#this legacy is not anything imposed by a human man but by the systems and roles that haunt palmer and become more Real than flesh and blood

[pochapal-pokespe]

palmer appearing for a split second in the static and then vanishing. never mind this isn't weird distortion stuff the battle frontier's just haunted

[prfxxor]

anyway. as a followup to this,

RECEIPTS FOR CHARLES’ PSYCHIC FUCKERY

i think xavier fucks with people’s minds like no other psychics -- at least in part -- is because he’s always very deliberate with the way he uses his powers since very early on.

[uncanny x-men #38] is the canon moment where humans officially “discovered” mutants among them and anti-mutant became an organized public sentiment. charles upon reading the news immediately flew all the way to DC to meet the FBI agent conducting investigation on the supposed “mutant menace.”

when getting pass the armed guards, he considered that while he could simply use mind control to order them to let him pass, it’s better if they didn’t remember the encounter altogether.

this seems a pretty small and very unremarkably reasonable thought, all things considered, but it underpins the way this man thinks and how he interacts with his ability vis-a-vis the world, namely...

he has the uncanny ability and aptitude to blend the mental/constructed world with the “real” world and make you doubt yourself

in the same issue [#38], when confronting the FBI agents, instead of making it so that the agent simply freeze or unable to push him, he made it so that the agent (in green) THOUGHT he’s pushing, but was actually not.

it’s a subtle difference, but the effect psychologically is just that much more jarring -- you’re not just being “controlled.” it’s not just an outside force imposing upon you and your body, your entirely perception of reality and of YOURSELF is challenged. after this, how can you trust ANYTHING that you do when this man is around?

[THIS POST IS TOO FUCKING LONG IM PUTTING IT UNDER CUT]

a similar trick was done in [legacy #225] when xavier single-handedly infiltrated the acolytes’ base.

at first they were surprised that he was able to bypass the security system, seemingly having the computers and weapons under his command (how could that be? “he has no telekinetic powers!” poor bennet exclaimed). but as it turns out, he’s actually controlling unuscione to do his bidding from the control room.

when questioned why her psi-shield wasn’t working, sentinel pointed out that it would’ve been... if it was turned on at all -- charles implanted the false memory of turning on the psi-shield in unuscione’s mind.

how fucking clever, chilling and mind-bending a trick is that?! for its subtlety. and it once again made it so that you can’t trust yourself.

i can go on about this whole sequence, including his encounter with random where he revealed that he’s bypassed his psi-shield by planting the hypnotic suggestions in his mind the night before in hiS DREAM--  this shows another aspect of his style of psychic warfare...

he plays the long game.

how long? it may be a minute, an hour, a day or a fortnight... but either way, he’d started before you knew it’s begun. he’s ahead of you. even just by a half step.

and then sometimes you get something like [legacy #219], where cain didn’t even know WHEN charles got into his head. in fact, he lived out a whole fucking scenario in which he killed charles for god knows how many days, weeks, or months, before the illusion was shattered.

(the way this thing went down was also just... a whole thing. i highly recommend checking it out. it’s a single issue one-shot but one of my favorite issues that’s both a master character study of charles fucking xavier, and a dissection of this troubled brotherly dynamic.)

herein lies the paradox or perhaps one of the contradictions with this character... however bizarre and out-of-touch his relationships with his fellow human beings (mutants included) seem to be, he also has a deep understanding of the human mind/psychology, which is what enables him to pull off these intricate mind tricks. and more importantly...

he watches and learns.

and we get the sense that he does this deliberately, like much of everything he does.

here is a moment i missed in my first reading: in [legacy #218], charles was facing off against claudine renko, aka miss sinister. miss sinister was one of sinister’s “hosts” and possessed similar psychic abilities. she was able to get the drop on xavier when xavier broke into her mansion. she attacked him with all sorts of mental tricks/illusions for about 1.5 page before he revealed that -- all along -- he’s got one of her psi-shield gadgets on him and used it to bypass her psychic assault.

something felt off about it but i couldn’t put my finger on it the first time reading it, until i realized... if he had the psi-shield all along, why did he let her attack his mind at all? why not have it activated the whole time and save the trouble?

a possible explanation seems to be that... he wanted to see what she’d do? he wanted to get her to show her hand and show herself -- which she did, letting on to him that she’s a host of mister sinister. and then, and only then, did he fight back and subdue her.

she should’ve learned from his previous battle with her original, mister sinister. it’s kind of a consistent thing that charles adjusts and gets better in psychic battles the longer they drag on.

in [legacy #214], he was locked in heated combat with mister sinister on the astral plane. and by all means he was losing. bad.

sinister was pulling out all the stops and weaponizing all of his past failures, regrets, angst, and humiliations against him. which all culminated in... onslaught.

what should’ve been the climax or the final blow ended up being the turning point where charles regained control and pushed sinister out of his mind and body (oh yeah sinister was trying to take over his body/mind in a ploy to resurrect himself forgot to mention that).... because it’s too obvious

...,,which.. . wt f yo mean tOo obvioSu?1!?!?

basically what i got out of this, and the totality of evidence, is that charles xavier is a tactician. once he knows what your game is/what you’re doing, he will figure out a way to counter it. whatever it takes.

whatever it takes.

[astonishing x-men (2017) #5] showed the epic battle between shadow king and charles xavier which ended in xavier’s last pre-krakoa resurrection via fantomex’s body (long story).

it’s a whole feat onto itself and i recommend people reading it, especially the 2017 annual #1 which further illustrates my point about charles’ psychic manipulation.

but the key point here is, he will throw everything at the problem -- and he never plays only one game at a time.

most importantly, he constructs a narrative. he doesn’t just make you do the thing he wants you to do, he gives you a reason as to why you’re doing it. a story. a history. an entire dollhouse that makes everything make sense... until it doesn’t.

it plays with all of your senses (possibly, but also not all the time. which ones do you rely on?), at multiple levels (it goes deeper than you thought, but by hitting the bottom you only discover how far he’s strung you along), and started way before you were ready, or even realized.

it shatters you by making you fundamentally question your relationship with reality. that’s what makes his use of psychic powers feel so intricate, elaborate, and so -- back to the central thesis of this post -- violating.

[grayjing]

Anarchist FAQ/What is Anarchism?/2.17<

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A.2.17 Aren't most people too stupid for a free society to work?

We are sorry to have to include this question in an anarchist FAQ, but we know that many political ideologies explicitly assume that ordinary people are too stupid to be able to manage their own lives and run society. All aspects of the capitalist political agenda, from Left to Right, contain people who make this claim. Be it Leninists, fascists, Fabians or Objectivists, it is assumed that only a select few are creative and intelligent and that these people should govern others. Usually, this elitism is masked by fine, flowing rhetoric about "freedom," "democracy" and other platitudes with which the ideologues attempt to dull people's critical thought by telling them want they want to hear.

It is, of course, also no surprise that those who believe in "natural" elites always class themselves at the top. We have yet to discover an "objectivist", for example, who considers themselves part of the great mass of "second-handers" (it is always amusing to hear people who simply parrot the ideas of Ayn Rand dismissing other people so!) or who will be a toilet cleaner in the unknown "ideal" of "real" capitalism. Everybody reading an elitist text will consider him or herself to be part of the "select few." It's "natural" in an elitist society to consider elites to be natural and yourself a potential member of one!

Examination of history shows that there is a basic elitist ideology which has been the essential rationalisation of all states and ruling classes since their emergence at the beginning of the Bronze Age ("if the legacy of domination had had any broader purpose than the support of hierarchical and class interests, it has been the attemp to exorcise the belief in public competence from social discourse itself." [Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p. 206]). This ideology merely changes its outer garments, not its basic inner content over time.

During the Dark Ages, for example, it was coloured by Christianity, being adapted to the needs of the Church hierarchy. The most useful "divinely revealed" dogma to the priestly elite was "original sin": the notion that human beings are basically depraved and incompetent creatures who need "direction from above," with priests as the conveniently necessary mediators between ordinary humans and "God." The idea that average people are basically stupid and thus incapable of governing themselves is a carry over from this doctrine, a relic of the Dark Ages.

In reply to all those who claim that most people are "second-handers" or cannot develop anything more than "trade union consciousness," all we can say is that it is an absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look at history, particularly the labour movement. The creative powers of those struggling for freedom is often truly amazing, and if this intellectual power and inspiration is not seen in "normal" society, this is the clearest indictment possible of the deadening effects of hierarchy and the conformity produced by authority. (See also section B.1 for more on the effects of hierarchy). As Bob Black points outs:

"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinisation all around us than even such significant moronising mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it."—Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and other essays, pp. 21-2

When elitists try to conceive of liberation, they can only think of it being given to the oppressed by kind (for Leninists) or stupid (for Objectivists) elites. It is hardly surprising, then, that it fails. Only self-liberation can produce a free society. The crushing and distorting effects of authority can only be overcome by self-activity. The few examples of such self-liberation prove that most people, once considered incapable of freedom by others, are more than up for the task.

Those who proclaim their "superiority" often do so out of fear that their authority and power will be destroyed once people free themselves from the debilitating hands of authority and come to realise that, in the words of Max Stirner, "the great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise"

As Emma Goldman remarks about women's equality, "[t]he extraordinary achievements of women in every walk of life have silenced forever the loose talk of women's inferiority. Those who still cling to this fetish do so because they hate nothing so much as to see their authority challenged. This is the characteristic of all authority, whether the master over his economic slaves or man over women. However, everywhere woman is escaping her cage, everywhere she is going ahead with free, large strides." [Vision on Fire, p. 256] The same comments are applicable, for example, to the very successful experiments in workers' self-management during the Spanish Revolution.

Then, of course, the notion that people are too stupid for anarchism to work also backfires on those who argue it. Take, for example, those who use this argument to advocate democratic government rather than anarchy. Democracy, as Luigi Galleani noted, means "acknowledging the right and the competence of the people to select their rulers." However, "whoever has the political competence to choose his [or her] own rulers is, by implication, also competent to do without them, especially when the causes of economic enmity are uprooted." [The End of Anarchism?, p. 37] Thus the argument for democracy against anarchism undermines itself, for "if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?" [Malatesta, Anarchy, pp. 53–4]

As for those who consider dictatorship as the solution to human stupidity, the question arises why are these dictators immune to this apparently universal human trait? And, as Malatesta noted, "who are the best? And who will recognise these qualities in them?" [Op. Cit., p. 53] If they impose themselves on the "stupid" masses, why assume they will not exploit and oppress the many for their own benefit? Or, for that matter, that they are any more intelligent than the masses? The history of dictatorial and monarchical government suggests a clear answer to those questions. A similar argument applies for other non-democratic systems, such as those based on limited suffrage. For example, the Lockean (i.e. classical liberal or right-wing libertarian) ideal of a state based on the rule of property owners is doomed to be little more than a regime which oppresses the majority to maintain the power and privilege of the wealthy few. Equally, the idea of near universal stupidity bar an elite of capitalists (the "objectivist" vision) implies a system somewhat less ideal than the perfect system presented in the literature. This is because most people would tolerate oppressive bosses who treat them as means to an end rather than an end in themselves. For how can you expect people to recognise and pursue their own self-interest if you consider them fundamentally as the "uncivilised hordes"? You cannot have it both ways and the "unknown ideal" of pure capitalism would be as grubby, oppressive and alienating as "actually existing" capitalism.

As such, anarchists are firmly convinced that arguments against anarchy based on the lack of ability of the mass of people are inherently self-contradictory (when not blatantly self-servicing). If people are too stupid for anarchism then they are too stupid for any system you care to mention. Ultimately, anarchists argue that such a perspective simply reflects the servile mentality produced by a hierarchical society rather than a genuine analysis of humanity and our history as a species. To quote Rousseau:

"when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behove slaves to reason about freedom."—Rousseau, quoted by Noam Chomsky, Marxism, Anarchism, and Alternative Futures, p. 780

[dweemeister]

Little Caesar (1931)

For a brief window in the early 1930s, Hollywood studios churned out a small flurry of gangster films that would define the genre into the present day. Among those influential progenitors was Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, released by Warner Bros. With Little Caesar, Warner Bros. was about to assume an identity of being the “dark” studio – greenlighting socially conscious films replete with human depravity and cynicism towards authority figures or, you know, gangster films where the police are given no nobility. Little Caesar, based on W.R. Burnett’s novel of the same name and adapted by Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert Lord, and future 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, is best remembered today as the film that made Edward G. Robinson a Hollywood superstar. Robinson and Little Caesar, as a film, resembled nothing moviegoers had seen before and demand for these movies – to the horror of state and local censors and special-interest morality groups – skyrocketed.

Audiences, in the opening throes of the Depression, admired these gangsters for their craftiness in assuaging their living conditions in dire economic times while hoping for their demise. Gangster films were an expression of wrath – bottled up within Western audiences due to the obvious costs of such behavior, but fully unleashed within the confines of fiction. That wrath could be consuming for characters in these films, and was often directed at the police, politicians (at any level of government), and other crime bosses with the gall to impose their own rules on a main character. By the end of the decade, this appealing aura would be reversed by the Hays Code – a set of guidelines by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) created in 1930, not fully enforced until 1934, and replaced with the MPAA ratings system in the United States in 1968 – by turning gangsters into unflattering personalities or shifting the narrative to the police attempting to capture the criminals.

Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello (Robinson) starts out as a minor criminal in the lower Midwest, along with friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). Discontent with their fortunes, they travel to Chicago – Rico joins Sam Vettori’s (Stanley Fields) gang while Joe pursues a long-held dream of being a dancer. Rico wants to help Joe rise through the gang’s hierarchy, but Joe declines when he learns the next heist is at the Bronze Peacock – the dinner-and-a-show establishment where he works. The friends go their separate ways, with Joe heeding his dance partner Olga’s (Glenda Farrell) words to leave the gangster lifestyle. At the Bronze Peacock, Rico – against the orders of “Big Boy” (Sidney Blackmer) – hails the Chicago police commissioner with a fatal gunshot. Open gang war has broken out in Chicago’s Northside, Rico believes Joe knows too much about what he has done, and friendships and fates will be determined in the film’s closing acts.

In supporting roles are William Collier, Jr.; Ralph Ince; Thomas E. Jackson as a police sergeant; Maurice Black as a rival boss; and George E. Stone as one of Rico’s henchpersons.

For modern audiences, one of the most glaring impediments to investing oneself into Little Caesar is the clunky acting from everyone who is not Edward G. Robinson (Fairbanks, Jr. feels like he is simply reading lines too often; Farrell is in her first credited feature film and will grow into her reputation as the wisecracking blonde in later comedies and musicals). The dialogue is delivered in stilted fashion, with theatrical voices being used in every scene (this is a legacy of the silent era, as actors and filmmakers were still trying to adapt themselves to synchronized sound – if Little Caesar was a silent film, I would be calling the acting anything but “clunky”). Despite this, the friendship between Rico and Joe feels like it existed even before the first minute of the film begins.

As a pre-Code film, Rico and Joe’s friendship also contains potential homoerotic subtext – Rico is completely dismissive of women as objects of sexual attraction (opens the possibility of other subtexts), he criticizes Joe’s attraction to Olga, almost always keeps his hands on his gun (concealed or otherwise) when rival men are around, the two are complete opposites but want the other to reform their ways, and Joe is the only person in the film that Rico can share his private ideas and life with. This subtext was overwhelming to ‘30s audiences, forcing W.R. Burnett (the author of the novel) to write a lambasting letter to the producers about the “conversion” of his originally and explicitly heterosexual title character. No matter Burnett’s complaints, the fact that the screenwriting team of Faragoh, Lord, and Zanuck packages this convincing friendship (or whatever it is) within a seventy-nine-minute runtime is an impressive achievement. It is also impossible without the performances of Robinson and, to a lesser extent, the junior Douglas Fairbanks.

Robinson, along with James Cagney, defined gangster films of the 1930s. Their relatively short stature – Robinson was 5′7″, Cagney 5′5″ – does not suggest a domineering physical presence on paper. But as Rico, Robinson is a fearsome menace constantly compensating for something. Rico cares little – but understands completely – about the ramifications of violence on society, friends, and families. Unlike many gangsters that would follow him, he is not seen under the influence of harder drugs or alcohol – he commits all his schemes and homicides sober. He does not have the athletic or imposing build of later gangsters, nor the cadence to force someone holding up their hands before their lights are turned off to piss their pants. Without any of this, Rico bathes himself in violence, committed to never being cuffed by the cops while still breathing (a promise to himself and the police that he exclaims several times, beaming with pleasure). His intelligence has justified killings in the name of gang loyalty and the familial structure it provides. His instincts allow him to evade capture and death from the hands of the police and rival hoodlums for a time, becoming the most feared – and, in a perverse way, admired – gangster of the Windy City.

Little Caesar does not have the scope of a gangster film directed by Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather trilogy) or a Martin Scorsese (1990′s GoodFellas, 2006′s The Departed). Many of the clichés found in the genre have not been codified yet but appear in this film: the small-time ruffian who shoots his way to the top, the friend of said ruffian attempting to escape a life of crime before meeting an end that involves the gallows or gunfire, the girlfriend who wants their man to stop working with the gang, the intransigent crime boss too set in their ways to prevent their usurpation, the rival crime bosses who instantly recognize the upstart as a destabilizing force in the balance of gang power, the police figures gunned down to kickstart what will lead to the film’s climax. All those aspects appear in Little Caesar – omitting, for the purposes of this review and in respect for those who have not seen the film, clichés in gangster movie finales. The gangster picture, in its concentration on violent masculinity, is one of the least versatile genres innovated by Hollywood. The blame for that dearth of narrative versatility should not be assigned to films that appeared before those tropes became tropes.

With film noir the eventual successor to the early 1930s gangster films, Little Caesar does not have the chiaroscuro lighting that would define film noir. Nevertheless, some of the imagery from cinematographer Tony Gaudio (1936′s Anthony Adverse, 1938′s The Adventures of Robin Hood) breathes grittiness and even a hint of tragedy to this set-bound production when the action is not set indoors. Otherwise, Little Caesar is not imaginatively shot for long stretches. With only one chilling exception, the lack of close-ups almost prevents Robinson, as Rico, from establishing invisible bounds that his subordinates dare not cross.

