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thattimdrakeguy · 5 years ago

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It’s never good to be unhealthily obsessed, or unhealthily emotionally attached to something.

Especially when it turns you into a bully.

Weirdest and most agitating part of the fandom is those type of fans that act like they’re helping their fav run for office or some thing.

Not literaly speaking--

But they’ll find an obscure panel that‘s a little edgy just cuz of the era or that artist maybe, and act like it defines them. Sometimes just a character looking mad, cuz well, they’re mad, as people real life and fiction do, and they use to act like a character is bad and every thing else around them is wrong-- despite being an outlier-- cuz they don’t care.

Yet if their own fav did a bad thing, they’d be doing some mental gymnastics or just plain ignore it.

I mostly see this on twitter, and it‘s insanely baffling that people just-- let it happen.

It‘s the kind of fandom stuff that numbs my mind. Like-- can we not just read some fiction without acting like every thing is a big deal? Damian tried to kill Tim once or twice, and I’ve never freaking cared. I used to even like Damian a lot, maybe that‘s why it never bothered me, but I just stopped liking him because I think he’s a really badly written character. Same with Steph.

But on mainly twitter, they read one bad comic, treat it like truth, and go delusional about some thing being inaccurate in it. they’ll even attack people over it and gaslight them, often in groups.

that is so unhealthy. In a social environment way, and just as a person. that should never be your natural response.

Only times I ever get annoyed at a bad action is when the writing ignores how bad it is to play dumb with it, or is maybe just bad written in-general. Damian’s early time I don’t really care that much, cause you’re supposed to know it‘s bad and nothing more usually, they show you why he’s like that and that‘s enough (although written horrendously inconsistently), while nowadays they’ll barely address it some times, let him get away with it, or remind you of his backstory so much it just feels like they’re really tryna make you feel bad you forget it. to another standard I don’t like Jason beating up Tim, because I just view that as out of character for him, and I honestly prefer anti-hero with an antagonistic relationship to the Bat-Fam Jason, because that‘s how he was built up in utrh, and New 52 just basically ignored the concept of character development being done well, and more or less had people forgive him even if it‘s incredibly unnatural.

Main reason why I don’t like Steph, isn’t because she does bad things, but because she at least roughly gets away with it when she really shouldn’t. She’ll get told off, maybe, but it never feels appropriate. Steph emotionally and briefly physically abuses Tim in an arc-- yet it‘s never really talked about. When she makes an apology to Tim, it‘s when she finds out his identity, and it‘s about only the concept of her wanting to know. Nothing actually about all the abusive behaviors she demonstrated. If anything it feels like she gets rewarded because she gets told Tim's identity and is suddenly, very randomly, unless something in another series, gets allowed access to the Batcave. (I’m also just not a fan of loud mouths that just back talk all the time.)

and that‘s just to explain my logic, because I feel like that‘d do better at explaining why this bizarre slander-esque crap over fictional characters confuses me so much. Because who actually cares a character did a bad thing as long as it‘s written well when you think about it?

the characters are the characters. they are here for our enjoyment. Sometimes characters do bad things, sometimes that’s all they do. It‘s all for the endgame of getting us something that we can hopefully get enjoyment out of (of course we don’t always enjoy something, but usually that‘s still the goal). I just don’t understand why people allow themselves to get so wrapped up in it, that they actually become unhealthy. Unhealthy to be around as well, cuz they tend to group and repeat the same crap. It can’t be healthy to be obsessed with a character that you’d do that .

How do people seem to despise so much of their own favs? Having to deny or deflect any bad behavior from a fictional character in even just a casual context that typically, as far as I’ve seen, not that harsh even to warrant it, feels so-- icky. It is fine to like a character that does bad things. to be so obsessed with a character that you treat them like they’re nearly flawless as you gaslight other people and group bully them for not liking them-- its just a bit weird, it‘s insanely toxic. the characters are here for us to enjoy. If you don’t actually enjoy them so much that you ignore so much of them-- then why are they who you chose to like?

that sudden almost unexplained unhealthily and emotional attachment I feel like is a really bad habit of fandoms. It‘s not behavior that should be encouraged, but more often than not they subtly have been. People wanna be accepted, and joining in on it and spreading so much random propaganda (on a freaking fictional character) is nauseating, but they feel apart of something so of course they do.

they’ll go out of their way to find a panel, often out of context just to make a character they don’t like look bad, and shame people that like that character, at least in some fashion. While often taking panels that make their fav look good to share like it‘s a benign political campaign.

Why is that even a thing people do? It‘s so obsessive and toxic, as well as just making people feel miserable over getting gaslit so much.

Somehow managing to make enjoying something, go too far.

the group aspect is especially annoying, cuz they enjoy gaslighting and bullying people in a group, because it‘ll make em seem more right. I’ve heard about people leaving the fandom because of it. No longer able to enjoy what they did, because they keep being harassed over it. Once seen them even make fun of someone that called them a bully seemingly. Either showing they’re that oblivious, or just that much of a jerk.

If you ever do any thing like that I really feel like you need to get out of the fandom, because it‘s never good to have your own instincts telling yourself to be nasty. Just come back at a better time when you’re better. It‘s fine to admit faults and get better. It‘s honestly a fine thing. We can’t improve ourselves otherwise.

I don’t feel like bizarre propaganda and libel on, may I repeat, fictional characters, is what a fandom’s suppose to be. It certainly at least shouldn’t be.

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secret-engima · 5 years ago

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THE FFXV STORM-DAUGHTER THING oh my god. Its AMAZING. Can we get more??? Of it??? Can we ask about it??? Galahd's reaction to the dragon when they first find her??? Or their reactions to her bursting through the trees and destroying everything in her way bar Galahdians and then passing Lib Ny+Selene. I love this already. Give me more dragons. ALSO LUCIS FINDING OUT ABOUT THE MOTHERFUCKING DRAGON OH MY GOD (laughter)

*cackles* YOU MAY INDEED.

Galahd’s first reaction to the dragon is ... alarm. Panic. At first they don’t ... KNOW what she is and they think she might be some kind of wild animal and how are they going to fight something that big? Except ... except she never bothers them. She stays in her den and only leaves to hunt other wild things. She avoids their villages and their shrines, and travelers who stumble across her are only grumpily growled at rather than eaten in one bite.

They witness her grief in those early centuries, how she suddenly shakes the jungle with her wingbeats and flies off until she is a mere spec in the distance before RAGING and that is how they find her name. Storm-Daughter, She Who Is Blessed By Thunder and Wave. No normal creature has magic that strong, not even the King Behemoths. She must be either a Messenger or a child of the Astrals (of Ramuh and Leviathan, a child with the stormy magic of her father and a great, beast-like form like her mother) and they spread the word. None are to touch her. All are to respect her.

They find the borders of her den territory and she watches with large, bitter eyes as they carefully build low, knee high walls just beyond the border. Not to cage her, but to serve as a warning for travelers not to pass that point. They carve talismans of peace and thanks and welcome and hang them from the nearby branches, leave offerings of food to the Storm-Daughter on the low wall so that she will always know that she is welcome, even if she watches them with visible disdain and anger.

The anger fades over the centuries. And eventually she sleeps. For twenty or more years at a time she sleeps only to wake, hunt the Behemoths of the isles for her food, then returns to her den and sleeps again.

It is not hard to conclude that something has broken the Storm-Daughter’s heart. That the humans of one mainland or the other have hurt her so deeply she despises human kind and can only sleep her pain away. Too tired even to fly from the isles and rage anymore.

They grow used to her. Their children grow up hearing tales of her wrath over the waters but never seeing it. The teens make games of, while traveling, creeping to the borders of the low wall and leaving gifts in the hope she will Bless them.

Everyone agrees that the Ulrics are NUTS when a small group of them, having lost their old village to an unseasonal flood, rebuild a village less than a half hour’s walk away from the Storm-Daughter’s den. The Ostiums agree even as they help build the walls of the new houses, and all direly agree that when Storm-Daughter next wakes, she will slaughter the village that dared come too close.

Instead, when she wakes, she investigates. The entire village freezes when her great head peers over the tree tops at them (over, not through, for she is taller than their jungle canopy). She blinks once, teeth the height of men glinting in the light as her teeth bare-.

She snorts once, a great gust of wind that bowls several of the unprepared over onto their backs, turns and leaves without touching the village.

They take it for a blessing and the village persists for another century there, untouched by the Storm-Daughter or misfortune until one Nyx Ulric is born.

Nyx Ulric who hears the stories of the Storm-Daughter and, fearless child he is, makes the journey to the low wall that he then proceeds to perch on TOP of as he watches the awake and disinterested Storm-Daughter. Eventually he drags Libertus along, and the two coax the Storm-Daughter into speaking with them in exchange for stories, and so a friendship blooms.

...

To answer you next questions- Galahd is already in fear and mourning as they flee to the boats, Niflheim on their heels. They do not think of the Storm-Daughter, for she has never interfered in human matters before. No, they are alone in this and their death, their homelessness, is near.

And then-.

The sound.

It is an unholy sound, furious and raw with rage and grief as deep as the earth and the oceans. It cracks apart the ground and bursts more than one unprepared eardrum. The birds of the jungle, already fleeing the growing fires, burst into a cloud of panic that cannot be heard over the sound echoing all around. Even the MT units, empty machines they are, pause in their rampage to look in the direction of the sound.

Then the jungle bows down. Trees fold and break, leaves flutter and touch the ground in all directions as from the depths of the center isle’s jungle-.

The Storm-Daughter rises.

And oh, these Galahdians have never seen her like this. For it has been at least two centuries since she flew rather than slept or prowled along the ground.

Her wings are massive, so large they seem to darken the sky, her head, smooth and tapered almost like an equine’s rather than a predators, swings toward the oncoming Niflheim air fleet, and her eyes glow with the light of the storm. The sun winks off brilliant sapphire and amethyst scales (Protection and Loyalty whispers instinct and tradition in their hearts and hope flickers to life) before the clouds form and throw the world into darkness almost as deep as night.

Then the Storm-Daughter roars and lightning spills from her jaws, lighting up the sky and turning an entire swath of enemy fleet into DUST. Less than dust. They watch with hearts in their throats as the Storm-Daughter destroys the fleet, speeding through their ranks with great flaps of her wings as if she is light as the smallest jungle bird and not a towering and ancient dragon. Rain falls from the sky at a swipe of her claws and puts out the fires, a smack of her serpentine tail cleaves the flagship in half.

Niflheim’s assault breaks and nothing, not even their super weapon, can stop her for more than a moment. She crushes the weapon under her paws and screams to the heavens in a language old and unknown and terrible.

There are no survivors from Niflheim.

The boats creep back to shore, and all of Galahd watches with pale faces, half-expecting to be next, for the Storm-Daughter has never looked kindly on humanity, for all she let them be until now.

Instead she lands and scans the crowd as if searching for someone in particular.

Murmurs of shock rise from the back, then ripple forward like a tide as one figure, a scraggly, wild-eyed Ostium teenager, pushes his way off the boats and onto the sand to stand right at her feet.

