#what you can gauge about a culture and society based on whether they have two seasons or six

[e-louise-bates]

I am about 18 pages into the introduction of Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker, and am happy to report that not only does she cite references properly (and explains in the preface that some of the translations are her own work and that's why they don't have citations), she has also managed, in 18 pages (of merely the introduction!) to make a better case against the myth of the Dark Ages, without trying to make that exact point but merely as the result of discussing things like calendars and such, than the authors of The Bright Ages did in the entire 3/4 of the book that I read before I finally decided I had better things to do with my life and threw it aside.

[rametarin]

Another gripe about the trends in tabletop takeovers.

I’m getting really disgusted by the move to culturally infiltrate and takeover tabletop games. And yes, I call it an infiltration.

No, it’s not, “LGBT+” doing it. To be technical, it’s only a radical faction of people and ideologues that are imping on and declaring themselves THE voices for LGBT, minority, women’s, disableds, rights, and arguing their positions are the baseline decency and default good things. But they will argue if you disagree with them, then you’re just anti-LGBT. That’s the beauty of it. By screaming about how they just want to support these things, they pretend they aren’t an active movement with ulterior motives and structure. When they absolutely are. They aren’t just “good social values,” they’re specific changes and mentalities towards a specific end.

And how they’ve decided to do so is under the guise of tabletop related stuff. That Guy stories lifted from forums.

In the past these people would perform these trust based credibility exercises where they lionize, say, a black person, or an Indian person, or a Jewish person, any minority person. Often a female/woman. And then over the course of this story some bad person, IE, a typically white, cisgendered, heterosexual male fitting a pattern of bad-guy behaviors and thoughts, does something bad. Micro-aggresses, or spews actual hate speech at them. These stories are just that, stories. But they’re designed to give an impression of how common they’re alleging this to be and how ubiquitous and how widespread it is, “in our culture and society.”

They’re effectively lying and expecting the recipient, if they trust them at their word and are good people that want good things, to accept these are true. Because if you voice skepticism over these fish stories, they may have reason to voice their suspicion YOU have reason to doubt the veracity of their, “and then everybody on the bus clapped!” stories of heroic minorities getting one over on the belligerent bad guy majorities. And that allows them to gauge your character and whether you accept what they’re saying is fact or if you critically analyze it or reject it off the cuff, instead of give it the benefit of the doubt.

They’ve taken to try and give this impression of just how widespread and “full of incels” videogaming and tabletop is, to give ammunition to the recipients imaginations on just how “those awful racist sexist cisheteronorms” are, “taking over OUR past-time!” When the reality is they’re very very liberally interpreting everything they can as under this massive, polarized umbrella of Our Totalitarian Good Views Vs. Their Horrible Evil Status Quo.

So every other Dear Debbie type editorial to these Rantsona 2.0s is about That Guy caricatures throwing out buzzwords you only find in the grittiest and most cloistered of Incel internet forums, whom were ALWAYS a minority in number and always have been. It’s just a kind of secular Satanic Panic 2.0, itself, honestly. Seeing neckbearded nice guy tribly wearing, sword cane swinging, “alpha/beta male” (unironic) language using, nice guy grognards wafting about.

These common spaces have become crypto grounds for discourse that very generously demonizes entire groups of people as being affiliated with the worst of the worst by drawing progressively reaching lines in the sand that amounts to putting more and more people under the umbrella of being a perverted, misogynistic Nazi and/or an unreasonable, unstable and dangerous person. At the same time they also wag the dog on, “the amount of dangerous and angry armed white men, a powder keg ready to explode!”

The biggest difference is when the fundamentalist Christians were doing this, they had a very obvious goal for flinging shit at and ruining the reputations of non-Christians and trying to browbeat their congregations and nondenominational faithful to do as they did, or else. They had a coherent and cohesive singular textbook by which to all congregate on; the bible, which over two millenia has been more accessible as literacy has grown and the printing press made the book democratized.

Whereas, these people advance in stages, and all of them are progressively opaque about their affiliation to the stages before. The ground floor seem so ubiquitous, and it mimics the most generic, milquetoast of values. Like, “don’t reject LGBT people because they aren’t like you.” Okay, yeah, one persons specific and particular flavor of that is similar enough to general “don’t discriminate against people for these specific reasons.”

Then a degree further they get close to using language that demands if you agree with it, you also agree with the how and why discrimination is bad, but it’s such a petty quibble that you only really know it’s there if you’ve been to the other side of this discussion, and stopping the conversation to demand we don’t discriminate against LGBT because discrimination is bad rather than “discrimination against Any Minority Class is bad if you’re a Majority class.” So you agree with them using class based hows and whys without even knowing in their minds, they’re demanding YOU discus under their logical and philosophical pretenses to speak.

And so on. While pretending to just be advocating against discrimination, they are in fact advocating for their own philosophical whys and hows that discrimination is okay, they just don’t want discrimination against their chosen trophy classes. And pretend their take on this is the TRUE justice and equality, by refusing to even allow other takes to have those terms used for them.

So they try to take over the spaces where the people are and become the gatekeepers, dictating the norms and basic universal definitions of words, what they mean, and what they don’t, while pretending they’re only doing it to defend “at risk minorities.” And if you oppose them, that must mean you hate minorities and want them either oppressed or dead. Loudly crowing about why they’re doing stupid shit, “in the name of female rights and equality,” so even challenging it makes you look like you’re just defending what they’ve uncharitably described as the status quo in their absence of power.

I absolutely fucking loathe this, especially in lieu of how the reason tabletops are trending more popular is because these types of people see an avenue of dominating discourse and social discussion. They take anything even approaching popularity and try to own it, so you can’t have that thing you like without also humoring their presence and control of it. Inseparably. They gatekeep, or you don’t get in the building.

It’s not about the money for them. And in fact, the more things they infiltrate and make go broke, the more competition companies that they don’t own and can’t make work for them recede- so the companies with more competent people at their helm but share their values can succeed. So Get Woke Go Broke is as much about destroying organizations that do not have leadership and council ruled by their values, as it is in spreading the message and reinforcing them as social expectations and norms, like viruses.

You can have LGBT tolerance and participation, non-bigoted race relations, sexual egalitarianism and more without their particular whys and hows. But they do not want those kinds of egalitarian values and solutions, they want something else that only vaguely addresses those things by recognizing them as classes. They want class consciousness and political unionism. Pretending to give a shit about minorities and scream loud songs about how they’re fighting against monoarchists and fascists, is the time honored tradition of how they get that.

[elaz-ivero]

The Worldbuilding Diaries- Chapter Five; Fantasy Languages Part One

Languages are an integral and crucial part of how we as a species connect, communicate and is susceptible to cultural evolution, it develops with the people who carry it and can be built on an already established language or be sprung out of a desire to teach beyond simple mimicking. 

It’s important to understand that implementing a fantasy language into your work isn’t as easy as mixing up the English alphabet and trying to find a word that sounds nice, your readers will be able to gauge whether your language includes things like unique phrasing, conjunctions and vowels. What you should aim to create is a conlang, a constructed language, elvish is an example of a conlang, a real language created through artificial means. 

First here are some important definitions; 

Language; the words, their pronunciation and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community. 

Accent; an effort in speech to stress one syllable over adjacent syllables 

Dialect; a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language.

Jargon; The technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group. 

Language is a large topic hence why this diary entry has been split into two parts, here we’ll discuss how languages originate and how you can evolve your culture and language simultaneously through understanding the process, sound theory and how to charecterize a group of individuals using their language and how biology can affect how language is spoken. 

Language originates when people, or intelligent life forms need to pass on information or discuss concepts beyond simple sounds, imitation and hand gestures, it’s important to understand that there must be an observable and instant benefit to your group if they use language for modern humans it allowed us to perfect tool making and make plans before executing hunts, leading to more food and an increased rate of survival. If your fantastical group is nomadic and isolated, hardly coming across another of their species they may not have ever needed proper or intricate communication and hand gestures and simple phrases might have worked just fine. 

Langauge is also diverse and I encourage you to listen to music and audio of the hundreds of spoken languages around the world, you’ll hear distinct differences in tone and pronunciation, for example, you might notice that a lot of northern languages use more rushed breaths, the mouth opens wider when speaking some African languages use clicking sounds as a substitute for words and these differences could help inspire some raw and new originality in your work.

For example, in one of my own fantasy languages, Nyefis , every word is spoken in two parts, Nye...Fis because the cultural group it originates from had to because of the protective gear in their mouths protecting them from the harsh arctic winds could only keep their mouths open for so long, words had to be spoken in two breaths and the words tend to be quite short until cultural evolution occurs and the group’s ancestors travel down the mountain to a warmer climate and explore literature and art more, later words associated with these things are longer and more romantic. 

By understanding how language originates you can also explore how your society originated and understanding how language dies will help you establish how fragile/well preserved the language in your story is. Has a language been outlawed due to war, is slang allowed or frowned upon, is everyone allowed to learn the language or can only a select few speak it? What birthed your language and what could possibly kill it?

Now you have your origin, what exactly is the language, if you choose to make your own alphabet (good luck making up over 20 new sounds) or use a pre-established one understanding how sound can indicate a culture or personality is interesting. I split my languages into three main types, light, harsh and medium. Light languages are built on soft sounds, H’s and S’s, whispered through pursed lips and delicately spoken, a lot of romantic languages play with lighter sounds, using o’s and frequently a persons’ pitch gets higher as they near the end of a word. By formulating a language using softer, sweeter, song-like tones and sounds the reader might already associate it with, civility, education, history, royalty.

Harsh languages are formulated with harsher sounds, k’s, t’s and q’s, it snaps on the tongue and you might notice a lot of ‘villainous species’ languages are either very huffy and low or sharp and loud this is because these sounds immediately convey anger, hostility and harshness. 

Medium Languages are a middle ground with both harsh and soft tones, it can be kind sounding or cruel and is open to interpretation. I like to choose the primary sounds of my language based on its origin, if the language originated from a hot climate it’ll likely be softer and shorter whereas if it originates from a harsher, survival against mother nature type climate it’ll be colder with stronger tones and sounds and include longer words. 

Treat your language like an art piece, chose the tones and shades carefully, did your people have the time to sit and chat and have long conversations or did planning have to be quick and concise and long words that mean several sentences had to be created. 

Biology is...important, human mouths are structured in a way that allows us to create a variety of sounds and yet some people struggle to roll their r’s or pronounce languages outside of their own, is their mouth structured differently? Nope, when we speak our mother tongue we cycle through muscle movements and tongue placements natural to us, pronouncing something differently forces us to figure out how to replicate the sound this is what leads to original accents poking through. If your society involves unique species that aren’t human clones with horns or longer ears think about their biological makeup, if they have fangs does that affect how they can open their mouths, can they whistle through one side of their mouth and that is a stand-alone letter in their language? For example, in my story I have a fantasy race that have black teeth which are shaped in a way that they have diastemas (gaps in their teeth) they can whistle through, a long whistle is a calling the equivalent of ‘come here’ or ‘follow me’, a short whistle is the equivalent of saying, ‘uhhhhhhhh’ its a thinking sound, a, please give me a moment I’m thinking. This is because they talk so much and so quickly they use this as a quick easy way to communicate to others without having to fully open their mouths. 

Think about other ways your species could communicate and how they could integrate that into your language, is a breath through the noise a way to breathe out after speaking for a long-winded period of time, is your language a mix of verbal and physical ques like signing or facial expressions. In order to avoid menial ‘small talk’ do the people wear necklaces with their name, parents and occupation on it so that they and a stranger can talk about what’s more important? 

Part 2 coming soon; 

Enjoy creating, there are so many amazing resources out there including the official conlang website https://conlang.org/resources/ 

Bye for now, -E

[sontower1]

Sunseakers Paphos Home Sales

The Very Best Places to Move to in Cyprus as a Deportee

When the mercury drops at home it can be appealing to think of exactly how unwinding a life abroad in the sunshine could be. Cyprus is just one of those places that shows up time after time as a favorite place for Britons when taking into consideration deportee life and happily puts on the title of having the hottest climate in the European Union.

Throughout history, this pleasant island has actually been 'calculated', with every king as well as leader wanting to stake an insurance claim to the seas and also lands in the Levant region of the Eastern Mediterranean. So if you're thinking about relocating to Cyprus, you're in great firm. From hunter-gatherer cultures 12,000 years ago to Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart as well as the British Realm, all have desired an item of this beautiful island.

An Abundant Culture

The island of Cyprus gauges simply 9,000 square kilometres but takes care of to cram in endless beaches, valleys, vineyards and also stunning villages, not to mention the Troodos Mountains (Mount Olympus is the greatest amongst the optimals) rising up to 1,952 metres. There are biking and hiking trails, a glass of wine courses to follow and also you can live your life outdoors year-round.

Culturally abundant, those relocating to Cyprus will additionally uncover an island with its roots securely embeded in ancient society, one that focuses on food, offering and family site visitors the warmest of invites. If you are transferring to Cyprus with a work in mind, the economy is very much based on the solutions sector, with tourist, as well as delivery crucial fields, along with a recent venture into energy thanks to oil deposits discovered offshore.

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Life in The Funding

Naturally, one point to bear in mind when transferring to Cyprus is that this is an island split in two. The south is Greek Cypriot, while the north is Turkish Cypriot, attacked by Turkey in 1975 seemingly to secure its Turkish population complying with a coup d'etat on the island.

In the funding, Nicosia-- home to 240,000 of the 1.2million-strong populace-- signifies this island's split condition. Head to a high look-out factor and you'll see the Eco-friendly Line separating north from south as well as safeguarded by soldiers. It has the sorry title of the world's last divided funding.

Despite its location-- or probably due to it-- Nicosia is the financial and working hub of the island and a main gathering point for every person as well as every little thing. It has been passed from realm to realm for many years and also makes a wonderful place to live.

Gothic cathedrals grow from Islamic buildings, themselves restored over the top of Venetian, English, French and also Genoese previous glories. Buildings like the St Sophia Sanctuary, currently called the Selimiye Mosque, are a good example.

A walk around the city will certainly disclose the medieval Venetian wall surfaces, 18th-century aqueducts and also the Famagusta Gateway, built in 1567 by the Republic of Venice. Nicosia might be a walled medieval town, but there is lots of life as well as modernity in this city, such as the Zaha Hadid-designed park. You do not have the coastline on your front door, but it's only a 50km repel on the weekend.

When it comes to choosing somewhere to reside in Cyprus, Nicosia is usually the leading area for those that are aiming to function as well as incorporate, while much of the expat favourites are on the south of the island. The north is still very dependent on Turkey for help, especially as it is not recognised worldwide as a sovereign state so struggles to create industry similarly as the south.

On The Coastline

Limassol, on the south of the island, is an additional historic and financial hub, house to the ancient city of Amathus, the Kourion Greco-Roman theater as well as the medieval 13th-century Kolossi Castle. The city is just one of the liveliest on the island, as well as locations like the Limassol Marina and also the Fasouri Watermania Park are some of one of the most prominent tourist locations, implying those that reside in the seaside city can delight in bustling summers, while still having the location to themselves in the mild winters months. With choosing the right Property for sale in Cyprus of night life and also a beautiful boardwalk close by the smooth, modern-day marina to enjoy the pleasant climate, it is no surprise Limassol has long been elected a favorite place to obey British expats, it easily combines ancient and also contemporary.

An additional most likely city destination for those thinking of transferring to Cyprus is Larnaca, the 3rd largest city in Cyprus, and also where you'll find Larnaca International Airport. Life below is most definitely a little slower than Nicosia as well as Limassol, however equally historical as well as pretty.

The Finikoudes coastline and also boardwalk is just one of the nicest locations in Larnaca, perfect for warm strolls with cozy waters and tidy sands. Larnaca uses deportees a little bit even more of a standard speed of life, far from the more energetic locations of the island, as well as its tourism is a little lower, meaning you can appreciate its quaint beauties without having to share them with too many people.Named a 2017 European City of Culture, the little harbour city of Paphos has long been a British favourite for holiday homes as well as is frequently voted the very best area to live for deportees. It's not difficult to see why, right here you'll locate one of the Mediterranean's most attractive harbours, a tangle of roads in the old town with good-looking colonial structures and genuine Cypriot life happening. There is the Paphos Archaeological Park, just outside of community with its awesome sea views. The rate of life here is slower, yet with a genuine local feeling and also stunning borders.

Off The Beaten Track

Naturally, those deportees who aren't always searching for work possibilities or the buzz of city life, commonly think about an extra country escape. There are picture-perfect villages with stone homes, or perhaps a lot more singular country residential properties, while others decide to resolve right on the shore. The wonderful thing about Cyprus is that absolutely nothing is ever too away, so you can take pleasure in the city, knowing you can run away to the coastline or countryside, or the other way around. If you're thinking of transferring to Cyprus, initially you need to think of what you desire from a step; whether it's tranquil as well as beach-side relaxation (possibly Paphos is for you), historical streets as well as excellent purchasing (take into consideration Nicosia), or maybe you are searching for fun and also amazing night-life alternatives (consider Limassol).

An island where old culture is still commemorated, there is still a focus on family and also a fascination with great food, not to mention a welcoming atmosphere, it is no surprise 70,000 Britons like to call Cyprus residence.

If you're considering moving to Cyprus, you're in good company. From hunter-gatherer societies 12,000 years ago to Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart and also the British Realm, all have desired a piece of this beautiful island.

In the funding, Nicosia-- residence to 240,000 of the 1.2million-strong population-- is a sign of this island's split standing. Larnaca supplies deportees a little bit more of a conventional pace of life, away from the extra energetic areas of the island, as well as its tourism is somewhat lower, implying you can appreciate its old-world appeals without having to share them with as well several people.Named a 2017 European City of Society, the little harbour city of Paphos has long been a British favourite for holiday houses as well as is regularly elected the ideal place to live for deportees. collaborating using ilisters apartments for sale paphos concerning Cyprus is that absolutely nothing is ever before as well much away, so you can take pleasure in the city, understanding you can escape to the coastline or countryside, or vice versa.

[bi-outta-cordonia]

In Another World, Part II

The continuation of the Colt x MC piece I was hoping to finally put out for @rodappreciationweek. The week itself is over, so this is just me slamming chapters up hoping to finally do a thing I’ve been thinking about for a minute!

Part I --> here!

Ride or Die: A Bad Boy Romance. Colt Kaneko x f!MC(Deidre Wheeler). PG-13, with warnings going out to Brandon’s rancid vibes. ~4k words.

