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jedibinx · 4 months ago

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Fic Masterlist - JediBinx 💜💚🖤

Here it is! The masterlist - I had no clue where to even start so I've organised them into Series and One-shots and linked each one with a short (very short!) summary of what it's about hope this helps! ^_^:

One-Shots:

When Darkness Calls, Who Will Answer? - vampire Jere with gender neutral reader. Creepy, strange and murdery.

Sweater Paws - Jere/Bojan - good old fashioned smutty smut smut.

It Started Out With A Kiss, How Did It End Up Like This? - Jere/Jukka post on-stage kiss.

Slender Wrists and Gentle Kissed - Jere/Security Man Veikko - Veikko has to comfort Jere after a traumatic incident.

The Will Of The Unconscious - Jere/Bojan - Bojan's POV, we find a struggling writer discovers the perfect inspiration... or did the writer create the inspiration?

Flash Fiction Picture Challenge - I take ten photos and create two sentence stories based on them

Just Once - I angsted up the onlyfans content. Because I could and I live to torture lol

Ask Me To Pose, I'll Be Your Doll - inspired by this lovely artwork. Nace/Jere fluff love.

Tell Me I'm A Good Boy - J/Jere smut. This is the fic that started it all with J.

Scratch The Itch - request for a friend - Kris/Nace smut

We Will Prevail - Bojan/Jere. Bojan surprises Jere for Valentine's day but not everything goes to plan and Bojan ends up playing the man card and being a stupid stupid head. Will he be able to save everything he ever wished for?

Parasocial Investigations - Kris/Jere. Kris is a social media influencer focusing on mental health and positive mindsets. Jere is alone, mentally unwell, and clings to Kris' videos and every interaction he has with him. When Jere convinces himself that Kris wants to come to stay, how will it turn out?

Wine, Dine and (Gory) Sexy Time - Tommy/Jere. Vampire gore and smut.

Save Me With Death - Bojan/Jere. Bojan is dying and stumbles across Jere, a starving vampire all but desperate for food. What will happen?

Daddy J and his Famalamadingdongs - my crack fic where Bojan joins Jere's religious cult where he's referred to as Daddy J.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend - Tommy/Jere. Tommy is a voyeur and Jere is all too happy to help. Smut.

Laid Bare - Jere. Stripper AU. Angsty, sexy, dramatic and traumatic.

Perhana - Bojan/Jere. Even more traumatic. Death and sadness.

Multi-Chapter Stories (Non-Series):

Wake Up - Bojan/Jere - A psychological thriller where we see Bojan, an ex addict try and patch things up with Jere but all the while Jere is falling further and further into a set of diaries that he has found... but all is not as it seems. What will happen when one slowly starts to fall apart and the other desperately tries to keep them together? What happens when things aren't what they seem, or are they just a dream within a dream? Can we really trust our own senses to tell us the truth?

Love and Be Loved, Kill or Be Killed - Jere/OC Female - Mara is a busy GP living her life as best as she can spreading kindness wherever she goes. She can't help it; she's just nice. When her town is plagued by a spree of murders on local women, she becomes anxious and a little paranoia takes hold of her but she carries on her day to day routine as best as she can, refusing to allow fear take over her life. When her good friend, Jere, asks for help with his sick mother, kind, caring Mara... how could she refuse? Little does she know that there's a side to Jere that she hasn't yet seen, but she's read all about it in the papers... and she's about to see it first hand...

Skylar - Regular life AU. Skylar is eighteen and being let loose into the world after spending his entire life in foster care. Kris has been assigned to be his counsellor after social services recognising he needed some assistance.

(UNFINISHED) Till Death Us Do Love - Vampire AU. Jere/Damon - After a freak accident that rocked the world by creating mutated humans not unlike the vampires seen in the Hollywood movies, humans fight back and reluctantly live besides them. Hatred is rife between the two species (and even that term is a stretch as technically they are still humans, just mutated). Jere is a vampire, the same yet different from the others, fleeing from Finland with his brother Mikke. Damon is a human who just wants to live his life the way he wants to but is met with nothing but resistance. How will the world cope when two unsuspecting people's lives run into one another, creating a cataclysmic explosion of a celestial fate that will create a ripple effect that no-one will be able to stop?

(UNFINISHED) Let Go - regular life AU - Jere/J. Jere is a stressed out married man seeking professional services from a Dom sex worker by the name of J. J is an aloof sex worker/dancer who holds everyone at arms length in order to protect themself. He/Him during work, They/Them during personal life. What happens when both people reach a breaking point and come clashing together in a destiny meant for two? Will they be able to let go, grab hold, and trust?

Series:

Jere/Nace One Shots - Porn with Feelings and Plot - 6 one shots - set in real life AU.

Kinktober Universe - Jere/Nace regular life AU. 4 multi-chapter stories. Jere and Nace have a marriage on the rocks and have 31 days to save it. (the subsequent stories are prequels - Holiday where they first meet, university and the letters during university)

BoJere Fluffy Fluff Fluff - regular life AU where Bojan and Jere have both moved to the UK and meet. All fluff no smut super sweet and delicious. 2 multi-chapter parts.

Writing Requests - 30 one shots requested by my lovely tumblr friends! ^_^ Includes, smut, gore, fluff, comedy, drama, angst everything you could ask for. All different pairings, polycule and even fantasy in there too.

Soulmate AU snapshots - Bojan/Jere - Bojan is immortal and Jere keeps reincarnating, forcing Bojan to fall in love over and over again.

(UNFINISHED) Finding NetherRealm Series - Fantasy AU. Lexi is a doctorate student, on her way to becoming the next member of the Horrorlogical Society. All she has to do is complete her placement at the Zoo of the Otherworld and not get too attached to the creature she is meant to study. Easy, right? Käärijä has been captured, stuffed inside a wooden box. He's in pain, he's scared, he's been taken from his family and he doesn't know where he is. All he has to do is make himself as scary as possible, for as long as possible, and they'll leave him alone. Easy, right? If there is one thing that they will learn rather quickly is that nothing in life, no matter who or what or where, is easy.

#käärijä #kaarija #jere pöyhönen #jere from vantaa #jere poyhonen #ao3 writer #ao3 fanfic #joker out #käärijä fanart #writer life #masterlist of fics

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stillness-in-green · 3 years ago

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Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Introduction and Part One)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

INTRODUCTION

The title states my premise here: the breezy way My Hero Academia presents and resolves the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front is ludicrous. If taken as presented and allowed to stand without being further addressed, it serves as a breaking point from which the series will be incredibly hard-pressed to recover. Why, you ask?

From a logistical standpoint, it strains credulity. From an ethical standpoint, it suggests deeply troubling problems with the state of Hero Society. From a thematic standpoint, it unravels whole portions of the narrative’s spine. I’ll be looking at each of these facets in turn to discuss the questions they raise which My Hero Academia has not yet seen fit to answer. Many in fandom don’t seem to be thinking about it too hard, so I’d like to lay out—in exhaustive detail—all the reasons I find this plot element so wildly out of touch with causal reality.

Please note that while they are discussed when relevant, this essay is not principally about the named characters in the League of Villains or the erstwhile high command of the Metahuman Liberation Army. The sorts of consequences Shigaraki Tomura or Re-Destro would and should be facing in a courtroom are orders of magnitude beyond what Random Liberation Warrior X would be, but it’s the mass numbers of Random Liberation Warrior Xs that this essay is most concerned with, as they are the ones most in danger of being swept under a rug and forgotten by the series in its current state.

Further, be advised that this essay in its full form is both very long (about 21K words excluding Sources and Further Reading) and will contain extensive discussion of real-life Japan—comparisons to historical events, minutiae of its legal and carceral systems, and general cultural views on criminality. This will include references to imprisonment, government oppression, and incidents of terrorism both real and in the context of My Hero Academia.

Being as it is about quite a recent event in the series, it will also contain heavy spoilers all the way up through the most recent chapter as of this writing, Chapter 310. It likewise contains spoilers for the spin-off series My Hero Academia: Vigilantes up through Chapter 95.

The essay will be posted in parts on tumblr and in full on AO3. For the tumblr posting, I will provide links to other tumblr posts as I reference them; however, as I would like this to actually show up in the tags, outside links containing my sources and further reading will be provided in a separate post following the conclusion of the essay.