The Storm-Daughter lowers one great paw and all of Galahd whispers at the sight of two Ulrics, a teen boy and a young girl, stumbling out of her grasp unharmed and falling into the crying Ostium boy’s arms.

They look up and see the Storm-Daughter watching the trio with love in her large, now dark grey eyes and suddenly they understand.

In the near front of the crowd, one Furia teen wheezes a hysterical laugh as he leans against his Arra and Lazarus friends and chokes out, “Leave it to an Ulric to be adopted by the Storm-Daughter.”

.... (Last of your questions!)

When word gets to Insomnia that an invasion of Galahd has been turned aside, supposedly by a Messenger in the form of a dragon ... Regis doesn’t believe it. Oh, he believes the invasion bit, but Astral intervention? After so many other territories have fallen without notice from the Astrals and their kind? There has to be another explanation. The dragon is propaganda to scare Niflheim away from trying again. Still, the isles are badly damaged and morale is low. There had been no time to muster the Crownsguard and send aid before the invasion got there, so to prove that Insomnia still cared for its outer territories, Regis overrides Clarus’s concerns and sails to Galahd, just him, Clarus, Cor, and a few Crownsguard, plus an entire crew of volunteer relief workers. With them they bring medical supplies, food, blankets and tents and other things needed to help rebuild from disaster.

They dock on the central isle’s harbor and are greeted with surprise and gratitude. Regis can see the devastation of the attack, the burned trees and cracked open earth (what cracked the earth? Bombs? A new type of weapon?) but withholds his questions. He is not here to interrogate people, he is here to help. After personally helping to pass out supplies and getting Clarus to glare at him by using his magic to heal the more injured children and elders, Regis finally asks after the person responsible for leading the counterattack that staved off Niflheim. He wants to congratulate them, meet with them (perhaps recruit them for the Kingsglaive, a new idea of his he has not yet acted upon, but this he does not say).

The Galahdians all look uneasy and explain Storm-Daughter does not meet with anyone she does not please. Cor scoffs and says Regis is the king, she can hardly turn down a summon from her monarch.

All the Galahdians pull away from Cor with wide, fearful eyes and Regis is about to scold Cor for his manners (clearly this person is respected in Galahd to earn a title like Storm-Daughter) when the wind cracks and the earth shakes. The Galahdians scatter, clearing a huge area around Regis like they expect something to fall from the sky.

Regis’s magic prickles and wails at the pulse of a much older, larger, angrier, deadlier magic and looks up in time to see the sky darken under massive wings. The towering, ancient dragon, taller than the trees, taller even then some of the buildings in Insomnia, slams down onto the earth with enough force to bowl Cor over and nearly do the same for Regis (who only stays standing because of Clarus at his back, acting as a brace). Blue and purple scales glitter like gemstones in the sunlight as the dragon folds its wings and bares massive, massive teeth (Astrals this dragon is at least the size of a Zu, possibly bigger, certainly more dangerous) and cocks its head to fix one, glittering grey eye on Cor.

And speaks, “Watch your words, human. I swore my oath to a human monarch lifetimes ago and was rewarded with nothing but pain. I have served my queen and I serve no other. Your little king is nothing to me, and I answer to none but whom I please.” Massive eyes narrow and fix on the gaping Regis, “And, little monarch. You are not welcome on MY isles. Begone before I destroy your ship the way I destroyed the imperial fleet and DEVOUR you whole-.” The dragon stops short, growls as deep as thunder and twists her long neck to look at her back impatiently. There is movement up there, and a moment later, a small face, a HUMAN face, appears. The teenager fearlessly slides down one massive foreleg and lands on the sand with soft “oof” then looks up at the dragon who is staring at the teen with an open expression of long-suffering.

“Don’t be rude, Tempestas! The king came a long way to help us. In person. I think that’s pretty cool!”

“Hatchling,” sighs the dragon in a voice that no longer rattles Regis’s bone marrow, “kings are all the same. He’s just here to make his meaningless prattle in person. It is still meaningless prattle.”

The teen looks over at Regis and gives a bright smile, “But he’s got magic, like us! And he didn’t bring words, he brought medical supplies and help. Come on, hear him out? The teen looks back at the dragon and Regis cannot for the life of him shake the mental image of a child giving puppy eyes to his indulgent mother, “Pleeeeeeeaasse?”

The dragon’s muzzle falls into what Regis swears is a deadpan worthy of Cor, then she looks up at the sky with a sigh that stirs up a breeze. She looks back down again, “Fine. I will tolerate his presence. For now. But if he touches you or Selene...” those giant teeth are bared again before the dragon settles into a very catlike loaf pose, “Since you’re so enthusiastic to meet a mindless human monarch, you can do the talking and the listening.”

And so Regis watches as the teenager shrugs, saunters over to him, and grins with teeth a fraction too sharp and looks him over with eyes that were definitely too slitted to be completely human (and suddenly all those impossible fables of Messengers falling in love with humans and having half-blooded children seem not so impossible after all), “Hello, Your Majesty,” says the teen, “I’m Nyx Ulric. You had some questions?”

“I think,” Regis hears himself say faintly, “I have more than a few of those, young master Ulric. And if I may, I think I also have a request.” The dragon narrows her eyes dangerously, but the teen just nods. Regis weakly finishes, “Might I have a chair? I think I need to sit down.”

Nyx Ulric waves at another Galahdian for a chair to be brought while the sand shakes under the force of the dragon’s laughter.

#SE asks #oliverslewty asks #Secret Engima Rambles #Rivers course my blood (my breath is thunder) verse #fairy tail #ffxv #xover #DRAGONS #mwahahaha

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erinptah · 5 years ago

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The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

#His Dark Materials #HDM #The Book of Dust #The Secret Commonwealth #tsc spoilers #review

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genderfluidkevinday · 6 years ago

Text

genderfluid kevin day headcanons bc i can do what i want and also i have the perfect url to spread my “please representation” propaganda.

“how did you know?”

because in the quiet of nights when kevin is supposed to be asleep but he cant, not really, when his heart is still pounding from practice and every breath riko makes him terrified of being caught, he reads what he stole from the public library and it says sometimes people do not fit into the gender they were assigned and

because by sneaking searches on the internet when he can, kevin finds words. dangerous, un-raven-like words for how to love someone and how to be yourself. he finds words that mean you are not alone.

because he wakes up one day and demands to be the queen of exy, to be seen as what he is. the best. more powerful than the king. (not entirely cisgender?)

because it feels right.

because in the quiet between exy and family, kevin day has the time and the love to have the quiet understanding that this is who kevin day is.

it’s kinda a shitty realization process to go through- kevin starts questioning in the ravens, then immediately goes “No TM !” and internalizes all those feelings

kevin internalizes All the feelings, always ! compartmentalizing!

bisexuality? put it in a box!

gender identity? put it in a box!

feeling crushing inferiority? put it in a box!

mom died tragically? put it in a box!

ur dad isnt here? put it-

jesus fuck these headcanons were supposed to be happy and it got SO derailed 2 points in

anyways

post canon, kevin starts to become more comfortable w every aspect of himself, and finally takes the time to have a gender crisis

and then, immediately, decides it was all ridiculous and he was actually a cisgender all along !

he does the dumb thing i did. which is spend about a month going “lmao i’m cis but i wish i wasn’t, i don’t need a gender!” while badly ignoring his gender crisis

it’s renee who finally helps kevin out a little

kevin, dumbass: pfft, gender is stupid, but i’m cis so whatever! renee, nb lesbian icon: are you sure? kevin, having a crisis:

renee actually sends kevin a bunch of links to pages that have lots of words, and “what gender are you” quizes, and dumb memes about being trans/nonbinary and it shouldn’t help as much as it does.

renee is the first person kevin quietly texts at like, 2 am, and goes, “uh, can you use they, i think?”

her response is, obviously, “of course!”

so they’re like, pretty sure they’re not cis, but they bounce around labels for about a week before they end up settling on genderfluid.

sometimes kevin day is a boy, with loud opinions and soft hands. sometimes kevin day is a girl, with messy hair and a bright smile. sometimes kevin day is neither, with clumsy limbs and determined eyes

(however- kevin day can always outclass any striker on a court.)

it just feels right, in a way nothing else did.

theyre like,,, super nervous about coming out, like, they can’t even come up with the courage to tell their dad they’re bi, how the fuck are they gonna end up telling anyone else? solution! don’t.

except kevin is becoming more comfortable with every aspect of themself, and being casually bisexual around the foxes (nicky makes one too many jokes about kevin’s “”hetero guy crush”” on jeremy and they end up snapping “bitch i’m bi there’s nothing hetero about it.” and nicky is immediately like !!!!!!!!!!!!!) (but thats another post)

so kevin, with the growing comfort that yes, you can be non-heterosexual and non-cisgender and still be fucking amazing at exy, they start to come out

it’s a slow process because when they tried to do it all at once, they got tongue tied and just walked away without saying anything. so they end up doing it individually.

allison first (because renee can be there and give support AND bc allison is also A Trans), and kevin whispers, “so, I’m genderfluid.”

allison, casually: what are your pronouns? kevin: she/her. i’m a girl today. allison, with all the softness of someone who has been there: do you want me to do your makeup? kevin, with all the softness of someone who’s new to this: maybe one day.

after allison is andrew+neil, because they spend so much time together at night practice it’s inevitable it comes up

and by that i mean kevin screams halfway through night practice “THIS IS GENDERFLUIDPHOBIA” because andrew keeps blocking her shots.

andrew flips her off.

neil asks if thats an actual term.

kevin says to fuck off and keep practicing.

next is wymack.

oh boy.

so kevin isn’t even sure how to be a good son- she has no idea how to go about being a good daughter. she has no clue how to be a good child.

she doesn’t know if wymack even wants that.

but she goes to him after practice and he snaps, “what is it?” in a voice thats maybe a little less gruff than usual

and she says, “i’m genderfluid.”

he stares at her for a while.

she continues, “i’m a girl today, actually, and i just thought you should know.”

wymack asks, “you’ll tell me when it changes, right?”

kevin nods and leaves.

its a start.

telling jean feels like a really big deal, but in hindsight its about fifteen minutes of bad puns that follow an awkwardly worded coming out.

kevin: so like... guys right jean: yes? kevin: what if... i wasn’t one jean: are you trying to come out to me? kevin: is it working?

the rest of the monsters follows after that- aaron obviously doesnt understand, but he doesnt say anything rude. (he looks into it later). nicky, immediately, takes a supportive role.

nicky: I’M GONNA STAPLE A GENDERFLUID FLAG TO MY FACE THATS HOW MUCH I SUPPORT YOU kevin, softly: please don’t how would you play exy.

matt and dan get a less official coming out, because kevin isn’t sure how to be friends with them at all. but they manage a “so, i’m not a guy, actually, i’m genderfluid, and right now i don’t have a gender.”

dan gives them a set of pronoun bracelets for their birthday and matt gives them a book about the history of the nonbinary community and yeah, maybe this is how to be friends.

the baby foxes don’t get to find out. kevin doesn’t trust them as much, and isn’t ready to be... out out.

kevin has absolutely no desire to change their name, at all.

kevin: why would i change my name i’m an ICON.

