love, then you’ll be as powerful and strong as Princess Allura. It’s possible to be the brave and chivalrous Paladin while also being the princess who likes the occasional sparkly thing.

The lesson of Philautia in VLD is one of embracing your limits of what you can give, and reminding the world that you matter, because loving yourself is the greatest act of defiance when you’re faced with an enemy who wants nothing more than for you to make yourself smaller, weaker, more amicable if it would please them. It’s the reminder to be gentle with yourself, no matter what battles you face, because caring for yourself is just as–if not more–important.

Xenia: Love for the Stranger

Hospitality is a massive part of many cultures, I personally had a relative (who has since passed) who would always have an open door for the poor families in their neighborhood and the stove would always have something cooking. My own mother will cook especially for you if you need her to. There’s a reason “Southern hospitality” is famous. Good food, good company, and ultimately safety are what sets Xenia among the categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks. In VLD, this form of love is very sparse in comparison to love such as Philia, however it’s extremely important that our heroes engage in it. To quote Coran, “70 percent of diplomacy is appearance. Then 29 percent is manners, decorum, formalities and chit-chat” (“Changing of the Guard”). The remaining one percent, which Allura notes, is actual diplomacy and fighting for freedom. That’s essentially what hosting, good and proper hosting, is. It’s taking someone into your home and providing them with material comforts and necessities such as food, as well as non-physical ones like safety or protection, or extending and respecting their rights.

A good host will anticipate their guests’ needs because they have a love for their fellow strangers, and they show that love by providing for them. Xenia is the love of the stranger who has taken up space in your home and respecting their need to do so, but it’s also a reciprocal love. By extending your hospitality to a person, they will be more inclined to do the same for you and yours in the future. In Greece it was a complicated dance of gift-giving and receiving, spurred by the belief that one would incur the wrath of a god in disguise. While offending the gods was a big fear, it’s important to remember that good hosting and good guesting will create a deep bond between both parties because you’re respecting one another. Respect your wayward traveler and welcome them into your home, and they will entertain you with tales from far away lands, and in the future you will find a place at their table. Respect your host and the space they provide you, and you’ll receive gifts and care fit for a god. This giving and receiving encourages goodwill between strangers, and providing care to someone you don’t know is an act of love in its own right.

There’s a rule in American food language: “never return an empty dish”. This rule is especially prevalent in the US South and Midwest regions, but the general idea is that when you meet someone new (i.e. a new neighbor) you bring them a dish of something to welcome them and introduce yourself. You make small-talk, help them get acquainted with the area, wish them well, and then go on your merry way. Then, once your new neighbor has settled, eaten the food you gave them, and had time to make something new, they come knocking on your door and return that dish to you with a new food in it.

That’s a facet of what Xenia can encompass, and we see Xenia acted out in three key ways in VLD: Allura recruiting people for the Voltron Coalition, Lotor hosting the Paladins during their alliance, and Hunk showing his care for others through cooking.

Allura, for all her charms, isn’t that great of a diplomat, especially in the beginning of the story. When she meets the Arusians, she accidentally informs them that their dance of apology isn’t enough, which then makes them think they need to sacrifice themselves on a pyre. She thankfully recovers and lets them continue the dance, and then invites them into the Castle of Lions later. With the leaders of the rebel planets, she has a good presence and is rather suave with her guests, however when attention moves off her and onto the Paladins, and when the question of Voltron comes up, it’s extremely difficult for her to take control of the situation again. The loss of Shiro was fresh, and she really didn’t have a good answer that would reveal they couldn’t form Voltron, so she struggled with taking control back. This isn’t an indictment on Allura, but it is meant to point out how Xenia is not easy to learn. As we follow the Paladins, however, Allura gains confidence in her ability to speak publicly, and as they gather more allies it becomes easier for her to encourage alliances. She goes from panicking and trying to keep Arusians from dying to being able to communicate with allies and command a room. Xenia doesn’t come as naturally to Allura as it does to Hunk, and Lotor has had millennia of practice, but the important thing about Xenia is that you extend your hand and make the effort, even if it’s a little clumsy, because in the end you’re caring about strangers and welcoming them into your home and telling them they have a place at your table.

However, where Allura falls short in Xenia, we see both Hunk and Lotor shine. Let’s examine Lotor’s expertise, first.

Lotor is ten thousand years old, and it’s implied he’s spent much of that time playing the political game of the Galra Empire, as well as learning about other planets. It’s canon that he has a thirst for knowledge, and so couple his curiosity with his need to survive a very blood-driven political environment and you have a golden host forged in fire. It’s difficult to surprise Lotor, since he’s pretty much always two steps ahead of everyone. When he forges an alliance with the Voltron Coalition after his victory at the Kral Zera, Lotor has banners hung that bear the same symbol that Zarkon and Alfor fought under, which also adorns the shield on Green’s back. He specifically sought to recall the good times between the Galra and Alteans, and personally greeted the Paladins on his flagship. He encourages the Paladins to explore and use whatever resources they need, because as their host, Lotor–and by extension the entire Galra Empire–is now at their disposal. He’s the ever-perfect host, inviting his lower-ranked guests to make themselves comfortable, and acknowledging Allura’s rank as princess and personally escorting her along. In a lot of other high fantasy or sci-fi stories, showing the heroes around would get palmed off to a servant of some sort, especially if the host is duplicitous. However, Lotor affords our Heroes and Heroines quite a bit of respect compared to what other characters in his place might do, even going so far as to offer his own personal time to the princess when he has an empire to claim still. Given the canon politics, Lotor logically should have been in constant communication with various officers and securing their loyalty to him, but instead he takes time to approach his new allies and make them feel welcome in the headquarters of their former-enemy.

So while Lotor is arguably the best example of good hosting I’ve ever seen in a show (without it turning out to be some sort of ploy), Hunk’s style of Xenia is equally good if in a different way. While Lotor is shown to essentially be a master of decorum, Hunk is a master in the kitchen and the art of making room for everyone at the table. Hunk has only been in space for a few months to a few years (depending on when in the series we’re talking), he hasn’t had the millennia to research planets and learn all their customs, or train in diplomacy to make up for any lack of education. He’s just a guy from Earth who likes to cook and who especially likes to cook for others. In all prior iterations of Voltron, Hunk has always been “the food guy” or “the slightly dumb, but lovable one”. It’s not particularly flattering, and VLD even pokes fun at how flat his character is historically in “The Voltron Show!” by adding fart gag noises. In VLD, however, we see that Hunk is intelligent and brave, if anxious, and he’s more at home in a home than he is in a Lion. Hunk is a good Paladin, but he is quite possibly the best diplomat in the whole show.

A large part of Hunk’s diplomacy lies in listening. When he’s out in the field, he’s quite possibly the best listener out of the entire team. When there are guests on the Castleship, or when the Alteans are on the IGF-Atlas, he doesn’t just listen, he welcomes them. In scenes from season 8, we really get to see this shine, because as Hunk says in “Day Forty-Seven”, “food has a way of reminding people of moments in time.” Bringing good memories with food can go a long way to putting stress and anger behind people.

Every person has a dish that, when prepared, makes them relax and think of happy memories. In Hunk’s kitchen, everyone eats, and nobody is unwelcome. Whether you’re Commander Lahn and working with Hunk to save your planet from devastating radiation, or you’re an Altean who just wants what’s best for your people, Hunk will meet you halfway and try to see things from your perspective, and offer you a cookie because he feels like it. Hunk’s Xenia is not wrapped up in protocol or etiquette. His Xenia is found just across the kitchen table, with a plate of warm food and a friendly conversation, ready to listen to your troubles and offer a hug, if not a solution.

Agape: Unconditional Love

Now that we have discussed the five prior categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks, let’s examine Agape, which can be difficult to conceptualize. “Agape” originates a Greek term, however it wasn’t used very often until Christianity came into the picture, and thus it encompasses far more than even xenia does, because while Xenia is love in the form of courtesy to travelers, Agape’s prevalent definition stems purely from the idea that God loves everyone unconditionally. In fact, “agape” is the term used in the Bible to describe the unconditional love of God, but when you translate it to English, the word simply becomes “love”, losing the weight that it carries in Greek.

The idea of unconditional and divine love is not unique to Christianity or the Ancient Greeks. Throw a rock in any direction and I’m sure you’ll find a culture with a similar concept to Agape. The key aspects of unconditional love is that it is sexless–meaning attraction is unnecessary to feel Agape–and that it is founded in goodwill for others. It feels cheap to throw the quote “love thine enemy” around in this section, because that discounts the importance of Philautia as we discussed it earlier in this essay, but at the end of the day that’s what Agape means. The Bible–which influences much of the definition of this kind of love–would have people forgive the ones who do them wrong, but forgiveness does not mean forgetting, and loving someone doesn’t require forgiving them either.

In VLD, a man loved a woman so much he tricked his closest friends and allies into opening a rift in an effort to save her life. In the process, they both died and revived, cursed with immortality and a thirst for destruction. Zarkon was a man who loved Honerva so much that he doomed the known universe to 10,000 years of his tyranny. Honerva, when she regained her memories, sought vengeance against Voltron for not just losing her son, but also because she blames everyone around her for being the reason why her own son rejected her time and time again. Honerva is the antithesis to Allura in pretty much every way, and in the edited season 8, Lotor is condemned to a cycle of abuse because he’s never offered an opportunity to speak, just like how he was violently silenced by his mother when he disobeyed his father on the colony planet in “Shadows”. Honerva, however, is not.

[ID: A screenshot of S8, featuring from left to right: Lance, Keith, Allura, “Shiro”, Pidge, and Hunk. They face Honerva, who is facing away from the audience so we see the back of her head and suit. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

[ID: A shot of “Allura”’s hand grasping Honerva’s wrist and vice versa. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

Allura being a paragon of growing into Philautia gives other characters the ability to do the same, but as @leakinghate notes in “Seek Truth in Darkness”, that is not Allura’s hand, just as that is not Shiro next to Allura in the prior screenshot. Allura is not the one who was most wronged by Honerva. She was asleep and hidden from the universe. Lotor, however, was subjected to centuries of abuse by the hands of his parents.

Agape is a complicated love, one that requires a person to be able to love everyone unconditionally, but love does not necessarily mean “forgive and forget”. It’s important that Allura impart the enlightenment she gained on her Heroine’s Journey, because this is the point where she can be at peace and claim her cosmic reward, but she cannot do so without the person who was most wronged being able to face his oppressor: Lotor.

[ID: A close-up shot of Lotor glaring at the audience, with the subtitle text reading, “maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.” Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

As @leakinghate pointed out, Allura is the one to use her abilities to restore Honerva’s sense of self, but Lotor being present makes this confrontation all the more poignant and intense. This is the opportunity for us to see Agape in its full glory, but with the edits to the final season it’s a pale shadow of what could have been. The universe is about to be reborn because Allura and Lotor stay behind to repair the rift in all realities. We need that Philautia that Allura is able to embody, but we also need Agape. We’re shown countless times throughout the show that good and evil are not so clearly delineated, and that there are shades of gray everywhere. Lotor has been hurt so much by the one person alive who should have loved him unconditionally.

And rather than continue the cycle of abuse and take vengeance, he chooses to let go. We should have seen him take his power back, not in a godly or violent sense, but his power over his fate. He is not his father. And he is not his mother. He is more. By confronting her in this rift of all realities, we see the foreshadowing of season 6 come into full swing and while we are missing much of that original sequence between him and his mother, it’s important to realize that regardless of the content that was removed post-production, he takes pity on his mother in a sense. She’s a flawed person who made bad decisions. He does not owe her forgiveness, and he does not owe her love, but in her finally letting go of not just him but all the spirits of the original Paladins, Lotor himself is able to be free to love in the way he was denied: unconditionally.

The universe needs people who love themselves enough to choose a path of peace, and it needs to be made with the unconditional love of a parent, a friend, a lover, a god. It needs the eternal goodwill of its new creators because the people of the new universe will fuck up. They’ll make mistakes and hurt each other and Weblums will eat planets and the circle of life will continue. But being able to look at the fucked-up universe and say “I love you” is a power that not many have. It takes courage to look at the universe that has wronged you, wronged billions, hurt the found family that’s accepted you, and still find a way to love it.

The new universe is made of love just as the old one was. It’s made with passion, for friends, for family, for strangers, and for yourself. It’s made by people with love and hope and the intent to make the world they live in a little better every day. And that, ultimately, is the true love that spurs the story of VLD forward.

Stay tuned for a companion meta soon, in which we will discuss these forms of love and how they can be twisted and taken to unhealthy extremes.

Works Cited

Dos Santos, Joaquim and Montgomery, Lauren. Voltron: Legendary Defender. Netflix.

LeakingHate, et. al. “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away in VLD”. Team Purple Lion. 12 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/gay-romance-cut-voltron/

LeakingHate, et. al. “Seek Truth in Darkness”. Team Purple Lion. 2 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/seek-truth-in-darkness/ Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Eros”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3De%29%2Frws

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Philia”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dfili%2Fa

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Storge”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dstorgh%2F

“Self-love”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-love

Payne, Will. “Botany for the Beginner”. Australian Plants Online. 2006. http://anpsa.org.au/APOL2006/aug06-s1.html

Potter, Ben. “The Odyssey: Be Our Guest With Xenia”. Classical Wisdom Weekly. 19 April 2013. Web. https://classicalwisdom.com/culture/literature/the-odyssey-be-our-guest-with-xenia/

@leakinghate @crystal-rebellion @felixazrael @voltronisruiningmylife

#TeamPurpleLion #Team Purple Lion #vld #freevlds8 #voltron

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engmjr419 · 4 years ago

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Joice Heth and the Antebellum Depiction

An advertisement for Joice Heth from 1835 Source

Imagine, if you will, it is December of 1835. It’s the end of another week and you’re attending an exhibition in a hotel to settle down. You pay 25 cents at the door for admission, and you’re herded into the exhibition hall where a sea of white faces gathers around a central figure. In the middle of room, is an old black slave woman, filling the room with the smell of an old pipe.

Her face is a field of wrinkles, her eyes stare blankly out without movement, and her nails are long, unkempt, and filthy. This is Joice Heth, the main attraction, the supposed nanny (or mammy) of George Washington, the father of a country. She entertains the crowd with catholic hymns, historical stories, and warm quotes while the mass of people poke, prod, and examine her beyond any reasonable boundary.

Who and what is she? It would not matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, Slave owner or Abolitionist. You would simply be a face in the crowd, looking at her, examining her, and considering her. Is she really George Washington’s nursemaid? Is she an automation made of black tar, whale bone, and India rubber? Okay, granted she definitely isn’t an automation made of tar, but curiosity still parades the mind thanks to rumors, gossip, and discussion amongst the audience.

To funnel these thoughts into a single sentence, a viewer’s background, social class, culture, and race influence how they digest and interact with entertainment. In this case, the entertainment is an enslaved old black woman paraded around the country under a guise of historical connection. How would you look at her? Would you see her as a pitiful slave? A fellow deceiver of the masses? A mummy? An automation? An animalistic creature? The nursemaid of George Washington? To be more direct, how a society and culture creates racial concepts, class, stereotypes, and caricatures influenced how the audiences of Barnum viewed, interacted with, and discussed Joice Heth.

Throughout her travels with Barnum and Lyman, a curious multivalence marked the exhibit of Joice Heth. Did her decrepitude mark her as a human oddity, to be marketed like the Chinese woman with “disgustingly deformed” bound feet, the Virginia dwarves, and the Siamese twins whose paths she often crossed on the touring circuit? Was it her scientific value as an embodiment of the different aging processes of the different races that merited her display? Was she an attraction because of patriotic value as a living repository of memories of a glorious past? Because she was a storehouse of ancient religious practices? Or simply because she was a good performer? (Reiss 81).

Joice Heth was P.T. Barnum’s breakout humbug, the 161-year-old 46-pound nanny of George Washington. Barnum quickly discovered as he carried out exhibitions of Joice Heth, that the exhibit was not popular because it was extremely believable but because it wasn’t. The possibility that it was both real and not real enabled layers of discussion to build onto the act. This also preyed upon the growing concerns over identity and deceptions in the growing urban space, especially over increasing anxieties about race with identity in increasingly Abolitionist northern states.

P.T. Barnum played his role in presenting himself in that growing anxiety about deception, but Joice Heth played her own role as well. Race in the period of Joice Heth was beginning to be further looked at (this is ironically reflective of our current issues), especially in regard to identity and the desire for scientific assertions. (79).

Barnum’s first humbug manages to continue postmortem of both Joice Heth and P.T. Barnum, for little is known truthfully about her. The most information about her we have is from a twelve-page pamphlet published by Barnum, which was used for advertising so the information in it is questionable minimally and completely fabricated at worst (I lean for the latter).

A depiction of Heth and Barnum from the Potsville Herald, 1835. Source

Joice Heth was legally purchased by P.T. Barnum from John S. Bawling, who had previously been exhibiting her, for the price of 1000$. Barnum in future years made contradictory claims about his ownership of her as a slave. “In 1854 he claimed to be "the proprietor of the negress," while in 1869 he wrote that his payment only made him "proprietor of this novel exhibition”. These differing claims were made to save face, as the American Anti-Slavery Society had already been founded in 1833 and slavery was illegal in the North in the areas where Barnum was exhibiting the woman (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

The only definite thing we can say is Joice Heth died in 1836 of natural causes (despite Barnum’s claims and people’s theories that she wasn’t dead, the corpse was a fake, the autopsy was a hoax, and that she was preparing a tour of Europe as a phial of ashes) and that she was blind, paralyzed in both legs, and toothless. At the time of her autopsy (which Barnum still made an exhibition of at 50 cents a ticket) she was declared to be somewhere in her 80s, which is still pretty good considering the average lifespan of a slave was somewhere in the mid-20’s (Reiss 78).

The cover of the 12-page pamphlet published by an unknown author (presumably P.T. Barnum and co.) Source

“Joice Heth, the subject of this short memoir, was born on the Island of Madagascar on the coast of Africa, in the year One Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-four. Of her parents little or nothing is known, save what she herself relates of them…At the age of fifteen she was cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents and her native land by one of those inhuman beings, who in those days, to enrich themselves, made merchandise of human flesh” (Cook 104).

To fully view how people from different Antebellum backgrounds viewed Heth, we first can look at how Barnum presented Heath. In his pamphlet overviewing her, he mixed both Abolitionist wording with the Antebellum narrative of slave and slave owners. In the above except he says she was “cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents” but later on stating “A highly respectable gentleman of Kentucky…who has generously offered to set them free on being paid two-thirds of what they cost him” in regards to a deal from the owner of her great-grandchildren (a story that was created in face of Abolitionist criticism). This is to both satisfy the increasingly Abolitionist North and the Slave-owning south majority, though we cannot ignore that both sides had elements of the other in them at the same time.

He emphasizes that Joice was “treated by them (the Washingtons) as an hired servant rather than a slave” and “as to accommodate her in the enjoyment of the constant company of her helpmate (Peter)” referring to her transfer to another owner. The narrative continues like this, implying she has “great thankfulness” and she “is highly pleased with the idea of her remaining as she is, until death may finally close this mortal scene with her”, her life ended in Barnum’s possession. One cannot say if she was truly complicit in the act, satisfied with her role, mistreated as an object, or otherwise as the only account we have is from the mouth of Barnum who I personally would take with a grain of salt (as he was the proprietor of family-friendly deceptions) (Cook 105).