Though this review, among most all others one could find on Little Caesar, has waxed about Edward G. Robinson’s violent-with-a-smile performance, Robinson himself was squeamish to the sound of gunshots. In the rushes, LeRoy and editor Ray Curtiss noticed, “Every time he squeezed the trigger, he would screw up his eyes. Take after take, he would do the same thing.” To resolve this, Robinson’s eyelids – in any scenes that involved Rico firing his guns – would be taped. Robinson, by all accounts, was anything but Caesar Enrico Bandello or any other of the gangsters he would portray on-screen. The immigrant son of a Romanian Jewish family, Emanuel Goldenberg was a fine arts lover who spoke to and of others with gentleness. He was more of a Christopher Cross from Scarlet Street (1945) or, maybe, a Martinius Jacobson from Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945).

Robinson would take on gangster roles – comedies and dramas – until Never a Dull Moment (1968). Somewhat typecast as the tough gangster in the coming decades, few other Robinson performances were as frightening as this. For almost that performance alone, Little Caesar is one of the most important and accomplished films of the early 1930s. It is not the first gangster film ever made, but the gangster film playbook that it wrote – alongside the other great gangster pictures shortly to follow it – has undergone few sweeping revisions since its release.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Meet Four Craft Chocolate Makers Decolonizing the Industry

Jill Fannon/Eater

Chocolate makers Jinji Fraser, Karla McNeil-Rueda, Damaris Ronkanen, and Daniel Maloney on how ancestry informs what they do, and how to eradicate cultural erasure in the industry

Over a perfect omelet brimming with spring ramps and morels, I found myself stunned mid-chew as I listened to the words of my father. Moments earlier, I learned from him that my grandfather’s final bit of travel before he died was to Guyana, where our ancestors had lived, and where he had arranged to meet with a distant family member. Between bites, my dad continued, ��there’s a Fraser family land trust outside of Georgetown...”

As a student of geography, I knew the region he’d begun to describe to be a major coastal export hub of Guyanese hinterland treasures, like gold, diamonds, and rice. As a chocolate maker, I knew Georgetown to be just west of cacao-rich rainforest. And right there, as I absently mopped up omelet sweat with a hunk of crusty bread, I felt the dissolution of the intimidation I had often felt while making chocolate in a male, white-dominant landscape. Our family land signified an ancestral connection to the greater sacred cacao story, which I suddenly found myself belonging to, creating a new grounding in my career. No longer was my work a radical dissent from the mainstream. It was now an homage to all who had come before me, passed down from generations ago through my DNA, and into my hands.

Even as my own story continues to unfold — through family lineage research and eventual travel to Guyana to see what has come of our land — I became fascinated with the ethnic diversity of the craft chocolate industry. I began to wonder about the ancestral rites of passage by BIPOCs (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) whose inclusion and celebration as chocolate makers has been marginalized in the media while the contributions of white men are normalized and bolstered. The narrow lens through which craft chocolate is seen is not only to the detriment of Indigenous chocolate makers globally, but also robs consumers of the chacne to experience the multitude of ways chocolate is produced. Healing the short-sightedness of our already fragile industry works toward universal fair-trade practices, equitable treatment of women farmers and producers, and the celebration of the work of BIPOC makers worldwide.

I spoke with Karla McNeil-Rueda (Cru Chocolate), who focuses on drinking chocolate, drawing from her own family experience while bringing attention to the undeniable influence of Mesoamerican heritage on the chocolate industry. Damaris Ronkanen (Cultura Craft Chocolate) also brought family nostalgia to our discussion, grounding herself solidly in community activism by educating the youth in chocolate making. Finally, I talked with Daniel Maloney (Sol Cacao), whose Trinidadian roots inspire him to continue his family lineage in cacao, as well as encourage an industrywide commitment to fair-trade practices. Altogether, we investigate how ancestry informs what they do and how they do it, as well as how we might eradicate cultural erasure in chocolate making, creating visibility and opportunity for more diversity.

The following interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Karla McNeil-Rueda

Co-Founder, Cru Chocolate, Sacramento, California

Eater: Did you find chocolate, or did chocolate find you?

Karla McNeil-Rueda: A bit of both. Chocolate, and cacao to be more specific, has always been here; it’s part of who we are, like corn, like a family member — it’s part of our DNA. Growing up in Honduras, we had many cacao- and chocolate-based drinks in different seasons with as many names as there were flavors, so this is a big part of our diet.

Keba Konte, courtesy McNeil-Rueda

Karla McNeil-Rueda

In the U.S., the chocolate-making space is dominated by white men. How do you find your own way?

Yes, it is true that what most people understand as chocolate making in the U.S. is represented mostly by white men, but we have no interest in fitting into that category. What they call chocolate is different to us; chocolate is our heritage and part of what we are. It is health, pleasure, an everyday ritual, a state of mind and a way of being. So we will never find our way in the chocolate industry; we must remain true to our own way. Chocolate in the U.S. and Europe needs the romance and the exotic appeal of a faraway land. For us, those lands are our homes, and that makes a big difference in our approach.

We also choose to only work with people who think differently, and [who] value the contribution of small and local businesses. These are people who also want to work with us, and don’t need to receive a container full of cacao in order to feel fulfilled — just how I don’t need to have a mega factory in order to find value in my work. It takes more time, more phone calls, more resources, more fun, more humanity, more everything — but that is what I love, that is the joy of freedom.

How does your ancestry inform what you do and the way you do it?

For me, ancestry is made up of the seeds and foods that fed those before us, including the agreements they made and work that they did in keeping each other alive through thousands and thousands of years.

So as we cook, our kitchens can become temples and our pantries can transform into altars, which opens our space for the feelings, emotions, memories and questions that arise. That is why I like to cook with music. It helps me have a sensibility,

This is how I feel my ancestry speaks, through food and especially through cacao. I notice how my thoughts change as the roasting or the grinding changes. We can better accompany our foods by listening as they go through these changes, because in the same way, they have accompanied us as we experience change in our daily lives.

How do we reconcile being chocolate makers when the industry is still entrenched in colonialism?

I think that the industry as a whole is dominated by many people, many colors, and many genders across the supply chain. There are many white women replicating colonial systems here in the U.S., and there are also many brown men enforcing this system at the farm level. The lack of fairness and equal opportunity in the chocolate industry has its roots in extraction, and that thrives in separation and in the erasing of others.

Import and export of crops are entrenched in colonialism, but cacao is an ancient native food, so you can also find many people still growing and making chocolate who are originally from the land in which cacao grows.

Colonialism is real, but so are the Indigenous people of these places. They are alive and thriving even with an imposed system, because they belong there. Colonialism is strong, but I believe our ancestral ways are stronger. We must have faith in the survival of these Indigenous groups; we must look for them, we must awaken a sincere desire for them to thrive.

It requires work, time, relationships, knowing each other’s culture, knowing each other’s languages, and courtship. That’s why colonialism is so appealing to many: You don’t have to know anything in order to participate and make money. A big lie of colonialism is the belief that there are no buying options; there’s only one way, the original people are gone, and what’s left is the colony. This is not true.

How do we create more diversity in the chocolate-making world?

First we must acknowledge the chocolate-making world is very diverse. In any city where you find immigrants from Mesoamerica, I guarantee you they are making chocolate.

That said, why is it easy for people to recognize a white man who had never seen a cacao tree before becoming a chocolate maker? And what makes it so hard to see a woman from Mesoamerica who has been making chocolate for generations as a chocolate maker? Why do people celebrate one and condemn the other?

I think when people rethink chocolate ... things will change. As long as people only chase the industrial candy bar, the craft chocolate bar, or the sugar- and cream-filled bon-bons, chocolate as a way of living among BIPOC will remain invisible. Misrepresenting chocolate creates social, environmental, and cultural problems, which at their core create disease and poverty for farmers and consumers.

Daniel Maloney

Co-Founder, Sol Cacao, the Bronx, New York

Courtesy Sol Cacao

Sol Cacao co-founders and brothers Dominic, Nicholas, and Daniel Maloney

Eater: Did you find chocolate, or did chocolate find you?

Daniel Maloney: At Sol Cacao, we believe chocolate found us. Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, one of our most memorable moments was our grandmother carrying a basket of vegetables in both hands and a bowl of herbs balancing on her head. She would do this ritual everyday, even after turning 99. She would show my brothers and I all the vegetables she would pick, and their nutritional benefits. These early memories would leave a major impression and seed our interest in food security and sustainable and renewable agriculture. Before my brothers and I enrolled in college, our father began telling stories of our grandparents and how they practiced farming for over 35 years. Their favorite crops were sugarcane and the cacao tree. After learning these stories, we saw it in ourselves that we are capable of being cocoa farmers or chocolate makers.

How do you stay grounded in your craft, and navigate the persistent colonialism in the chocolate industry?

When we launched Sol Cacao, there were few people of color in the industry, so we had no choice but to jump into it and learn the process. We would dream about someday being on a cacao farm and picking the beans to make chocolate, a dream our grandparents were never able to fully realize for themselves. For these reasons we viewed chocolate making as a culture and family legacy, which gave us inspiration to pave our own way in the chocolate industry.

As a chocolate maker in the 21st century, we carry the responsibility to correct some of the historical injustices which have taken place in the cacao industry. One way chocolate makers are doing this is through traceability and transparency in their chocolate-making process. It starts with where and how the cacao beans are grown and harvested by sourcing organic or fair-trade cacao. Through purchasing fair-trade cacao, we ensure the cacao farmers get the correct compensation to have a livable wage to make change back in their local communities, to global effect.

Damaris Ronkanen

Founder, Cultura Craft Chocolate, Denver, Colorado

Eater: What family memories have informed your perception of chocolate?

Damaris Ronkanen: My abuelita would always have fresh tortillas and atole in the morning. She would get up early and take her nixtamal [cooked corn] to the molino, where they would grind the corn into fresh masa. When she came back she would make tortillas by hand and use a little bit of the masa to make a fresh batch of atole. Whenever I was there she always made sure to make champurrado (a chocolate atole) since she knew it was my favorite. She would toast cacao beans on her comal and grind them by hand using her metate. She would then blend the chocolate into the steaming hot atole and use her molinillo to whisk it until it was super frothy. The process was mesmerizing.

Juan Fuentes, courtesy Ronkanen

Damaris Ronkanen

Unfortunately, I could never replicate this to be quite the same when I was back in the U.S. There weren’t molinos to grind your corn, and people didn’t make their own nixtamal, and there definitely weren’t cacao beans freshly toasted and ground by hand.

How has your business model evolved since its inception?

When we started out making chocolate, the big guys of the chocolate-making industry defined what craft chocolate was, so we felt the pressure to make bars in order to succeed. Still, I was pulled by my Mexican roots, and the memories of market visits and fresh champurrado with my grandmother.

There was a huge difference between my grandmother’s texture and European texture. When we officially started Cultura, I wanted to get back to my heritage, so we introduced drinking chocolate. I knew in order to honor my grandmother, and to move my business forward, I would need to define what I was doing on my own terms and decide what impact my business could have on my community. As successful as the bars were at the wholesale level, they weren’t speaking to my soul.

What is your approach in how you communicate about chocolate in your work?

After experiencing such a pivotal moment in 2018, opening Cultura, connecting with my roots helped define not only what I wanted to create, but how I talk about chocolate too. Our local community in Westwood is composed largely of Mexican immigrants, and we made it part of our mission to create a non-intimidating space where families could feel at home with familiar flavors. They might not immediately connect with the single-origin bars we offer, but they definitely get excited about the drinking chocolate, which opens a door to educate about origin, terroir, and processing.

Even in the way we designed our logo, and chose a mural for the outside of our building, people in the community feel welcome. It becomes a true form of empowerment for our community when they take part in hands-on classes, teaching everything from where the cacao originates to making beverages to explaining what the molinillos they may have seen around their grandparents’ houses are actually used for.

How have you been able to find success while avoiding the elitist mentality around chocolate making?

We focus on culturally relevant chocolates. I’ve learned to not try and emulate the style of chocolates other companies were making, but instead to make chocolate that our community appreciates, and that highlights my heritage. Without having real experience, these other companies construct their narratives around their sourcing, creating a false reality of how much impact they really have on the groups of people they feature on their social media feeds. These stories are used for marketing and to drive up pricing. There’s a certain elitism in craft-chocolate making that fetishizes authenticity through communication and packaging in order to make their product accessible for white people.

We don’t have the influence and reach of these other companies, but that isn’t the goal either. It has taken a lot of effort for people to understand why we do things the way we do, but I’ve always known there was so much more my business is capable of in terms of making chocolate accessible and engaging our community.

How can we leave the door open to create more diversity in the chocolate making world?

The question we’ve always asked of ourselves is: What impact can our company have? A conversation I would like to see happen is of the limited entrepreneurial spirit and access in America. In Mexico, the opportunity is available to everyone to continue family traditions in business. Here, there is a lot of intimidation and difficulty in making your own path. So in order to positively influence this issue, we exclusively hire women from within the community. We offer classes to youth who otherwise don’t have access to craft chocolate — this is their space too. We are bilingual, so there aren’t any language barriers to learning or curiosity.

Jill Fannon/Eater

Jinji Fraser

Jill Fannon/Eater

The lingering question is: What actionable steps might we take to inspire a new generation of BIPOC chocolate makers, and how can they feel justified in exploring the craft of chocolate making in their own ways without intimidation or judgment?

“BIPOC makers need to organize and create their own BIPOC chocolate makers association, in which we spend time and resources educating, supporting, and uplifting each other, and where many ways of expressing chocolate can coexist,” McNeil-Rueda says. As for me, my earliest experience in chocolate making was at the International Chocolate Show in Paris in 2012. I learned then, and have known through my career, that an impeccable bar is one whose texture is smooth and melt is indiscernible from one’s own body temperature. Perfection and accolades are both sought through thousands of dollars of stainless-steel equipment and, importantly, an agreement and an eidetic memory of European technique.

My most recent experience of chocolate making in Guatemala was categorically different, and wildly more satiating: Indigenous women slow-roasting beans over an open flame, then hulling them using friction and the wind, before using a molcajete to grind the beans into a paste heavy with grit and fragments of all the cacao ever to pass that stone bowl, ready for drinking. In that moment of awed observation, I felt that this technique and experience should be allowed to live in those Highlands, and with their descendants; respected without appropriation, lauded with curiosity and intrigue. I knew it was upon me to discover what methods and practices are innate to me, and then to educate my community on a broader vision of good chocolate.

As it relates to chocolate, one should be able to choose their pleasure. However, this is not a journey that can be void of education. There must be support for the idea that chocolate takes on many different forms, and freedom for each form to exist means respect for all who make it. “Positions of leadership in craft chocolate companies should be held by Black and brown people in order to heal the whitewashing of our cultural roots,” says Ronkanen. Indeed, that would be a collective effort to decolonize chocolate and acknowledge the ancestral pathways critical to making the industry whole.

Jinji Fraser is a Baltimore-based writer and chocolate-maker at Pure Chocolate by Jinji.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3kgZVpA https://ift.tt/3m5Q9qO

Jill Fannon/Eater

Chocolate makers Jinji Fraser, Karla McNeil-Rueda, Damaris Ronkanen, and Daniel Maloney on how ancestry informs what they do, and how to eradicate cultural erasure in the industry

Over a perfect omelet brimming with spring ramps and morels, I found myself stunned mid-chew as I listened to the words of my father. Moments earlier, I learned from him that my grandfather’s final bit of travel before he died was to Guyana, where our ancestors had lived, and where he had arranged to meet with a distant family member. Between bites, my dad continued, “there’s a Fraser family land trust outside of Georgetown...”

As a student of geography, I knew the region he’d begun to describe to be a major coastal export hub of Guyanese hinterland treasures, like gold, diamonds, and rice. As a chocolate maker, I knew Georgetown to be just west of cacao-rich rainforest. And right there, as I absently mopped up omelet sweat with a hunk of crusty bread, I felt the dissolution of the intimidation I had often felt while making chocolate in a male, white-dominant landscape. Our family land signified an ancestral connection to the greater sacred cacao story, which I suddenly found myself belonging to, creating a new grounding in my career. No longer was my work a radical dissent from the mainstream. It was now an homage to all who had come before me, passed down from generations ago through my DNA, and into my hands.

Even as my own story continues to unfold — through family lineage research and eventual travel to Guyana to see what has come of our land — I became fascinated with the ethnic diversity of the craft chocolate industry. I began to wonder about the ancestral rites of passage by BIPOCs (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) whose inclusion and celebration as chocolate makers has been marginalized in the media while the contributions of white men are normalized and bolstered. The narrow lens through which craft chocolate is seen is not only to the detriment of Indigenous chocolate makers globally, but also robs consumers of the chacne to experience the multitude of ways chocolate is produced. Healing the short-sightedness of our already fragile industry works toward universal fair-trade practices, equitable treatment of women farmers and producers, and the celebration of the work of BIPOC makers worldwide.

I spoke with Karla McNeil-Rueda (Cru Chocolate), who focuses on drinking chocolate, drawing from her own family experience while bringing attention to the undeniable influence of Mesoamerican heritage on the chocolate industry. Damaris Ronkanen (Cultura Craft Chocolate) also brought family nostalgia to our discussion, grounding herself solidly in community activism by educating the youth in chocolate making. Finally, I talked with Daniel Maloney (Sol Cacao), whose Trinidadian roots inspire him to continue his family lineage in cacao, as well as encourage an industrywide commitment to fair-trade practices. Altogether, we investigate how ancestry informs what they do and how they do it, as well as how we might eradicate cultural erasure in chocolate making, creating visibility and opportunity for more diversity.

The following interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Karla McNeil-Rueda

Co-Founder, Cru Chocolate, Sacramento, California

Eater: Did you find chocolate, or did chocolate find you?