WAIT i lied,,, they change their middle name to kayleigh.

the first time kevin gets invited to a girls night, she cries

its a surprise, which is hard to plan- girls nights are always on tuesdays, so they have to wait for a tuesday where kevin is free and feels like a girl

renee casually mentions that they have a history book that kevin might like, so she should come pick it up

and then in the dorm, dan and allison are setting up a movie and popcorn and renee is getting her nails painted. dan waves kevin over and tells her to pick a movie, allison tells her to pick out a nail polish, and renee actually does have a history book for her.

kevin finally accepts a make over from allison.

she cries like five times that night and tries to brush it off as nothing but... kevin can finally exist in a space, and feel welcome, and also feel... wanted.

it’s a good feeling

kevin, wearing a crop top with the genderfluid flag on it, painting renee’s nails as they watch the trojans game: lmao can you imagine thinking i was cis? what was i thinking? i was so dumb lol. renee, sweetly: no it was a perfectly normal reaction to being raised in a cisnormative society, and i’m very proud of you for figuring out that it wasn’t right for you kevin: dammit renee why do you have to be so kind and supportive just let me make jokes about my moron-ness in PEACE

kevin day is the fucking QUEEN of exy !!!!!!! she’s better than you and you know it.

each and every day kevin day hears misogonistic comments towards female exy players and each and every day kevin day wants to scream B I T C H in their face

he wanted to do this even before he figured out he was genderfluid bc kevin day drank respect women juice before realizing he was also drinking sometimes i am women juice

kevin actually 100% hates dresses a lot bc they can never find any that are a good texture and its Sensory Hell, and also you cant play exy in them?? what the fuck???

they end up liking crop tops and short shorts, and a few kinds of makeup, but skirts and dresses are dumb and itchy actually

kevin goes on an impassioned rant about this at LEAST once a month

you know that really good feeling when you wake up one day and you realize you’re happier knowing who you are and maybe it’s rough and maybe it’s not perfect but you get to know who you are and your friends respect and love you for who you are and you start to realize you love knowing you too????????

yeah.

kevin day is genderfluid and this is my hill to die on thank you and good night

#aftg #tfc #aftg headcanon #tfc headcanon #kevin day #if u follow me ur legally obligated to rb this bc its in line w my url #(joking)#genderfluid kevin day #renee walker #if only bc she features so heavily #i dont wanna tag all the others

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southeastasianists · 6 years ago

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In 1998, when Thet Swe Win was in the ninth grade, he picked up a propaganda booklet at school in downtown Yangon. In it, he read that his race and religion were under threat. If Muslims were allowed to spread, the booklet claimed, it would not be long before Burmese Buddhists would vanish.

“After I read that, I was anti-Muslim,” says Thet Swe Win. He boycotted Muslim-owned businesses. He stopped eating biryani, one of his favourite foods. He regularly beat up the smaller of the two Muslim boys in his class. “The book said we had to do something about it,” he explains. “One teacher asked me why and I said, don’t you know this book? Muslims are very bad and we have to do this back to them.”

Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north in Rakhine State, 17-year-old Sujauddin Karimuddin was experiencing the increasingly militant fallout of this “hateful incitement”, as Thet Swe Win calls it. A member of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, Sujauddin first realised he was an outsider at age five, during enrollment on his first day of school in the small town of Kyauktaw. A teacher told him that his name was unacceptable; he should call himself the Burmese name Khin Maung Lay instead.

It didn’t help. After the government intensified its persecution of Muslims in 1991, forcing 200,000 people across the border into Bangladesh, school life became increasingly difficult for Sujauddin. Despite being an A-grade student, he was forced out of classes by Buddhist classmates and told to ‘know his place’ when he complained. Physical attacks and insults like ‘cockroach’ and ‘rat’ were frequent. Muslims were referred to as ‘it’. The friend he’d often skip school to smoke cigarettes with told him coolly: “If I were king, in one day I would kill all you guys”.

Initially protected from the worst abuses by the community standing of his father, a prosperous businessman, Sujauddin’s luck eventually wore thin. In the name of patriotic duty, he was repeatedly arrested by the army and subjected to forced labour. In 1995, his village was stormed by militants and his family’s farmland confiscated; they remained trapped for a year after resisting “relocation” to an unlivable jungle outpost. In 1998 Sujauddin left, alone, for Australia.

Few of his fellow Rohingyas were as lucky. Following vicious riots in Rakhine State in 2012, more than 112,000 Rohingyas fled, most of them by boat. Those remaining were excluded from the country’s first democratic vote in 2015. Tensions mounted, and in October 2016, 300 men from an insurgent group calling themselves the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) killed nine Burmese border guards, triggering a military crackdown that escalated into a genocide. In less than a year, at least 10,000 Rohingyas were killed. A million more fled to Bangladesh.

Ethnic violence on this scale is orchestrated by Myanmar’s brutal and politically unaccountable Tatmadaw army, which has dominated control of the country since it gained independence from Britain in 1948. The military is far from alone in driving the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, however. A small but influential cohort of the country’s revered, red-robed monks now lends vocal support to the violence, justified by highly contentious interpretations of Buddhist scripture.

In reality, though, these justifications all boil down to the same fear espoused by Thet Swe Win’s propaganda booklet: that Buddhist culture is under siege and could be usurped by Islam and other minority groups. Again, this paranoia isn’t new, despite the fact that Buddhists enjoy overwhelming majorities (of 70%, 88% and 93% respectively) in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.

Militant Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka claim that the minority Hindu Tamil population is really just the vanguard of India’s 74-million-strong Tamil Nadu state, poised and ready to invade. In Myanmar, members of the broader, ultranationalist 969 movement insist that the country’s Muslims – who make up less than 4% of the population – are quietly plotting to take over the country. Notwithstanding, that the Islamic calendar still has 560 years to go, some even claim that the number 786, symbolic in Islam, is a secret code denoting a plot to take over the world in the 21st Century (7+8+6 = 21). Sujauddin vividly recalls seeing posters “everywhere”, especially in immigration offices, warning that it would not be a natural disaster that wiped out Burmese Buddhists, but the Rohingya.

In Myanmar, this militant Buddhism is spearheaded by ultranationalist monks like Ashin Wirathu of the Ma Ba Tha organisation and the rebel Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), started by the late monk Thuzana in 1992. The phenomenon is far from limited to Myanmar: Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have played a key role in stirring up Sinhalese nationalism and religious hatreds for decades, while in Thailand’s troubled deep south, “bad” monks have been known to take up arms in guerilla warfare between Buddhist and Muslim fighters.

What’s more, some of these violence-supporting monks have begun forming international networks to support and learn from each other. “The Sri Lanka and Myanmar Buddhist monks have signed a memorandum of understanding,” says Burmese activist Ro Nay San Lwin. “They are working closely”.

To many in the monkhood and outside it, such behaviour is deeply shocking. Buddhist monks are widely expected to eschew any form of political engagement, even in cases where this appears benign.

“Militant Buddhists are those who are resorting to political violence to achieve their aims and who violate this founding principle of Buddhism that’s ahimsa, ‘do no harm’,” explains Peter Lehr, author of Militant Buddhism and lecturer in Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrew’s, and who also studied as a Buddhist monk in Thailand.

Dr. Lehr relates how he saw this rift manifest between a pair of twin brothers, both monks, in the deep south of Thailand, where attacks on mosques and on Buddhist temples are commonplace. While one called upon the monks to assist in the fight against anti-Buddhist attacks, his twin brother insisted that temples can be rebuilt, and while the deaths of monks are always regrettable, it is for the monks to step back and allow karma to run its course.

But monks who are critical of their colleagues for breaking their apolitical religious stance by encouraging violence are also reluctant to break it themselves to call for tolerance, integration or laws that protect ethnic minorities. As Dr. Lehr explains, most Buddhists disapprove of monks that speak out, making it extremely difficult for them to defend minorities or model the ethnic cohesion that is so badly needed in their communities. Thus the violent side tends to hold greater sway in the public sphere.

Yet at times, peaceful political contributions by monks can be powerful. For Thet Swe Win, now a civil society activist who speaks out on behalf of minorities in Myanmar, the turning point came with the Saffron Revolution in 2007. Joining a protest in Yangon that was led by Buddhist monks, he was surprised to see the city’s Muslims donating generously to support the protesters, even giving their slippers to the barefoot monks.

“I realised we are all just the same people, all being oppressed,” he says. “We live in the same areas but we don’t communicate. We’re isolated.��

If mobilising the Buddhist population against ethnic minorities is intended to help autocrats divide and conquer, it seems to be working. In Myanmar, the social and religious rifts created by militant Buddhism continue to tear apart mixed communities, frustrating attempts to move the country forward and keeping power in the hands of the military, even as the nation struggles towards democratic rule. In Sri Lanka, violence led by Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalists in the historically peaceful Kandy province led to a state of emergency being declared in 2018, curtailing civil rights and endangering the lives of Muslims and Buddhists alike.

Unchecked, these militant movements may eventually pose a risk to the governments that allow them to grow. After a year of playing down the ongoing genocide in Rakhine State, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National Democratic Party finally stepped in to outlaw Ma Ba Tha in July 2017, but the group is still going strong, largely thanks to the financial support of the army.

At the same time, the Rohingya genocide has attracted the attention of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), all of which have called for their supporters to wage jihad in Rakhine state. In Thailand, Malay-Muslim insurgents have established links with ISIS supporters in Malaysia, which could potentially support the flow of ideology into Thailand as well as weapons into Malaysia. The Easter bombing campaign that swept across Sri Lanka on 21 April demonstrated either that homegrown terror groups are alarmingly well-organised or that they’re dealing with one that’s supported by a jihadist network such as ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

As religious polarisation intensifies throughout Southeast Asia, the last thing a country like Myanmar or Sri Lanka needs is to turn a fabricated threat into a reality by pushing minorities towards groups keen to exploit them. By ignoring and even encouraging militant Buddhist movements, these leaders risk sparking ethnic conflicts that spread beyond their borders – and back again.

#Southeast Asia #Religion

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 5 years ago

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crime and disorder

Previously on Impeaching the Motherfucker: Donald “Individual-1” Trump tried to use the Oval Office to shake down Ukrainian President Zelensky for a public announcement of bullshit investigations, which Trump wanted to use to discredit American citizens and intelligence agencies.

You may have seen people compare Trump’s scheme to have the Ukrainian president announce investigations into his Democratic opposition to James Comey’s various interventions in the 2016 election. This comparison is not wrong. If anything, it understates the similarities.

The story that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to feed Zelensky about a member of Joe Biden’s family was basically fascist fanfiction by a guy named Peter Schweitzer. Schweitzer worked for Steve Bannon, who led the Trump campaign for a while, at the racist agitprop website Breitbart. His books are funded by the Mercer family. (If you’re struggling to place that name, they also finance the Facebook data thieves at Cambridge Analytica.) As Schweitzer’s lies were being used to pressure Zelensky to abuse law enforcement, they were also being fed to the mortifyingly credulous New York Times. The NYT validated the smear, which gave Giuliani and his crew leverage to increase pressure on law enforcement to take action in the hopes that this would create more news.