Lastly, I spent an entire month writing this as a fan who is sympathetic to the villains in general and the MLA in particular. If your response to the very concept of this essay is anything to the tune of, “Who cares what happens to a bunch of disgusting quirk eugenicists?” know that you and I have radically different views on the MLA, and the role of the justice system in general. You are, of course, welcome to read the essay anyway, but, having said my piece about the MLA and their relationship with quirk supremacy elsewhere, I will not be engaging with arguments or gotchas on that subject here.

PART ONE: The Facts at Hand

Before we get too deep into things, let’s lay out the basic facts: how many people are actually involved in the arrest, as well as some comparisons to real-life events to contextualize that number and provide some referents for the issues the arrest raises.

Re-Destro gives the numbers of the Metahuman Liberation Army as 116,516. A lot of people go on to die in Deika, though we’re never given a solid count. The biggest batch we see killed in a single go are the press of sixty or so people Shigaraki decays, then the sixteen-ish Toga drops, though some of those might possibly have had quirks that allowed them to survive. Any number of people certainly died as well simply in the moments we didn’t see, and who even knows how many were caught in the radius of Shigaraki’s last attack.

Further, there may well have been a measure of organization bleed when the MLA became the PLF (though I imagine trying to leave was a very dangerous proposition, giving an additional reason to stick it out on top of the general cult-like mindset the MLA displays); likewise, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t have been some deaths at the Gunga Villa, be it from Gigantomachia’s departure, Geten cutting loose, or combatants—be they hero or comrade—overcompensating somewhat in the middle of a chaotic melee.

I suspect it’s overestimating the depletion, but for the purposes of simplicity, let us call it 115,000 remaining members at the time of the raid.[1]

We are told that, in all, 16,929 people were captured at the villa—just about 17,000. 132 escaped in the confusion; this is a fairly negligible number, save for the fact that it includes high-ranking advisors, but not Machia and those of the Front that were with him.

We are further told, and I quote, “Their bases scattered around the country were hit too, and the sympathizers rounded up.” Horikoshi did not provide any solid numbers for this,[2] but if we’re to assume that it is just the rest of the group (more on the logistics of that bit of spycraft later), “the sympathizers” would be 98,000 additional people.

However, 98,000 may be a significant underestimation. It’s based, after all, on a number Re-Destro cites to describe “warriors lying in wait, ready to rise to action.” This begs the question: is Re-Destro quoting the entire membership of the group, or only those who actually are ready to take action? In other words, does his number account for non-combatants? Is he counting young children? I tend to assume the MLA doesn't have a retirement age as such,[3] but if they do, does his number account for the elderly?

How many more people might be “sympathizers” to the PLF insomuch as they are e.g. the six-month-old infant daughter of an MLA couple? What about the ninety-year-old man in the retirement home whose only real act of war these days is tying up the phone line at City Hall to complain about repressive quirk use laws? How about the fired-up fifteen-year-old that was going to get their official code name next month, just in time to join the first wave of attacks? If he’s being literal in his usage of “warrior,” the actual count of the MLA could easily be twice as high as the number he actually gives.

But okay, maybe Re-Destro’s number does include absolutely everyone. Maybe he’s just being rhetorical—maybe, in his mind, even the six-month-old is waiting to rise to action; she’s just going to have to wait a bit longer than the rest, is all. For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the numbers we have: a low-end of 17,000, a high-end of 115,000, captured not merely in a single day, but allegedly in the span of a few hours.

I’m sure I don’t need to stress that that is a lot of people. But how many people is it, practically speaking? Is there a precedent? Anything we can look to for guidance on how this kind of thing would go in real life?

Comparative Analogues

The PLF is tricky to categorize for the purposes of real-life comparison, especially compared to how they’re treated in-universe. In some lights, they resemble a protest movement; in others, a terrorist group. Just looking at the way the government reacts to them—and certainly in terms of their combat capabilities—they might as well be an all-out insurrectionist uprising! Below, I’ll examine a handful of historical incidents that cover that spectrum; they will continue to provide useful reference points throughout the rest of this essay.

The March 15 Incident

In the first half of the 20th century, Japan saw a huge uptick in socialist and communist activity, much to the general dismay of the ruling powers. In response, they passed a series of laws commonly referred to as the Peace Preservation Laws, designed to better enable authorities to suppress political dissent and freedom of speech, particularly that of leftists and labor movements.

The Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, but outlawed in 1925. This merely drove members underground, however, from which position they pointed supporters towards the numerous other parties with more legally tolerated leftist policies that had cropped up in the wake of the JCP’s dissolution. Following the February 1928 General Election (the first in Japan held with universal male suffrage), those parties supported by the JCP saw enormous gains in representation in Japan’s National Diet. Alarmed, the Prime Minister declared the mass arrest of known communists and suspected communist sympathizers. Accordingly, on March 15, 1,600 people were arrested throughout Japan.

Over the course of twenty years, some 70,000 people would be arrested under the auspices of the Peace Preservation Laws, the majority of them in 1925 through 1936. The laws would eventually be repealed by American occupation forces after WWII, and the JCP allowed to operate openly once again.

The Rice Riots

In 1918, an inflation spiral had driven the price of rice out of control, exacerbating economic insecurity and hardship. Farmers were being paid a pittance of the market value of their crop by rice buyers and government agents, while urban consumers were being charged an exorbitant price for the staple food, as well as a great many other consumer goods, and their own rents. In response, a series of riots ripped across Japan in late July through September. Beginning with peaceful protesting in a small fishing town in Toyama Prefecture, the unrest escalated to involve riots, strikes, looting, even bombing in demonstrations that reached major cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The scope was and remains unprecedented in modern Japanese history, seeing some 25,000 people arrested.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

If you’ve heard of any of them, it’s probably this one. On March 20, 1995, members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on five different Tokyo Metro trains in the middle of morning rush hour. Thirteen people were killed and over 5500 injured, about a fifth of them moderately to severely so. If not for small errors in the production of the gas and the rudimentary distribution method thereof, loss of life might easily have been catastrophically higher.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult, but the motives for that particular attack were much baser than bringing about the Apocalypse: at the time, the organization was under police investigation for its involvement in the kidnapping of a public official. Its leader, Asahara Shoukou, hoped that the attack would divert police’s attention from a planned raid.

It did not do so; police executed raids on numerous of the cult’s compounds, arresting many of its senior members both immediately and over the course of the following months as the investigation unfolded. In all, over 200 members were arrested of an organization that counted its membership prior to the attack as numbering 11,000 people in Japan.[4]

The February 26 Incident

There have been a significant number of uprisings and violent protests in Japan’s modern history; when looking for a representative example, I focused my attention on the military coups of the 1930s and 40s, largely because they took place in what was closest to the modern Japanese legal context.[5] Of that subset, I chose the February 26 Incident for the severity of the government response. The others disintegrated before they could be properly carried out or were met with sympathy for the dissidents despite the obvious illegality of their actions. The February 26 Incident, however, was when they finally became too troublesome to dismiss, and the Emperor himself ran out of patience.

In this period, the Japanese military had become drastically factionalized into two main groups—an ultra-nationalist group, largely powered by a group of young officers, which supported the Emperor and wanted to purge Japan of Western influences, and a more moderate group mainly defined by their opposition to the above faction.[6] Occurring in 1936, the February 26 Incident involved the young officers, believing that they had tacit approval from higher-ranked officers of their own faction, launching assassination attempts against the nationalists’ most prominent enemies in the government (six assorted Ministers and former Ministers in the Emperor’s Privy Council and the Diet) and a bid to seize control of the administrative center of the capital and the Imperial Palace, after which they planned to demand the dismissal of more officers and the selection of a new Cabinet.

The seven ringleaders had convinced eighteen other officers to lend their forces to the attempted coup, a total of around 1,500 men, calling themselves the Righteous Army. Several of their assassination attempts failed, however, and while they succeeded at taking the Prime Minister’s residence and the Ministry of War, they did not manage to secure the Palace. The outraged Cabinet demanded the Emperor take a hard line with the rebels, and by the 29th, the Righteous Army was surrounded by 20,000 government troops and 22 tanks. In this hopeless situation, the officers dismissed their troops; two committed suicide (a third attempted it unsuccessfully) and the remainder were arrested by military police.