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

Seventeen, eighteen—her keyboard clacks in steady strokes, each letter spelling out a larger plan that should take no more than three years and some change to complete if she works hard enough. Every orientation event is over. Every “meet and greet” has long since burned the flames of excitement out her bones. Extracurriculars, plus honors programs, plus a few personal hobbies will fill her free time in between classes. But the main question again…

Seventeen credits or eighteen credits?

Deidre’s hands hover over the keyboard and she chews her lip.

“I know it’s not my business…” Deidre tosses a look back at Ingrid, her pouty lips pursed and her brow drawn. Ingrid glances pointedly at the open document on the computer screen. “We’re definitely still doing the competition thing, right? Pushing each other or whatever?” Deidre nods slowly. “Which is cool! But like…I don’t want you to burn out before we really get into it!”  

Deidre frowns. “You’re taking seventeen credits.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I’m doing my lab first!” Ingrid waltzes up and clicks to the next screen, displaying the course load Deidre painstakingly puts together months before the first day of classes. “Do your lab first, duh. You already have a bunch of high school credits for the 100 levels.”

“But I’d still have to drop a class,” Deidre says.

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “God, I respect you so much but you can really be irritating.”

Deidre balks. “Alright—”

“Here, take a bullshit class and you can keep your seventeen.” Ingrid clicks a few buttons and lands on a page describing a philosophy class. She squints at the screen. “Blah blah blah, classical and modern conceptions of love, blah blah. You just need to get an A and you’ll be solid, yeah?”

Deidre shakes her head and turns her attention back to the screen.

~ 

“A look at the ways in which classical and modern conceptions of love and romance have changed over the natural course of time. What the course aims to do is interrogate how love has been defined and shaped by society and cultures. Bring an open mind and an equally open heart to a two day a week lecture!”

Seems simple enough.

Day one doesn’t fully prepare her for the sheer amount of bodies filling every concrete path between her and the rest of Langston. The way she works out her schedule, serious classes take place Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. “Bullshit electives” (Ingrid’s words) occupy her Tuesdays and Thursdays for the time being. One class that focuses on life skills and the other is apparently a philosophy class about love.

A comfortable pair of jeans and even more comfortable sneakers gets her through the throngs of people jockeying for space on the sidewalks. Some souls are brave (or foolish?) enough to bike through the madness but she remembers her favorite self-defense trick from her father—throw them bows.

Deidre shoves her way to Terrence Hall and wanders around the building twice before she finds the lecture room. “Room” because it’s small like a classroom and filled from front to back with desks. The age of the building shows in some of the dusty corners and faded paint on the walls. A good number of her peers sit scattered throughout the room, some leaning on desks and carrying on with casual conversations. A few of them eye her as she walks in. Their gazes immediately catch her old shoes and even older jeans. It’s almost funny how the braids and brown skin are the last things they see—at Mar Vista, it was the first but she at least had four years to show them all the money their parents had still couldn’t afford them a brain like hers.

She takes a seat in the front and rummages through her bag when she sets it down. Notebook, lead pencil, laptop open and ready—a long ten minutes pass and the professor walks in holding a cup of coffee.

He’s a small man and most certainly older.

“Thirty of you this year! Much less than I usually get for the fall semester,” he exclaims. His eyes scan over the class and the collective mood drops in an instant. Most of the students are sophomores. A lot of them are just trying to bang out electives first and this was one of the easiest classes the university offers. “Well, anyway—introductions, yes? As many of you should know by now, I am Professor Pines.” Some of the students giggle. “Yes, yes, terrible name, isn’t it? Regardless, I’d rather not spend too much time reflecting on my family’s awful choices in naming conventions.”

He hands a stack of papers to a girl in the front who passes the papers back. A steady stream of motion fills the room as students pass around what she assumes is the syllabus. When she receives her copy, she purses her lips:

20% for quizzes—

15% participation—

15% mid semester report—

25% group project—

25% final exam—

She almost groans along with the rest of the class when they all see it—group project. Professor Pines seems a bit too gleeful despite knowing he’s just cast them all to their doom.

“The basics of the course first,” he starts. “As this is a philosophy class, most of the materials we’ll be working with are going to come from a variety of readings we’ll be doing, examining facets of love and romance across multiple sources to answer that big question that hangs over us all—what exactly is love? What does it entail and how do we define it?” The professor clasps his hands behind his back and looks out over each student. “There are about a thousand ways to describe love but I want to have you all truly engage the topic. How we see it, experience it, and demonstrate it varies wildly and I’m eager to see what the lot of you come up with. Now, if you could all—”

The door opens and the professor stops for a brief moment. He continues with his next topic but it’s hard not to notice him digging through the papers on the table near him as he searches for a spare syllabus for his newest student.

Deidre sits up and thinks the weird boy from the frat party might recognize her as he scans the room for a seat. His eyes find her for all of a second before he struts down the path and takes a seat at the back of the room. She sucks her teeth and turns her attention back to the professor.

He goes on for a long while covering the basics and answering questions as he goes. Most of the students are just using the class to fill up electives—her included. Engagement seems like it’ll be interesting compared to her other classes but at the very least, she’s going to put some effort in. She took top spot back home and she’s going to have to work hard for even the smallest chance at achieving that out here.

“Before I let you all go, I just want to ask…” Professor Pines steeples his fingers, eyes intently watching the class. “What is love?”

His gaze rakes across the length of the room, each student slinking down in their seat and holding a careful breath as they gauge whether he’s the sort that will call on people or let them speak on their own. The silence lasts for a few more minutes until Deidre raises her hand.

The professor beams and the classroom lets out a collective sigh.

“Love can defined in a number of ways but the most basic would point to it being a psychological effect between individuals with well-defined social bonds,” she answers. “It can be a series of emotions, complex affections, and highly specific in terms of behavioral patterns defined by the parameters of a person’s relationship with the object of said love.”

Professor Pines nods approvingly and looks up. “Yes? In the back?”

“It’s a collective of impulses disguised as particular receptors in the brain that dictate meanings behind specific actions.” Deidre turns around in her seat and catches the boy from the party bringing his coffee to his lips for a sip. “Doesn’t always have to be deeper than that—sometimes the brain just does weird shit and we run around trying to add meaning where there doesn’t need to be.”

The class buzzes and Professor Pines seems even more giddy.

“Ah, a realist!” he says and the boy shrugs. “I always get one! Perspective is going to be key here, both in your understandings of the material and of what you take away from this class.”

Deidre raises her hand. “But the whims themselves would become receptors based on the emotional bond between the individuals in question, wouldn’t they? People can act out of a sense of impulse but love requires those impulses be tailored to prior experience with an individual.”

The boy snorts. “Not necessarily. People can say or do something under the guise of love but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. It’s the brain assigning meaning to whims.”

She bristles. “The presence of whims would require a prior interaction that shapes it.”

“Does it? I mean, I don’t believe in that ‘love at first sight’ crap but the existence of such narratives makes a pretty strong case for love being just the brain trying to find ways to assign meanings—”

“Which still can be explained through a prior interaction because ‘love at first sight’ still requires some form of meaningful—”

“And there’s the idealist,” the professor says, nodding thoughtfully. Professor Pines continues, “I don’t really want to keep any of you any longer, so please make sure to read over the syllabus.” He pauses for a moment, glancing between the front and the back of the room. “I have a feeling this is going to be an interesting semester.”

Deidre glances around and sinks a little in her seat at the other students tossing looks between her and the boy from the party. When she looks back at him, he lifts a brow and takes a languid sip of his coffee.

~

“Don’t ask me about that,” Deidre snaps. “I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“That bad?” Riya snorts.

“He’s a douchebag! He actually tried to pull some bullshit devil’s advocate crap day one of the entire semester and he wouldn’t even tell me his fucking name at the party!” Deidre dodges a couple rushing out the dorm and ignores Riya’s cackling.

“I mean, he sounds pretty hot…”

“Riya!” Deidre yanks her phone away from her ear and glares daggers at it. Her teeth grind as Riya’s raucous laugh rings through the tinny speakers and she lets out a roar that has heads turning her way. “You’re being a bad friend!”

“You have a crush on him! Look—Deidre—”

“I’m hanging up on you. Hand to God, I will absolutely end this call right now—“

“Oh my god, stop being dramatic.”

“And of course he shows up ten minutes late to class with Starbucks in hand—didn’t even give a fuck about everyone staring at him or the fact that he chose to further disrupt everything by walking his—” She fumbles her keys at first but eventually jams the metal into the door, “—stupid—dumb!”

Ingrid sits up but Deidre only gives a small wave as she quite literally throws herself on her own bed. She puts Riya on speaker and tosses the phone on her nightstand.

“Dee?”

“Hey Riya!” Ingrid says. Her eyes dart between Deidre and the phone. “Everything okay?”

“Deidre’s got a crush.”

“Shut up.” Deidre rolls over and faces the wall. “There’s a douchebag in my class.”

Ingrid pauses for a long moment. “Like frat boy rich douchebag or just regular smegular rich douchebag?”

“She’s got budding sexual tension with a boy that’s probably as smart as she is.”

“Riya—” Deidre pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Oh, mood.” Ingrid readjusts her glasses. “If he’s as hot as the dude you saw at the frat party, I’ll be the first to say you should go for it.”

Deidre braces.

“Speaking of which—”

“Riya.”

“You wouldn’t believe it but it just so happens—”

“I’MHANGINGUPTHEPHONEGOODBYE.”

A profound silence hangs in the room like the most uncomfortable and bloated thing in the world. Ingrid keeps penning away on her notebook and occasionally peeks at the textbook lying open next to her. Deidre lets the silence fester as she gets up and digs through her bag, pulling out notebooks and textbooks to get started on her own work.

An hour passes before Ingrid speaks up. “Ohhhhh…it was the hot guy from the frat party, wasn’t it?”

Deidre pointedly ignores her.

~

Three hours and seventeen minutes. She times herself only because it’s necessary. Darius used to joke and say she was going “beast mode” when she got so into her work that time just stops existing as a concept.

Even if time stops existing, hunger doesn’t so it comes as no surprise that her tummy growls when she finally shuts her last textbook. Day one and she’s already diving deep—perfect. She stretches as she gets up and grabs her keychain.

The dining hall is something else entirely. A bevy of appetizing foods fill the buffet and even more is served by the dedicated cooking staff, of which are all chefs of significant renown if she remembers correctly from the online facilities tour.

Stepping through the doors almost feels like stepping into another dimension. Extensive wood finish fills in every panel of the floor, mahogany furniture with fine leather seats make up a sitting area, and ornate paintings hang on all the walls. Her stomach gurgles again when the smell of baked chicken wafts in her nose. Deidre makes a beeline towards wherever that smell leads her.

Rotisserie chicken, beans and rice, steamed vegetables perfectly seasoned, freshly prepared mango and passionfruit juice—

It isn’t even the most delectable thing from the kitchens: lobster bisque, the freshest produce, the most tender cuts of steak, oysters, and even more. Savory and sweet collide in a mesh of flavorful smells that sets her appetite from moderate to desperate. She swipes her card for her meal and carefully dodges students shuffling about the dining area.

“Oh, right…” she mumbles.

Seems like every person decided now was a fantastic time to get dinner. The dining hall is packed from top to bottom with students. Some sit in groups with textbooks and laptops out on the tables. Others sit off on their lonesome reading from books while absently shoveling spoonfuls in their mouths. There’s a group of extremely attractive girls that waltz past flanked by some fit boys all wearing identical shorts and boat shoes.

Deidre takes a few tentative steps forward and scans the room carefully.

There’s a butt in every seat. Some eyes dart towards her as she walks past but they don’t seem to mind her presence. Or maybe they just don’t care.

She finds an empty seat and moves to set her tray down when a girl clears her throat. The smile that spreads across the girl’s face is sickly sweet—she’s clearly not happy seeing a face trying to squeeze into such a big space and her eyes noting the simple style of Deidre’s fashion makes the smile spread a little wider.

“I’m waiting on some friends. Sorry,” the girl says, clearly not apologetic.

Deidre stares at her for a moment before shaking her head and turning back towards the packed dining hall. She starts her hunt anew when a hand touches her on the square of her back.

“Hey, Deidre, right?” She turns around and finds Brandon’s face. His gaze roams uncomfortably, where he looks she isn’t sure but she’s just as equally sure she doesn’t want him to do that. “Where’s Ingrid?”

“Uh, studying,” she says. “How’ve you been?”

He shrugs. “Day one, so nothing really exciting yet. How about you? First day of college going well?”

“Yeah, just—” She nods towards the full room, “—looking for a place to sit. I didn’t think so many people would be here.”

Brandon’s hand slides a little further up her back and there’s a pressure there that feels like he’s trying to guide her. Her feet lock in place even though her body sways and when she locks eyes with him, he’s staring at her like he’s trying to gauge his next move.

“You should come sit with me and my friends,” he suggests. He points out a table full of students with laptops sitting out. “We’re all STEM—engineering mostly. Ingrid said you were mechanical engineering, right?”

The whole reason she goes to that frat party is to try out new things as a young adult. Life here doesn’t have to be all about hitting the books, it’s about exploring and Ingrid attempts to give her that on the first night. Going back inside was for Ingrid’s sake then and for the remainder of the party, Brandon couldn’t seem to keep his eyes to himself. He wants to get to know her and she should try getting to know him but there’s just something so strange about this.

Her eyes dart around the room and a piercing gaze connects with hers.

The weird boy—the douchebag in the leather jacket.

He’s holding a book but he’s got it hovering over the table like he’s about to set it down. His gaze flits to Brandon behind her and he makes a subtle nod at the empty chair in front of him. He’s got his feet in it.

“Uh, actually…” Deidre steps away from Brandon and tries not to sigh in relief as his hand falls away from her back. She musters the best sheepish smile she can handle. “I just saw a friend! I’ll see you later!”

She wants to kick herself—she doesn’t want to see him again if she can’t help it. But it doesn’t matter now, getting away is all that’s important.

The weird boy moves his feet quickly and sits up in his chair. His gaze lingers on Brandon while she sits down and lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding in.

“Is he gone?” she whispers.

He doesn’t answer her for a while. Eventually, he leans back again and opens up his book.

“You’re good.”

Silence fills the void between them as he occasionally flips through his book. Her confused stare morphs into an annoyed glare and she digs into her food once it becomes clear he’s done his one good deed of the day. Savory food fills her belly bite after bite and she swears to try the fried plantains next time. It won’t be anything like how her mom used to make, she’s sure, but the thought fills her with a sense of nostalgia.

She wonders what her dad’s doing right now.

He’ll be getting ready for work soon. The three hour time difference is still something she hasn’t gotten used to just yet but he doesn’t seem to mind getting “good morning” texts at six o’clock.

She sighs—he’ll have to find something to occupy his time now that she’s gone. He’s truly alone this time around.

Deidre looks up and the weird boy is staring straight at her. She hates his look almost as much as Brandon’s.

“What?” she says around a mouthful of food.

“You keep making weird noises and I’m debating on whether or not I want to ask what’s up with you,” he responds.

“You just—” She swallows her food. “I’m fine. Thank you for letting me sit down.”

He keeps looking at her and she tries her best to pointedly ignore him. Every so often her eyes dart to the book in his hand—Mount Washington by James Ashton.

“What’s really up with you?” Deidre looks up at him. He shuts the book and sets it next to his already empty tray. He crosses his arms and leans on the table, subtly glancing over her shoulder. “You were way too chipper for an eight o’ clock in the morning elective so I’m assuming you’re either new to campus or...”

His lips quirk when she narrows her eyes.

“Or?” she asks, already aware of the answer. “I’m a ‘nerd?’ God forbid someone takes their education seriously around here…”

He shrugs. “You still haven’t said what’s wrong with you.”

She chews on a bit of chicken slowly before swallowing, eyes finally connecting with his again. His are black as the night and striking. There’s nothing wrong with admitting he’s handsome in a boyish way. He tilts his head and her face grows a little warm.

“I was thinking about my dad,” she finally says. “It’s been the two of us for a while and I’m wondering what he’s going to do now that I’m not home.”

A small silence hangs between them.

“Where you from?” he asks.

“LA.”

The boy snorts. “Bullshit.” She fixes him with a questioning look and he shakes his head. “I’m from LA. I knew Mar Vista sounded familiar—you went to that prep school. State of the art or some shit.”

“It wasn’t all that, I promise you. Where’d you go?”

“Just a little further north—H.H. Huntington. Public school though, so nowhere near as fancy as what you got.” His face softens a bit though not nearly by much. “I left my mom back home but she’s had a year to figure out the benefits of having a house to herself by now. Your old man will get there soon.”

There’s a part of her that can’t help but think it’s a little sweet that his hard gaze softens further at the mention of his mother. Babies all grown up and flying out the nest is how their parents will see them. She wonders if her dad will even recognize her when she comes back—wonders if the boy’s mother has already accepted the young man that now walks through the doors when he comes home.

“You seemed pissed about earlier today.” His voice brings her back and she stabs at a piece of broccoli.

“In class, you mean,” she clarifies.

“Studious types—you can’t stand being wrong.”

“I wasn’t wrong—”

“And neither was I,” he interrupts. His eyes dart over her shoulder once more and she turns a bit just to follow his gaze. Brandon sits over with his friends and turns the minute her body starts shifting. The boy drums his fingers on his arm. “You done yet?”

~

“You were valedictorian, weren’t you?”

Her brows draw. “Why?”

“Chipper for an eight o’clock and you’re scared about the semester already…” He glances back over his shoulder. “And I told you Langston doesn’t take average kids.”

The boy is so weird. Not weird like Brandon is, which is the kind of weird that makes a person want to double bolt their doors. He’s weird in the sense that there’s a constant game of hot and cold that seems to fuel his every word. He’s perceptive—he remembers her mentioning Mar Vista despite only speaking to her for a total of two minutes. The last time she speaks with him (prior to dinner), he prods at her like an asshole kid poking at a hornet’s nest. His ability to pick things apart is apparent and—

Her brain literally stops.

Langston is filled with money. Langston is money. Average students means average in status only and it’s an extremely competitive school to get into.

Deidre’s eyes rake over the boy—his face, the leather jacket, the backpack slung over his back, and the white motorcycle helmet he holds in the other hand…

“You were…” It’s like the wheels are turning and his gaze immediately meets hers.

“Go on,” he quietly urges.

“You were the valedictorian of your school,” she manages.

He cracks a smile that she can only describe as vicious—she’s not sure why. “Yeah, this semester is about to be hilarious.”

She bristles. “You’re a dick.”