These exact same people pulled these exact same moves in 2015 and 2016. Of course, that time the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton, and Schweitzer’s lies were about the Clinton Foundation.* Those lies were debunked as quickly and easily as the stories about Biden, but they were still validated and spread by the mainstream media, in particular by the New York Times. These stories were picked up by the various disinformation trollbot networks throughout the 2016 election and used to drown out the serious stories about Donald Trump’s many financial crimes. And it gave a partisan faction in the FBI an excuse to open an investigation into Clinton.

Giuliani, by his own admission, was also the Trump campaign’s connection to the FBI’s New York field office in 2016. Now he’s telling the press, on the record, that his scheming in Ukraine is an attempt to manipulate the Department of Justice into investigating Biden.

It’s important to remember what happened from there. Short-term, we need to prepare ourselves to keep it from being so effective next time. The impeachment hearings might have discredited this particular line of attack against Biden, but something like this will happen to whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being. Long-term, progressives need to start holding grudges the way conservatives do, not least because our grievances are real. And we have to do this for ourselves because, let’s be honest, most of the mainstream and nearly all of the “leftist” media would rather be rounded up at gunpoint and sent to a gulag than admit they fucked up in 2016.

We remember the EMAILS investigation because it was so public, but in fact, the FBI was also investigating the Clinton Foundation, despite the Department of Justice telling them there was no case, specifically because their “evidence” was just trash from Schweitzer’s book.+

An FBI investigation is a serious thing, even if the director doesn’t use it as a pretext to throw a presidential election. That’s why the FBI is supposed to take it seriously. They’re only supposed to open an investigation if they have an an actual reason. (To state the obvious, debunked conspiracy theories by a political propagandist are not an actual reason.) Then they’re supposed to shut the fuck up and actually investigate, not preen for the media about how great they are for doing all this manly investigating. This is both to protect the reputation of the person they’re investigating and because you can usually investigate something better if you minimize how many people know you’re investigating. When they’re done, they’re supposed to either charge someone with a crime or to close the case and leave the person alone.

The FBI clearly did not take the Clinton Foundation investigation seriously, because if they had been taking it seriously they never would have pretended there was a case there at all, but it was still a serious thing. The existence of this “investigation” bolstered these false propaganda narratives which were intended to distort a presidential election, and which publicly disparaged a world-class charity that has saved millions of lives around the world.

Worse, the bullshit metastasized within the FBI. It ate into the time and attention of senior leadership, when they needed to be making some genuinely complicated decisions concerning the national security threat posed by the criminal syndicate known as the Trump campaign. Instead, they were finding out what happens if you give a mouse a cookie. The faction of the FBI who were abusing their power to hurt Clinton and help Trump seem to have been emboldened by the indulgence. FBI leadership fell into the bad habit of feeding the press, especially right-wing media like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, hints that something crime-y was going on with the Clinton Foundation. A week before the election, after Comey had upended the election with his letter about the emails, “sources” at the FBI were telling a Fox News anchor that there were about to be indictments over something at the Clinton Foundation.

Reading between the lines of various reports, it looks like these pressures within the FBI to support the Clinton Cash propaganda helped desensitize Comey and his bros to the idea of taking dramatic public action against Hillary Clinton. It never occurred to anyone else that they would pull a stunt like this, not because everyone trusts the FBI so much, but because it is so far from what they do. Nobody expects the feds to start wearing mashed potatoes to the office instead of suits, either, not because they have such great fashion sense, but because it’s too bizarre to occur to anyone. But if there were a handful of agents crabbing every day that they should wear mashed potatoes to work, and those agents kept forwarding around a drumbeat of media speculating that maybe they would start wearing mashed potatoes to work, maybe they start to think it’s not too weird of a compromise if they just start wearing mashed potatoes instead of jackets and ties.

Law enforcement abusing its power to influence elections is bad for democracy. But it’s also bad for law enforcement. As long as everyone understands the FBI shouldn’t be expected to get involved in partisan politics, there’s no incentive for politicians to waste time trying to pressure them. But once they caved to this pressure from right-wing media, it showed that they could be manipulated by at least one side, and the Republicans have been hammering them relentlessly ever since. Trump doesn’t beat up on the FBI – or, for that matter, the NYT – because he’s afraid of them. He beats up on them because he knows, from experience, that it works.

Since all that happened, Trump’s had time to purge his dupes from FBI leadership and replace them with people he believes will be even more likely to follow his unethical directives. So that’s not great.

One major difference in Giuliani and Schweitzer’s scheme this year is that they’re trying to outsource their dirty work to Ukraine, which is a lot riskier and a lot more work. In a weird way, this is a slightly encouraging sign for 2020. Even if the real motivation is that Trump is fucking around with Ukraine to please Putin and smearing Biden is just a side benefit, I doubt it would be happening like this, because you don’t actually need to bring your clown sidekick and his clown sidekicks into your clear-cut impeachable offenses. It’s entirely possible that they’re going global because they don’t think the FBI will throw all the rules out the window to help them this time.

On the other hand, the fact that they’re changing the pattern means it could easily get even worse. Right-wing ratfuckers have already attacked at least two 2020 Democratic presidential candidates with false claims of sexual violence. At this point, it’s still the JV squad,± but once we have a nominee, the professionals are going to get involved. It wouldn’t even take Giuliani’s subtlety and finesse to get law enforcement involved, either, just one pro-Trump sheriff’s office in an area the nominee could have conceivably visited. I don’t have a concrete idea of what to do if things take this particular turn, but I’m legitimately worried that we need to brace ourselves for it.

*Substantively, this comparison is unfair, because Burisma is an oil and gas company with a mixed ethical record, while the Clinton Foundation is a clean, transparent charity that has saved millions of lives. The fact that Schweitzer and the New York Times describe them nearly interchangeably says it all.

+The existence of not one but two flimsy investigations into Clinton actually discredits both of them even further, because it shows a pattern of the FBI investigating a person rather than a crime.

±It’s easy to treat the Warren thing as a joke because this particular ratfucker faceplanted so badly, but the lie itself wasn’t funny. Escalating consensual BDSM into a vicious, traumatic beating isn’t some wacky cartoon trope, it’s a type of abuse that real people have experienced.

#mainstream media #disinformation #impeachment #ukraine #trump #fbi #election 2016 #election 2020

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sinrau · 5 years ago

Link

The White House turned into a fortress by a lunatic President. Protestors being gassed with chemical agents in front of it. Police beating people — old, young, black, white — in city after city. Tough guys who assault little girls for posting protest signs calling for…justice. Soldiers in the streets of the nation’s capitol. Military vehicles roaring through it. New York Times op-eds by major political figures calling for people to be…shot.

America’s authoritarian nightmare is coming true.

All of that raises a question for people like us — those of us who saw it coming.

The last four years have unfolded according to our worst fears . So what if the next six months do too? Shudder.

Let me begin with the first part.

The last four years have unfolded to according to our worst fears. By “our,” I mean people like me. Those of us who’ve studied how societies collapse — and lived in survived authoritarianism, too. Of course, you don’t have to be either of these things, scholar or survivor, to have harbored those worst fears. Maybe you just knew, the day Trump crowed “grab ’em by the pussy!” Or when he called refugees “vermin.” Or, or, or.

How precisely? Trump was elected in 2015. By 2016, the Trump Administration’s first priorities weren’t giving Americans the healthcare, retirement, education, and raises they desperately needed. It was…building his dumb wall, the one made of bricks, and the other one, by banning minorities. Both walls went up.

By 2017, America had a network of concentration camps . By 2018, it was “separating families” — tearing kids away from their mothers and fathers. And putting them in cages. That, by the way, the last living Nuremberg Prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, called a crime against humanity. By 2019, raids in towns and cities across America were commonplace, and America had something very much like a Gestapo, checking papers, putting people in camps, disappearing them.

(Those of us who tried to warn of all this, by the way, were either marginalized, erased, or mocked. But I digress.)

And so here we are today. 2020. Do you like what you see? Soldiers on the streets. Protestors being gassed. Politicians calling for state violence in the pages of top newspapers. The White House fenced off, surrounded by men with machine guns, in body armour, who nobody can really figure out even are.

Where does America go from here? Those of who’ve studied authoritarian collapses, lived through them, or both, like me, will tell you: America is in grave, grave danger right about now.

Let me crystallize the lesson of the last four years. Authoritarianism proceeds according to the worst case scenario. The one you don’t expect, consider, or reflect upon much. The worst fears of all were realized, faster, harder, and more terribly than most ever thought possible in America. Especially it’s pundits and intellectuals and so forth — the “wise men” who failed to anticipate, and thus prevent, authoritarianism from hardening. The worst case scenario is the most likely one when it comes to authoritarianism and fascism. That is how America sleepwalked into collapse, right off the edge of a cliff.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — should take a moment to understand that lesson. Just how badly wrong the rosy-cheeked, optimistic predictions were. When Trump was elected, pundit after pundit, intellectual after intellectual proclaimed something between: “Everything will be fine!” to “There’s nothing to worry about!” to “Lol!” And yet, just a few short years later, all those wise men are now histrionic and breathless, wailing about authoritarian-fascism. But not a one has the guts to admit they were wrong.

That’s not a jeremiad or condemnation, by the way. It’s a note of caution. Maybe you were wrong, too. The point is that we need to learn from the past, and quick.

So. If we should expect the worst when it comes to collapses like this, then what will the next few months bring? Just ask yourself: what are your worst fears?

They probably go something like this.

Trump uses the civil unrest spreading across America to declare the martial law he’s already threatened to. Soldiers line the streets of major American cities. Real violence begins to break out. Then, Trump declares a state of emergency. Using emergency powers, he postpones the election. Until when? Nobody…knows.

Or maybe the election proceeds. Trump’s margin of loss is close enough to contest, thanks to Facebook and Twitter mostly looking the other way, when it comes to disinformation and propaganda. The case goes to the Supreme Court. Guess who they — leaning heavily Republican — decide it for?

Or maybe Trump loses. And he simply refuses to concede to a peaceful transfer of power. His lawyers cook up some cockamamie case — they excel at those — and it’s sent to the Supreme Court. They dither and dally. The country’s left in limbo. There is no leadership. If you think this is chaos…what about that?

Or maybe Trump wins outright, with a little help from his friends in the Kremlin. Another four years…of this? America’s already way, way past camps, bans, raids, and cages. It’s at soldiers in the nation’s capitol, and people being beaten in the streets.

Four more years? They’d bring something like this. Leading journalists and critics and opposition party members being put on sham trial, on Trumped-up charges (see what I did there?), and thrown in jail. Those camps being filled up with even more minorities — this time, probably citizens. Widespread — even more widespread — brutality from law enforcement. The construction of an Iron Curtain, to keep people in. The rise and triumph of the final and late stages of fascism: institutional dehumanization, state violence, and genocide.

Think that sounds improbable? Maybe, maybe not. It’s about your worst fears, remember? In the situation that America is in right now — a proper authoritarian-fascist collapse — the worst-case scenario is the most probable one.