Top: The depiction of Joice Heth used in advertising from 1835 to 1836. Source

Bottom: An illustration from P.T. Barnum’s autobiography, Source

Furthermore, we must look at how Barnum and others presented her in depictions and in writing as many newspapers ran stories about the hoax. Many drawings, paintings, and sketches of Joice Heth depict her very differently, from alien-looking, to human, to more animalistic in nature from caricature to truthful depiction. The drawing above on the left is from the advertising poster used by Barnum, depicting her with dark, bark-like skin, elongated hands (referencing her supposed long, talon-like nails), and the clothing of the traditional mammy character (a bonnet and an aproned dress).

The drawing on the right is Barnum’s autobiography in 1855, in it she looks immensely less grotesque. The depiction used as advertising by Barnum is obviously an exaggerated caricature for the purposes of drawing in a crowd. It brings to my mind the concept of a “Tar baby” from the stories of Briar Rabbit, who also had roots from slave tales.

A depiction of Tom Rice, a popular minstrel show actor. Source

Caricatures of Black people and other people of color would be not foreign to the audiences of Joice Heth. Afterall, minstrelsy would have been in full swing by the time P.T. Barnum got possession of Heth. Even before then, caricatures of black faces, racist archetypes (specifically in our case the mammy), and exoticism (specifically the mystical minority concept) would be in the minds of the white faces observing her. Caricatures of these people would depict dark, almost pure black skin, exaggerated anatomy, and archetypical clothing, all of which is seen around Joice Heth.

Newspapers at the time described her in various ways, multiple from the New York area calling her an “animated mummy” (a bit harsh if you ask me). The New-York Evening Star describes her as “very much like an Egyptian mummy escaped from the Sarcophagus” while the New-York Sunday News said “This living mummy, on whose head 161 winters have sprinkled their snows” (Cook 108). A letter to the Editor of the New York Transcript shows some beliefs about “blacks” in relation to Heth’s passing and autopsy:

Another important physiological fact should be stated, which is, that blacks have a much greater tenacity for life than whites, and were it not that, like the domestic horse, they are broken down by servitude, they would live to much greater ages than the Circassian race -- and in the case before us, had it not been for the affectation of the lungs… together with what must have been fatigue to her, travelling and being subjected to the annoyance and importunity of her visitors, it is not improbable that the vital spark might have continued to flicker considerably longer (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

While this belief may seem completely odd and illogical to us at this point, let us not forget that a small population of our culture believes the world to be flat. People of the Antebellum era held the black individuals in their society at a different level, wherever that be on a lower one or a mystical one, typically both.

A political cartoon by Mark Knight of the Herald Sun of Serena Williams. Source

Blacks and other races in American society (among others) typically face racial based Dehumanization and Objectification, where the individuals presumed humanity is metaphorically taken from them and then the belief they have conscious, independent thought. This process obviously was done to slaves as they were treated as property rather than conscious individuals. It still occurs today, for example Serena Williams as well as many other Black Americans being called “gorilla” amongst other things and portrayed animalistically like the controversial political cartoon above.

Barnum does this with Joice through several points, from presumably purchasing her as legal property, to claiming and indulging in the fact she enjoys “Animal food” (it is unclear if that means horse, chicken, or dog), to creating an entire rumor that she is an Automation created from “India rubber, Whalebone, and springs” which only pushed audiences to further prod and examine her to further his humbug, “Her debility was a draw, too, for many came to gaze on- even to touch her- marvelously decrepit body” (Cook 105-106, Reiss 79).

Moreover, from the various newspapers and media calling her a “mummy” to Barnum publicizing, dramatizing, and broadcasting her autopsy as a “spectacular display of race”. As Benjamin Reiss puts it further, the autopsy “dramatized some of the new meanings of Racial Identity and provided an opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse” (79). Joice Heth was continually objectified by the masses, as a topic for discussion, as a thing to examine, and as a being to figure and unearth it’s identity.

The audiences of Joice Heth were probably never made up of one individual group. Poor or rich, Young or Old, Abolitionist or Slave owner, Southerner or Northerner. Each face in that sea of individuals had an individual thought and concept of Joice Heth, if she was real or fake, human or machine, aged beyond human limit or simply mundanely old, a pitiful slave held under Barnum’s thumb or a fellow deceiver who was comfortable in her servitude.

For whoever and however the viewer may have seen her, their opinion was influenced by what they were presented and what rumors they digested, their view of Black americans and slavery as a whole, and their fears or beliefs of identity and race. Joice Heth served to the masses as a way for them to further their concept of identity, race, deceptions in the growing urban site, and assert their influences on the new Antebellum era.

It is ironic then how I, another white face in the crowd, am looking upon Heth and considering her for myself in this era of racial discussion. That I am yet another white individual talking for Heth, in place of her own voice.

Phineas T. Barnum. “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It In the Universe.” Edited by James W. Cook, 2005, 104-108.

“The Joice Heth Exhibit.” The Lost Muesum Archive, https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/heth

Benjamin Reiss. “P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race” American Quaterly, No. 1, Vol. 51, 1999, 78-107.

#Joice Heth

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day.

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas.

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

#history #rant #long post #i'm sure i have more to say #but that's enough for now #anonymous #ask

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doomonfilm · 5 years ago

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Review : Parasite (2019)

Certain films that pass through the hallowed path that is Cannes Film Festival tend to generate monster levels of buzz, and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is no exception to that lucky rule. The buzz around this film was so thick, in fact, that I decided to check this one out simply on the strength of the general publics’ word of mouth. Without reading a review of or seeing a trailer for this film, I walked into my screening, and spoiler alert : my mind was blown.

In South Korea, a family lives in a cramped, semi-basement level apartment, communcally struggling to make the ends meet. After meeting with his friend Min (Park Seo-joon), Kim (Choi Woo-shik) lands an opportunity to tutor Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), the daughter of wealthy parents Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeng). After visiting the family’s lavish home, designed by famed architect (and former resident) Namgoong, Kim is hooked, and immediately enacts plans to employ his family to Park Da-hye’s family in a myriad of sneaky ways. After learning that Park Da-hye’s younger brother Park Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon) is an aspiring ‘artist’, Kim convinces Choi Yeon-gyo to hire Kim Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) as his art tutor, under the guise that she is a friend of a friend. Quickly, the siblings find a way to get Park Dong-ik’s personal driver Yoon (Park Geun-Rok) fired and replaced by their father Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho). After a bit of research and sabotage, the siblings also managed to get legacy housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) fired and replaced with their mother Kim Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin). With Kim’s family in place, and having convinced the family they are employed to that they are strangers, the group begins having visions of occupying a home like the Namgoong home. Their world is shattered, however, when Moon-gwang returns under strange circumstances during a family camping trip in honor of Park Da-song’s birthday, and the fallout causes waves that are felt by all families connected to the home.

This film is a whip-smart, darkly comedic look at materialism and classicism, with a pinch of suspense and tension sprinkled in by way of deceit on multiple levels. The Park family, while charming in their own right, clearly value objects more than people, with their fascination on American objects (read : consumerism) permeating to the point that they don the Kim family with American names, as if they are toys/servants. Despite this subtle power move, the levels of deceit used by the Kim family throw the power struggle on its head, with their ruse being implemented so quickly and efficiently that an artificial trust is built between the two parties. The classicism is presented via the extremely wide divide that exist between the help and the helped, with both the Kim family and Moon-gwang hiding ENORMOUS secrets literally right under the nose of the Park family due partly to the poorer familys’ need to do whatever they must to survive, and partly to the blind eye that the Park family turns on the poor and the old, with Park Dong-ik literally being repulsed by the smell of the old and the poor.

This film would not work nearly as well as it does without the monstrous presence that the house exudes, with its notorious reputation as a product of a famous architect serving as a distraction to its own set of deep secrets. The design of the home fits the decadence of the Park family, with its breathtaking aura being fueled by a mixture of simple (but grand) design that houses a litany of objects and a beautifully manicured lawn. Moon-gwang’s return, however, opens a door that is both figurative and literal, showing that even those that are implementing a dangerous ruse have room to be surprised and shocked. The home gives the Park family such a sense of comfort that it almost forms a literal haze around them, with young Park Da-song being the most perceptive member of the family due to his age and innocence being a strong protector against the fog of materialism and the jadedness that life experience creates.

The writing in this film is textured and tight, with plenty of seeds planted that pay off brilliantly throughout the run of the movie. The characters are as intelligent as they are funny, which allows them to play slightly over the top without sacrificing a sense of realism or damaging the ever-present tension that grows as the story unfolds. The cinematography is fluid and flowing, as the camera moves among those that inhabit the world of the film like an observant spectre (much like some of the characters find themselves eventually doing). The subtle undertones presented in the film feel like a reward to the audience, as Bong Joon-ho is careful not to spoon feed viewers or beat them over the head with information, relying instead on revealing things slowly and timely as the story progresses. The balance found in the parallel locations of the semi-basement level apartment and the grand Namgoong home works well, with the big secret that the Namgoong home hides serving as a bridge that connects everyone. The final half-hour of this film is as gripping and captivating cinema as anything I’ve seen all year.

The Kim family manages to be incredibly engaging despite being the true antagonists of the film (though the film really has no protagonists). Song Kang-ho finds a way to exude pride that is surrounded by a reservation and acceptance of his squalid situation, with Jang Hye-jin’s strong personality offsetting Song Kang-ho's sadness. Choi Woo-shik brings a teenage curiosity that he mixes with the eye of a hustler and opportunist, and Park So-dam runs the entire show with a keen mix of an assorted skill set, a sharp and actively observant state of mind, and a chameleon-like personality. As for the Park family, Jung Ji-so displays a proper level of boy-crazy tendencies, and Jung Hyun-joon lets his child-like mischief fuel his performance, making his character reveals and callbacks hit harder when they are played. Lee Sun-kyun exudes a quiet strength fueled by an indifference to nearly everything, and a shallowness that eventually becomes his downfall. Cho Yeo-jeong is arguably the most sympathetic of all the characters, with the love for her family playing against her deficiencies as a mother, wife and housekeeper, essentially making her a trophy wife with minor levels of autonomy. Lee Jung-eun plays her opening background roles strongly, making her return to the narrative a reveal that opens entirely new pathways of audience experience, judgement and tension. Appearances by Park Myung-hoon, Park Geun-Rok, Jung Yi-seo and Park Seo-joon round out the film.

This film is a hard one to talk about without revealing too much, and although I doubt that it would damage the experience of seeing this movie if you go into it with a bit of knowledge, this dish is one that is best served without prior knowledge in order to achieve maximum enjoyment. If you’re a fan of the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, or you like your humor mixed with a respectable level of shock and subtle social commentary, then Parasite is your film.

#ChiefDoomsday #DOOMonFILM #BongJoonHo #Parasite #SongKang-ho #JangHye-jin #ChoiWoo-shik #ParkSo-dam #LeeSun-kyun #ChoYeo-jeong #JungJi-so #JungHyun-joon #LeeJung-eun #ParkMyung-hoon #ParkGeun-Rok #JungYi-seo #ParkSeo-joon

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oliverarditi · 5 years ago

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The truths between instants

‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera, rather, can never speak truthfully, because the truth is never that people and objects are frozen rigidly between moments. Any facial expression presented in a photograph is a fugitive state, stolen from the transition between one movement and another: there was never a time when ‘that was the expression on their face’, because no observer ever read the meaning of a face from outwith the geometry of events that we perceive as the sequential flow of time. The truth is a moving target, which every still photograph is fated to miss. The camera presents us with images from which two of the four physical dimensions have been excised, and attempts to convince us that they can be readily reconstructed from the two that remain.

This is not to say that photographs cannot be truthful, simply that their defining characteristic of optical verisimilitude does not give them a greater claim on veracity than paintings, poems, pebbles, peaches, or parkour. Truth is not quantum, not a matter of discrete immutable facts, visual or otherwise; it is not digital, but analogue. Truth was abundantly present in Journey, Story, Memory, a career retrospective of the Sicilian photographer Ferdinando Scianna, into which we stepped, as though through a portal between worlds, from the demoralised, sun-bleached quadrangle of the former Franciscan friary that houses Palermo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna. Initially, a truth of Sicily; or beneath that even, a truth of Bagheria, a small town ten miles to the east of Palermo in which Scianna grew up. In these black and white images (as far as I know, all of Scianna’s work is monochrome) the contingency of a motionless optical impression is clear: a man balances on a pole over water, with rowing boats in front of him; a child runs along a street; a child is upside down, springing over a railing and down a terrace, one hand on each; two men are diving from a high rock, with no water visible beneath them. In none of these images is there a complete physical context, or sufficient narrative clues for the viewer to be certain of their prosaic ‘truth’; instead they must imagine, that the men are diving into water, that the end of the pole that is out of shot is anchored to the land or to a boat, that the child has risen early from bed and will later devour a bowl of pasta alla Norma provided by a weathered grandmother who has seen his like before and knows his tricks.

Truth arises in what the photographs direct us to outside themselves, and it arises between the images, in the connections that appear when they are viewed as a body of work. Scianna is both visually insightful and theoretically informed, and so he responds to the fleeting truths of visual experience neither with the heavy-handed objectivism of documentary photography, nor with self-expressive subjectivist formalism. In this show he chooses to group his work thematically, and it is only in the first exhibition space that the theme is geographically defined - and there it is also defined by the youth of the photographer, who did not leave his native town until he was twenty-three. In that context it is easy for him to let us know what truths have concerned him, but the individual works also read very clearly in that interzone between subject and object: Scianna aims to let the images speak for themselves, but he has clearly chosen carefully what kinds of image to construct, and knows very well what they are likely to say.

The subjects and genres that Scianna chooses are extremely varied, ranging from the intimate to the detached, the domestic to the public, the local to the cosmopolitan, the social to the aesthetic. There are still-lives, street scenes, portraits, fashion shots, landscapes and objets trouves. It would clearly be difficult to take one image in isolation, an aerial photograph of an island, say, or a piece of bent wire on a beach, and say ‘this is by Ferdinando Scianna’, but group enough of them together and his eye emerges unmistakably. He is an accomplished technician, manipulating depth of field and sharpness of focus in ways that emerge as characteristic once the viewer has taken in enough of his work, but what left the most striking after-images on my retina was his dramatic and geometric deployment of chiaroscuro, which reminded me at times of the work of the great American comic artist Jaime Hernandez. The two creators share some insights about visual grammar, and both marshal the affective power of geometric and graphic elements to comment on pictorial and narrative denotations.

Scianna’s fashion work, to which he came later in his career, is represented here by a series of photos he took for Dolce e Gabbana of the Dutch model Marpessa Hennink. In these, he engages critically with the absurdities and artificiality of the genre, often attempting to subvert its dominant tropes. At the same time he is clearly infatuated with the image of Hennink herself, which is extremely striking, but when that image is permitted to ‘speak for itself’ all of its specificities are swamped by the morphologically prescriptive fetish-commodity that images of women’s bodies become in contemporary visual culture. Huge prints of her face and her naked torso can only be read in the same way as any other hyperreal image of a beautiful, slender young woman. Much better is the image that positions her next to a homely, dirty butcher’s boy with a huge side of pork over his shoulders. In a way these pictures define the limit condition of Scianna’s critical insight, which usually leads him to endow his portraits with some context, but which also permits him to frame Hennink’s image as an autonomous aesthetic object.

The portraits in the show include images of some cultural figures of personal significance to me, such as Martin Scorsese, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roland Barthes, and most interestingly Jorge Luis Borges. Each portrait, most of which position their subject alongside some significant object, or in some meaningful place, is accompanied by an essay by Scianna on his relationship with them, or on the circumstances of the shoot. Borges was apparently amused, in a very Borgesian way, as Scianna notes, ‘to become the object of images he would never see’. This seems an interesting commentary on the observation that photographs preserve an optical impression that has no counterpart in visual experience, other than the experience of looking at a photograph. Nobody else ever saw those images of Borges, except in the photographs that Scianna took; the visual truth of Borges was and remains unavailable, to him and to us, except in the moment of seeing him.

The broad sweep of this extensive and almost overwhelmingly varied exhibition enables the entire oeuvre of more than fifty years’ work to emerge as geographically situated in relation to the artist’s roots in Sicily. I haven’t mentioned Scianna’s travelling, or the images he captured in far-flung places, but they are a significant part of his body of work, and in the short, insightful essays with which he introduces each section of the show, he demonstrates unequivocally how grounded he is in his native soil. This awareness of a relationship with his point of origin enables Scianna to grasp truths about other places, about the world, that can be elusive in the absence of a solid frame of reference. Like the exact rectilinear boundaries of his photographs, Sicily provides Scianna with such a frame. I forget who it was that said in something I recently read, that to be a citizen of the world it is necessary to know where you come from; I would struggle to justify such a claim with any evidence relating to the island’s aesthetics, or artistic or photographic traditions, but I am left by the exhibition with a very powerful impression that this is definitively Sicilian photography. This is the mutable, emergent truth that seeps out between these transient monochrome flashes of the imagery that Scianna traversed on his journey away from and towards his home.

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet

The production and release of Captain Marvel, the new science fiction superhero adventure from Marvel and Disney, has a number of remarkable features, but none of them involve the film’s drama, action or characters.

Briefly, Captain Marvel, in convoluted fashion, follows US Air Force pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) who absorbs an awesome energy source, making her potentially “one of the universe’s most powerful heroes ever known,” according to the film’s publicity.

However, six years later, she is suffering from amnesia, doesn’t know who or what she is and has become a member of the repressive Starforce Military under her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). The shapeshifting Skrulls, the apparent enemy, force Danvers to crash-land in the US in the mid-1990s. But all is not what it appears. Danvers discovers secrets about herself and about a “galactic war” between two alien races.

Not much of this is interesting, although it is noisy and “action-packed.” Captain Marvel, as a film, is predictable, empty and tedious. The more “sensitive” scenes on Earth, focusing on Danvers and her African American friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and daughter (Akira Akbar), are possibly the most contrived and least convincing.

The first genuinely noteworthy fact about the new film, not surprisingly, concerns money.

Disney, the film’s distributor, is the world’s largest media company, with some $100 billion in assets. With a market value of $152 billion, it ranks as the 53rd largest company of any kind in the world, just behind Total (oil and gas), Merck (pharmaceuticals), the Bank of China (one of the four leading state-owned commercial banks in China), Unilever, DowDuPont and BP.

Media reports place Captain Marvel’s combined net production and global marketing costs at $300 million. To date, the film’s global box office stands at $774 million.

Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel.

In fact, Task & Purpose reported that Marvel Studios launched the official start of production “with a photo of Larson, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, then-commander of the 57th Wing and the service’s first female fighter pilot, atop an F-15 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”

“To prepare for her role, Larson,” according to The Wrap, visited the Air Force base “to join simulated dogfights. The film’s red-carpet premiere included testimonials from Air Force men and women and a flyover by the Air Force’s Nellis-based Thunderbirds.”

Task & Purpose, a website that follows the American military, also cited the emailed comments of Todd Fleming, chief of the Community and Public Outreach Division at Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs: “The Air Force partners on any number of entertainment projects to ensure the depiction of Airmen and the Air Force mission is accurate and authentic. Our partnership with ‘Capt Marvel’ [sic] helped ensure the character’s time in the Air Force and backstory was presented accurately. It also highlighted the importance of the Air Force to our national defense.”