He smirks like he’s proud of it. “I’m walking you home, aren’t I?”

Deidre scoffs and turns away. Day one and she’s regretting some of her decisions already. 

“I don’t even know your name,” she says.

“I don’t know yours either.”

“I tried to ask you at the frat party and you just blew me off,” she counters.

The boy shrugs. “My roommate wrapped up her date and I didn’t want to waste any more time. I guess I could tell you now but it’s way funnier thinking your name is...” A wicked smirk spreads across his face.

She looks at him. “Is what?”

“Stacy,” he says and laughs at the indignation on her face.

“It’s Deidre.”

“Or Becky,” he keeps prodding. “But ‘Deidre’ is nice. I bet people say it right.”

She sighs. “The first time, sure. But then they see the face that goes with the name and it’s impossible to get them to do it again.”

He goes quiet for a second. “Colt. And, no, it’s not short for anything. My last name’s the one that gets butchered though, but I’m not telling you that.”

Colt. His name is “Colt.”

“I prefer thinking of you as ‘the weirdo’,” she teases.

“Most girls save that kind of talk until after the first date.”

Deidre sucks her teeth.

“You think you can get away with things because you’re a smartass,” she bites.

“No, I get away with it because I’m cute. But if you want to go head to head over this, I won’t stop you.” Colt stops—they’ve reached the halfway point across campus. She looks up at him and feels one side of her brain wrestling with the other in the form of an oncoming headache. They stand there awkwardly (mostly on her part) until he nods down the path leading to her dorm. “Be careful, alright?”

So strange—one minute he’s a smartass and the next he’s being a white knight. Deidre wraps her arms around herself and nods.

“See you on Thursday…” She says, turning down the path. A quick glance over her shoulder and he stays rooted there until she gets a safe enough distance across the quad.

[96thdayofrage]

Researchers modeled the impact of structural racism on viral transmission and disease impact in the state of Louisiana.

The higher burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection among Black people also amplified the virus's spread in the wider population.

Reparations could have reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the overall population by as much as 68 percent.

Compared with white people, Black individuals in the United States are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, more likely to end up in the hospital with COVID-19, and more likely to die from the disease.

Civil rights activists have long called for monetary reparations to the Black descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States as a financial, moral, and ethical form of restitution for the injustices of slavery.

Now, a study led by Harvard Medical School researchers suggests reparations could also have surprising public health benefits for Black individuals and the entire nation.

To estimate the impact of structural inequities between Black and white individuals, the researchers set out to capture the effect of reparation payments on the Black-white wealth gap in the state of Louisiana.

Their analysis, published online on Feb. 9 in Social Science & Medicine, suggests that if reparations had been made before the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the state's overall population could have been reduced by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent.

The work was done in collaboration with The Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

"While there are compelling moral and historical arguments for racial-injustice interventions such as reparations, our study demonstrates that repairing the damage caused by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racism would have enormous benefits to the entire population of the United States," said study senior author Eugene Richardson, assistant professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.

The disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on racial minorities—Black individuals in particular—have been well documented. Black people get COVID-19 at a rate nearly one and a half times higher than that of white people, are hospitalized at a rate nearly four times higher, and are three times as likely to die from the disease, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The greater disease burden among Black people has caused tremendous loss of life and unspeakable suffering across these already vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Notably, these effects have also spilled over and are driving transmission rates of the virus in the overall population, the study authors said.

Addressing the structural inequalities at the roots of this disparity through monetary reparations would not only radically decrease the impact of COVID-19 among the people who received reparations, the authors said, but would reduce the overall toll of the disease on a broader scale, benefiting the entire population.

The findings, the researchers said, powerfully underscores the truly global nature of the pandemic and the notion that a society is only as strong as its most vulnerable members.

"If we extrapolate these results to the entire United States, we can imagine that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared, and the entire nation would have been saved much of the hardship it has endured in the last year," said Richardson, who is also the chair of The Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

For their analysis, the researchers paired sophisticated data analytics and computational tools with commonly used epidemiologic modeling methods to calculate the impact of structural racism on infection rates among Black and white populations in Louisiana. They chose Louisiana as an exemplar of the impacts of structural racism in the U.S. because it was one of the few states that reported infection rates by race in the early stages of the pandemic. For a control group, the researchers chose the relatively egalitarian population of South Korea.

The researchers noted that although modeling is used to understand many factors in the spread of an infectious disease, such as differences in infection risk based on whether passengers on a train sit with windows open or closed or individual variations in mask-wearing habits, it has rarely been used to capture the effects of social factors that can create vast disparities between populations, such as those seen between Blacks and whites in the U.S.

Richardson's recent book Epidemic Illusions explores the ways conventional epidemiology is constrained from proposing solutions that address the root causes of health disparities derived from the combined weight of centuries of racism, imperialism, neoliberal politics, and economic exploitation. One of the goals of the paper is to challenge the narrow ways people who work in medicine and public health measure and think about problems and solutions and to broaden the public imagination, thus opening new conversations about what challenges and opportunities are worth considering in global health and social science, Richardson said.

The study examined the initial period of the outbreak, before infection control measures were implemented, so any differences in infection rates between populations at that time would have been driven mainly by differences in the social structures, the researchers said.

For example, Louisiana has a population heavily segregated by race, with Black people having higher levels of overcrowded housing and working jobs that are more likely to expose them to SARS-CoV-2 than white people. In comparison, South Korea has a more homogenous population with far less segregation.

To probe how such structural inequities impact transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers examined infection rates over time for the first two months of the epidemic in each location. During the initial phase of the outbreak in Louisiana, each infected person spread the virus to1.3 to 2.5 more people than an infected individual during the same phase of the outbreak in South Korea, the analysis showed. The study also showed it took Louisiana more than twice as long to bring the early wave of the epidemic under control as South Korea.

Next, the researchers used next-generation matrices to gauge how overcrowding, segregation, and the wealth gap between Blacks and whites in Louisiana could have driven higher infection rates and how monetary reparations would affect viral transmission.

The model showed that greater equity between Blacks and whites might have reduced infection transmission rates by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent for every person in the state.

This research comes at a time when many Americans are already thinking about the larger societal costs of structural racism, the researchers said. They noted, for example, that the nationwide movement to protest police brutality against Black people has been fueled by many of the inequitable outcomes exemplified so painfully by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

"This moment has made it possible for a lot of people who had no reason to think about these inequalities to be very aware of them," said study co-author and Lancet reparations commissioner Kirsten Mullen, who was a member of concept development team for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Anti-racism in action

Richardson said that the research was designed to explore how reparations payments might have altered the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. and how a different response to the disease could have helped mitigate the disparities fueled by social conditions that are vestiges of slavery. Such conditions, Richardson noted, include ongoing discrimination and structural racism in the form of redlining, overcrowding, over-incarceration, and the heightened use of lethal force in policing experienced by Black people.

Richardson said that historian and anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi's description of the differences between racism and anti-racism were helpful in designing the study. According to Kendi, a racist policy is any policy that produces or sustains inequality or promotes the power of one racial group over another, whereas an anti-racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains equity between racial groups.

Richardson said that one important goal of the project was to attempt to harness the power of mathematical modeling for an anti-racist response to the coronavirus and beyond.

"When you look at a formula for transmissibility, it looks like an objective calculation," he said. "But where is lethal policing in that formula?"

Richardson noted that it was important to call attention to the systemic and structural elements of racism that can get lost in simplified models of disease.

What are reparations?

Mullen and study co-author William Darity, who recently published a book on reparations and have written in the press about the case for using reparation payments to fight COVID-19, defined reparations as a program of acknowledgement, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice. In this case, Mullen said, the atrocities are associated with periods of enslavement, legal segregation and white terrorism during the Jim Crow era, and racial strife and violence of the post-Civil Rights Act era, including ongoing inequities in the form of over-policing, police executions of unarmed Black people, ongoing discrimination in regard to incarceration, access to housing, and, possibly most important, the Black-white gulf in wealth.

Successful reparations programs include three elements: admission of culpability on behalf of the perpetrators of the atrocity; redress, in the form of an act of restitution; and closure, wherein the victims agree that the debt is paid and no further claims are to be made unless new harms are inflicted.

In this case, Mullen said, reparations would take the form of financial restitution for living Black individuals who can show that they are descended from at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S. and that they self-identified as Black on a legal document at some point during the 12 years prior.

The financial restitution is designed to help close the Black-white wealth gap. Darity noted that it is important to distinguish wealth from income. Wealth is how much you own, and income is how much you earn. Greater wealth translates to greater stability for individuals and families across time. Greater wealth is also more strongly associated with greater well-being than greater income, Darity said, and disparities in wealth manifest as health disparities.

"Wealth is more strongly associated with familial or individual well-being," said Darity, who is the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University and a Lancet reparations commissioner. He noted that, according to the Federal Reserve Board 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, the average Black household had a net worth $800,000 lower than the average white household, and that Black people, who represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, only own 3 percent of the nation's wealth.

"This dramatically restricts the ability of Black Americans to survive and thrive," Darity said.

To assess the effect of reparation payments on the trajectory of the pandemic, the researchers based their calculations on a model that would pay $250,000 per person or $800,000 per household to descendants of enslaved individuals—one of several proposed reparation models.

Every transmission is a social transmission

"Every transmission has a social cause," said study co-author and Lancet reparations commissioner James Jones, associate professor of Earth System Science and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

For a brief moment when AIDS was in the spotlight during the late 80s and early 90s, people interested in social behavior became interested in mathematical modeling of disease, Jones said. While that interest largely waned, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the need to think about social science, inequality, social structure, behavior patterns, and behavior change, as well as how they fit together with how we understand and respond to epidemics, Jones said.

Even the simplest model must account for a rudimentary social structure, Jones said. At its most basic, this can be represented with a generalized estimate of how likely an infected person is to come into contact with a susceptible person. He explained that this number, R0 or "R-naught," is the average number of people an infected individual transmits the virus to. When R0 is less than one, no epidemic is possible because the number of people infected decreases. When R0 is greater than 1 an epidemic is possible. R0 also determines the total number of people who could potentially become infected or how many people would need to be vaccinated to end the epidemic. It can also be used to calculate the so-called endemic equilibrium—which determines whether a disease will continue to exist within a population, simmering constantly in the background or bubbling up seasonally, like influenza.

"That's the theory of infectious disease control in a single parameter," Jones said.

That seeming simplicity can make it hard to focus on the complex ways that infectious diseases move through the real world, the researchers said.

"It's important to highlight that R0 is not simply a function of the pathogen," Jones said. "It's a function of the society." Social and environmental factors like mobility, segregation, and the nature of the built environment help determine rates of infection, he said.

This is one important reason that diseases don't hit all people the same. Global R0 is an average of very different R0s for different groups of people. Some groups are more likely to interact only with members of their own group, some groups are more likely to come in contact with infected people, and some are more susceptible to the disease for other reasons, Jones said.

In this case, the researchers used mathematical models to help understand the differences in R0 for Black people and white people in Louisiana and to help think about how things would change if racism were less prevalent in America.

Absent those interventions, the researchers noted that Black Americans remain at an elevated and inequitable risk of becoming infected and dying during the COVID-19 pandemic and that this inequity will continue to fuel the pandemic for all Americans.

"Increasing equality would have huge benefits on infection rates for everyone," said co-author Momin Malik, who was a data science postdoctoral fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University at the time the study was conducted.

[lecognito]

When Consent Goes Haywire

I recently came across a phenomenon called “flirting without consent”. For anyone in the 21st century, consent has become a hot word, but this concept appeared to me like the bastard child of a movement with good intentions. 

There’s no denying that there’s a history of men “crossing the line”, and while we can rail on men for not “teaching children properly” or setting a good example, it’s just not that simple. 

Ok, for the record, rape and assault are inexcusable. The reality is that sometimes consent is set aside and men openly violate a conduct of trust and a communication of trust (i.e. a no means no). But sometimes it’s not that, and there’s more to understand. Sometimes, a woman says no but is less insistent on that no. Sometimes a person goes along with what’s happening only to feel some sort of perceived injustice after the fact, but not during. And it’s moments like these that have proven this decade to be a confusing whirl of legalities regarding consent. 

This isn’t to blame women or to defend the men who have clearly crossed a line and that’s not the purpose of this article. It just means there are more factors to consider before coining a concept like “flirting without consent” because there are deeper implications something like this has on future interactions. 

Before I get into it, let me just say I GET IT. I get why this concept exists. But can we understand that flirting is an ORGANIC and NATURAL part of human interaction? It’s part of social intelligence--picking up on if someone is responding to your advances or not. It’s a way we let someone know we’re interested and a way we gauge the level of interest that someone may or may not have in us. Put guard rails on this organic process and very quickly you lose a lot of what romance and courtship is about, which in turn makes men seem inherently awkward, boring, and stale when that’s the bag of tricks that was given to them.

Of course things get tricky with flirting. Some people don’t have good social intelligence and don’t read social cues very well. And that makes things vastly more complicated. Add to that the fact that everyone’s experience of romance and courtship can be drastically different and that everyone’s preferences are different. There are women who preach that guys “need to be more aggressive” and welcome the bad boy attitude, there are some who like to be the one who leads, and then there are those who like to set clear expectations. Tone of voice during a conversation, body language, and the level of relationship that two people have all come into play. At the end of the day, everyone falls on a different part of that spectrum of experiences which informs their decisions, their ability to pick up on social cues, and how they perceive a given action or inaction. In short, things become exponentially more complicated. Oh, and that’s not even including whether or not they’ve had drinks.

The need for some sort of structure is understandable. But consent to flirt is not that. A structure like consent to flirt is essentially a form of gatekeeping—a way to justify swiping left IRL just because you think you’re not interested. We can agree that there are some things that are clearly over the line, vulgar, and inappropriate. That’s what we as a society have termed, “harassment” and “sexual harassment”. Both are obviously wrong, and consent to flirt tries to wrap the idea of harassment under the gallant flag of “transparency”. Really, it’s like slapping a Smart Water label on a bottle with your normal house tap water—it’s a gimmick, a fluffy phrase, while providing no clarity to the confusion of consent. 

Bear with me here with what I think could be the worst case scenario, but with something like consent to flirt, a girl could sue a guy who came up to her at a bar and gave a compliment to strike up a conversation. You could argue that even a positive comment that was stripped of any sort of sexual or inappropriate intent was perceived by the woman as “crossing a line”. That’s how romance dies. That’s how courtship becomes a bureaucratic, robotic transaction that deems your advances appropriate or inappropriate based on whether or not you have “premium” features. Again, probably the worst case scenario.

Even so, the question remains, how can you really know if someone isn’t right for you? Feelings change. Perceptions change. And consent to flirt destroys that opportunity for learning and discovering aspects of a person you would’ve never expected to see or know. This isn’t to say that we can’t form judgments about a certain person because in a way, that’s inevitable. 

When we get down to it, what a concept like “flirting with consent” and consent in general seems to reveal about the heart of our broader culture is the desire to set intentions and expectations. Why do celebrities get into problems with consent? Why does anyone get into a problem with consent? Precisely BECAUSE no one knows when or where consent is necessary. You might be saying to yourself, it’s simple: no means no. Consent seems like a very obvious thing when you put it strictly in terms of “no means no”. It’s a good rule of thumb to go by, but realistically as we’ve seen, a variety of factors complicates even a simple construct. 

So what do we do? How do we mend this broken system? We need a simple construct where consent is already implied. What is that construct? The oldest form of love, courtship, and romance in the books: marriage. I know what you might be thinking, but hear me out. 

Call it the idealized form or what it should be, but marriage is a covenant, a promise between two people who have essentially AGREED in the presence of witnesses, to being with each other. Keyword: AGREED—from the very beginning of anything happening. Within this covenant is a sense of trust. You have roles, you know who the other person is, and you know what to expect within this relationship. But let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean one person can do whatever they feel like or that they’re entitled to the other person in any sense. It doesn’t mean one person loses their individuality or their autonomy. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of bad things happening--they still do. It’s just that when it comes to the issue of consent, there are certain things that aren’t totally uncalled for. 

Marriage maps out and clears out the murky forest of consent. You can be flirtatious, you can be suggestive, you can have intercourse—because you both agreed to it! It doesn’t mean you can’t get uncomfortable about certain things but you still have that sense of TRUST that allows you to express that discomfort openly, safely, and unabashedly. That trust and that relationship takes you so much farther with someone you know and love than with a complete stranger, where it may be awkward to voice a concern at the risk of appearing inexperienced or being a mood killer. 

But doesn’t this agreement exist already even without marriage? Aren’t there plenty of extramarital relationships that demonstrate that level of agreement? Isn’t that what consent is all about? Yes, our culture of sexual freedom and companionship have applied the blueprint of  marriage to relationships without the words and the paperwork of marriage. Yet that’s where it falls short--the lack of a proper covenant. The very existence of millions of relationships in this moment is dependent on a commitment that isn’t real. Sure there’s a verbal recognition of some sort of feeling of commitment but that’s all it is: a feeling. And for anyone with an inkling of experience in a relationship, feelings can and do change. If that’s the case, then commitment can change. 

Marriage brings into focus a certain expectation, which is that while your feelings can change, your commitment shouldn’t. That’s the point of making vows to one another and that’s the point of “til death do us apart” even if many would consider it just an antiquated trope that romantics and movies say. Some might say that there shouldn’t be any labels on a relationship and that love is love. Sure, but is love only love when you feel like it? Shouldn’t it go beyond just a purely personal emotional satisfaction? 

None of this is meant to be accusatory towards extramarital relationships or to say that marriage is the cure-all. It is however, to draw attention to the idea that “labels” if you will, help us know exactly what something is and know what to expect from it. You don’t look at a strawberry and say “I don’t like putting labels on it,” because then it becomes very difficult to describe what to do with a strawberry. Do you eat it? Do you use it as ink? Do you throw it like you would a baseball? On that note, labels help you understand what to expect: what you get from a strawberry is very different from what you get with a strawberry milkshake, a strawberry smoothie, or strawberry milk. Without a name for a strawberry or any produce for that matter, the produce aisle would be chaos.

Sure, a strawberry is not a relationship. But the same logic applies—relationships have the potential to be utter chaos without the label. A boyfriend or girlfriend who runs off is theoretically off the hook. A label-free relationship can invite multiple people into it and people do. But it breeds a nebulous and subjective ground of emotions and expectations that can’t be adequately expressed or fulfilled. In other words, there’s no consistency. And when there’s no consistency, what can and can’t be done can change. It’s your word against theirs. It’s your feeling against theirs. 