International Examples

For obvious reasons, I prefer to limit my examples to events that happened in Japan. However, I will also be briefly referring to a few international incidents of mass arrest, taking place in India, the U.S., and Egypt, respectively.

In the following parts, I'll use these facts and comparative analogues to take a closer look at what readers were told became of the Paranormal Liberation Front.

Part Two

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Footnotes (Part One)—

[1] Over three months’ time, they likely gained some new blood also, simply in the course of their usual recruitment tactics. You don’t get an underground organization that size by sitting back and waiting for people to come to you, after all. I don’t know a practical way to calculate that, though, so just bear it in mind for when I talk about new members later.

[2] Possibly because he was aware that 17,000 people captured in one fell swoop was difficult enough to swallow without adding on more than five times that number.

[3] We do, after all, see some very aged people fighting in the streets of Deika.

[4] They were considerably more international than you may have heard. They had 50,000 members at the time, some 30,000 of them based in Russia.

[5] The Meiji Constitution was ratified in 1889; universal suffrage (for men) was granted in 1925. The modern constitution was enacted in 1947.

[6] More moderate, mind, in the context of the Imperial Japanese military. Neither of these factions had any time whatsoever for leftist movements, hence all those suppressive crackdowns.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

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tatiana-maximum · 7 years ago

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How I became an atheist

I was born in a religious country (Russia), in a religious household. But not only religious, also very superstitious. The men in my family folowed the Russian tradition of not being involved in child’s education so, as many other children I was brought up by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother always attended church (christian orthodox) and usually brought me up with her to the mass. She never bothered to explain much. I was given a book called ‘Bible for children’ which I adored because it had a beautiful illustration on each page along with a wonderful story and I’ve always loved a good story. I never understood what purposes the church services served, I remember watching the painting of a woman in the church and always thinking it was the holy trinity because I never understood the concept. I don’t recall us ever talking about religion or God I just know that at a very young age it was established that God exists, and I only remember my grandmother talking about angels that always protect us. Surprisingly, strong belief in christian God didn’t stop my grandmother from believing in Chinese medicine, numerology and other nonsense. Still to this day she buys lunar calendars, assigns great meaning to the Chinese new year, reads books on parapsychology, etc. My mother, on the other hand, looked for other ways to understand the world. She tried all sorts of cults. From some protestant churches - which she attended briefly wanting to protect myself from the dangers of the world by finding me “trustworthy Christian” friends - to Jehova’s witnesses (whose literature I read with great interest always finding it amazing how their beliefs differed from the ones I was brought up with but also seemed to make sense in a way), passing by Emmanuel Swedenborg - whom she considered (and maybe still considers) the only true prophet who could talk to people living on other planets. During the coming of age I wanted to make sense of it all on my own, I read literature on ancient religions (Greek, Nordic, Celtic, Hinduism…) because I really wanted to know how this world was created. I started to attend church willfully and attended a course on religion teached at the local church (still russian orthodox - while I was living in France). Russian orthodox priests are so special, they are so sure that their religion is the only true one, they under no circumstances want to talk about the parallels with other belief systems; which was not suitable for me because I was convinced that everything was connected and the truth was still “out there”. Funny thing - being so convinced astrology was real I was always surprised when I heard my French friends say that they didn’t believe in it. But being born “in the greatest country and religious system in the world” I never for a minute doubted my beliefs and thought that those French people just didn’t know better. Along with continuing my research I started to attend pagan meetups which were held roughly every month, even attended a meditation in the forest which was rather nice. They were completely different from what I expected - they didn’t care whether god existed or not - they related to the energy (or energies) “existing in the universe” and it was all about connecting with oneself and/or nature. Very nice people, but still - no answer on how the world was created and what is the meaning of life and why there are so many religions in the world. The more I searched the less I found. I still believed in god and everything else just didnt know how to get to “the truth”. Everything changed when I came back to Russia. Having left it as a teenager I couldn’t compare the life I lived in France as a young adult with my native country, and that’s partly why I wanted to go back. And I’m glad I did. People are so hopeless here but they also believe life has a purpose and they are just destined to live how they do. So much apathy. So much superstition. No initiative to change anything at all. That’s when it hit me - the French aren’t “strange” they just believe you can do anything if you put your mind and effort into it. The Russians believe in nothing. If anything happens it’s because it’s “supposed to”. There’s no responsibility for your actions, no need to do anything because everything is how it is - and religion is greatly responsible for this mindset. At this point I started questioning it all. I guess a part of me always did because I was always interested in science, read books on physics and cosmology and even attended a few conferences but in my mind science was always just a way to prove that everything my religious beliefs told me was true. Still as part of my research I bought “The Selfish gene” by Richard Dawkins, it was so well written and I found it curious that he was an atheist and even wrote a book about it, so I decided to check it out. Now, I won’t say “The God delusion” changed my life - rather dissipated the few doubts I had left and convinced me that accepting there is no god doesn’t make you a bad person, and there IS a meaning to life if you want to make one.

As a kid and teenager I used to have horrible nightmares where demons and witches were chasing me, I used to wake up terrified, trying to figure out what I did wrong, always stressing myself. I don’t have then anymore because now I understand that none of it is real.

I think about my past a lot (quarter-life crisis is real) and regret on the time I wasted waiting for my destiny to reveal itself to me. For 20+ years I’ve done nothing important, didn’t invest myself in anything I was passionate about because I was tought you have to have “a special gift” to do something. Now, I’m trying to make up for the time lost but it’s hard because I now have a job and a few responsibilities to manage, and the people surrounding me (especially my family) are religious and it’s impossible for them to understand what I went through. They say I have to “attein a certain age“ to understand religion and what it means and they disregard my protests and don’t want to listen about the hell I was living in.

Please, don’t allow unreal things to influence your life, it’s all in your head and you just have to analyze your worries and let them go. The world is still a beautiful place full of magic but this magiс is governed by the laws of physics/chemistry/biology.

P.S. I wanted to write this story for quite some time because I see a lot of people in the same place I was at, trying to find the meaning of it all wasting time and money in useless pseudoscience books and teachings, convinced they know better. And I don’t think I can make them think otherwise, they have to come to this understanding on their own. (I really hope this post will help you even just a little bit.) And to the people who think all religious people are stupid - please don’t, it’s a matter of education and cultural surroundings - attacking them won’t make them change their mind - rather the opposite.

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yogatempleindia · 4 years ago

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Yoga in India: 7 Differences Between Eastern and Western Yoga

Yoga in India and in the West is very different, and as I came to explore it more it’s something I really wanted to share about on the blog. Before India, I took hot yoga in the US and loved it as a hard-core workout. I was pretty sure all I lost was water-weight, but I liked the feeling of sweating that much. In India, I was really surprised to find out what the “birthplace of Yoga” considered “real” yoga. A 200hr Yoga Teacher Training in India really changed by life.

Yoga Temple India is a peaceful, quiet (sometimes the teacher didn’t speak one word) place, where we meditated for 20–30 minutes before and after, and held positions much longer, so long in fact, that I thought my arms would fall off! I was taught one-on-one yoga many times and told by my emaciated-looking 50-year-old Indian teachers that I should eat once a day, never take a group class, and make yoga my life.

Clearly, the East has a different take on the “yoga lifestyle” than the West. We know yoga came from the East, but when you pinpoint it down, they say probably Rishikesh, India. There’s a reason the Beatles chose Rishikesh to come to relax and write music with their guru. Most of the students choose Yoga Teacher Training Rishikesh in their first chose when choosing a Yoga Course in India.

Yoga in India: Differences between the West and East

Before we get into it, I want to share a few other articles that you can open in new tabs and read. I have been living in India for nearly six years and wrote up lists of the top places to learn yoga in India for travellers based on location. I have prices and what’s included for all of them.

· Top 5 yoga retreats in India

· Best places to do yoga teacher training in India based on reviews and popularity

· Top 5 yoga retreats in Goa

· Top yoga teacher training in India straight from my reader’s opinions and experiences (this is such a great post with insight from people who have recently stayed at the locations)

What I learned from practicing yoga teacher training in India, which I wouldn’t have learned from the West.

