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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 4 months

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By: Adam Neiblum

Published: Dec 20, 2023

Every once in a while, an atheist or other nonbeliever will undergo a change of heart. Someone who has self-identified as an atheist or, at the very least, a “none-of-the-above” type undergoes a change of mind. They may do a full turnabout and embrace a religious faith, either for the first time or as a return to the fold. For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she began as a Muslim, turned atheist in her adulthood, and has recently rejected atheism to become a Christian, for the “legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

[For another perspective on Hirsi Ali’s conversion announcement, see Free Inquiry editor Paul Fidalgo’s “The Enemy of Her Enemy.”]

Confusingly, many of the world’s devout will argue that this individual conversion represents solid evidence that atheism is wrongheaded and that god belief and religious faith are right, good, and proper. Hirsi Ali makes this argument herself:

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilization. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Hirsi Ali and I have very different understandings of the history and impact of Christianity on Euro-American culture. Is she not aware of Christian misogyny? Or the importance of America’s separation of church and state? How about the 165-year-long denial of our true origin story: Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution? Or contemporary bans on knowledge and literacy? And why are atheists still considered by so many Americans to be misguided at best or literally demonic at worst? From where I sit, Christianity impedes our progress and development toward a more enlightened, peaceful, and sustainable human civilization. The fact that this one individual chose to embrace religion is understood to be strong evidence supporting the conclusion that atheism is a mistake, a transgression; that atheists such as myself have been shown the error of our ways and put in our place.

I would like to set the record straight.

Just the Facts

Many readers are no doubt familiar with the God-of-the-gaps concept. This refers to the fact that, historically, answers to life’s many mysteries that had been religious or spiritual in nature—God caused that tsunami or this hurricane, for example—are replaced with the falsifiable and far more probable answers on offer from reason and science. Importantly, however, this well-known phenomenon rarely, if ever, goes in reverse: from the scientific and rational back to the spiritual and religious, except perhaps in the minds of the religiously inclined (think flat-earthers).

And so it is in regard to these nonbelievers who embrace, or return to, religious faith and supernatural beliefs. It happens, but it happens very rarely. When it does happen, it makes a splash. True believers make a big deal about it. If it is someone well-known, it may even make the evening news.

When I finally awakened to the fact that god beliefs are entirely false—the result of cognitive instincts in conjunction with powerful cultural indoctrination—and recognized the truth behind atheism, it was a moment of genuine awakening. I could never go backward into darkness. It’s the same with belief in Santa Claus. Once you grow up and “get it,” it is extremely unlikely that a sane adult is ever going to return to a genuine belief in Santa Claus.

Furthermore, individuals turning away from religion and turning toward the light of reason is not at all extraordinary but, in fact, an everyday occurrence. Here in the United States, it has been happening for years. Those who return to religion are few and far between, whereas, according to Pew Research, the United States is undergoing a “rise of the nones,” with Americans turning away from religious affiliation in droves.

So, these individual conversions (or re-conversions, as the case may be) do occur. But they are far rarer than, and unevenly trumpeted, is generally recognized. This singular example of conversion is thought to serve as evidence that we atheists are delusional lost souls on the wrong track. The devout will often crow, in a somewhat accusatory, “gotcha” manner, What do you infidels make of THAT?

Deathbed Conversion

In December 2011, famous atheist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, breathed his last, ceased to be, and shufflel’d off this mortal coil. Unsurprisingly, rumors quickly circulated that he had undergone a “deathbed conversion” to Christianity. This merely represented an example of Christianity’s fast and loose relationship with the truth, his son confirming that nothing of the sort happened. It proved to be just another of the relentless fictions and fables that are the beating heart of religious faith and god beliefs. More propaganda.

[ Christopher Hitchens by RantingJo ]

But even when a deathbed conversion does occur, it in no way, shape, or form suggests that atheists are in error or misguided. When driven by fear, terror, and worry, when face to face with death, be it the “atheist in the foxhole” or the similarly iconic deathbed conversion trope, it comes as no surprise if some, on occasion, return to religious belief for consolation or are inclined to make other, similarly poor decisions. None of this says anything about whether God is real, nor whether any religious claims are true or even remotely beneficial. Deathbed and foxhole conversions are far fewer in number than we are led to believe by such deeply enmeshed axiomatic truisms. If and when they do occur, all they really tell us is that when faced with existential fears, we humans can be strongly inclined to weakness of will, a propensity to choose instinct over reason or comforting fictions over hard facts. And they tell us that religious indoctrination is very, very effective.

Hitchens had, like myself, a solid secular education and had clearly demonstrated that he was more than comfortable with the reality so many fear to face. Simply put, when we die, we simply cease to exist, except through our works, our friends’ and family’s (hopefully) fond remembrances, and the prodigious supply of food we represent for the worms, tiny organisms, and microbiota so essential to life on planet Earth.

An Extraordinary Case

All this brings me to the hot topic at hand—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, famous Muslim-turned-atheist, author of Infidel (2006), Nomad (2010), and Heretic (2015). Hirsi Ali was raised, and heavily indoctrinated, in the deeply misogynistic Islam of modern Somalia. She suffered horrid abuse, including female genital mutilation (FGM), at the hands of the Muslim devout. Once she escaped from this early influence, she became an avid atheist, a politicized activist, an advocate for women’s rights, and an outspoken critic of the religion of Islam, especially in regard to forced marriage, honor killings, child marriage, and the practice of FGM.

In my own work, I have made several references to Hirsi Ali. I stand by my comments at the time and in my writing. Her story, as told in Infidel, serves as an excellent example of the highly problematic nature of Abrahamic faith, the backward nature of some branches in particular, and the significant and entirely positive changes wrought by awakening to atheism.

Hirsi Ali has now returned to the Abrahamic fold, converting to Christianity. This has been presented to some of us more outspoken atheists as if it were a repudiation of our work, our beliefs, and our very lives as nonbelievers. But that Hirsi Ali should return to this somewhat less misogynistic branch of the Abrahamic faiths comes as no big surprise to this atheist. She has simply found solace in an Abrahamic sect that offers her the comfort and familiarity of a childhood characterized by extremely powerful indoctrination and yet without the heinous degree of misogyny with which her own life was so violently rent. I imagine it might feel very comfortable for her.

Hirsi Ali is misguided to believe as she does. Let me be clear: I am never critical of the believer, only the belief. It is clear to me that the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam are highly problematic, being both factually fallacious and ethically errant. My stance is that believers are genuinely misguided. I have nothing against believers, however. I oppose the beliefs, not the persons who are themselves the victims of those beliefs.

But Hirsi Ali has an agenda. It just happens to be one that I, and I am confident many of my fellow Nones, can agree with. She is a feminist who strongly opposes what many branches and sects of Islam do to women and girls. She believes that Christianity offers the best way out of these specific worldly troubles. And indeed, to a certain limited degree, it is possible she is correct. Euro-American Christianity today is, broadly speaking, far less misogynistic than either today’s Islam or yesterday’s Christianity. While some sub-Saharan and South American Christianity still remains stuck in the eighteenth century, the Islamic practices she challenges are positively biblical, so to speak. If her goal is to communicate an anti-misogynist message to the largest proportion of modern humans she possibly can, she will probably reach more as a feminist Christian than as an atheist. As she stated in her article regarding her conversion to Christianity:

[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in ‘the rules-based liberal international order.’ The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

I can’t help but wonder if in fact Hirsi Ali was ever truly an atheist in the first place.

Wrong and Bad

Hirsi Ali and I obviously have a very different view of the “legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” The position that many, including myself and (I dare say) the late Mr. Hitchens, wholeheartedly assert and avow, is that the Abrahamic religions of Islam and Christianity are, as a matter of fact, both wrong and bad. They are wrong in the sense that they represent pseudoscience dangerously misinterpreted as literal truth by millions. They are bad because they cause more problems than they cure in the big picture, in the long run, and promote a stunted moralism that is more obedience training than genuine moral good.

Ideally, her atheism should not have had anything to do with her fight against misogynistic practices. The fact that she felt compelled to rejoin religion to keep the focus on the important issue of women’s and girls’ rights is most unfortunate. In the end, though, only Hirsi Ali knows whether she made this choice to maximize her reach as a feminist activist or because she personally suffered from what most who re-convert, be it in foxholes or upon deathbeds, also suffer from—a childhood and lifetime of intense indoctrination in the Abrahamic religions.

To fully understand the re-conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then, three things should be taken into account. First, it is possible that she wisely calculated that conversion to Christianity, still the world’s largest religion, offered her the best possible opportunity to make inroads on behalf of feminism and women’s rights. Unfortunate, because she could have probably done her work and kept the focus off of her religious beliefs or lack thereof. The second point would be that she was heavily indoctrinated, deeply and fully, in the Abrahamic religious beliefs and practices. As such, she has perhaps returned to her comfort zone of consoling beliefs. As she stated, “I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable—indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” And yet, at the same time, she gets to keep up a good fight. A lifetime of hard-core indoctrination is extremely difficult to overcome. All the re-conversion of Hirsi Ali really tells us is that religious indoctrination is a very powerful thing.

But, we already knew that.

Ultimately, I think that Hirsi Ali is misguided. Atheism is true and right, and religions such as Christianity and Islam are both wrong and bad. So don’t look to us atheists as if her re-conversion somehow showed we were wrong all along. It shows nothing of the kind. It may show that atheists are not accorded the respect we should be, such that we cannot advocate for genuine, valid causes as successfully as we ought to be able to, because people tend to dismiss us outright and without reason. It illustrates the intense power of religious indoctrination and shows us just how seriously difficult it is to overcome.

I think that the real take-home message is that we should more seriously embrace atheism and freedom from religion. That she required submission to mother church and Christian dogma to find a sense of purpose and meaning does not mean that we require religion to have such things. She felt them missing precisely because religious propaganda had impressed upon her, fallaciously, that the two are inseparable. But my life, and the lives of the many atheists I know, have purpose and meaning. However, they are the result of reason, naturalistic knowledge, and science, not faith, submission to authority, dogma, or traditions that are literal millennia beyond their expiration date. Religion disempowers human beings and human civilization. It is through atheism and humanism that we Homo sapiens will be empowered, employing reason and knowledge to build a more just, peaceful, and sustainable human civilization here on this beautiful planet Earth, upon which we evolved into existence.

#Adam Neiblum #Ayaan Hirsi Ali #Christopher Hitchens #deathbed conversion #atheism #christianity #islam #abrahamism #abrahamic religions #religion is a mental illness

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stephreynaart · 3 years

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Gravity Falls - “Waiting”

Pop-Pop AU

Stan sits in a hospital waiting room, thinking about his life and the people he loves.

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This is kinda old, but I realized I never posted it on tumblr. Hope ya like it!

Lots of fluff, the only ships are Soos and Melody.

AO3 LINK

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It had a square aspect ratio. Ink pen and watercolor on white heat pressed cotton paper in a bland white frame. One single blue flower in a red vase with what looks like a yellowish shadow. One shadow going left, the other going right. The lack of confidence and inexperience was obvious, the lines were unfocused and jagged, the color plainly filled the shapes and gave no other visual interest to the image.