“[Captain Marvel] is not part of a recruiting strategy but we would expect that audiences seeing a strong Air Force heroine, whose story is in line with the story of many of our Airmen, would be positively received,” Fleming said.

The issue of female recruitment is no small matter. American imperialism, recklessly gearing up for war against Russia, China and other rivals, needs vast new supplies of human fodder. Task & Purpose explains, “The spotlight on airmen [in Captain Marvel] comes at a time when the Air Force, like the other services, is hunting for the next generation of pilots. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are all short 25 percent of their pilot billets, according to a GAO [Government Accountability Office] report published this summer; the Air Force in particular has doled out cash incentives like candy in a vain effort to prevent pilots from defecting to the private sector. Indeed, the branch’s plan to increase its number of squadrons by 76 to Cold War levels will require an additional 40,000 personnel, further straining the service’s recruitment capabilities. At the Air Force Academy, female cadets are increasingly encouraged to vie for pilot spots to help bridge that gap.”

Larson, who has made all sorts of useless (or worse) comments about #MeToo, alleged sexual abuse and her own “social activism,” like most of affluent Hollywood, is entirely oblivious to the criminal role of the US military, the greatest source of terror and “abuse” on the planet by an order of magnitude of 100 times or more.

The female heroism in Captain Marvel, of course, has been greeted with plaudits. Entertainment Weekly noted excitedly that the film would “mark the first time a woman will be headlining her own solo superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also marks the first time a woman will direct a superhero film for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden will co-direct with her Mississippi Grind partner Ryan Fleck.”

The hope is that Captain Marvel will do “for women” what Black Panther did “for African Americans”—which is, of course, nothing whatsoever, except for a small layer of prominent studio executives, writers, performers, etc.

This comment from Deadline is typical: “One film finance source believes that it’s pretty much certain that Captain Marvel will see $1 billion around the world and break the glass ceiling for female-led pics at the global B.O. [box office], dashing past Wonder Woman’s final global of $821.8M.”

As is this Vox headline: “Why Captain Marvel’s milestone status creates so much pressure for it to succeed—Why Captain Marvel represents more than just a superhero movie.” The article proposes to answer these important questions: “What does a woman superhero mean for Marvel Studios and the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]? What are the takeaways from Captain Marvel’s already overwhelming box office success? What does the film have to say about feminism? What might have happened if it had flopped? And who gets to shape the conversation and narrative surrounding it?”

The final and perhaps most remarkable feature of Captain Marvel involves its writer-directors. (And, secondarily, its performers. What are Larson, Jude Law and the talented Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whose acting in The Land of Steady Habits we recently praised, doing in this rubbish?)

We have made the point previously on more than one occasion about the objective significance of the “long march” of numerous so-called independent or art filmmakers toward empty-headed, “blockbuster” movie-making. We noted the examples of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, etc.), Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys), the Russo brothers (the Captain America and Avengers franchises), Kenneth Branagh (Thor), Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, etc.), John Singleton (a Fast and Furious installment), Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, one of the James Bond fantasies), Marc Forster (another of the Bond films, Quantum of Solace), Sam Mendes (yet another Bond film, Skyfall) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman).

To that list, one can add the more recent examples of Jon Watts (two Spider-Man films), Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther).

In a number of these cases, the filmmakers had earlier indicated vaguely oppositional political views or a certain concern at least for the fate of broader layers of the population.

The lure of large amounts of money is obviously an issue. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: what are the social and ideological conditions that make writers, directors and performers susceptible to this “lure”? It is not inevitable. Artists, including in the US, have been known to repudiate such offers with contempt. Almost inevitably, however, such resistance has been rooted in political and social conceptions and opposition of a left-wing character, sustained by a confidence in the better instincts of the population and its willingness to struggle. Those conceptions and that confidence are sorely lacking today.

The directors of the dreadful Captain Marvel, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, should not be entirely unfamiliar to readers of the WSWS, although the context—big-budget Hollywood—may be unexpected. We have reviewed two of their films in the past, Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008).

The Atlantic notes with surprise that Fleck and Boden “until now have worked in the realm of quiet, sensitive indie films.” More than simply “quiet” and “sensitive,” Half Nelson centers on an obviously left-wing high school teacher working at an inner-city school in Brooklyn.

A 2006 New York Times article about the making of Half Nelson is worth citing. The Fleck-Boden film, wrote Dennis Lim, “is a political allegory, a film about a would-be visionary who wants to change the world but can’t get his act together and is often his own worst enemy. It’s not a stretch to read it as a comment on the sorry state of the American left.”

“‘That was more or less conscious,’ the film’s director, Ryan Fleck, said of the political subtext.” Fleck and Boden “started writing Half Nelson … four years ago, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. ‘It felt like we were going to protests every other week,’ Mr. Fleck said recently. ‘But ultimately you don’t have the energy to do it all, and you feel like you’re doing very little. A big part of the frustration was the inability to make meaningful change.’

“The activist spirit comes naturally to Mr. Fleck, who was born to socialist parents on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. As a child he was taken to rallies and protests. As a teenager he read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.”

In an interview with Slant magazine, Fleck, asked about religion, replied jokingly “I was raised communist.”

Fleck and Boden’s Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player playing in the minor leagues in the US, the WSWS commented, was “about immigration and acculturation, capitalism and exploitation, hospitality and loneliness.”

Now, a decade later, Captain Marvel.

The same 2006 Times article referred to above contained this passage:

“Mr. Fleck said he hoped that their future projects would remain, however obliquely, rooted in a sense of social justice. ‘Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets,’ he said. ‘But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way.’

“Ms. Boden’s idealism is more tempered. ‘I don’t have an inflated sense of what a movie can do,’ she said. ‘But you can at least try not to put something out there that you don’t believe in.’

“Mr. Fleck added: ‘That’s a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world.’”

Unfortunately, they have now.

#captain marvel #brie larson #disney #marvel #marvel mcu #feminism #usaf #us military #war criminals #capitalism #class warfare #propaganda #bourgeois propaganda

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judgestarling · 6 years ago

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Driving Professor Sydney Brenner

One of my scientific idols, Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), who helped determine the nature of the genetic code—he discovered two termination codons—who co-discovered mRNA, and who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 for deciphering the sequence of events leading to the development of a multicellular organism from a fertilized egg into an adult nematode, died on April 5, 2019. He was 92. In my only face-to-face (actually face-to-back) conversation with him, many years ago, I told him that his cigarettes will kill him. And, indeed, they did… at 92.

I met Professor Brenner in 2002 when he was awarded the Dan David Prize in Israel, had a brief correspondence with him via email in 2013, and throughout my entire scientific life, I devoured his papers and commentaries.

The Dan David Prize is a weird institution. It is governed by my former employer, Tel Aviv University, and the Dan David Foundation, a somewhat secretive private charity that supports a variety of academic causes, with a heavy emphasis on archeology. Every year the Dan David Prize grants three awards of $1 million each for outstanding achievements in three categories: Past, Present, and Future. Each year, an academic committee decides the specific topics for each of the categories to be recognized the following year. (The selected fields for 2019, for instance, were Past: Macrohistory, Present: Defending Democracy, and Future: Combating Climate Change).

Prize laureates have to donate 10% of their prize money to doctoral scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholarships for outstanding researchers in their own field from Israel and around the world.

The first awards ceremony took place at Tel Aviv University on May 2002. The theme for the first Future prize was Life Sciences and the prize was split among three laureates: Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, Robert Waterston. (Seven month later, in December 2002, we learned that that Brenner and Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize together with H. Robert Horvitz for “for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.”)

As expected, the novelty of the million-dollar prizes attracted a lot of attention from the Israeli press. Most of the journalists, however, focused on John Sulston, who had the courage to insist that some scholarships be awarded to Palestinian scholars.

In 2002, I was the “Gordon Professor of Life Sciences” at Tel Aviv University—a grand title accompanied by no endowment—but in May 2002, for two days, I had an even more impressive title, I was Sydney Brenner’s chauffeur. His assigned chauffeur for the series of lectures and ceremonies simply stood him up, and I volunteered to drive him from the hotel to the University for his scientific lecture to faculty and students. Professor Brenner was not very impressed with my miniature Honda, but he was happy that I did not raised any objections to his chain smoking in my car. My ride with him constituted the first and last time that I enjoyed the traffic congestion in Tel Aviv, as it meant having a long conversation with Prof. Brenner.

Brenner first asked me if I knew Francis Crick. I told him that Crick was a scientific hero of mine, but that I think that his “reverse learning theory of dreams” was an unworthy detour.

“That’s what I think too,” he replied, “but since Crick was always right in the past, I’ll withhold judgement. People didn’t believe his tRNA, his selfish DNA, and his Central Dogma, but he was always right. I have the nagging feeling that his theory on dreams will also turn out to be true” (1).

“And what about Jim Watson,” I asked.

“Don’t want to talk about that racist arse,” was his quick reply.

When we arrived at the place where he was supposed to give his first talk, I asked him about the slides.

“I’ll be careful,” I said, “I promise not to drop the slide tray.”

“What slides?” he muttered and rushed to the podium.

He then proceeded to deliver one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever listened to. No slides, no notes, just a stream of consciousness by a feverish brilliant mind, who demolished every logical distortion, every sign of mental laziness, and every methodological shortcut.

Genomics? “Enormous factories for generating billions of data points that are a poor substitute for thinking.”

All other -omics? “Forget about them. It’s biochemistry, stupid.”

Universities? “Places where students can Xerox themselves to death” (2)

The human genome project? “A billion-dollar generator of junk-DNA sequences.”

He then proceeded to tell us how he reached the conclusion that sequencing the human genome in its entirety is not the only way to gain insight into the workings of human genetics.

It was the middle 1980s and several people, including Robert Sinsheimer and Renato Dulbecco started pushing for the establishment of a mega project to sequence the human genome. Given the speed of the sequencing technology at the time, a major stumbling block was finding people who would be willing to do such a seemingly boring and tedious task as sequencing the genome. Walter Gilbert advocated a large center, highly integrated, and organized along industrial lines. Sydney Brenner half-jokingly suggested establishing “a penal colony where sentences consisting of large-scale sequencing projects would be carried out.”

The prospect of becoming involved in an industrial project did not appeal to Brenner. There must be a way to get results without sequencing every piece of junk in the human genome. He came up with two alternatives: sequencing the human exome, i.e., about the 1% of the human genome that was known to perform a selected-effect function, or find a Readers Digest version of the human genome that could be sequenced faster and more cheaply than the human genome, yet would be as scientifically meaningful and rewarding.

Someone—Sydney Brenner did not remember whom—suggested he look into a paper published in the late 1960s in American Naturalist.

“What, I’ll find my answer in a nudie magazine?” said Brenner, playing on the difference between “naturalist” and “naturist.”

And there it was, in a paper by Ralph Hinegardner (Evolution of cellular DNA content in teleost fishes. 1968. Am. Nat. 102:517-523) at the end of Table 1: Tetraodon fluviatilis (green pufferfish) with 0.40 picograms DNA.

A congeneric species with a smaller genome was subsequently found, Tetraodon nigroviridis (green spotted pufferfish) with 0.35 picograms. For reasons that most probably concerned availability of tissues, Brenner’s choice was another pufferfish, the famous, poisonous, and exorbitantly expensive Japanese delicacy, the fugu (Fugu rubripes) (3).

In 1993, he reported the initial characterization of the fugu genome (Brenner S, Elgar G, Sanford R, Macrae A, Venkatesh B, Aparicio S. 1993. Characterization of the pufferfish (Fugu) genome as a compact model vertebrate genome. Nature 366:265–268). He found that the fugu haploid genome was 7.5 times smaller than the human genome of which more that 90% was unique. The fugu genome had a similar gene repertoire as the human genome, and according to Brenner and colleagues, “it is the best model genome for the discovery of human genes.”

Sadly, his suggestion to completely sequence Fugu and only sequence the human exome did not convince the granting agencies, which at this point in time were desperate to find the next “moonshot,” the next big project, that could be sold to the masses as a cure-all for all humanity’s ailments (4).

A partial fugu genome was published in 2002 with Sydney Brenner as the last author one year after the publication of the human genome. The genome of Tetraodon nigroviridis was published in 2004, three years after the first draft of the human genome. Brenner was not an author on this paper.

After Brenner’s lecture in 2002, I started reading everything Professor Brenner had ever written… with one exception—a seventy-four page methodology paper (Barnett L, Brenner S, Crick FHC, Shulman RG, Watts-Tobin RJ. 1967. Phase-shift and other mutants in the first part of the rII B cistron of bacteriophage T4. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 252:487-560) that Francis Crick predicted no one will read. As far as I am concerned, Crick was right again.

The second time I communicated with Prof. Brenner was eleven years later.

In 2013, as I was fighting the obscene conclusions by the equally obscene ENCODE Project, I discovered that the accepted historical narrative according to which the term “junk DNA” was coined in 1972 by Susumu Ohno as part of his work on the role of gene and genome duplication was inaccurate (see here). The term was used in the literature at least 12 years before Ohno used it. The trail of clues led me to Cambridge in the late 1950s, and following a suggestion by Tim Hunt, another Nobel Prize Laureate, who used the term “junk DNA” independently of Ohno, I contacted Dr. Brenner.

Dr. Brenner was very generous in his answer

October 7, 2013

Dear Dr. Graur

I can confirm that we were using the idea of junk in the genome in the sixties in Cambridge. Indeed in the late fifties we were very much concerned with this big puzzle: Analyses of the nucleotide composition of bacteria showed that the ratios of AT to GC varied in different bacteria from 1:3 to 3:1, whereas the composition of ribosomal RNA (which we thought at the time was the information intermediate) was constant. One possibility was that the coding information only occupied a small fraction of the DNA the rest being junk. [Noboru] Sueoka killed this idea when he showed that the composition of the DNA could be measured by equilibrium sedimentation and that when he sheared the DNA to smaller sizes separation of two kinds of DNA did not occur and the composition was maintained down to small pieces. It was the discovery of messenger and understanding the degeneracy of the code that solved this problem.

All through the sixties we were concerned with the problem of the C paradox in higher organisms. DNA contents varied over enormous amounts which had no relation to biological properties. The development of CoT analysis by Roy Britten revealed that this could be explained by the fact that "single copy" DNA represented only a minor fraction of the DNA and that large and variable fractions could be represented by repetitive DNA with different annealing rates.

We also had to contend with the fact that the heterogeneous RNA in animal cells (which was the messenger) had a very high molecular weight suggesting that the genes of higher organisms were very large - of course we did not know that there were introns at the time. It was very natural to use the term junk to describe this useless DNA and I was using in Cambridge in the sixties and I gave lectures on this in the Woods Hole Physiology course in 1968 and 1969, where incidentally I read the papers which showed the small DNA content of the puffer fish. Of course we had a lot of difficulty to explain to people why this useless DNA was being maintained and had not already disappeared. This type of “logic” is still part of the psychology of most people and especially of the ENCODE gang.

My distinction between two kinds of rubbish - junk and garbage - which you quoted in your paper, came much later when I discovered that most languages made a distinction between the rubbish you keep and the rubbish you throw away.

I was interested very much in your [ENCODE] paper (could you send me a copy please) and I am still working on the problem.

I think the key is to understand that there are two processes going on in our genomes. One is change in the DNA by mutation or transposition and other is its fixation. I think that the assumption that selection does not work for neutral changes and that they can only be fixed by random drift is wrong. The big driver for fixation of neutral changes is linkage to selected genes - the hitchhiking effect.

You may also be amused by the story that when micro RNAs were discovered somebody wrote to me demanding that I withdraw a statement I had made that 97% of the human genome was junk. I replied saying I was willing to change this figure to 96.8% And another one: when asked what the function of all this extra DNA was our reply was it was there to maintain the viscosity of the nucleus.

Thank you for being so patient.

Sydney Brenner

In December, I got permission to quote his email

I feel most remiss in not replying to your letter more promptly. You are welcome to quote from the letter.

Sydney

Sadly, that’s where the correspondence ended. My follow-up emails went unanswered and his colleague in Singapore, Dr. Byrappa Venkatesh, wrote to inform me that Prof. Brenner “has not been well,” and may not have seen my emails.

Notes

(1) Crick’s publication on the reverse theory of dreams has been cited over a thousand times in the literature, but did not prove popular with psychologists. It did, however, reinforce modern post-Freudian ideas that dreams are meaningless, and the paper by Crick and Graeme Mitchison on reverse learning contributed to the marginalization of dreams in clinical psychological practice.

(2) Brenner was known for his legendary love of wordplay. For example, he instructed students to “neurox” (copy from paper to brain) rather than Xerox (copy from paper to paper. He also invented “Occam’s broom” to complement “Occam’s razor.” The function of Occam’s broom was “to sweep under the carpet what one must in order to leave your hypotheses consistent.”

(3) In 2013, Tetraodon fluviatilis and Tetraodon nigroviridis were found to be misclassified, and were subsumed into genus Dichotomyctere. As expected, molecular biologists didn’t give a shit about the proper biological nomenclature; since 2014 the name Dichotomyctere nigroviridis was only used 30 times, whereas the invalid name Tetraodon nigroviridis was used more than 4,000 times. The genus Fugu is actually a minor synonym of the valid name Takifugu. The valid name in this case fared better than Dichotomyctere. In the last 10 years, Fugu has been used 3,960 times, while Takifugu was used 9,430 times.

(4) All subsequent wasteful and boastful megaprojects from ENCODE to the Brain Project can be traced to the decision to reject Brenner’s proposal. And as we all know, the Human Genome Project has indeed eradicated all disease, ended world hunger, stopped global warming, and put an end to the use of Comic Sans in PowerPoint presentations.

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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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rumandtimes · 3 years ago

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I Don’t Trust Atheists on TV

__________________________________________________

Winfred Thoroughfare

Assoc. Reasonable Man Contributor

There’s something unsavoury about television personalities in general, but especially those that address the topic of religion. As a reasonable man, I don’t trust religious personalities on television at all, but I couldn’t say that I distrust overt atheists any less or believe in them any more than the commercial evangelists.

The Call To Atheism

For an out-and-out atheist to take to the stage and the limelight, they must have some sort of mission. Namely, to sell their book, but on the back of that goal they have a supplementary objective: the destruction of religion. TV atheists usually don’t espouse the benefits of one religion over another and typically hate them all. Their goal is to destroy world religion. But as most of them in the English-speaking circuit come from the United States or England, they usually set their targets for Christianity, making little distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, but viewing Protestantism as slightly more evolved because it can in certain cases be more secular, and usually making no distinction between Orthodoxy and liberalism, since such a divide is unimportant to the U.S. / U.K. audience.

While they are no worse than idiots spreading religious lies and falsehoods to a closed loop of believers on TV, televisions atheists are often consumed by their particular egos and in propagating the achievement of their respective book. Even atheists who feign humility will go on and on about how humble they are, and take the stage to speak of how they do not care for recognition. The companionship of atheism and egoism is likely, probably because the atheist feels as if there is a thousand-year-old tradition spanning human existence up into the majority of the present population, yet they alone in their limited group of intellectuals have solved the ultimate problem: that the big, existential lie of monotheism does not exist.