It is 5 am, the crows are crowing, the cockerels are singing their morning wake up song and the dogs are barking. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but you can feel the heat in the air. Welcome to India, the origin and home of yoga, where else would I do my yoga teacher training. Not only is India the sacred land from a yoga point of view but Goa where I trained also offered me sunshine, a beach and the ability to train with local Indians who dedicate their life to yoga. This is not just a form of exercise in the East. Our day would start with two hours of morning practice with empty stomachs, ending as the sun started to rise; we would cover traditional Eastern yoga, philosophy and adapt our western lives to a totally eastern practice of yoga, worlds apart from the fitness style class in the west.

1. Our food affects our emotions

It was a culture shock to start with. Being encouraged to live a full yogi life didn’t just include engrossing ourselves into yoga practice it also included eating a vegan plain diet. The meals were designed from the Ayurvedic philosophy. The food was plain with limited spices because we learned that food has a big impact on our emotions, plain food doesn’t play with emotions and also caters for vegans, vegetarians and people with food intolerance. Being plant-based it was easier to digest and it made me feel guilty for all the times I over ate in the West and did not listen to my body when it was hungry; I would eat for the sake of it and because there is an abundance of food.

2. More than just an exercise

In the western world, we have just taken one part of a whole yoga lifestyle. It is mainly used as a form of exercise. However, yoga is a whole practice of life and living, how you treat others, the respect you have for your body and the world around you. Trying to be non-judgemental.

There are 6 branches of yoga with the practice in class just being one of these. Along with that Yoga is an integrative eight-step (limbs) system recorded in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and comprises ethical guidelines and observances (yamas and niyamas), postures (asanas), breath work (pranayama), ability to turn inward (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana) and the state of fulfilment, freedom, bliss and contentment (samadhi — the ultimate goal of yoga).

3. You need to still your mind

Yoga in India has a lot more meditation but it doesn’t mean it is a cult or a religion. I was very privileged to have had a Brahman teach me yoga philosophy. What the western world do wrong in some styles of yoga is missing the ability to be mindful and still your mind. Yoga can change your life, it helps us to sit still, be non-reactive to emotions such as sadness, possessiveness or anger and similar. The yoga practice has to occur off the mat just as much as whilst you are doing the physical poses.

4. Learn to remove the ego

Too often yoga in the west is portrayed with a thin girl in a very unusual position which would be impossible to achieve as a beginner, wearing the latest body-hugging lycra outfit. The images on social media and in magazines pictured in these desirable locations of beautiful beaches or rolling hills makes yoga seen unaffordable and not accessible to the average person. There is little interest in weight loss as our bodies are just a machine to get us through life. It is about working on what’s inside, which is why food becomes a focus.

Ultimately, what we aim to do in yoga is to develop ourselves from the inside, gaining body intelligence on the mat will start to move your practice off the mat and encourage you to have more awareness of what you are putting into the body. Yoga is designed to cleanse your body and mind of physical and emotional blockages, develop a stronger sense of connection of the two, promoting better awareness and mindfulness of the choices we make in life whether it is about the way we treat ourselves or others, or attitudes we express. Yoga is a union of your body and your mind, not about how you look in the mirror.

5. Being spiritual doesn’t make you religious

I learnt that being spiritual was just about trying to be happy. Yoga is just a road to happiness, some people see it as enlightenment but this it is just trying to allow you to lead your life as easily as possible, removing the stress and strains of day to day living so you can be as happy as possible.

Our practice would always start with an Om channelling the vibration from the sound and our intention for the day into the universe; this would follow breathing exercises to cleanse out body and meditation. We tuned into our body and we learned that yoga is a method to prime your body so it is comfortable when meditating. In the East, the ultimate aim of Yoga is to experience the Truth, by realizing the true nature of ourselves. It is not religious.

6. Lifelong learning

Many people think yoga is like a gym, or like going to a work-out, but that is not yoga

In Indian culture, you go to a teacher and learn from him. It is a lineage and it is lifelong learning. You are taught to have patience and take your time over years not weeks and months like you are taught in the West. It makes me sad that in 4 weeks you can become a fully-fledged yoga teacher. My yoga teacher spent 10 years dedicated to his own self-practice before he even thought about sharing these finding with others, there are limited teachers in the UK which can claim the same. You have to be a student and know that you will be a student your whole life. Yoga is never ending. It’s like the ocean and what we have learned is like a small drop. There’s a lot to learn and for our whole life, we keep learning.

7. There is no avoiding the silence

Many people have come to me and said, “I started practicing yoga and my life has been changed.” People can improve their whole lifestyle. You cannot separate the exercise from the traditional philosophy. I started out in the mindset of doing yoga to prevent injury in sport. Now yoga is my only exercise and I crave to still my mind in myself practice. I notice in my body and my mind if I haven’t practiced. Yoga is more than just an exercise for me. There is no avoiding it because the movements work with the breath they become a form of meditation.’ The continued practice of the exercises will, whether you intend it or not, eventually influence you toward wanting to understand more and wanting to develop yourself outside the practice on the mat.

Booking Yoga Retreats and Yoga Teacher Training in India is a good choice if you want to give a certification to your yoga practice and help others in their life.

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coachingreviewsite · 5 years ago

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Personal Development Change Can Make You Happy

New Post has been published on http://personalcoachingcenter.com/personal-development-change-can-make-you-happy/

Personal Development Change Can Make You Happy

A lot of people struggle with the right place or way to start their personal development. Since everyone is different it is important to identify what can work for you when you're thinking about personal development. There are, however, some common advice that can help a majority of people get started on a personal development journey, and that is what the following tips cover.

When dealing with the emotional downers in your life, self help is many times the solution for people. Like anything else in life, it requires dedication to succeed, but there is always room for improvement and you should always strive to better yourself. Remember to always keep your head up.

If you would like to move forward in personal development, you should be humble. Realizing that you are but a small part of the bigger picture will potentially open your mind to attaining new insights. By instilling these ideas in your brain, you will be more open to improving yourself and learning new information.

You are responsible for the state of your life right now. You have the ability to make changes and own up to the decisions you have made by embracing them and extracting the value and experience you have gained from them. By realizing you are in control of your life, you can be more effective in identifying the things you wish to improve or change about yourself.

How Meditation Helped Me to Uncover My Path

www.pickthebrain.com

"You're reading How Meditation Helped Me to Uncover My Path, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you're enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

I remember the time in my life when I was stuck amidst the false narratives of success, failure, and competition. Humans are free species with a mind that is capable of doing wonders, and natural abilities to achieve astonishing outcomes. But do you know what stands between you and the success? It is your own mindset and insufficiency to disconnect from the unnatural wrath of ego that comes in between. I was in the same position a couple of years ago – completely delusional, dwelling under forced expectations, and just living my life on absolutely absurd terms. I had no idea what my heart wanted or what my soul was searching for. Living in denial is one perilous thing, isn’t it?

Humans love living in absolute renunciation because it offers some short-lived emotions- love, greed satiation, and ego inflation. What was missing in my life? Why wasn’t I happy even though I was living a life that had everything approved by the societal norms and standards? I realized that every waking moment of my life was a slave to some or the other requirement or demand. My work was not serving my soulful purpose and my bank account was there just to boost my ego. Ask yourself, “is this what you want?” It was way back in 2016, that one of my friends introduced me to Yoga & meditation and since then, I never looked back.

The unnecessary mind chatter was over all of a sudden, happiness was there in the heart, and an unreal sense of satisfaction encompasses my gut. Suddenly, everything looked bright and every morning, the sun looked even more beautiful.

Meditation turned my life upside down…..for good.

Constant Anger

Past 4 years were a roller coaster ride of emotions and mental instability. Anger was my second personality and nothing was working enough to pacify the strange irritation towards everything and everyone. I was always hungry, stressed, and my gut wrenched in pain. In a nutshell, I was annoying and unapproachable. During the first few days of starting my meditation session, I was horrible, failed to concentrate on anything, and could not keep my eyes closed. With time, I learnt to connect with my body and keep up with its demand. The first wake up call for me was to change my lifestyle and diet for a while to see if it changes anything. I am a pescatarian now. I feel full, stay humble, feel energetic, and my hunger pangs are controlled. I was missing the basic vitamins and animal hormones, which is why I was ungrounded for most parts. It is proved that some of the basic vitamins and minerals are found in animal products and I was obviously missing from my diet. Led by the new-age cult, my lifestyle was affected in the most pathetic ways possible and my brain remained wishy-washy about the positive changes. Meditation brought me closer to my existence and put me into a thinking mode. I became practical enough to take care of my body first and include things that can help me reach healthier goals.