Below the frame was a small white card that read “Painting donated by Jessica Blaise from Gravity Falls Elementary School”

Stan scanned the painting at least 20 times while sitting in that chair. The too rough and too soft at the same time chair that had similar copies populating the almost white room he sat in. The wallpaper bouncing off light pinks and blues with tiny ducklings as a makeshift wainscoting was starting to irritate the old man. It was too bright, and the consistent buzz of the fluorescent lights seemed so loud. Stan adjusted himself in his chair, switching his crossed legs to a wider spread and leaned his head against the wall.

The only other stimulus in the room were a few posters promoting proper hand washing techniques, the play area with a small table and chairs with large blocks, crayons and that weird “game” with the metal wiring and wooden beads that’s in every waiting room Stan’s ever sat in. He played with the toys to give himself something to do after he read all the magazines. The novelty wore off fast.

The television mounted on the wall was airing some cooking channel with no sound and no subtitles. Looking at food when you haven’t eaten in a few hours was practically torture, so Stan had been averting his eyes.

There were other paintings on the wall, one was less of a painting, but instead a print of a painting. He doubted that the artist got any compensation from it, if they were still alive. The other was a charcoal drawing done by a student from the community college a town away. Another square, but the entire image was black, the brightest thing on the page was an intruding infant hand coming from the left with the arm fading into the dark background. The fingers seemingly mid-twitch and grabbing at something. The lighting was dynamic and interesting. Stan swore it was a drawing of a penis the first time he glanced at it, which resulted in his brother’s laughter. Stanley smiled at the memory, it was only a few hours ago, but he relishes any time he can make Stanford laugh.

Stan’s eyes darted at the door in the far corner when it opened suddenly. He eased back into his chair when the nurse crossed the room to talk with the receptionist. He couldn’t hear the conversation very well, but could tell they were just gossiping and making jokes. Nothing that was of his interest. So he looked back to the elementary school child’s painting and analyzed it again. His eyes were dry and he was tired. He wished he could sleep, the chair wasn’t comfortable enough and when he did managed to sleep, his neck was sore when he woke up. He was only lucky Ford let him use his shoulder as a pillow for a while. He looked to his left and noted the book his brother placed in the seat. It seemed thick and in what looked like Hebrew. Stan wasn’t very surprised Ford was fluent in the language they were acquainted with as children. Their grandparents on their father’s side were the last to be fully fluent in Hebrew. It was like his brother to be curious of their heritage, but Stan only remembered a few phrases and words he learned from holidays and special event when he had to recite anything in Temple.

Stan crossed his arms and glanced at the clock on the wall and let out an exasperated sigh. It had only been 10 minutes since he last checked the time. He wanted to be at home, be in his soft warm bed and getting ready to eat pancakes at this time in the morning.

He and Ford were on the porch of The Mystery Shack when Soos rushed them off to the hospital the yesterday afternoon. What he originally thought would be a couple of hours of waiting turned into almost twelve. Apparently labour can last a long time.

Stan wished he could be a witness for Soos and Melody like he was when Dipper and Mabel were born, but Melody wanted her privacy, which Stan could respect, but Soos wanted him there…..so he and Ford waited in this bright, annoyingly pastel waiting room, twiddling his thumbs awaiting the arrival of the new member of the mystery family. He was glad he was in at least comfortable clothes, some gray sweatpants and a sweater Mabel knitted for him that read “godfather”.

He was never clear on what the title entailed, but it was mentioned a few times by Soos’ grandmother and the kids insisted that Soos was intending to ask him. He hadn’t, but he didn’t protest Stan wearing the sweater. Whatever job godfathers had, he was willing to play the part if Soos were to ask him.

Stan looked at the double doors a few feet away that lead out of the waiting room and into the halls. His brother left to find something for them to eat, but was taking his sweet time. The turkey being basted on the television was no help in aiding his growling stomach.

He distracted himself by returning his thoughts to Soos and Melody. Just down the hall they were experiencing the strange and beautiful phenomenon that was witnessing the arrival of a brand new person. Stan remembered the feeling so clearly. His entire life he’s felt the presence of human beings. It’s inherent in most people to feel when someone is in the room with you, the other soul sharing the same space as you. Imagine being in a room with a set amount of people and someone else comes in, but imagine they came in without using a doorway. Just appearing seemingly out of thin air. Suddenly another person is with you, and they’re brand new to the world, a life full of potential and power. Yes, today is indeed a happy day, but no amount of positive thinking would ease Stan’s nerves. His foot began to bounce and his hands unconsciously began to fiddle with each other. He didn’t want to think anything would go wrong with Soos’ baby, but anything can happen and life is so fragile, especially at the start of it.

He recalled his nephew’s nervousness the day Dipper and Mabel were born. His hands were shaking and he was constantly checking on his wife and asking the doctors loads of questions. He didn’t fully understand the twins’ father’s behavior until the end of that day.

Mabel’s birth was swift and easy. Her mother only needed to push one and a half times before she was here. It was as if she was eager to meet everyone waiting for her. She cried like most babies do, but Stan could’ve sworn they were tears of joy. While Mabel was greeted with, “hello, beautiful”, “hi, sweetie” and “she’s perfect”, Her brother’s introduction to world started with, “what’s wrong?”, “wait, let me hold him”, and “he’s not moving”. Dipper was rushed out of the room before his mother got a chance to look at him. Stan managed to catch a glimpse of the horrifyingly blue tint on his great nephew’s tiny face. The memory still gave him chills. He remembered how much he wanted to hold Mabel, who began to fuss and cry, obviously missing her brother. He was terrified at the prospect of another incomplete set of twins in their family. After the longest 30 minute of his life, Stan’s great-nephew returned with a bright pink face, wailing with all the power his little lungs could produce. Once the twins were reunited in their mother’s arms, they settled down almost instantly. The doctors told their parents Dipper was significantly lighter in weight than his sister, but both were very strong and healthy. Every so often Stan thinks about Dipper and how much he has impacted his life. His thoughts lead to darker places and he questions if Ford would be here if Dipper wasn’t there to find the third journal. He shook his head as a cold shiver went up his spine.

Stan did his best to distract himself from revisiting the scare that Dipper caused him 16 years ago.

16 years…..17 in August

Stan blinked. The squishy, bright faces that stayed with him that first summer had changed significantly. They stayed in contact all year round and visited every summer since they were 12. But every in-person meeting was always a shock. Dipper was developing the square jaw Stan, both his brothers and nephew shared. He started to regularly wear glasses their second summer with the Stans. Poor kid will grow up looking like Filbrick like the rest of the Pines men. He reminded Stan of Ford at that age.

And Mabel…..

Stan will never get over how much she looks like his mother. It didn’t strike him until Soos and Melody’s wedding and she put her hair in a bun. She’s calmed her hyperactivity down a bit, but not by a lot, she still brightens his day with her wit and creativity. They’ve both matured physically, but not much has changed personality wise and they still acted like big children when they’re around each other. Stan loved them very much, and wished he could see them more often. He wondered what the future held for all of them. Would they still visit town after going to college? Would they move here? Or somewhere else?

He’s had several conversations with them to see how they’re managing the prospect of separating. They’re much better at communicating than he and Ford were and they seem actually excited to have some independence. It made Stan nervous, but he was sure their close relationship wouldn’t suffer.

Wendy chose to be elsewhere for the next few years. She and her friends booked a plane ticket and plan to backpack and hitchhike around Europe and the UK. Stan hopes they stay safe and watch out for each other. Lotta weirdos in Amsterdam. She was set to leave in the coming days, Wendy wanted to wait until today arrived so she could meet Soos and Melody’s kid before going away for who knows how long.

A tap on the shoulder woke Stan from his deep thoughts. His brother arrived with some warm sub sandwiches and coffee.

“Any word yet?, he asked Stan

“Nothin’ yet”, Stan felt helpless not having any clue how Soos and Melody were doing.

Stanford took his seat next to Stanley and they both silently enjoyed their late breakfast. Since arriving they’ve witnessed families reuniting and going past the door in the far corner to meet their children, grandchildren or siblings. Stan looked at the clock again. How has it only been another 5 minutes? He sighed, leaned back and finished the rest of his sub. One hand holding the sandwich, the other went back to gripping the arm rest, then a six fingered hand went down to rest on top of it. Stan let go of the armrest and tangled his fingers between Ford’s and held onto it with a, hopefully not too tight, grip. It was like an anchor to reality, much better at easing his anxieties than any words could. Over the past 4 years, Stan and Ford’s bond grew stronger. Stan still feared one day he would wake up and find himself still in that basement surrounded by broken machinery and languages he didn’t understand. He hasn’t yet, and was enjoying the time he had left with his twin. Stan took a moment to look at his brother again, Ford made eye contact and smiled then continued to read his book. Hands still intertwined

Stans thoughts went back to Soos…

It amazed Stan how much he had grown and it still baffled him that Soos idolized him as much as he does. Before Soos, Stan had no one. His brother was….gone, the rest of the family didn’t talk to him much outside of the holidays and special occasion. There hadn’t been any sense of consistency in Stan’s life for years, decades even, until he hired the chubby little kid he barely glanced at one random Saturday. Soos always arrived to work early, sometimes with breakfast for both of them. Stan didn’t know how much he needed a reliable companion until he had it and he enjoyed the 10 years he had with that kid… or man he should say. Here he was…a few rooms away, becoming a father.

Stan used to daydream a lot about the prospect of having kids when he was younger. He’s was always good with them when he had the chance to babysit his nephew, then later Dipper and Mabel when they were toddlers. He loved having kids in his house that first summer. He loved the energy and the sense of adventure the twins brought. They gave him a sense of purpose and belonging he hadn’t felt in years. He wished he was brave enough to have his own children. Not that he was ever with anyone long enough to want to have kids with him. He supposed it was for the best that he didn’t subject a child to homelessness or an unhappy marriage. He was also terrified at the idea. His dad used to say having kids ruined his life. He wondered who his father was before his older brother was born. Did they really ruin his life? Stan often wondered if he would be like his own dad if he has children of his own. Would he change and become that annoyed parent that resenting his children?

He thought about Soos again

That was probably the closest to parenthood he ever experienced. The first time he felt like one was when Soos asked him for homework help after closing. He initially told Soos no, he wasn’t exactly smart and didn’t think he would be any help. It apparently upset the kid, so Stan sighed and gave it a try. It was fairly simple middle school math, he didn’t remember everything, but helped Soos do more than half of it. Soos thanked him and went home happy. Stan felt weirdly proud, he was glad he made a small difference and managed to teach Soos something he didn’t even know he knew.

The second time was when Soos was a teenager. His grandmother wasn’t able to teach Soos to drive, since she had forgotten how and her late husband used to do the driving, she mostly walked everywhere. Soos offered to work for free so Stan could teach him. Stan loved driving and found teaching Soos cathartic. He was a fast and eager learner, he only bumped Stan’s car once while trying to figure out parallel parking. Little did Soos know that he was getting paid for his normal work hours. Stan just put it away long enough to help buy the kid some old used truck in the junkyard for getting his license. They fixed the truck up and in only a few weeks it was ready to be on the road. Soos has taken good care of it and it’s still his ride to this day

Stan was very proud of Soos. He taught the kid some basic self defense and managed to be a decent influence in his life. Soos at least has his priorities straight.