Karla McNeil-Rueda: A bit of both. Chocolate, and cacao to be more specific, has always been here; it’s part of who we are, like corn, like a family member — it’s part of our DNA. Growing up in Honduras, we had many cacao- and chocolate-based drinks in different seasons with as many names as there were flavors, so this is a big part of our diet.

Keba Konte, courtesy McNeil-Rueda

Karla McNeil-Rueda

In the U.S., the chocolate-making space is dominated by white men. How do you find your own way?

Yes, it is true that what most people understand as chocolate making in the U.S. is represented mostly by white men, but we have no interest in fitting into that category. What they call chocolate is different to us; chocolate is our heritage and part of what we are. It is health, pleasure, an everyday ritual, a state of mind and a way of being. So we will never find our way in the chocolate industry; we must remain true to our own way. Chocolate in the U.S. and Europe needs the romance and the exotic appeal of a faraway land. For us, those lands are our homes, and that makes a big difference in our approach.

We also choose to only work with people who think differently, and [who] value the contribution of small and local businesses. These are people who also want to work with us, and don’t need to receive a container full of cacao in order to feel fulfilled — just how I don’t need to have a mega factory in order to find value in my work. It takes more time, more phone calls, more resources, more fun, more humanity, more everything — but that is what I love, that is the joy of freedom.

How does your ancestry inform what you do and the way you do it?

For me, ancestry is made up of the seeds and foods that fed those before us, including the agreements they made and work that they did in keeping each other alive through thousands and thousands of years.

So as we cook, our kitchens can become temples and our pantries can transform into altars, which opens our space for the feelings, emotions, memories and questions that arise. That is why I like to cook with music. It helps me have a sensibility,

This is how I feel my ancestry speaks, through food and especially through cacao. I notice how my thoughts change as the roasting or the grinding changes. We can better accompany our foods by listening as they go through these changes, because in the same way, they have accompanied us as we experience change in our daily lives.

How do we reconcile being chocolate makers when the industry is still entrenched in colonialism?

I think that the industry as a whole is dominated by many people, many colors, and many genders across the supply chain. There are many white women replicating colonial systems here in the U.S., and there are also many brown men enforcing this system at the farm level. The lack of fairness and equal opportunity in the chocolate industry has its roots in extraction, and that thrives in separation and in the erasing of others.

Import and export of crops are entrenched in colonialism, but cacao is an ancient native food, so you can also find many people still growing and making chocolate who are originally from the land in which cacao grows.

Colonialism is real, but so are the Indigenous people of these places. They are alive and thriving even with an imposed system, because they belong there. Colonialism is strong, but I believe our ancestral ways are stronger. We must have faith in the survival of these Indigenous groups; we must look for them, we must awaken a sincere desire for them to thrive.

It requires work, time, relationships, knowing each other’s culture, knowing each other’s languages, and courtship. That’s why colonialism is so appealing to many: You don’t have to know anything in order to participate and make money. A big lie of colonialism is the belief that there are no buying options; there’s only one way, the original people are gone, and what’s left is the colony. This is not true.

How do we create more diversity in the chocolate-making world?

First we must acknowledge the chocolate-making world is very diverse. In any city where you find immigrants from Mesoamerica, I guarantee you they are making chocolate.

That said, why is it easy for people to recognize a white man who had never seen a cacao tree before becoming a chocolate maker? And what makes it so hard to see a woman from Mesoamerica who has been making chocolate for generations as a chocolate maker? Why do people celebrate one and condemn the other?

I think when people rethink chocolate ... things will change. As long as people only chase the industrial candy bar, the craft chocolate bar, or the sugar- and cream-filled bon-bons, chocolate as a way of living among BIPOC will remain invisible. Misrepresenting chocolate creates social, environmental, and cultural problems, which at their core create disease and poverty for farmers and consumers.

Daniel Maloney

Co-Founder, Sol Cacao, the Bronx, New York

Courtesy Sol Cacao

Sol Cacao co-founders and brothers Dominic, Nicholas, and Daniel Maloney

Eater: Did you find chocolate, or did chocolate find you?

Daniel Maloney: At Sol Cacao, we believe chocolate found us. Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, one of our most memorable moments was our grandmother carrying a basket of vegetables in both hands and a bowl of herbs balancing on her head. She would do this ritual everyday, even after turning 99. She would show my brothers and I all the vegetables she would pick, and their nutritional benefits. These early memories would leave a major impression and seed our interest in food security and sustainable and renewable agriculture. Before my brothers and I enrolled in college, our father began telling stories of our grandparents and how they practiced farming for over 35 years. Their favorite crops were sugarcane and the cacao tree. After learning these stories, we saw it in ourselves that we are capable of being cocoa farmers or chocolate makers.

How do you stay grounded in your craft, and navigate the persistent colonialism in the chocolate industry?

When we launched Sol Cacao, there were few people of color in the industry, so we had no choice but to jump into it and learn the process. We would dream about someday being on a cacao farm and picking the beans to make chocolate, a dream our grandparents were never able to fully realize for themselves. For these reasons we viewed chocolate making as a culture and family legacy, which gave us inspiration to pave our own way in the chocolate industry.

As a chocolate maker in the 21st century, we carry the responsibility to correct some of the historical injustices which have taken place in the cacao industry. One way chocolate makers are doing this is through traceability and transparency in their chocolate-making process. It starts with where and how the cacao beans are grown and harvested by sourcing organic or fair-trade cacao. Through purchasing fair-trade cacao, we ensure the cacao farmers get the correct compensation to have a livable wage to make change back in their local communities, to global effect.

Damaris Ronkanen

Founder, Cultura Craft Chocolate, Denver, Colorado

Eater: What family memories have informed your perception of chocolate?

Damaris Ronkanen: My abuelita would always have fresh tortillas and atole in the morning. She would get up early and take her nixtamal [cooked corn] to the molino, where they would grind the corn into fresh masa. When she came back she would make tortillas by hand and use a little bit of the masa to make a fresh batch of atole. Whenever I was there she always made sure to make champurrado (a chocolate atole) since she knew it was my favorite. She would toast cacao beans on her comal and grind them by hand using her metate. She would then blend the chocolate into the steaming hot atole and use her molinillo to whisk it until it was super frothy. The process was mesmerizing.

Juan Fuentes, courtesy Ronkanen

Damaris Ronkanen

Unfortunately, I could never replicate this to be quite the same when I was back in the U.S. There weren’t molinos to grind your corn, and people didn’t make their own nixtamal, and there definitely weren’t cacao beans freshly toasted and ground by hand.

How has your business model evolved since its inception?

When we started out making chocolate, the big guys of the chocolate-making industry defined what craft chocolate was, so we felt the pressure to make bars in order to succeed. Still, I was pulled by my Mexican roots, and the memories of market visits and fresh champurrado with my grandmother.

There was a huge difference between my grandmother’s texture and European texture. When we officially started Cultura, I wanted to get back to my heritage, so we introduced drinking chocolate. I knew in order to honor my grandmother, and to move my business forward, I would need to define what I was doing on my own terms and decide what impact my business could have on my community. As successful as the bars were at the wholesale level, they weren’t speaking to my soul.

What is your approach in how you communicate about chocolate in your work?

After experiencing such a pivotal moment in 2018, opening Cultura, connecting with my roots helped define not only what I wanted to create, but how I talk about chocolate too. Our local community in Westwood is composed largely of Mexican immigrants, and we made it part of our mission to create a non-intimidating space where families could feel at home with familiar flavors. They might not immediately connect with the single-origin bars we offer, but they definitely get excited about the drinking chocolate, which opens a door to educate about origin, terroir, and processing.

Even in the way we designed our logo, and chose a mural for the outside of our building, people in the community feel welcome. It becomes a true form of empowerment for our community when they take part in hands-on classes, teaching everything from where the cacao originates to making beverages to explaining what the molinillos they may have seen around their grandparents’ houses are actually used for.

How have you been able to find success while avoiding the elitist mentality around chocolate making?

We focus on culturally relevant chocolates. I’ve learned to not try and emulate the style of chocolates other companies were making, but instead to make chocolate that our community appreciates, and that highlights my heritage. Without having real experience, these other companies construct their narratives around their sourcing, creating a false reality of how much impact they really have on the groups of people they feature on their social media feeds. These stories are used for marketing and to drive up pricing. There’s a certain elitism in craft-chocolate making that fetishizes authenticity through communication and packaging in order to make their product accessible for white people.

We don’t have the influence and reach of these other companies, but that isn’t the goal either. It has taken a lot of effort for people to understand why we do things the way we do, but I’ve always known there was so much more my business is capable of in terms of making chocolate accessible and engaging our community.

How can we leave the door open to create more diversity in the chocolate making world?

The question we’ve always asked of ourselves is: What impact can our company have? A conversation I would like to see happen is of the limited entrepreneurial spirit and access in America. In Mexico, the opportunity is available to everyone to continue family traditions in business. Here, there is a lot of intimidation and difficulty in making your own path. So in order to positively influence this issue, we exclusively hire women from within the community. We offer classes to youth who otherwise don’t have access to craft chocolate — this is their space too. We are bilingual, so there aren’t any language barriers to learning or curiosity.

Jill Fannon/Eater

Jinji Fraser

Jill Fannon/Eater

The lingering question is: What actionable steps might we take to inspire a new generation of BIPOC chocolate makers, and how can they feel justified in exploring the craft of chocolate making in their own ways without intimidation or judgment?

“BIPOC makers need to organize and create their own BIPOC chocolate makers association, in which we spend time and resources educating, supporting, and uplifting each other, and where many ways of expressing chocolate can coexist,” McNeil-Rueda says. As for me, my earliest experience in chocolate making was at the International Chocolate Show in Paris in 2012. I learned then, and have known through my career, that an impeccable bar is one whose texture is smooth and melt is indiscernible from one’s own body temperature. Perfection and accolades are both sought through thousands of dollars of stainless-steel equipment and, importantly, an agreement and an eidetic memory of European technique.

My most recent experience of chocolate making in Guatemala was categorically different, and wildly more satiating: Indigenous women slow-roasting beans over an open flame, then hulling them using friction and the wind, before using a molcajete to grind the beans into a paste heavy with grit and fragments of all the cacao ever to pass that stone bowl, ready for drinking. In that moment of awed observation, I felt that this technique and experience should be allowed to live in those Highlands, and with their descendants; respected without appropriation, lauded with curiosity and intrigue. I knew it was upon me to discover what methods and practices are innate to me, and then to educate my community on a broader vision of good chocolate.

As it relates to chocolate, one should be able to choose their pleasure. However, this is not a journey that can be void of education. There must be support for the idea that chocolate takes on many different forms, and freedom for each form to exist means respect for all who make it. “Positions of leadership in craft chocolate companies should be held by Black and brown people in order to heal the whitewashing of our cultural roots,” says Ronkanen. Indeed, that would be a collective effort to decolonize chocolate and acknowledge the ancestral pathways critical to making the industry whole.

Jinji Fraser is a Baltimore-based writer and chocolate-maker at Pure Chocolate by Jinji.

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[juliedeardorff]

“I am constantly discovering, expanding, finding the cause of my ignorance, in martial arts and in life. In short, to be real.” -Bruce Lee

I’ve always been a Bruce Lee fan.

I’m not sure at what point exactly he made such an impression on me; I only know it was a lasting one.

He didn’t believe in limits, barriers, or conformism; he believed in self mastery, authenticity, and testing the abilities of human potential. He had a higher level of thinking that transferred into every area of life. He created his own style of martial arts that had no style — it was adaptable to anything. His legacy is the kind we all aspire to leave; one of significance, purpose; making an impact in the time we’re here.

I have 2 copies of his book, Jeet Kune Do. He was always thinking, always evolving, always learning. I did ‘Bruce Lee Monday’s’ for awhile as a tribute, but people kept asking if I was taking karate instead of focusing on the wisdom.

I looked up some of his habits and how he spent a typical day. According to his daughter Shannon, Bruce dedicated time for physical, mental and spiritual development in his daily life — creating a day filled with training, learning, teaching, writing, and connecting with people.

In other words, he created a schedule that fit his life priorities, not squeezing his life to fit around someone else’s.

Take his advice: research your own experience. Design the life and style you want to live, then do the work to make it a reality. Don’t pursue things society says you should want; don’t conform to anyone else’s expectations. Understand your own.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from him, and from those who knew him. I hope they resonate with you as much as they do with me. -J

1. “I have changed from self-image actualization to self actualization…from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc, to searching internally for the cause of my ignorance.”

2. “A man is at his worst when he does not understand himself. He will work to accumulate external securities rather than do the inner work that will bring true security and rootedness. So cultivate and school yourself.”

3. “Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”

4. “To see a thing uncolored by one’s own preferences and desires is to see it in its own pristine simplicity.”

5. “We possess a pair of eyes to help us to observe as well as to discover, yet most of us simply do not see in the true sense of the word. However, when it comes to observing faults in others, most of us are quick to react with condemnation. But what about looking inwardly for a change? To personally examine who we really are and what we are, our merits as well as our faults. In short, to see oneself as one is for once and to take responsibility for oneself.”

6. “The conformer seldom learns to depend upon himself for expression; rather he faithfully follows a pattern. As time passes, he will probably learn some dead routines and be good according to his set pattern, but he has not come to understand himself.”

7. “Man, the living creature, the creating individual is always more important than any established style or system.”

8. “As a person matures, he will realize that his skills are not so much tools to conquer others, but tools used to explode his ego and all its follies.”

9. “Although I can tell you what is not freedom, I cannot tell you what it is because that you must discover for yourself.”

10. “…On the sea, I thought about all my past training and got mad at myself and punched at the water. Right then in that moment, a thought suddenly struck me. Wasn’t this water, the very basic stuff, the essence of kung-fu? I struck it just now, but it did not suffer hurt. Again I stabbed it with all my might, yet it was not wounded. I then tried to grasp a handful of it but it was impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, could fit into any container. Although it seemed weak, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water."

11. “I treasure the memory of past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.”

12. “The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.

13. “Each man binds himself — the fetters are ignorance, laziness, preoccupation with self and fear. You must liberate yourself.”

14. “Bring the mid into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.”

15. “When you are talking about fighting, with no rules. Well then, baby you’d better train every part of your body.”

16. “There is no mystery about my style. My movements are direct, and non-classical. The extraordinary part of life lies in its simplicity. Every movement of Jeet Kune do is being so of itself. There is nothing artificial about it. I believe that the easy way is the right way.”

17. "A good teacher can never be fixed in a routine. Each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly adapting. A teacher must never impose this student to fit his favorite pattern. A good teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. I am not teaching you anything. I just help you explore yourself."

18. Master: “What is the highest technique you hope to achieve?

Bruce: “To have no technique.”

a. “Time would just stop when he was around. He was so inspirational and high-spirited. When I was down, Bruce would always lift my spirits and I would feel better. He could be a serious person one moment and a jokester the next.” -Allen Joe

b. “What many do not know is that Bruce was a practical joker. He giggled a lot, he was somebody you went to high school with. On the other hand, he was very philosophical. He compelled you to be in his presence.” -Jerry Poteet, Bruce Lee’s student and friend.

c. “I met Bruce Lee and he picked up my spirits…he had this inner desire to create equality among people and to try to bring out the best in people.” -Taky Kimora

#goalrecon #goals #hardtokill #nevergiveup #barrierbreaker #consistency #lifestyle #Impact #worlddomination #humanspirit #fearless #mindset #life #inspiration #motivation #perspective #gratitude #satoriseeking #meditation #namaste #R8 #justbecause

[voresmithing]

Truce: Chapter 14.1

Hanzo returns home three days after the fight.

The wake is that same evening.

He floats through it, feeling ephemeral and untethered in the hospital issued hover chair. The guests offer their condolences with murmurs that pass through him; not a single word manages to catch inside his ears. His sight is also compromised; unfocused and erratic. His eyes skate around the framed photos of his brother, instead drawn to the movements of hands over the bowl of incense and the slow waft of pale smoke. He realizes he will never get the smell of incense, earthy and morbid, out of his nostrils.

There is no casket. He has attended dozens of funerals, but this one breaks pattern. The body is already cremated. A numb monotone in the back of his mind informs him he has fucked it up; his brother's one and only funeral.

Ando-san pays his respects with his head bowed, as if he had not four days before told Hanzo that Genji needed to die, and two days after that congratulated him on doing the right thing. The elder's mouth had cut a severe crevice in stony features, but his eyebrows were held aloft with something like pride.

An distant part of Hanzo advises he leap from the chair and cut the man's throat open. Ando is old, Hanzo wouldn't need his feet.

A more immediate part reminds he'd be better to turn the blade into his own stomach instead.

The rest of him chants a silent mantra that none-the-less drowns out the priest and his sutra; he's dead because you killed him, he's dead because you killed him, he's dead because you....

Hanzo stays with the ashes all night and does not sleep. He reminds himself that if he was able to carry out the duty of killing his own brother, he is certainly capable of anything else. The night passes without words or tears or much of anything but an empty stare at the carved box bearing his brother's remains. Hanzo wonders how long it will take until he feels as if he inhabits his own body again. How long until he believes that body inhabits a reality where his brother is dead (because I killed him).

In the morning, there is another ceremony. His brother's ashes are buried near their father.

Hanzo records little of it to memory.

The funeral guests are all family, clansmen, some of them men who had despised Genji, others who hadn't even known him. They are here because they support the clan, not because they would miss his brother.

Genji's friends do not attend. Hanzo almost thinks to ask if they had even been invited, but finds he doesn't care about the answer.

When the guests leave, a young woman with eyelids painted bright green darts between the bodies filing out the open gate. Hanzo does not recognize her specifically, but identifies her as the right age and disposition to be among his brother's social circle.

She has a wide look in her eyes. Frightened; not of standing in the middle of a loose gathering of yakuza, but of the dour funeral wear surrounding her. "Where is he?" She asks no one, until the moment her gaze finds Hanzo. He watches her identify him, then take in the chair and the blanket hiding his injured legs. Her stare lingers where his feet do not dent the blanket.

"What happened?" This time there is a cold certainty in her voice, clear as the peal of a bell. She already knows the answer.