When you understand that, then you can really begin to fight authoritarian-fascism. Until you do, you’re like America over the last four years: impotent, helpless, and deluded.

Right now, the most likely case out of all of those is all of those. That Trump somehow manages to win, steal, commandeer, or simply cancel the next election. That there’s some kind of grey area, where the next election is contestable, or not quite fully determined, and as a result, Trump manages to cling to power. And another four years somehow come to pass. In other words…

The unthinkable happens.

Hasn’t that been the story of America over the last four years? If I asked you a decade ago — do you think that America will have a wall by 2016, concentration camps by 2017, be putting kids in cages in them by 2018, be sending Gestapos to raid towns and cities by 2019…and by 2020, people would be being gassed in front of the White House, which now looked like a military installation, as soldiers poured into Washington DC, and military vehicles roared through it, while President…Donald Trump…threatened to declare martial law…

Be honest. You would’ve laughed, and either slapped me, or asked me to go for a beer, because anyone who can spin a yarn like that must be fun to hang out with.

The unthinkable has happened in America over the last four years. That is the lesson of every authoritarian collapse — and unfortunately, most nations don’t learn it until too late. Iranis didn’t think their urbane and cultured nation was going to implode into a fundamentalist Islamic state. Lahore, Pakistan used to be called the Paris of the subcontinent, so literate and artistic was it. Russians, too, on the eve of Soviet Collapse, didn’t dream that one day in the near future, Putin would rule them with an iron fist. The story is as old as time.

Nobody thinks their society can collapse. That is precisely why and how societies collapse faster and harder than anyone much really expects them to.

Especially in situations like America’s. A wrecked economy. A society that doesn’t seem to cohere anymore. A culture of idiocy. All these things predict further, and harder, authoritarian-fascism — not less.

In times like these, you must think the unthinkable, and guard against it. That is the only — the only — defense against authoritarianism going all the way, and seizing power for generations.

What’s even more unthinkable than the cases I sketched out above. How about President Ivanka? Jared? Little Donald? How about a Trump Dynasty ruling over a ravaged America, looting it, for decades? Sound like science fiction? So would 2020…in 2015. The lesson is: think the unthinkable.

America’s authoritarian nightmare is coming true. Because society was in deep denial that the unthinkable was already happening. How is America to stop it’s authoritarian nightmare from coming all the way true — its democracy dying, for good, this time?

The answer to that goes like this. Every remaining functioning institution in society — and there aren’t many — has to think the unthinkable. The military. The people. The opposition. The media. The intellectuals. All of them have to learn, right now, to anticipate the worst-case scenario, as the most likely one. Then they have to work together, to stop it.

That means civil disobedience. It means military disobedience, from leaders who understand that soon enough, a President might be ordering them to open fire on American citizens. It means media finally taking fascism and authoritarianism seriously, and educating Americans that it’s been happening here — and owning up their mistakes in not recognizing it, either. It means the opposition beginning to genuinely oppose fascist-authoritarianism in America, by being serious about trials for crimes against humanity and so forth.

That’s just a small list of beginnings. But they all have one thing in common. The unthinkable.

The unthinkable became real precisely because nobody much in America took the possibility of fascist-authoritarianism seriously. America now has five crucial months which will decide its fate for generations to come. More than likely, permanently. Now is the time to take the unthinkable lethally seriously.

Because a democracy has never needed to be on a higher alert than America does right about now. Do you really think Trump doesn’t want to corrode, steal, or thwart the next election — and make his kids the strutting, preening Gadhafis and Saddams and Putins of a broken, cowed America? Don’t kid yourself.

Think the unthinkable.

Umair

June 2020

America’s Authoritarian Nightmare is Coming True #web #website #copied #to read# #highlight #link #news #read

#IFTTT #WordPress

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batadine · 4 years ago

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Oh I completely agree.

It isn’t that the antis themselves are right wing. They’re mostly very earnest about being the opposite of that, if anything. The problem with most fandom anti wank, not even just mdzs related, is that the rhetoric often ends up sounding very much like right wing propaganda. The whole purity politics angle of it especially.

To use a very loose analogy; they sort of end up on a colour wheel-esque sliding scale of “morality” that they have invented between right and wrong; the blue and the red. A magenta, which doesn't actually exist as a wavelength that we can see, and is instead a colour that our brains perceive to sort of fill in the blank space and complete the wheel for human convenience. From what i’ve seen on most social media platforms is that the antis sort of thrive in that void of not blue not red, where buzz words like you’ve rightly pointed out, can be leveraged for virtue signalling. I don’t use black and white, as that analogy would imply that they understand grey spaces. but they do not, as perceiving shades of grey does not take the imaginary leap of logic that magenta does. So they end up trying so hard to blue that they end up in red. (i’ll stop torturing this analogy now.)

Most of them are stuck somewhere in between internet fandom social justice discourse and real world issues that are nuanced and deserve far more gravity, critical thought and action than is given by most people ona day to day basis. Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour and thought is a slippery slope to radicalisation and passive right wing actions. (for example, the forced outing of queer authors who write queer material, to prove a moot point that actively might harm the author in the real world)

MDZS is just one of the most relevant examples that i can think of. Where yelling about a piece of media and cancelling an author without any forethought or critical thinking can and might just harm real people in the real world. Honestly MDZS is one of the most subversive, dense and thoughtfully written pieces of media i’ve read in a minute, that ironically actually deals with this exact rumour mongering and sheeple like behaviour. (but ofcourse we’re all only into it only for the bad sex and supposed fetishization, rolls eyes into my skull)

It especially really gets my goat when CQL only fans pretend that the source material is heinous; for unfounded, badly misconstrued reasons. But somehow a product of that source material that was made under censorship and actively altered to suit the ruling party’s autocratic regime and actual conservative thought is the better piece of media, and then turn around and think they have the moral high ground. It absolutely baffles me how you can argue about the superiority of the drama, and condemn the author and the novel without being either actively malicious or passively ignorant and/or brainwashed, which honestly is still malicious when you become an anti and actively spew hatred and misinformation publicly without spending a minute to first check all of your facts. In no way does this mean that MDZS is above criticism or that it is the peak of fiction in any way. It most definitely does have its demerits that one can talk about, but unfortunately hardly anybody ever makes any of those arguments. This also is not in any way a condemnation of people who enjoy CQL. It was made to be enjoyed and has its own merits as as any media will, and not everything needs be picked apart and analysed for leisurely enjoyment.

It is only those who spread misinformation and their oft racist and ignorant condemnations of a piece of media, that they have either not read fully or refused to engage with in good faith, that enrage me. Unfortunately this is a large group of people that seem to be taking over most fandom spaces these days.

(i’m sorry for having highjacked your response, i just get v salty about fandom antis, and how they will actively advocate for censorship without considering the consequences, and wanted to explain exactly what i meant by right wing propaganda led brain rot)

just dropping by to say that i cannot express how much i appreciate your salt about the cql only antis. not to mention your very thoughtful metas on the novel. it baffles me how blindly racist and ignorant some of these people are yet hold onto their supposed 'moral highground'. i'm this close to starting an mdzs sideblog to just post in solidarity with you and the few others not suffering from right wing propaganda brainrot.

(although, as a sidenote, I’m not sure the ‘brain rot’ can be blamed on people being right wing. At times people with what seem to be leftist beliefs go so far down the ‘authoritarian route’ that they end up either aligning with or sounding like right-wingers, and that seems to be the case here)

I think also that a lot of people drinking the anti-MDZS/MXTX kool-aid are not necessarily doing so out of bad faith (although some definitely are), but because they believed what people told them. And it is not difficult to understand why, considering so many of the criticisms (generally unfounded or that grossly misrepresent the novel) leverage code-words that internet leftists will rally behind: it’s homophobic! it’s sexist! it’s rape! it’s pedophilia! etc. You’d hardly want to associate with a work that is described like that, and you’re less likely to want to give it a chance or to read it in good faith, under the circumstances. Unfortunately, social media is sort of the dying ground for nuance, and being incensed and hating stuff is energising, while taking time to read and analyse something takes the kind of attention-span and reading comprehension that are not, uh, nurtured by platforms like tumblr or twitter.)

#fandom wank #mdzs discourse #saltier than the dead sea

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jshi610 · 5 years ago

Text

Reading response week 2

1. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class

In my opinion, I think good art work could never get away from politics. It’s not something that everyone can get away as a human; and it’s not something that avoiding it will make it easier to look.

When there are movements in the streets, for example the situation in Hong Kong right now, related art works are more sensitive to timeliness and accuracy. Specific events happened in the street can be quickly transferred to related art works and put on social media as an effective propaganda. In this case, I think the ‘quality’ of the art work might not be so important; because art works against time. Seldom is a quick art work a good art work; but in some situations, especially when it is related to news and politics, quickness is a very important feature.

This second line that I would like to mention is also crucial. Artists have a characteristic of Narcissism; as a matter of fact it’s nothing bad at all, because making art works and putting one’s own thoughts in front of the world requires Narcissism to some extend. However, when related to ‘big things’ such as politics, some of them might go too far.

This made me think of another example. Not long ago, Kyoto Animation, a beloved Japanese animation studio went through a tragic arson attack. Many stuff members were killed, and many animation art works were destroyed in fire. Shortly after that, on Chinese social media, someone drew a short manga depicting the victims ‘lost their lives because they were trying to save the art works’. This manga got widely spread in no times, followed by huge controversies- because it was not true, as Kyoto Animation clarified at that time. Many people accused the artist of trying to gain attention for herself over other’s tragedy, and the final result was that the artist deleted that post.

There were something typical in this thing. First of all, from aesthetic angle, the manga was badly made. The proportion of human bodies were badly drawn; the lines were awkward; and the artist put too much deliberate make-you-cry features in it. It almost will make people laugh, if not cry in awkward.

However, this manga did got widely spread and made more people know about this tragedy- people outside the Japanese animation lovers. Even the controversial and debate part is, potentially, made people pay more attention to the studio itself and donated more money because they were ‘disgusted by the artist’s selfish to try to get more followers from this tragedy’.

The ending is also not a good thing in my opinion. Yes, it was a bad art work; but people shouldn’t have the right to call the artist murder and anti-human, and used this to make her deleted that post. It’s just not right. Art should have no boundaries; but still, when involved with politics situations, people are naturally more strict about it, because behind the black and white manga figures, there were once lived humans.

That’s also one point. Due to the barrier of time, space, language and ideology, human just can’t connect with each other in merely words. However, art work is different. They are lines, shapes and colors. You don’t need a MFA to read the pictures; and you don’t need to understand Cantonese to see that one young protester girl lost one of her eyes by the violent police. Suddenly the barrier disappears. However, then the art works served as a mean to the end, not as a finally product. It’s more like people searched the background story after they saw the art works; and they need the background story to complete the art work. Art work once again become a by-product, just as they did in Medieval times to religion. Is that what we want then?

What it means to be a ‘political artist’? Is it just like a title of ‘oil painter’ or ‘digital painter’? Should it be like that? What’s people’s opinion about ‘political artist’ versus ‘quiet countryside landscape artist’? Should there even be a title called ‘political artist’?