Everyone knows it’s not so simple. It is an easy matter to prove that any religious text is demonstrably false, and every religious tradition is inconsistent and inane more often than not. But that does not negate the purpose religious has in society, which is not a historical or scientific one, but a bluntly cultural function that often guides socioeconomic behaviours.

Christianity in the United States, for instance, is a markedly isolationist, greedy, and self-indulgent religion; it exists to justify the biases of the congregant, not to challenge a sense of conformity or growth. While American Christians might take umbrage with that observation, pointing to charitable works by their millions of churches and blanket ideals of amicability, religion in America is more often an economic identity or a regional heritage than a calling to a universal standard, and the threat of hell to the nonbeliever out-levers the embrace of opposing factions to a ubiquitous degree.

The Mormons, who may call themselves the most American sect of Christianity (as they claim Jesus was an American) prioritise charity, discipline, and humility for the congregant — all which could be viewed as selfless virtues. But, of course, the Mormons are also extremely strict about social habits such as embracing all forms of abstinence, and their charity comes as a cloak over the dagger of proselytisation and attempts at conversion. Humility on the individual level may be cooperative, but at the institutional level it plays a part in enforcing conformity and obedience from the top down. Charity comes with expectation, discipline comes with sacrifice, and humility comes with ceding control. While it may be hard for a believer of such transactional and oppressive religion to hear, there are forms of Christianity that ask the believer to give up nothing, and instead revel in what there is to gain in following ‘the one true way.’

While religions are often polluted and poisoned by administrative strangling of the freedoms of their lower communities, all religions at their centre have a commentary about the nature and purpose of life, a narrative on the conquest of death, and a guide to live a happier and better existence. Most people are not blind to the corruption of the global clergy, but are happy to ignore and accept the nonsense in return for the community and spiritual gains, or at the very least, the illusion of these comforts. The evangelist atheists underestimate this along with the capacity of their audience whom they ostensibly hope to convert, and underestimate the mortal terror most people have of death and living a useless life.

To broach this fact, many TV atheists speak to the fact that they don’t care what a person believes or how they find comfort, so long as it falls within the cliche utilitarian principle that it does not harm another person. For these atheists however, that is a hard definition to make, because they are very much building a public profile and a career on exterminating religion because they view religion as necessarily irrational and damaging.

Take the prominent TV atheists, while all of them are somewhat fading as of late: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry, Daniel Dennett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye — it is difficult to trust any of them on the topic of religion. Not because they can easily and conveniently poke holes in religious structures, as we all can, a child can grasp the paradoxes and mistruths of a religious story or text, but because they do not offer an alternative set of mind.

Becrying a problem and then failing to point to a solution helps no one. How will religion die? Where is the answer to that question? They avoid this question. Yet, to the TV atheist, questions of god are easy: Is God all-good? Of course not, because the world is a place that is not all-good. Is God anthropomorphic? Of course not, expecting the creator of the universe to resemble humankind is a clear limit of human hubris and egocentrism. Is God real? Of course not, there is no evidence that a god exists, and all religious accounts we have are clearly incorrect, so there is more reason not to believe and remain atheist or at the very least agnostic than there is reason to believe, therefore any god does not exist. Everyone but the deepest and most repressed religious fanatic has asked themself these questions and come to these rather obvious conclusions, and they didn’t need to map it out in a lengthy book to do so. Yet, still, to the vast majority of people it simply does not matter.

If you meet a Christian on the street and become upset that this man could believe in such a stupid, corrupt, and repressive religion as the Christian church, what will you do? Tell him that the church is corrupt? He will respond that the message of Christianity is dependent on Jesus, who is perfect, not the church, which may well be corrupt.

What if you tell him that Jesus did not exist? Or that Jesus was just a man, and not a deity or demigod as the Christians claim? He will respond that it is irrelevant, because the Bible is a narrative handed down through the generations and not a book of current events, and he values the heritage of traditions set forth in the Christian faith, regardless of the perception nonbelievers have of the Bible, and regardless of whether the account of Jesus exactly correct or not the message of Jesus is real, and that is all that matters.

What if you tell him the message of Jesus and the Bible is inconsistent and self-contradictory? He will respond that it is the duty of a good Christian to see the true, all-good message of the Bible by picking out the good parts as scripture, and ignoring the bad parts as a list of examples of traps of sin not to fall for.

Any argument you throw at this man about the history, epistemology, or philosophy of the Christian faith are irrelevant, because all he cares about is the end result: a belief that Christian teachings will guide a good life, and holding an absolution from the fear of death. Atheists can spout off their nonsense as much as they want, but unless they have a good alternative on how to live a meaningful life and how to not fear death, nothing they say actually focuses on the points at hand. And it is these two questions atheists routinely fail to address.

The TV atheist would tell you to live a life that feels good and helps others, and to accept the inevitability and futility of death. Not only are such statements callous and almost entirely incompatible with human psychology, they are easily criticised through quite valid complaints against hedonism and fatalism. Just as easily as religion in practice falls prey to the atheist attack, atheists’ advice in practice also can quickly fall flat. If religion is a lie, it is a lie that helps the individual live their life.

Atheists are brought back to their initial debate: If god (a higher, infinite purpose) doesn’t exist and if believing something doesn’t hurt anyone else, there is no use in changing the world as it is. But religion is an exception, because while it may help the individual, it hurts society, therefore there must always be a separation between church and state. Yet atheists are forced to reconsider the fact that religion is actually bad for society, and if it indeed isn’t at least worse than the alternative, then to consider the problem that promoting atheism actually trips the lines of not hurting others.

If atheists are spreading anti-religious rhetoric because they know religion to be false and consider it useless or redundant, but in so doing break the spirits of religious people, they are causing harm to others with out of a personal grudge or for the purpose of a vanity project. And if it turns out that human beings start to feel hollow and morbid in the broad absence of religion, or a replacement of religion, and the atheists are not able to provide that replacement, then they will have dismantled a potentially essential part of society, not only in transgression of their values of utilitarian freedom of ignorance and freedom of belief, but also to the detriment of many disillusioned peoples’ lives.

TV atheists would tell you that religion actually does not offer people anything, and everyone would be better off without believing in myths and lies, but people believe in existential lies all the time. The whole of human existence is based upon illusion, not least of which the illusions of the senses and the illusions of consciousness. Religion may be false, religion may be stupid, but by the very rules atheists set for themselves about what is acceptable for other people to believe, religion does not cause enough harm to justify an atheist making a highly public profile and international campaign in favour of destroying religion.

Atheism is not the same as education, as, again, many religious people are fully aware of the gaps in their religion already, but they choose to ignore them. That is an informed decision to remain ignorant of a problem, which is very different to being ignorant of that problem in the first place. Atheists setting out to teach Christians the truth about Christianity because they want to look so informed has a reverse effect of making the atheist look foolish and narrow-minded. Once atheists are making arguments about the weakness of religious thought, it is no longer an educational session but is just that, an argument, and if TV atheists are utilitarian as they claim then they should recognise there is no utility in arguing a moot point. Even is a religious person lapses from a religion based on being persuaded by arguments, they might change their nominal identity and retract support for a religious movement, but are their core values and daily routines really all that likely to change. They are the same person, but they just no longer check the “Catholic” box on registration forms, and now they will attend annual atheist book signings instead of attending weekly mass (which one could argue is a downgrade in practical social terms).

Many of the complaints atheists have are also complaints religious people have: Corruption in churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues; Vapidity of religion in politics; Deviation of contemporary religious teachings from the revelation of ancient religious texts; The failure to modernise the message of some religious doctrines on a regular basis. These are not religious failures, but social failures, and as the religious person would be quick to point out, religion is the solution to social ills, not the cause.

An atheist arguing with a believer about society, where religion is the solution to one person and religion is the problem to the other person, won’t get anywhere. It would be much more useful to actually argue solutions. Bill Nye arguing religion in the objective that undermining Christianity would somehow bolster Darwinism was misplaced; he should have stuck to solely explaining evolution rather than argue with someone who refused to listen to what he was saying based on irrelevant defiance of facts. That is not a religious problem — as many, if not most, Christians embrace evolution (not to mention, many nonbelievers refute evolution on baseless grounds) — it is a problem of dealing with an idiot. Tracing the gospel of Jesus will never advance that conversation, because that was not the question at issue, and Nye should have seen through and restrained himself from the red herring. Just because an idiot wants to invoke a “religious exception” to facts does not mean it is worthwhile to focus on the appeal to religion, as the tantrum against facts is the real point of contention.

TV atheists going off about religion in public sounds more like TV religionists than not. They both have a message to sell for their own sake, usually a financial or even spiteful incentive to push those ideas, and are driven above all by an egoism of hearing themselves speak a correction to the flawed masses while reaffirming just how right they are and how their own rules do not apply to themselves. In short, they want attention.

An instance I completely lost all possibility of respect for Richard Dawkins is when he gave a televised speech and took questions from an audience. All the audience were likeminded to him, as you might imagine the kind of draw to a commercial book promotion for a text Dawkins had authored and was willing to sell and sign for a price. There was no ‘reaching the masses,’ only an atheist author playing an atheist crowd, or — as they say — preaching to the choir. One spectator asked Dawkins a moral question, a chance for Dawkins to build a moral philosophy to replace the absence of modern religious guides to life, and that question was, shockingly, if gay incest was morally acceptable and even healthy. Disturbingly, Dawkins agreed with his pervert fan and said that it was okay, specifically for a lesbian mother to have sex with a lesbian daughter, or for lesbian sisters to have a long-term or exclusive sexual relationship.

A perfect example of how TV atheists will say anything to sound contrarian and build up a stir while playing their fanbase, and of how completely devoid of the human condition their thinking is. Having sex with a family member, or against an imbalance of power, is not solely wrong because it could lead to genetic diseases or questions of parenthood as Dawkins assumed. Those are costs to be reckoned after the fact. But it is wrong in the conception of the act because it violates the family structure and destroys the development of a normal and healthy life if a parent views their own child as a sex toy to be groomed into adulthood, and it violates the requirements of happiness and satisfaction in consent if there is a power imbalance in a purposefully mutual relationship.

While the loser in Dawkins’s audience obviously didn’t realise it, there is a need in human relationships to have a bond on a personal level, to have an unconditional bond on a parental level, and to have a familial bond on the sibling level (including cousins). People’s relationships are not just sexual.

Promoting incest in the presence of contraception or homosexuality as Dawkins did in an offhanded comment is disgusting and disturbed, because such a broken system would be harmful to the people involved on a social, biological, and individual level, depriving them of the value of having a family. Viewing each person as a sexual object, and each household as a harem in the process of self-breeding where people have no worth outside of being violated by their close kin, not only undermines the first and most major drive that people have in forming new relationships despite the risk with new people but it also corrodes the safety and security of life at home. There is a reason that most people don’t have an urge to have sex with their family members, and where it does happen occasionally it has never in the history of any human society on Earth been viewed as most normal and best long-term option.

Just because people consent to something does not mean it is good for them, and two lesbian siblings having sex with each other could only lead to disaster (or is likely the product of some previous disaster), no matter whether Dawkins and his acolyte have given them the go-ahead. As pornographic as it might feel to have sex with a sibling to the Dawkins-brand of utilitarian, such a perversion of biology could never compare to the fulfilment of going out into the world and meeting someone who cares for you on a purely sexual level without destroying the deeper relationship you have with a sibling for the rest of your life after the hormones wear off.

Most people know that hooking up with an ex or a co-worker is a bad idea, yet Dawkins is telling people to go for their mom if she’s into it and they bring a condom. And as a biologist, hiding behind the title of biology to push evolution as a trojan horse for atheism, Dawkins should — should — have immediately noted that such a stance is evolutionarily unsustainable if adopted to any real degree, and that it comes off as somewhat homophobic and ill-informed to acquaint doing gay stuff with doing incest and then say it’s cool only because “they can never have children.” Gay people are not black holes of morality, nor are they dead ends of evolution, which Dawkins neither said nor implied, yet that was implied by what he said.

Perhaps tellingly, Dawkins and fan completely failed to understand the fact that sex is a behavioural more than a procreative act — another misconception about human nature Dawkins ironically shares with the church. As a general rule, as well as an absolute rule, say no to incest.

While that’s Dawkins, and maybe people never respected him anyway, the other TV atheists have a repetitive air to their talks of wasting their time (Bill Nye), pushing an ulterior agenda (Sam Harris), going on a pointless rant (Stephen Fry), flattering their own ego (Richard Dawkins), suffocating people with the obvious (Daniel Dennett), being generally unsufferable if not all of the above (Christopher Hitchens), failing to properly contextualise the issue (Neil deGrasse Tyson), or acting out as a contrarian (Bill Maher). If being reasonable is the only goal of the TV atheist, they ought to reason out the fact that religion does play a role in people’s lives, and solving the issues of child rape or poor education or genocidal conflicts are not as simple as saying, “abolish the church,” because the church is a manifest if flawed representation of religion, and religion itself is not responsible for those atrocities.

If anything, religion is a meaningless term — especially in hyper secular and materialist societies like the United States, Britain, European Union, China, and Russia — and especially in hyper dogmatic societies such as Pakistan, Iran, Tanzania, Israel, and Argentina. Religion means whatever the religious person wants it to, and that is not due to ignorance as the TV atheists believe, but is actually by design.

People convert religions, lapse, mutate, and protest their teachings in accordance with their own beliefs. Just because this happens behind the scenes and in silence for most people does not mean the internal doubts and realignments do not take place. And at the end of the day, religion is still there, because people need a sense of purpose and a reason to live their lives, and because most people (unlike the impenetrable exterior of the common TV atheist) don’t want to die — and the concept of death includes aging, being outperformed by rivals, feeling useless, losing a sense of purpose or time, feeling regret over memories, and facing the unknown in both the present and the future.

Religion helps people by telling them lies. Such as in America, American-Christianity telling people everything happens for a reason, telling people that god has an individual purpose for them, telling people that money does not corrupt but instead empowers, telling people that they are guaranteed to live forever in a perfect existence after the first inevitable death which they already know is coming, telling people that they can never be alone because god is always with them, telling people if they do the right thing the right thing will happen for everyone in the end. No one in their right mind could live in a world where they did not believe each of these things were true, regardless if religion is what gets it to them.

Having a handful of rich, famous, and disillusioned men complain about the idiot commoner rejects reality, or complain that the idiot commoner is being scammed by the insidious clergyman, because they just won’t accept that their lives are meaningless, and that there is no plan, and that there is no afterlife, is — frankly — mean-spirited, impractical, dishonest, harsh, and somewhat insane. Atheists may have qualms with the rabbinic tradition, but what is the harm whatsoever in a Jewish person believing that they have a calling in life and suspending disbelief is something challenges that identity? That does not mean that religion cannot or should not be reformed constantly, but the TV atheists need to start asking what is their calling, and what truly does it mean to be religious.

#Atheism #Bill Nye #Neil deGrasse Tyson #Richard Dawkins #Religion

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Q. & A.

Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward

The Author of “White Fragility” Discusses Her New Book, “Nice Racism.”

— By Isaac Chotiner | July 14, 2021 | Robin DiAngelo

“All white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world.”Source photograph by Jovelle Tamayo (2019)

In 2018, Robin DiAngelo, an academic and anti-racism consultant, published the surprise best-seller “White Fragility.” The book, which argues that white people tend to undermine or dismiss conversations about race with histrionic reactions, climbed best-seller lists again last summer, when the murder of George Floyd and the surging Black Lives Matter movement forced American institutions to address structural racism. Major corporations, such as Amazon and Facebook, embraced the slogan “Black Lives Matter” and brought DiAngelo in to speak. Millions of Americans began to consider concepts such as systemic racism and look anew at the racial disparities in law enforcement, and DiAngelo became a guide for many of them.

DiAngelo’s success was not entirely without controversy: critics claimed that her definition of “white fragility” was broad and reductive and that DiAngelo, who is white, condescended to people of color. Carlos Lozada, of the Washington Post, wrote, “As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable. . . . Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.” In The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote that DiAngelo “makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple. This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else.”

Last month, DiAngelo published a new book, “Nice Racism,” which argues that even well-intentioned white progressives—the types of people who might read DiAngelo’s work—are guilty of inflicting “racial harm” on people of color. She writes that “the odds are that on a daily basis, Black people don’t interact with those who openly agitate for white nationalism,” but they do face a different danger: “In the workplace, the classroom, houses of worship, gentrifying neighborhoods, and community groups, Black people do interact with white progressives.” She continues, “We are the ones—with a smile on our faces—who undermine Black people daily in ways both harder to identify and easier to deny.”

I recently spoke by phone with DiAngelo about “Nice Racism.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether her work includes structural critiques of racism, why she has become so popular over the past year, and whether it’s possible to disagree with her and not be a racist.

How important is attending workshops like the ones you run and talk about in the book if America is going to become less racist?

I’m not sure that it has to be a workshop, but it does have to be education in some form or format, because we’re not educated in this country on our racial history, and of course workshops are an excellent way to gain that education. If they are not followed up and sustained by continuing conversations, then they’re not very effective. Stand-alone, onetime workshops I don’t think are effective.

What is the goal of your work, if white people, as you say, are never going to be completely free of racism?

Less harm, to put it bluntly. I am confident that as a result of my years in this work, I do less harm across race, and that is not actually a small thing. That could translate to one hour longer on somebody’s life, because the chronic stress of racism, for Black people and other people of color—literally, it shortens their lives. I would definitely like to do less harm.

Your work starts from the premise that history and society have made all white people racist. But I was trying to figure out whether you were making a structural critique or offering structural solutions to racism, in part because so much of the book is about workshops.

The foundation of the United States is structural racism. It is built into all of the institutions. It is built into the culture, and in that sense we’ve all absorbed the ideology. We’ve all absorbed the practices of systemic racism, and that’s what I mean when I say we are racist. I don’t mean that individuals have conscious awareness of anti-Blackness, or that they intentionally seek to hurt people based on race. That’s not what I’m referring to when I make a claim like all white people are racist. What I mean is that all white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world, and it comes out in the policies and practices that we make and that we set up.

What needs to change structurally?

Well, the homogeneity alone at the top guarantees that advantage would be built into those systems and structures by the people in the position to build them in. This doesn’t have to be conscious or intentional, but, if significant experiences and perspectives are missing from the table, they’re not going to be included. If a group of architects is around a table designing a building and all of them are able-bodied, they’re simply going to design a building that accommodates the way they move through the world. It’s not an intentional exclusion, but it will result in the exclusion of people who move differently.

You have to have multiple perspectives at those tables, and you can’t just take the additive approach, like, “Oh, well, we included some more diversity,” if you don’t also address power. That’s what I wanted to say. You can have policies that appear to be neutral, but, because we don’t account for just centuries of social discrimination, the impact of those policies will not be neutral.

Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, “Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities.” What is the problem with individualism?

Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. That’s the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldn’t value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you don’t know somebody specifically you can’t know anything about them.

Of course, on one hand, that’s true, right? I don’t know everybody’s experience and life stories and so on, and we are also members of a social group. By virtue of our membership in this social group, we could literally predict whether you and I were going to survive our birth—and our mothers also. It’s like saying, you know, upon my birth, it was announced, “Female,” and then I have been completely exempt from any messages about what it means to be female. We wouldn’t say that, because we know that the moment I am pronounced female, an entire set of deep cultural conditioning is set into place.