Hanzo says nothing.

But that isn't enough. And the moment she springs for him is the moment Watanabe-kun steps from between two guests, grabbing the girl's wrists and twisting them behind her in a relentless grip. The girl grimaces, growls, and then decides Watanabe is not who she wants, her attention snaps back to Hanzo. "Tell me!"

"He's dead." Because I killed him.

His intention was to only give her half the truth, but his mouth rebels. Voicelessly, his lips complete the manta, confessing to this stranger. He watches her decipher the message and feels nothing.

To some degree or another, all of Genji's friends have a confrontational spirit. No respectable citizen would consort with someone of Genji's demeanor, appearance, tastes, and connections. He expects her to be furious. Maybe threaten to kill him.

Instead he sees the anger and fear drop away from her features, replaced with only a knit confusion. A look of such disoriented loss that Hanzo almost has the impulse to offer her a hand.

"What?" She shakes her head, Watanabe-kun continues to hold her wrists but it's unnecessary. The girl looks as if she has been spun dizzy. Like if Watanabe released her, she might sit down where she stands. "Why? What... happened? Aren't you his brother?"

"Enough," Watanabe jerks her hard by the wrists, no nonsense as she escorts her prisoner to the gate to be tossed out. The girl hardly even seems to notice, dragged through the gathering of family that watched but kept a distance. Her vision jerks to each of them in turn, stuttering between imposing faces and mourning garb. "Don't you call yourself family?? What the fuck is wrong with you?!"

No one answers her.

Watanabe-kun drags her out of view of the gate.

When the guests have left, Hanzo steers his chair through the halls until he reaches Genji's room.

It's different, Hanzo realizes, as he takes in the decorations with dull observations. It is always different, lately. Genji redecorated or rearranged his room at least once a year. Posters went up and down, Japanese sensibility was replaced with a western frivolity, then back to his roots again. Merchandise from his favorite shows would go on display, then be knocked into trashcans or drawers. Currently he has a large mattress on a high pedestal with dark blue sheets. Armor he hates to wear still stands in proud display on a mannequin in the corner. A wall has been decorated with all manner of weapons, as if they are for aesthetic purposes alone. Hanzo supposes Genji would rather use them to impress lovers than take lives.

Not that it matters now. Not when he's dead because you killed him.

There is a long cabinet in the corner, expensive bronze wood engraved with dark, shimmering dragons. It had belonged to their father. Hanzo remembers catching Genji sliding it through the halls from his room; one of the few demonstrations his brother made of trying to keep a piece of the man who had raised them.

They hadn't talked much, in the months since his death. Hanzo had no doubts that the spike of increased distance was related to his brother's own fraught feelings about their father and the Shimada legacy left to them. But Hanzo'd had little time to mourn, and no option to run away from his responsibilities.

He opens the cabinet, revealing a narrow skyline made up of colorful bottles; tall or fat, square or round. He picks out a long red one, rice wine produced right here in Hanamura from a small distillery, and pours himself a glass.

Genji's room looks out over a square garden. It's late in the season and the blossoms are sparse, but green and burgundy leaves have unfurled into a backdrop for the remaining speckle of pale flowers, all of which rests on the slate gray gravel that makes up the majority of the garden. Every pebble polished down to river stone softness so they could walk on it barefoot with no discomfort.

He supposes neither of them will ever enjoy that again.

Hanzo's bedroom is on the opposite end of the same garden, though it has been years since they would meet in the middle. To spar, to discuss their unshared interests, to bicker, to drink.

"It's my birthday, brother, so you have to do whatever I say."

"I've never once agreed to that," Hanzo sighs, begrudgingly aware that within reason, he would anyway. Genji must have deduced the same.

"C'mon, I'm not asking for a lot, just try a little spine with me."

Hanzo turns a sharp gaze on Genji, "You must be joking."

"No?"

Hanzo, twenty, on break during Golden Week meaning he had only half as many responsibilities as usual, reaches out to tweak his younger brother's ear. "Stop using the product! You're going to get addicted."

Genji sidles closer to Hanzo at the tug with the same fluidity he uses to diffuse punch or a throw. And then rolls his eyes. "So it's fine if it's other people, just not me?"

"Yes."

"Heh," there's a wistful twist to Genji's mouth. "Sure. Look, we're not getting addicted, I just want to try it once."

Hanzo sighs, and Genji nudges him. "Have you ever been high?"

"When would I find time?"

"Hmmm, maybe on your brother's birthday? The one that's conveniently also a holiday?"

Genji had wheedled his way to victory with a sing-song smugness, and Hanzo had covertly agreed to smoke bullet of spine with him; artificially green orbs of a psychedelic drug they were distributing internationally with a Russian partner. Hanzo had only seen them on business trips, their father had been staunchly against their distribution within Japan. He'd never gotten around to asking how Genji got his hands on it.

It hadn't gone well.

Spine got its name from the dramatically heightened focus on information coming out of the nervous system, resulting in an ability to experience ones own body to a degree most people found ethereally super human. The rest compared it to being buried alive within their own flesh.

Hanzo, it had turned out, fell into the later category. At some point his brother had dragged him into a closet and covered him with a blanket, while Hanzo remained steadfastly convinced that the sting of salt from tears forming in his eyes was actually the sensation of his body turning to dust and drifting away one grain at a time.

Genji had a great deal more fun, too high to actually be concerned about Hanzo's paranoid breakdown.

The closet and blanket hadn't really helped, but he suppose it hid him well enough that no one in the family ever found out about the embarrassing incident.

He feels a faint smile tug at his lips. He had been more angry at himself than his brother; a stupid choice made to appease your family is still stupid.

He didn't do anything with Genji on his birthday this year. Hasn't in a while.

Hanzo notices his sake is gone and floats back into his brother's room to refill it. He wonders if Genji is likely to come home soon, and if he would be annoyed to catch his brother going through his alcohol.

Then he remembers the snap across his fingers as the arrow flew.

How could you forget that he's dead because you killed him?

He drinks the next glass much more quickly, and instead of refilling it just takes the bottle into the chair with him.

Eventually he has drunk enough that it feels acceptable to poke through Genji's belongings. The three complete sets of women's lingerie don't convince him to stop, but his mind is changed quickly by the chest full of a colorful assortment of items he recognizes as 'sex toys' but whose purposes he cannot, for the most part, decipher.

Is this something he wants to look up himself, or ask Genji about, or simply scrub from his mind entirely?

Then he remembers the dragons burning up his veins as they claw their way out of him.

You'll never ask anything again, not when he's dead because you killed him.

It's like his brain, usually so sharp, deliberately keeps letting go of the information, so that he can be punished anew every time he rediscovers it.

He drinks, and decides that is fine. It is far less than he deserves.

He drinks, and returns to the garden to suffer the almost cathartic tide of memories.

He drinks, and he thinks about the brother that is dead because he has killed him.

Full work on ao3

[hermanwatts]

Fantasy New Releases: 7 September, 2019

The week’s fantasy new releases feature an ancient mech standing ready for its just as ancient foe, the dread fall of a legion of post-human warriors, and a young radio engineer’s travels in search of an impossible metal hidden in an America that never was, but should have been

Archangel One – Evan Currie

Humanity has reached an uneasy truce with the Empire—but unless the allies bring the fight to the enemy, extinction is all but assured. In preparation for the inevitable next war, Commander Stephen Michaels is at the helm of the Archangel Squadron, and his orders are simple: go rogue.

Disguised as mercenaries, Commander Michaels and the Archangels seek valuable intelligence on their imposing foe. Their mission takes them deep into uncharted territory, where they make inroads with the Empire, fiercely guarding their true identities and purpose. Fighting for the enemy goes against everything they stand for, but these are desperate times.

As their deception increases, so does the risk. With the Empire’s deadliest secrets within reach, Commander Michaels and the Archangels accept a mission that will take them even deeper into the Imperial fold. They know all too well that one wrong step won’t just end their lives—it could end their entire civilization.

The Buried Dagger (The Horus Heresy #54) – James Swallow

The skies darken over Terra as the final battle for the Throne looms ever closer… As the Traitor primarchs muster to the Warmaster’s banner, it is Mortarion who is sent ahead as the vanguard of the Traitor forces.

But as he and his warriors make way, they become lost in the warp and stricken by a terrible plague. Once thought of as unbreakable, the legendary Death Guard are brought to their knees. To save his Legion, Mortarion must strike a most terrible bargain that will damn his sons for eternity.

Meanwhile, in the cloisters of Holy Terra, a plot is afoot to create sedition and carnage in advance of the Horus’s armies. Taking matters into his own hands, Malcador the Sigillite seeks to put a stop to any insurrection but discovers a plot that he will need all of his cunning and battle-craft to overcome.

Engines of Empire (Empire of Machines #1) – Max Carver

The upstart colony Carthage has conquered and dominated most of humanity’s settled planets, including Earth itself, with fleets of autonomous, AI-driven warships and armies of robotic infantry. Freedom from their empire is found only in rough outer worlds on the distant fringes of settled space.

On Galapagos, a free world, newly elected Minister-General Reginald Ellison had hoped he’d seen the end of war. He spent his youth fighting in battles across his planet’s vast oceans and small islands, and his later years working to build a coalition of peace among the world’s fragmented nations. Now the arrival of an unnerving android ambassador from the distant imperial planet of Carthage threatens his world’s hopes for a free and peaceful future.

On Earth, the machines patrol the post-apocalyptic ruins of bombed-out megacities, left over from Earth’s war with Carthage. In the fallen megalopolis of Chicago, a young scavenger makes a discovery that could empower Earthlings to finally fight back, but could also endanger everyone he loves.

On Carthage, the rulers of humanity enjoy extreme wealth and luxury, while machines carry out all forms of labor and provide for their every whim. Audrey Caracala, daughter of Carthage’s top political leader, has led a protected existence, groomed to help her family rule the known galaxy. Now her family’s enemies hunt her as she searches for her missing brother in the dangerous, unfamiliar territory of the Carthaginian underworld, where she begins to face hard truths about the machines and about her own family’s legacy.

Three people, on three very different worlds, must confront alternate faces of the ever-evolving machines, which spin their own designs beyond the vision of their human masters, forging a new kind of empire that will be ruled by no man.

Justified (Saga of the Nano-Templar #1) – Jon Del Arroz

To save a world he must rely on God.

After years of fighting for justice with his deadly nanotech, Templar Drin abandons his post, crash landing on a desert world controlled by a tyrannical alien empire. Its inhabitants are forced into slavery, broken where a once-proud race cultivated its lands.

For the first time in Drin’s life, he has no backup, no support, none of his brothers.

He stands alone against evil.

Drin must face overwhelming odds to liberate millions of slaves from their captors and bring faith to a downtrodden world. But in his way stands the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy.

Can Drin use his Templar training to survive?

The Messenger – J. N. Chaney and Terry Maggert

Dash never asked to be a mech pilot, but fate has other plans.

On the run and out of chances, he guides his ship and crew into the heart of a relic older than the galaxy itself–and finds himself on the edge of an eternal war he never knew existed.

The relic is a mech, lost to history and forgotten by all who remain. Built by an ancient race to be the ultimate weapon, the machine is capable of unspeakable destruction, and its discovery could unhinge the balance of power throughout known space.

Worse still, the A.I. inside the machine speaks of an ancient evil that will soon arrive–a race whose power far exceeds anything humanity has ever witnessed.

Only the Messenger can stand against them, the A.I. tells its new pilot. Only you can do what must be done.

Spartan’s Specialists (Four Horsemen Tales #12) – Alex Rath

Captain Markus ‘Spartan’ Nicolos is one of the Golden Horde’s premier hackers and communication specialists, and a top-tier CASPer pilot. His experimental Hoplite scout CASPer aided significantly in thwarting an attempt by a Besquith general to wipe out the Golden Horde.

Now, while most of the Golden Horde goes out on a major contract, Spartan has been given a small team of less than 30 mercenaries—specialists, all—to teach a race that has just joined the Galactic Union how to defend itself. And, in his spare time, Spartan is to spy on the Merchant Guild.

After arriving in the new system on a ship from the Intergalactic Haulers Mercenary Company, Spartan’s group of specialists begin completing their mission, but things rapidly go downhill when they find out the Omega Wars have begun and Human mercenary companies are being hunted.

Unable to contact his company’s leader, Colonel Sansar Enkh, Spartan is on his own to put the pieces together and figure out a new plan to deal with the changing situation. Can Spartan’s small team of Golden Horde specialists complete their mission and find a way to survive the Omega Wars on their own, or is this Spartan’s last ride?

Worldshift: Virtual Revolution – Scott Straughan

Ethan is young and unemployed. One of the many who fail to find a job and join the elite who run the government and the mega corporations. However, thanks to the economic support everyone gets, he can spend his idle days playing virtual reality games. Online, he can chase thrills and lash out without consequence.

Yet, despite his isolation, Ethan can’t help but feel that something is deeply wrong with society. It reaps the benefit of advanced automation, but forbids further scientific development. That feeling becomes inescapable when he starts playing the latest event in the world’s most popular VR game, Worldshift. Thousands of players are lured into climbing the Tower of Ascension by an incredible prize. Inside, the combat is intense, but nothing is as it seems. The tower is far more than a game. Not only are its rewards very real, but so are its dangers.

Change is coming to a long stagnant world -a virtual revolution- and everything Ethan knows will be threatened.

The Tower of the Bear (Yankee Republic #3) – Fenton Wood

From the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, to the forbidden lands west of the Mississippi, to the shores of a prehistoric inland sea … a young radio engineer enlists the aid of scientists, kings, ancient gods, and mythological beasts, in a search for a super-metal from another universe!

A blend of radio science, alt-history, tall tale, and myth, YANKEE REPUBLIC is an epic like no other.

Fantasy New Releases: 7 September, 2019 published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[n-o-w-is-l-a-t-e-r]

Everything is Exploited for Surival Pt. 2

In a sociological study with youth of color in Oakland, Victor Rios found that youth learned to “code switch” into this performance of “acting hard” to in order to survive in the streets and specifically to resist “the violence of the state and other institutions that criminalize and punish them” (Rios, 2006: 48). The “respect as domination” modality of masculinity is based upon intimidation and maintaining a constituted power based on hierarchal social relations and is supported by patriarchy, racism, homophobia. As such, it is often embodied by the hegemonic masculinity as practiced by men involved in law enforcement, the military, and sports teams.

Utilizing violence and psychology (fear), they learned to dominate much like their oppressors. In order to live on this planet and to avoid death (nothingness) we must learn to survive. This eventually lead to their animalistic nature as we become reliant on survival. We become bent on distinction through competition (ego). In turn, we become  paranoid. Masculine paranoia is the fear of being percieved as weak. In a white supremacist patriarchal society such as the United States of America, dominance is the realm of straight white men. When men of color embody this masculinity, it at once reinforces the patriarchy against women but creates a racial conflict because brown men cannot embody whiteness. This conflict usually requires the confinement and premature death of men of color because by embodying the dominant masculinity, they are transgressing the hegemonic order of white supremacy. This is one reason why young men of color are systematically shot to death by white law enforcement officers who fear for their safety, and why there are so many men of color who are incarcerated to keep the threat to White Supremacy at bay. The historical legacy of the reality of Lynching is a tremendous amount of confusion for young men of color about what it means to be a man.?

Pain/tension create strength. Strength = power. Power = control. Men are conditioned to not be weak. The very purpose of mind control in the military settings are to impose a means of mind control. Through conditioning, the subject loses its subjectivity in becoming a tool for a larger ideological agenda (superego). They are told how to think, act, and appear based on the authority. They are conditioned to break the threshold of pain in becoming fearless. This ultimately leads to the development of a one-track mind. To receive and obey. Thus why the greeks and romans trained young males from the earliest age possible to mitigate their fear and to stamp out weakness. In Fight Club (1999) the men are conditioned to be fearless, no longer giving into the whims of their own subjectivity. The projection of the phallus in fight club symbolizes the need for authority, for control. They become cogs in a system to destabilize the dominant mode of society. In the end, Tyler releases this need for authority (masculinity) and willingly “castrates himself” thus reuniting with Marla (Marla etymologically means = “mother”, the divine feminine – nothingness ). In closing the buildings falls in orgasmic splendor symbolizing the chaos of the material realm, the false realm. Jack and Marla, in uniting (holding hands) The quickflash cut scene of a penis at the very end of the film symbolizes projection of hegemonic masculinity in fight club (masculine – penis- ego-surface) and its fades to black symbolizes the demise of the phallus in the 4return to nothingness (chaos). American Psycho (1999) reveals the psychosis/emptiness of formality and function. The psychosis of perfection and the need to compete, compels Patrick Bateman to kill. American Psycho symbolizes the psychosis of the surface, and the hierarchy of those in power within American structures. Blackness is deemed “negative” as it is an emotional state (passivity) does not correspond with ruthlessness of whiteness. This is conveyed perfectly when Patrick interrogates the homeless black male, assuming the position that his attitude is the purpose behind his failure in society. Much like dynamics of wealth in American culture, there is always a gap between the wealthy and the poor. American Psycho is about the pointlessness of evolution. Form is empty.