When I was little my family already told me to stay away from politics. After that certain year in Chinese history, who were university students at that time became parents, and they certainly didn’t want they children died like once their classmates. My family told me to do technical or scientific jobs as they stayed as far as from politics. Instead I choose art; but still, there are so many times that I’m not sure if it is safe to bring one political issue up on the desk. That is, including call myself ‘want to become a political artist’.

It is one thing to stand on the shore and watch people sinking in the river, and it is another thing to be the people sinking in the river. The thing is, I don’t think there are such things as ‘few political movements in evidence’. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it not exist. In those so-called third world countries everyday political movements are everywhere. They might not adapted in a familiar form to first world countries’ residences, and they might even have the chance to get known to the world before they’ve already been put out by the authorities. So this is an aspect I would like to point out.

And that is just painfully true. There are some fundamentally contrast part between art and politics; they need each other but also try to kill each other in the same way.

I like the word ‘political aesthetic’ because it made itself sound like a real issue. No, there’s no such thing; everything artist do, think and make is political; we might just not realized that how a small changes in politics may have lethal affects to art world. We are living in a too comfortable situation that make us forget what once it was like. See German in WWII, see Soviet Union and see China now; again, just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it not exist. We are all on the thin ice now and always, like it or not.

2. Comment section of CNN's Photo section

I must admit that, as a Chinese student, I’m not unfamiliar with the feelings and expressions used in those negative comments. Just changing a few words and those comments might even have a nationalism(or in this case should I say regionalism) feeling hidden behind.

The reason why her work upsets them is simply: those people were assuming themselves on a higher or advantage ground than ‘everyday Appalachians’. Two comments actually mentioned that:’...what's SO horrible about all of these people that you're ashamed to be associated with them...' and ‘Not all of us are backwards hicks.’. For example, when talking about the bad influences(they won't bring jobs to this region) of businesses and industries when they saw 'crap like this', Mindy Miller had already firmly believed that all those people in the photos shouldn’t have the right to have a job. This is elitism; by separating themselves from the ‘general public’, they find themselves worthy and above the average. I don’t blame them for that. This is like a human instinct; when visiting the museum, there are ‘serious art lovers’ and ‘visitors’; when eating in a restaurant, there are 'Gourmet' and 'hungry beast'; human need to divide themselves into groups and start the conflict, otherwise they will have to face the fact that all of us are tiny, worthless and boring creatures compared to the universe.

The second sentence I found myself familiar is ‘Where are they? I haven't seen them.’. No matter whether you see them or not, those people will be there. Living in modern days people always assume they will see enough to conclude that they’ve seen the world- but no. I’ve lived in NY for 5 years now but I only visited Flushing twice; even in my hometown there are so many countryside areas that belongs to my city Nanjing, but I, as born and raised in Nanjing, never heard their names. Back to the CNN photos, it’s only 359 comments; and how many people are there in Appalachia? When facing controversial topics posting on the Internet, sometimes people forget that of all those people involved directly to the problem, only a few ‘top’(both in educational and economical) of them have the condition to type on the Internet. Thinking of the hobos’ issue- how many hobos will be able to check a phone or laptop 24/7 and see what people’s about? Having not seen them can’t serve as a strong argument without further information- if Mindy Miller is an expert Appalachia researcher who traveled through all the parts and met everyone in there- which is hardly possible even if he or she really is an Appalachia expert- then this ‘haven’t seen them’ might be a sufficient argument.

The next line will be '...there are backwards people living in these hills, but there are also extremely intelligent people, ..., who live here.'. It’s funny how Mindy Miller’s comment really is a good represent for those upsetting people, since I didn't find any other one more suitable for picked up and shown as an example. Backwards people can also be musicians, artists and civil right leaders. Asians and blacks(seriously, ‘blacks’?That’s word he or she is using to praise them? I’m glad Asians aren’t ‘yellows’) can, or just say were thought as backwards people during periods American history. I do understand what this line is about, but that was a terrible way of expressing it. In this case, Mindy Miller shared the same aspect he or she hated with Stacy Kranitz- no matter what they were trying to say, they made their ‘audience’ misunderstood terribly.

Finally, my personal thoughts over those photos is they are technically and aesthetically nicely finished. However I still understand those upset comments and I think Stacy Kranitz indeed had something to do with them- her title, her ways of describing it, and the platform she chose to display it. If that was intentional, and she was prepared and accepted the consequences, them they are successful samples of art. I think art doesn't and don't have any restrictions, but the maker has to bear the responsibility and risk of her own work.

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srseattlestreetnews · 8 years ago

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Seattle Street News 53, The Krund Issue

City News:

Broken News—(by demmalition1)

Sitting in a small roadside diner, nice place with a retro 2020’s vibe called “Hindsight”. Throwback places are never really accurate, I can spot at least three memorabilia from the 1990’s in there, but no one else is giving a shit so why should I? Food’s good though, plate of warm soy-shrimp with soy-noodles and real garlic, plate of real bruschetta, and some wine to wash it down. You’d think they’d have soy-burgers and beer, but I’m not complaining.

Seating’s good and the waitress is flirting with me trying to get those extra few percentage points on her tip, probably to cover for this month’s rent based on how hard she’s pushing it. I ignore her and flip through the AR news feeds trying to catch up on what I missed after finishing my last report. Seems like most of the debris fell into the ocean harmlessly, one or two pieces on the outskirts of Japan, and a few scattered pieces on the UCAS/Tir Tairngire border. Hopefully nothing to worry about, but I’m still on guard for anyone asking me if I’ve heard the good word of our Lord and Savior <prog.Monads.exe>.

Anyways, I’m getting off track here, let’s flip through the minor news here... Oh yeah...

Corporate News shill Meta RyRy has been kidnapped live on air! That’s right folks, the persona of poison and corporate deceit has been deposed from his throne of lies in front of several thousand viewers. So far public reaction has been one of sadness and shock tempered by a solemn resignation of “it was bound to happen sooner or later”. I’m fairly certain a large percentage of active viewing participants were simply corp execs looking at their egregiously narcissistic ads or sniping other corps with insults, and are more dismayed at the loss of a soapbox than of the person reading off their corp scripts. Sure, some of this might’ve been useful or for the public good, but can you take a man seriously when he says that there’s no public health risk from the satellite debris or that a manastorm isn’t brewing until it’s too late? Can you trust the man who constantly gave “the finger” to us at the SSN (including me personally on one occasion) or others who tried to help the SINless?

Frankly, I’m glad to see him go, he spread corp propaganda right up to the night of the “Concert Freefall” wherein the Seattle Metroplex marketplace lost a combined ¥200 billion in value overnight. That’s right, the shadow war between Horizon and Saeder-Krupp in which various other corps banded together finally came to a head. A joint concert held by both sides to promote unity was actually a cover for their more duplicitous actions involving multiple runner teams, industrial sabotage, and an all-out assault on both Horizon Media and SK-Aerospace. In its wake thousands will lose their jobs, even many executives at the top are not safe, as I hear the Corporate Court is taking action and reshuffling their decks as I write this. Expect to see many “Will Oppress Masses For Food” signs out in the streets in the following weeks.

So where does this leave us? A corporate shill and his corporate lies have disappeared from the face of the Metroplex. Can’t say I’ll miss the propaganda, but the show did have a certain unabashed bravado in its brazenness, it was very entrancing and at times even humorous. The corps are hurting badly, but they will recover like they usually do. The SINless will continue to suffer in the short term until Governor Dzhugashvili’s progressive legislation gets passed.

But that’s that, there’s nothing to go back to. No system to salvage and the events that occurred over the past week are sure to galvanize many people in the coming months. Already there are fissures in the underground that are creeping to the surface, a new cracked and fragmented society awaits us in this brave new world of the damned.

All About Krund Yuste Alfonso!

Footage has recently leaked (See exclusive video HERE!) of the attack on gubernatorial candidate Krund Yuste Alfonso that occurred a few months ago at the Aztechnology Emerald City Fitness gym. I’m sure you all remember the incident! Krund Alfonso was running for mayor when a naked British troll accosted him in the shower room. At the time, Krund Alfonso insisted to the SSN (See Issue 36), that this was no attack at all, but a simple mix-up with an over-eager fan. But the video footage reveals that Krund Alfonso was downplaying what was clearly an attack. Although the footage we have does not give a clear look at the British troll nor the reported homeless dwarf, what we are seeing is a clear assault by an unknown assailant. The assailant wrestled with the candidate and then fled.

This video raises many questions that all of the citizens of the Metroplex should be asking. If Aztech, one of the most security and militarily powerful Megacorps can’t keep its execs safe in the most vulnerable of moments—naked in the gym—can any corp exec be safe? Is any gym safe from intrusion? Krund Alfonso, a kind and conscientious figure, clearly lied about the assault in order to protect Aztechnology’s reputation in light of their shamefully inadequate security. But why was Krund Alfonso really assaulted? And does this assault have anything to do with the fact that Krund Alfonso is currently missing and has been since the revelation that he was an Arislen clone? Where is Krund Alfonso now? Is it true the Horizon might know the answer and they are hiding that information from the rest of us? Why would they do that? What do they have to hide? The corps have been trying to distract the public from the disturbing implications of this news by bringing up other so-called stories that mostly consist of trying to attack their favorite scape goats: SINless runners, the heroes of the streets. Don’t fall for that! Keep your eyes on the prize! Speaking of prizes…

The video also revealed quite a few other things to the Seattle masses. One of the major things it revealed is that Krund Alfonso, ex UCAS marine, still cuts a dashing figure. People on the streets have said that he is the most physically fit ex-gubernatorial figure in decades, and everyone is talking about Krund Alfonso. Looks like there is a bit of a fashion war going on between two powerful forces over Krund Alfonso’s body. Sources tell me that both Spinrad Industries’s fashion division and up-and-coming fashion designer Arzu Kaprol want Krund Alfonso to model their fashions for the upcoming season. And why wouldn’t they? Krund Alfonso has become this season’s It-Boy. He is fit, he is polite, he cares about the SINless, he is a sex symbol, he is a mysterious Arislen clone…and more importantly, he is missing! Where is he? Was he kidnapped? After so many missing execs, is he another one?

People of Seattle, the corporations are clearly unsafe, not only to the SINless and the UCAS citizens, but also to their own citizens! Let your voices be heard! Tell Governor Dzhugashvili to pressure the Megacorps for more transparency. Let’s find out what the truth is! And let’s find out where Krund Alfonso has gone!

Keep your eyes open for Seattle’s own Troll and send in tips!

Entertainment News

SpiceBOT Concert

Last week the SpiceBOT reunion concert co-sponsored by Saeder-Krupp and Horizon was a huge, if odd success. Tens of thousands of people crowded downtown to see the wildly popular band perform all their hits. The Metroplex was transformed into a SpiceWorld. In the Virtual, the Saeder-Krupp band concert was broadcast by Horizon Media. Except, halfway through the concert, Horizon’s media feeds failed, leaving people frustrated throughout the world. Saeder-Krupp’s new Media subsidiary heroically saved the day and was able to finish broadcasting the show for the grateful viewers. Good job SK! We all want to zig-ah-zig-ah.