I don’t think anybody would say, “My gender has had no influence whatsoever on my life.” When it comes to race, we want to take ourselves out of any kind of collective experience. These are observable, describable, measurable patterns. Does every single person fit every pattern? Of course not, but there is a rule that the exception of course makes visible.

You also talk about an ideology that is called universalism, and you say it functions similarly to individualism, and write, “But instead of declaring that we all need to see each other as individuals (e.g., ‘Everyone is different’), we declare that we all need to see each other as human beings (e.g., ‘Everyone is the same’).” To be clear, “everyone is the same” is not what universalism is, correct? My understanding of universalism is that it’s essentially saying, “We’re all human beings and we all deserve to be treated as human beings.” Do you see it differently?

I’m sure there’s different nuances of the term. When I use it, I’m using it to capture this idea that these categories have no meaning, at the same time that one group consistently is seen as objective and able to represent everybody else’s experience. The example I often use is that we have film directors and then we have Black film directors, or we have film directors and then we have women film directors. We only mark that which is not that universal norm, right? And, in so doing, of course, we reinforce this idea that some people are objective and can speak for everybody.

You have many scenes throughout the book of you talking to people at workshops, and sometimes they get contentious. You write that after one training session two people, “a white woman, ‘Sue,’ who had been sitting next to a white man, ‘Bob,’ approached me and declared, ‘Bob and I think we should all just see each other as individuals.’ Although in my work, moments like this occur frequently, they continue to disorient me on three interconnected levels. First, I had just gone over, in depth, what was problematic about individualism as a means to ‘end racism.’ How could Sue and Bob have missed that forty-five-minute presentation?” In several of the scenes you get annoyed or frustrated with people for not getting the point of what you’re saying. Is there a tension between seeing white people as irredeemably racist and fragile, and also thinking that the best way to change their consciousness is to berate them a little bit in these group settings?

I’m explaining. I don’t know that I’m berating at that point. It’s, like, “O.K., let me help you understand why that is actually a problematic response. Let me break it down for you and explain.” I’m an educator, right? So I want you to understand what that does, how that functions in the conversation. Having just laid that out, yes, I do continue to feel frustrated, because I do have an expectation that people will have some insight or at least some food for thought. When it’s framed as “We think this,” as if they actually didn’t hear any part of it, as if they have no sense that I have a different take on it and that take might have some weight or some value in relation to theirs, that does throw me off. There is a kind of scratching of the head that happens. You would think at this point I would be used to it, but not always.

You have a list in your book of things that are racist, including some obviously racist things such as blackface. One of the things on the list is “Not being aware that the evidence you use to establish that you are ‘not racist’ is not convincing.” Is there a tautological aspect to this?

Yeah, I mean, I think what is missing that makes that problematic is the humility and the curiosity, given that the vast majority of white people live segregated lives, have never studied systemic racism, all the way through higher education. You can get a Ph.D. in this country and never have discussed racism. You can be seen as qualified to lead virtually any organization with no awareness or ability to engage in these conversations on racism. Given all that, it’s the lack of humility about what you might not be understanding. It’s not granting that this is arguably the most complex, nuanced, social, institutional, cultural, societal dilemma of the last several hundred years.

I may land, after thoughtful reflection, on “That’s not going to work for me,” but that’s very different from rejecting it out of hand in a way that will allow no more information or nuance to come in. I think I’m a great example of someone who must at some point make a decision about the validity of the feedback I’m getting, right? Because I couldn’t possibly follow it all. I’ve worked hard and long to gain some ability to do that, and I have people that I can check in with to help guide me in that. Trusted and authoritative sources. But somebody who’s never really thought about these issues, couldn’t answer the question of what it means to be white, and just rejects it out of hand, I think that’s problematic.

Another entry on the list is “Not understanding why something on this list is problematic.” This seems to imply that someone who disagrees with you, Robin DiAngelo, is racist. Is there another tautological issue there?

Well, maybe one of the challenges in the way that’s framed is that “racist” is such a strong word. Keep in mind that the subtitle is “racial harm,” right? I deliberately didn’t say how white progressives are racists but how we perpetuate racial harm within a racist society. Again, rather than “Am I missing something? Can I thoughtfully engage in a conversation about this?” is it just “Nope, nope, nope”? I mean, if somebody fundamentally, at the base, accepts the existence of systemic racism, accepts that they have inevitably been shaped by it, and is willing and open to struggle with that, challenge that, then there’s going to be lots of nuance in whether we agree or disagree on particular things. I’m really talking about people who haven’t done any of that work and still feel it’s completely legitimate for them to determine what is valid and what is not.

The list also includes “Lecturing bipoc people on the answer to racism” by saying things like “People just need to . . .” This was obviously written by you, a white person, in a book that tells people that they “need to” do various things. Is there a circularity there?

Well, I’m always asked to make sure I give the answer. It’s not as interesting to me as the analysis.

What do you mean?

For me, the analysis of racism, the question of how things function—that’s fascinating and interesting. I do believe that, if you understand more deeply how racism functions, you know that answer in the sense of what to do, what not to do, what kind of basic orientation skills will help you in almost any situation. There’s constant pressure when you write a book to “Make sure that last chapter tells people what to do.” What was the other part of what you asked?

On the list of racist things is lecturing people of color about the answer to racism, and saying people just “need to” do things. Since your book is talking about the answers to racism and telling people what they need to do, I thought it was interesting that that was on a list of things that were racist.

Yeah, but notice that the book is written by a white person to white people. I’m not lecturing bipoc people on what to do but I’m offering some analysis, some deconstruction of things that white people often say and do, and letting my readers know that that’s generally considered problematic. How do I know that? Years of feedback, years of witnessing, of falling in it myself, which I hope I demonstrate. If you are already starting from a place of denial of systemic racism, then we’re just having two different conversations. It’s like climate change. If somebody denies climate change, we’re not going to have that conversation.

Your book argues that white people should not presume to speak for people of color. Do you think that’s an accurate description, and can you talk about the importance of that?

There is a nuance there. When people of color aren’t present, do you understand enough about racism that you can represent, generally, that perspective? That’s different from speaking for them. I, again, am talking to white people as an insider, as somebody who shares all the same socialization. I have challenged some of that, and that is a lifelong endeavor—it’s been twentysomething years. Here’s lessons learned, gathering from my own research, from mentorship, from Black scholars, white scholars, practice. I’m sharing lessons learned and observations made and analysis, and hopefully it’s useful.

Another thing on the list is claiming “to have a friendship with a Black colleague who has never been to your home.” Isn’t that up to the two people in that situation, one white, one Black, to say whether in fact they have a friendship? How do you make a judgment like that, not knowing specifics?

Well, in my experience, many Black people have shared that there are white people who believe they have relationships with them that the Black person does not share. It’s a polite, respectful kind of acquaintanceship, but there’s a level of trust that isn’t present, and the white person is not aware of that. I’m also talking about when white people use friendship with a Black person as evidence that they are free of racism. Not only would that not be good evidence in general—because, trust me, I have friendships with Black people, and I do on occasion say and do hurtful things—but if you haven’t even ever been to their home and you’re using them as your evidence that you couldn’t possibly be racist, I would offer that the relationship may not be as close or deep as you think that it is.

On your list of racist things is “Speaking over/interrupting a bipoc person.” Maybe this goes back to our individualism conversation, but is that the type of thing that needs context, and might not belong on a list that also includes things like blackface? Certainly, in some situations, personal or at work, people speak over one another. In some cases, obviously, that’s a sign of racism, and in other cases it might just be the way people talk or the way they interact. How do you disaggregate that?

Well, first of all, it’s a range. There are things on the list that are more obvious, and then there’s some more insidious, subtle things, and they don’t stand alone. You talked over that Black person, and that’s your personality and you always do it, you do it with everybody, but that’s the tenth time that day or that week that that person has been talked over, and they’re left having to wonder, Isn’t this about the fact that I’m Black? It sure seems like it happens to me more than other people. They’re on that wheel of trying to assess that.

I think part of our arrogance and our entitlement is that we don’t have to consider the impact of our actions on people who are positioned differently in relation to us. A great example is, if I work in an overwhelmingly male workplace and that’s how they talk to one another—they yell at one another, they talk over one another—great, but when you do it to me it’s going to have a different impact. I would want and expect them to be attentive to that. I can just hear somebody saying, “Oh, I have to watch everything I say.” Well, you know, is that really that much to ask, that we should just be aware that there is historical harm between our groups, and that you do need to think about the impact that might have?

You write, about the things on the list, that “the intentions are irrelevant to the impact.” Is it that they’re irrelevant, or is it that circumstances matter?

Let me think about how I want to phrase this. I am pushing back and trying to close all of the escape valves that I have seen my fellow white people use over the years, and focussing on intentions is a very common escape valve for saying, “It shouldn’t matter, because I didn’t mean to.” On the one hand, I’m glad you didn’t mean to, but it does matter and it did have an impact, so let’s let go of your intentions and move over here and take responsibility for the impact. I’m trying to, again, take that escape hatch away, so maybe I’m being stronger than necessary because I don’t see a lot of nuance in people who are new. Sometimes you kind of have to say, “Here’s the boundary. Don’t even go there. Let’s just go here until you get a little more skilled at that.”

There’s one scene in the book in which some white women begin crying because a Black woman is telling a story about her son and the police. You call the white women to account for reacting in such a way, and taking the focus off the Black woman. That’s followed by a chapter about white silence—the idea that white people not speaking up or not showing how they’re feeling about racism is also a problem. Sometimes it seems like maybe you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in some of these workshops.

I would say in some ways you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and that applies to all of us. In other words, we just simply are not going to get this right. There are many, many tensions in this work and that is one of them, but again, that should never be the reason you don’t struggle to get it a little more right. I don’t think I took them to task. I observed and I had a realization. I hope I framed it that way. Sometimes, in watching the dynamic, I realized, like, Oh, this is not our place to be comforting Black women about the pain of racism right now. I also add, you know, a hand on the back, just a real “Hey, may I touch you? May I put my hand on your back?” you’re showing your presence, but you’re not actually telling people that something’s O.K. or going to be O.K. from your position. I find that to be problematic. There’s no way you can tell me it’s O.K. from your position as a member of the group that perpetrates this and benefits from this.

You write, “Although motivated by compassion, this seemed deeply inappropriate to me.”

Yes, although motivated by compassion. I’m clear. I didn’t stand up and call anybody out. It was an observation that was kind of like, you know, Note to self: don’t do that.

You’ve spoken to large and small companies, especially after the murder of George Floyd forced many institutions to address instances of racism. How does it feel to have your work at the center of this conversation, and what is it about your work that you think makes so many companies want to turn to you?

Well, some of this I can answer because the Black people in many of these companies bring me in, and they understand that their white colleagues are more likely to hear it from me, and that there’s a way that I can name it and it’s harder to deny than when they try to name it. Oftentimes, that then makes room and space for them to continue forward with what they’ve been trying to do. What I bring is an insider’s perspective that, again, is harder to deny. Implicit bias is such that, consciously or not, I’m probably granted the benefit of the doubt even before I begin in a way that Black people are not.

When a Black person is laying out how racism functions, they pretty much can only point the finger outward. I mean, they can share their own experience, which white people don’t share, and then they can explain to white people that what white people are doing is harmful. When I do it, I can point it both inward and outward. When I point it inward, it gives room for other white people to admit that they have said and felt and done the same things. There’s a little bit of, like, O.K., if she can admit that, then I can admit that. It brings down some of the defensiveness, and yes, it does at the same time center white people. This is one of the great tensions of the work. There is no way outside of the construct we’re in.

You’re saying that you’re bringing something to the table that would be harder for a person of color in our society to bring to the table?

It’s only one piece of what should be at the table, but it’s a piece that’s been missing for so long.

— The New Yorker

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coralkittytimetravel · 4 years ago

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Credit Report Repair News: Digest for May 04, 2021

Credit Report Repair News

ANTI-STATE • ANTI-WAR • PRO-MARKET

Table of Contents

Will Special Interests Finally Allow America's 'Longest War' To End?

A Pandemic of Fear

Vaccinated People Shedding and Spreading Genetic Disaster to Unvaccinated Women?

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d'État, and the 'Great Reset'

Forced Masking

A Vaxxing Question

Why This Frenchman Regrets Buying an Electric Car

Highly Cited Covid Doctor Comes to Stunning Conclusion: Gov't 'Scrubbing Unprecedented Numbers' of Injection-Related Deaths

The Camp of The Saints Is Upon Us

Biden Family Justice

A Software Company Comes Up With a Brilliant Corporate Speech Policy

CDC Officially Recommends Covid Jab for Pregnant Women

Will Special Interests Finally Allow America's 'Longest War' To End?

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

Even if "won," endless wars like our 20 year assault on Afghanistan would not benefit our actual national interest in the slightest. So why do these wars continue endlessly? Because they are so profitable to powerful and well-connected special interests. In fact, the worst news possible for the Beltway military contractor/think tank complex would be that the United States actually won a war. That would signal the end of the welfare-for-the-rich gravy train.

In contrast to the end of declared wars, like World War II when the entire country rejoiced at the return home of soldiers where they belonged, an end to any of Washington's global military deployments would result in wailing and gnashing of the teeth among the military-industrial complex which gets rich from other people's misery and sacrifice.

Would a single American feel less safe if we brought home our thousands of troops currently bombing and shooting at Africans?

As Orwell famously said, "the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous." Nowhere is this more true than among those whose living depends on the US military machine constantly bombing people overseas.

How many Americans, if asked, could answer the question, "why have we been bombing Afghanistan for an entire generation?" The Taliban never attacked the United States and Osama bin Laden, who temporarily called Afghanistan his home, is long dead and gone. The longest war in US history has dragged on because…it has just dragged on.

So why did we stay? As neocons like Max Boot tell it, we are still bombing and killing Afghans so that Afghan girls can go to school. It's a pretty flimsy and cynical explanation. My guess is that if asked, most Afghan girls would prefer to not have their country bombed.

Indeed, war has made the Beltway bomb factories and think tanks rich. As Brown University's Cost of War Project has detailed, the US has wasted $2.26 trillion dollars on a generation of war on Afghanistan. Much of this money has been spent, according to the US government's own Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, on useless "nation-building" exercises that have built nothing at all. Gold-plated roads to nowhere. Aircraft that cannot perform their intended functions but that have enriched contractors and lobbyists.

President Biden has announced that the US military would be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. But as always, the devil is in the details. It appears that US special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and the private contractors who have taken an increasing role in fighting Washington's wars, will remain in-country. Bombing Afghans so that Max Boot and his neocons can pat themselves on the back.

But the fact is this: Afghanistan was a disaster for the United States. Only the corrupt benefitted from this 20 year highway robbery. Will we learn a lesson from wasting trillions and killing hundreds of thousands? It is not likely. But there will be an accounting. The piper will be paid. Printing mountains of money to pay the corrupt war profiteers will soon leave the working and middle classes in dire straits. It is up to non-interventionists like us to explain to them exactly who has robbed them of their future.

The post Will Special Interests Finally Allow America's 'Longest War' To End? appeared first on LewRockwell.

A Pandemic of Fear

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance" Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural Address

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." William Shakespeare, The Tempest

We have now clocked 14 months and counting since the "temporary emergency" (two words that send chills up any libertarian spine) lockdown orders to prevent our nation's hospitals from being unduly stressed by the Covid 19 virus. Without denying Covid's transmissibility or infectiousness, especially for the elderly and at risk individuals with one or more co-morbidities, I think we can all agree that we have careened from fear to fear over this period of time. Fear over hospitalizations gave way to fear over the infamous death counts displayed 24/7 by mainstream media. As death rates subsided last summer, fear of death gave way to fear over cases accompanied by an almost manic counting of tests administered. And, finally, the obsession with test and case counts has been displaced by how many have gotten their Covid shots. Fear, as FDR intoned in his famous inaugural address, is often unreasoning and unjustified. It elevates the flight or fight syndrome, causes the suspension of disbelief and leads to emotional, panic-driven decisions. At each of these four stages of Covid engendered fear, one could have raised objective counters to the prevailing narrative. To wit, very few hospitals were overcrowded. Most Covid deaths, by the CDC's own admission are with Covid not from Covid with the latter constituting 6% of the total reported. The case counts were likely drastically overinflated as a result of faulty and overly sensitive testing methodologies. And the vaccines may not be a magical cure all preventing transmission or infection, but, if safe and effective, may minimize adverse symptoms should one contract Covid. Big pharma is already mentioning the need for annual booster shots.

Raising any of these counterpoints to the prevailing narrative is unlikely to be countered by rational, calm debate, but most assuredly will get one tagged as being a Trumpian anti-vaxxer, classic ad hominem attacks hardly deserving response. But, to set the record straight, this writer is neither a Trumpian nor an anti-vaxxer. Over time my philosophic journey has evolved from an initial belief that government was a necessary evil to thinking that is mainly evil. Few politicians are for me exemplars of moral courage or intellectual honesty. President Kennedy is one exception in my lifetime as his moral courage to avert nuclear war and dismantle the national security state very well may have cost him his life at the hands of political enemies. Before Kennedy, I have to retreat to Grover Cleveland, who had the courage time after time to uphold the Constitution, earning him the sobriquet of Mr. Veto for his repeated nays to Congressional attempts to create powers not enumerated. And saying that I am anti-vaxxer is a pejorative slight implying that I substitute superstition for medicine and science when in fact, like many, I am trying to make my own informed decision about my own health and treatment or prophylactic options.

Someone recently asked me about the origins of my love of individual liberty and how I came to embrace the non-aggression axiom at the heart of libertarian philosophy. I initially responded that after college, I followed Mark Twain's advice never to let my schooling interfere with my education so I embarked on my own course of self-education, devouring all the classics by Rand, Rothbard, Hayek, Block, Hoppe, von Mises as well as political philosophers diametrically opposed to their love of liberty and individual responsibility. But, upon further reflection, I realized that my libertarian roots may have been present as a toddler. One of my earliest memories is my parents growing frustrated with my endless use of the word why! I guess I simply never liked being told what to do or what to think, and I think this skeptical predisposition to question authority was the fertile soil for building my set of political and moral beliefs.

So, in the spirit of being the why (and hopefully wise) guy, I have just a few questions I would like to pose to the CDC and the vaccine manufacturers before I dutifully line up to take the shots. If they can answer these fully to my satisfaction, my consent to get the shots will be informed and voluntary; if not, my submission will only occur because legal mandates will make it impossible to enjoy life on acceptable terms.

Here is my list:

Why is the partnership of government and 4 major vaccine manufacturers exempt from the usual harms of crony capitalism present in other industries where government and big business are allied? Bailouts and subsidies in other industries create moral hazard, socialize risk, and tend to result in high prices and/or poor product quality as the removal of market-based penalties for failure is weakened. Where many glorify Operation Warp Speed and are eager to announce Mission Accomplished much as Bush the younger did in the early days of the forever Iraq war, I have a gnawing sense of discomfort that a product is being rushed to market without full and extensive testing. The government can posture as savior. The vaccine manufacturers, who are granted legal immunity under their private/public partnership and have been provided enormous subsidies to develop the vaccines, have a pure profit opportunity with legally constrained limits on loss or reprisal. This is not meant to ascribe improper motives to either government or corporate entities as the efforts to abate the pandemic may indeed be totally humanitarian. But, zero liability and skewed risk/reward structures create incentives which leave me uneasy.