In order to truly be free, we must free ourselves from these forms. Psychopathy is also complicit in domination for it allows one to conquer someone/something without fear. White people trained themselves on fear, on learning to adapt to circumstances through conquering anything in their way. An assassin/solider thrives on cold logic and an equally cold, hard shell. He is motivated only by what exists for him: survival. Humanity is an evil thing, thriving only through separation. Its inherently flawed. It's full of psychopaths. Much like Plato's Cave, humans are largely ignorant of themselves and others. Much like Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson: obey, mindlessly, and you'll “survive”. This films simulate an exaggerated reality but one not dissimilar to our own. Contestants are chosen randomly (without consent) similar to the process of birth. You are then forced to fight to the death (survival/base) to survive in a simulation. Much like the fighters in District 1, the “Careers” (military) have been trained by the empty logic of survival, only seeing enemies to be hunted. This hierarchy blends these ruthless “tributes”, with tributes from other districts, who are most likely unskilled and lacking in killer instinct, where they duel to the death. You adapt, utilising any skill available, or you die from ignorance, fear, or starvation. Compassion (divine feminine) is a vulnerability. This hierarchy is established so only the strong can survive (narcissism-ego: animal form) can win. The tribute who wins gains access to the Capital for life, safe within the illusive confines of “freedom”: wealth, sex, etc. Collins alludes to the dynamics of hetero-capitalist dichotomies, which only allow a small percentage to thrive due to competitive advantage, forcing those below them to adapt, or die. In Beastly, a recent adaption of Beauty and the Beast, the antagonist is vain, and selfish. Alex “Kingson” (son of the king-ego) is the embodiment of modern vanity. At (0:46) we are introduced to his infatuation with the surface (ego). Only building up his surface layer, (ego) nothing He embodies the flesh or the “Beast” (father-fire: narcissism). We then see his reflection superimposed onto the skyline of New York City, a place based on image-based materialism. The smatter of billboards focused on the surface preceding this introduction help in framing the narrative themes of greed. 1:27-2:36 : Alex running for Green Committee Leader emphasizes his ignorance. It is no coincidence that the color Green symbolizes Earth, it is also the color of the Heart Chakra. This is an allusion to imperialism of the Earth due to greed. 2:47- 4:10, we are introduced to the “Witch” Kendra, who, cloaked only in black garments embodies Chaos (nothingness). She is not concerned with vanity, only what exists beneath the surface. She deliberately scrawls on his campaign, “defacing” his features. Linda (etymology: Beauty, Belle) symbolizes compassion, self-awareness, and mercy. She is the embodiment of the spirit (Earth). 4:55 to we are introduced to “Kingson” interior. Pearlescent, sharp, and minimal the space devoid of vibrancy (color = Life). this interior “reflects” the vanity and coldness that exists on the surface, and helps to showcase the emptiness of the relationship between Alex and his father, and his lack of love. 6:15, cue the black “maiden” who embodies “life”, she is the caretaker of the estate. This is a racialized/gendered shallow exchange as Alex can only interrogate the surface. The maid status positions her underneath the surface, unable to fully interact with her due to the dynamics of power in place. Alex blinded by the surface of who she “appears” to be what he interprets that as being. Women are the pedestals for his ascent, for without the exploitation of women, he would be nothing. In, The Truman Show, Truman faces obstacles concerning his true nature (nothingness), he is being watched over by Christof (aka God, the creator of this realm) and his story being projected onto the consciousness of the culture of humanity through television. Truman's whole life is built around illusions. Illusions that he merely “human”. He is then forced to find his way out of the maze or he will be confronted with the limitations of his consciousness by those who wish to dissuade him. My mother settled out of fear. Instead of putting herself first she was indoctrinated to believe that she was incapable of existing on her own. She convinced herself that the mother was the only role she was capable of playing. Entrapment became a full time job for my mother as she couldn’t bear the thought of existing alone and or worse: dying alone. So she married a man out of convenience and lay'd her egg. Unfortunately, for my siblings and I, we were conditioned by the dominant Western culture forced to survive on our own terms. She made it extremely difficult for me to walk away because she projected her fear of loneliness on to me. She projected her fears/insecurities onto her children so that in turn they would latch onto her, thus creating an imbalance in their own personal lives. She provided us her damaged view of relationships. In turn, we suffered because we lacked the courage to pursue our convictions in honesty. I had poor eating habits and a general naiveté that left my vulnerable. I was truly afraid of being alone and expressing my convictions because I was afraid of dying. Parents must raise healthy individuals. The Heathers final scene involving Veronica watching JD blow himself to smithereens symbolizes his need to destabilize his ego. Veronica in turn, visibly filthy due to the fallout symbolizes her  transcendence of status-ego. She becomes Disrespect is an illusion based on fear, there is no authority. Authority is symbolic (glamour) a mask for the purpose of both concealment and visibility. It cloaks itself in form, however, this is mostly empty. The mask of gender forces us to adapt to the social expectations of others. Ruthless competitive form. A form that is only concerned with survival. Empty individualism, the exaggerated surface (phallus) is concerned with order. Compassion is considered a weakness in this masculine world. For if you are “soft” or “weak” you can be exploited my men. I am at a loss because I was not bred as a male. I was not bred to be competitive/or arrogant. I was socialized as a women: compassion, giving, and soft. My stepfather stepped in and* I am a ghost. When you become a ghost you no longer have any distinction, any purpose, any meaning. You are not tied to your ego and you have nothing. The truth of the universe lies in its emptiness. I wake up to realize how empty I am that I'm am just ‘there/their', here and now and that society casts its blanket of social roles onto to me to distinguish the separation between something and nothing. Death is freedom from distinction. Freedom from ownership. Freedom from the animal nature which haunts these forms. I've taken on a radical shape, no longer distinguished through “surface”. Once you cast radical ownership of yourself, you break through the illusion of “I” and “me” and you become aware of the nothingness that awaits us all. “Pride is an illusion of the ego, of what/whom we appear to be. The nothingness that swallows the paranoia of existing/percieving in a schism body/mind perspective. I am empty, and I will fade. My mother played the role of “mother”, she bathed, clothed, fed, and loved me but didn't understand my needs. She should of addressed my traits instead of rejecting them. In turn, I embodied my mother (because in truth I am just like her),but in actuality, her projection was for me to be obedient within a hegemonic system. However, I couldn't be disciplined within a hegemonic cis, white, het system so I was deemed an outsider. This world was not meant for me. I was meant to convey the principles that this world conveys. yet for so long I adapted to what others wanted, out of fear of being isolated. Now, I can recognize whom/what is necessary in my life. What you created I must die for or live for myself. If living, I must build an ideology around my values. I must become the beacon of light for the ideals I strive for. I must practice love, compassion, and courage constantly, for that is the only way I can survive. I must break the chain of injustice and build upon a foundation (Taurus Sun) of truth (Leo) for myself. Only when you get tossed on your ass continually will you learn to fight back. Finding your ideology The Death of the Monastery and the rise of ideological space: There has been a death of the monastery. A space where souls could exist and devote themselves to their faith within the confines of an intimate space in contemplating the divine. In turn, we have come to worship the individual-self and the materialism that it carries. We worship at the temple of the World Banks, where we exchange service for monetary value. We scour the restaurants, shopping malls, and venues of the world, both exotic and familiar, to fill the void of emptiness inside us. To feel a sensation other than pain. The ideology of capitalism always a profit to be made. In a cis/heteronormative patriarchal those at disadvantage are forced to perform. Those who have inherited traits (competitive advantage) specific to thriving within the dominant system are rewarded. Weakness of any kind, especially disobedience results in death. Much like Commander Snow in the Hunger Games, he embodies the principles of God (authority = government) and more specifically the wrath of God (military = mind control). For those tributes chosen are forced to compete in spite of personal objection because if they don’t they will suffer the pain of torture or worse: death (the fear of the unknown). To win, they must fight against the odds of inherited traits (“May the odds be ever in your favor”) in winning the wicked game.This game, symbolizes the reality of our lives. We exist at the expense of an external source which controls our development We learn to survive based on upon our environment. The ideology of tradition is emphasized, as this tradition has been established by Snow (God) and it must be tolerated, treated as  sacred. Without this tactic, the curtain vanishes and the fear along with it. This fear is outlined in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and perfectly captured in the tone conveyed by Varys in Games of Thrones: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” You adapt, or die. There is no in between in a white hegemonic system you are either adapt to your animal instincts, or suffer the consequences. We are the puppets of God, doing his will out of fear of severe punishment. This is the ideology of Christianity, you are obedient in faith you will receive, if not you are banished to “eternal hell”. Many people are puppets for their parents, state, and other authoritarian for doing their bidding so they can receive the benefits. They fall in line with principles that are not aligned with their intentions and they become doomed to repetition. Others are punished for their honesty. In truth, God is only an illusion, a meter for human morality projected through the consciousness of the super-ego. The mechanics of Christianity were reliant upon the basis of control so in gaining said control they created the ultimate Authoritarian. However, God is truly nothingness. Normative ideologies insist on controlling behavior of those involved. I recognize that nothing is normal. Form is evil. Evil-oution. In truth I am more than my body. The ego is taught to fear because in truth it fears pain. The spirit is free. Free from distinction. From harm. Death is the only way out or “smile, and behave”. The surface is a delusion.

[newsonlinegroup-blog]

The Best TV Moments of 2017, From 'Game of Thrones' to 'Master of None'

Nowadays, TV is everywhere. It's in living rooms, on laptops, streaming on phones. Very rarely are there events anymore that cause everyone to gather 'round the television set. But that doesn't mean folks don't bond over great TV anymore. From Master of None to Handmaid's Tale to Game of Thrones, a lot of shows had people talking in 2017. These TV moments were amongst the best. The Good Place Goes Deep Michael Schur's afterlife comedy is the best thing on broadcast TV for a lot of reasons—incredible performances, smart writing, a Simpsons-level love for puns—but in its first season and a half, nothing has distilled its genius better than the episode "The Trolley Problem." Fed up with Chidi's (William Jackson Harper) theory-heavy philosophical teachings, Michael (Ted Danson) puts his ethics to the test by turning the famous thought experiment into a real-life re-enactment. Things, as you might expect, go off the rails. There are still background gags (the movie marque announces both STRANGERS UNDER A TRAIN and BEND IT LIKE BENTHAM), but above all the sequence underscores what fans already knew: The Good Place thinks harder about thinking hard than anything else on TV. —Peter Rubin Saturday Night Live's 'Come Back, Barack' Since being sworn into office in January, Donald Trump has attempted to bankrupt the middle class by raising taxes, reshape environmental policy, overhaul the justice system into a more conservative enterprise, rewrite civil liberties for transgender servicemen and women, strip Americans of affordable healthcare, impose a travel ban on Muslim countries, and has continually insulted private and public citizens on Twitter. All of which made SNL’s “Come Back, Barack” segment—starring Chance the Rapper, Kenan Thompson, and Chris Redd in a 1990s Boyz II Men-inspired music video—one of the most enjoyable slices of TV all year. We miss you, 44! —Jason Parham Dave Chappelle's 10-Minute Freestyle on Def Comedy Jam 25 Fifty-six minutes into the Netflix special honoring the legacy of HBO's groundbreaking standup comedy showcase, host D.L. Hughley and Dave Chappelle walk onstage, and you know something is going to happen. Dave's just too loose, standing there in his amber-tinted aviators; he's not here to perform, he's just here to be with his comedy family. The payoff comes after barely a minute. Just as he finishes saying something semi-deep—"What Def Comedy Jam was always willing to do was take the heat, the criticism, and the hate...’cause that's just basically being black in America"—a mistimed musical cue from house DJ Kid Capri crashes through the speakers. Dave laughs, and what follows is a master class in extemporaneous comedy. Over the next few minutes, as he and Hughley run through their "scripted" intro again and again, they interrupt themselves to savage tiki-torch-bearing white supremacists, talk about reading in public, and lead the crowd in a rendition of Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just a Bill." You can keep your UCB Theater and Harold podcasts; this is what improv really looks like. —Peter Rubin Insecure's Show-Within-a-Show, Due North The one thing Issa, Molly, Lawrence, Kelly, and the Insecure crew could all agree on this season was the irresistible appeal of its must-see TV-show-within-the-show, the pre-Civil War soap-opera Due North. Set in the Antebellum South but molded in the likeness of Lee Daniels’s drama-fueled Empire, it starred Regina Hall as a slave named Ninny, Scott Foley as her slave master and secret lover, and Michael Jai White as Ninny’s one-legged husband. What began as a joke in the writers room soon became one of the more engrossing aspects of Issa Rae’s HBO hit. When the finale aired, Due North was finally, and rightfully, given screentime in the ultimate five minutes of the show, proving to be every bit the delicious and surprising piece of TV the Insecure crew promised it would be. —Jason Parham The 'Thanksgiving' Episode of Master of None There wasn't a single, more perfectly written episode of comedic television last year than Master of None's "Thanksgiving" chapter. I say that subjectively, but also objectively—None star Aziz Ansari and his co-star/co-writer Lena Waithe won an Emmy for it. But "Thanksgiving" is so much more than a good episode of television. It's also a testament to the curious and lasting bonds of family and friendship and the iterative process that coming out is for most LGBTQ people. Largely written by Waithe, and based on her own experiences coming out to her mother, the entire story—told over a series of Thanksgiving meals—is handled with such depth and levity that it's heartbreaking and heartwarming from beginning to end. It warrants second helpings. —Angela Watercutter Olenna Tyrell Getting the Last Word on Game of Thrones Look, a lot of friggin' people die on Game of Thrones. Killing off your problematic fave is kind of the show's thing. But man, when the writers off somebody, they do it right. This blaze-of-glory style was never more apparent than when Jaime Lannister showed up to sack Highgarden and kill Lady Olenna Tyrell. The Kingslayer thought he had the upper hand until he gave the Queen of Thorns her poison and she, in no uncertain terms, told him it was she who had poisoned Joffrey, his child with his twin sister Cersei. Lady Olenna then twisted the knife by adding, "Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me." There are no microphones in Westeros, but if there were, this is the moment when she would've dropped hers. It was so perfect and cutting it even inspired a meme. Well played, Lady Olenna. —Angela Watercutter Easy Lives Up to Its Name All Over Again Joe Swanberg has always told small stories about regular life, but as his career has progressed from mumblecore (Hannah Takes the Stairs) to star-stocked festival indies (Drinking Buddies) to this Netflix anthology show, his lens has widened in some heartening ways. Easy's first season introduced viewers to a sprawling, sometimes overlapping assortment of Chicagoans navigating relationships of all kinds; this follow-up adds a number of new characters, virtually all of whom help feel the show even broader (despite limited screen time, Odinaka Malachi Ezeokoli and Karley Sciortino are promising newcomers). This isn't appointment TV, it's anointment TV. You probably hate this kind of advice as much as I do, but feel free to skip the season's first episode—despite a great cast, it's anomalously pointless—and mainline the rest. Preferably on a Sunday morning. —Peter Rubin Handmaid's Tale. All of It There couldn't have been a more awfully apropos year for Hulu to release its adaptation of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. From the worldwide Women's Marches to the myriad sexual harassment and sexual assault stories that came out, 2017 was a year during which people spent a lot of time talking about the rights and roles of women. And in no other story are the rights and roles of women placed into more stark relief than Tale, which imagines a theocratic future where any woman who can have a baby is forced to do so for families in the ruling class. Dark and foreboding, and sometimes even funny, Handmaid's Tale cut to the bone at a time when a lot of folks could glom on to its message—even if it was hard not to feel like you were under his eye. —Angela Watercutter Big Mouth Gets to the Heart of Filth If you heard the phrase "Nick Kroll co-created an animated Netflix show about hormone-addled seventh-graders," you'd be forgiven for assuming that the result would be wall-to-wall NSFWness. And it was: between the masturbation, Veep-level profanity, talking vaginas, singing tampons, and planet-humping, there's just about nothing I can embed here without incurring at least 19 HR violations. But it also ended up being the sweetest, most honest show about adolescence since Freaks & Geeks, due in no small part to its equal-opportunity puberty woes—which is something I can embed. Add in an incredible voice cast (in addition to Kroll and John Mulaney, there are star turns from Jessi Klein, Jenny Slate, Jordan Peele, Maya Rudolph, Richard Kind, rightly ubiquitous weirdo Jason Mantzoukas, and a many more), and you've got one of the best comedy surprises of the year. Catch up now, before the show comes back in 2018. —Peter Rubin 'Finding Frances' on Nathan for You Few television creators achieve in a single episode the embodiment of a show’s entire ethos. This year, Nathan Fielder, creator of the cult-hit Nathan For You, did exactly that. The show—a blend of reality TV and absurdist comedy—is full of scenes that obliterate the boundaries of social norms, creating cringe-worthy moments sustained by the awkward energy Fielder infuses into his role as human and situational puppeteer. But the show’s true genius has always been in the way it simultaneously finds comedy in the subtle (and not-so-subtle) forces that drive behavior, and the humanity at the heart of it. In “Finding Frances,” the show’s two-hour Season 4 finale, Fielder is given the space to explore that idea more thoroughly—to reach deeper into the dark well of humanity and pull out a story that’s as much a meditation on love, regret, and empathy as it is a must-press-pause-to-finish-laughing journey through the limits of the absurd. It will leave you both devastated and out of breath. —Nate Goldman The Finale of Big Little Lies In the span of just a few weeks, HBO's Big Little Lies went from "Are you watching...?" to "OMG, did you see?!" There's a reason for that. What started out as a high-gloss soap opera about self-involved privileged folks with great beach houses in Monterey, California, quickly turned into a hard-hitting look at toxic relationships and abusive marriages. And by the time it got to its heart-stopping finale, no one was able to turn away. We won't spoil it now, but OMG, did you see that?? —Angela Watercutter Sasha Velour's Rose Petals on RuPaul's Drag Race The key to any great drag performance—besides precise dancing, flawless makeup, a fabulous wig, a good tuck, and a perfect outfit—is an element of surprise. And in all nine seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, no queen ever brought more of a surprise than Sasha Velour did during her lip sync battle with Shea Coulee to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional." During the song's, well, emotional chorus, Velour—looking more distraught by the second—shook off her crimson wig as a cascade of rose petals came raining down. It was a moment of inspired genius that was only made sweeter by watching her proud father and partner tear up in the audience as the number came to an end. Nothing but chills, honey. —Angela Watercutter Saturday Night Live's 'Welcome to Hell' Was a more biting or of-the-moment Saturday Night Live musical number this year than “Welcome to Hell”? We’ll go ahead and answer that for you: No. No, there was not. Released in the immediate aftermath of Matt Lauer’s firing from the Today show and Kevin Spacey’s release from House of Cards amidst sexual misconduct allegations, the music video was a reminder to everyone clueless about the harassment of women that “this been the damn world” they've lived in for centuries. Funny, scathing, and so on-point it was alarming, “Welcome to Hell” was a badly needed laugh after an incredibly crappy year for women. And just remember: Nothing good happens in a van. —Angela Watercutter Read the full article

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Herbert Hoover Is the Model Republicans Need

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/herbert-hoover-is-the-model-republicans-need/

Herbert Hoover Is the Model Republicans Need

Never has the United States elected a more accomplished man to the presidency than Herbert Clark Hoover, whose organizational genius saved millions of lives from famine and destitution. Never has the ensuing presidency been marked by worse disasters.