Your gut regulates your life, let that sink in!

Eating Disorder?!

Eating disorder is not a pleasant sight, believe me. Eating a bag of chips, a burger and still not feeling satiated! No one wants to be this monstrous with food. I had an unhealthy relationship with food that made me unstable and extremely annoyed for most parts. Nothing was working on my appetite and by the end of the day, I was bloated and sick as hell. Meditation taught me to focus more on the moment and this helped me a lot during my withdrawal symptoms and helped me go through the paradigm shift, with ease. I learned to chew each morsel with contentment and concentrate on that very moment. My emotions were all over the place and I found solace near every junk food stall or truck. However, scientific studies prove that junk food has a high content of Omega-6 that messes up the gut and everyone knows that happiness starts at the gut. The art of mindfulness taught me to stay in harmony with my disrupted emotional well-being, take food as a fuel, and stop obsessing with my meals.

Career Path

But where do you get the food from? I had to live a life on my own terms and ethics. This is not easy as you need both emotional and financial support, which is steady enough to take you through thick and thins. A closed mind is an outcome of societal conditioning, childhood preaching, and certain religious beliefs that stops you from being your real self. A constant need of a polished self-projection puts pressure on your tender mind and often forces you to do things against your life’s purpose. My career path was the most arduous terrain I have ever walked, no jokes. At some point in life, I was nearly close to sabotaging my desires and suppress my skills. You become a push-over when you stay in denial and disconnect from Nature. I started trusting my instincts more and developed the strength to follow my skills. The art of meditation brings your soul back home and make you realize that temporary emotions satiate the ego, not the soul.

Success Rate

You have to understand this thing- “the effective way to lead a happier life is to stay grounded and be grateful”. Greed is a common emotion and honestly the most powerful one. Constantly fanned by ego, your greed takes everything to extreme. At first, my approach towards life in general was extremely haywire and this is why my mindset was haggard and unsteady. Meditation is a scientifically proven tool to deactivate the parasympathetic nervous system, which means less unstable emotions, eased up mind, and more energy to take up intricate tasks. In every sphere of my life, I elevated from a confused to a more mature human being and my mind levelled up from being unsteady to becoming practical. Wondering what this can do to you? A stable mind leads to a more realistic approach towards life; you feel better about yourself, approach your goals with a calmer mind and sop rushing into things. These attributes confirm nothing but a steady success rate and constantly fueled ambitions to move ahead in life. This will take time but things started to change after a week.

Do I Owe Stability to the Cumulative Effects of These Changes?

The art of meditation is not a magic wand that yields result at the single swirl. Consider this – you approach to use a divine tool in order to achieve a higher consciousness but this is not an easy path. Meditation is a catalyst to this mission, which makes you aware of your instabilities, weaknesses, and covered ego. First few instances of failure shall teach you that your life is not only a bed of roses but often days of walking the eggshells. I was more than exhausted and this was because meditation takes a lot of energy, the negative one. You will not feel it at the first go – all that sitting at one place with closed eye thing. My mental chatter stopped after a week and this was no miracle. It was more about lack of centered emotions and unnecessary inclination towards egotistical qualms.

A lifestyle that was not serving my higher-self had to be shunned so that I could listen to my mind and feed my body the right way. Inculcate the art of meditation in your everyday life, add it to your workout regime, morning routine or simply do some inhale-exhale action before hitting the sack. The rhythmic breathing patterns helps pacify stressed nerves allowing you to raise your vibrations in the most realist way.

Om Singh is blogging at Retreat Kula, a website that offers best yoga retreats and yoga teacher training for yogis around the world. He is always on the lookout for interesting places to visit. It took him 25 years of his life to realize where his true calling lies, but once that was done, there’s been no looking back. Since the last ten years that he is on the go, He is sharing his travel experiences by writing about them.

You've read How Meditation Helped Me to Uncover My Path, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you've enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles." https://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/how-meditation-helped-me-to-uncover-my-path/

Being able to effectively manage your time will play a huge role in the level of success of bettering yourself and your life. Staying organized is important because the stronger your plan, the less leeway you have to get off track and the less excuses you will be able to make.

You can contribute to a more loving and fulfilling relationship with your partner by making an effort to clearly state your specific needs and expectations as they relate to showing appreciation for one another. Yes, you love your partner dearly, but you do not share the same brain. He or she should not have to guess when it comes to your wants and needs. In fact, this concept can be readily applied to your work and family relationships as well.

Build strong and healthy relationships with good people. The people that you share your life with are going to help you in your journey to a happy life. If you are around negative people, it is not going to help you change your ways and find the life that you want to live.

If you hear a voice in your head, chances are it is just your subconscious talking to you. Those words you hear are called affirmations or your inner voice. Some of these may be positive, and some may be negative. The goal is to concentrate on the positive ones and work to eliminate ones that are negative.

Don't rely simply on your memory for knowledge, invest in understanding things completely. You need to approach life and learning not only with the goal of understanding the 'how' and 'what', but also of understanding the 'why'. When you begin to grasp why something occurred, you are are opening up a layer of knowledge that many people ignore.

Top 10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Memory

www.developgoodhabits.com

"Some things just won't stick, you can't remember them. Everyone sometimes forgets something, but sometimes it is important that you remember certain things, and including some of the mentioned habits can help you out. The list contains ten tips that give your memory an extra boost. They are small tricks, habits in your everyday behavior, and […]The post Top 10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Memory appeared first on Develop Good Habits. " https://www.developgoodhabits.com/improve-memory/

To be on a path of personal development means not leaving things to chance. Don't let yourself blame the universe for what happens. Take control of your life and you can choose what your life will be like. In every situation, you have the choice on how you will react, so make the right choice, starting today!

Be honest with yourself. If you are trying to change something about your life, you need to be brutally honest about what you can and can not do. If you are not a very emotionally strong person, you will need to work on that before going into your deeper issues.

To achieve your goals you need to recognize what motivates you. Although advise from others can be helpful, do not be surprised if what works for them does not work for you. Once you realize what motivates you, you will be able to set up an award system for yourself that will help keep you focused on your goal.

Don't forget about the power of positive thinking. It is necessary to maintain the proper mindset on your road to personal development and negativity will only thwart your best efforts. Practice positive thinking to achieve positive results. When you remain positive about everything that you do, good things will follow.

What Is Your Success Meter?

www.dumblittleman.com

"What does success mean for you? Here’s an interesting story. In 1983, a young talented guitarist was kicked out of his dream band. He was delirious with joy even just before the manager called him at his office to kick him out. It happened just three days before he was about to record his first […] The post What Is Your Success Meter? appeared first on Dumb Little Man." https://www.dumblittleman.com/what-does-success-mean/

Religion can help some people. Perhaps the religion you were raised in is not for you if you consider yourself an atheist. Certain people see religion as a way of finding their place in the universe, and some people see it as a way to improve their daily life by adopting a certain philosophy.

Self awareness and self control are a part of personal development. Knowing who you are, being confident in your perception of the world around you and controlling your emotions will allow your true self to prosper. Always stand up for what you believe in, but try and do so without infringing on others beliefs.

Consider learning an instrument as part of your personal development. You probably had some type of music training when you were young, and it is never too late to learn again. Learning an instrument can expand your appreciation for various types of music. Music teachers for adults can customize lessons and use music that are more appropriate for adults. Therefore, do not worry that you will only be learning children's songs. Being able to play an instrument is a wonderful feeling, you are really missing out if you don't give it a try.

Use whichever suggestions from this post seem applicable and practical for your own situation; not every tip will work for every person. If you are aiming for success in nearly any area, the information available in this material will help you. If you know of anyone who could also pick up useful advice from this piece, pass it along and help them begin the journey to becoming a more well-rounded individual.

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personalcoachingcenter · 5 years ago

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Personal Development Change Can Make You Happy

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/personal-development-change-can-make-you-happy/

Personal Development Change Can Make You Happy

How Meditation Helped Me to Uncover My Path

www.pickthebrain.com

Meditation turned my life upside down…..for good.