That “label” of marriage gives a greater sense of security. It helps us to know that the intimacy that happened the night before wasn’t “a mistake”. It gives us emotional fulfillment and the expectation of that fulfillment. It doesn’t leave us hanging in the wind. 

No, this is not a call to get married and this is not a judgment on anyone on how they pursue relationships. It’s to address and contemplate why our culture (and most probably the entire world) struggles with consent. Consent to flirt doesn’t make things any easier or any clearer in that struggle. In fact, it moves in the opposite direction of what we need. It cripples the creation of organic relationships and enables an even more confusing set of rules under the guise of honesty and transparency. Consent as a whole is crucial, but pursuing it and being an advocate for it requires us to exercise caution with careful consideration of the words we attach to it. No matter our zeal, we can’t push for it blindly. Specificity is important, but not all specificity serves to clarify.

[heironymous-smash]

…And nope, I'm not referring to oral sex.

CW:  Living in a puritanicalish society, this is one of the cool Life Truths I don't get to discuss very often, but screw it (heh), I'm here and I've gotta post something today.  This is knowledge I've earned through hard work and deliberate experimentation and long thought, so here it is.  And yes, to be explicit (lol), as the title indicates, this post contains information about sex.

If you hate reading about sex, then by all means skip this (there'll be another post tomorrow!)

…But if you hate reading about sex because you feel like it should be "automatic", a thing that just flowers out of a crush or a date and then, y'know, happens, be aware that in this post, I'm declaring that you're BAD AT SEX.

—

I'll keep the backstory short here so as not to embarrass either of us, but it's relevant to know that I've put two decades of conscious experimentation into sex — at least as much work, writing, and trying things as I've put into sleep.  And I had reasons for this — I was really screwed up initially, given SO much bad information and some early non-consentual encounters that messed me up about it badly.  And when I determined to "fix it" by figuring it out on my own, I found that I had to change and challenge a lot in order to find what "good sex" even was. 

And what I found is what's in the title:  You can absolutely gauge whether anyone, yourself included, is good at sex based on how well they use their mouths — or hands, if they use ASL — i.e. how comfortable and willing and experienced they are at communicating about sex with someone they'd like to have (or are having or have had) it with.

I've reached an age where sometimes teenagers ask me about sex — I probably make a good target because there's grey in my hair and I'm not afraid of swear-words, nor has a sex question from a kid ever shocked me.  In truth, I'm way more shocked at how many adults can't summon the wherewithal to answer simple questions you'd think they know by now.  Questions like "how do I do this right / avoid doing it wrong?"  That your standard adult answer sounds something like "don't do it" or "stop thinking about it" strikes me as violently absurd, and also harmful, since avoiding thinking about sex is one of the real fast roads towards being awful at it, and potentially hurting yourself or others.

Sex is not an emotionally safe activity, just like rock-climbing isn't a physically safe activity.  That's why we have safety gear, and why smart people require that you have a basic amount of training and awareness of what you're doing in order to participate in it.  We don't want children to have sex because they're too young to do it safely, but once their bodies are ready and they've developed an interest in it, you'd think we'd give them the tools to do it right and as much advice as we could.  But we suck at this.

Rather than talk about why, though, I want to just go ahead and give the advice — yes, the advice I give to teenagers and adults alike, and which, by the way, kids are perfectly capable of understanding.  (The adults are too, but many of them really don't like knowing that they're doing this wrong and need to work harder at it.  There's a myth out there that adults magically get their Sex Card sometime in college and from then on out get to claim to be good at it.  Yeah well, HA to that.)

—

THE BASIC SKILL of sex — for you tabletop fans, the stat you roll for it — is COMMUNICATION.  It happens and matters first, and during, and also after and in-between.  Being good at it gets you laid, makes you better during the act, and makes you a better lover to have, and to have had.  Here are some (just some!) of the ways this manifests:

  1. You let people know that you're interested in sex, and ready for it.  (I tell teenagers, "If you aren't sure if you're ready for sex yet, imagine being naked in a room with this person and talking to them about sex — what you want to do and don't, what your body's needs and desires are — and if you can't stomach the embarrassment and vulnerability of that conversation, you're definitely not ready.") 

Also, I'll say this here but it applies to all these points:  Doing this is sexy.  It turns people on.  If you don't have as much sex as you'd like…have you tried fucking communicating about it??

2.  You seek and listen to information from the other party(ies) about what they're interested in and ready for, then you confirm for both of you that activities X and Y are things you both have overlapping interest in and readiness for.  (Note that this requires being aware of what you're ready for and interested in!  Knowing this about yourself is a prerequisite, though it's true that maybe you don't know the details until you're right there contemplating it with someone — our interests definitely change by circumstance.  So not only do you need to know your basic yes-and-no's; you also should, especially by the time you're an adult, be able to feel what they are on the fly, at that moment.  And if you have the slightest worry about your ability to do this, never, ever have sex drunk/high, because drugs inhibit this part of your brain.)

3.  Once you're touching each other, you feed data back and forth, through words, noises, muscle-tension, facial expression, etc. about what is pleasurable and "working" for you, and what isn't.  If the more subtle communication methods are confusing (common when someone's new to you, but happens all the time), you back up to using words to make sure.  You do this because you know that going slowly and taking communication-breaks is FAR preferable to (and sexier than!) hurting or squicking each other. 

4.  After Stuff has been Done, you check in — at least once, more if you're awesome — and share thoughts about how it went, how it felt, and what you both might be interested in doing later/again. 

—

It's astonishing to me how many people — sometimes people who've been having, or trying to have, sex for years — think these steps are somehow optional or unimportant.  That's like saying your ropes are unimportant in climbing!  It IS the cultural narrative, I get it — in the movies (romantic or porn or anything in-between), you rarely see these parts happen.  The "ideal sexual encounter" we're fed involves some kind of telepathy or accident that makes everyone magically consent to and express their enjoyment of things; total strangers are assumed to have completely understood each others' needs based on a single glance and a tiny moan.  (And I won't harp on this, but so as not to skip acknowledging it:  The root of that icultural story is in misogyny; it almost always goes badly for the woman — whose job in that automatic script is to "give in" to what the man wants — and it's one hair away from real rape, though which gender(s) are taken advantage of can change in any particular circumstance.  Seriously though?  The opposite of rape is consent.  And the basic requirement of consent is communication!  THIS ISN'T HARD. :P)

The idea that good sex will happen automatically, without clear communication, is just about as smart and realistic as how guns in movies never need reloading, never make anybody standing next to them go deaf, and kill you instantly only if you're a bad guy.

The above four things are SKILLS, yes — you need to do them and pay attention to them, and as you do so more, you'll get better and faster and more artistic about their execution.  (And oh man, th higher / artistic levels are FUN, I assure you.) 

They do NOT happen automatically, or as a magical result of your pheromones.  I don't care how good your phereomones are, or how attractive your face or whatever is.  Those things do not produce good sex — good communication, and that alone, does.

And by the way, like anybody new at a skill, I used to get super nervous and kinda hate the experience of doing them — it was scary, especially when it didn't go great.  But after a while, I got comfortable with them, and now, I love doing them — I even love doing them first — because they tell me immediately if the person I'm considering bonking with is going to be any good at it.  By cultivating those skills, I not only made myself into a universally-lauded Good Lay (what; it's my blog; if I can't brag about that here then where can I), but it also gave me an iron-clad system for knowing when it'd be better to just politely say no and avoid an unpleasant experience with someone:

If they can't overcome their embarrassment to talk with me about sex, they 100% cannot have good sex with me.  OMG the amount of bad sex I've avoided just by making "you must be able to talk about it" my rule!  \o/

If they keep looking for an "automatic progression" of things instead of checking in with me about what we're both into, ::BUZZER NOISE::

If they're clearly not watching for or interpreting my reactions (and pausing to ask me if they aren't sure what they mean), hell to the nope.

If they refuse to tell me what they want (yup, this happens), there's the door.  (I'm not going to sully my excellent pants-reputation with sub-par encounters with people who clearly can't dance. :P)

Sex sometimes happens according to an unspoken social script, sure.  You both have some drinks…you lean in…you kiss…you grope…you fondle…you remove clothing…etc etc…but I will stand by my assertion that GOOD sex almost NEVER happens this way — especially not more than once!  (If you have enough drinks or don't have much experience with really good sex, you could interpret that automatic BS as "good enough", sure.  But you'll get sick af of it, if repeated, precisely because it isn't involving what you actually want at all.)

—

In closing, it's amazing to me that people of all ages will buy books and read articles and ask eager questions about, like, what specific geometric shape they should make with their tongues at what speed for what duration in order to "please their partner", but when told that the answer is talk to, pay attention to, and check in after with your partner, they screech like vampires given a garlic sandwich.  Dude, that IS sex.  Asking and noticing and clarifying and responding to another person's body IS SEX. 

If that's too difficult or embarrassing for you, for all our sakes, don't have sex.  If you do, you'll just be awful at it.

If you're lucky enough to be trying it with me or someone like me, you'll at least know you're awful at it, and probably not get very far before you get told to go home — and that's a huge boon for both parties, believe me.  What's really saddening is when "you", whoever you are, try it with someone else who doesn't know about this, and who thinks the way to do it is to let you fumble around and use them to get off on, and then they have to deal with that suuuuuuuper gross feeling the next day of having had really terrible, impersonal, uncommunicative genital-play (I won't even call it sex, frankly) … that makes me upset just to contemplate.  So if this rather revealing post does nothing but save one person from that experience, it was worth it!

Happy f****** !  :D

[patriotsnet]

How Many Gay Republicans Are There

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-gay-republicans-are-there/

How Many Gay Republicans Are There

List Of Lgbt Politicians In The United States

How Many GOP State Senators Are There, Adam?

This is a chronological list of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politicians who have held office in the United States. Historical figures are included only if there is documented evidence of an open queer identity.

Most out LGBT politicians in the U.S. are part of the Democratic Party, which has taken a more favorable stance than Republicans towards LGBT rights.

Nbc Outcourt Orders Idaho To Provide Gender Surgery For Trans Inmate

Despite the backlash to the Trump endorsement, Charles Moran, the groups national spokesperson, told NBC News the group has no plans to rescind its support for the president as it was a universal decision determined by the board of directors and chapters.

When asked whether Henry was involved in the endorsement decision, Moran said he could not speak to that as he was not on the phone call during her resignation but that he and the board thank her for her service to the Log Cabin Republicans.

Henrys departure comes just weeks before the groups Sept. 17 Spirit of Lincoln reception in D.C. The annual event has typically included a dinner and reception featuring high-profile Republican attendees, but this year there will only be a reception.

Were seeing a lot of what I thought would happen: A lot of prominent leaders are leaving the group, Evans told NBC News. We need a Republican group that advocates for LGBTQ issues, but the Log Cabin Republicans have sent the message that this is not their priority.

While Democrats Take The Lesbian And Gay Community For Granted Donald Trumps Republican Party Is Delivering Real Results

Democrats are using their convention this week to tout their agenda for the next four years, including their promise to stand up for the lesbian and gay community. For years, Democratic Party leaders have taken for granted the lesbian and gay community along with other minority communities thinking they had no where else to turn. Those days are over.;

Ive fought for civil rights for gay Americans for the past four decades. Today, the Republican Party is delivering real results and leadership for our community:

It hasnt always been this way. For years, the GOP generally stood against the inclusion of gay and lesbian conservatives. As one of the Republican National Committees first openly gay members, and a longtime leader of Log Cabin Republicans, Ive worked tirelessly alongside many friends and colleagues to pull the party into the future. Today, thanks in large part to the leadership of President Donald;Trump, the party has delivered meaningful policy victories for gays and lesbians.;

He didnt abandon these principles when he assumed his position behind the Resolute Desk.;

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Log Cabin Republicans V United States

A lawsuit filed by LCR in federal court challenging the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which excludes homosexuals from openly serving in the U. S. military, went to trial on July 13, 2010, presided by Judge Virginia Phillips. LCR argued that the policy violates the rights of homosexual military members to free speech, due process and open association. The government argued that DADT was necessary to advance a legitimate governmental interest. LCR introduced several admissions by President Barack Obama, including that DADT “doesn’t contribute to our national security,” “weakens our national security,” and that reversing DADT is “essential for our national security”. Rather than address plaintiff’s claims or bring evidence to support their own claims of national interest, the government relied exclusively on the policy’s 1993 legislative history.

On September 9, 2010, Phillips ruled in favor of plaintiffs, finding that DADT violates the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

On September 29, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the district court’s decision, ruling that the legislative repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by President Barack Obama and the outgoing Democratic congressional majority in December 2010 rendered the case moot. The dismissal left the lower court ruling without value as precedent.

Support Metro Weeklys Journalism

These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet its crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So wont you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each weeks magazine , access to our Member’s Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!

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Hawaii And South Dakota

At the start of this election cycle, only three U.S. states Hawaii, South Dakota and Mississippi had no openly LGBTQ elected officials at any level of government. This year, candidates in Hawaii and South Dakota hoped to get their states off that list.

However, in Hawaii, Adrian Tam who upset a 14-year incumbent in the August Democratic primary for the state House of Representatives defeated Republican Nicholas Ochs, making him Hawaiis only openly LGBTQ elected official.

Why Dont They Support Gay Rights

The reason why gay Republicans dont argue for gay rights is that they dont need to care. They wont get subject to any physical attacks or abuses for being gay. For example, Peter Thiel is a rich Silicon Valley billionaire. He doesnt deal with homophobia because he can just buy out your company and fire you. Hell never be subject to a hate crime because he can afford private security. People like Guy Benson, while not a filthy rich billionaire, also have a lot of privilege. He looks straight presenting, so he wont get harassed by strangers for being gay.

When you become rich and privileged enough, the problems that affect people in your situation completely disappear, and it allows you to not care about the issues that pertinently affect your community.

Whether people like them or not, gay Republicans will still exist, but they need to stop taking credit for advancing gay rights because they never did.

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Poll: Large Majorities Including Republicans Oppose Discrimination Against Lesbian Gay Bisexual And Transgender People By Employers And Health Care Providers

Half Say Society Hasnt Gone Far Enough in Accepting Transgender People

Large majorities of Americans think it should be illegal for either employers or health care providers to discriminate against people because they are lesbian, gay or bisexual, or transgender, a new KFF poll finds. This includes large majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats across a range of questions about such discrimination.

The poll gauges the publics views following two major developments this month that move in opposite directions on LGBTQ protections. First, the Trump administration finalized regulations removing protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in health care, arguing that the definition of sex does not extend to either. Then last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that gender identity and sexual orientation are protected under the definition of sex discrimination in the workplace.

The poll finds:

9 in 10 in ten adults agree with last weeks Supreme Court ruling, say it should be illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire people because they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual or transgender .

About 9 in 10 say it should be illegal for doctors or other health care providers to refuse to treat people because they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual or transgender .

85% say it should be illegal for health insurance companies to refuse to pay for health care services for people who are transgender.

Other findings include:

Topics

Gay Republicans Explain Why They Are Proudly Supporting Donald Trump

The Gay Minority – How Many Americans Are Gay?

Trump was the GOP nominee to positively refer to the gay community at the RNC.

Gay Republicans Say Why They’re Supporting Donald Trump

— Charles Moran, a gay Trump delegate from California, was standing just feet from the stage at the Republican National Convention when he heard billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel give his now-famous speech.

Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican, Thiel told a cheering crowd at the RNC in Cleveland this past July.

Thiel made history that night as the first openly gay RNC speaker, and this week he doubled down on his Donald Trump endorsement, donating $1.25 million to his campaign.

Thiel sits on the board of , and so when many in the online community lashed out at him for supporting Trump, Facebook founder stepped in to defend him, writing in a post, There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault.

Moran said listening to Thiels speech was an incredible moment.

This is my Republican Party, Moran said. This is what I’m here for. This is the candidate I’m here to nominate. The guy who brings somebody like Peter Thiel to the deck and puts him up on stage — that’s my Republican Party.

As Trumps chances of winning the election appear to continue to drop in the waning days of his campaign, many gay conservatives, an unexpected segment of the Republican Party, are still backing him.

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Nbc Outtrump Applauds Poll Showing 45 Percent Support Among Gay Men

Kazmierczak called Trump a staunch supporter of gay people and their rights, but he said he makes a distinction when it comes to religious groups.

“He doesn’t want gay rights forced on religious institutions,” Kazmierczak said. “It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t support gay people. It means that to him, religious freedom is more important than social issues.”

Trump made a halfhearted effort to court the LGBTQ community in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. He called the massacre of 49 mostly LGBTQ people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that year an “assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”

At the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump swore “to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

And two days before Election Day, he grabbed an upside-down Pride flag inscribed with “LGBT for Trump” at a rally in Colorado and waved it around.

Once in office, however, Trump has consistently opposed LGBTQ rights from rolling back Obama-era nondiscrimination protections to banning openly transgender service members in the military. The national LGBTQ rights group GLAAD has accused the Trump administration of 181 separate attacks on the community since his inauguration.

President made history for #LGBT Americans and nobody knows that better than . #GetOUTspoken

LogCabinRepublicans

Women Young Adults Have Highest Estimations Of Us Gay Population

U.S. women estimate that about three in 10 Americans are gay or lesbian — the highest of any key subgroup, and much higher than men’s perceptions .

Meanwhile, average estimates of the U.S. gay population vary by age. Adults aged 18 to 29 offer the highest estimate , and adults aged 65 and older, the lowest .

Among political partisans, Democrats and independents estimate that about a quarter of Americans are gay or lesbian, while the average approximation among Republicans is a bit lower .

Even the groups offering the lowest average estimates of gays and lesbians in the U.S. exceed Gallup’s figure on all LGBT identification by about four times.

Mean estimate

Gallup, May 15-30, 2019

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Back Into The Wider World

After Bakers speech, the groups first female chairman, Sarah Longwell, announced the afterparty was at Nellies, a popular gay/sports bar with a weekend drag-queen brunch. You boys enjoy yourselves, she said, Ive got kids at home. Someone appeared in a skin-tight Make America Great Again dress and posed for photos in front of the Log Cabin logo with the dress designer; they were the most exotically outfitted attendees:

Online, Democratic critics unsheathed their knives. Your org has accomplished nothing in 40 fucking years as the GOP has gone from bad to worse to Trump on your watch, the activist and advice columnist;Dan Savage wrote;in response to a cheery tweet from Angelo celebrating the night. Go fuck yourselves Log Cabin Republicans, Savage wrote.