Features:

Once More 13--(by Breach)

War is a complicated thing, and the more recent the war, the harder it is to break down, especially in the space I have here at SSN. JackPoint compiled a 26-page dossier on the event and it still doesn’t cover everything, but the fallout of this one is big enough that I think we all need to understand it, even as removed as we are from the battleground here in Seattle.

The official declarations came in early 2072, though tensions had been building long before - Aztlan has ever been an expansionist empire, and has been long-stymied to the north by the mutual defense agreement between the CAS and PCC, so south it has looked, swallowing up the nations of Central America until it became once again stymied in South America by the Awakened State of Amazonia; the combined power of Hualpa and Sirrug was enough to curb even the mighty Aztechnology - for a time.

I’m going to leave out most of the details - get your hands on JackPoint’s Storm Front data file if you want those - but to give a broad overview, the war was between not just two nations, but two megacorporations as well; Aztlan and Aztechnology are virtually inseparable, the welfare of one being intrinsically tied to the other, but Amazonia had Corporate aid as well, from Aztechnology’s decade-long PR rival, Horizon.

The war was an actual war, have no doubt of that, but it was not fought solely in the jungles and streets of South America; it was fought also on the global stage, in the hearts and minds of the world.

Horizon won early victories, casting Aztlan as the villains and sullying the good press Aztechnology usually enjoys with the masses, leading to painful UN sanctions that still affect us all to this day (ever wonder why the price of soycaf went up? This is why.) But in the end, Aztechnology’s PR branch won out, because when you can trumpet the defeat of a Great Dragon, it’s pretty easy to get the people on your side.

The fact that Horizon couldn’t find any real evidence and had to trump up their charges instead - and that AZ could prove that - didn’t hurt either.

Sirrug. The Destroyer. A dragon so powerful he almost single-handedly crippled the Aztlan military and turned what might have been a brief border-conflict into an all-out guerrilla war - and the first Great Dragon since the alleged death of Feuerschwinge to be felled by metahumanity (perhaps the actual first, if some of the whispers I hear in the shadows are true.)

Sure, there were some border changes (the Free City of Bogota is no longer quite so free, Aztlan enjoys a few hundred kilometres more of Amazonian jungle, and Aztlan Texas belongs to the Pueblos now, giving Aztlan only one northern neighbour instead of two), but Sirrug’s the major fallout of the war, the big takeaway - the Great Dragons might actually be killable. Now, there’s debate over whether Sirrug is actually dead - his body was never retrieved - but he has not been seen since, and was at the very least severely wounded.

Aztlan may possess the technology to rival the Great Dragons themselves, and that’s going to have lasting effect on the world.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! [email protected]

Gang News:

There Has Never Been a Story of More Woe, Than This of JuL33T and her MEO

Tragedy! No one was able to get ahold of MEO and the worst has happened. Ancient Street Sam JuL33T, it turns out hadn’t died, but had taken a dose of Slab, insiders tell me that she has secretly married Chula MEO and used the Slab to fake her death and get out the gang life and set up a new happy-ever-after with MEO somewhere else. But MEO never got the message. He went to see her body, resplendent in her armor, chromed up cyber and katanas. There, holding her hand, MEO took the dose of Seven-7 he bought from you-know-who. He died immediately. But according to my insider, it wasn’t much longer after that JuL33T’s Slap wore off. Seeing MEO slain, she took her own life with the katana she was never without.

This tragedy could have been avoided. We need to stop the gang hostility in Puyallup.

Corp News:

Horizon Kidnapping Technomancers

It seems that Horizon is at it again! Sources report that the Megacorp had been holding some Technomancers prisoner in the Metroplex biodome. These Technomancers were able to escape from their harrowing ordeal and make it to safety. Sources say that Horizon, in a fit of corruptions, bad sportsmanship, and the way they are prone to coverups, have been trying to deflect attention away from their unethical and illegal behavior onto some shadowrunners who, last I heard, were visiting family in Europe. Don’t let Horizon deflect! Demand to know if they are continuing their abuse of Technomancers!

Seattle Street News is an independent activist news source released weekly on Tuesdays or Wednesdays

[Watch CorporateSINs on every Wednesday, 6pm PST or on Youtube at, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11c7BLFQtc&list=PLHKocVDXoWBtzze1SGGUnU6KB5UFrDLFo]

#CorpSINs #shadowrun #HyperRPG

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christianlivingtoday-blog · 6 years ago

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A Good General Fights to Capture the Minds and Hearts of People

Then the king of Assyria sent Tartan and Rab-saris and Rabshakeh from Lachish to King Hezekiah with a large army to Jerusalem. So they went up and came to Jerusalem. And when they went up, they came and stood by the conduit of the upper pool, which is on the highway of the fuller’s field.

When they called to the king, Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebnah the scribe and Joah the son of Asaph the recorder, came out to them.

Then Rabshakeh said to them, “Say now to Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, “ What is this confidence that you have?

You say (but they are only empty words), ‘ I have counsel and strength for the war. ’ Now on whom do you rely, that you have rebelled against me? Now behold, you rely on the staff of this crushed reed, even on Egypt; on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him.

But if you say to me, ‘We trust in the Lord our God,’ is it not He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away, and has said to Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem’? Now therefore, come, make a bargain with my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them. How then can you repulse one official of the least of my master’s servants, and rely on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen?

Have I now come up without the Lord’s approval against this place to destroy it? The Lord said to me, ‘Go up against this land and destroy it. ’”’”

Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebnah and Joah, said to Rabshakeh, “SPEAK NOW TO YOUR SERVANTS IN ARAMAIC, FOR WE UNDERSTAND IT; AND DO NOT SPEAK WITH US IN JUDEAN IN THE HEARING OF THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ON THE WALL.”

But Rabshakeh said to them, “HAS MY MASTER SENT ME ONLY TO YOUR MASTER AND TO YOU TO SPEAK THESE WORDS, AND NOT TO THE MEN WHO SIT ON THE WALL, DOOMED TO EAT THEIR OWN DUNG AND DRINK THEIR OWN URINE WITH YOU?”

Then Rabshakeh stood and cried with a loud voice in Judean, saying, “Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria.

Thus says the king, ‘ Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you from my hand; nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, “The Lord will surely deliver us, and this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.” Do not listen to Hezekiah, for thus says the king of Assyria, “ MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH ME AND COME OUT TO ME, AND EAT EACH OF HIS VINE AND EACH OF HIS FIG TREE AND DRINK EACH OF THE WATERS OF HIS OWN CISTERN, UNTIL I COME AND TAKE YOU AWAY TO A LAND LIKE YOUR OWN LAND, A LAND OF GRAIN AND NEW WINE, A LAND OF BREAD AND VINEYARDS, A LAND OF OLIVE TREES AND HONEY, THAT YOU MAY LIVE AND NOT DIE.” But do not listen to Hezekiah when he misleads you, saying, “The Lord will deliver us.” Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria?

Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? Have they delivered Samaria from my hand? Who among all the gods of the lands have delivered their land from my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem from my hand? ’”

But the people were silent and answered him not a word, for the king’s commandment was, “Do not answer him.”

Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and told him the words of Rabshakeh.

2 Kings 18:17-37 (NASB)

Rabshakeh was sent by the king of Assyria to capture the hearts and minds of the people of Israel and to make them believe that they were going to perish. Eliakim, the messenger of Hezekiah sensed that Rabshakeh was winning the hearts and minds of the people by speaking to them in the Jewish language. So he shouted out to him that there was no need to speak to them in the Jewish language. He wanted them to speak in Aramaic so that the ordinary Jews listening would not understand the threats and dangers they were in. Every general knows the need to convince the masses of certain things. A good general therefore knows the importance of information dissemination. Through the information that is put out, you can control the population and make them believe almost anything.

Many evil regimes were thought of as good governments during their reign. After these governments were overthrown, the real picture came out. Today, many useless politicians maintain their deceptions and power by propaganda and lies on television, radio and the internet. This is how they win elections and gain control of the masses. With time, it is seen that they were really a useless government. Everyone comes to know the truth about that government. In the same way, the devil has fed this world with lies and deceptions. Unfortunately, most of the people in this world have believed it. Many evil governments, which are heavily inspired by the devil, were very good at propaganda, lies and deception.

How Adolf Hitler Won the Hearts of Germany

Adolf Hitler did not come into power because he was popular or liked. He and his Nazi party never actually won the majority of votes at an election. He was the leader of the largest party but they still did not have the majority support in the country. When Adolf Hitler did come into power, he knew that he had to convince those who opposed him that it was pointless to continue with their opposition. He also wanted those who had chosen him to be informed about how correct their decision was.

To do this, Adolf Hitler appointed a Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. As the Minister of Enlightenment, it was his job to ensure that no one in Germany ever produced or read any negative material about the Nazi party. He was also to ensure that the views of the Nazi party were put out in as persuasive a way as possible. They then set about to work with the secret service to hunt out those who might produce negative materials and eliminate them.

In order to censor everything that was produced in the country, Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, set up a chamber of commerce which was an organisation to deal with literature, music, radio, film and newspapers. Everything that was published or produced in the country had to pass through this chamber of commerce. From then on, you could only read, see or hear what the government wanted you to.

Goebbels organized book burning episodes. Books that did not match the Nazi doctrine were burnt in public. Libraries were raided and offending books were brought out and burnt.

Films were also controlled and only films that centred on the Jews or the greatness of Hitler were produced. Two films of note were made. Hitlerjunge Quex was made in 1933. This film told the story of a boy brought up in a communist family in Germany who broke away from this background, joined the Hitler Youth and was murdered by the Communists in Germany for doing so. The Eternal Jew was a film that vilified the Jews comparing the Jews in Europe to a hoard of rats spreading disease. As the world war approached, the films produced centered on how badly Germans were being treated in other countries – a way of preparing people for war with nations that were not treating Germans nicely.

To ensure that everybody could hear Hitler speak, Goebbels organized the sale of cheap radios. These were called the “People’s Receiver” and they cost only 76 marks. A smaller version cost just 35 marks. Goebbels believed that if Hitler was to give speeches, the people should be able to hear him. Loud speakers were put up in streets so that people could not avoid any speeches by Hitler. Cafes and other such properties were ordered to play in public the speeches by Hitler.

Goebbels, the man of propaganda and public enlightenment, organized spectacular night time displays at Nuremberg, the headquarters of the Nazi party. Here, he organized massive rallies and parades that were designed to show the world the might of the Nazi party. Huge arenas to hold 400,000 people were built, 150 search lights that could be seen from about a hundred kilometers away, surrounded the whole area and were lit up vertically into the night sky.

Initially, Goebbels did not believe in anti-semitism, but turned around completely and organized attacks on the Jews. Goebbels’ hatred for Jews was propagated through a systematic campaign to turn the entire nation of Germany against Jews. He said, “The Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether. That will take some time, but it must and will happen.” By 1938, Goebbels was working on requiring all Jews to wear an identifiable mark and confining them to a ghetto. He wrote, “Our aim is to drive the Jews out of Berlin and that without any sentimentality.”

With his propaganda, he drove everyone to hate Jews, to kill them and to eliminate them from the world, even making people believe that it was the Jews who had started the Second World War.