Constant Anger

Your gut regulates your life, let that sink in!

Eating Disorder?!

Career Path

Success Rate

Do I Owe Stability to the Cumulative Effects of These Changes?

Top 10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Memory

www.developgoodhabits.com

What Is Your Success Meter?

www.dumblittleman.com

youtube

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donnamoserr · 5 years ago

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Reading While High

Recently, once the weekend comes and I am on cloud Cannabis nine, I am having the desire to express myself more creatively, rather than sitting and viewing Netflix.

If your looking for some medicine or cannabismo at an affordable price and delievered straight to your door then have I got the place for you. Starting with their specialty of being a White Fire OG strain seller, www.Weed-deals.ca is the perfect place to find all things like strains such as Platinum Bubba Kush and high quality at the same time. Looking for something to store all of your cannabis in? Weed Deals will have a

Occasionally I will write. Occasionally I will participate in a mutually stimulating video game, or host an amassing. Other times, I will start to get my yoga on. Otherwise at other moments, I will explore reading .

youtube

Reading while high may be challenging to begin, however.

However, with additional effort in eliminating myself from all of the’marvelous’ distractions (technology, social websites and etc), the experience you receive from studying while stoned is WELL worth it.

Just picture your favorite tales Getting more vibrant than any display, carrying on a life all their own as you exude deep assumptions, strange characters and lively dialogue with a brand-new perspective.

Imagine soaking and adopting the wisdom in the many different Experiences authors and writers have to give. The small details our active minds readily overlook and miss.

Studying is a fantastic way to decompress, because the action is similar to being in a meditative state.

Thus, if you’re searching for items to see while high, grab a blanket, then catch your favorite system of cannabis ingestion and unwind someplace comfortable, as we supply you with our best 5 novels to read while lifted.

Reading While High: 5 Novels That Will Improve Your Expertise

5 books is not a lot. We all know. But it’s a Fantastic beginning, because the Writers of every have an exhausting collection of deep literary inventions.

If a publication does not interest you originally, we recommend you to search These writers are masters in their craft. From Philip K. Dick

“Perhaps I will go where I could see Stars, ” he said to himself since the automobile gained speed and elevation; it led off from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation into the north. On the place where no living thing goes. Not unless it believed that the end was coming.

Ever heard of the film Blade Runner? To the timeless sci-fi movie with a faithful and dedicated cult following.

Even though High, you will feel yourself becoming lost in postsecondary San Francisco, after the dark tale of Bounty Hunter and officer, Rick Deckard, whose job would be to’retire’ renegade androids who’ve returned from space — androids who attempt to pass themselves off as individual and might do anything to stay intact.

This story is more than Dangerous androids, though it includes some white-knuckled suspense sequences. The book takes you into gloomy moments of the individual mind, where Deckard finds himself torn between his own feelings as well as the needs of his place to kill.

Morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He had been lying on his back as hard as armor plate and if he lifted his head a bit, he watched his glistening brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribsto whose asses that the cap, about to slide off completely, would barely cling”

What might be trippier than stirring As a huge insect? The story’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, has worked to the verge of fatigue so as to repay his parents’ debts, and that bodily toll has shown to a insect metamorphosis. He wakes up on day unexpectedly transformed into a sizable, insectile creature, but with his individual mind .

The household continues on as though nothing That unexpected has happened. Each and every single day, banal discussions and dull events, continue to perform (waking up late, cleaning the home ). Strangely, they become monstrous in their own disregard and neglect of Gregor.

It is a bizarre assumption, particularly when studying while large, but if you dive deeply, you could interpret this job as a Metaphor for depression. You will find a glimpse of the way that households may reply to the emotional illness, the inherent mindset and assumptions society on a bigger scale holds contrary to it and much more.

Given that the publication was published in 1915, a time when psychological Illness was more stigmatized and misunderstood than it is now, anticipate a mind-bending studying high-profile.

“I think there is a whole new generation of children. They walk distinct… I can hear it at the audio… It used to really go life-death, life-death, but today it is death-life, death-life…”

I can not consider anything better than studying this story although: In 1968, at Palo Alto, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, signs up to take part in a medication research sponsored by the CIA. The medication he receives is a new experimental drug named LSD.

Starts to entice a group of ragtag adventurers, and they drop acid and also journey about California in a bus known as’Furthur’.

Get trapped into their crazy, hippie Life as they experience The Grateful Dead, Hell’s Angels and major figures of the Beat Generation such as Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, while geting chased by authorities and escaping into Mexico.

Nothing is what it is, because everything would be what it’s not.”

There you and Alice go togetherdown, down, Downdown the rabbit hole…that the Cheshire Cat looks with an amazing smile, Alice drinks a potion and melts down to size, and also watches a caterpillar smoke from a hookah.

If You Would like to lose yourself when Reading, Alice’s narrative does precisely that as she sees the world change around her. Occasionally frightening and sometimes for the greater, as she attempts to make sense of a vivid dreamworld.

Do not get stuck by the fact that this can be Categorized as Children’s fiction. This publication is a combination of crap, dreamlike passages and possibly extending to the realms of philosophy.

Or possibly, I really don’t understand. I received a telegram in the house:’Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours’ That does not mean anything. Perhaps it was yesterday”

You have likely grappled with the Idea that human presence retains no larger meaning. Meursault, the narrator, is a young guy residing in Algiers, that commits an act of violence apparently according to no logic or rationale, which disturbs those about him to get his lack of guilt and indifference. If his mom dies, he reveals his feelings simply to meet the expectations of the others.

It’s intimidating to delve to the mind of someone characterized by apathy and indifference, that commits crimes with no motive — especially once you understand that the narrative is conducive with the bigger notion that the world is absurd and isn’t here to serve humanity.

Can Reading While High Be Your Item?

If emotionally digesting the numerous things to see while high is not your thing, you can find infinite choices by passively going through a Netflix binge, or aimlessly becoming a societal networking browsing pro.

Playing marijuana games, throwing a bud celebration , practicing the yoga arts or working in your sexual lifestyle with your spouse are fantastic activities to do while high.

Experiment and take advantage of your additional sensory experience that is sensitive!

source http://www.stusolutions.com/reading-while-high/ source https://stusolutions.tumblr.com/post/186904495968

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96thdayofrage · 8 years ago

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Requiem for a Lightweight

Markos Moulitsas was once the face of American progressivism. That shouldn’t happen again.

For most people, the natural reaction upon learning Markos Moulitsas had penned a blog post titled “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance. They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For” probably went something like this:

“What is this? This is awful.”

“Hmm. That is awful.”

Or, perhaps, “Who? What is this website? This is awful to me.”

Twelve years later, and it feels like we are a much longer way away from the halcyon era of the Howard Dean campaign. It is baffling to think the losing Democratic primary campaign of a yelping pharma shill in the pay of a violent Iranian cult could be some high-water mark for liberals. But to at least one rapidly graying liberal clique, it is.

Such is — was — the mindset of Markos Moulitsas, or “Kos,” as he is insufferably known: an un-person already, at the youngish age of forty-five.

The Markos Moulitsas of 2016 uneasily lingers on from those heady Netroots days, like some errant looping transmission from a long-lost spaceship — a hologram still beaming from some distant spot in the galaxy, screeching about a Borg attack that claimed his life many lightyears ago.

Frankly, it seems in poor taste to bring up Moulitsas’s name in any volume above a whisper, in the somber way the Irish might refer to a relation who never wrote after leaving for America. When, as with Moulitsas, one’s working assumptions and grand strategy have been pulverized again and again and again and again and again — an entire life’s work rendered as laughable as a small hat on a big dog — well, it seems unnecessary to stamp the dirt down harder.

And yet. Two months out from the shock demolition of the Democratic Party, the most faithful acolytes are not getting it. Someone like Moulitsas, an irrelevancy himself, can only be a real, pressing threat when marching in lockstep with the rest of a vast zombie horde — a sea of dead flesh which somehow is still upright, clogging the highways, trapping those still alive and trying to break out, in a waking nightmare without end. It is the only way of explaining a Democratic Party, from Markos Moulitsas to Cory Booker to Rahm Emanuel, cheering the demise of decent health care as a going concern for many Americans.