Stan was even glad to see that Soos was willing to question him. When the portal was reaching the final countdown, he didn’t hesitate to protect the kids from him when he thought Stan was dangerous. He didn’t know, none of them did, so he didn’t blame Soos for distrusting him. He hoped he never had to betray him again. They both had crappy dads, and Stan knew how Soos saw him. Stan was never really sure if he reciprocated those feelings. It felt natural to act the part, but to put a label as important as “dad” on Stan was daunting. Soos definitely deserves better than what he was given, Stan wasn’t sure if he was it.

Stan looked up at the familiar voices running towards him from the double doors.

“Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Ford!” Mabel waved to them

The two teenagers and Wendy walked in holding a balloon and various toys. They took some seats across from the Stans and asked how everyone was doing and if the baby arrived yet.

“Not yet, hopefully soon” Ford answered

Stan relaxed and silently enjoyed his family’s company. He laid his head back and leaned slightly on Ford to rest for a minute. His eyes shut as he listened to the kids joke around and talk amongst themselves. He squeezed Ford’s hand one more time before drifting off.

He knew he should’ve tried sleeping earlier, he wasn’t out for more than 15 minutes when Soos came into the waiting room. Stan’s eyes shot open and he was on his feet faster than he did when he was being chased by angry costumers as a door to door salesman. Soos’ red eyes sagged and he seemed exhausted, but carried a proud, wide smile across his face. He sniffed and wiped his eyes.

“It’s a boy”, he squeaked, “mom and baby are okay”

Dipper and Mabel were first to start the hugs, and the room filled with cheers of congratulations and love. Stan felt light as a feather giving Soos a hug and joking about child labor.

“Can we see him?”, Mabel bounced with anticipation

“Yeah, dudes!”, Soos gestured everyone past the corner door and into the suite. “But only for a little while, Melody has to sleep”

The room was small, dimly lit and warm. The Pines crew collectively lowered their voices as Melody came into view on the bedding holding a bundle of blankets decorated with small yellow ducklings. She was leaned back on a large pillow, covered in blankets and toted a soft smile on her face. Soos stroked her hair and picked up his little son to show to the Pines’. The younger twins got a look at him first,

Mabel squealed and cooed at the tiny infant. Then Wendy, who said hi to the baby and told Soos she’d make sure to send him gifts while she was away

“What’s his name?”, Mabel asked Melody

“I named him after my dad”, Melody replied, “Jacob”. She smiled sadly at the memory of the father she lost the year before.

Soos approached the Stans, Ford smiled and complimented the couple on a having such beautiful little boy, but shot Soos a look, who silently replied with another one. Something was up.

Finally Stan got a look at baby Jacob. “Wow” Stan smiled, patting Soos’ arm. “He looks exactly like you”

Soos laughed, “really? I think he looks like Melody”, there was a short silence before Soos spoke up again.

“Do you want to hold him, Mr Pines?”

Stan looked at Soos and smiled, “heh, sure”. He held his arms out. Soos lowered his arms to pass the baby to Stan, who scrunched his face up and started to fuss. Stan took the infant and managed to hold him with one arm. He bounced and shushed little Jacob until he calmed down. “Heya kid”, He’s held babies dozens of times, but something felt different about this one. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but Stan felt an almost magnetic pull towards him. Jacob settled comfortably against Stan and continued his rest. Stan softly beamed at the tiny person in his arms.

“Hey, Stan?”

Stan lifted an eyebrow and looked at Soos, who was fidgeting with his hands and nervously smiling.

“Uh..”, he paused, taking in the sight of Stan holding his child. “You know about my dad”, Soos looked at Ford again, who shrugged and nodded. Stan studied Ford’s face, who’s eyes strayed away as he hid a small smile. Soos got his attention again.

“You uh…he wasn’t…”, Soos choked up, his voice strained a bit, “I met you when I was probably the loneliest I ever was in my entire life”. Stan pictured the little boy he hired on the spot, he didn’t remember him until Soos showed up at his door step the next day ready to work. He didn’t know how much that quick, thoughtless decision would change his life.

Soos perked up and walked across the room to a table and picked up the piece of paper sitting on it. Soos glanced at it, then at Stan and smiled, gaining some emotional strength it seemed.

“You mean a lot me”, Soos, “you were there when I really needed it, you gave me a job, taught me just about everything I know. I don’t think I ever thanked you for that”

Stan got a bit nervous, Was this him asking to be the godfather?Everyone was silent and curiously watching. Soos held his hand out and handed the paper to Stan. He adjusted his arm to properly hold Jacob in his arm and took it. Stan flipped the page and noticed it was the baby’s birth certificate. Stan eyes bounced off the page and read the various information: birthdate, weight, parents, but he froze when he read the full name. Stan’s wide eyes questioningly studied Soos’ face.

“Are you…”, Stan felt his own throat tightening, crap. Come on, not in front of everyone “really?”, he asked. Soos gave a genuine nod and sniffed.

“I uh” Soos cleared his throat, “I was wondering, since Jacob doesn’t have one…if you wanted to be…. his grandpa?

There it was

Stan felt dizzy and took a small step back before remembering who was in his hands and regained his balance. Ford came to his side and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. Stan decide not to look at his brother and chose to stare forward, then his eyes went back to Soos, who look deflated. Oh man. Stan was terrified, he didn’t want to say no and hurt Soos, but if he said yes….he wasn’t sure what made him so nervous. The entire concept sounded so alien to him, like he didn’t deserve the title. He always considered Soos, Melody and their son a part of his family. But to bare a title like “grandpa”, had to mean he had children that that children. That he was already a parent without his knowledge. It all felt so natural to want to lean into this and become part of this family like Soos wanted.

He heard something make a noise from beneath himself. Stan looked down at little Jacob, who was mid yawn. The baby’s mouth grew wide opens and inhaled, scrunching up his face and suddenly shut. Suddenly two tiny eyes opened for just a few seconds, enough time for Stan to make eye contact before Jacob shut them and got comfortable again

Everything was different now.

Stan didn’t notice how quiet the room had gotten nor the tears forming in his eyes. Stunned by beauty and overcome with pride and a sense of purpose. The pride he felt teaching Soos math, how to drive and attending his graduation all combined just looking at the perfect being in his arms. If he said yes, he would want everything that came with it. Stan lifted the birth certificate up to read the name again.

Jacob Stanley Ramirez

“Y-Yes”, he heard a shaken voice say, almost not realizing it was his own “of course”. He looked at Soos, tears in his eyes and a bright smile on his face. He still wasn’t sure if he deserved this, but Stan wanted it. He wanted it all. Why not indulge just this once? He gave the certificate to Ford and used his now free hand to pull Soos into a hug. Gently sandwiching his…..grandson in between him……and his son.

#gravity falls #gravity falls fan fiction #stanley pines #stanford pines #soos ramirez #melody #mabel pines #dipper pines #wendy corduroy #pop pop au #poppop!stan #dad!soos #dad!stan

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eirichele · 4 years

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a VERY in depth look at fire emblem: three houses and its grooming problem

OR: how this game managed to make an accurate portrayal of grooming and exactly how it made it palatable

(warning: really long. though to be fair, the length is mostly screenshots. you can also read this in google docs)

***

SO i’ve been wanting to write something Formal and In Depth for a while, because this game’s reception has been a nightmare for me and other csa victims and quarantine hit, so i finally had time. i just really wanted to get all my thoughts in one place before i move on from 3h. i’m basically done talking about this after this one because... idk what else i could say that hasn’t been said here, really. fe has history with this, and the in-game excuses ring hollow when we know the fe devs disregard csa victims at every turn while pandering to male gamers who love sexualised teenage girls.

long, long analysis under the cut:

Some previous context: Fire Emblem games have a history of normalising harmful romances

It’s understandable for many to not know the history of the series since 3H was insanely successful and it brought a lot of new fans. Fire Emblem has always been a character driven game where making your units bond was encouraged both for gameplay and story reasons. Some end in special romantic epilogues, and some of those relationships were concerning to say the least: Sylvia, 14 years old, can marry every eligible man in Genealogy of the Holy War, Jill from Radiant Dawn, 18, can marry her father’s protegé who is 34. This is not a new phenomenon for the series, it just became more noticeable and malicious post-Awakening, because it became first person fanservice.

FE decided to rehaul the series sometime in 2011 by including dating sim elements, which made it explode in popularity. Avatars were introduced to represent the player in-game, allowing them to marry whoever they wanted. The first game to include a pseudo-dating sim was Awakening, released in 2012. The player can marry every named playable character, on top of the usual FE shipping mechanics . Donnel, Nowi and Ricken, all children, are part of your party. Nowi is a thousand year old dragon that looks like a child of 11-15. She loves playing, and throws tantrums, and overall acts very childishly, but the narrative insists that she’s really an adult feigning childishness.

In Fire Emblem lore, dragons are veeeery slow ageing people with the power to transform into dragons, which means they can be biologically still children even when they’re hundreds or thousands of years old. Tiki, another similar character, is considered a child in Shadow Dragon by her adult dragon family while explicitly being around Nowi’s age. Despite evidence to the contrary, Awakening treats Nowi like an adult who can marry. Fire Emblem had previously included many dragon child characters in the past, but none were romantic options for anyone, and they were considered a younger sibling of sorts. Nowi was a first in the series, and after her inclusion these romances became common with characters like Nyx in Fates and Flayn and Sothis in Three Houses. Worth noting is her design, which is incredibly sexualised. A (not so) fun fact is that the outfit designer of Awakening and Fates was none other than Three Houses’ future director, Toshiyuki Kusakihara:

Ricken and Donnel are just regular 13-15 year old boys. No magic. Other adult characters and your avatar just marry them, and it’s stated they will have children in the future. The next game, Fates, actually managed to outdo this somehow: Your pedophilic romance options are now five, and unlike Awakening’s avatar Robin, whose age was unknown and could potentially be portrayed in their mid-teens, Corrin canonically is in the 18-21 age range, making this unambiguous pedophilia. Fates is a very standout game when it comes to Fire Emblem’s worst parts: There’s no “children from the future” excuse for the avatar having children like in Awakening. The avatar impregnates all spouses (or gets pregnant) and has the child after an in-game time skip, which means you can canonically impregnate your approximately 15 year old sister in a Fire Emblem game. You really do not want to stan these devs.

pictured: definitely not 18, even if the english localization really tried to pull that.

Which is yet another thing in this game: Incest with adopted siblings is possible and even encouraged. Incest is constantly fetishized through the character of Camilla, who is an attractive and sexualized older sister obsessed with the main character. Another (not so) fun fact is that most characters will continue to call you ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ in the story even if you’re married because Fire Emblem rarely changes the story to fit with your marriage options. The most insidious thing about the incest and pedophilic couples in Fates is that they’re completely normalized. It’s not shown as abusive, and they look like normal couples that could even look cute out of context. They confess their love, tease each other, blush and have cutesy epilogues.

pictured: marrying your sibling and a literal child

All of this is to end with the conclusion that this is a constant pattern with Fire Emblem, especially the ones with marriage. Any potentially awful relationships portrayed are not outwardly abusive. You won’t catch Xander gaslighting Corrin, or anything. They’re a “cute” relationship that just happens to be incest. Their interactions are not outwardly unhealthy, and it’s tailor made for ‘’’harmless’’’ shipping, but in the end, it’s incest and pedophilia portrayed as a valid pairing that’s “healthy” by all means. It’s normalization of something that’s objectively horrifying to live through. As a CSA victim, Fates literally made me quit the franchise for all the years it was popular.