At the Mayflower, after a few minutes of post-speech;networking chatter, much of the room cleared out.

Outside the grand ballroom two women in pantsuits walked down the wide marble hallway from the party. They casually held hands for a moment, then unclasped as they approached the crowded lobby.

Next to the front door stood a group of men in well-cut suits in shades of charcoal. It was impossible to tell if they were they from the Log Cabin event or part of the Mayflowers regular carousel of business guests.

And that, the Log Cabin Republicans would tell you, is exactly the point.

Working For Lgbt Americans

In 2019, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced that pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences;Inc., would donate pre-exposure prophylaxis medication for uninsured, high-risk HIV individuals.

As part of the president’s Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America initiative, this medication, which could run up to as much as $20,000 per patient, per year, would be distributed to up to 200,000 individuals each year through at least Dec.;31, 2025.;

The Trump plan is focused on communities most in need and has received;support from those who have been involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

In similar fashion, Trump announced during Pride Month in 2019 that his administration was launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality. His leadership on this issue couldnt be more necessary;;even in 2020, 72 countries;still identify same-sexual orientation as criminal, including eight;where it is punishable;by death.;

This campaign was spearheaded by former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, an openly gay member of the administration who subsequently served as acting director of U.S. national intelligence, becoming the first openly gay Cabinet member in our history. In coordination with the United Nations, the European Union and other human rights organizations,;the campaigns goal is to pressure nations into ending homophobic laws, securing the safety and freedom of all LGBT individuals throughout the world.

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Lgbt Demographics Of The United States

This article is missing information about LGBT demographics in the U.S. territories. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.

The demographics of sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States have been studied in the social sciences in recent decades. A 2017 Gallup poll concluded that 4.5% of adult Americans identified as LGBT with 5.1% of women identifying as LGBT, compared with 3.9% of men. A different survey in 2016, from the Williams Institute, estimated that 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.

Studies from several nations, including the U.S., conducted at varying time periods, have produced a statistical range of 1.2 to 6.8 percent of the adult population identifying as LGBT. Online surveys tend to yield higher figures than other methods, a likely result of the higher degree of anonymity of Internet surveys, and demographic of those utilizing online platforms which elicit reduced levels of socially desirable responding. The U.S. Census Bureau does not ask about sexual orientation in the United States Census.

Burning During The War Of 1812

On August 2425, 1814, in a raid known as the , British forces invaded the capital during the . The , , and were burned and gutted during the attack. Most government buildings were repaired quickly; however, the Capitol was largely under construction at the time and was not completed in its current form until 1868.

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Trans Rights: A Perplexing Issue

Like many other gay conservatives, however, he seems to disconnect gay rights and transgender rights. Kabel recalled a recent article with a quotation from the conservative activist Tony Perkins that contrasted the Democratic and Republican platforms in 2016.

“The only issue Perkins raised was the transgender bathroom issue,” Kabel said. “And I thought, ‘That means we won.'”

Kabel called transgender equality “one of the most perplexing issues going.”

“Transgender people deserve support and protection just like anybody else, but it’s a very complex issue,” he said. “It’s remarkable when you hear their stories, but it’s just a very perplexing issue about how to really address it and do it so that they’re protected but other people aren’t hurt, so that people’s religious views are actually taken into consideration.”

Transgender visibility is all but absent in the Log Cabin Republicans, from their leadership to their messaging.

An OUTSpoken Instagram post compares the LGBT left to the LGBT right by putting an image of a person who appears to be transgender or gender-nonconforming next to a shirtless picture of former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, while the campaigns store sells T-shirts bearing slogans like “gay for Tucker” “gay for Melania” and “gay not stupid.

OUTspoken sent Brokeback Patriot, who has stated trans women are not women, to New Orleans Southern Decadence party to ask passersby if they think Trump is pro-gay.

[caitlyn1258]

Instructions to Use Goal Setting To Move Your 2018 Safety Program Forward

December has arrived and it's an ideal opportunity to take a gander at your wellbeing program for 2018. Witheverything you've achieved in 2017, what will move your program forwardfor 2018? At the point when I dealt with a quickly developing organization prior in my vocation, objective setting had a critical effect on the achievement. It constrained me to watch a lot farther into the future, imagine where the organization could proceed to make how we planned to arrive. Regardless of where you are today with your security program, pushing your program ahead is vital to bringing down laborers' remuneration claims, further developing worker wellbeing IQ ppe suppliers and having dynamic support in creating security culture. We should see 3 stages to consider when putting the 2018 objectives and plans together. Stage 1. Openly Assess Where You are Today Have a cycle to allude to, to move your wellbeing program forward. To push ahead, we need to see what has happened for this present year. Kindly don't hurry through this segment or become cautious regarding why an objective wasn't reached. Stay objective and utilize this data to learn and anticipate 2018. Be unbiased in what worked out positively, what turned out badly and focus on examples, great and terrible. Wellbeing Culture – Take a hard gander at where your security culture is today. The DuPont Bradley Curve is a valuable instrument to assist you with surveying or measure where your association falls along the curve.It characterizes a few phases of advancement in wellbeing society improvement, from receptive, to subordinate, to related to at last reliant. Pay attention to your chiefs just as representatives and measure if wellbeing enters their day by day language. The board Commitment to Safety – Gauge where your administration chiefs are in supporting wellbeing and security culture. Your appraisal ought to be prompt. In the event that you can't say in a second you have full help, you have your answer. Directors have an ethical commitment to protect individuals just as comprehend the roll wellbeing plays in bring down laborer's remuneration costs, expanded efficiency and decidedly influencing the main concern. Finished Training for 2017 – Assess worker preparing for 2017. What preparing were workers relegated and finished (gathering or person). What preparing worked out in a good way and where were representatives missed? Is it accurate to say that you were ready to prepare on every one of the themes you arranged? Were there seasons that were more hard to finish preparing than others? This is a target appraisal with regards to what security preparing was cultivated for 2017. Danger Analysis 2017 – Hazard examination is the place where perils are recognized, causes decided, and the measure of hazard decided. Were your key discoveries either controlled or relieved here and there? Provided that this is true, what were the achievement factors in getting them disposed of or diminished. Similarly, were there regions that were not tended to? What kept them from getting decreased or controlled? Survey your peril appraisal report, was it begun and not finished? Was it powerful in relieving perils that were recognized? Following and Measurement – Safety preparing and hazard relief ought to be benchmarked with the goal that you can follow whether progress is being made. How is your association getting along? Is it true that you are monitoring wounds, close to misses and peril moderation? Have you reported all the preparation and kept a participation sheet? OSHA needs to see archived confirmation of trainings. It is safe to say that you are ready for an OSHA inspection?Do you keep a month to month add up to of wounds? Cases that had lost time and clinical cases that were just clinical? Do you follow kinds of wounds and what caused wounds? These straightforward measurements can be your security gauge. These meaurements ought to be imparted to the executives, directors and workers. Step 2A. Distinguish Future Safety Goals for 2018 Progress is preposterous without change. Security Culture – Use the DuPont Bradley Curvementioned above as a benchmark, what could your gathering achieve before the finish of 2018? Remember an objective will take you and others outside a safe place and force some change. The objective of the Bradley bend is to move individuals from left to one side to diminish absolute wounds and have workers paying special mind to each other. Be explicit on what will influence change and get security associated with more discussions. Rundown two key 1-2 objectives. The executives Commitment to Safety – Are generally chiefs and managers energetic about security? If not, distinguish the failure points and look to decide the main driver or justification the absence of excitement to help the general vision to diminish wounds. Put forward your objective to get everybody ready for security drives or take them to a more elevated level. Distinguish 1-2 objectives to acquire absolute administration and director responsibility. Finished Training for 2018 – This is a region where you can be quite certain. Make your rundown and backing it with the reasons it is significant. A finished rundown needs administrator and chief purchase in. The better they comprehend the requirement for explicit preparing, the better they can uphold the drives in arriving at the organization objectives. Put forward one significant objective. Risk Assessment 2018 – Hazard appraisal is a continuous interaction from one year to another. You are either attempting to control a danger or attempting to relieve the peril. Put out your objectives to evaluate and address the perils in the working environment. Look for a more significant level of appraisal than in 2017. Any place you battled last year, put forward your objective to a more significant level whatever it or they might be. Following and Measurement for 2018 – Having great data in following ppe clothing past execution is foremost to gaining ground. Precise following and estimation assist us with assessing, control, financial plan, persuade, advance, celebrate, learn and improve. On the off chance that you don't have the foggiest idea where you've been, it's difficult to push ahead. In the event that there has not been following before, you currently have your benchmark. Have an objective to precisely and basically track every one of the four themes above so you can utilize this data to lay out 2019 objectives all the more precisely. Step 2B. Objective Setting Tips A generally famous objective defining measure is called SMART Goals. Brilliant is an abbreviation that you can utilize an aide for your objectives. Explicit (straightforward, reasonable, critical) Quantifiable (significant, spurring) Reachable (concurred, feasible) Important (sensible, reasonable, results-based) Time Bound (time sensitive, time restricted, time-touchy) There are numerous objective setting cycles and procedures accessible - discover an objective setting method that works for you and use it. Here are some key components I use as to objective setting: Save the aggregate sum of objectives for a task job/individual to close to 7 (research shows that a human can't deal with more than this) Record best ppe your objectives, be explicit, have them quantifiable and have a cutoff time Power yourself outside your usual range of familiarity and make them convincing Keep objectives apparent and known to all workers, report occasionally to outline progress Stage 3. Plan to Achieve Your Goals Since you've made your evaluations and defined objectives to move your security program forward, it's an ideal opportunity to foster an arrangement to make your objectives feasible. For every one of the objectives foster an arrangement. This is the place where the detail will come in. You might not have every one of the appropriate responses today as you make the arrangement, the arrangement is a continuous cycle to assist you with accomplishing the objectives. Foster 3-4 things that should be TRUE all together for your objective to be accomplished Recognize the hindrances in your manner Decide the extra assets you'll require (information, abilities, help, and so on) Decide your detailing rhythm to refresh progress and offer with the group When an objective is composed, identiify the following best activity, make that move, and gather speed simultaneously Offer the objectives 1 pager with the group Keepgoals infront of them with the revealing rhythm created above (to get everybody contributed) The key is to keep it straightforward and connect with the group, so security turns out to be important for the "estimation" culture. One final piece of exhort: when you get endorsement/close down, utilize this as a functioning record. Try not to put the arrangement on the rack and visit it next December. We should Bring this Together Use objective setting to give the system to move your 2018 wellbeing program forward. To lay out grand yet attainable objectives for 2018, there should be a target take a gander at 2017. What worked, what didn't and what progress was made in 2017. By understanding where you've been, you have the premise to defining objectives to where your wellbeing project can move for 2018. Pull a solitary archive plan together and appropriate it to every one of the directors. At the point when supervisors see the objectives, have an arrangement and are consistently refreshed on the advancement, they can more readily acclimatize the arrangement, support the arrangement and convey to their subordinates. Keeping objectives before administrators, managers and representatives and giving an account of the advancement will set wellbeing profound into the organization's way of life and make a more secure working environment so everybody can Get Home Safe.

[transcending-chaos]

Writing Religions 101

Okay, so I’m not just gonna bitch about this tonight, here’s a quick 101 on writing these things. This is one heck of a long post, but hopefully it’ll explain things well enough. 

CLASSIFICATIONS

There are measurements and rules as to what classifies/what is considered a religion, especially if you want to write an Organized Religion. As such, here are the definitions again, as well as what they entail:

Religion is a group of collected beliefs passed down either through generational storytelling, instruction, or conversion. These beliefs have significance, importance, and prevalence in the adherents’ society, social activities, personal lives, relationships, and world views

Basically, religions are (often) archaic or long-standing, established beliefs that have weathered the passage of time or transformed along with it. They spread via common story-telling, through writing, generational teachings, familial traditions, are have bearing in an individual adherent’s life in some form, even if it’s mild superstition. It is a cultural tool used to help inform a worldview, and teach the uninformed or uninitiated. Yes, this can be bad, and yes it can be good, but it needs to have impact that resonates with the masses- even if it’s contained to one area. The resonance and personal value is what quantifies it as a religion in the first place; yes this varies from person to person, but without that quality, validity, attachment, and lens to help view the world through, it is not considered a religion or faith.

If this sounds strange, that’s because you’re trying to measure and quantify feeling, emotional and spiritual attachment, and give it value to be measured by. It’s a hard thing to do, but it can be done. It’s the attachment of people and principles, their devotion, their community and connection with a cause and ideal that is bigger than themselves.

So, that’s the broadest definition I can give, now to the sub-categories.

Organized Religion is a religious structure, narrative, values, and set of beliefs specified in a formally established doctrine that has interpreters, leaders, and systems. These are post-literate, meaning written or containing documents, and can be read or translated.

Any religion with definitive text and interpreter (preacher, spiritual leader)

This means that the religion has been written down and there is a structure and format to the members. Be it a hierarchy with different tiers, a community with a single speaker who reads, defines, and provides context for the text, or a structure where people take turns, Organized Religions have to be organized. There are systems to keep order, often for the sake of keeping the message of the text clear and unified, and this is what allows Organized Religions to spread so easily when compared to their counterpart. They often have community outreach or influence, they have a tendency to be much larger than Folk Religions, as well as considered more ‘valid’ in the eyes of the law because of their prevalence and the beneficial value they bring to the masses.

Please note that Organized Religions do not always mean Theocracies, though if you’re going to make a believable theocratic structure, you might want to use this one because it’d be a larger threat.

Folk Religion is/are social concepts followed by groups of people often determined by old superstitions and regional practices.

This one is harder to define because it can be offensive or insinuate that a group’s customs or traditions are not a ‘valid’ religion. Everything from tribal religions, forgotten ancient customs that few still practice, to civil religions can be considered Folk Religion.

Folk Religions are like old wives’ tales that are specific to regions or smaller territories than Organized Religions, as well as not usually written down. These have a far greater emphasis on oral storytelling and generational teachings, and of the two, are the ones with more malleable symbols and structures, but ultimately the morals and messaging should reach the same conclusion. These tales are more like superstition, often subtle, and often very simple. Considering a black cat crossing your path as bad luck is an example, throwing salt over your left shoulder if you spill it is another. Heck, if a town has ghost stories that are shared and reiterated over generations, than that’s a form of Folk Religion.

Cult as a term used to refer to those devoted to certain sects of larger religions. (For instance those who were devoted to a certain Saint in Catholicism would be considered a cult, but they still followed the larger practices and doctrine of the Catholic teachings.)

New movements within larger religions were usually classified as cults before becoming established sects.

In the traditional sense, Cults really were just smaller facets of larger religions that were devoted to another god within a pantheon, a saint within the host, etc. Also, anything new or not established were considered cults, as they were not formally organized, as widespread, or long-standing as the other two types of religions.

In the modern sense, cults are groups that practice a predatory method of recruitment and extremist ideals. Cults can rise to the level of organized religions, but doing so takes great periods of time, devotion from followers, outreach, influence, etc.

WHY DO CLASSIFICATIONS MATTER?

Quite simply, it determines structure, influence, validity (as determined by law), acceptance by outsiders, and the gauge your characters’ faith will be measured by. These criteria are put in place so that no one can make up something and then just say it’s a religion to get out of doing something else or breaking a law; it’s a way of categorizing and verifying that something is indeed intrinsic to one’s way of life.

Religion *has* to matter to your world if you give it one; it must have impact in some way. Does this mean your character has to have faith? No, absolutely not. But if you mention religion or begin to hint at one, be prepared to at least write the basic ramifications/effects of it existing in your world.

WAYS RELIGION HAS IMPACT/THE ‘WHY’ OF HAVING RELIGION

Religions are forms of mythology, ways that were established to explain the world when people did not know much about it.

Religions pass down traditions and connect multiple generations of people

Religions can unify nations and create peace/community through common belief

Religions dictate morality, good conduct, bad conduct, and consequences for actions

Religions were used to maintain order during periods of great social change

Religions offered entertainment for the masses or distractions from hard work as most are filled with parables

Religions offer comfort, solidarity, and purpose to those who need/seek it (ie. ‘finding faith’)

These are all explanations of why we have religions to begin with; whether it’s an old mythology that was once used to explain the world, or a collection of stories that withstood the test of time and slowly was transformed into something greater, these are reasons we have religions today. You must have a why, be it because of people trying to make the world into something they could fathom, actual divine instruction/intervention, or something someone made up and established a long time ago to create an empire, there has to be a reason. There must be a catalyst: a prophet or leader, an event, an object, something that still holds great relevance and meaning in the current day and age.

If you want an old-world religion, then go with the myth, tradition, and morality reasons.

If you want a religion that’s being used to manipulate the way a certain group of people thinks and interprets the world (via a theocracy), then go the route of choosing unification, morality, maintaining order (to repress change), and comfort.

If you want more of a Folk Religion path, choose something more like morality and entertainment.

Yet whatever the case, keep in mind that in order for your religion to stay around in your world, it must have a redeeming value. This is why ‘comfort’ is on the list. People will ignore reason and fight for what makes them feel good. It’s a good scapegoat if you’re struggling to come up with other reasons. 

IMPACT AND SYMBOLS

Here is where you let your creative side go nuts. Because your religion has relevance to groups of people and their worldview, it’s obviously impacted how they interact with the world. Your doctrine can be as broad or specific as you like, but it needs to have bearing on the world and/or it’s people. THERE MUST BE EFFECTS.

Symbols can be anything, for instance:

Christian Symbols:

-Christian Symbols focus predominantly on morality and the superiority of God

--Depending on what sect is using the symbols, certain images and techniques are more common

--Typically triumph Christian morals and viewpoints but these change based on the sects

-God Conquers All narrative

-Crosses (St. Peter’s Cross, the Crucifix) -humility, sacrifice, martyrdom, faith, carrying the weight of one’s sins

-Saints, Humans -servitude, reward, dedication, devotion, the images of God

-Angels -protection, devotion, messengers/heralds, divine interaction

-The Color Red -blood of Christ, sacrifice, fire and brimstone, hell and damnation

-The Color White -innocence, purity, virginity, perfection, divinity

-Theme of Unity and Edenic Worlds

-Theme of Virtue over Sin and/or Hypocrisy

-Theme of Conversion

Pagan Symbols

-Spirals and Knotwork -Pantheism, connection to all things

-Elements -Nature is Holy, Nature is God/powerful

-Magic -Transformation is necessary and natural, everyone and everything has power and importance

-Animals

--Predators are representative of savagery and forces greater than man

--Prey are humility, representative of humans, and how even the seemingly insignificant have important roles

--Sacrifices to or embodiments of God(s)

These symbols are highly malleable and change through the years to keep their relevance, but this is a rough outline of some very basic concepts.