That paradox has energized every biographer of Hoover, from William Leuchtenberg’s brilliant brief study to the massive six-volume collective effort headed by George Nash (which I must confess from the start to having “read in,” but never to have actually “read”).

The paradox again energizes the latest of the biographies, by Kenneth Whyte, released last month. (I should mention here that Whyte was the founding editor of a newspaper to which I contributed a column between 1998 and 2013.)

The central question in assessing a new contribution to Hoover studies is to ask, “What new contribution does it offer to resolving the Hoover paradox?”

Or perhaps I should say paradoxes, for there is more than one. Here’s the first:

Almost as soon as he entered office, Hoover was presented with the severest economic crisis of modern times, the Great Depression. The U.S. economy slipped into reverse in August 1929, not even five months after Hoover took office. Counter to later partisan mythmaking, Hoover did not passively submit to the crisis. He worked tirelessly and creatively to mitigate its pain and reignite economic growth. But his efforts largely failed, and often made things worse. The greatest problem-solver ever to enter the presidency miserably failed to solve the greatest problem ever presented to a president.

Now the second:

Few if any Americans have dedicated more of their lives to the service of others than Hoover. A wealthy man by age 40, he turned his back on opportunities to earn more—and dissipated much of what he had gained—to devote himself to humanitarian work. As a private citizen, he organized food relief for German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. He undertook an even more ambitious task of rescue in Russia and Ukraine during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Then, as commerce secretary, he took charge of the response to the devastating flooding of the Mississippi valley in 1927: floods that drove hundreds of thousands from their home to temporary camps and left the region in economic shambles.

It wasn’t just that Hoover did these things well. He invented the idea that these things could be done at all, or at least done on any large scale.

Yet this hugely compassionate person was also a high-handed authoritarian, morbidly sensitive to criticism. Undemonstrative and withdrawn, the hyperactive Hoover perversely presented an image of indifference to a society that—thanks to the spread of radio—had just for the first time been introduced to the appearance of direct personal contact with its president.

Kenneth Whyte addresses both these paradoxes with scholarship, insight, and verve—even as he chafes against them. Whyte summons us to see Hoover as a human personality, more than just a walking embodiment of Great Depression studies. Hoover’s personality was the product of origins and early career that Whyte attentively details. Hoover lived for 30 productive years after losing office in 1932, and Whyte does just to those years too. Hoover would be called back into public service by President Truman to rationalize and reshape the U.S. government. The creation of the Department of Defense out of quarreling armed services owes much to Hoover, as does the Office of Management and Budget, a president’s most powerful tool for setting priorities. Hoover’s non-disaster work at the Commerce Department would constitute an honorable career in its own right. From the collection of unemployment statistics to the standardization of sizes for industrial parts, from the encouragement of aviation to the creation of property rights in radio frequencies—even had Hoover quit politics in 1928, he would still have shaped the modern American economy more than any cabinet secretary since Alexander Hamilton.

But the Great Depression is always there, at the center of the story. It’s critical to Hoover’s place in history—and his legacy to American politics.

Beneath the opening credits of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, actors Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton sing a song that includes the lyric, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.” In a big country, almost anything is statistically possible. But as a matter of probability, it’s exceedingly unlikely that a working-class New Yorker born in 1924, Archie Bunker’s biography, would have had anything good to say about Hoover. The political drama of the 1970s was the movement of people like Archie away from their inherited loyalty to Franklin Roosevelt’s party into Richard Nixon’s, Ronald Reagan’s—and now Donald Trump’s.

To encourage and hasten that movement, the conservative intellectual world of the time condemned Hoover fully as fiercely as any Democratic partisan had ever done. He had signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff. He had raised taxes in 1931. Calvin Coolidge and even the intensely mediocre Warren Harding were championed and rehabilitated. Hoover was blamed for wrecking their prosperous legacy. When Ronald Reagan, always conscious of himself as the great historic bookend to Franklin Roosevelt, ordered a portrait of a precursor for his Cabinet room, he selected Coolidge, not Hoover.

None of this made intellectual or historical sense. The Republicans of the 1920s had passed—and Warren Harding had signed—a much more burdensome tariff than Smoot-Hawley in 1922. It was the 1922 tariff that barred European exports from the U.S. marketplace. That tariff compelled nations rebuilding themselves from the First World War to obtain dollars by piling peacetime borrowing atop wartime borrowing, rather than by running trade surpluses, as economic theory would recommend. If tariffs caused the depression, Harding and Coolidge should have shared it.

Hoover did indeed raise taxes in 1931. He did so because the alternative was to quit the gold standard, as Britain would do in September 1931. Under the gold standard of the time, the United States promised to sell an ounce of gold for $20.67 to anyone who wanted to buy it. In times of budget deficits, more speculators would buy gold—confronting the United States with the risk of running out. The only way to stop such runs on the bank was by raising interest rates and balancing budgets. Hoover’s critics are right that this was precisely the wrong thing to do in 1931. But many of them also passionately championed a gold standard that required the policies they opposed. This was not tenable.

The conservative attack on Hoover in the 1970s originated not in his actual record, but by an ideological hunt for usable heroes. Since Harding and Coolidge occupied the presidency in sunnier days, they were adopted—even though their policies had much more to do with bringing on the Depression than anything Hoover did. Hoover was assigned the villain’s part, to punish him for his bad timing.

Yet it’s also true that the embittered post-presidential Hoover self-harmed his own reputation. Hoover commenced his political life as a progressive-leaning Republican. Terms like “progressive” and—worse, its antonyms like “Old Guard”—artificially impose an order that may have been lacking in real life. But speaking very broadly, progressives like Hoover championed scientific expertise and disliked patronage politics; accepted some increased government regulation of industry; preferred lower tariffs to higher; favored more U.S. involvement to keep the postwar peace rather than less; and were more open to forgiving war reparations and war debts rather than insisting on full payment. Hoover could fuse those attitudes with a very individualist appreciation of the free enterprise system. But—a truly self-made man—Hoover disliked hereditary advantages and endorsed heavier taxation of inheritances. In a different world somehow bypassed by the Great Depression, it’s possible to imagine a Hoover presidency that signed into law some kind of Social Security system—a concept endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt when he ran for president on a progressive line in 1912.

But the Depression did happen, and Hoover was left against the machinations and defamations of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the last president to be inaugurated in March rather than January. Hoover sought to involve his successor in decision making over the five months between election and inauguration—in particular, in negotiations to resolve the international debt problem and to stop the competitive devaluations by which the major economies sought advantage over one another. Perhaps it was not yet too late to save German democracy.

Roosevelt refused all cooperation, while simultaneously sabotaging Hoover’s own ability to lead during the interim. Hoover and his wife Lou to the end believed that Roosevelt had intentionally sought to aggravate chaos over the winter to make himself look better in the spring. Via that resentment, Hoover reached more radical politics in his post-presidential years. He urged U.S. isolation from the coming war between Nazi Germany and the European democracies. He hoped for a war between Stalin and Hitler by which each would destroy the other—and half of Europe as well, presumably—without the United States having to involve itself. His economic individualism—hitherto balanced by his social conscience—became more extreme. Whyte calls Hoover “the father of the new conservatism” that was born after World War II, the conservatism of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan, a conservatism that sustained the fight against the New Deal order through a second depression that could easily have proved as destructive as the first. The tribute seems both apt and ironic, given how those same conservatives would eventually defame him as badly as his Rooseveltian rival ever had.

But everything changes. Whatever else the Trump presidency is doing and has done, it has closed the book on that old “new conservatism.” It’s early to perceive what will succeed it, but it won’t be that. And when the time for succession comes, Hoover’s old party could learn things from his impressive career of public service. Among the great services of Ken Whyte’s elegant, lively, and witty biography is its unceasing reminder of this other Hoover. “If we want this civilization to march forward toward higher economic standards, to moral and spiritual ideals,” Hoover argued in a 1926 speech, “it will march only on the feet of healthy children.” The father of the new conservatism had earlier been also the founding president of the American Child Health Association, the exhorter of state governments to build state health clinics and hospitals for children, like Oregon’s Doernbecher hospital, established that same year.

Hoover’s astounding accomplishments and generous impulses have been effaced by polemical narratives written to serve polemical political purposes. Such distortions are offenses against historical memory. Yet it would prove an interesting irony if justice is finally done to Herbert Hoover not for historical reasons alone, but also because in the unceasing ideological quarrying of the American past, this great man and execrated president has proven himself useful again. To understand Hoover’s life, career, and his legacy in full, this rich new biography will certainly prove indispensable.

Original Article:

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In The Welfare of Nations, the decade-later follow-up to his The Welfare State We’re In, James Bartholomew – former leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – takes us on a tour of the world’s welfare states.

It’s fair to say he isn’t a fan. He argues that the welfare state undermines old values and ‘crowds out’ both our inner resourcefulness and our sense of duty to one another – including our own families. Instead of aspiring to be self-reliant, the welfare state makes us self-absorbed. People aren’t encouraged to exercise responsibility anymore; instead, they are handed a plethora of ‘rights’. Welfare states ‘have diminished our civilisation’, Bartholomew concludes.

The welfare state has always been a problematic entity, from its modern beginnings in the nineteenth century with Bismarck’s cynical ‘state socialism’– built as much to placate the increasingly politically active masses as to attend to their welfare – to the vast systems maintaining millions of economically inactive citizens across the world today. The welfare state, as its advocates contend, always promises a better society, with higher levels of equality, but, as Bartholomew counters, it also tends to foster unemployment, ‘broken families’ and social isolation.

Some versions of the welfare state are better than others. Wealthy Switzerland has a low unemployment rate despite generous social insurance-based benefits. But, at the same time, the Swiss state imposes tough conditions: there’s no minimum wage and workers can be fired on the spot. Sweden’s benefit system is generous, too, but if you can’t afford the rent on a property, you have to move out.

In the UK, matters are equally complex. For instance, shared-ownership schemes, ‘affordable housing’ and planning regulations contribute to distinctly unaffordable house prices. Indeed, housing costs have risen from 10 per cent of average UK household income in 1947 to over 25 per cent. For the poorest sections of society, it is worse still. This is despite the fact that the state subsidises dysfunctional, workless households on bleak public housing estates.

And what of state education? Nearly one-in-five children in OECD countries is functionally illiterate. The best performing advanced countries have autonomous schools, ‘high stakes’ exams, quality teachers and a culture of discipline and hard work. Compare that to the US, where you can’t get rid of bad unionised teachers in the state schools.

Bartholomew convincingly argues that state schools’ ‘shameful’ inadequacy, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, breeds inequality. He fears that the success of the free- and charter-school movement is at risk, too, from ‘creeping government control’. Bartholomew is upfront about his own old-fashioned conservative views. He’s a kind of evidence-based Peter Hitchens, using ‘bundles of academic studies’ to show what he suspected of the welfare state all along. The care of ‘strangers’, he argues, is bad for children and aged parents alike, and damages the social fabric. Over half of Swedish children are born to unmarried mothers, whereas the family in Italy, he says approvingly, is ‘the main source of welfare’, with charity-run ‘family houses’ (no flats or benefits) for single mothers. At a time when Conservatives aren’t really very conservative, it takes Bartholomew to ask important questions about social change.

Again, southern Europe offers a useful contrast to the situation in northern Europe. Over half of single people aged 65 or over in Italy, Portugal and Spain live with their children. Just three per cent of single Danes do. Should individual autonomy trump the burden of caring for children and family members? What role should the state play? UK social workers are office-based, writes Bartholomew, and contracted care workers follow ‘rules rather than doing things from an impulse of loving care’.

By 2050 over a third of the European population will be aged over 60. Even though the age at which people are eligible for pensions is increasing, state pensions can’t be sustained, says Bartholomew. In Poland, Greece and Italy, pensions account for more than a quarter of public spending. The UK spends nine per cent of its national income on healthcare, the US an insurance-fuelled 18 per cent, and Singapore just five per cent (though Singapore has to put twice that into ‘personal’ health-savings accounts). ‘Wealth leads to better healthcare’, says Bartholomew, but the monopolistic UK system, despite the NHS’s officially cherished status, is one of the worst of the advanced countries for health outcomes, including, for example, cancer-survival rates. ‘Obamacare’ notwithstanding, millions of uninsured Americans – neither poor enough for Medicaid nor old enough for Medicare – struggle to pay for healthcare.

Democracies, says Bartholomew, are susceptible to the fantasy that welfare states can solve our problems without consequence or cost. This is despite US public spending increasing from seven per cent of GDP in 1900 to 41 per cent of GDP in 2011. In 2012, France revealed that public spending accounted for 57 per cent of its GDP.

But it’s Bartholomew’s critique of the wider welfare culture, rather than his carps at benefits systems, which provides an important corrective to what can be a narrow and mean-spirited discussion. He also offers practical solutions: let’s increase housing supply but abolish public housing; let’s have a system of ‘co-payment’ for healthcare between state and individual; let’s allow schools and hospitals to compete in markets; and let’s give individuals the opportunity to save and insure themselves to pay for social-care needs and pensions (albeit through Singapore-style compulsory bank accounts).

So what do we do with the welfare state? As Bartholomew puts it, the welfare state, rather than capitalism or communism, was ‘the ultimate victor of the turmoil of the twentieth century’. But Bartholomew makes clear that this is a hollow victory with many millions left idle and communities undermined. So yes, let’s cut the welfare state down to size and stop infantilising its dependants. But we also need to get more ambitious than Bartholomew allows. He thinks it’s too late to get our freedoms back and argues for a minimal ‘welfare’ state only. But why stop there? If the architects of the welfare state have anything to teach us, it is to be bolder in our visions.

Dave Clements is a writer, public servant and convenor of the Institute of Ideas Social Policy Forum. Follow him on Twitter: @daveclementsltd. Visit his website here.

Aquinas • 2 years ago

The Welfare State is the product of rationalism and the loss of religious faith. Man cannot live thinking that he is alone in the world, that he’s facing the cosmos on his own. For centuries, people lived under religious hope, but at the same time they knew that God helps those who help themselves and so the trust in God went together with a life of self-reliance and resourcefulness. Then religion was forsaken and all faith was transferred to science. The wonder of scientific discoveries made people think that if we can master the physical universe, we can also master our lives. Just like we can improve a machine through the use of the laws of science, we can perfect our lives through scientific evidence based social planning. The rearing of children, the planning of cities, the care of the elderly, the education of the young, everything is left to the central authority of the state. They have the knowledge, they have the expertise and they will act in the best interest of people simply because that’s what their job description says. We think that a God that cares about humanity is a religious superstition and we seriously expect state bureaucrats and politicians to benevolently and rationally do what is best for us.

The Welfare State is a great folly, a monumental case of self-delusion that has emasculated the whole of the West. It turns people into helpless serfs, it ignorantly treats human affairs as amenable to scientific programming. It has been a moral disaster that destroys families and civil society and an economic catastrophe that has left a mountain of debt. Its legacy is that of political activism, the cult of victimhood, effeminate emotionalism and generations of schooled ignoramuses.

Politicians make for poor gods and the only hope for a good life rests in one’s own unaided effort. Calvin Coolidge expressed it perfectly: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent”

Aquinas Guest • 2 years ago

I never said it was a Bible quote, I just said that's how people interpreted it. The Bible addresses individual people, it doesn't ever address institutions of authority like the government. It is your duty to help others but you must do it ethically. Forcing others under threat to help people is neither charity nor just. The history of the Welfare State has absolutely nothing to do with helping others in a moral sense, that's just a fantasy, There is never any attempt to actually elevate people, it's just cold bureaucracy and it is a tool of social control clothed in an array of cosy words. Why should David Cameron care more about the poor than you or me? By all means, go and help others, just do it with your own time, in your own way, help only those who you think are deserving and with your own money. That is always going to be far more beneficial for both the donor and the recipient. Just like the Salvation Army is much better than Social Services and me taking care of my mother in law is much better than her being looked after by the department of pensions.

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Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are dominating America under Trump

(Credit: Getty/Rick Wilking)

Donald Trump’s election was a victory for toxic masculinity and patriarchy, two issues psychologist Terry Real has spent a career exploring. Since the 1998 publication of his groundbreaking book “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression,” Real has been one of the most incisive voices on men’s issues, with an emphasis on the destructive effects of male trauma. With Trump’s ascension to the White House, Real sees the re-emergence of a dangerous form of masculinity with potentially far-reaching psychic and emotional consequences. He argues that recognizing and addressing our personal and collective trauma — much of which was inflicted even before Trump entered the political arena — is the only way to heal.

AlterNet publisher Don Hazen and associate editor/senior writer Kali Holloway sat down with Real to discuss the role of toxic masculinity in Trump’s presidential win; “blue” and “red” masculinity; the destructive notion of intimacy as a gendered trait; and the trauma created by psychological patriarchy.

Kali Holloway: Can we start by discussing what toxic masculinity is, how damaging it is and how exactly we got here?

Terry Real: Sure. About Trump — someone in the Trump campaign spoke to me off the record and said that every time Trump did something outrageous and the Democrats and liberals would be up in arms, [the Trump team] was happy because they would watch his numbers dip momentarily and then come roaring back. The chilling thought is that for at least a sizeable part of the population, Trump wasn’t elected despite his horrible misogynist behavior, but to some degree because of it, and that what America seems to be after is an old-style masculinity. Of course, men and women both can participate in patriarchy.

Let me say something about patriarchy. I distinguish between what I call political patriarchy and psychological patriarchy. Political patriarchy is very straightforward. It’s the oppression of one cohort, women, by another cohort, men. It’s about sexism. Of course, it’s still going on in America and all over the world. As a psychotherapist, what caught my eye was not so much the politics of sexism, but a dynamic that exists at the core of the patriarchal system that I see as a psychological dynamic, but I’d like to spell it out.