He wrote, “Our state’s security requires that we take whatever measures seem necessary to protect the German community from the Jewish threat.”

Goebbels developed ten commandments of propaganda for his hearers.

1. Your Fatherland is called Germany. Love it above all and more through action than through words.

2. Germany’s enemies are your enemies. Hate them with your whole heart.

3. Every national comrade, even the poorest, is a piece of Germany. Love him as yourself.

4. Demand only duties for yourself. Then Germany will get justice.

5. Be proud of Germany. You ought to be proud of a Fatherland for which millions have sacrificed their lives.

6. He who abuses Germany, abuses you and your dead. Strike your fist against him.

7. Hit a rogue more than once. When one takes away your good rights, remember that you can only fight him physically.

8. Don’t be an anti-Semitic knave. But be careful of the “Berliner Tageblatt”.

9. Make your actions such that you need no blush when the New Germany is mentioned.

10. Believe in the future. Only then can you be the victor.

Goebbels controlled the minds and the hearts of Germany till the very end. He made the people of Germany believe in all that Hitler was doing. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945. In June 1941, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia where his army was defeated. That was the beginning of his downfall and the downfall of Germany and the Nazi party. But all through the decline of Germany, from 1941 up to 1945, Goebbels maintained a strong control on the hearts and minds of the people convincing them that Germany was a mighty power, successful in all that it did when in actual fact it was declining from as early as 1941. Through intensified propaganda on radio, television and the print media, Goebbels ensured that Adolf Hitler looked good until the very end.

When the war was clearly lost in the east, he continued his campaign of deception and lies; writing in the newspaper, “Our soldiers in the east will do their part. They will stop the storm from the steppes and ultimately break it. They fight under unimaginable conditions. But they are fighting a good fight. They are fighting not only for our security but also for Europe’s future.

Sadly, he believed the very lie that he created and said it was not worth living if Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were not in power. After Hitler committed suicide, he killed his six children and then killed himself and his wife.

Satanic Propaganda

Today, large sections of the world have fallen to captivity through propaganda. Today, ordinary young men are made to believe that they are homosexual because of the onslaught of lies and deception. Today, the most unnatural sexual practices are promoted by respectable-looking politicians and other dignified leaders. It is not about understanding homosexuals or giving them rights but the fact that the world is being forced to believe that it is a normal thing rather than seeing it as something that needs compassion and help to correct. The point I am making is that deception is very pervasive and over time, some untruths can become the main truths. Today, people in Europe have decided that there is no God. They have decided that they made themselves and came into the world through a big bang. With time, the entire continent of Europe will be overwhelmed with the absurd idea that there is no God.

A Good General Must Launch His Own Campaign

A good general knows that the enemy will launch a campaign to capture the minds and hearts of the people. A good general, therefore, launches his own campaign of propaganda to counter the deceptions of the enemy. There are many arguments against the insanity of atheism. These arguments must be sought out and disseminated so that our children will not believe that there is no God. There are also many arguments against the depravity of homosexuality; perhaps, the greatest being that there are no homosexual animals. The arguments against accepting homosexuality as an orientation and a normal lifestyle must be disseminated strongly, lest half of the church falls to this deception and becomes a homosexual community.

A strong campaign to capture the hearts and the minds of people must be launched through camp meetings, church services, the internet, radio and television. You cannot leave the enemy to have a field day with his campaign of lies and deception. During the Second World War, the British fought against the deception of the Nazi Germans by throwing leaflets on them. Some of these leaflets had no words but simply showed a picture of a large open field with thousands of graves of German soldiers. This effort was to demoralize the German soldiers and to discourage them from continuing to fight.

by Dag Heward-Mills

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latestnews2018-blog · 6 years ago

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Facebook pulls post by Anne Frank Center after seeing only nudity in a photo of the Holocaust

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/facebook-pulls-post-by-anne-frank-center-after-seeing-only-nudity-in-a-photo-of-the-holocaust/

Facebook pulls post by Anne Frank Center after seeing only nudity in a photo of the Holocaust

Facebook moderators temporarily removed a post by the Anne Frank Center which was seeking to raise awareness about the Holocaust, after the company was unable to distinguish between historical genocide and child nudity.

The post included an archive photograph of Jewish children who had been stripped and starved by Nazi Germany.

Between 1941 and 1945 the German state imprisoned and murdered millions of Jews in concentration and death camps — the child Anne Frank, who the Center is named after, being just one of them.

Frank died in 1945, aged 15, after her hiding place in Amsterdam had been uncovered. She was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where, seven months later, she died of typhus.

In school history class as a teenager I remember being shown similar footage of the emaciated bodies of Jewish people starved and murdered during the Holocaust.

It’s not the kind of imagery you forget. It is terrible. Haunting. It is a shame of history, not pornography.

Facebook moderators apparently cannot tell the difference.

These numbers are alarming, but this is why we do what we do. Currently only 10 states mandate Holocaust and Genocide Education. How do we counter ignorance about the Holocaust with knowledge, compassion, and understanding? https://t.co/1xtsNLAKEx

— Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 21, 2018

Around six hours after the Center complained on Twitter that the post had been taken down, Facebook reinstated it.

In a tweet replying to the Center’s complaint the company explains its actions, saying “we don’t allow nude images of children”, before ending with an apology for making the wrong decision in this case — owing to the image having “important historical significance”.

It wrote: “We put your post back up and sent you a message on FB. We don’t allow nude images of children on FB, but we know this is an important image of historical significance and we’ve restored it. We’re sorry and thank you for bringing it to our attention.”

@AnneFrankCenter, we put your post back up and sent you a message on FB. We don’t allow nude images of children on FB, but we know this is an important image of historical significance and we’ve restored it. We’re sorry and thank you for bringing it to our attention.

— Facebook (@facebook) August 29, 2018

If you’re getting an acute sense of deja-vu that’s because Facebook has similarly failed to understand historical context before — when, for example, in 2016 its moderators took down an iconic war photo of a child fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam in 1972.

The violence had also stripped that child — clothing her with terror.

Again Facebook’s moderators simply couldn’t tell. So they scrubbed historical record from the platform. An outcry was necessary to reinstate it.

Called on that crime against history, Facebook described its moderating decision as a mistake — saying “we intend to do better”.

Two years later there’s no sign it’s living up to that stated intent.

Running the world’s biggest content platform without editorial oversight and with woefully under-resourced moderation is indeed a very hard problem. One that AI cannot hope to solve in any near or short term framework — if ever. Context is king for a reason.

The kicker here is that company founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to choose to provide a platform for Holocaust deniers on Facebook.

He could choose to ban Holocaust denial — which is, after all, an attack on both history and the Jewish people. But he prefers not to. He’s not for banning, unless it’s nudity. (Classic art nudes included, at times.)

And so we arrive at the tragi-ridiculous pass of true historical imagery of the Holocaust being scrubbed from Facebook — while vicious lies about the Holocaust are allowed to stand and swirl and take root via Facebook.

That’s what running a content platform without a moral compass looks like.

Another example for the history books. 1-There is no cheap way to do content moderation well at scale; 2-It’s not clear how to do it much better at scale with a lot more investment but; 3-It’s guaranteed to be done badly at the level of investment—as a cost center—it gets now. https://t.co/qv4CcyeHJ9

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 29, 2018

We asked Facebook to explain why it took down a post by the Anne Frank Center that was seeking to raise awareness about the Holocaust yet refuses to take down posts by Holocaust deniers who are seeking to undermine historical truth.

A company representative pointed us to its earlier response to the Center — but did not engage with our question.

Update: The Center has now sent us the following statement regarding Facebook’s actions:

Our original post was to draw attention to the fact that the Holocaust is woefully undertaught across the USA and that ignorance on what happened is a direct result of this. We have been working with numerous state representatives across the nation to mandate K-12 Holocaust education through our 50-State Genocide Education project.

While Facebook removes the AFC’s post promoting the need to educate on the past, it continues to allow pages and posts that directly deny the reality of the deaths of more than six million people.

Holocaust denial dehumanizes people. It makes thousands feel unsafe. It violates the very standards Facebook lays out for it users. Yet these hate-filled propaganda pages remain.

We have written to Facebook previously offering to work with them to tackle the spread of Holocaust denial and hate on its platform and to promote education.

If Facebook is serious about its community standards it should start tackling Holocaust denial and not the organizations who are trying to educate people on discrimination, facts, and history.

We understand the difficulty in assessing the context of potentially controversial content. That said, it shouldn’t have taken us publicly calling out Facebook to restore our post. Hopefully, Facebook can revise their protocols.

We understand that the Center’s post was originally published on Facebook on August 21, and taken down by Facebook moderators on August 27 — before it was subsequently reinstated by Facebook after the Center complained.

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sheminecrafts · 6 years ago

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Facebook pulls post by Anne Frank Center after seeing only nudity in a photo of the Holocaust

The post included an archive photograph of Jewish children who had been stripped and starved by Nazi Germany.

Between 1941 and 1945 the German state imprisoned and murdered millions of Jews in concentration and death camps — the child Anne Frank, who the Center is named after, being just one of them.

Frank died in 1945, aged 15, after her hiding place in Amsterdam had been uncovered. She was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where, seven months later, she died of typhus.

In school history class as a teenager I remember being shown similar footage of the emaciated bodies of Jewish people starved and murdered during the Holocaust.

It’s not the kind of imagery you forget. It is terrible. Haunting. It is a shame of history, not pornography.

Facebook moderators apparently cannot tell the difference.

— Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 21, 2018

Around six hours after the Center complained on Twitter that the post had been taken down, Facebook reinstated it.

— Facebook (@facebook) August 29, 2018

The violence had also stripped that child — clothing her with terror.

Again Facebook’s moderators simply couldn’t tell. So they scrubbed historical record from the platform. An outcry was necessary to reinstate it.

Called on that crime against history, Facebook described its moderating decision as a mistake — saying “we intend to do better”.

Two years later there’s no sign it’s living up to that stated intent.

The kicker here is that company founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to choose to provide a platform for Holocaust deniers on Facebook.

That’s what running a content platform without a moral compass looks like.

Another example for the history books. 1-There is no cheap way to do content moderation well at scale; 2-It's not clear how to do it much better at scale with a lot more investment but; 3-It's guaranteed to be done badly at the level of investment—as a cost center—it gets now. https://t.co/qv4CcyeHJ9

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 29, 2018

A company representative pointed us to its earlier response to the Center — but did not engage with our question.

Update: The Center has now sent us the following statement regarding Facebook’s actions:

While Facebook removes the AFC’s post promoting the need to educate on the past, it continues to allow pages and posts that directly deny the reality of the deaths of more than six million people.

Holocaust denial dehumanizes people. It makes thousands feel unsafe. It violates the very standards Facebook lays out for it users. Yet these hate-filled propaganda pages remain.

We have written to Facebook previously offering to work with them to tackle the spread of Holocaust denial and hate on its platform and to promote education.

If Facebook is serious about its community standards it should start tackling Holocaust denial and not the organizations who are trying to educate people on discrimination, facts, and history.

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