Ultimately, choose your symbols with care and relevance to your created faiths.

WHY HAVE RELIGIONS AT ALL IN A NARRATIVE?

Aside from being a way to increase the scale of conflict to unfathomable and ancient wars between the very embodiments of good and evil, it’s a very easy way to get morals across as long as you’re clear in your messaging. Religions are very personal beliefs that are transcendental from culture to culture, relating themes in a concise manner (parables), and are often very human -because they have to relate to humans (I mean, in our world at least). They exist to fill needs, and whether those needs have gone and past are up to you in your narrative. Once again, they are cultural tools used to help inform a worldview, and teach the uninformed or uninitiated.

The possibilities are endless, but treat them with care.

For instance Religions can impact:

-Arts: fashion/visual arts/music/poetry/writing

-Sciences: the progression of how fields go forwards/sponsoring new fields of study

-Humanities: social structures/hierarchies/types of (un)favorable behavior/values of society

Literally anything and everything can be affected by religion, entire societies rise and fall with it.

These are just the most essential elements you need to write something that qualifies as a religion in your works. The broadness of the terms gives you a lot of room to explore, but it has to have substance, meaning, relevance, and an effect. Remember, you’re trying to validate and quantify things that are, by nature, unquantifiable. 

[perfectirishgifts]

How Vanterra Capital’s Accelerator Fund Is Helping Early Stage Purpose-Driven Companies Scale And Grow

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/how-vanterra-capitals-accelerator-fund-is-helping-early-stage-purpose-driven-companies-scale-and-grow/

How Vanterra Capital’s Accelerator Fund Is Helping Early Stage Purpose-Driven Companies Scale And Grow

Naadam, a sustainable and ethical apparel company

Vanterra Capital’s Accelerator Fund (VAF) is a leading fund dedicated to helping mission-driven consumer companies scale and drive meaningful change with a particular focus on what they call ESY Investing (better for the Environment, better for Society, and better for You), a method that goes a step beyond ESG investing.

The fund, focused on venture-stage investments in the consumer, health & wellness, and technology space, sets itself apart from others by way of its active ownership in portfolio brands: aside from finding talented visionaries that are capitalizing on the current transformation shift in the marketplace, Vanterra makes it a priority to continuously build an ecosystem (which includes capital, resources, strategy and mentorship) around its entrepreneurs, even after onboarding them, that allows them to take actionable steps to transform great ideas into businesses that make meaningful impact.

I caught up with Shad Azimi, Managing Partner and Founder of Vanterra Capital to find out more.

Afdhel Aziz: Hi Shad, welcome! Please tell us a little about Vanterra Capital’s Accelerator Fund and why you decided to set it up?

Shad Azimi: With our private equity heritage, we have been investing in lower middle market businesses for over a decade. Several years ago, we started seeing the tremendous disruption being created by nimble, earlier stage companies in the consumer space. This was also being supported by the data we were seeing from our own portfolio companies suggesting that early stage startups were scaling quicker than ever and taking market share from larger incumbents.  The rapidly changing consumer landscape has allowed venture funded businesses to scale from zero to $100m in revenue in 3 or 4 years. This is not something that was possible 15-20 years ago.  The digital revolution has been fueled mainly by technology allowing brands to engage directly with their customers and the ability to use data to better understand their customer, improved logistics and infrastructure, and the social media boom and shift towards efficient marketing spend to these new channels.

Another major trend we saw was the increased interest in social impact investing.  In the past, there was a connotation that socially conscious companies were essentially charities with limited market demand and were not expected to make money.  This is not true anymore. I think consumer’s nowadays, particularly millennials, demand it.  And as conscientious investors ourselves, it was important to us as well.

Hence, we launched Vanterra’s Accelerator Fund to specifically focus on utilizing the firm’s unique capabilities to help earlier stage mission-driven consumer companies scale and drive meaningful change and impact. We believe this platform is filling a gap in the venture landscape, which is predominantly operated by “spray and pray” investors that do not necessarily add enough value post-investment. Through the Vanterra Accelerator Fund, we felt that we could bring our private equity playbook to the venture space.  

Shad Azimi, Managing Partner and Founder of Vanterra Capital

Aziz: Thanks for sharing that Shad. Please tell us about your unique ‘ESY’ Investing strategy?

Azimi: Our goal is to build an ecosystem around entrepreneurs that allows them to take actionable steps in order to transform great ideas into businesses that make a meaningful impact on this planet.   

Broadly speaking, VAF is focused on early stage consumer and consumer tech. Within those two verticals, there are two themes that excite us.  

The first theme is what we call the ESY category, or companies that build brands and sell products that are “Better for the Environment, Better for Society, & Better for You”.  We believe companies should bring products and services to consumers that are bettering their lives, making them healthier, and doing so in an environmentally sustainable manner while giving back to the communities that have helped them along the way. Research shows that sustainability is a critical factor in purchasing decisions for more than 55% of Gen-Z and Millennials compared to only 30% for Baby Boomers.  As these younger generations mature into the most important consumer demographic, brands will need to cater to their value systems around sustainability, or risk losing market share. 

The second theme that excites us revolves around companies that are capitalizing on the digital revolution. We love digitally native brands, and ultimately seek great products that we believe can succeed by scaling through an omni-channel strategy. Brands, now more than ever, can build strong relationships directly with their customers, gauge exactly what they want, and deliver to them. 

US consumers will spend $710bn on e-commerce in 2020, representing an increase of 18% year-over-year. While growth has sharply accelerated in 2020 due to COVID, e-commerce is expected to continue growing to $860bn in total sales by 2022, representing a 15.5% market share of total retail sales. E-commerce is only going to grow and younger consumers expect a strong digital presence. 

This is still a relatively new asset class.  Many people assume that social impact investing is very black and white; social impact investors evaluate a company and determine whether it’s doing good or not.  But we believe it’s more of an ongoing process. Even after we make an investment, we have to constantly iterate with the company to continue to ensure they are finding ways to be better.  We are constantly evolving and improving our model of doing this.  

Cleancult – green cleaning business that provides coconut-based cleaning products

Aziz: What are some of the companies in your portfolio that illustrate this approach?

Azimi: All of the companies in our VAF portfolio are omni-channel brands with a strong digital strategy. Our ESY angle is also a consistent theme as well: 

Naadam: One of our companies that I am very proud of is Naadam, a sustainable and ethical apparel company. Naadam goes straight to the source of the world’s best cashmere, Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, and works directly with herders to bring high-quality, sustainable cashmere clothing at prices that are fair for them and their customers. It’s a company that we backed early on and have continued to support it.  I personally sit on the board and have been actively involved.  It’s been a tremendous business success, but just as important, it’s been an embodiment of our investment thesis. What is especially unique about Naadam is that social impact is present in every single aspect of their business. Founded in 2013, Naadam has been committed to transparency, ethical practices, cultural preservation and environmental sustainability. The company even has a Social and Environmental Impact Report to formally outline its commitments and framework on people, product, planet and progress through 2025.  

Cleancult is a green cleaning business that provides coconut-based cleaning products like hand soap, dish soap, multipurpose cleaners, and detergents without toxic ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate. Not only is Cleancult’s aim to be the “cleanest cleaners on the planet”, the business also has a plastic-free product design in which initial products are sold in glass bottles and subscription refills are delivered in in paper-based milk-cartons, which eliminate single use plastic packaging that most of the competitors in the industry still rely on. 

Paravel provides “trav-leisure” products such as bags and luggage. Their “negative nylon products” are Oeko-Tex certified and made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic water bottles. Their wheeled luggage line is also the first ever carbon-neutral suitcase and features a recycled polycarbonate shell, recycled zippers, a lining made from upcycled plastic water bottles, and a recycled, aircraft grade aluminum handle. Paravel’s ecocraft canvas bags are made from upcycled materials.

Biohm is a transformative gut health company that provides probiotics supplements backed by real science. BIOHM’s products can help break down digestive plaque and improve nutrient absorption. The Company also sells “gut health” test kits that can provide you unparalleled insight into your personal gut profile; one of their registered nutritionists can create a customized eating plan based on your results.

Hu Products provides “better for you” vegan and dairy-free dark chocolate snacking products and grain-free crackers with zero refined sugar, cane sugar, palm oil, or emulsifiers. Hu Products has done extremely well during COVID due to many household’s pantry-stocking and looking for “better for you” alternatives. 

Hu Products provides “better for you” vegan and dairy-free dark chocolate snacking products and … [] grain-free crackers.

Aziz: Have you seen data that shows mission-driven companies managed to withstand COVID’s effects better? 

Azimi: The consumer market has undergone a paradigm shift driven by trends that involve rising e‐commerce (D2C) adoption and changing consumer preferences for sustainable, healthier, and higher quality products and services. This shift has only been accelerated by COVID‐19 and our ESY, ‘better for the environment, better for society, and better for you’, thesis resonates with consumers and prospective companies now more than ever before.  

To date, all of the companies in our portfolio have exceeded even our pre-COVID budgets. We think the reason for this is that we have focused on companies that have a unique value proposition, are primarily e‐commerce based, and are nimble with low fixed costs.  Most importantly, we believe that our portfolio companies are building community. One of the most important aspects in consumer businesses is building customer engagement and loyalty; that stickiness leads to recurring customers and high lifetime value (LTV).

Beyond our own portfolio, there is broader evidence that suggests mission-driven companies have been able to not only withstand COVID’s impacts but have actually accelerated growth meaningfully through COVID. According to Morningstar, in the first quarter of 2020, US Sustainable Equity Index Funds performed more than 100bps better than the conventional S&P 500 Benchmark. Bain & Company research also shows that over the past 16 years a STOXX index of global ESG leaders have outperformed STOXX Global 1800 Index by around 37%. 

Why does ESY work in a time of COVID?  Scientific findings suggest that COVID is a zoonotic disease that made the jump from animal to human, most likely in a wet market. Environmental destruction has brought us closer to animals and exposed us to more potential disease and outbreak. In fact, a 2015 study on Vector Borne and Zoonotic diseases by EcoHealth Alliance found that land use changes, such as urban expansion and deforestation, is the single most significant driver of many of the zoonotic outbreaks that have occurred since 1940.

The hardest hit are the people in greatest need, living in worst conditions. It is every stakeholder’s responsibility to improve society and the lives of everyone in the supply chain to improve their daily living conditions.

There is also direct correlation between COVID fatalities with other health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, lung function, and general immune deficiencies. Individuals that make healthier choices through diet and exercise are better equipped to fight off diseases like COVID.

We think COVID’s impact on ESY and mission driven companies is not just something that is short-lived but will be long lasting in the minds of customers and companies. 

Biohm is a transformative gut health company that provides probiotics supplements backed by real … [] science.

Aziz: Finally, what advice would you give to founders who are looking to build mission driven companies?

Azimi: First, I would say that perfection is the enemy of progress. Your product or idea may not be perfect out of the gate and usually it never is. However, it’s important to make ongoing incremental improvements that make your brand and product fully in-line with your corporate values and the expectations of your consumers. Looking back, you will realize that the small steps you took have compounded into something truly impactful and went a long way in shaping both your brand and final product. 

Second, I would say is to be clear and authentic about your product or service, about what value you will provide and about your sustainability practices or other messaging that is communicated to customers. 

Consumers today are highly informed and can sniff out when products are overpromising and under-delivering. This is very true when it comes to sustainability where many companies are guilty of greenwashing their products or packaging. This needs to come from an authentic place. It is better not to say anything at all than try and make a big inauthentic marketing leap around your messaging.

I would also recommend that founders prioritize finding the right capital partner whose values are aligned, instead of trying to maximize short term valuations.   

Finally, I would say that if you want to make a sustainable positive impact with your company, then your business model needs to be sustainable and viable itself.  Your company needs to be built to scale profitably and conscientiously.

From CMO Network in Perfectirishgifts

[southeastasianists]

In tourism brochure clichés, Myanmar is often referred to as the last jewel of Asia. After fifty years of isolation under military rule, the newly open Southeast Asian nation conjures quaint images of the last untouched frontier in a shrinking world. Although we must remind ourselves that such romanticisation can be misplaced, given the authoritarian regime was a harsh reality rather than a luxurious abstinence from modernisation, many foreigners are curiously enthusiastic about visiting the country.

As an undergraduate focusing on Myanmar studies and the Burmese language, across my degree I have had numerous friends approach me to discuss plans to visit the country, famous for its glittering pagodas, ancient temples and rich cultural diversity. When people learn I study Myanmar, they often gush to me about their own experiences in the country. From backpackers I have chatted with in cheap bars in Cambodia, to wealthy club-goers smoking cigarettes outside expensive nightclubs in Singapore, almost everyone had a positive story to share.

However, recently the tone surrounding this conversation has changed. When hairdressers, university peers, strangers at parties or uber drivers ask me what I study, their first question is now about the Rohingya crisis, or negative feelings stemming from media coverage of the situation.

A lot of this discussion has focused on whether it is ethical to visit Myanmar, given recent widespread attention to the mass exodus of the Rohingya from Rakhine state. People do not want to be seen as financially or ethically condoning this traumatic situation—who wants to look back across history and say they supported what has already been called a genocide?

Therefore, it is worth speculating on two things: how this most recent wave of international outrage could dent Myanmar’s tourism figures, and whether foreigners should boycott the country, for fear of lining an authoritarian pocket.

Tourism growth is important for Myanmar’s government. For some background, it is difficult to accurately gauge tourism statistics in Myanmar. In 2014, Myanmar claimed to receive 3 million international tourists. However, at least two-thirds of this figure were day-trippers from Thailand, China, India, Laos and Bangladesh. The number peaked in 2015 at 4.68 million. Unsurprisingly the following year, total tourist figures dropped dramatically to 2.9 million when conflict in north and north-eastern Myanmar rendered day-tripping more difficult.

A different measurement of tourism in Myanmar has been airport arrivals—this figure rose from 593,000 in 2012 to 1.08 million in 2016. Yet only 48.2 percentof those arriving in Yangon International airport in 2014 did so on a tourist visa, and it is estimated only 50-60 percent of arrivals in 2016 were purely for leisure. Measuring the sale of tickets at Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most famous tourist attraction, revealed 505,351 tickets were sold in 2014—far from the three million tourists statistic—and in 2016, 600,000 tickets were sold, a contrast to the 2.9 million total tourist figures.

The Myanmar Ministry of Tourism plans to accommodate 3.5 million tourists by the end of 2017, and claims to have hosted 2.27 million tourists from January to August 2017. Given the difficult in knowing if tourism is even really booming to begin with, in evaluating the impact of the Rohingya crisis on Myanmar’s nascent tourism industry by the end of 2017, we should be cautious to not make sweeping claims about how exactly figures did or did not drop, and instead carefully examine airport arrivals, ticket sales to sites like Shwedagon Pagoda and Bagan, and day-trip percentages to gauge the real impact the crisis will have on Myanmar’s 2017 tourism figures. Currently, some coverage suggests the crisis has taken a toll on hotel bookings, particularly visits to Rakhine-based attractions such as Ngapali beach and Mrauk-U, but only time will reveal the true impact.

So, is it ethical to visit Myanmar? Most people asking me this question are concerned for two key reasons—they do not want to financially assist the regime’s conduct towards the Rohingya, and they do not want to be seen as morally endorsing the Rohingya crisis, or at best, being complacent to it.

With regard to lining the wrong pockets, opponents of a tourism boycott arguethat tourism infrastructure was mainly government-owned in the past and such a case could be made, however today hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, hawkers and vendors are privately owned and employ ordinary people. Accordingly, a tourism boycott would have little impact on the government while adversely impacting many who have built a livelihood around tourism. Others may argue that the government still owns substantive cogs in the tourism machine, such as airlines, or that it will benefit from tax revenue raised via tourism. Regardless of what you think, there is lots of literature suggesting economic sanctions in Myanmar never really had an impact in its democratic transition, so it is tough to conclude that a tourism boycott for economic purposes would now suddenly change the government’s attitude.

But what about more generally visiting Myanmar—is chowing down on Shan noodles and taking a selfie outside Shwedagon Pagoda normalising the Rohingya exodus? I think there are numerous factors why this is not necessarily the case.

Reverting back to avoiding the Myanmar people is one of the worst things we can do. Transitioning from a politically oppressive society with little access to information—to most of the country having Facebook within a few years—means the spread of misinformation and mistrust is particularly potent in Myanmar. Even within Myanmar, understanding of the Rakhine situation has been poor due to a history of travel limitations. In a global era of “fake news”, one of the most worthwhile tools we have is human relationships. To the common person in Myanmar, exposure to other norms will not come from catchy think-pieces, it will come from human interaction.

We should also keep visiting Myanmar because even beyond the Rohingya crisis, democracy and rule of law in the country is very fragile. A recent speaker I witnessed described the environment in the country as a collective PTSD. As a young person who has been to Myanmar many times, including with several Australian friends, I think cross-cultural interactions have been very valuable in prompting all of us to be more open to reframing our thoughts, especially if thinking is embedded in historical trauma.

And most of all, I have had people from Myanmar take me more seriously when they know I have bothered to get to know their country. Passionate strangers on Facebook or Twitter with contrarian political beliefs to mine considerably open up when I can blurt out some basic Burmese, reference my time in the country, and express an opinion as someone with a deep fondness for Myanmar, as opposed to looking to win a moral battle for ego points. Therefore, I hope to keep encouraging those around me to spend time in the country and with its people, now more so than ever.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Mish Khan is a fourth year Asian Studies and Laws honours student at the Australian National University and the 2016 New Colombo Plan fellow to Yangon. She is currently based at Yangon University and can be reached at mish.khan@anu.edu.au.

[spacesforcommoning]

We have recently heard much about the “educational turn in curating” among several other “educational turns” affecting cultural practices around us.1 Having participated in several of the projects emerging from this perceived “turn,” it seems pertinent to ask whether this umbrella is actually descriptive of the drives that have propelled this desired transition.2

My questions here firstly concern what constitutes a “turn” to begin with? Are we talking about a “reading strategy” or an interpretative model, as was the understanding of the “linguistic turn” in the 1970s, with its intimations of an underlying structure that could be read across numerous cultural practices and utterances? Are we talking about reading one system—a pedagogical one—across another system—one of display, exhibition, and manifestation—so that they nudge one another in ways that might open them up to other ways of being? Or, are we talking instead about an active movement—a generative moment in which a new horizon emerges in the process—leaving behind the practice that was its originating point?