When Three Houses announced that it would take place in a school while you play a teacher, after seeing all of this play out all FE fans could feel was dread. When 3H announced even later that all romance would take place post-time skip everyone forgot about their reservations instantly— ignoring the fact that everyone being over 18 when marriage happens doesn’t absolve all potential problems with predatory writing. How you write a couple with an age gap is critical. Moving on with Actual Three Houses:

Byleth has a canon age unlike Corrin and Robin, but the game tries to hide it

Corrin and Robin were both avatars meant to be somewhat customized. Byleth cannot be customized. They have a set appearance and age. You can choose Byleth’s name, gender and birthday when you start up the game, but Byleth canonically cannot be born anywhere after September 20th 1159, their “canon” birthday, since their father states in his diary that they’re already alive. 3H starts in the year 1180, which makes Byleth 20 or already 21 depending on their chosen birthday.

All other Three Houses characters have their ages shown clearly in their unit menu, and all bios update accordingly when you learn new information, including yours. Byleth’s age is revealed in a cutscene, but despite this, the game tries to “hide” their age. This is all Byleth has in their bio even well into the endgame:

It’s presumably so the player can “headcanon” their age, as the player avatar, but they still have a canon age, because they’re not a customizable one. It’s a very odd design choice that makes no sense until you consider that the game is romantically pushing teenagers at you. Romanceable students range from 14 to 22 years old before the time skip, but the great majority are in the 15-18 range. Early on, when you introduce yourself to your students, they seem taken aback by how young you are and comment how you seem like you’re “their age.” This is your only dialogue option in response:

No sixteen year old has ever told a twenty/-one year old that they’re the same age, but this is anime high school dating sim logic. An addendum is that this game has incredibly shallow dialogue options to hide how linear it really is, and this is the first glaring instance. This comes up later on with the romance options—you have little to no options to reject a student’s advances. Boundaries as both a player and RPG protagonist are non-existent in this game.

pictured: “yes” and “sure why not” dialogue options to agreeing to meet with a student alone. linhardt just turned 17 last month

Byleth can flirt pre-time skip

Most of your units are students, thus all romance should in theory, stay in the war phase…. Which doesn’t happen at all. All the narrative framing of characters’ “closeness” and foreshadowing of romance are definitely a part of the school phase. The worst offender by far is an in-game event called the Goddess Tower, the school’s local romantic spot. It’s said in universe that a man and a woman who make a vow there on a specific night will stay together forever, and this is a prelude to the marriage scenes five years later, which will take place in that Tower. You can even pick who to bring with you to the Tower, and this is what Byleth says to themselves before the drop down menu shows up:

this is one of those lines that’s like semi-innocuous, since byleth is addressing the player here, but what the fuck is a teacher doing thinking about a student “that way”???? my girl doesn’t know there will be a 5 year time skip where they’re going to be legal she’s just saying this about a bunch of sixteen year olds.

The Goddess Tower itself is a mess of bungled flirting and unnatural romantic scenes, made all the worse by the fact that you can only trigger this scene with a student. Older characters like Seteth, Catherine and Shamir are locked out of the Goddess Tower. They can’t be picked from the menu, and if they’re your highest support, the game will default to the next highest supported student. Here’s some lines from Ingrid’s scene:

ingrid is 17 when this takes place. the youngest byleth possible is well over 21 and the oldest is turning 22 next month

Check out this post for more examples of the Goddess Tower. Byleth’s dialogue options here are right out of a god damn PSA about child safety. They genuinely come off as a huge creep here, especially “Just the two of us….” My dude.

Thankfully one of the few instances where you can turn the student down, but notable anyway. Dorothea’s C support, where you have the option of following her flirty lead, and her response will be the same regardless of your choice:

Another infamous bit of inappropriate flirting is Edelgard’s Japanese C1 support, which you’re likely to unlock before her 18th birthday in June because it’s her very first support:

This was thankfully removed in the English version (Though she still has the same flustered reaction), but the intentions are there. Curiously, I’ve seen many supporters of the Byleth/Edelgard ship say they were upset this was removed, while simultaneously denying the ship has any grooming connotations whatsoever— when an authority figure making ha ha, unless? 😳 sexual jokes in front of underage/barely legal kids to see their reaction is textbook grooming:

Once a trusting or special relationship is created, the offender may carefully test the victim’s reaction to sex. (x)

Not helping is the fact that Edelgard falling in love with Byleth during the school phase is practically canon judging by dialogue in CF of her missing you “more” than the others. Which leads to:

Some interactions pre-time skip resemble grooming tactics

In fans’ minds the lack of boundaries are somewhat mitigated by Byleth’s supposed good intentions, and it’s common to hear fans say Byleth obviously didn’t go to Garreg Mach intending to marry one of the kids they’re teaching because grooming must be malicious from the start. However, it’s well known that unlike premeditated abuse of younger kids, sexual abuse of older teens often happens by “accident”

In contrast, educators who teach at the late middle and high school level target victims in this age range. They might be outstanding teachers, although they may also be mediocre (Shakeshaft, 2003). Sexual abuse at this level may be less premeditated and planned and more often a result of bad judgment (Shakeshaft, 2004). (x)

In other words, by putting zero boundaries between teacher and students and enabling weird situations, which is 3H to a T. Many students flirt, but Byleth doesn’t say anything, or even flirts back.

Secondly, Byleth is like… barely a character, so this isn’t meant to be a callout post accusing them of being a manipulative abuser or whatever, because this is about the dev team putting teenagers in these flirty positions to satisfy the player that Byleth is meant to represent. Byleth is just the plot device they use to do so. People often say this flirting isn’t grooming because Byleth has “good intentions,” but they’re a self-insert, and a self-insert doesn’t have to have any in-universe intentions because the outside writing drives their actions— the thing is we KNOW these writers are not above writing pedophilia as harmless romance. People project good intentions on Byleth, because that’s the avatar. You’re supposed to project on them. This of course includes their “good intentions,” and when I play 3H I headcanon that too, but canonically speaking, these intentions are 100% ambiguous. They never voice attraction to another student, or disgust at the thought of dating them because they speak in small, limited dialogue options and thought bubbles. We don’t have a real, canon indication that they would oppose dating a student before the time skip nor that they would actually do it.

What we do have are the canonical interactions that make people uncomfortable, however. Byleth can think of students in “that way” when the Gatekeeper describes a romantic getaway on the Goddess Tower. If we take them at face value, then their dialogue options clearly establish that they’re okay with flirting with students as young as fifteen, at the very least. They “die” before potentially starting to date any of them for real, but the beginnings of an uncomfortable romance are there and the game fully embraces this as okay .

This is all a result of the writing. Fates never condemned you for picking your sister over any of the other thirty (?) romanceable characters, just like Three Houses doesn’t condemn you for picking Lysithea over any older women in the teaching staff. It’s just another S support option, and it even gets some sweet extra content. She’s touched that you care for her, and you do everything in your power to take care of her frail health, and you guys get happily married. No one ever mentions that you were her high school teacher when she was fifteen and you met at said high school, and she was your favourite student— and this is, you know, something of an important detail in any relationship. Just like Fates, it’s sweet and shippable out of context, which just encourages normalization. How dare you say this is unhealthy? It’s tender! Look how much he loves her!

The thing is that 3H initially presents your students as your charges in school. You’re unambiguously in charge of them as both tactician and instructor, even if you treat each other in a familiar way. Even if most students technically outrank you as nobles, Garreg Mach as politically neutral ground implicitly puts you above them as their teacher. The younger ones are vulnerable teenagers, away from home in a boarding school. Most have some sort of underlying emotional problem that they come to you for. They come to you for advice, and sometimes just venting. You can give them gifts, and have tea every week with them if you so wish in an off-screen conversation. Tea also serves as the “skinship” of this game where you get to see the anime boy/girl of your dreams from up-close, which is a pretty creepy thing to do with a fifteen year old anime girl even out of universe, but I digress.

Looking at this chart in the essay I linked earlier gave me a little bit of a stroke, because the “Strategies” aspects are all things you do in 3H prior to the time-skip:

This is obviously accidental, but still concerning because we know these devs have a twisted idea of what romance is, and that culminated in what I sincerely hope is an unintended but still eerily accurate portrayal of grooming.

Emotional confidence, teatime and gifts, flirting, making a vow together at the Goddess Tower, sex jokes, are all things you do pre-timeskip, and some student’s personal arcs make this even worse. Marianne, Dimitri and Bernadetta have mental illnesses, and they heavily rely on you for support. Edelgard and Sylvain express attraction towards you. You meet Felix’s father and he puts his full trust in you. Ignatz, Bernadetta and Marianne have very low self-esteem. Characters like Ashe and Annette have major parental issues that they discuss with you. In short, you see them at their most vulnerable as kids, and then get together as adults.

About the only thing you don’t do pre-time skip in that list is “Isolate,” but some character arcs post time skip have this distinct vibe nonetheless. Many students leave their homes in the war phase explicitly because of you and no other reason. CF Ingrid in particular outright betrays Faerghus and everything she knew for you, as she says she doesn’t really believe in Edelgard’s war. Knowing you as a teacher can string her along in her Goddess Tower scene while she’s underage puts this in an awkward perspective.

This is what makes the five year time skip hold little weight. Everyone is an adult when the relationship is consummated, yes, but it starts pre-time skip.

Emotionally vulnerable teenagers having a strong relationship and frequent alone time with their older teacher, who is a confidant and someone that makes them feel special is already looking bad, but the absolute loyalty, idolisation and close relationship when they’re adults only makes it worse, even if it’s probably just a result of poorly thought out game design and player pandering gone wrong.

It’s not just player pandering, however. The devs just clearly think these relationships are okay. Other non-Byleth student/teacher romances deserve a mention, too—Manuela is forty something and thinks of her romantic potential with some 19 year-old:

Thankfully, this support ends at B, but others don’t. She has romantic endings with Lorenz, Ferdinand and Dorothea, who she even canonically met before Garreg Mach as a child and who idolises her as an opera star. The game doesn’t stop at the normalisation of grooming with Byleth, they’re just the most noticeable example, especially since it’s a power fantasy for the player who can romance all of them, not just a few.

The time skip had the opportunity to fix some of the creepy implications, but it didn’t

People like to look at the time-skip as a justification of romance. That 15 year old kid is 20 now, after all, and your students are adults, who have matured and grown outside of your influence.... Except your interactions with them remain virtually the same. They still call you Professor and hold you in some extremely high esteem as an authority figure.

Three Houses has an avatar worship problem like all newer Fire Emblem games and this definitely contributes to the uncomfortable implications in the narrative, because literally everyone respects you and adores you to an uncomfortable degree. Even as grown ass adults, the avatar worship just makes it seem like your students still idolize you like when they were kids awe struck by how cool you are.