I like to think of psychological patriarchy as occurring in three rings. Think about it as three concentric rings, three processes. The first ring I call the Great Divide. It’s when you take the quality of your androgynous self — the qualities of one whole human being — and you draw a line down the center. You say all the qualities to the right are masculine, and all the qualities to the left are feminine. We all know what the breakdown is. It’s what [renowned family therapist] Olga Silverstein called halving, or the halving process. Halving a human being is intrinsically traumatic.

Don, as you know, this halving process is traumatic and is imposed by violence. If anybody dares to step outside of the box, the retaliation is swift. I have to say, after 50 years of feminism, the retaliation against “tomboy” girls has softened some over the years. The retaliation to “mama’s boys” and “sissy boys” is just as violent now among peers as it has always been. This halving process takes place whether you want it to or not.

The other thing I want to say about the halving process — when boys learn to suppress half of who they are — is that it takes place between the ages of three and five. It’s very young, almost preverbal.

The second concentric ring is what I call the Dance of Contempt, and that is simply that these in traditional patriarchy, these two halves of masculine and feminine are not held as separate but equal. The masculine qualities are exalted. The feminine qualities are reviled. The essential nature, the dynamic between these two halves, is contempt: contempt for the feminine.

Don Hazen: Contempt is one of the worst elements of any kind in a personal relationship.

TR: I agree. It’s like cancer. It’s toxic. That’s the dance of contempt.

The third concentric ring is one of the unsung great psychological forces in the world. It’s important to remember that the feminine side of the equation can be man, woman, boy or girl. This equation can play out between a man and a woman, but it’s not embodied; it can play out between a man and a woman, it can play out between two men, it can play out between a mother and a child, it can play out between two races, it can play out between two cultures, it can play out in your head.

The point is, whoever inhabits the feminine side of the equation has a deep compulsion to protect the disowned fragility of whoever is on the masculine side of the equation, even while being hurt by that person. Whoever is on the feminine side protects the masculine side from its own disowned fragility. You don’t speak truth to power. You protect the perpetrator. You protect power.

DH: Does that have anything to do with why so many women voted for Trump?

TR: Yes, I think that has a lot to do with it, in the sense that the offensive and perpetrating behaviors were minimized. But I think there’s a simpler answer, actually. I think that what has more do with it is a resurgence of the traditional vision of patriarchy, which is appealing to some, both men and women. To understand that appeal, I’d like to talk to you about a couple of apes, if I could.

You know the whole thing about the alpha male. Everybody’s heard about the alpha male who gets all the females, and the biggest and strongest and toughest gets access to mating. Well, that is a narrative that it turns out was spun by alpha anthropologists who were all male. When women were allowed into the field of anthropology, they discovered a very different kind of male. They call it, lo and behold, the relational ape, or the relational male. That male spends a lot of time grooming the females and is good with their kids and is a nice guy.

DH: Is this the beta male model?

TR: I don’t know what you would call it. We’ll call it “factor R,” for relationship. Anyway, it turns out that the relational male gets as many females as the alpha male does, and they take turns. It’s really very straightforward, and it doesn’t take Darwin to figure this out. In times of peril or scarcity, females tend to favor the alpha male. In times of prosperity and peace, females tend to favor the relational male.

What’s happened, if you have been alive on this planet, is that at 9/11 we were attacked on American soil, and that was trauma. Let me tell you about masculinity and trauma: I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, which never got published, right after 9/11. I said there are two ways to respond to trauma. You can embrace your own vulnerability and deal with the reality of what happened to you and start to put it together piece by piece. Or you can deny your vulnerability and fly into grandiosity. The flight from shame to grandiosity is central to masculinity.

James Gilligan, [psychologist] Carol Gilligan’s husband, wrote a brilliant book 25 years ago called Violence. Jim was the medical director of Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane for 25 years. He writes about himself as a young resident going into this place for the first time. He says to himself, “If I can figure out the mind of a serial killer, I can figure out the mind of any violent person to the most extreme.” What he comes up with is the role of humiliation and self-esteem.

He tells the story of a serial killer who killed women, and usually upper-middle-class, attractive women. He would sew their eyes and sew their mouths. The analysis of this man revealed that there was a pivotal moment where some pretty young women of some prosperity were laughing at a street corner, and in his paranoia he imagined they were laughing at him. He was humiliated, and he righted his humiliation by closing the eyes that were gazing at him and closing the mouth that was laughing at him.

It’s this shift from inferiority to superiority, from inadequacy to attack, which is central to masculinity. I wrote in the piece, if we don’t deal with our trauma, we’re going to find somebody to go attack.

DH: It didn’t take long.

TR: It certainly didn’t. Women are no less prone to this than men are, but they’ll do it vicariously. In times of stress, they turn to that grandiose, powerful, strong, protective man, which Trump clearly positioned himself as being. His rhetoric was very clear about women needing to be protected. He says this explicitly, “And I’ll protect them.” The only difference is that apes don’t generate or amplify times of scarcity or threat in order to make a political point, but Republicans do. You exaggerate the “bad hombres” flooding in from Mexico, and you exaggerate the terrorist on every street corner. You generate the need for that strong alpha male, and that’s part of the machinery.

KH: Trump functions as a man in what you call the ‘one-up position,’ right?

TR: Yes. He’s one-up and boundary-less. You can be one-up and boundary-less, one-down and boundary-less, one-down and walled-off, or one-up and walled-off. Trump is one-up and boundary-less.

DH: What does it mean to be boundary-less?

TR: That he’s uncontained.

DH: Literally, there’s no constraints on him.

TR: Little to none. Certainly less than one would imagine. I’m writing a piece right now and tentatively titling it “Patriarchy Under the Age of Trump.” I start off by saying that as a family therapist, I’m preaching to the saved. You guys are already progressive, but as a couples and family therapist, I’m terribly concerned about the rise of traditional masculinity and traditional patriarchy. Not just in America, but around the world.

One of the ways I describe this is “an ill tide floats all boats.” There’s no surprise that with inflamed rhetoric follows violent actions. I think that traditional masculinity, or toxic masculinity, is dangerous. It’s dangerous to the man, and it’s dangerous to the people around the man.

DH: How much reemergence of this toxic masculinity has there been since Trump, or even before? Is this a trending thing, or is it always true?

TR: No. Ask the Republican baseball players [who were shot by a gunman in Virginia] whether there’s been a reemergence of this kind of toxic masculinity. The most extreme version of this masculinity is a gun.

There’s a great trilogy which has influenced my thinking enormously. It’s by a cultural historian, literary historian Richard Slotkin. It’s a cultural history of America in three volumes. The name of the trilogy, the name of the whole history of America, he sums up as “Regeneration Through Violence.”

DH: Wow. Powerful.

TR: I wrote about this in my book on men and depression, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It.” I wrote about the myth that you find in almost every boys’ adventure story or movie. The myth of the good man, the innocent man, who’s pressed to the wall unfairly. It’s Rambo just walking through town and getting picked on by people. It’s Dustin Hoffman in “Straw Dogs.” There are a million of them.

Somebody gets pressed. At first they don’t do anything, and then the worm turns. They pick up an Uzi and they start blowing people away. The audience cheers. This is a celebration of regeneration through violence, the central theme in masculinity, from one-down to the one-up.

DH: Which can be enabled by many people, including women and mothers, because everybody wants protection, right?

TR: You can have women who inhabit the masculine side of the equation, and you can have men on the feminine side of the equation. You can have women on the feminine side of the equation who buy into the alpha male and think that someone like Trump really will be strong and protect them, and that somebody like Obama was Hamlet-like and too indecisive and weak. That’s the narrative: Trump is a real man.

KH: For Trump’s base, this is the offending from the victim position.

TR: Yes. That’s from one of my mentors, Pia Mellody. Offending from the victim position is, “I’m your victim, you hurt me, and so therefore I have the right to hurt you twice as hard back. I have no shame or compunction about retaliating because I’m your victim.” It’s that righteous indignation, that righteous anger.

I believe that offending from the victim position accounts for 90 percent of the world’s violence. The rest is a scramble for resources. You killed my brother, I’ll kill your family. You kill my family, I’ll rape your grandmother. You rape my grandmother, I’ll burn down your village. And on and on and on. Yes, there’s a resurgence of hate crime, and yes, there is a continuing trend toward increased violence.

DH: Do you also find this true in male/female relationships: husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend? There just seems to be constant case studies of murder, of men stalking women they are in relationships with — finding them, shooting them and then often killing themselves.

TR: Yes.

DH: How does that dynamic work?

TR: Abusive men inhabit the same quadrant that I was just speaking about, one-up and boundary-less. They’re love dependent. One of the few characteristics that distinguishes a normal cohort of men from a cohort of abusers is increased sensitivity to the issue of abandonment. You show film clips and the batterers will pick out themes of abandonment much more readily than normal people. They’re boundary-less and they’re dependent.

DH: Are there biochemical things that go on when that abandonment happens?

TR: What being a love addict means is that you’re an addict. If the drug is flowing — and for a love addict the drug is the woman’s warm regard — if her warm regard is flowing, then I have warm regard for myself. I supplement my bad self-esteem for her esteem of me. When she separates from me or disappoints me in any way, I go into withdrawal. I go into a crash, and it feels ugly to be in that crash.

DH: We’ve all experienced that.

TR: We have. It feels dark and jagged and cold and lonely. When you’re one-up and a love addict, you have about two seconds’ worth of tolerance for those feelings, and then you go up from shame into grandiosity. You bounce up into grandiosity. Now you’re an angry victim. Now you’re a self-righteous victim. Now you’re a revenging angel, and you’re going to get that mother.

I write about this extensively. The problem with shifting from shame into grandiosity is that it works. It’s a great self-medicator. It takes away the depression, takes away the impotence, rights the injustice, does it all. It will create utter havoc in your life, but it does pump up your flagging self-esteem. And so you lash out. Then there’s remorse and shame, and the cycle just continues.

DH: What do you imagine is going to happen going forward, assuming Trump continues to be president and act in the ways he does, looking for wars, destroying people’s safety nets, the kinds of things we’re increasingly aware of. Are we going to see more and more of this kind of masculinity? Is there an antidote for it?

TR: I really feel, what is absolutely not in doubt is that we’re at war. There are two halves to this country. There is a blue masculinity and a red masculinity and they don’t get along.

DH: I’ve felt that so many times, but I’ve never quite heard it expressed that way. In fact, one of the things that seems to be Trump’s most potent weapon is to demonize us, make fun of us, poke at us.

TR: Yes. One of the things that he’s tapped into, as several people on the left have written about, is the humiliation of that group at the hands of our contempt for them for years. These are the deplorables. These are the unwashed masses. We have been elitist. We’ve been culturally elitist, and we have looked down our noses at them. Meanwhile, they’re struggling to put food on the table, and they don’t like it.

DH: Do you see any relationship between the opioid crisis and the toxic masculinity crisis?

TR: I do, for young people in particular. Not in Europe or Mexico or South America or Canada do young people, college-age people, get together and socialize by getting shit-faced. That’s not how it’s done in other countries. I think the reason why our young people socialize through extreme intoxication is because they have trouble relating to each other and they have difficulty knowing how to be with each other without getting smashed. They learn over time. Millennials are a mixed bag. I have great faith in the millennials. They will take over, and that Trumpian masculinity will decline when they do.

Millennial men are hands down the most gender-progressive men on the face of the planet, for all their narcissism and all their immaturity. Part of it is economic. Millennial men expect that they’ll be dual career families. They expect that the women will work. They expect to divvy up the housework. That doesn’t mean they always do it, but they expect it. They expect to share decision-making.

I’m writing a piece now about how we therapists cannot be neutral on this issue. We must stand for moving beyond these patriarchal norms. They’re bad for everybody. We know, for instance, that egalitarian marriages breed substantially greater rates of marital satisfaction and happiness, and that traditional marriages breed greater rates of anxiety and depression and dissatisfaction. We as therapists knowing that cannot say, well, you want a traditional marriage, you want a more modern marriage, this is a matter of opinion between the two of you. No, this is a matter of health.

DH: There’s a great book called “The Mirages of Marriage” about systems and relationships. And the secret was the quid pro quo — that if two people could agree that they were both treated fairly, whether one took out the garbage and the other did the dishes or vice-versa, that sense of equality was what kept the relationship going and solid. It’s when one person was exploited that the relationship failed mostly.

TR: Yeah. That’s a relational point of view, one of the things I teach people. It’s really something we’re all concerned about.

KH: We know what the wages of toxic masculinity are: shortened lifespans for men, and often covert depression. We also know more than 60 percent of white men voted for Trump. They’re also the people dying off at increased rates; they’re the only group that for a while there, was seeing increased mortality, often because of reasons that were self-caused: suicide, the kind of self-medication that leads to death. What does that mean, in terms of the kind of toxic masculinity being replicated because of Trump, for his base? Isn’t it likely to exacerbate that stuff among his supporters?

TR: It’s not even a question, absolutely. Trump has been at rallies and has said somebody should punch people’s lights out. I don’t know of more direct inciting than something like that. Absolutely.

It shows up in my office in terms of vulnerability. I had a woman in my office who was crying. She wouldn’t let her husband near her physically, sexually. Since the election, she’s just been in a state. It turns out her father was one-up and boundary-less, and maybe a sex addict, and was very sexual with her. [After the election] she just started crying, and I said, “You know, your father’s now in the White House.” She said, “I know. I feel so unsafe. I just feel safe in my own skin.”

DH: Wow. This is exactly what we’re talking about. (And what we’re writing about with our Trump Trauma project.) The men’s group I was in back in the early ’70s was set up so there was a women’s group that we had to meet with once a month to hold us accountable. We all thought that was great. But we discovered that the problem was we couldn’t be intimate with each other as men. That causes a lot of the sexism because as soon as you get intimate, you feel you’re becoming your feminine part.

TR: One of the great paradoxes is that in the rubric of patriarchy, intimacy is feminine. Closeness, relationship itself is feminine — it’s a chick flick, and we devalue it. We idealize it in principle and devalue it in fact, which is what we do with things we deem feminine. Yeah, you’re right there. Of course we have to learn to be vulnerable and talk to each other.

KH: The last time I spoke to you, you said something that stood out for me, which is, ‘So many men fear intimacy. I think that those men don’t actually know what intimacy is. What they fear is subjugation.’

TR: What they fear is being dominated. What they fear is being overrun. In the one-up, one-down world of men, you’re either in control or being controlled. So men don’t know much about what [author and cultural historian] Riane Eisler calls “power with.” Instead, it’s always power over, and you’re either up or down, one or the other. When women come in, particularly if they’re critical or controlling in any way, men are really phobic about that. They’re really paranoid about being controlled, and paranoid and phobic about being criticized, which doesn’t make them very good listeners.

There’s work that women can do about how to speak with more skill, to be honest. I talk to people in general and women in particular about what I call standing up for yourself with love; cherishing your relationship and your partner and standing up for yourself all in the same breath. It’s very powerful. I really am angry at my brethren in the therapy world, because all over America women drag men into therapy so that the therapist can make them more relational, more responsible, more open, and more open-hearted. The therapist, under the rubric of neutrality, throws the woman under the bus.

I know you are aware of [poet and leader of the men’s movement] Robert Bly. On YouTube, evidently somebody recorded a talk. Bly asked me to teach with him, and I went to Moose Lake. We did the drumming and the Sufi dancing and the whole thing, and I gave a talk to the men. Funny thing, you’re in these cabins in the woods, and whenever anybody would want me, Bly would say, “Get the feminist out here.”

I gave a talk to the guys. It was very well received, and I said, “Look, it’s great that we’re opening our hearts to each other off away from life and our families like this, but when we go home we have to treat our wives and kids well, and we have to bring this back to our families.” They really responded to that message. It was lovely.

DH: There are many millions of men who need to go through that experience. It’s too bad it’s not available to them.

TR: I talk to parents, in particular, about forming relationship subcultures around their families and generating the values that are relationship cherishing instead of relationship despising. This interview is part of that, and you guys are lights in that string of lights, so thank you for your work.

DH: Thank you. We need your inspiration and your analysis. A lot of us don’t fully understand this stuff, and it’s enlightening to have a theory that makes sense and is useful.

Source: Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are dominating America under Trump Source: Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are dominating America under Trump

[viralhottopics]

Gift of freedom: how Obama’s clemency drive tackled aftermath of ‘war on drugs’

Ramona Brant is one of 1,324 people serving long terms for relatively minor drug crimes to be freed by the president but his successor is unlikely to follow suit

Last April, two months after Ramona Brant walked free from prison having served 21 years of a life sentence for a first-time non-violent drug offense, she found herself outside the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington as a convoy of limousines drew up. A tall black man got out of the central vehicle and greeted her with the immortal words: Hey Ramona, come on, Im taking you to lunch.

I was no good, I couldnt think, Brant recalls. This is the person who used his executive power to say Enough is enough, you can go home now. Then he invites me to lunch. I couldnt believe this.

By the end of lunch, Brant had composed herself sufficiently to make Obama a heartfelt promise. She told him that she would not allow his name to be tainted by anything she did that would send her back to prison.

I will honor you with my freedom, she said. And that is what I have done.

Brant is one of 1,324 women and men who will honor Obama with their freedom long after he vacates the White House in less than three weeks time. Most of them, like her, were serving long prison sentences 395 of them for life for relatively minor drug crimes imposed during the so-called war on drugs.

Brants case was particularly brutal. She had no history of drug dealing when in 1994 she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine valued by the prosecution at $37m. I have never sold drugs at all in my life. Never once.

Yet through association with her violent and abusive boyfriend, who forced her to accompany him when he went on interstate drug runs by beating her and threatening to kill members of her family, she was accused of personally trafficking large amounts of crack cocaine and powder cocaine quantities she says were entirely fictitious.

Those amounts never existed, there was nothing there. They were based on what my co-defendants traded among themselves, and all of that was lumped together and I was held responsible for it.