Are the vaccines safe and effective? If so, why are many government officials still recommending that the vaccinated wear mask(s), socially distance and otherwise put their lives on hold? Does not this public messaging do more to undercut the incentive to get a vaccine than any anti-vaxxer could create?

If the vaccines are so effective, how do you account for the occurrence from December 14, 2020 through last Friday of almost 120,000 adverse events in the US reported to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) including over 3500 deaths?

While these may statistically indeed be a small percentage of total vaccines administered to date, is it likely that the systematic underreporting to you under VAERS is on the order of just one to ten percent of all adverse events? If that is so, then do you consider the likely true number of adverse vaccine events of 1.2 to 12 million to be material?

And, for certain segments of the population (namely anyone under the age of 30) for whom the odds of contracting Covid and/or debilitating symptoms may be close to zero, how do you justify taking an injection which is admittedly still experimental? Is this risk/reward logical?

If the "vaccines" are so desirable, why have you resorted to classic propaganda techniques (including frequent public servant announcements, photo ops of athletes, politicians and movie stars getting their shots, nonstop social messaging) to encourage their acceptance? Do you think the average citizen is too infantile to provide informed consent?

Why are you threatening the use of vaccine passports and a legal nether world of the unvaccinated to coerce getting the shots? Do you think the average citizen is too infantile to provide informed consent?

Do you think that employers and colleges mandating these vaccines at your behest is consonant with the key elements of the Nuremberg Code and its strictures regarding the scope of and moral underpinnings of medical experimentation?

Why have dissenting views by other scientists and/or vaccine safety organizations been greeted with silence and/or censorship?

I look forward to receiving complete answers to my list of questions. In the meantime, I fully recognize and respect the decision of any individual who chooses to mask up, isolate from society and get vaccinated. It is your right and prerogative. Your body is your choice. I do not respect or recognize your ability to mandate that my individual health decisions are subject to your dictates, which, by and large, I find inhuman, inhumane and unconstitutional. I search in vain for a pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights, which were adopted with a devastating smallpox scourge in the founders' rear view mirror. To compel that I abide by your dictates so that we can all get back a way of life that was unnaturally and unconstitutionally obliterated strikes me as morally obtuse.

The post A Pandemic of Fear appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vaccinated People Shedding and Spreading Genetic Disaster to Unvaccinated Women?

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

MANY women are posting reports of disrupted and unusual menstrual cycles, heavy bleeding, and miscarriages.

What's more, some of these women haven't received the COVID vaccine, but they've been in close contact with others who have been vaccinated—leading to the question:

Can the COVID vaccine (which is actually an experimental genetic treatment) "shed" something harmful that can be passed from person to person?

Perhaps that sounds impossible, but in the world of genetics, much can go wrong.

In fact, for the past 25 years, we've had an illustration of shedding right in front of our eyes: GMO crops.

If you recall, Monsanto assured one and all that these crops—genetically engineered to survive the sprayed herbicide Roundup—would flourish, while weeds would succumb to the chemical.

So what actually happened? The weeds were resistant and became super-giants. And the Monsanto genes drifted from farm to farm, contaminating crops that were never meant to be engineered.

The Monsanto genes were "shed" and they spread.

This spread was not only the result of obvious cross-pollination. Bacteria in the soil, and in human digestive systems, also picked up and incorporated the Monsanto genes.

Why couldn't "shed and spread" occur with a genetic COVID vaccine?

The COVID injection contains a piece of RNA. The RNA nanoparticles enter human cells, forcing those cells to manufacture a protein similar to a protein in the purported SARS-CoV-2 virus. The immune system mounts a neutralizing attack against that protein, thus "rehearsing" to defeat the virus if it comes along later.

That's the hypothesis.

In practice, who knows how many different dangerous and harmful processes can be detonated in the human body—plus the drifting of those genetic effects from person to person, whether vaccinated or not.

Yes, I know the experts will point out the difference between inserting genes into crops and inserting them into humans. They'll say the GMO crops are supposed to hold on to those new genes long-term, but the COVID injection only has short-lived genetic effects.

Supposedly, this is true. Supposedly.

The universe of genetic experimentation, however, is rife with problems, mistakes, unintended consequences, as well as efforts to make weapons that attack life at basic levels.

Consider, for example, gene drive technology, which asks the question: what species should we make extinct today?

Why are Bill Gates and the US military involved in forwarding that technology?

A gene-drive scientist says, "I have a plan. By manipulating genes, we can make invasive rodents extinct, on an island where humans are living."

In the next fraction of a second, a flurry of questions pops up.

The overarching question is: Does this mean genetic manipulation can make ANY species extinct?

Here is a passage from Gene Drive Files, a vital site with an enormous amount of referenced information on the subject:

"Gene drives are a gene-editing application that allows genetic engineers to drive a single artificial trait through an entire population by ensuring that all of an organism's offspring carry that trait. For example, recent experiments are fitting mice with 'daughterless' gene drives that will cascade through mouse populations so that only male pups are born, ensuring that the population becomes extinct after a few generations."

"Proponents have framed gene drives as a breakthrough tool for eradicating pests or invasive species. However, the Gene Drive Files reveal that these 'conservation' efforts are primarily supported by military funds."

Gene drive technology could be deployed to wipe out troublesome plant-parasites, weeds, crops, animal pests, animals, and…humans. Mull that over with your morning coffee.

Several years ago, certain UN member nations were considering a recommendation to call a moratorium on the use of gene drives. However, Bill Gates showed up to try to squash the moratorium.

The Gene Drive Files reports: "Documents received under Freedom of Information requests reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid a private agriculture and biotechnology PR firm $1.6 million for activities on Gene Drives. This included running a covert 'advocacy coalition' which appears to have intended to skew the only UN expert process addressing gene drives…"

"Following global calls in December 2016 from Southern countries and over 170 organizations for a UN moratorium on gene drives, emails to gene drive advocates received under a Freedom of Information request by Prickly Research reveal that a private public affairs firm 'Emerging Ag' received funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to co-ordinate the 'fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents'."

There's more from the Gene Drive Files. It involves the military:

"A trove of emails (The Gene Drive Files) from leading U.S. gene drive researchers reveals that the U.S. Military is taking the lead in driving forward gene drive development."

"Emails obtained through a freedom of Information request by U.S.–based Prickly Research reveal that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given approximately $100 million for gene drive research, $35 million more than previously reported, making them likely the largest single funder of gene drive research on the planet. The emails also reveal that DARPA either funds or co-ordinates with almost all major players working on gene drive development as well as the key holders of patents on CRISPR gene editing technology."

"These funds go beyond the US; DARPA is now also directly funding gene drive researchers in Australia (including monies given to an Australian government agency, CSIRO) and researchers in the UK. The files also reveal an extremely high level of interest and activity by other sections of the U.S. military and Intelligence community."

As I've shown in past articles, the latest and greatest gene-editing tools (e.g., CRISPR), which are used for gene drives, are far from slam-dunk precise, despite official assurances.

For example, Nature Communications, May 31, 2017, "CRISPR/Cas9 targeting events cause complex deletions and insertions at 17 sites in the mouse genome." That's UNINTENDED genetic "deletions and insertions."

And how about this study? It was published in Genome Biology on June 14, 2017, and is titled, "CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing induces exon skipping by alternative splicing or exon deletion." An exon is "a segment of a DNA or RNA molecule containing information coding for a protein or peptide sequence." So you can see that exon skipping or deletion is a very bad outcome.

In other words, ANY gene editing done on ANY species opens the door wide to all sorts of errors and unforeseen consequences. Doomsday genetic warfare and mutually assured destruction are the far shore of insanity…but closer in, where more limited experiments are taking place, there is no safety zone, either. Insanity reigns there as well.

Read what adorers of genetic experimentation have gushed:

"I went to Monsanto, and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there, and I have revised my outlook, and I'm very excited about telling the world. When you're in love, you want to tell the world." (Bill Nye, the Science Guy)

"I know it's a long shot and people would say it's 'too absurd'… but I'm doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day." (Arikuni Uchimura, quoted in "Japan bio-scientists produce 'singing mouse’", The Independent, 21 December 2010.)

On the other hand, there is this: "Genetic engineering is to traditional crossbreeding what the nuclear bomb was to the sword." (Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety)

So…we have a new COVID vaccine, based on experimental technology that delivers genetic instructions to cells of the body—instructions to create a protein that would otherwise never be created.

We're told nothing can go wrong.

We have many examples of genetic technology going very wrong.

Farms that were supposed to be protected from Monsanto gene-drift turned into GMO Monsanto farms. So why couldn't unvaccinated people turn into vaccinated people, through "shed and spread," without ever receiving the COVID injection?

The problem is, the officials and experts who would answer that question for us are riddled with conflicts of interest; and they pretend to know what they don't know; and they're afraid of losing their jobs if they contradict the party line; and they're experienced professional liars.

They've rewritten the old fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. These professionals NEVER cry wolf, no matter what disasters are brewing.

So we can never believe what they say.

Now let's consider a key Pfizer document titled: "A PHASE 1/2/3, PLACEBO-CONTROLLED, RANDOMIZED, OBSERVER-BLIND, DOSE-FINDING STUDY TO EVALUATE THE SAFETY, TOLERABILITY, IMMUNOGENICITY, AND EFFICACY OF SARS-COV-2RNA VACCINE CANDIDATES AGAINST COVID-19 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS."

On page 67, we find a warning about potential adverse effects of the vaccine. The abstruse term "study intervention" pops up. It surely means "vaccination." "Environmental exposure" means contact with elements of the vaccine other than by injection.

Warning of adverse effect: "A female is found to be pregnant while being exposed or having been exposed to study intervention due to environmental exposure. Below are examples of environmental exposure during pregnancy:"

"A female family member or healthcare provider reports that she is pregnant after having been exposed to the study intervention by inhalation or skin contact."

"A male family member or healthcare provider who has been exposed to the study intervention by inhalation or skin contact then exposes his female partner prior to or around the time of conception."

These warnings, from the vaccine manufacturer, Pfizer, are shocking. They imply that women can be harmed by breathing in, or contacting by skin, the vaccine as it moves from person to person. Which would be "shedding."

And what is being transferred from person to person? What is in the vaccine? Genetic material. RNA.

—There is a Coda to this whole business. I write it because I don't believe in ringing lots of alarm bells and leaving people with nothing but fear.

From personal experience, and 83 years of living, I know that people have an extraordinary ability to outlast elite insanity, no matter what.

Our faith, desire for freedom, creative force, resistance, outrage, immortal refusal to give in; these are the core of a story that has been unfolding for centuries and millennia.

This story goes beyond the forces arrayed against us. Regardless of the machinations brought to bear on humanity; regardless of claims that "there is no way out," we find ways.

We're told: WELL, NO ONE CAN REMAIN HEALTHY IN THE FACE OF THAT. "That" is the latest psychotic experiment in which we are the non-voluntary subjects.

But many people do retain their strength, through their inner resources and their overriding faith, and their absolute refusal to knuckle under.

Believe that, don't believe it; it's real.

Permanent victimhood is not our destiny.

It never was, it never will be.

Sitting at the big table, shove in all your chips on that decision.

If you do, you're in a community that has strengths no technocrat or secret society can begin to conceive of.

It's not over. It's never over. Time is very long.

We are the cure.

This is the war.

Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport's blog.

The post Vaccinated People Shedding and Spreading Genetic Disaster to Unvaccinated Women? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d'État, and the 'Great Reset'

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

This E-book consists of a Preface and Ten Chapters.

We are dealing with an exceedingly complex process.

In the course of the last twelve months starting in early January 2020, I have analyzed almost on a daily basis the timeline and evolution of the Covid crisis. From the very outset in January 2020, people were led to believe and accept the existence of a rapidly progressing and dangerous epidemic.

I suggest you first read the Highlights (below), the Preface and Introduction before proceeding with chapters II through X.

Alternatively you may wish to View the Global Research Video entitled: The 2021 Worldwide Corona Crisis (released in February 2021), which provides a 25 minutes summary.

Each of the ten chapters provides factual information as well as analysis on the following topics: What Is Covid-19, what is SARS-CoV-2, how Is it identified, how is it estimated? The timeline and historical evolution of the Corona Crisis, the devastating economic and financial impacts, the enrichment of a social minority of billionaires, how the lockdown policies trigger unemployment and mass poverty Worldwide, the devastating impacts on mental health.

The E-book also includes analysis of curative and preventive drugs as well as a review of Big Pharma's Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is an "unapproved" and "experimental" drug affecting the human genome. (It is a dangerous drug. See Chapter VIII)

Also analyzed are issues pertaining to the derogation of fundamental human rights, censorship of medical doctors, freedom of expression and the protest movement. The last chapter focusses on the unfolding global debt crisis, the destabilization of national governments, the threats to democracy including "global governance" and the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset" proposal.

This E-Book is made available free of charge with a view to reaching out to people Worldwide.

Please help us in this endeavor. Kindly forward to family, friends and colleagues, within your respective communities.

If you wish to make a donation click here, that would be much appreciated.

All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 51 languages by activating the "Translate Website" drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). Please forward to friends and colleagues in foreign countries (while pointing to the translation plugin).

Readers can reach Prof. Michel Chossudovsky at [email protected]

Video

click the lower right corner to access full-screen

Highlights

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.

Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 "pandemic".

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.

More than 7 billion people Worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis.

The COVID-19 public health "emergency" under WHO auspices was presented to public opinion as a means ("solution") to containing the "killer virus".

If the public had been informed and reassured that Covid is (according to the WHO definition) "Similar to Seasonal Influenza", the fear campaign would have fallen flat. The lockdown and closure of the national economy would have been rejected outright.

The first stage of this crisis (outside China) was launched by the WHO on January 30th 2020 at a time when there were 5 cases in the US, 3 in Canada, 4 in France, 4 in Germany.

Do these numbers justify the declaration of a Worldwide public health emergency?

The fear campaign was sustained by political statements and media disinformation.

People are frightened. They are encouraged to do the PCR test, which is flawed. A positive PCR test does not mean that you are infected and/or that you can transmit the virus.

The RT-PCR Test is known to produce a high percentage of false positives. Moreover, it does not identify the virus.

From the outset in January 2020, there was no "scientific basis" to justify the launching of a Worldwide public health emergency.

In February, the covid crisis was accompanied by a major crash of financial markets. There is evidence of financial fraud.

And on March 11, 2020: the WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic at a time when there were 44,279 cases and 1440 deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion (Estimates of confirmed cases based on the PCR test)..

Immediately following the March 11, 2020 WHO announcement, confinement and lockdown instructions were transmitted to 193 member states of the United Nations.

Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large of number countries, entire sectors of the World economy have been destabilized. Small and medium sized enterprises have been driven into bankruptcy. Unemployment and poverty are rampant.

The social impacts of these measures are not only devastating, they are ongoing under what is described as "A Second Wave". There is no evidence of a "Second Wave". Amply documented the PCR estimates are flawed.

The health impacts (mortality, morbidity) resulting from the closing down of national economies far surpass those attributed to Covid-19.

Famines have erupted in at least 25 developing countries according to UN sources.

The mental health of millions of people Worldwide has been affected as a result of the lockdown, social distancing, job losses, bankruptcies, mass poverty and despair. The frequency of suicides and drug addiction has increased Worldwide.

"V the Virus" is said to be responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. That's a lie. There is no causal relationship between the (microscopic) SARS-2 virus and economic variables.

It's the powerful financiers and billionaires who are behind this project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy. And there is ample evidence that the decision to close down a national economy (resulting in poverty and unemployment) will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality.

Since early February 2020, the Super Rich have cashed in on billions of dollars.

Amply documented it's the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history, accompanied by a process of Worldwide impoverishment.

Preface

The fear campaign has served as an instrument of disinformation.

Media lies sustained the image of a killer virus which initially contributed to destabilizing US-China trade and disrupting air travel. And then in February "V- the Virus" (which incidentally is similar to seasonal influenza) was held responsible for triggering the most serious financial crisis in World history.

And then on March 11, a lockdown was imposed on 193 member states on the United Nations, leading to the "closure" of national economies Worldwide.

Starting in October, a "second wave" was announced. "The pandemic is not over".

The fear campaign prevails. And people are now led to believe that the corona vaccine sponsored by their governments is the "solution". And that "normality" will be restored once the entire population of the planet has been vaccinated.

The SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

How is it that a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which under normal conditions would take years to develop, was promptly launched in early November 2020? The mRNA vaccine announced by Pfizer is based on an experimental gene editing mRNA technology which has a bearing on the human genome.

Were the standard animal lab tests using mice or ferrets conducted?

Or did Pfizer "go straight to human "guinea pigs."? Human tests began in late July and early August. "Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm."

Our thanks to Large and JIPÉM

This caricature by Large + JIPÉM explains our predicament:

Mouse No 1: "Are You Going to get Vaccinated",

Mouse No. 2: Are You Crazy, They Haven't finished the Tests on Humans"

And why do we need a vaccine for Covid-19 when both the WHO and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have confirmed unequivocally that Covid-19 is "similar to seasonal influenza".

The plan to develop a vaccine is profit driven. It is supported by corrupt governments serving the interests of Big Pharma. The US government had already ordered 100 million doses back in July and the EU is to purchase 300 million doses. It's Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.

In the following chapters, we define the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the controversial RT-PCR test which is being used to "identify the virus" as well establish the "estimates" of the so-called "positive cases".(Chapter III)

In Chapter II, we examine in detail the timeline of events since October 2019 leading up to the historic March 11, 2020 lockdown.

We assess the broad economic and social consequences of this crisis including the process of Worldwide impoverishment and redistribution of wealth in favour of the Super Rich billionaires.(Chapter IV and V).

The devastating impacts of the Lockdown policies on mental health are examined in Chapter VI.

Big Pharma's vaccination programme which is currently being imposed on millions of people Worldwide is reviewed in Chapter VIII.

Chapter X concludes with an analysis of the World Economic Forum's proposed "Great Reset" which if adopted would consist in scrapping the Welfare State and imposing massive austerity measures on an impoverished population.

This E-Book is preliminary. There is a sense of urgency. People Worldwide are being lied to by their governments.

A word on the methodology: our objective is to refute the "Big Lie" through careful analysis consisting of:

A historical overview of the Covid crisis, with precise data.

Quotations from official documents and peer reviewed reports. Numerous sources and references are indicated.

Scientific analysis and detailed review of "official" data, estimates and definitions,

Analysis of the impacts of WHO "guidelines" and government policies on economic, social and public health variables.

Our objective is to inform people Worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a pretext and justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries.

This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: 7.8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings Worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.

I remain indebted to our readers, our authors and the Global Research team.

Reprinted with permission from Global Research.

The post The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d'État, and the 'Great Reset' appeared first on LewRockwell.

Forced Masking

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

Writes a friend:

Like many others, I am against forced masking. I have attended rallies and contacted lawmakers. I have never worn one outside of my job, where I have little (no) choice in the matter. I am a public school teacher.