They don’t show the change from “mentor” to “peer” satisfactorily, like they intended for the romance elements to work. Byleth’s name is customizable, making a first name basis difficult, but they easily could have changed your war phase title to something that would make it seem like your students’ view of you changed, like a military title such as Commander, or even just Eisner, your canonical last name. All students still call you “Professor,” in the war phase, though. Some students even call you Professor when you’re about to propose to them in the S support, like Lysithea. Leonie, one of the oldest students who is actually your age, has this to say about calling you by your name… you know, like a normal peer and friend would:

White Clouds is also a whole year while VW, AM, and SS take place during six to seven months, CF during five. You spend more time as their teacher and mentor than as “peers,” so Leonie’s position is pretty understandable despite being like, barely a year younger than you.

To rewind, this game lets you pick a “special” student pre-time skip, who you’re encouraged to build bonds with through tea, gifts and the Goddess Tower. You’re their favourite teacher, as said by many other characters. They grow up and join you in your war regardless of who they have to fight, some even just to be with you. They still affectionately call you Professor, and look up to you. You can then marry them. This is unironically seen as both acceptable and even romantic.

Many of these interactions like tea are gameplay elements and thus come off as the devs not thinking too hard about it. Except, again, we know they have no problem in writing outright pedophilia, but Fates in particular had heavy backlash over this, which explains the need to tone it down a little. Grooming was their “compromise” between not turning off the casual audience while still cheekily pandering to that crowd. Everyone is technically over eighteen in Three Houses, even if they act extremely similar to their teenage selves. The “technically 1000 year old” romances like Flayn and Sothis were also left intact.

This is an important distinction, because a bit of a popular “it’s not grooming” argument when dealing with the war phase is Byleth’s weird dragon powers slowing their aging. Unlike the kids, all adult non-students in Three Houses undergo no portrait changes during the time skip, including Byleth. The thing is that in Chapter 10, they receive dragon powers as part of some plot nonsense, so it has different implications than just anime hating everyone over 25. There’s implications in the game that this definitely affected their ability to age normally, such as the Flayn ending:

However, we don’t know how their aging was affected and to what extent. Three Houses’ lore didn’t specify much about the way dragons age. Rhea undergoes dragon madness, so we can thus tentatively assume Fódlan’s dragons are similar to Archanea and Valentia’s dragons, which would mean there’s a chance Byleth even aged normally for a few years before slowing down significantly like Nah from Awakening did. It’s entirely possible they’re biologically 25-26 like they’re meant to be, because they didn’t physically die. They were just asleep.

Even if they really did not age a day over 21/22, it still makes the pre-time skip hold weight, however. Byleth can flirt with them as teens prior to any fantastical excuse, and they’re still a mentor figure in the students’ eyes, which goes on to colour every interaction with you in the war phase. Post-time skip everyone is legal, but they still have that history with you, and the game makes no real effort to change that whatsoever. It still fulfills the student/teacher fantasy despite the many, many technicalities it tries to pull out of its ass.

Intsys is self aware and knows that this upsets people

To say these devs probably didn’t mean it that way is not entirely impossible, but they don’t exactly inspire confidence. They even “acknowledge” their flippant way of treating teacher/student relationships in a DLC quest during school phase:

Of course, this is a silly complaint because a teacher being friendly with students is a good thing! Students learn better in a positive environment! The problem here is that it’s obviously referencing and mocking the people upset that this becomes romantic later on. I think anyone would have been able to forgive the overly friendly nature of Byleth and the students’ relationships if no line had been crossed regarding romance. This is Fire Emblem after all, and it wouldn’t be Fire Emblem without supports and relationships values.

But also, Intsys is very good at jokingly acknowledging when they’re being creepy rather than striving to do better. It’s not the first time they’ve done this. A really bold faced example is when the Fire Emblem mobile game widely known for fanservice released a ten year old child (no magic or dragons, either, just a child) dressed as a bride and had her say: “This outfit is just for the [bride] festival, don’t get any weird ideas!” when they were the ones who made a child bride for fanservice purposes.

this one was pretty fucked up even by their standards. comment sums it up

The devs also once called Camilla from Fates a “cow” in an interview for having huge breasts and a little tiara that looks like horns. They designed her that way, but then mocked her for looking like an oversexualized caricature. Any way you look at it, they’re well aware they’re being off-putting and cheekily being like, tee hee, I sure made a dating sim set in a high school! Which ultimately leads to the final point:

Though canon definitely has its problems, it’s less about canon and more about the devs’ bad intentions and the fans’ general lack of empathy for CSA victims:

This is not to diminish canon’s impact at all, because it’s outright malicious to portray an unhealthy relationship as cute and harmless. In short, they just pull technicality after technicality out of their ass to make student/teacher okay somehow instead of just..... not having student/teacher at all. After Fates having fucking incest, 3H and teacher grooming seems outright tame and that definitely contributed to the wide acceptance in the fanbase, because it’s less outrageously pandery. I can’t believe I have to say this in 2020, but…... that’s still not good, lads.

I will also admit there’s some nuance here regarding some of the students, especially those 20+ year olds who aren’t easy to manipulate teenagers like Mercedes. We can sit here and argue all day about whether or not this game legitimately 100% can be considered grooming because of those 20+ students, and all of those in-universe technicalities since there’s no real life academic journal on grooming who will talk about the offender being a dragon, but the end of the matter is that the devs chose to portray their pseudo-dating sim franchise in a school, while your MC is a teacher and most of the students are teens. These relationships are also 100% normalised and okay in-game. They did it with incest and with teacher/student, both topics that are majorly upsetting to CSA victims, and that alone is worth calling out. They even mocked people who were upset about it with a little DLC quest, just to rub it in.

This whole post was a critique of 3H and Intsys, but it’s impossible to critique the game without critiquing the fan culture around it, because the devs definitely had a fanbase in mind. We know they take feedback, since they toned it down after complaints about Fates, but the reason why they didn’t just get rid of pandering aspects, is because they’re popular. There’s a huge demand for this, and that’s exactly why they keep doing it, and it’s the simple reason that online anime spaces full of adults have always placed a particular interest in teens and sexualising and shipping them. A Fire Emblem game set in a school with a calendar and a lot of romantic and social elements that started development in 2017 just screams Persona 5 inspired. Fans obviously noticed.

”edelgard is soooo thirsty” jokes are a lot less funny if you know going for the thirsty kid is a legit strategy

Now, I don’t know shit about Atlus, and after seeing all these memes regarding Persona 5 and the fans’ positive reaction to them, I have zero intentions to play it, but I’ve unfortunately played every single FE game and watched the transition to classic FE to 3DS FE to 3H. I have my criticisms about modern FE’s writing quality for sure, and while I obviously can’t say it used to be perfect because it was still a fairly mediocre (but fun) game about teenagers beating up dragons, it’s now become one of the single most unfriendly fanbases if you’ve gone through any kind of sexual trauma. Incest shipping, pedophilic shipping, and sexualizing teenagers was always there to some extent, but it’s blown up now that the devs have emboldened those fans by doing it in canon itself. It’s rampant, especially on “waifu” circles, and now grooming ships are mainstream and everywhere. Even LGBT friendly “safe spaces” are unbrowsable. F!Edeleth in particular is commonly seen as the holy grail of wlw representation. Linhardt is the most popular M/M option despite the other two being adults. Doromanuela was given a shout-out by Dorothea’s English voice actress.

Old FE games had background things like that all the time, (Roy/Cecilia is Literally gender swapped Petra/Byleth) but the keyword here is background. Not like... 80% of the ships involving the MC in game, which means you weren’t bombarded with this every day. Worse, the discussion about this topic has been non-existent. Reddit has not touched this at all despite the community there being well known for meticulous criticism, Twitter and Tumblr have seen its fair share of discourse, but it’s quickly dismissed. Just click here to watch people dismiss the concerns of every single grooming and CSA victim, or even call them stupid like we can’t recognize this shit in every single fandom. Of note are the fans who dismiss grooming concerns by saying all flirting occurs post time skip (which is false, as we just said) and the characters are only 3-6 years apart anyway……………….. and then gleefully consume/produce pre-time skip content:

miscellaneous tags on a pre-time skip linleth comic (20/21/22 and 16/17 if you’re not keeping count) not posting the comic itself cause i don’t want anon hate lol

While there’s an argument to be made for romance with anyone who was 20+ pre-time skip, there is NONE for the underage kids. None. And like, even if you somehow still want to argue that 3H itself isn’t grooming because of the time skip, a huge chunk of the fanworks objectively are, and this is a huge problem that needs to be called out and nobody does so whatsoever. That comic has 2500+ notes.

This isn’t even a call to tell people to throw out their copies and riot, just to be aware of this and try to make fan spaces a little more bearable for CSA victims. A lot of people call this ‘toxic cancel culture’ and whatnot, but I personally can’t defend a dev team who I KNOW has done heinous things in the past, and continue to support the pedophilic mentality in online anime fan spaces but like, in a cheeky subtle way. They easily could have made Byleth a student who tutors the others because of their experienced mercenary background with Jeralt, or just not let them romance the kids at all. They could have pleased both the dating sim and high school camps by letting you choose to be either a 21+ teacher or a 17 year old student with the appropriate romance options, too. They didn’t do any of this, and their questionable past begs me to ask why, and none of the answers I can come up with are very encouraging. They also even blatantly gave you extra content when romancing students.

I hope contextualizing the 3H grooming at least makes some people understand why it’s so upsetting to see it everywhere. It’s just the decent thing to do to tag your posts, and to not dismiss any of these things. It’s just the decent thing to do to listen to people who are sharing their experiences and respecting their boundaries if they simply do not want to interact with you if you decide to continue supporting Intsys.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. Stan Claude von Riegan.

#t #fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #fe3h #grooming mention #csa ment

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simp-for-mha-men · 4 years

Text

𝕔𝕠𝕗𝕗𝕖𝕖 𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕔𝕦𝕖 (𝕤𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕒 𝕒𝕚𝕫𝕒𝕨𝕒 𝕩 𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣)

A/N: Back at it again with my favorite teacher! This one’s pretty cute, at least to me. I was drinking my coffee this morning and had this pop into my head. I wrote more than I expected, but it is so freaking cute. Enjoy it!

Genre: teacher x teacher fluff with Aizawa, caffeine, and a friend 💞

Word count: 1.5k

♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥

Mondays always started off wrong for Aizawa. Nothing ever went right. The coffee machine was usually broken almost every time, due to Present Mic somehow forgetting to work one over the weekend. This was the reason that Aizawa hated Mondays.

Class 1-A figured out that Mondays with their homeroom teacher were mostly spent in quiet solitude or with a minimal lecture. Tenya Iida, the speedy class president, never spoke a word unless he was asked a question. Katsuki Bakugou, the explosive Pomeranian, was bone-chillingly silent. None of the other students made any sudden movements that would disrupt their teacher. This was the way it was supposed to be.

However, one of Aizawa’s colleagues was always prepared. (y/n) (l/n) was a true phenomenon to him. Every Monday a new coffee beverage was in their hands. One morning in October, he could smell pumpkin and nutmeg coming from their tumbler. Sometime in June, before summer vacation, he could smell caramel and cinnamon. Each Monday, a new drink was to be introduced.

Although this Monday was just like every other Monday, Eraserhead felt that something was off. The weather was normal for this time of year. He didn’t forget anything in the dorm. What could it be? As soon as you walked through the door, his question was answered.