Secondly, it seems pertinent to ask to what extent the hardening of a “turn” into a series of generic or stylistic tropes can be seen as capable of resolving the urgencies that underwrote it in the first place? In other words, does an “educational turn in curating” address education or curating at precisely the points at which it urgently needs to be shaken up and made uncomfortable?

Delving into these questions is made more difficult by the degree of slippage that currently takes place between notions of “knowledge production,” “research,” “education,” “open-ended production,” and “self-organized pedagogies,” when all these approaches seem to have converged into a set of parameters for some renewed facet of production.3Although quite different in their genesis, methodology, and protocols, it appears that some perceived proximity to “knowledge economies” has rendered all of these terms part and parcel of a certain liberalizing shift within the world of contemporary art practices.

Concerned that these initiatives are in danger of being cut off from their original impetus and threaten to harden into a recognizable “style,” I would like to invoke, towards the end of this discussion, Foucault’s notion of “parrhesia”—free, blatant public speech—as perhaps a better model through which to understand some kind of “educational turn” in art.

Education

It might be easiest to enter the fray of education via what were for me the two projects which best reflected my own engagement with “education” within the arenas of display and of gathering.

The first of these was the Academy project (2006) at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.4 Part of a series of exhibitions, projects, and events that took place between a number of institutions, this installment in the Netherlands was a collaboration between 22 participants and the staff of the museum. The project as a whole posed the question, “What can we learn from the museum?” and referred to a form of learning that could take place beyond that which the museum sets out to show or teach.

Our initial question concerned whether an idea of an “academy” (as a moment of learning within the safe space of an academic institution) was a metaphor for a moment of speculation, expansion, and reflexivity without the constant demand for proven results. If this was a space of experimentation and exploration, then how might we extract these vital principles and apply them to the rest of our lives? How might we also perhaps apply them to our institutions? Born of a belief that the institutions we inhabit can potentially be so much more than they are, these questions ask how the museum, the university, the art school, can surpass their current functions.

Of course, we touched on this problematic at the very moment a heated debate regarding the Bologna Accord—the European so-called reform of education—was erupting all around us. Instead of hanging our heads and lamenting the awfulness of these reforms, with their emphasis on quantifiable and comparable outcomes, we thought it might be productive to see if this unexpected politicization of the discussion around education might be an opportunity to see how the principles we cherish in the education process might be applied across a broader range of institutional activities. This could be a way of saying to the politicians: “You want to politicize education? Let’s really politicize education. Let’s make it a principle of actualization that really does touch the institutions of culture—not by producing perfectly trained, efficient, and informed workers for the cultural sector, but by thinking of the cultural sector as a market economy, and bringing the principles of education there to operate as forms of actualization.”

When we say that these institutions of ours could be so much more than they are, we don’t imply that they should be larger, or more efficient, or more progressive, or more fun (though they certainly should be more fun). Instead, we wish to say that their reach could be wider, that they might provide sites for doing so much more than they ever thought they could.

In asking what we can learn from the museum beyond what it sets out to teach us, we were not focused on the museum’s expertise, what it owns and how it displays it, conserves it, historicizes it. Our interests were in the possibilities for the museum to open a place for people to engage ideas differently—ideas from outside its own walls. So the museum in our thinking was the site of possibility, the site of potentiality.

Academy wanted to stimulate reflections on this potentiality within society. It situated itself in the speculative tension between the question of what one needs to know and that of what one aspires to. Academies often focus on what it is that people need to know in order to start thinking and acting, but we chose to approach the academy as a space that generates vital principles and activities—activities and principles you can take with you and which can be applied beyond its walls to become a mode of life-long learning. As such, Academy aimed to develop a counterpoint to the professionalization, technocratization, and privatization of academies that result from the Bologna reforms and to the monitoring and outcome-based culture that characterize higher education in Europe today.

In considering what we might have at our disposal to counter such official assessments of how learning can be evaluated and appreciated, we focused on two terms: potentiality and actualization.

By “potentiality” we meant a possibility to act that is not limited to an ability. Since acting can never be understood as being enabled simply by a set of skills or opportunities, it must be dependent on a will and a drive. More importantly, it must always include within it an element of fallibility—the possibility that acting will end in failure. The other term we wanted to mobilize in conjunction with “academy” was that of “actualization,” which implies that certain meanings and possibilities embedded within objects, situations, actors, and spaces carry a potential to be “liberated,” as it were. This points to a condition in which we all function in a complex system of embeddedness—one in which social processes, bodies of learning, individual subjectivities cannot be separated and distinguished from one another.

Both these terms seem important for mobilizing any re-evaluation of education, as they allow us to expand the spaces and activities that house such processes. Similarly, they allow us to think of “learning” as taking place in situations or sites that don’t necessarily intend or prescribe such activity.

At Van Abbe, we envisaged an exhibition project that brought together five teams of different cultural practitioners who had access to every aspect of the museum’s collection, staff, and activities. Each of these teams pursued a line of inquiry into what we could learn from the museum beyond the objects on display and its educational practices.

The access that was given was not aimed at producing institutional critique or exposing the true realities of the institution. Instead, it aimed at eliciting the unseen and unmarked possibilities that already exist within these spaces—the people who are already working there and who bring together unexpected life experiences and connections, the visitors whose interactions with the place are not gauged, the collection which could be read in a variety of ways far beyond splendid examples of key art-historical moments, the paths outward which extend beyond the museum, the spaces and navigational vectors which are unexpectedly plotted within it.

There were many questions circulating in our spaces in the exhibition, with each room and each group producing their own questions in relation to the central one: “What can we learn from the museum?”

There were questions regarding who produces questioning: What are legitimate questions, and under what conditions are they produced? The seminar class, the think tank, the government department, the statistician’s bureau are sites for the production of questions, but we were suggesting others born of fleeting, arbitrary conversations between strangers, of convivial loitering and of unexpected lines of flight in and out of the museum as in the Ambulator project (Susan Kelly, Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano).

There were questions regarding the relations between expertise and hope and expertise and governance, knowledge that is used to bolster hopeful fantasies and knowledge that is used to impose dominant concerns, such as in the Think Tank project (John Palmesino and Anselm Franke).

There were questions regarding what kind of modes of attention are paid in a context such as a museum or a library. What could these modes of attention be liberated for? Could they be made use of in some other ways? Could they become an instrument of liberation, as in the Inverted Research Tool (Edgar Schmitz and Liam Gillick)?

There were questions regarding the very nature of ownership of an image or an idea. How does a simple object come to stand in for an entire complex network of knowing, legitimating, conserving, and “anointing with cultural status” (all of which operate under the aegis of ownership)? Imaginary Property (Florian Schneider and Multitude e.V.) asked, “What does it mean to own an image?”

There were questions regarding cultural difference that asked whether a museum really is an institution of representation, meant to represent those outside its systems and privileged audiences. If it is not, then maybe those “outsiders” are not outside at all, but can be recognized as already here and part of us, but only if we listen—really listen to ourselves, as in Sounding Difference (Irit Rogoff, Deepa Naik).

And there were other questions about the museum’s knowledge vs. our own knowledge, and about open forums for learning at the edges of that which is acknowledged, as in I Like That (Rob Stone and Jean-Paul Martinon).

Summit

That initial project within the spaces and parameters set by the museum led several of us to think about taking those questions into a less regulated and prescribed space, one in which institutional practices could encounter self-organized, activist initiatives. This led to SUMMIT Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture (www.summit.kein.org), a forum which took place in Berlin in May 2007.5

In a sense, we came together in the name of “weak education,” a discourse on education that is non-reactive, and does not seek to engage in everything that we know fully well to be wrong with education—its constant commoditization, its over-bureaucratization, its ever-increasing emphasis on predictable outcomes, etc. If education is forever reacting to the woes of the world, we hoped to posit that education is in and of the world—not a response to crisis, but part of its ongoing complexity, not reacting to realities, but producing them. Often these practices end up being low-key, uncategorizable, non-heroic, and certainly not uplifting, but nevertheless immensely creative.

Why education and why at that particular moment?

This focus on education provided a way to counter the eternal lament of how bad things are—how bureaucratized, how homogenized, how understaffed and underfunded, how awful the demands of the Bologna Accord are with its homogenizing drives, how sad the loss of local traditions is, etc. Though not without its justifications, this voice of endless complaint serves to box education into the confines of a small community of students and education professionals. How, then, to paraphrase Roger Buergel, can education become more? How can it be more than the site of shrinkage and disappointment?

And why at this particular moment? Because, with Bologna and all its discontents, this moment is also seeing an unprecedented number of self-organized forums emerging outside institutions, as well as self-empowered departures inside institutions. Propelled from within rather than boxed in from outside, education here becomes the site of a coming-together of the odd and unexpected—shared curiosities, shared subjectivities, shared sufferings, and shared passions congregate around the promise of a subject, an insight, a creative possibility. Education is by definition processual—involving a low-key transformative process, it embodies duration and the development of a contested common ground.

Here was perhaps one of the most important leaps from Academy to Summit—an understanding of “education” as a platform that could signal a politics, a platform that could bring together unexpected and momentary conjunctions of academics, art world citizens, union organizers, activists, and many others in such a way that they could see themselves and their activities reflected within the broadly defined field of “education.”

At its best, education forms collectivities—many fleeting collectivities that ebb and flow, converge and fall apart. These are small ontological communities propelled by desire and curiosity, cemented together by the kind of empowerment that comes from intellectual challenge. The whole point in coming together out of curiosity is to not have to come together out of identity: we the readers of J. L. Nancy encounter we the migrant or we the culturally displaced or we the sexually dissenting—all of these being one and the same we. So at this moment in which we are so preoccupied with how to participate and how to take part in the limited space that remains open, education signals rich possibilities of coming together and participating in an arena not yet signaled.

Having liberated myself from the arena of strong, redemptive, missionary education, I would like to furnish the field with the following terms:

Notions of potentiality and actualization offer a capacity to replace the reorganization of education with ideas concerning distribution and dissemination. This speaks to an idea that there might be endless possibilities within us that we might never be able to bring to successful fruition. “Academy” becomes the site of this duality, of an understanding of “I can” as always, already yoked to an eternal “I can’t.” If this duality is not paralyzing, which I do not think it is, then it has possibilities for an understanding of what it is about an “academy” that can actually become a model for “being in the world.” Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our perception of a place of education or training to one which is not pure preparation, pure resolution. “Academy” might instead encompass fallibility, which can be understood as a form of knowledge production rather than one of disappointment.

Equally, I would suggest education to be the site of a shift away from a culture of emergency to one of urgency. Emergency is always reactive to a set of state imperatives that produce an endless chain of crises, mostly of our own making. So many of us have taken part in miserable panels about “the crisis in education.” A notion of urgency presents the possibility of producing an understanding of what the crucial issues are, so that they may become driving forces. The morning after George W. Bush was re-elected president, my classroom moved swiftly from amazement to a discussion about why electoral forums were not the arena of political participation, and what they might actually represent instead—a move from an emergency to an urgency.

Perhaps most importantly, I want to think about education not through the endless demands that are foisted on both culture and education to be accessible, to provide a simple entry point to complex ideas. The Tate Modern comes to mind as an example of how a museum can function as an entertainment machine that celebrates “critique lite.” Instead, I want to think of education in terms of the places to which we have access. I understand this access as the ability to formulate one’s own questions, as opposed to simply answering those that are posed to you in the name of an open and participatory democratic process. After all, it is very clear that those who formulate the questions produce the playing field.

Finally, I would like to think of education as the arena in which challenge is written into our daily activity, where we learn and perform critically informed challenges that don’t aim at undermining or overtaking. When political parties, courts of law, or any other authority challenges a position, it is done with the aim of delegitimizing with a better one, of establishing absolute rights and wrongs. In education, when we challenge an idea, we suggest that there is room for imagining another way of thinking. By doing so in a way that does not overcome the original idea, we don’t expend energy forming opposition, but reserve it for imagining alternatives. At a conference I attended, Jaad Isaac, a Palestinian geographer, produced transportation maps of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that had an almost mind-blowing clarity to them. It made me think of what gargantuan energies had to be put into turning the evil chaos of that occupation into the crystalline clarity of those maps—energies that were needed in order to invent Palestine. In their pristine clarity, the maps performed a challenge to the expenditure of energies as a response to an awful situation. If education can release our energies from what needs to be opposed to what can be imagined, or at least perform some kind of negotiation of that, then perhaps we have an education that is more.

Turn

Quite a long time ago, when I had just finished my Ph.D. and was embarking on a postdoc and a radical change of path towards critical theory, I ran across my very first Art History professor on the street. This was unexpected—my being in a different country and city with the promise of another life on the horizon were not conducive at that moment to knowing how to deal elegantly with that which I had left behind. Having asked me what I was up to, he listened patiently as I prattled away, full of all the new ideas and possibilities that had just opened up to me. My professor was a kind, humane, and generous scholar of the old school. He may have been somewhat patrician, but he had an intuitive grasp of changes shaping the world around him. At the end of my excited recitative he looked at me and said, “I do not agree with what you are doing and I certainly don’t agree with how you are going about it, but I am very proud of you for doing this.” It is hard now to imagine my confusion at hearing this, yet I realize with hindsight that he was recognizing a “turn” in the making, rather than expressing concern or hostility for what it was rejecting or espousing. Clearly this man, who had been a genuinely great teacher of things I could no longer be excited by, saw learning as a series of turns.

In a “turn,” we shift away from something or towardsor around something, and it is we who are in movement, rather than it. Something is activated in us, perhaps even actualized, as we move. And so I am tempted to turn away from the various emulations of an aesthetics of pedagogy that have taken place in so many forums and platforms around us in recent years, and towards the very drive to turn.

So my question here is twofold, concerning on the one hand the capacity for artistic and curatorial practices to capture the dynamics of a turn, and on the other, the kind of drive being released in the process.

In the first instance, this might require that we break somewhat with an equating logic that claims that process-based work and open-ended experimentation creates the speculation, unpredictability, self-organization, and criticality that characterize the understanding of education within the art world. Many of us have worked with this understanding quite consistently, and while some of its premises have been quite productive for much of our work, it nevertheless lends itself far too easily to emulating the institutions of art education, with its archives, libraries, and research-based practices as primary representational strategies. On the one hand, moving these principles into sites of contemporary art display signaled a shift away from the structures of objects and markets and dominant aesthetics towards an insistence on the unchartable, processual nature of any creative enterprise. Yet on the other hand, it has led all too easily into the emergence of a mode of “pedagogical aesthetics” in which a table in the middle of the room, a set of empty bookshelves, a growing archive of assembled bits and pieces, a classroom or lecture scenario, or the promise of a conversation have taken away the burden to rethink and dislodge daily those dominant burdens ourselves.6 Having myself generated several of these modes, I am not sure that I want to completely dispense with them, because the drive that they made manifest—to force these spaces to be more active, more questioning, less insular, and more challenging—is one to which I would like to stay faithful. In particular, I would not wish to give up the notion of “conversation,” which to my mind has been the most significant shift within the art world over the past decade.

In the wake of Documenta X and Documenta XI, it became clear that one of the most significant contributions that the art world had made to the culture at large has been the emergence of a conversational mode hosted by it.7 In part, this has had to do with the fact that there already exists a certain amount of infrastructure within the art world, where there are available spaces, small budgets, existing publicity machines, recognizable formats such as exhibitions, gatherings, lecture series, interviews, as well as a constant interested audience made up of art students, cultural activists, etc.8 As a result, a new set of conversations between artists, scientists, philosophers, critics, economists, architects, planners, and so on, came into being and engaged the issues of the day through a set of highly attenuated prisms. By not being subject to the twin authorities of governing institutions or authoritative academic knowledge, these conversations could in effect be opened up to a speculative mode, and to the invention of subjects as they emerged and were recognized.

And so the art world became the site of extensive talking—talking emerged as a practice, as a mode of gathering, as a way of getting access to some knowledge and to some questions, as networking and organizing and articulating some necessary questions. But did we put any value on what was actually being said? Or, did we privilege the coming-together of people in space and trust that formats and substances would emerge from these?

Increasingly, it seems to me that the “turn” we are talking about must result not only in new formats, but also in another way of recognizing when and why something important is being said.

Foucault, in a lecture he once gave at Berkeley, embarked upon a discussion of the word “parrhesia,” a common term in Greco-Roman culture.9 He stated that it is generally perceived as free speech, and that those who practice it are perceived to be those who speak the truth. The active components of parrhesia, according to Foucault, are frankness (“to say everything”), truth (“to tell the truth because he knows it is true”), danger (“only if there is a risk of danger in his telling the truth”), criticism (“not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but as the function of criticism”) and duty (“telling the truth is regarded as a duty”). In parrhesia, Foucault tells us, we have “a verbal activity in which the speaker expresses his personal relation to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”10

It is hard to imagine a more romantic or idealistic agenda for invoking “turns” in the educational field. And yet, I am drawn to these with less embarrassment than you might think one would have as a self-conscious critical theorist working within the field of contemporary art. Perhaps because nowhere in this analysis are we told which truth, or to what ends it is being deployed. Truth, it would seem, is not a position, but a drive.

To add an even more active dimension to Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia, we can also establish that in Aramaic the term is invoked in relation to such speech when it is stated “openly, blatantly, in public.” So this truth, which is in no one’s particular interest or to any particular end, must be spoken in public, must have an audience, and must take the form of an address.

Foucault called this “fearless speech,” and at the end of his lecture series he says, “I would say that the problematization of truth has two sides, two major aspects…. One side is concerned with ensuring that the process of reasoning is correct in ensuring if a statement is true. And the other side is concerned with the question: what is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them?”11

Increasingly, I think “education” and the “educational turn” might be just that: the moment when we attend to the production and articulation of truths—not truth as correct, as provable, as fact, but truth as that which collects around it subjectivities that are neither gathered nor reflected by other utterances. Stating truths in relation to the great arguments, issues, and great institutions of the day is relatively easy, for these dictate the terms by which such truths are both arrived at and articulated. Telling truths in the marginal and barely-formed spaces in which the curious gather—this is another project altogether: one’s personal relation to truth.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate race in Alabama became the latest avenue of American life to be rocked by a scandal involving improper sexual conduct. The Washington Post reported allegations that Republican Roy Moore pursued relationships with four teenage girls, one of whom was 14 at the time of a sexual encounter with Moore. Moore has unequivocally denied the report.