I recently wrote the letter below to my school board members and superintendent. I took out names lest I reveal the district for which I work. I wrote it as a parent with a child who attends the district. I have a beautiful daughter who is forced to wear a mask. I have told her many times that she does not have to. I will take her to our incredible local doctor and will get an exemption. That offer always results in her begging me not to: she is terrified that she will be ostracized and targeted. I have even offered to let her "learn virtually," a term which I use lightly. Fortunately, we are near the end of the school year. I wanted to share this letter with you because of nine people to whom I wrote, I received one response. One. Perhaps some of your readers have had similar experiences as they have attempted to make their voices of reason heard.

Dear, (redacted),

On April 12th, the (redacted) members voted to keep a mask mandate which required students and teachers to be fully masked at all times when six feet of distance could not be maintained. One of the primary factors in this determination appeared to include the requirements of unmasked students and teachers to quarantine when possible exposure to Covid-19 occurred. It was made clear that virtual instruction during quarantine can in no way equal the quality of instruction that can be provided in a face to face learning environment, a fact with which I am certain nearly all teachers, students, and parents would agree. On April 19th, however, the board reconvened in an emergency meeting where they declared that masks would no longer be required in outdoor settings such as sporting events. Quarantine measures, however, had not been lessened. Unmasked students, teachers, and coaches exposed to Covid-19 in an outdoor environment would still be at risk of quarantine. This decision was made in distinct opposition to the viewpoints offered at the previous meeting: we wear masks so we do not have to quarantine. Now, with the passing of SB590 (now Act 1002) we see an obvious acknowledgement of the political theater that forced masking has always been. Recent action by lawmakers clearly supports a disagreement with forced masking, while inaction by the governor in regards to SB590 appeared to me a silent statement of admission to his original overreach that began in the summer of 2020. Now, because of the failure to pass an emergency clause which would put an immediate end to this overreach, SB590 (now Act 1002) will not go into effect until July, thus failing to protect our children from the continuance of overreach despite a clearly worded decision from our board on April 19th. The decision of April 19th (7 days after the meeting where the board voted to keep all mask requirements) indicated that with any change in Arkansas law our students would be allowed to remove their unsanitary, unsightly, uncomfortable, and ineffective facial coverings.

As a parent, it hurts my heart each day to see my beautiful daughter shroud her face. It angers me to see her gasp for breath and struggle with headaches and eye strain as she is forced to breathe in her own exhalations and stare at the top of her ridiculous mask each day. It makes me question the moral integrity of our leaders as I see her forced to cover God’s countenance that we as Christians have been instructed to show.

Members of the board, this is no longer about the safety of our students and staff members. Covid-19, a virus which I will not digress to argue the validity of, is not a virus which negatively impacts most children. Masks, however, are a direct contributor to learning problems, struggles in social interactions, increased headaches and asthma, anxiety, and overall discomforts. Members, I see only a forcible push to show sovereignty and authority: the board members demand compliance from the superintendents, who in turn must demand begrudging compliance from administrators, who in turn must demand compliance from tired teachers, who in turn must demand compliance from fed up students. As a parent, I am livid that my child continues to be treated in this manner. This is reprehensible, disturbing, and totally unnecessary. I ask, as it is no secret that I have asked before: please unmask our children. I am under no misconception that my lone voice will incite change, however, I cannot sit in silent acceptance of the maltreatment that my child is experiencing by being forced to cover her nose and mouth on a daily basis. If a parent is concerned about the safety of their own children, then they should require that their own children be masked. They should not, however, impose their own fears upon all the children of the district. They should not require our kindergarteners to smother themselves. They should not require our teenagers to long to commit immature acts of rebellion involving arriving to school en-masse without facial coverings. They should not make our children yearn for learning yet detest entering a school building.

Many thanks to the members of the board who have been vocal and active in taking a stand for what is right: removal of the imposition of the 14th amendment rights of our children. It is a pity that our children continue to be punished by the (muffled) voices of those who wish to see our children masked in the useless rags of insanity.

The post Forced Masking appeared first on LewRockwell.

A Vaxxing Question

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

In 1956 German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, licensed a new experimental drug designed to treat colds, flu, nausea and morning sickness. Known as Distaval in the UK, Distillers Biochemicals Ltd declared the drug could 'be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child' – a basic pre-requisite for licensing a drug.

While forty-nine countries licensed the drug under multiple different names, the then head of the FDA Dr. Frances Kelsey, a physician-pharmacologist with a profound interest in fetal development, refused authorization for use in the US market due to her concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety.

The drug was also known as Thalidomide.

Sixty-five years on and the stringent safety measures brought in to avoid another scandal on the scale of Thalidomide have been swept aside in order to fast track the approval of experimental mRNA vaccines. This is in spite of concerns voiced by (among others) Dr Wolfgang Wodarg and Dr Michael Yeadon who petitioned the European Medical Agency (EMA) with a Administrative/Regulatory Stay Of Action in regard to the BioNtech/Pfizer study on BNT162b – not just in regard to concerns about pregnant women, the foetus and infertility – but also in regard to the effect of the mRNA vaccines on those with prior immunity, for whom immunization could lead to a hyperinflammatory response, a cytokine storm, and a generally dysregulation of the immune system that allows the virus to cause more damage to their lungs and other organs of their body.

No previous research into treating illness or disease with messenger RNA or mRNA vaccines has been successful and this is the first time mRNA vaccines have been used on humans.

The concerns of Yeadon, Wodarg and others appear to be borne out by data from the King's College Zoe app that records adverse events from the mRNA vaccines. Taken from a pool of 700,000, data reveals that 12.2% of those vaccinated with the Pfizer jab experienced adverse events or side effects, a number which tripled to 35.7% for those with prior immunity. Adverse events from the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were already high at 31.9% but increased to 52.7% for people with immunity.

Ellie Barnes, professor of hepatology and immunology at Oxford University and a member of the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium referred to the discovery – that when you've had a COVID-19 infection your T-cells become activated and become memory T cells – as 'emerging' as though this was something revelatory. Yet the dangers of over-immunization had been flagged up multiple times and well before vaccine rollout.

It gets worse.

In spite of additional research from New York's Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Maryland which indicated that those who had previously developed Covid-19 were effectively already immune and wouldn't need a second dose (arguably they didn't need the first dose if they already had immunity), Eleanor Riley, professor of infectious diseases at Edinburgh University said that 'Incorporating this into a mass vaccination program, may be logistically complex', adding 'it may be safer overall to ensure everyone gets two doses'.

May be safer? Many in the study group had already had an adverse event from the first dose, so how could it be 'safer' when second doses have been shown to increase the adversity of an event.

And how is it logistically complex to notify those who have already experienced an adverse event? The medical data of the 700,000 patients has already been logged into the Zoe App system, otherwise the Zoe App wouldn't be able to differentiate between those with or without prior immunity. Therefore, those with prior immunity from having had Covid-19 – or those for whom an adverse event would perhaps indicate prior immunity – can be notified that there is no need for a second dose.

Moreover, why on earth aren't people tested for prior immunity before taking any vaccination considering the concerns associated with over-immunization?

Alarming data is also emerging from the Yellow Card Scheme.

Read the Whole Article

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Why This Frenchman Regrets Buying an Electric Car

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

Mayday! Mayday!! A Miller's tale from La Belle France !!Â Allez le diesel !!!

Here's a guy who bought an electric car! (Article from the Spectator).

He starts out really enjoying his new car, but then… ____________

Why I regret buying an electric car

I bought an electric car and wish I hadn't. It seemed a good idea at the time, albeit a costly way of proclaiming my environmental virtuousness. The car cost 44,000 Euros, less a 6,000 Euro subsidy courtesy of French taxpayers, the overwhelming majority poorer than me. Fellow villagers are driving those 20-year-old diesel vans that look like garden sheds on wheels.

I order the car in May 2018. It's promised in April 2019. No later, promises the salesman at the local Hyundai dealer. April comes and goes. No car. I phone the dealership. No explanation. The car finally arrives two months late, with no effort by Hyundai to apologise. But I Iove it. It's quiet, quick and with the back seats down, practical with plenty of room for the dogs. It does insist on sharply reminding me to keep my hands on the steering wheel, even when they're on it. And once alarmingly slamming on the brakes for no discernible reason.

I've installed a charger in my driveway so I plug the car in. It works first time! Then the boss turns on the kettle and every fuse in the house trips. The car is chargeable, but only if you don't cook, wash clothes or turn on the dishwasher at the same time.

First road trip. Off to the centre of France with the horse-obsessed boss to watch a three-day equestrian event. I consult an app that promises an high-speed charger half way to my destination. We arrive and hunt and ultimately find the charger. It doesn't work. Range anxiety? More like a panic attack.

We make it to the next charger on the motorway with the battery practically empty and my marriage in peril. It works! But subsequently, EDF, the French electric utility, simply shuts down its entire motorway network after discovering the chargers are not just unreliable but dangerous. In Britain, meanwhile, the Department for Transport has, I read, granted an exclusive contract to install rapid chargers at motorway service areas to a company glorying in the name Ecotricity. These turn out to be equally unreliable and very costly to use. Social networks are rapidly bombarded with complaints.

Back in France, after a two-month wait, EDF upgrades my home electricity supply. Rejoice! We can finally cook dinner and charge the car simultaneously. The little Kona is still mostly performing well. It's fast. I could beat a sports car from a traffic light, except we have none in my corner of La France Profonde. It's eerily quiet. But much as I attempt to defend my choice, I'm having doubts.

I meet a British couple in the supermarket car park, down for the summer, loading groceries into their electric Nissan. How was the trip down? I ask. "A nightmare" of broken charging points, they reply, bitterly. A 10-hour trip took 18 hours, with lengthy stops at low-speed chargers, often miles off the highway.

Read the Whole Article

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Highly Cited Covid Doctor Comes to Stunning Conclusion: Gov't 'Scrubbing Unprecedented Numbers' of Injection-Related Deaths

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

One of the world's most prominent medical doctors with expertise in treating COVID-19 has gone on the record with a scathing rebuke of the U.S. government's approach to fighting the virus. He says the government's strategy, carried out in cooperation with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations World Health Organization, has resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and is now being followed up with thousands more deaths caused by a mass-injection program.

Dr. Peter McCullough, in a 32-minute interview with journalist Alex Newman, said if this were any other vaccine it would have been pulled from the market by now for safety reasons.

McCullough holds the honor of being the most cited medical doctor on COVID-19 treatments at the National Library of Medicine, with more than 600 citations. He has testified before Congress and won numerous awards during his distinguished medical career.

Between Dec. 14 and April 23, there were 3,544 deaths reported to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS], along with 12,619 serious injuries.

One might expect these numbers would trigger an exhaustive investigation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But the opposite has occurred. According to McCullough, the government has taken what amounts to a passing glance at the alarming numbers and dismissed them with a bare minimum of scrutiny.

"A typical new drug at about five deaths, unexplained deaths, we get a black-box warning, your listeners would see it on TV, saying it may cause death," McCullough said. "And then at about 50 deaths it's pulled off the market."

The U.S. has a precedent for this. In 1976 during the Swine Flu pandemic the U.S. attempted to vaccinate 55 million Americans, but at that point the shot caused about 500 cases of paralysis and 25 deaths.

"The program was killed, at 25 deaths," McCullough said.

Compare that type of response to the government's reaction to much higher reported death numbers related to the Moderna and Pfizer shots and the contrast is alarming, McCullough said, especially when the shots have not even been granted full FDA approval and are only being allowed on the market under an Emergency Use Authorization.

"In the U.S. today [as of late March] we have approximately 77 million people vaccinated for COVID and we have 2,602 deaths reported, so it's unprecedented how many deaths have accrued," he said.

"Then on March 8 the CDC announced on their website with very little fanfare, that they had reviewed about 1,600 deaths with unnamed FDA doctors and they indicated not a single death was related to the vaccine," he added. "I think that was concerning in the academic community."

McCullough said he knows from first-hand experience that doing a thorough investigation into 1,600 potentially vaccine-related deaths would have taken months to complete.

"I have chaired and participated in dozens of data safety monitoring boards and sat on those committees and I can tell you that this type of work would have taken many months to review all the labs, the death certificates and all the circumstances of an event. It is impossible for unnamed regulatory doctors without any experience with COVID 19 to opine that none of the deaths were related to the vaccine."

Previous studies, including one from Harvard University, estimate that only 1 to 10 percent of all vaccine-related deaths get reported to VAERS. So in all likelihood, there are more people dying than even gets reported, yet the FDA can't come up with a single death related to the Moderna and Pfizer shots.

"Reporting a death requires a healthcare worker to enter it into the system," he said. And if the death does not occur within the normal 15-minute monitoring period they often go unreported. Most deaths occur within 72 hours of the shot. "They pile up on day one, two and three," he said.

As a matter of comparison: There are 20 to 30 deaths reported every year to VAERS related to the flu shot. That's with 195 million receiving flu shots. Compare that to the COVID shot, which resulted in 2,602 reported deaths through 77 million vaccinations.

That's a stunningly high ratio of deaths to vaccinations, the highest for any vaccine in U.S. history, and yet no major media outlet has launched an investigation. Independent journalists and researchers such as Alex Newman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Leo Hohmann have been ruthlessly censored.

"So the U.S. government has made a decision, along with the stakeholders – the CDC, NIH, FDA, Big Pharma, World Health Organization, Gates Foundation – they have made a commitment to mass vaccination as the solution to the COVID pandemic and we are really going to be witness to what's going to happen in history. We're sitting on, right now, the biggest number of vaccine deaths, there's been tens of thousands of hospitalizations, all attributable to the vaccine, and going strong."

McCullough testified before the U.S. Senate on Nov 19, 2020.

"I estimated at that time we could have saved half of the lives lost," he told Newman. "There are now current estimates that we are up to about 85 percent of all lives lost could have been saved with something called sequenced oral multi-drug therapy."

But instead, the government and its "stakeholders" in Big Pharma chose to focus on vaccines. At the same time, news organizations were recruited to present only one side of the vaccine story.

Mainstream outlets have agreed to not allow any news critical of the shots to reach the American people. This corrupt collusion falls under the Trusted News Initiative, a global collaboration signed onto by Big Tech social-media giants and many of its corrupt corporate media "partners."

The partners signed onto the Trusted News Initiative to date are: Associated Press, AFP; BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post. The New York Times has also participated in the past.

Reporting facts related to the dark side of the experimental mRNA vaccines is considered "dangerous disinformation" by the globalist media elites behind the Trusted News Initiative.

Dr. McCullough describes 'whitewash of historic proportions'

"So I think this was effectively a scrubbing, like we've seen elsewhere. There is a Trusted News Initiative, which is very important for Americans to understand, this was announced Dec. 10, and this is a coalition of all the major media and government stakeholders in vaccination, where they are not going to allow any negative information about vaccines to get into the popular media because they're concerned about vaccine hesitancy, that if Americans got any type of fair, balanced coverage on safety events then they simply would not come forward and get the vaccine."

"The Trusted News Initiative is really troublesome," he continued, "because we're now at record numbers of deaths, they continue to occur every day."

Confirming a LeoHohmann.com report from earlier this month, McCullough said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, while it does have issues with blood clots, is actually the safest of the three vaccines now being offered to Americans.

"In my professional opinion, the safest vaccine on the market was the J&J vaccine. And that was pulled for very rare blood-clotting events. We had seven million people vaccinated but the estimates are for the other two vaccines available, the blood-clotting rates are probably 30 times that of J&J, and these others are going strong."

McCullough suggested that there is an incestuous relationship between the U.S. government and certain elements within Big Pharma, which causes regulators to look the other way when confronted with safety issues.

"A lot of Americans don't understand how tight these stakeholders are. Keep in mind the NIH [National Institutes of Health] is a co-owner of the Moderna patent, so they have a vested financial interest in keeping these vaccines going," he said.

More than 15 months into the COVID nightmare, the evidence is beginning to suggest the U.S. government colluded from the outset with the Gates Foundation, CDC, FDA, the United Nations World Health Organization and Big Pharma to make the vaccines the central focus of the global COVID response effort. They started promoting the vaccines before they were even out of clinical trials, McCullough said, which is against U.S. regulatory law.

Read the Whole Article

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The Camp of The Saints Is Upon Us

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

The national disintegration of France is progressing precisely as Jean Raspail predicted in his novel. Those who see the disintegration and urge its halt are the ones punished exactly as in the novel.

The situation in the United States is far more serious than in France. In the United States the authorities have brainwashed themselves with their belief in "American exceptionalism." Consequently, warnings are not even acknowledged. I have been pointing out the ongoing American collapse for years, and it has never produced a debate.

It is too late for France and the US. If you read The Camp of the Saints, you will be brought face to face wth your own fate. The Democrats, the media, the woke "intellectuals," the universities, and the public schools are hard at work preparing our doom. The United States are now the Disunited States. The blue states believe in white guilt, critical race theory, systemic racism, identity politics, and that all products of Western civilization, even mathematics, are symbols and devices of white supremacy. The red states do not have an understanding of the ideological assault that has been mounted against them. Their president was removed from office in a stolen election that was in every sense a coup, and the Red States accepted the removal of their president. The red states still believe in America even though America has ceased to exist. White people in general have been infused with a sense of guilt and are weakened in their own defense by self-doubt. Their monuments are removed, their history rewritten, their art and music denounced as racist, and their children turned against them in public schools and universities.

If you require more evidence of American collapse and the generalized collapse of Western civilization, read the last three chapters of Andrei Martyanov's book, Disintegration: The Coming American Collapse. Actually, the collapse has already arrived. We just haven't yet recognized it.

Martyanov and I have reached the same conclusion: "The American belief system as it exists today is incapable of accepting empirical evidence, because evidence destroys American exceptionalism's extreme confirmation bias and most modern American intellectuals on both the nominal left and the nominal right cannot deal with it." US policymakers base their actions in emotions, not in rational thought. No sophistication of any kind any longer can be found in Washington's foreign policy which rests on barbaric immaturity. Martyanov gives the example of Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes, who professes to be a martial artist like Putin and challenges Putin to a fight "in single combat in a location where he can't have me arrested." Wittes writes that former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, State Department policy planning chief Anne-Marie Slaughter, and big name US presstitutes agree that "Putin needs to man up" and meet Wittes in a fight.

This infantile challenge epitomizes the violent character of US "diplomacy."

The Disunited States are a multicultural calamity. While white liberals create an anti-white system of caste privileges, Washington pursues conflict with Russia, China, and Iran. Are demonized white Americans going to fight for a country that is abusing them and turning them into second class citizens? As Judge Robert Bork warned 25 years ago, "American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaninglessness. Standards of European and American origins are the only possible standards that can hold our society together and keep us a competent nation. If the legitimacy of Eurocentric standards is denied, there is nothing else. . . . We are, then, entering a period of tribal hostilities. Some of what we may expect includes a rise in interethnic violence, a slowing of economic productivity, a vulgarization of scholarship (which is already well under way.)"

American students are not enculturated into their civilization and neither are Europeans. In place of education there is anti-white indoctrination. University reading lists consist of compilations of rants by ideologues describing the horrors of slavery, which is said to be unique to Western civilization. National consciousness is being stamped out along with scholarly and artistic standards. As Bork warned, the destruction of Western legitimacy means only interethnic violence remains. In Raspail's novel, the guilt-ridden French never reach this conclusion and experience genocide. It remains unclear whether insouciant white Americans will understand before it is too late for them.