You came in with no coffee tumbler in your hand, dark circles under your eyes, and bandages on your forearms. In short, you looked like you had spent all night trying to quell a fight in an abandoned alley. It shook the erasure hero to his core.

In all of his years of knowing you, he had never once seen you in a such a state. It broke his heart. You were always so put together, but today, you had it worse than rough. He needed to do something to help you out.

“Shouta, I need help” you said, shocking him that you would use his first name. You usually only went by last names for the sake of being “formal.”

“What is it, (l/n)?”

“Come outside with me, please.”

When Aizawa heard it as a plea rather than a question, he sprung up out of his chair and followed you down the hall.

It was still pretty early. The sun had just started rising about 10 minutes prior so no students would be out and about yet. What could’ve happened that made you need to talk to him? Did you apprehend a spy on the U.A. grounds? Could you have trapped a villain? What did you do?

“I know this seems a little bit strange,” you said, interrupting his thoughts, “but you’re the only one I can turn to for this kind of thing.”

Now he was really confused. You two aren’t close. Sure, you always said hello to each other in the mornings and waved as you passed in the halls, but you never saw each other outside of work. He thought you were a masterpiece. The way you carried yourself with such ferocity while holding kind eyes captivated him. You deserved to be in prison for being too gorgeous. It’s true.

“Did something happen to you, (l/n)?” he questioned.

“First,” you began, turning to face him, “call me (y/n), please. We’ve known each other for so long that you can also address me by my first name, Shouta. Second, nothing bad happened to me. Something happened to an innocent victim.”

You held out your right arm to Aizawa, nodding your head as a signal that he could unwrap the bandages. When he did, he was met with at least 20 little cuts that had bled pretty badly. They were all very tiny, so a knife couldn’t have done it. Actually, no weapon was small enough to make these cuts.

“The victim went into a mode of self-protection when I tried to help it,” you explained simply.

It? Why would you call a person it? Was the person so far gone mentally that they didn’t even deserve pronouns? What could’ve happened? You were always so careful on your missions. This must’ve been a dire situation.

You both continued walking until you made it to the front gate. You walked over to a bush and picked up a large, cardboard box. Placing it in front of your coworker, you knelt on the floor behind it.

“You’re the expert,” you stated. “I...I don’t know what to do for it.”

“(y/n), why would you--”

“Open the box, Shouta. You’ll get it.”

With trepidation filling his core, Aizawa reached for the box and slowly opened it. Once he saw the contents, he let out a gasp of shock. There, wrapped tightly in a lilac blanket, was a sleeping black cat. He noticed the cat was missing spots of hair on its head and ears, probably due to stress or a condition. It shook a bit in its sleep from a nightmare.

After staring at it for a little longer, Aizawa came to the conclusion that the cat was abandoned. You rescued a cat. However, it didn’t seem to appreciate your help at first. That’s why you had so many “battle scars.” It clawed you until it realized you were a friend.

“Did you give it any food?” Aizawa asked, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” you nodded, slowly standing up. “I picked some up from a convenience store not too far from here.”

“Did you check its gender?”

“No. It kept clawing me and wouldn’t let me see its stomach.”

“Did you properly treat your wounds?”

“I--”

You began to speak but immediately shut your mouth. Shouta Aizawa, the man you had been quietly observing for years, was indirectly asking you if you were alright. You felt your heart skip a beat. You’ve always thought he was hot, but never have you thought about pursuing a relationship with him. What would the other staff members think? Wouldn’t it be considered unproffessional?

“(y/n)?” he inquired again, louder this time.

“I-I didn’t. I was s-so worried about the poor thing that I didn’t think a-about my own h-health.”

You felt the rain start to wet your face. Wait, it shouldn’t be raining. You then realized you were crying. It was pathetic of you, but that was how your body reacted.

“(y/n),” Aizawa began softly, “did you even sleep last night?”

Slowly shaking your head, you began to sob. Before you knew what you were doing, you flung yourself into a safe haven: Aizawa’s arms.

He took a sharp breath in. He never realized that behind your strong facade, you were extremely fragile. He instinctively wrapped his arms around you, and you nuzzled your face into his neck. Sinking down to the ground, he began to realize something. It felt comforting. It felt warm. It felt....like destiny.

During your crying session in Aizawa’s arms, you both failed to realize your furry friend was yawning and waking up. It crawled out of the blanket carefully and slid into your lap. Nuzzling its face into Aizawa’s leg, the rescue fell asleep once again.

You both looked down in affection. Your eyes were soft, and you giggled at how easily it fell asleep again. Aizawa showed a soft smile before glancing over to see your expression. You were a gift to him. He had to take advantage of that.

“Hey,” you said, poking him.

“What?”

“Female. Kohii.”

Aizawa tilted his head, letting a smirk grace his features. “What?”

“It’s a female cat, and I’m naming her Kohii.”

“You’re naming her coffee?”

You nodded your head, sadness leaving you. “Yep! It reminds me of you.”

When Aizawa’s expression changed, you realized what you had just said. Slapping your hand over your mouth, you looked away from him quickly.

Instead of getting angry, he let out a chuckle and picked up your new friend. “Since you got to name her, you owe me something.”

You quickly snapped out of your trance, trying to ignore the blush on your face. Rolling your eyes, you replied, “Obviously. We’re going to take care of her together. Nezu will grant us permission, I’m assuming.”

Aizawa nodded his head. “Of course he will. However, I need something else.”

“Oh, come on!” you sighed. “What is it? Money? Want me to grade your class? What could you possibly want from me?”

“Coffee.”

His simple response shocked you. He wanted....coffee?

“What kind?” you questioned, cocking your head to the side.

“The kind that lets me drink it with you.”

Now, you knew your face was red. You quickly turned away, missing the mischievous glint in his eyes and smile. Scoffing, you tugged on his scarf. He fell completely backwards, eliciting a belly laugh from you. It was music to his ears.

“When?” you questioned, finally glancing at him.

“Now.” he responded.

“Sure.”

All three of you were smiling. Yes, all three. Kohii couldn’t exactly express it, but she was on the inside. You could tell. It was as if you three were the perfect family.

Standing up, you offered your hand to him. He gladly accepted it and picked up Kohii after gaining his balance. You all headed off campus, and everyone was happy.

“You know,” you began, “we should prank Yamada next week.”

“Rig the coffee machine before he breaks it?” he asked.

“Oh yeah.”

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mixelation · 3 years

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this is related to the ask you got the other day but i was wondering if you have any thoughts on why a lot of people dislike self insert fic so much? i can understand disliking the y/n ones that can be kind of clunky to read, but there are so many amazing and well written fic with fully fleshed out ocs/self inserts that people will completely shit on just because it's a oc and not a canon character and i don't understand it at all.

Ah, yes. This is also an interesting question.

So, I think the first thing to note is that the popularity of SIs in fanfiction is actually relatively new. Like, the idea of writing an OC based on yourself into a story has obviously been around for as long as people have been telling stories, but at least when I started reading/writing fic in the early 2000s, it was seen more as a cringe-y niche thing for hyper teenaged fangirls. There was a lot of general anxiety from writers/readers about OCs being “Mary Sues,” which was basically the worst possible thing you could do as a fic writer.

The turning point in is the popularity of SIs I think happened during the period I was I sort of checked out of fanfiction, so I can’t claim to have bared witness to it. But as far as I can tell, most people point at Dreaming of Sunshine in the Naruto fandom as the source. I haven’t read DoS but it is very well beloved, and is the oldest fic I can think of that uses “reincarnation into canon” as the method of self-insertion. I think this new method is what really drew in a lot of skeptics. Before, if you wanted to write a ninja!SI, the usual method was “fall into a plothole” and then end up in the Naruto world.... and then usually readers would be nitpicky about your real-world teenager/young adult character being able to physically keep up with ninja, or any canon characters being invested enough to want to train them. (Plasticity is actually, in part, me trying to write one of these fics completely straight.)

Reincarnation, though.... this fixes so many problems people had before! You can just give your SI a sharingan, if they’re born an Uchiha. Of course your favorite character loves your SI, if they’re a blood relative they grew up with!

I think it also helped that fandom as a whole was getting bored with the idea of a “Mary Sue.” A lot of the popular SI fics I can think of were written by adult (adult as is 18+ -- I know tumblr sometimes conceptualizes 20 year olds as children for some reason) fans who probably had their phases as 14 year old fans who wanted “cringey” SI fics, except now they were old enough to not care about “cringe” and also even better writers who could do their ideas justice.

So that’s my unified theory of why SIs became popular. Basically, some writers went “fuck cringe, this is fun,” and then generated some high-quality fics that got popular because SIs are fun. So why do some people still shit on them? Many reasons!

One is just misogyny. SIs are mostly female, and some fans are annoyed by the types of stories female fans generally want to write about. Some people still buy into the idea that Mary Sues are the root of all evil, and any female OC is a Mary Sue.

Another is just backlash against popular fandom trends. A lot of SIs draw ideas from each other or have overlapping themes for various reasons, and I’ve seen a lot of complaints about things like “SIs get too upset about canon-typical violence” or “I don’t like that SIs win the respect/friendship of canon characters so easily.” There’s also the phenomenon where, if one doesn’t particularly like a thing, but no one around them will shut up about the thing, then there’s much stronger backlash than is really warranted. I am VERY guilty of this for some fandom trends.

My final reason is that there is this general feeling of.... well, why should I care about a non-canon character? I think this is totally valid-- usually people go into fandom because they want to see more of the characters they like, so OCs can be a hard sell. There are some fandoms where I don’t want to read OCs at all for this reason. However, I don’t really like how hypercritical some fans can get.* Fans are quicker to criticize OCs for being too powerful or too weak; for having a “shitty personality” or being too bland; for changing too much of canon or not changing enough; for not conforming to some arbitrary standard of “realism.” Fans also do this annoying thing where they think an SI should somehow be their SI, not the writer’s, and get annoyed when the SI makes choices they wouldn’t make.

So that’s my take on the topic. Hope it made sense!

*If you ever get me in a private chat, I’m actually one of those hyper critical people.... but I’m not going to call out a specific writer in public. Especially not in the comment section of their own fic!

#Anonymous

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thefakejeffreyazoff · 3 years

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‘He’s our Satan’: Mega music manager Irving Azoff, still feared, still fighting

(x)PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. —

This is not Irving Azoff’s house. Irving and his wife Shelli own houses all over, from Beverly Hills to Cabo San Lucas, but right now in the last week of October it’s too cold at the ranch in Idaho and too hot at the spread in La Quinta, so he’s renting this place — a modest midcentury six-bedroom that sold for $5 million back in 2016.

From the front door you can see all the way out, to where Arrowhead Point juts like the tail of a comma into the calm afternoon waters of Carmel Bay. More importantly, the house is literally across the street from the Pebble Beach Golf Links, where Azoff likes to play with his college buddy John Baruck, who started out in the music business around the same time Azoff did, in the late ’60s, and just retired after managing Journey through 20 years and two or three lead singers, depending how you count.