Even the trial judge as he sentenced her to remain behind bars for the rest of her natural life complained that putting her away forever made no sense. But his hands were tied the sentence was mandatory.

Her former boyfriend remains in prison on a life sentence.

Obama cited Brants case in the long article he wrote last week for the Harvard Law Review looking back on his impact on criminal justice reform. Ramonas case is in many ways emblematic of the problems with overly harsh mandatory sentences in the federal system, he said.

Brant says that she kept her spirits up over 21 long years in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, by placing her trust in God. Her prayers were answered last December when she received a letter from Obama saying that he believed in her and was giving her a second chance by commuting her sentence.

To see the letter, and his signature! I just sat there reading it over and over, it was surreal.

Barack Obama escorts Ramon Brant to the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington DC on 30 March 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Multiply that overwhelming joy by 1,324 and you start to get a sense of the human scale of Obamas clemency project. In any future assessment of his legacy, his flinging open of the prison gates to so many victims of the drug war is certain to loom large.

What hes done has been unprecedented, said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project. These people were the victims of policies that trapped them in the criminal justice system for low-level drug offenses these werent the drug kingpins.

One of the strengths of Obamas clemency drive is its power to act as a model for individual states that are responsible for the incarceration of the overwhelming majority of prisoners in America. While there are about 190,000 people held in the federal penal system almost half of them for drug offenses there are close to 2 million under state lock and key.

President Obama has tried to set an example on the national stage, and that is critically important in shifting the needle on what is fair and proportionate. The whole country is looking at this, Gotsch said.

Obamas embrace of commutations comes at the end of a singularly frustrating period for criminal justice reform. A year ago there were high hopes that a bipartisan coalition of forces, from the rightwing Koch brothers to the ACLU, would effect legislative change that would bring freedom to thousands of largely black Americans caught up in the harsh mandatory sentencing of the drug war.

When those hopes were dashed on the rock of Republican intransigence in the House of Representatives, Obama turned to his presidential power to grant clemency without the need for congressional approval. It would be comparatively slight compared with the initial ambition to overhaul the entire justice system, but it would be something.

This is his last shout to try and bring relief to as many people as possible, Gotsch said.

It has certainly come late in the day for the Obama presidency. Until he announced the clemency project in 2014, Obama displayed scant interest in this area indeed during the whole of his first term he granted pardons or commutations to only 23 people.

As recently as last March criminal justice experts were lamenting in the Washington Post that his record on pardons where individuals have their legal liabilities erased as opposed to commutations where their convictions still stand was so poor that Obama could go down as one of the most merciless presidents in history. It was only in 2016 that his drive for clemency really picked up speed, with 1,171 of the 1,324 lucky recipients gaining their freedom in the course of last year alone.

Obamas sudden burst of activity rocketed him from being a no-show on the clemency league table to being a titan among postwar presidents. Many of the reports on his late conversion to commuting and pardoning prisoners have noted that he has wielded his clemency power more times than the previous 11 presidents combined.

That characterization is misleading. Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St Thomas who set up the first clemency legal clinic in the country, points out that Obama holds such a distinction only if you discount the clemency record of Gerald Ford.

In 1974, the Republican president granted clemency to 14,000 draft dodgers and deserters of the Vietnam war. That was a brave move, Osler contends, given that at the time draft dodgers were as popular as crack dealers are today.

Ford achieved his massive clemency rate by setting up a lean bipartisan operation that could push petitions through with minimum bureaucracy. By contrast, Osler criticizes the Obama clemency project for operating a system of review that is so cumbersome it has gummed up the process.

The professor lists seven consecutive hurdles, spanning four federal buildings, that any prisoner must negotiate to have her or his petition granted: The petition goes from a staff person at the pardon attorneys office to the pardon attorney, then it goes to a staff person at the deputy attorney generals office to the deputy attorney general, then to the staff at the White House counsels office then to the White House counsel, and finally to the president. And people are surprised that the results are so uneven.

As a lawyer who has represented more than 60 petitioners, Osler is keenly aware of the impact of Obamas efforts. For the 1,324 beneficiaries, he said, this was an incredible act of grace. The restoration to society matters, not just to them but to their families and communities.

But he is also keenly aware that the vast majority of more than 30,000 prisoners who have petitioned the president have been denied clemency or are still waiting for an answer. The problem is, I feel like the person after the shipwreck in the lifeboat seeing all the other people in the water.

Ramona Brant knows that feeling all too intimately. Many of her fellow prisoners she calls them her sisters are still incarcerated. There are still too many of my sisters left behind, she says.

Hopes for those people are fading with every day. President-elect Donald Trumps choice for US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been scathing of Obamas clemency project, denouncing it as an abuse of executive power. The chances of the Trump administration continuing to push for release of low-level drug offenders is slim to none.

Ramona Brant with her two sons, now grown up. Photograph: Brant family

As a way of doing her bit to keep the flame alive, Brant has spent much of the past year since she was released last February traveling the country speaking about the dual scourges of domestic violence and mass incarceration. She uses the power of her personal story to try to influence change.

I didnt just study criminal justice, I lived it. This has been my life and that of so many other women. The system is structured to incarcerate people, black women like me.

Brant, who was a mother of two young sons by her co-defendant and former boyfriend when she was arrested, thinks back on all the precious moments she missed over 21 years in a cell. I missed an opportunity to be a mother to my own children, to watch the first tooth come out, to take them to the first day of school; I wasnt by my fathers side when he died, or there when my mom was put to rest; I missed my first two grandchildren being born. No matter how many pictures you have on your wall they cannot replace the images in your mind, and I have no images.

She was there four months ago, however, at the birth of her third grandchild. She has begun to fill up the void.

She thanks Obama for that. He has given me an amazing gift, and I wish there was a way to express my gratitude. He knows he gave me a second chance, but I dont think he knows the depth of what it really means to be free.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2ijuyim

from Gift of freedom: how Obama’s clemency drive tackled aftermath of ‘war on drugs’

[cubaverdad]

Fidel Castro - The Tyrant Exits but the Damage Remains

Fidel Castro: The Tyrant Exits but the Damage Remains / Jeovany Jimenez Vega Jeovany Jimenez Vega, 29 November 2016 — The dictator Fidel Castro died last Friday at the age of 90. The extensive news coverage was to be expected. After all, he was both the object of the most romantic, idealized love and the most scathing, caustic hatred. Gone was the man who, over the last six decades, had left his imprint on Cuban history, a man who was unquestionably one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. There is little to say that has not already been said about this tyrant, so there is little point in now rehashing extensive accounts of his life. It seems more prudent to ask a basic question that might summarize what imprint this man had on Cuban society. What did Fidel Castro leave behind? What did Cubans inherit from his more than half-century legacy? The answer is not always a simple one because almost nothing is simple in Cuba, where the reality itself is often tinged with varying shades of light and shadow. From Fidel Castro's point of view, he leaves behind a country with virtually no illiteracy and an educational system accessible to everyone everywhere within the country's borders. It seems idyllic, especially in light of the repeated positive assessments by UNICEF. But let's not forget an essential point: Not everything here is so rosy. There is only one centralized, compulsory system of education, imposed on everyone, which provides no alternative. Parents cannot choose what kind of schooling their children will receive. Every day children must swear an oath: "Pioneers for Communism; we will be like Che!" They are taught by educators suffering from enormous personal frustration. In exchange for their enormous efforts, teachers receive paltry salaries, working under the most inadequate of conditions in schools that are in near ruin. Additionally, every child is subjected to political indoctrination, which is responsible in large part for the unfortunate loss of civic culture paralyzing Cuban society today. And what is there to say about public health? The country which boasts of its achievements in biotechnology, universal childhood vaccination and state-of-the-art clinics catering to foreigners — comparable only to those reserved for exclusive use by elite government officials — is the same country whose neighborhood medical clinics stand empty and whose pharmacies suffer from a constant shortage of medications. Its excellent doctors are paid poverty-level wages, must deal with unimaginable scarcities and work under deplorable conditions in hospitals which are structurally unsound and which, in many instances, should be demolished. The government of Fidel Castro has always relied on its medical missions to more than sixty countries — "in search of the world's poor" — as its trump card. Under the heel of Raul Castro, those same missions greedily skim 70% off the salaries of its overseas medical personnel. This slave trade generates between 8 to 10 billion dollars a year. Meanwhile, the government shamelessly rails, with characteristic cynicism, against worldwide capitalist exploitation. The very serious crisis in Cuban sport is so obvious that it is scarcely worth discussing. The defections of more than two-hundred top-flight baseball players to the "brutal north" in search of better opportunities in recent years are a slap in the face of the deceased, who used sport as a weapon of propaganda. But the humiliating and mediocre performances of a wide range of athletes in international arenas suggest that things could hardly get much worse. And what has the "invincible" comandante left behind on the field of economics? Anything one might say on such a potent and cruel topic risks sounding redundant. The profound economic damage resulting from the endless trail of Fidel Castro's erratic policies continues to have ongoing repercussions. So absurd and systemic was the damage that it has become insoluble, at least under the current rules of the game imposed by the military dictatorship, which subordinates everything to its perverse predilection for control. In spite of having enjoyed the world's most generous subsidies — courtesy of the former Soviet Union —for its first three decades, Cuba has never experienced a period of real economic independence or credible growth during the entire Castro era. It later suckled on the nipple provided by Hugo Chavez, who always had to cradle the drooling mouth of the silly child because it never learned to support itself. It is an undeniable fact that the comandante's government, like that of its successor, never managed to overcome its prodigious parasitic habits. Its survival always depended on an outside supplier. In short, the dictator leaves behind a desolated country, perpetually in the red and without a a credible development plan in sight. Did the comandante opt for persuasion, for convincing argument, in order to govern? Did he exercise his power through normal, healthy and necessary confrontation — free of judgment — with a dissenting legislature in which opposition was a daily reality, as in all free societies? Certainly not. From the very beginning, he penalized difference of opinion and buried the press under a blanket of hermetic censorship. He monopolized national editorial policy and all mass media, maintaining an iron-fisted stranglehold which he never eased. Under his totalitarian dictatorship there was never anything that might be called a parliament. Instead, a circus of marionettes met once a year to give consent — always by unanimous vote — to orders previously approved by the Central Committee of his Communist Party. The shocking human rights situation has been a constant for the entirety of the Castro regime. It represents a very long saga of systematic abuse, a logical consequence of having no separation of powers. The noteworthy indices of political repression have been the immutable backdrop of Cuban society for more than five decades, though they have become something of a scandal since the thaw in relations with the United States was announced. The dearly departed leaves behind, as testament to his despotism, about a hundred political prisoners in jail cells, to say nothing of the thousands who preceded them. The comandante also bequeathed to Cuban history four great waves of emigration, confirming his scandalous failure as a ruler. Young people fled in terror from their enslavement, an eloquent expression of an entire people's discontent. Well organized exoduses were augmented by an endless string of drownings from sunken rafts in the Florida Straits, a deeply painful saga for the Cuban people caused, once again, by Fidel Castro's absolutism. But let's try to shed light on at least one small aspect of the genius which frontmen and toadies attribute to him. Let's look at the tactical "solutions" the tyrant imposed as well as their practical and permanent long-term consequences. For example, no sooner had revolutionaries won than they found themselves with a housing problem. Did the comandante promote a coherent national program of building new housing to meet the demand? No. It was easier to steal long-held properties from their rightful owners through to the Urban Reform Law. The consequences? Even today, half a century later, housing remains one of the country's most serious problems and perhaps the hardest one to solve. In 1959 the newly triumphant comandante also found himself facing the problem of land distribution. But once the Agrarian Reform Law was adopted, did it create the conditions necessary for small-scale farmers to flourish? Did it vigorously stimulate agricultural and livestock production throughout the country? No. Instead it imposed one absurd regulation after another in order to impede, by any means necessary, agricultural producers' financial success. It created multiple mechanisms to limit their profits and unleashed the Attorney General's watchdogs on any misguided soul who had acquired wealth by dint of his own legitimate efforts. The consequences? Even today, meager harvests rot in the fields thanks to the well-documented irresponsibility of the Empresa Nacional de Acopio (National Harvest Company) — an ineffective monopoly and the sole entity in charge agricultural harvesting. Even today, as an indefensibly large proportion of the country's arable land remains plagued by maribu weed, Cuba imports millions of dollars worth of food, including — of all things — sugar. Fields lie untended due to, as always, the whims and stubbornness of the country's rulers. Meanwhile, shortages of basic staples set new records week after week. An uninterrupted mass exodus began in early 1959, most notably of professionals, when a segment of the population felt disappointed by the first populist measures. What did the newly-inaugurated prime minister, Fidel Castro, do to halt or discourage it? Did he improve working conditions or offer better salaries to those professionals? No. He chose, as usual, to restrict the the right of all Cubans to travel freely for decades and prohibited any overseas travel that did not have official authorization. The consequences? The island literally became one vast prison, serving as Fidel Castro's private gulag for more than fifty years. During that time the despot deprived us of the universal right to freely come and go from our own country. It is also worth remembering one fateful moment: When faced with the challenge of a democratic election in 1960, did he fulfill the promise he made in the Sierra Maestra to hold elections after eighteen months in power? Never! Instead he coined that celebrated slogan "Elections for what?" The unfortunate consequences of that failure translate into an absence of political freedom today. The consequences? Since then, there has been a complete disregard by Cuba's military/political elite for our natural right to free thought and for many of the most basic human rights, an offensive contempt resulting from, above all, the twisted personality of Fidel Castro. Faced with the persistence of tens of thousands of private businesses and family micro-enterprises throughout the country, did the comandante develop a parallel national system of consumer services that would compete on an equal footing with those of the extensive private sector? Was their promise finally fulfilled, providing better services to the people? Absolutely not. Instead, he launched the notorious Revolutionary Offensive in March 1968, which in a few months swept away the legacy of millions of entrepreneurs who had amassed their fortunes as a result of generations of honest work. This wave of brazen confiscation, followed by widespread institutional laziness, led to a dramatic and irreversible decline in the food service industry and every possible consumer service from Cabo San Antonio to Punta Maisí. The consequences? Even today, this sector remains one of the most eloquent testimonials to the inefficiency and corruption of a system as centralized as that of Cuba. In other words, this bearded reprobate always opted for the easiest, most mediocre, most simplistic solution — coincidentally, usually the one he had come up with — that in the long run would lead to the worst consequences. Where is the supposed genius in leading the country into absurdist economic ruin, trampling on people's human rights, putting power in the hands of an arrogant oligarchy with bourgeois tastes, creating a disturbed, dysfunctional society and turning it into a quagmire of moral ruin? What fanciful argument could purport that a life so aberrant and demonstrably harmful to the Cuban people was virtuous? Other than stores in several countries being closed, there was nothing memorable about last Friday, November 25, except for the day's top story. Nothing of consequence will happen in Cuba after this date because it marked an outcome for which the dictatorship has had sufficient time to prepare. The military will, for now, keep everything under control and business will continue as its usual. The tyrant died but he left behind an intact dictatorship, with an organized army of henchmen and repressors well-trained in all manner of coercion, intimidation and blackmail. It acts like an eager, arrogant hitman who has his finger on the trigger, always at the ready. In his profound alienation, he would not hesitate to calmly pull it as soon as the order was received. The dictatorship's capacity for repression remains intact; the people remain totally defenselessness against the divine designs of the dictator on duty. We carry with us the execrable consequences of massive social indoctrination, which will require the passing of more than a generation to overcome its imprint of immorality once freedom finally arrives. Society still lacks the vital independent mechanisms to seriously address the true aspirations of the Cuban people. All this notwithstanding, there have been many messages of condolence from a wide range of political and religious figures including Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Frei Betto and Pope Francis. Other diverse figures include soccer star Diego Maradona, every leftist president from Latin America and King Felipe of Spain. There will undoubtedly also be hundreds of condolences from all over the globe, from people of varied ancestries who nevertheless all have one thing in common: none have personally suffered the consequences of the Stalinist madness of the deceased. None of these grieving mourners were the father of a young man who was shot. None were humiliated for a being believer or a homosexual and sentenced to hard labor in the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). In fact, not one of them will even know what the UMAP was. None of them were forced to support their families on twenty dollars a month or experience the hell of a ration book. None of these very disturbed friends of the dictator had family on the '13 de Marzo' tugboat; none was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison during the Black Spring; none has seen their mother, their wife or their daughter dragged by the fascists hordes during a march of the Ladies in White; none is a dissident besieged or beaten with impunity by the Cuban political police; none has been imprisoned for weeks or months without even knowing what charges are imputed to them, and then released without trial or further explanation; none has been expelled from their job due to political differences nor had a child expelled from their university career for the same reason. None suffered a raid on their home without having engaged in punishable offenses; none has witnessed the degrading repudiation rallies organized by the political police and the Communist Party of its Commander-in-Chief against peaceful opponents. In short, none of them is surnamed Zapata, Payá, Boitel, Soto García, or Pollán. But the inevitable finally occurred and dust returned to dust. Fidel Castro exerted absolute power using brutal methods for half a century. His achievement, such as it is, was that he always appealed on the most mean-spirited, despicable and lowly aspects of human nature. Camouflaged by his extraordinary capacity for simulation and guided by a highly refined ability to discern a person's basest instincts, he manipulated people for his personal advantage in order to satisfy the pathological impulses of his deeply narcissistic personality, his insatiable egotism and an uncontrollable need for recognition of his boundless megalomania. The despot has left to face God's judgement but leaves behind a painful legacy. The monster has died but the damage he caused remains. In spite of all this, Cuba will one day find the true pathway toward democracy. While we will try to never again hate, we are obliged not to forget. The dictator leaves this world, as many of his kind often do, without summary judgment, without having faced earthly justice. But the tyrant will never escape to the moral judgment of a people who have, at least so far, not definitively absolved him. History, however, has already firmly condemned him. Source: Fidel Castro: The Tyrant Exits but the Damage Remains / Jeovany Jimenez Vega – Translating Cuba - http://ift.tt/2iUa2BQ via Blogger http://ift.tt/2iZgo5o