The Alabama special election was already getting national attention as one of the fronts upon which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said he would be waging his war against the Republican establishment, so the race has several facets to be closely watched — social, cultural and, yes, political.

Although it’s difficult to predict what effect a scandal will have on an election, here’s what we’re looking at and considering as it unfolds.

Where did the race stand before the Post story?

The five most recent public pollsters to survey the race — all before Thursday’s allegations — found, on average, Moore ahead of his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, 48 percent to 42 percent. That sounds like a pretty decent lead until you realize that President Trump won Alabama by 28 points in 2016.

Why was Moore underperforming?

Alabama is a ruby-red state, but Moore has a had a long and controversial record there — which might explain why he’s not doing as well as you might expect for a Republican.

Polls differ a bit on why Moore has been struggling, but they all agree that he’s having trouble with voters who don’t identify as evangelical. (Moore has been doing fine among Alabama’s heavily evangelical Republican base.) Hillary Clinton won non-evangelical voters in Alabama by 12 percentage points in 2016, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. But Moore is doing much worse than Trump did among that group. Jones was leading Moore among non-evangelical voters by around 40 points, according to a JMC Analytics and Polling survey and an Opinion Savvy poll.

Another weakness for Moore? Alabama’s independent voters. Both a Fox News poll and the Opinion Savvy poll have Jones winning independents even though Trump carried them in Alabama by 49 percentage points according to the CCES.

It’s possible that Moore has already lost the Alabama voters who would have been most likely to abandon him in light of the Post story. That said, the Fox News poll found that 42 percent of Moore’s supporters had reservations about him, so either they’ve made their peace voting for a candidate they see as flawed or they already have one foot out the door and the Post story could send them the rest of the way.

What will Republican officials do?

How national Republicans react to the scandal could do quite a bit to tip the balance of the race, forcing talk of the scandal into the conservative media and increasing pressure on Moore and his campaign.

Senators from the establishment wing of the Republican Party who have already been at odds with the Bannon-esque contours of the Moore campaign were quick to speak out. Sen. Lisa Murkowsi of Alaska and Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona were among the first to tell reporters that if the reports of sexual conduct with minors were true, Moore should resign from the race. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said much the same, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a statement to the same effect.

Spot the common denominator. http://pic.twitter.com/1D9LdSOm16

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) November 9, 2017

Republican elected officials, perhaps aware that Moore was already problematic, seem to be in a holding pattern, loath to out-and-out call for him to drop out (and risk angering the base) but far from willing to vouch for Moore. Arizona Sen. John McCain went the furthest of his caucus, calling the allegations “disturbing” and “disqualifying.”

How will Trump react?

The president is, as always, a wild card. Trump didn’t endorse Moore in the primary, instead favoring McConnell’s choice of Luther Strange. But in the waning days of the race, Trump seemed to express some regret with his decision, and after Moore won, he deleted some tweets expressing support for Strange.

Trump, who has weathered his own sex scandals, seems to always take the line of fighting allegations, so he might stand by Moore. Or, ever eager for approval from the electorate, Trump might bide his time to see how conservative media reacts, gauging how he thinks his base might take the news — as “fake news” or troubling allegations involving teenage girls.

How will the conservative media react?

News of the Post story first made its way onto the internet by way of a Breitbart report headlined, “After Endorsing Democrat in Alabama, Bezos’s Washington Post Plans to hit Roy Moore With Allegations of Inappropriate Relations with Teenagers; Judge Claims Smear Campaign.” Breitbart is, of course, Bannon’s domain, and Moore is Bannon’s horse in the race — so the website’s sympathetic coverage makes sense. How Fox News and other conservative outlets cover the scandal could play a part in how the Republican base comes to view it.

Trump won the presidency despite allegations of sexual assault, but the allegations against Moore involve underage girls, which might change how Republican voters view the scandal. The allegations led the right-leaning Drudge Report and Washington Examiner on Thursday evening, as well as Fox News’s homepage.

Can Moore be replaced on the ballot? Could there be a write-in campaign?

No and yes.

Moore’s name will appear on the ballot — it’s too late to switch it out for the Dec. 12 election — but there’s certainly still a chance for Republicans to launch a write-in campaign. Who’s at the top of the list? Strange. Murkowski, who famously won a write-in victory of her own, has already said that she’s in touch with Strange about this very thing. Should Moore stay in the race — as he has said he will — and Strange jumps in, the Republican vote could split. That would be good news for Jones.

Does it matter that Moore ran as a “values” candidate?

How the GOP base in Alabama reacts to this story is certainly the big looming question in all of this. Moore has made his name in the state as a fierce champion of evangelical Christian values, often testing the limits of democratic governance along the way; he was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 for refusing to take down a replica of the Ten Commandments that stood in front of the court.

Allegations of sexual contact with children are incredibly serious, but it remains an open question whether the state’s Republican voters will see the story as true or not. As the past year has shown, in a highly politicized and polarized national environment, every story seems to take on political shading, including the allegations of sexual assault against men in positions of power. Party loyalty overrode personal affront for many Republican voters in 2016. And Clinton and other Democratic politicians, for instance, were quickly linked to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein — who has been accused of a litany of wrongdoings, from harassment to rape — given his donations to various Democratic campaigns.

In some ways, the allegations against Moore might test how much American society, in all corners, has absorbed the national conversation on sexual assault allegations. Emerging narratives around that conversation feature a hope that more credibility is being lent to victim allegations. But some also fear witch hunts of powerful men. The next few weeks will surely tell us more about how Alabama voters are grappling with this cultural sea change.

Are there precedents we can look to?

There are past political scandals that involved underage or teenage victims, though most came before the highly polarized political environment of the past 10 years and most candidates dropped out of the race before election day.

In 1990, Republican Jon Grunseth dropped out of the Minnesota gubernatorial race after allegations of sexual misconduct. Among these allegations were that he had encouraged two girls — one 13, the other 14 — to take a nude swim with him. Grunseth’s primary challenger, Arne Carlson eventually won the race as a write-in candidate.

In 1983, the U.S. House formally censured two members, Republican Dan Crane and Democrat Gerry Studds, for sexual relationships with 17-year-old pages. Both ran for re-election, with Crane losing and Studds winning.

In 2006, Republican Mark Foley resigned from office after he was accused of sending explicit text messages to an underage former page. Foley’s name was kept on the ballot, and Democrats won the seat.

Alabama itself is fresh off another sex scandal (though it didn’t involve anyone underage). Republican Gov. Robert Bentley resigned from office in April as he was facing impeachment for allegedly having used his office to cover up an extramarital affair. His approval rating dropped precipitously after the revelation of the affair, showing perhaps, that there are instances when moral outrage outweighs partisan interest.

Is there empirical research on how much “scandals” can change electoral outcomes?

One paper from researchers who looked at senators running for re-election from 1974 to 2008 estimated that scandals involving immoral behavior cost the scandal-plagued candidate 6.5 percentage points and raised his opponent’s vote share 6.5 points, for a net change of 13 points. We don’t know if the Alabama race will move that much, but any penalty approaching that size would be more than enough to significantly darken Moore’s prospects of winning this Senate seat.

[cloudytian]

Understanding Gender Dynamics in Touhou and Historical Japan (Part One)

tl;drs in bold, so you can skim parts that you’re not interested in. 

This is the first half of a two part essay on the interpretation of gender dynamics in Touhou, which is part of a larger series of essays on the geared to help western consumers of eastern media recognize how their cultural values differ from historical eastern ones so that they may better learn to understand the cultural background of the media they consume. While the focus will be on Japan because of its current cultural dominance in entertainment, the epistemological guidelines I give can be used to better analyze our approaches towards understanding different cultures with a more critical eye.

I started writing this in response to this video post by @thejorlosopher (provocatively titled “There Are No Women in Gensokyo”), because @turbobyakuren​ was the only watcher to recognize that imposing western values upon a Japanese work that draws heavily from historical Japanese values erases their culture AND results in a faulty analysis.

I then realized that it was difficult for consumers immersed in western culture to realize that a different set of values govern eastern media because:

A) their cultural dominance is rarely challenged enough for them to realize that their values are not universal and unequivocal across all cultures

B) understanding current eastern values requires a historic and government context of the ancient philosophies that influenced them because of the strictness by which governments imposed the enforcement of their values, and there concepts so fundamentally interconnected that any overview will always be incomplete.

B draws from a tenet true for all pursuits of knowledge; the further you go, the more context and scope is required, and so it is not possible for any singular person to possess the absolute expanse of experience to know everything about a singular subject. There are those who can be called masters in a field, but never those who can be said to have mastered a field. It is therefore imperative that we all approach education with the mindset of students.

So, this first part focuses critical thinking practices that have helped me as a student of global customs with learning to identify ignorance of cultural and behavioral mores and how to work to lessen it. 

You don’t need to watch Jorlosopher’s video to read this analysis because A) I cite the specific line I am referring to when using it a segue and B) I find it to be deeply flawed and shallow. That said, I encourage you to watch the video first and freely form your own thoughts if you intend to participate in that part of the discussion so that my views will not colour your interpretations of it. 

POOR CRITICAL META-ANALYSIS AND IGNORANCE OF IGNORANCE

Jorlosopher, there were some good points made in your video, but many more mistakes. For one, you're ignoring the cardinal rule of artistic interpretation: do not assert that your interpretation is the only correct one. That discourages constructive discussion and invites meaningless echoing or argumentative head-butting that does not serve to constructively develop ideas, and narrow-mindedly discounts the possibility of others coming to different conclusions because of their differing experiences and background. Or, as ZUN put it (though I can’t find the exact quote), everyone has their own personal Gensokyo, and they're all equally real.

So, I'm not going to argue that your interpretation is incorrect, because it is a valid prediction of how our societal constructs might appear in Gensokyo according to your existing cognitive schema, but I will argue that your interpretation is weakly supported and too drenched in existing prejudiced rhetoric to be valid as a thoughtpiece on gender dynamics, and give you some advice on how to rectify those mistakes.

First off, from a purely structural standpoint, you lack a coherent message on gender dynamics in Touhou other than the title, because your statements about Gensokyo blatantly ignore the vast Eastern influence on the setting, and have no supporting evidence for your insubstantially simplistic claims.

"But Cloudy, this is a casual thing, it's made for fans of Touhou who are already familiar with the world I'm talking about!" 

Again-- your interpretation of Touhou canon is not the only correct one, and as it is expansive, you will forget and misremember some things and continuously form interpretations as you read that will influence interpretations of future things you read. Therefore, it is imperative that you cite sources when interpreting large bodies of work and promoting your interpretation so that people can see the chain of thought behind your reasoning. Also, by applying academic scrutiny of gender dynamics to Touhou, Jorlosopher invites not only academic counter-scrutiny and meta-scrutiny but also the nerds who take that stuff super seriously, and I am nothing if not a huge nerd.

So, friendly advice: please kindly cite your sources, and evaluate your own biases, or nerds will beat you up and steal your nerd card and also possibly your lunch money.

REFUTATION OF “THERE ARE NO WOMEN IN GENSOKYO“

You have next to no supporting arguments for your claim that “there are no concepts of womanhood in Gensokyo”, as you have no sources or examples to base your claim on. The strongest argument that you have is not, in fact, your rhetoric but rather a quote from @asa-turney​ misrepresented to suit a simplistic and shallow model of the concept of gender that does not even acknowledge the existence of nonbinary spectrum of gendered concepts in Touhou and eastern media as a whole. Asa has repeatedly and thoughtfully explored the relationship between androgyny of traits in anime and our modern conceptions of gender, so the fact that you would use a quote from an advocate of diverse gender expression to justify an interpretive view that marginalizes diverse gender expressions demonstrates a lack of credible ability to analyze the context of ideas.

It’s also a useful gauge of academic validity, because good scholars must know how to evaluate the not only the context of their field, but also the context of their arguments. You cannot trust someone to possess the intellectual integrity to thoughtfully analyze broad, complex topics if they cannot thoughtfully analyze their own narrow claims.

Jorlosopher’s claim: "The fact that there is only one gender creates a plain in which there are no genders [in Touhou]."

Asa’s quote: “What does ‘being a female’ mean in Gensokyo? It means something, and means nothing at the same time. They’re all female because they’re drawn with a certain aesthetic in mind, but gender identity never comes into play because no one is treated differently for filling any particular role as any particular gender.”

Asa's quote focuses more on the inequality of gender dynamics than the expression of gender identity-- Gensokyo is appealing because in its internal logic, there are none of the dynamics that reward masculine traits and demean feminine ones, or punish people for possessing or lacking masculine or feminine traits that society says they shouldn't. This does not mean, however, that the association of masculinity and femininity do not exist, as they are cultural concepts held and dictated by the society that Touhou is based upon and explores the traditions of. By failing to identify or acknowledge these masculine/feminine associations and dynamics, however, you strip away a deep level of complexity and artistic accomplishment of Touhou as a series and deminishes the impact of Japanese culture upon the world of modern media.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ANALYZE GENDER DYNAMICS?

However, I disagree with Asa’s claim that “gender identity never comes into play because no one is treated differently for filling any particular role as any particular gender,” because it restricts the exploration of gender dynamics only to how they are used to deprecate people, and thus implies that gender dynamics can only be used for prejudice. This conflation of “gender dynamics” with “gender prejudice” is what Jorlosopher’s claim relies on, when gender dynamics can and have been used to artistically and scientifically further our understanding of human experience, such as in the romanticised strength and valour of literary heroes like Karna or Mulan or in the appreciation of human beauty spurred Renaissance artists to pioneer the modern field of anatomy. We must consider what it means to explore gender in a way that is not purely dictated by ignorant opponents in order to promote the positive awareness needed to overwrite this ignorance so that more constructive debate and discussion can occur.

I define gender identity from an epistemological perspective as the words and ideas used by people to describe and communicate a specific permutation of “feminine” and “masculine” traits, whether they be visual, biological, social, or mental, as well as absent, concurrent, or contradictory, both in terms of how they are used to describe oneself and how they are used to describe others. The key to exploring gender, by that definition, lies in recognizing what standards and values define masculinity and femininity across various cultural contexts.

And there definitely exists a deliberate interplay of masculine and feminine motifs in Touhou names, designs, and personalities, most prominently with Marisa and Miko, which serves to highlight the ephemerality of social constructs like gendered associations and lampshade the futility of trying to simplify such natural ambiguity by confining it to rigid absolutes, but that’s a topic that can’t be tackled without an exploration of the impacts that the philosophies behind eastern religions have had on perceptions and the development of common modes of thought.

A LACK OF MEN DOES NOT MEAN A LACK OF CONTEXT FOR GENDER

Jorlosopher’s claim: "There is no significant population of men impose traits onto...therefore these traits will not be discouraged in women."

First, there's no unshakeable evidence either way on just how many men exist in Gensokyo. There's not even the argument of stable populations to consider because for all we know, the Human Village could be 99% gays granted fertility through prayers and divine intervention, so I'll grant you benefit of doubt for the premise, instead of immediately refuting it with, "The Human Village has a notable male population, and Gensokyo split off in the 1800s when human society in Japan had already developed gender roles and biases which then influence the youkai they create and bestow them with those same gendered preconceptions, so while sexism might be nonexistent in Gensokyo thanks to the importance of traditionally feminine professions such as shrine maidens in their society, this does not mean that sexism never existed in the first place, but rather that it was overcome by granting all people the same agency of opportunity that used to be reserved exclusively for men."

I will, however, strongly imply that instead.

Second, your representation of gender discrimination against women revolves solely on men, and only addresses one possible avenue of prejudice when in fact the rationales between all sorts of prejudice are connected. The prejudice formula can be broadly boiled down to down to “If discrimination of groups exist, then comparisons of groups exist. If comparisons of groups exist, then contradicting opinions will arise. If contradicting opinions exist and we try to diminish the validity of one opinion solely to validate the merits of another, then ignorance takes hold and prejudice spreads.” Note that discrimination, in the sense of recognizing the distinctions between one thing and another, is not inherently bad in itself, but only becomes harmful if we use our differences to justify an ignorance that demeans the value of opinions we poorly understand.

Third, it fails to acknowledge the feedback loop of tribalistic demonization of an entire dissimilar group, and then the consequent demonization of even the traits of that dissimilar group that causes prejudice to entrench itself. By attempting to eliminate all exposure to a group, the internal tribe removes positive exposure to that group that would challenge and contradict the prejudices they hold and confront them with the burden to change.

And lastly, it fails to acknowledge the existing standards of feminine and masculine traits that were present in Japan that ZUN chose to include and explore in Gensokyo, out of a complete ignorance of historical Japanese culture.

I believe that you have good intentions and genuinely attempt to acknowledge the existence of and refute the justifications of sexism, and thus hold no ill feelings towards you, and in fact welcome your thoughts! There's a sort of underlying dissociation between entertainment media and academia, as there isn't nearly enough discussion on the themes, merits, and influences of pop culture, even though it's such a large part of our lives and by definition, the most popular form of artistic and cultural expression today. But I cannot feel positive about the messages espoused by someone without the intellectual integrity to examine and compensate for their own intrinsic biases when making a statement about gender politics while claiming to be a philosopher. Work towards correcting your biases by expanding your scope, and never stop learning.

Remember that Remilia built a house-rocket and flew it to the moon with only her unshakeable self-efficacy holding it together and then literally powered it on faith and prayers, because the “common sense” frameworks of the modern, westernized outside world that you attempted to enforce upon themes illustrated in Touhou in your limited understanding of cultural context don’t automatically translate to Gensokyo. You can try to adopt the sense of Gensokyo to explore the fantastical wonder within that world, but you absolutely cannot impose your sense upon Gensokyo so as to limit it to the meagre surface banality of your personal world so that you can claim that you have explored it.

Learning and self-improvement is a personal journey different for all. I cannot and will not attempt to dictate the means by which you grow as a person, but I will attempt to give my fellow students a tool for furthering their understanding so that they may meander less and reach further than those who have come slightly before.

The latter half of this essay (which will be posted tomorrow) will examine the expectations for the roles of women in historical Japanese society, particularly around the start of the Meiji Period during which the westernization of Japan began to diminish the hegemony of the “traditional” values that Touhou celebrates and satirizes in equal measure. Understanding the expectations and values that define womanhood allows readers to better identify what qualifies as masculine and feminine motifs in Touhou in the context of the oft-ignored retro eastern perspective that it draws from.