(Via LA Times)

Azoff is 72, and this weekend he’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau. Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham are already in, but Azoff and Landau are the first living managers thus honored. Azoff is not only alive — he’s still managing. As a partner in Full Stop Management — alongside Jeffrey Azoff, his oldest son and the third of his four children — he steers the careers of clients like the Eagles, Steely Dan, Bon Jovi and comedian Chelsea Handler, and consults when needed on the business of Harry Styles, Lizzo, John Mayer, Roddy Ricch, Anderson .Paak and Maroon 5. Azoff has Zoom calls at 7, 8 and 9 tomorrow morning, and only after that will he squeeze in a round.

The work never stops when you view the job the way Azoff does, as falling somewhere between consigliere and concierge. “My calls can be everything from ‘My knee buckled, I need a doctor’ to ‘My kid’s in jail,’” Azoff says. “I mean, you have no idea. The ‘My kid’s in jail’ one was a funny one, because the artist then said to me, ‘Y’know, I’ve thought about this. Maybe we should leave him there for a while.’”

Golf entered Azoff’s life the way a lot of things have — via the Eagles, whom Azoff has managed since the early ’70s. Specifically, Azoff took up golf in the company of the late Glenn Frey, the jockiest Eagle, the one the other Eagles used to call “Sportacus.” By the time the Eagles returned to the road in the ’90s they’d left their debauched ’70s lifestyles largely behind, but Azoff and Frey got hooked on the little white ball.

“Frey would insist on booking the tour around where he wanted to play golf,” Azoff says. “We made Henley crazy. Henley would call me in my room and he’d go, ‘Why the f— are we in a hotel in Hilton Head North Carolina and starting a tour in Charlotte? Is this a f— golf tour?’”

Trailed by Larry Solters, the Eagles’ preternaturally dour minister of information, Azoff makes his way down the hill from the house for dinner at the golf club’s restaurant. He’s only 5 feet, 3 inches, a diminutive Sydney Pollack in jeans and a zip-up sweater. In photos from the ’70s — when he was considerably less professorial in comportment, a hipster exec with a spring-loaded middle finger — he sports a beard and a helmet of curly hair and mischievous eyes behind his shades, and looks a little like a Muppet who might scream at Kermit over Dr. Teeth’s appearance fee.

His father was a pharmacist and his mother was a bookkeeper. He grew up in Danville, Ill., booked his first shows in high school to pay for college, dropped out of college to run a small Midwestern concert-booking empire and manage local acts such as folk singer Dan Fogelberg and heartland rock band REO Speedwagon. Los Angeles soon beckoned. He met the Eagles while working for David Geffen and Elliot Roberts’ management company and followed the band out the door when they left the Geffen fold; they became the cornerstone of his empire. “I got my swagger from Glenn Frey and Don Henley,” he says. “No doubt about it.”

Azoff never took to pot or coke. The Eagles lived life in the fast lane; he was the designated driver. “Artists,” he once observed, “like knowing the guy flying the plane is sober.” This didn’t stop him from trashing his share of hotel rooms, frequently with guitarist Joe Walsh — whose solo career Azoff shepherded before Walsh joined the Eagles, and who was very much not sober at this time — as an accomplice.

“This was a different age,” Walsh says of his time as the band’s premier lodging-deconstructionist. “We could do anything we wanted, so we did. And Irving’s role was to keep us out of prison, basically.” He recalls a pleasant evening in Chicago in the company of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, which culminated in Walsh laying waste to a suite at the Astor Towers hotel that turned out to be the owner’s private apartment. “We had to check out with a lawyer and a construction foreman,” Walsh remembers. “But Irving took care of it. Without Irving, I’d still be in Chicago.”

Azoff became even more infamous for the pit bull brio he brought to business negotiations on behalf of the Eagles and others, including Stevie Nicks and Boz Scaggs. He didn’t seem to care if people liked him, and his artists loved him for that. Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker said they’d hired Azoff because he “impressed us with his taste for the jugular … and his bizarre spirit.” Jimmy Buffett’s wife grabbed him outside a show at Madison Square Garden, pushed him into the back of a limo and said, You have to manage Jimmy, although Buffett already had a manager at the time.

His outsized reputation as an advocate not just willing but eager to scorch earth on behalf of his clients became an advertisement for his services, a phenomenon that continues to this day. In August 2018, Azoff’s then-client Travis Scott released “Astroworld,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, and occupied that slot again the following week, causing Nicki Minaj’s album “Queen” to debut at No. 2. On her Beats One show “Queen Radio,” Minaj accused Scott of gaming Billboard’s chart methodology to keep her out of the top slot and singled his manager out by name: “C—sucker of the Day award,” she said, “goes to Irving Azoff.” Azoff says he reacted as only Azoff would: “I said, ‘I’m really unhappy about that. I want to be c—sucker of the year.’” In 2019, Minaj hired Azoff as her new manager.

Most of the best things anyone’s ever said about Azoff are statements a man of less-bizarre spirit would take as an insult. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Eagles in 1998, Don Henley stood onstage and said of Azoff, “He may be Satan, but he’s our Satan.”

An N95-masked Azoff takes a seat on a patio with a view of hallowed ground — the first hole of the Pebble Beach course, a dogleg-right par 4 with a priceless view of the bay. He cheerfully admits that he and his partners at Full Stop are “obviously, as a management business, kind of losing our ass” this year due to COVID-19. In another reality, the Eagles would have played Wembley Stadium in August before heading off to Australia or the Far East. Styles would have just finished 34 dates in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. As it stands Azoff is hearing encouraging things about treatments and vaccines and new testing machines, and is reasonably confident that technology will soon make it possible for certified-COVID-free fans to again enjoy carefree evenings of live music together; he doesn’t expect much to happen in the meantime.

“What are you gonna do,” Azoff says, “take an act that used to sell 15,000 seats and tell them to play to 4,000 in the [same] arena? The vibe would be horrible, and production costs will stay the same.”

He knows of at least six companies trying to monetize new concert-esque experiences — pay-per-view shows from houses and soundstages, drive-in events and so on. But he’s not convinced anybody wants to sit in their parked car to watch a band play. More to the point, he’s not convinced it’s rock ’n’ roll.

“Fallon and Kimmel, all these virtual performances — people are sick of that,” he says. “Your production values from home aren’t that good. And they’re destroying the mystique. I mean, Justin Bieber jumping around on ‘Saturday Night Live’ the other night without a band, and then he had Chance the Rapper come out? It made him look to me, mortal. I didn’t feel any magic. So we’ve kinda been turning that stuff down to just wait it out.”

In the meantime, he says, Full Stop is picking up new clients during the pandemic. Artists with time on their hands, he believes, “have taken a hard look at their careers— so we’ve grown. No revenues,” he adds with a chuckle, “but people are saying, ‘We need you, we need to plan our lives.’”

“IN HIGH SCHOOL,” Jeffrey Azoff says, “I wanted to be a professional golfer, which has obviously eluded me.” He never expected to take up his father’s profession. “But my dad has always loved his job so much. There’s no way that doesn’t rub off on you.”

The younger Azoff got his first industry job at 21, as a “glorified intern” working for Maroon 5’s then-manager Jordan Feldstein. After a week of filing and fetching coffee, he called his father and complained that he was bored. According to Jeffrey, Irving responded, “Listen carefully, because I’m going to say this one time. You have a phone and you have my last name. If you can’t figure it out, you’re not my son.”

“Direct quote,” Jeffrey says. “It’s one of my favorite things he’s ever said to me. And it’s the spirit of the music business, by the way. There are no rules to this. Just figure it out.”

Over dinner I keep asking Irving how he got the temerity, as a kid barely out of college, to plunge into the shark-infested waters of the ‘70s record industry in Los Angeles. He just shrugs.

“I never felt the music business was that competitive,” he says. “It’s just not that f—ing hard. I don’t think there’s that many smart people in our business.”

It’s been written, I say, that once you landed in California and sized up the competition, you called John Baruck back in Illinois and said —

“We can take this town,” Azoff says, finishing the sentence. “Where’d you get that? John told that story to [Apple senior vice president] Eddy Cue on the golf course three days ago. It’s true. I called John up and said, ‘OK, get your ass out here. We can take this town.’”

In the ensuing years, Azoff has occupied nearly every high-level position the music industry has to offer, surfing waves of industry consolidation. He’s been the president of a major label, MCA; the CEO of Ticketmaster; and executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, the behemoth formed from Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation. In 2013 he and Cablevision Systems Corp. CEO and New York Knicks owner James Dolan formed a partnership, Azoff MSG Entertainment; Azoff ran the Forum in Inglewood for Dolan after MSG purchased it in 2012.

Earlier this year Dolan sold the Forum for $400 million to former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who’s since announced plans to build a new stadium on a site just one mile away. Despite the apocalyptic parking scenario that looms for the area — two stadiums and a concert arena on a one-mile stretch of South Prairie Boulevard — Azoff is confident that the Forum will live on as a live-music venue. “People are going, ‘They’re going to tear it down’ — they’re not going to tear it down,” Azoff says. “It’s going to be in great hands. I have many of the artists we represent booked in the Forum, waiting for the restart based on COVID.”

The holdings of the Azoff Co. — formed when Dolan sold his interest in Azoff MSG back to Azoff two years ago — include Full Stop, the performance-rights organization Global Music Rights and the Oak View Group, which is developing arenas in Seattle and Belmont, N.Y., and a 15,000-seat venue on the University of Texas campus in Austin. Azoff describes himself as increasingly focused on “diversification, and building assets for the family that aren’t just dependent on commissions, shall we say.”

But as both a manager and a co-founder of a lobbying group, the Music Artists Coalition, he’s also devoting more time and energy to a broad range of artists’-rights issues, from health insurance to royalty rates to copyright reversion to this year’s Assembly Bill 5, which threatened musicians’ independent-contractor status until it was amended in September. (“That was us,” Azoff says, somewhat grandly. “I got to the governor, the governor signed it — Newsom was great on it.”) He describes his advocacy for artists — even those he doesn’t manage — as a “war on all fronts,” and estimates there are 21 major issues on which “we’ve sort of appointed ourselves as guardians.”

He does not continue to manage artists because he needs the money, he says. (As the singer-songwriter and Azoff client J.D. Souther famously put it, “Irving’s 15% of everybody turned out to be more than everyone’s 85% of themselves.”) Everything he’s doing now — building clout through the Azoff Co., even accepting the Hall of Fame honor — is ultimately about positioning himself to better fight these fights. “I’d rather work on [these things] than anything else,” he says. “But if I didn’t have the power base in the management business, I couldn’t be effective.”

The recorded music industry, having fully transitioned to a digital-first business, is once again making money hand over fist, he points out, but even less of that money is trickling down to artists. That imbalance long predates Big Tech’s involvement in the field, but the failure of music-driven tech companies to properly compensate musicians is clearly the largest burr under Azoff’s saddle.

“These people, when they start out — whether it’s Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, whatever — they resist paying for music until you go beat the f— out of them. And then of course, none of them pay fair market value and they get away with it. Your company’s worth $30 billion and you can’t spend 20 grand for a song that becomes a phenomenon on your channel? Even when they pay, artists don’t get enough. Writers don’t get enough. Music, as a commodity, is more important than it’s ever been, and more unfairly monetized for the creators. And that’s what creates an opportunity for people like me.”

AZOFF’S FIRM NO longer handles Travis Scott, by the way. “Travis is unmanageable,” Azoff says, nonchalantly and without rancor. “We’re involved in his touring as an advisor to Live Nation, but he’s calling his own shots these days.”