The Rise of the Blogosphere

It’s hard to believe now that, at the height of his prominence, Moulitsas was as far to the left a figure as could be fathomed by most of the mainstream media. But in the dim, dank confines of the Bush years, he got himself a ticket to the big time.

Like the official introduction of sushi as a Sizzler salad bar item, Moulitsas’s mainstream inclusion as a pundit in the those years was a grasping, clumsy attempt by corporate forces to keep up with the times. That in all of his appearances, Moulitsas inevitably resembled a teacup poodle, yapping endlessly at passing mailmen, was immaterial. He had tapped into something new, something fresh. This man blogged. This man blogged, online — on the internet.

It was the right time and place to be writing online. Kos, along with a lot of other people, was well positioned in the early 2000s to exploit an emerging technology that the big boys didn’t quite understand yet. It’s easy to forget now, when the president-elect can liquify share prices with a pissy tweet, that political blogging was once a novelty. Within a few years of blogging’s established viability, it was ubiquitous enough for everyone to be doing it, such that by the time Obama came along, even fameballs like Pat Sajak were blogging about politics (in a welter of truly diseased arch-right screeds that I of course highly recommend reading).

But there was a period in which a host of these well-scrubbed blogger types gained purchase in the media landscape by doing what nobody established had been able to do online yet. Moulitsas was among them, as he organized some nascent liberal blogging activist vanguard. But along with him came a coterie of yuppie types with a knack for turning out reams of clean, wonky prose, paeans to entitlement reform that absolutely could not withstand a second reading.

Not that anyone ever would reread any of the works of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, or Ross Douthat. That wasn’t the point of all that scribbling. In the words of Jeremy Irons’s Wall Street wraith in Margin Call, if you want to succeed in the market, “be first, be smarter, or cheat.” The class of 2004 was first, not smartest.

We are still stuck with many of them — tenured by now, flush with money, and not one lick less stupid. And for a time there, it looked like Moulitsas might be one of them.

On the Right’s Turf

The war in Iraq turned into a violent quagmire. American liberals mostly contented themselves with righteous opposition — whether in the ultimately feckless Jon Stewart court jester vein, or the more stentorian Keith Olbermann style, with his affected anti-McCarthy histrionics. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, such opposition “proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.”

Then as now, with the election of Donald Trump, liberals seem more interested in perfecting their Edward R. Murrow impression than in offering a compelling and relevant alternative vision of how life in America could be. Politics is the determination of who exercises power, and how — a no-brainer for Republicans, who believe such powers to be theirs by right, and a continually mystifying assertion to Democrats, who profess to be happier losing than winning if the cost is behaving any less genteel than the droids populating “The West Wing.”

The admonition that “when they go low, we go high” must go down like a mug of warm cocoa for liberals — one they’ll sorely need on the cold morning of Trump’s inauguration.

Funnily enough, it was Moulitsas and his “Kossack” followers who fashioned themselves as street brawlers upending this tendency. To their credit, this was true, insofar as liberals of that era were about as threatening in their rhetoric as the Snuggle fabric softener bear — unless the target of their ire happened to be the unwashed freaks actually protesting the war.

Kos’s schtick was always as a tough guy, a truth-teller with little regard for the niceties of most liberals. While he wasn’t very good at it, at least he tried. His 2010 book, American Taliban, a naked attempt to ape the polemical bestseller style of a Jonah Goldberg or Ann Coulter, was very dumb, but with its titular thesis in the hands of a more fearsome writer, might’ve gotten at some dark truths.

They view themselves as ardent liberals who extracted real concessions from the Democratic Party, rendering the GOP impotent, as recounted in a 2014 victory lap which seems unhinged the more you think about it. Even at their most resolute, norms regarding illegal warfare, addictive militarism, free-market greed, and vicious social conservatism were more or less accepted by Netroots liberals as unimpeachable political realities to be snaked around rather than confronted head-on.

It is the only way to explain their resulting strategies, and might very well define the boundary between liberalism and leftism. By surrendering so many of the terms of the debate to modern American conservatism — a far more revolutionary, farsighted, and politically astute project that can plausibly claim its Leninist streak — much of the most strenuous liberal activism that seemed to be in opposition to Bush was, in truth, pointless at best. At worst, it was indistinguishable from that of the Republicans themselves.

Unsurprisingly, Kos and his cohorts don’t see it that way. I imagine it would be genuinely shocking and enraging for someone like Moulitsas to hear that he’s hardly removed from a Democratic bete noir of that era like Joe Lieberman.

The thinking went something like this: the “loyal opposition” would alternate between rolling over to play dead on every insanely violent foreign intrigue offered by the GOP, or seek to court the same ideological adherents, but in a kinder, gentler way. The early 2000s was not a shining era of democracy. Any voices of sanity were not going to be getting through the Democratic door. Americans were sick, and swollen with fear. People wanted to kill the Dixie Chicks. This country was entirely deranged.

Subscribers to that favorite canard that politics is “the art of the possible,” a formulation that exists less in the service of political transformation than in making excuses for its obstruction, the Netroots focused their energies on getting Democrats elected in districts that would ordinarily go Republican. Any Democrats, really.

While they evinced a progressive profile, politics dictated they not recruit anyone too left-wing to run in places like Kentucky or North Carolina. Thus it became that seasoned militarists would advance antiwar principles on behalf of the Democrats, and by dint of their past hawkishness, do so with political cover — an Orwellian formulation which somehow became the conventional wisdom for defeating Republicans. And so it was that their putatively antiwar energies flowed seamlessly into advocacy for crooks like Representative John Murtha — a pork-barrel baron, FBI sting target, and avatar of everything one might think was wrong with the party.

The “Netroots” existed in a surreal realm, embodied in a contradiction they were incapable of seeing: while defining themselves as being in rabid opposition to the Blue Dog tendency in Democratic politics, they instead choked off any left-wing influence from being felt upon the party.

In his otherwise amusingly idiotic book, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America — a title I’d wager Abraham Lincoln might have disliked — centrist pundit Ron Brownstein nevertheless accurately identified this apparent incongruity:

Kos wasn’t as reliably liberal as the MoveOn community. Although he opposed the Iraq War, he supported the invasion of Afghanistan. His favorite Democrats were not Eastern cultural liberals like [John] Kerry but Westerners who combined economic populism with libertarian views on social issues like gun control. He disdained the conventions of identity politics among Democratic interest groups. In a book Moulitsas co-authored with [Jerome] Armstrong, the two suggested that Democrats were too doctrinaire in demanding support for legalized abortion.

Such was the strange logic of Moulitsas: the (admittedly odious) senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was an enemy to be crushed, while Virginia’s Mark Warner — venture capitalist, telecom millionaire, and Wall Street–financed deficit hawk — was keynote speaker material for Moulitsas’s interminable yearly convention.

This was an era in which General Wesley Clark — a lunatic and war criminal who nearly started World War III over an airport in Kosovo — was somehow drafted by Moulitsas as not merely an alternative to Bush, but as an antiwar standard-bearer. The 2004 presidential candidates wound a strange dialectic of proving their antiwar bona fides by trying to sound more martial and hawkish than Bush; even Howard Dean, the least offensive of this bunch, would demand Saddam Hussein “disarm” himself of non-existent weapons, while advancing the stalking horse of Afghanistan as the “good war” to be fighting.

That such actions could be considered estimable for the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party” says something about how delusional these people were.

And when the Democrats responded by nominating a decorated Vietnam veteran, subscribing to the notion that such a figure could beat Bush on his own turf, they were shocked to see John Kerry libeled and smeared, the kryptonite that was his valorous war record turning in midair and cutting the candidate to ribbons. It was almost as if they didn’t really seem to understand how this country works.

If you “crashed the gates” of the Democratic Party of this era, it probably wasn’t actually as great an achievement as its practitioners triumphantly crowed. This was one of those cases where, as a famous German might have put it, the abyss was gazing back.

Moulitsas trod a route through this Bush-era thicket which did not challenge the broader insanity that had reached a fever pitch in America. He would never have thought to do such a thing. “Progressivism” in the Bush years was about conforming to a set of realities fixed by the darkest, most violent urges of the American mind, sloping downward on the outermost bell curve of this chaos.