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Biden Family Justice

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

If you want to grok the awesome failure of authority these Fourth Turning crack-up years in America, start with the lawlessness at the Department of Justice and its sociopathic step-child, the FBI, along with a demonic host of intel agencies seeded throughout the national government: the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the DHS, and even the lowly crypto-public US Postal Service, lately enlisted to spy on US citizens' social media posts.

Who is supposed to rein-in these freewheeling rogues? I'll tell you: the courts and the judges appointed to them. The problem is especially acute in the federal courts where, for instance, Judge James Boasberg allowed the FBI to lie repeatedly on warrant applications to his FISA court, and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan hung General Mike Flynn out to dry even after the DOJ had to admit misconduct in his prosecution — and the DC Court of Appeals failed to enforce the DOJ's reluctant decision to finally drop charges.

The campaign of false witness against US citizens went into overdrive when Donald Trump strutted onto the scene and "seventeen agencies of the Intel Community" conspired with The New York Times and other news media to manufacture the RussiaGate hoax. No top official across the boards has been taken to law for the stupendous cavalcade of false accusations and deceitful investigations associated with that venture in sedition, and the nation is still waiting for the apparition known as Special Counsel John Durham to make a peep. In fact, since 2017 much of the publicly-reported activity around the DOJ and FBI has demonstrated only their attempts to suppress their own felonious misdeeds — cover-ups on top of cover-ups.

Now comes the curious case of Rudy Giuliani, whose apartment was raided on a warrant last week by the FBI seeking his computers and cell phones. The probable cause remains murky — something to do with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in representing Ukrainian clients in the US? So, the DOJ wants Rudy's files, emails, and memoranda on that? Of course, Rudy was acting as the President's lawyer in impeachment No. 1 over a telephone call to Ukraine, and what was that about? Hunter Biden's grifting activities, his cumulatively receiving millions from the Burisma Company, of which Hunter's dad was due to receive at least his usual ten percent cut? And concerning which activity, Joe Biden threatened former Ukraine President Poroshenko in withholding US aid, unless an investigation into Hunter's Burisma grift was dropped.

It might be helpful to the current occupant of the Oval Office to know what kind of evidence Rudy has acquired on all that and more over the years — yes? But then, there's plenty of evidence about it and much much much more on Hunter's wayward laptop. Perhaps hundreds of millions in wide-ranging grifts beyond lowly Ukraine all the way to China, where to this day Hunter retains active and substantial financial connections through his Skaneateles LLC financial company. And it has become known that the FBI was in possession of Hunter's laptop from at least one month prior to the commencement of impeachment proceedings in December of 2019. And nobody was informed about that… not least the president's lawyer?

Don't Christopher Wray and William Barr have some 'splainin' to do about how such a crucial trove of evidence was withheld during the impeachment? After all, Mr. Trump's fateful phone call to Ukraine was about the influence-peddling operations of the Biden family in foreign lands. A whole other year passed before the existence of Hunter's laptop was even acknowledged in the fall of 2020, and then the sole reportage about it from The New York Post was suppressed in a coordinated campaign between the social and news media — in the midst of a national election, with Joe Biden standing for president. Funny how that worked.

Also, note the connections between Rep Adam Schiff's House Intel Committee, where the first impeachment hearings were staged, especially the committee's Chief Counsel, one Daniel Goldman, and William Barr's DOJ. Mr. Goldman was a former US Attorney in the Southern District of New York (2007 -2017). Do you suppose he knows people in Main Justice — like, just about everybody? Was he apprised formally or otherwise of the existence of Hunter's laptop in possession of the FBI at the time of the hearings? Or Did Mr. Wray and Mr. Barr leave him in the dark about what was on it? (Personally, I doubt it.)

It has come out lately that the FBI secretly hacked its way into Mr. Giuliani's iCloud data storage account without a warrant in the fall of 2019, when Mr. Schiff's Intel Committee held its hearings preliminary to impeachment and Mr. Giuliani was the president's lawyer. Did Mr. Wray and Mr. Barr or others funnel info about what was on the president's lawyer's private iCloud files to Mr. Goldman and Mr. Schiff? And was that info known to then Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire? Or Intel Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who allowed the bogus complaints of CIA "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella and National Security Council officer Alexander Vindman to be manufactured into an impeachable "crime?" Do these seem to be esoteric issues? I don't think so. Will they ever be adjudicated? And will our country pay a price for allowing all that to happen?

It has also been imputed in media coverage of the Giuliani raid that the president's lawyer was somehow nefariously involved in advising Mr. Trump to fire US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. In fact, ambassadors to foreign lands serve at the pleasure of the chief executive. He can fire them for any reason. And his lawyer has every right to advise him to do it. Does the news media not know that?

Does the DOJ aim to mount an indictment against Rudy Giuliani? Well, if they do, of course, they open the door to evidentiary discovery — like, who gave the order to hack into the President's lawyer's iCloud account during the 2019 impeachment? Anything funny going on with that? It happens that Mr. Giuliani's personal lawyer is one Bob Costello, who served as head of the Southern District's criminal division when Rudy ran the DOJ's SDNY. Mr. Costello might know something of the workings in Main Justice. He could possibly root something interesting out.

To return to my original point: who and where are the authorities who will hold high public officials accountable for the things they've been doing? Do you wonder why Americans increasingly lack faith in their government? Do you wonder why, for example, so many want to avoid "vaccine" shots, endorsed by government officials as "safe and effective?" Do you note the contrast between what's taken ultra-seriously in the BLM hoopla over police shootings of perps obviously resisting arrest and fighting with them, and the awesome depravity at the highest levels of the US justice system? Oh, by the way, the Arizona ballot recount and voting machine forensic inquiry goes on. Maybe soon you will start putting together the reasons why your country is cracking up.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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A Software Company Comes Up With a Brilliant Corporate Speech Policy

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

Basecamp is remote work software that provides a single online environment in which workers on a single project can consolidate everything they do on that project. No matter where you are, there’s a virtual meeting space in cyberspace. That’s pretty cool. What’s really cool about Basecamp, though, is its CEO’s new rule: people may not discuss politics at work. With that single announcement, a third of the workforce quit. Other American corporations should follow suit.

After “a contentious all-hands meeting,” the Basecamp CEO and one of its founders, Jason Fried, posted a lengthy statement online detailing the new policies that he and David Hansson, a Basecamp founder and partner, had reached. (Note: As a private corporation, Basecamp can impose speech policies on its employees.) Here are the core parts (and except for the first sentence, bolded emphasis is mine):

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore. Update: David has shared some more details and more of the internal announcement on his HEY World blog.

(I urge you to read David’s blog post, because it’s an excellent statement about how free speech should work in America.)

In addition to banning political talk in the workplace or over the workplace communication system, the company is turning away from the Silicon Valley trend of turning every workplace into an amusement park for overgrown children (except for the first sentence, bolded emphasis is mine):

2. No more paternalistic benefits. For years we’ve offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer’s market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we’ve had a change of heart. It’s none of our business what you do outside of work, and it’s not Basecamp’s place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we’re getting too deep into nudging people’s personal, individual choices. So we’ve ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year. In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan to provide direct compensation that people can spend on whatever they’d like, privately, without company involvement or judgement.

Lastly, in the sixth numbered item, Fried reminds the employees that Basecamp’s purpose is to make “project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it.” As far as Basecamp leadership is concerned, “We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure.”

There are three other changes, but they’re very work-related, so they’re not relevant to this post.

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CDC Officially Recommends Covid Jab for Pregnant Women

Monday 03 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05

The beyond conflicted U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has struck again: Pregnant women are now urged to get the COVID-19 gene manipulation jab, based on preliminary findings.

The postmarketing surveillance data, published in The New England Journal of Medicine,1 found "no obvious safety signals" among the 35,691 pregnant women who got either the Moderna or Pfizer shots between December 14, 2020, and February 28, 2021. The women ranged in age from 16 to 54 years old. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky issued a statement saying:2

"No safety concerns were observed for people vaccinated in the third trimester or safety concerns for their babies. As such, CDC recommends pregnant people receive COVID-19 vaccines."

Can Self-Reported Data Be Trusted?

There is more than one reason to be suspicious of this green-lighting for pregnant women. First of all, as noted by Jeremy Hammond in a recent Tweet:3

"This was NOT a randomized placebo-controlled trial. There is no data from clinical trials showing that it is safe for pregnant women to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Postmarketing surveillance is NOT a sufficient substitute for proper safety studies."

The authors themselves state that data on mRNA "vaccines" in pregnancy are limited, and that without longitudinal follow-up of large numbers of women, it's not possible to determine "maternal, pregnancy and infant outcomes."4

Secondly, all postmarketing surveillance data are preliminary, so it seems incredibly foolhardy to make a blanket recommendation for all pregnant women at this early stage. Thirdly, this data is solely based on voluntary self-reporting to one of two sources:

The Vaccine Safe (V-Safe) After Vaccination Health Checker program,5 a vaccine safety registry set up specifically for the monitoring of COVID-19 "vaccine" side effects

The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

By using voluntary self-reporting, we have no way of knowing how many side effects have gone unreported and cannot confirm that the data present an accurate picture. Historically, we know that voluntary reporting of vaccine side effects range from less than 1%6,7 to a maximum of 10%,8 so it's likely we're not getting the full story.

A hint that an enormous amount of data concerning pregnancy outcomes are being overlooked or hidden can be discerned by the fact that the paper only looked at 11% of the total number of pregnancies reported to V-Safe. While they state that a total of 35,691 pregnant women were included in the analysis, they actually only looked at 3,958 of them. Here's how the paper reads:9

"A total of 35,691 v-safe participants 16 to 54 years of age identified as pregnant … Among 3,958 participants enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry, 827 had a completed pregnancy, of which 115 (13.9%) resulted in a pregnancy loss and 712 (86.1%) resulted in a live birth (mostly among participants with vaccination in the third trimester)."

If there were 35,691 pregnant V-Safe participants, why are they looking at just 11% of them?

Experimentation of the Worst Kind

Giving pregnant women unlicensed COVID-19 gene therapies is reprehensibly irresponsible experimental medicine, and to suggest that safety data are "piling up" is pure propaganda. Everything is still in the experimental stage and all data are preliminary. It'll take years to get a clearer picture of how these injections are affecting young women and their babies.

Pregnancy is a time during which experimentation is extremely hazardous, as you're not only dealing with potential repercussions for the mother but also for the child. Any number of things can go wrong when you introduce drugs, chemicals or foreign substances during fetal development.

The CDC has absolutely no way of gauging safety for pregnant women and babies as of yet, so to do so is reprehensible beyond words, in my opinion — especially seeing how women of childbearing age have virtually no risk of dying from COVID-19, their fatality risk being a mere 0.01%.10

Contrast this to the potential benefits of the vaccine. You can still contract the virus if immunized and you can still spread it to others.11,12,13,14 All it is designed to do is lessen your symptoms if or when you get infected. Pregnant women simply do not need this vaccine, and therefore any risk is likely excessive. I have little doubt we'll end up with a second Nuremberg Trial over this at some point in the future.

Are These Miscarriage Ratios 'Normal'?

Getting back to the NEJM study, the authors report the following findings, based on data collected from VAERS and V-Safe:15

"Among 3,958 participants enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry, 827 had a completed pregnancy, of which 115 (13.9%) resulted in a pregnancy loss and 712 (86.1%) resulted in a live birth (mostly among participants with vaccination in the third trimester). Adverse neonatal outcomes included preterm birth (in 9.4%) and small size for gestational age (in 3.2%); no neonatal deaths were reported.

Although not directly comparable, calculated proportions of adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in persons vaccinated against COVID-19 who had a completed pregnancy were similar to incidences reported in studies involving pregnant women that were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among 221 pregnancy-related adverse events reported to the VAERS, the most frequently reported event was spontaneous abortion (46 cases)."

So, in VAERS, the miscarriage rate was 20.8% (46 of 221 reports), and in V-Safe (looking at just 11% of pregnant participants), the miscarriage rate was 13.9% (115 of 827). Again, these data were reported between December 14, 2020, and February 28, 2021.

The combined miscarriage and preterm birth rate, per V-Safe, was 23.3% (13.9% + 9.4%). As of April 1, 2021, 379 VAERS reports16 had been filed by pregnant women, 110 of which involved miscarriage or premature birth, giving us an updated rate of 29%. In other words, it appears the rate of miscarriage and premature births is rising as more reports come in.

According to the authors of the NEJM report, these ratios are comparable to the miscarriage rate normally seen among unvaccinated women, while admitting that the data is "not directly comparable."

I find that dubious, seeing how sources17 reviewing statistical data stress that the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20.

And, while the NEJM study18 report that 92.3% of spontaneous abortions occurred before 13 weeks of gestation, it specifies that very little is as yet known about the effects of the injections when given to women during the periconception period and the first and second trimesters, as "limited follow-up calls had been made at the time of this analysis."

Now, if the miscarriage rate is normally 5% and declining after Week 6, then miscarriage rates of 13.9%, 20.87% or 29% before Week 13 is clearly excessive. As for the preterm birth rate, 9.4% does appear relatively "normal" based on historical data, which in 2019 ranged from 7.28% to 18.8% depending on the region, with an average right around 10%.19

Time will tell whether that percentage will remain within the norms as the outcomes of pregnant women are entered into databases. If preterm birth rates do rise above the norm, then that too is a significant public health issue, as the impact of premature birth on society is enormous, averaging at $26.2 billion annually, as is.20

Toxicology Expert Calls for End to mRNA Experiment

The featured video at the top of this article is the recording of a public comment by Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC, given to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), April 23, 2021.

Lindsay's expertise is analysis of pharmacological dose-responses, mechanistic biology and complex toxicity dynamics. In her comment, Lindsay describes how she aided the development of a vaccine that caused unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted.

She calls for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to safety concerns on multiple fronts. She notes there is credible concern that they will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may "impair fertility and reproductive outcomes."

I've touched on this in previous articles, including "How COVID-19 Is Changing the Future of Vaccines" and "Pfizer Bullies Nations to Put Up Collateral for Lawsuits." Not a single study has disproven this hypothesis, Lindsey notes.

Another theory of how these injections might impair fertility can be found in a 2006 study,21 which showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg. The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations.

It is possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein. So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage.

"We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation," Lindsey warns. The fact that there have been live births following COVID-19 vaccination is not proof that these injections do not have a reproductive effect, she says.

Lindsay also points out that reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who have received the injections number in the thousands,22,23,24 and this too hints at reproductive effects.

I agree with her conclusion that we simply cannot inject children and women of childbearing age with these experimental technologies until more rigorous studies have been done and we have a better understanding of their mechanisms.

Rare Blood Clotting Disorders Being Reported

Lindsay also points out there have been hundreds of reports of rare blood clotting disorders following all COVID-19 "vaccines" among people with no underlying risk factors, including immune thrombocytopenia25,26,27,28 (ITP), a rare autoimmune disease that causes your immune system to destroy your platelets (cells that help blood clot), resulting in hemorrhaging. Serious blood clots are also occurring at the same time.

Here, she points out the obvious: COVID-19 has been found to cause blood clotting disorders due to the virus' unique spike protein. The COVID-19 "vaccines" instruct your body to make that very spike protein. Why would one assume that this spike protein cannot have similar effects when produced by your own cells?

One hypothesis that has been presented is that platelet-antagonistic antibodies are being formed against the spike antigen.29 Another novel hypothesis30 is that the lipid-coated nanoparticles, which transport the mRNA, may be carrying that mRNA into the megakaryocytes in your bone marrow.

Megakaryocytes are cells that produce platelets. According to this hypothesis, once the mRNA enters your bone marrow, the megakaryocytes would then begin to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which would tag them for destruction by cytotoxic T-cells. As your platelets are destroyed, thrombocytopenia sets in.

Avoid This Risky Milk-Sharing Practice

Women who have received the COVID-19 jab are also making what I believe is a huge mistake by sharing breast milk in a misguided effort to inoculate unvaccinated mothers' babies. As reported by The New York Times:31

"Multiple studies32,33 show that there are antibodies in a vaccinated mother's milk. This has led some women to try to restart breastfeeding and others to share milk with friends' children."

Again, there's scarcely any data on what these gene therapies might do to infants, which is reason alone not to experiment. So far, only one suspected case34 of an infant dying has been attributed to breastfeeding. A 5-month-old infant died with a diagnosis of thrombotic thrombocytopenia purpura within days of his mother receiving her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.35,36

But while fact checkers roundly dismiss the idea that the child could have developed thrombocytopenia from mRNA-contaminated breast milk,37 it's important to realize they have no evidence for that. It's pure opinion.

At present, all we can confidently say is that short-term harmful effects of COVID-19 vaccines are being reported at a staggering rate, and that the long-term effects are completely unknown.

As of right now, we have no idea how or why the infant developed this rare blood disorder, but it would be premature and irresponsible to say that nursing children cannot be affected and that there is no risk at all. In addition to that lethal case, there are at least 20 other cases where children have had an adverse reaction to breast milk from a vaccinated mother.38

At present, all we can confidently say is that short-term harmful effects of COVID-19 vaccines are being reported at a staggering rate, and that the long-term effects are completely unknown.

In addition to the more immediate effects already discussed, there are mechanisms by which COVID-19 "vaccines" may actually worsen disease upon exposure to the wild virus, as detailed in "How COVID-19 Vaccine Can Destroy Your Immune System," "Will Vaccinated People Be More Vulnerable to Variants?" and several other articles.

As noted in a February 4, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine paper39 reporting on the safety and effectiveness of the mRNA-1273 vaccine developed by Moderna, "Whether mRNA-1273 vaccination results in enhanced disease on exposure to the virus in the long term is unknown."

Sources and References

1, 4, 9, 15, 18 NEJM April 21, 2021 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2104983

2 CNBC April 23, 2021

3 Twitter Jeremy Hammond April 23, 2021

5 CDC V-Safe

6 AHRQ December 7, 2007

7 The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020

8 BMJ 2005;330:433

10 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

11 Harvard Health March 25, 2021

12 CDC April 2, 2021

13 NBC Chicago April 8, 2021

14 The Defender April 6, 2021

16 The Defender April 9, 2021

17 Medical News Today January 12, 2020

19 CDC.gov Preterm births by state 2019

20 March of Dimes, the Impact of Premature Birth on Society

21 Molecular Reproduction and Development 73(10):1239-46

22 MSN April 10, 2021

23 UK Gov Yellow Card Report Unspecified Brand March 28, 2021 (PDF)

24 Life Site News April 19, 2021

25 Hopkins Medicine ITP

26, 29 The Defender April 13, 2021

27 The Defender February 9, 2021

28 New York Times February 8, 2021, Updated February 10, 2021 (Archived)

30 Medium March 19, 2021

31 New York Times April 8, 2021 (Archived)

32 Fox 4 April 7, 2021

33 Healio April 19, 2021

34, 35 Twitter Alex Berenson April 23, 2021

36 Twitter VAERS detail

37 USA Today April 9, 2021

38 Medalerts.org 4/16/2021 VAERS data

39 NEJM 2021; 384:403-416

40 The Defender January 25, 2021

The post CDC Officially Recommends Covid Jab for Pregnant Women appeared first on LewRockwell.

from https://youtu.be/GuUaaPaTlyY May 04, 2021 at 02:00AM

#Credit Report Repair News: Digest for May 04 #2021

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brewermaine · 4 years ago