Moulitsas and those like him were Democrats first, and identified strongly as such, despite any protestations to the contrary. To fathom life outside the banal strictures of the party would be to court irrelevance. And so, like Hungry Joe in Catch-22, in that post-9/11 dark age, Moulitsas enjoyed the individual battles of a nonsensical war — which meant that he too was totally insane.

Even the Netroots favored designation, “progressives,” was a punt — a surrender to the feeling that Republicans had made the very word “liberal” a dirty word, requiring a rebranding. They weren’t leftists; such a thing might’ve indicated a belief system that existed a posteriori, beyond the demands of the party.

To his credit, Kos and his “Netroots Nation” were correct in believing the Democratic Party would need to be taken over to effectively challenge the right wing. As such, Moulitsas was able to force the Democratic establishment of the Bush years to pay homage to him.

It was a kiss of death, then and now — a catch-22 of its own. If your political beliefs — such as those of Bernie Sanders — pose even a mild threat to the corporate and ideological interests that dominate the Democratic Party, then you will be ruthlessly shut out, lest you make any progress in trying to turn it into a party of the people. If, however, establishment Democrats can make peace with you and let you join the club, then you are not really a threat at all to “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.”

Moulitsas and those like him did not challenge this — they never talked in really sharp terms of anything as unseemly as class conflict because, useful idiots that they were, they didn’t see it. Worse, they seemed to actually believe in the Democratic Party as a good institution — one perhaps in need of a tune-up, but fundamentally a sound body.

It was a dead end, a sinkhole. But Democrats like Murtha, an ex-Marine who had spoken out against the Iraq War (after voting for it), were catnip for these blogger types, enamored as they were with somehow defeating the Right, but on terms set by the Right. For all their talk of advocating for progressive policies, they sure seemed easily gulled into getting right-wing Dems elected.

Take this interminable 2007 Meet the Press debate between Moulitsas and then-Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr, a particularly soulless Blue Dog who is now a Wall Street investment banker. In an important sense, even after watching it, I’m still not sure what the two disagree on. While the segment is clearly framed as a clash of left and right flanks of the Democratic coalition, Moulitsas speaks proudly of his and his cohorts’ efforts on behalf of candidates that, in the eternal phrase, “fit their district” — candidates like, well, Harold Ford Jr. Directly pressed on which policies he most wants to see espoused by candidates he supports, Moulitsas digressed instead on the need for candidates to speak “authentically,” not as talking heads.

Cool. But uh . . . who gives a shit? Who cares at all about that? A non-entity like John Edwards can crow all he wants about “two Americas” on the campaign trail and seem as earnest as a deacon while doing so. But it matters more that he hewed to an anti-union, pro-war line when it actually fucking mattered.

Moulitsas’s indifference to the only meaningful distinction of each individual politician — which policies they will support when it matters most — was best embodied by his inability to name any of anti–Iraq War Lieberman primary opponent Ned Lamont’s other beliefs. It was an ineffably blinkered political project, compromised from the beginning, unable to offer any truly effective resistance at a time it was sorely needed. It was damned to be fleeting. And yet Moulitsas somehow claimed victory.

And so it was that these New Coke Democrats, once elected, did — well, what exactly? Going by the numbers, the top answer would be, “lose office in a reelection bid.” For all their showy disdain for the Rahm Emanuels of the world, Kos sure seemed to come to mimic his worst thinking — right down to laughing at the loss of health care by some despised underclass opponents.

And so it is the Netroots Revolution seemed to die as soon as it started. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where now the horse and the rider?

The Hangover

Despite being totally discredited by the course of events, Moulitsasitis seems to continue plaguing the Democratic Party.

The aforementioned blog post, cackling at the plight of Trump-voting coal miners, was published on December 12 on Daily Kos — a website which, like Citizen Kane’s crumbling mansion, improbably remains standing years after most people considered it derelict. It is a short post of workmanlike prose that is entirely unmemorable, probably written in about twenty minutes.

Nevertheless, it is worth quoting in its entirety, to get a full sense of the smug banality, casual cruelty, and reality-defying cluelessness which characterizes the Democratic Party’s courtiers in the wake of their stunning, disqualifying failure this November.

Hillary Clinton won the election, but a system designed to let a powerful minority override the will of the majority selected some asshole.

Hillary Clinton did not win the election. Hillary Clinton very much did not win the election. Some newspapers covered this event. Some even might go so far as to say she lost the election. The electoral college is antidemocratic to the hilt, an insult to the idea of democracy, a banana republic institution. It was also the only game in town, and everyone knew that in the march to November.

For now, we have to deal with that bullshit reality, and lots of good people will suffer serious consequences. But don’t feel sorry for the ones who enabled this nightmare by voting for the incoming Trump-Putin administration. For example, why should we weep for the retired coal miners who will now lose their health insurance thanks to the GOP majority — despite the best efforts of coal-state Democrats to change the outcome?

In Moulitsasitis’s cosmology, voters betray Democratic senators — not vice versa. That is: well-financed machine politicians are betrayed by the lowly participants in electoral democracy. Fealty is owed in only one direction, and that is from the public to the public servant. The public servant’s sins are not to be discussed here. This is how democracy should work.

Yes, this will be a terrible outcome for a group of people who have really drawn a shitty lot in life. But how sorry should we be for this crowd?

The use of “but” as a qualifier in this way should never be allowed in political writing. Ever. It is telling — the Cain’s mark of an amateur who lacks enough respect for the reader to state what the writer actually believes. Whatever sentiment precedes the use of “but” is something the author does not really believe or care about, but must, for reasons of good taste, appear to at least consider.

What Moulitsas is actually saying here, in his weaselly way, is: fuck ‘em!

Compare Moulitsas here, with his insincere, mealy-mouthed concession to liberal pieties, to the pure-flowing arsenic of National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who quite openly and viciously blames the underclass for their own travails. Who is more honestly and lucidly communicating their beliefs here?

Coal country swung hard for Donald Trump, winning 70 to 80 percent of the vote in some of these counties.

Maybe coal country swung hard for Donald Trump at least in part because he went there and asked for their votes, and Hillary Clinton did not. But what do I know. That’s just how politics has worked since 44 BC.

Don’t weep for these coal miners, now abandoned by their GOP patrons.

“Don’t weep for these coal miners” might mark the final 180-degree turn from where the modern progressive movement began in America. That such a pox was pronounced by a rich little shit sitting at a laptop also seems relevant. If Moulitsas dreamed he saw Joe Hill last night, it would have been in a nightmare.

They are getting exactly the government that they voted for. Democrats can no longer offer unrequited love and cover for them. And isn’t this what democracy is all about? They won the election! This is what they wanted!

Moulitsas is finally having some fun here. Like Chuck Schumer’s infamous assurance that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs,” the idea of discarding a broad swath of the working poor as an interest group to be catered to is greeted with glee. This theory’s only possible flaw was the idea that openly denigrating swing state voters might have poor consequences in an election.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin, Sherrod Brown, and Joe Donnelly got to stand up for those miners, reminding their coal country constituents who is really looking out for them. But when you elect a Republican majority, that’s the government they’re going to get.

Exactly as they hoped.

Far be it from me to doubt the motivations of a liberal star like Joe Manchin. But what did Democrats do for the working poor in their time in office, precisely? And those few good things they did do — did they ever campaign on them? This is the rotten fruit he spent a career not only helping to grow, but pontificating endlessly was the only possible harvest.

Who’s more credulous here: Moulitsas, with his disbelief that America would not conform to his expectations, or Trump voters?

Any legacy which can be encapsulated within the breadth of the Facebook memes your liberal uncle might post from pages like “Democrats for SANITY” or “Jon Stewart for President” or “Liberals United Against Underwood (L.U.A.U.)” is not a legacy worth having. Much less telling anybody about.

What then for the future?

Leftists must remake the Democratic Party, from the grassroots up, in order to combat the juggernaut of capital, warfare, and racism wracking the country. Let Moulitsas, and the diminishing returns his brand of principle-impoverished liberalism offered, serve as a warning of how not to do it. Only when the Democratic Party stands for estimable political action — and it’s a long shot, given the entrenched decadence of American political corruption — can calling oneself “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” constitute something of which anyone can be proud.

More doing – less blogging.

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personalcoachingcenter · 5 years ago

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