I ask if, in the age of the viral hit and the bedroom producer, he finds himself running into more artists who assume they don’t need a manager. Ehh, Azoff says, like it’s always been that way. “There’s a lot of headstrong artists,” he says. “I haven’t seen one that’s better off without a manager than with,” he says, and laughs a little Dennis the Menace laugh.

We’re back at the house. Azoff takes a seat on the living-room couch; Larry Solters sits across from him, his back to the sea. Azoff recalls another big client. Declines to name him. Says he was never happy, even after Azoff and his people got him everything on his wish list. “He hit me with a couple bad emails. Just really disrespectful s—. I sent him an email back that said, ‘Lucky for me, you need me more than I need you. Goodbye.’”

He will confirm having resigned the accounts of noted divas Mariah Carey and Axl Rose. Reports that he once attempted to manage Kanye West have been greatly exaggerated, he says, although they’ve spoken about business. “Robert [Kardashian] was a good friend of mine. The kids all went to school together,” Azoff says. “What I always said to Kanye was, you’re unmanageable, but we can give you advice.

“A lot of people could have made a dynasty on the people we used to manage,” Azoff says, “let alone the ones we kept.”

But he still works with many artists who joined him in the ’70s — with Henley, with Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and with Joe Walsh. Walsh has been sober for more than 25 years; it was Azoff, along with Henley and Frey, who talked him into rehab before the Eagles’ 1994 reunion tour. “Irving never passed judgment on me,” Walsh says. “And from that meeting on, he made sure I had what I needed to stay sober.” If he hadn’t, Walsh says, there’s no chance we’d be having this conversation. “All the guys I ran with are dead. Keith Moon’s dead. John Entwistle’s dead. Everybody’s dead, and I’m here. That’s profound to me.”

The first client Azoff lost was Minnie Riperton — in 1979, to breast cancer when she was only 31. Then Warren Zevon, to cancer, in 2003. Fogelberg, to cancer, four years later.

“And then Glenn,” says Azoff, referring to the Eagles co-founder who died in 2016. “I miss Glenn a lot. And now Eddie.”

Van Halen, that is. I ask Azoff if he can tell me a story that sums up what kind of guy Eddie Van Halen was; he tells me a beautiful one, then says he’d prefer not to see it in print. It makes perfect Azoffian sense — profane trash talk on the record, tenderness on background.

I ask if he’s been moved to contemplate his own mortality, as his boomer-aged clients approach an actuarial event horizon. Of course the answer turns out to involve keeping pace with an Eagle.

“Henley and I are having a race,” he says. “Neither one of us has given in. Neither one of us is going to retire.”

Henley was born in July 1947; Azoff came along that December. Does Don plan to keep going, I ask, until the wheels fall off?

“I don’t know,” Azoff says.

Do you ever talk about it?

“Yeah! He’ll call me up and he’ll go, ‘I really feel s— today.’ And I say, ‘Well, you should, Grandpa. You’re an old man. You ready to throw in the towel? Nope? OK.’”

Azoff says, “I contend that what keeps us all young is staying in the business. I’ve had more people tell me, ‘My father, he quit working, and then his health started failing,’ and all that. Every single — I mean, every single rock star I know is basically doing it to try and stay young. And I think it works. I really think it works.

“I have this friend,” Azoff says. “Calls me once a week, he’s sending me tapes, it’s his next big record. Paul Anka! He’s 80 years old. OK? And my other friend, Frankie Valli …”

“Do you know how old Frankie Valli is?” Solters says. “Eighty-six. And he still performs.”

“Not during COVID,” Azoff says. “I told the motherf—, ‘You’re not going out.’”

#jeffrey azoff #la times #11.05.20

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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The massacres at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area this week, leaving eight human beings dead, others injured, and their families scarred, were horrifying. Read this deeply moving story about the son of one of the women killed to remind yourself of this. It’s brutal. The grief will spread and resonate some more.

But this story has also been deeply instructive about our national discourse and the state of the American mainstream and elite media. This story’s coverage is proof, it seems to me, that American journalists have officially abandoned the habit of attempting any kind of “objectivity” in reporting these stories. We are now in the enlightened social justice world of “moral clarity” and “narrative-shaping.”

…

We should not take the killer’s confession as definitive, of course. But we can probe it — and indeed, his story is backed up by acquaintances and friends and family. The New York Times originally ran one piece reporting this out. The Washington Post also followed up, with one piece citing contemporaneous evidence of the man’s “religious mania” and sexual compulsion. It appears that the man frequented at least two of the spas he attacked. He chose the spas, his ex roommates said, because he thought they were safer than other ways to get easy sex. Just this morning, the NYT ran a second piece which confirms that the killer had indeed been in rehab for sexual impulses, was a religious fanatic, and his next target was going to be “a business tied to the pornography industry.”

We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.

And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.

…

And on and on. It was almost as if they had a pre-existing script to read, whatever the facts of the case! Nikole Hannah-Jones, the most powerful journalist at the New York Times, took to Twitter in the early morning of March 17 to pronounce: “Last night’s shooting and the appalling rise in anti-Asian violence stem from a sick society where nationalism has been stoked and normalized.” Ibram Kendi tweeted: “Locking arms with Asian Americans facing this lethal wave of anti-Asian terror. Their struggle is my struggle. Our struggle is against racism and White Supremacist domestic terror.”

When the cops reported the killer’s actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany: “The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy, misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this ‘explication’ from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is also a willful erasure.”

In The Root, the real reason for the murders was detailed: “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.”

Trevor Noah insisted that the killer’s confession was self-evidently false: “You killed six Asian people. Specifically, you went there. Your murders speak louder than your words. What makes it even more painful is that we saw it coming. We see these things happening. People have been warning, people in the Asian communities have been tweeting, they’ve been saying, ‘Please help us. We’re getting punched in the street. We’re getting slurs written on our doors.’” Noah knew the killer’s motive more surely than the killer himself.

None of them mentioned that he killed two white people as well — a weird thing for a white supremacist to do — and injured a Latino. None pointed out that the connection between the spas was that the killer had visited them. None explained why, if he were associating Asian people with Covid19, he would nonetheless expose himself to the virus by having sex with them, or regard these spas as “safer” than other ways to have quick sex.

They didn’t because, in their worldview, they didn’t need to. What you see here is social justice ideology insisting, as Dean Baquet temporarily explained, that intent doesn’t matter. What matters is impact. The individual killer is in some ways irrelevant. His intentions are not material. He is merely a vehicle for the structural oppressive forces critical theorists believe in. And this “story” is what the media elites decided to concentrate on: the thing that, so far as we know, didn’t happen.

…

But notice how CRT operates. The only evidence it needs it already has. Check out the identity of the victim or victims, check out the identity of the culprit, and it’s all you need to know. If the victims are white, they don’t really count. Everything in America is driven by white supremacist hate of some sort or other. You can jam any fact, any phenomenon, into this rubric in order to explain it.

The only complexity the CRT crowd will admit is multiple, “intersectional” forms of oppression: so this case is about misogyny and white supremacy. The one thing they cannot see are unique individual human beings, driven by a vast range of human emotions, committing crimes with distinctive psychological profiles, from a variety of motives, including prejudices, but far, far more complicated than that.

There’s a reason for this shift. Treating the individual as unique, granting him or her rights, defending the presumption of innocence, relying on provable, objective evidence: these core liberal principles are precisely what critical theory aims to deconstruct. And the elite media is in the vanguard of this war on liberalism.

…

The more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that can be directed toward them. The National Crime Victimization Survey notes that “the rate of violent crime committed against Asians increased from 8.2 to 16.2 per 1000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018.” Hate crimes? “Hate crime incidents against Asian Americans had an annual rate of increase of approximately 12% from 2012 to 2014. Although there was a temporary decrease from 2014 to 2015, anti-Asian bias crimes had increased again from 2015 to 2018.”

Asians are different from other groups in this respect. “Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics). … Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers … are less likely to be offended in their residence … and are more likely to be targeted at school/college.” Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.

But what about hate crimes specifically? In general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes in the US are African-Americans. At 13 percent of the population, African Americans commit 23.9 percent of hate crimes. But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and Covid? Solid numbers are not yet available for 2020, which is the year that matters here. There’s data, from 1994 to 2014, that finds little racial skew among those committing anti-Asian hate crimes. Hostility comes from every other community pretty equally.

The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white offenders.

…

The media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it appears to be where all elite media is headed.

#andrew sullivan #substack #journalism in action

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Fire Season Comes Early To California (CNN) Fire weather is coming early to California this year. For the first time since 2014, parts of Northern California are seeing a May “red flag” fire warning due to dry and windy conditions. The warning coverage area extends from Redding in the north to Modesto in the south, and includes portions of the Central Valley and the state capital of Sacramento. The warning also extends to the eastern edges of the Bay Area. A brush fire that started Friday in Pacific Palisades flared up Saturday due to gusty winds, burning more than 1,300 acres and threatening homes in Topanga Canyon. Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains is about 20 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The Palisades fire caused about 1,000 people to be evacuated from their homes early Sunday, with other residents on standby to leave.

Pandemic Refugees at the Border (NYT) The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters. But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees. They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible. According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year. At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.

The U.S. conversation on Israel is changing, no matter Biden’s stance (Washington Post) In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed pulling the spotlight away from Hamas’s provocations to the deeper reality of life for millions of Palestinians living under blockade and occupation. He pointed to the havoc unleashed in recent weeks by rampaging mobs of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem, as well as the questionable Israeli legal attempts to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of a neighborhood in the contested holy city. “None of this excuses the attacks by Hamas, which were an attempt to exploit the unrest in Jerusalem, or the failures of the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, which recently postponed long-overdue elections,” Sanders wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control.” In another era, Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues. But he is not alone. A number of Democratic lawmakers, including solidly pro-Israel politicians, issued statements indicating their displeasure with the casualties caused by Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Others were more vocal, accusing Israel of “apartheid.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) tweeted: “This is happening with the support of the United States....the US vetoed the UN call for a ceasefire. If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a center-left pro-Israel advocacy organization that increasingly reflects the mainstream position of American liberals, said in a briefing with reporters last week that the “diplomatic blank check to the state of Israel” given out by successive U.S. administrations has meant that “Israel has no incentive to end occupation and find a solution to the conflict.”

Mexico City is sinking (Wired) When Darío Solano‐Rojas moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’” Different, it turned out, in a bad way. Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking—big time. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. And because some parts are slumping dramatically and others aren’t, the infrastructure that spans the two zones is sinking in some areas but staying at the same elevation in others. And that threatens to break roads, metro networks, and sewer systems. “Subsistence by itself may not be a terrible issue,” says Cabral-Cano. “But it's the difference in this subsistence velocity that really puts all civil structures under different stresses.”

Today’s the day: British holidaymakers return to Portugal as travel ban ends (Reuters) Sun-hungry British visitors descended on Portuguese beaches once again on Monday as a four-month long ban on travel between the two countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic ended, in a much-needed boost for the struggling tourism sector. Twenty-two flights from Britain are due to land in Portugal on Monday, with most heading to the southern Algarve region, famous for its beaches and golf courses but nearly deserted as the pandemic kept tourists away. Visitors from Britain must present evidence of a negative coronavirus test taken 72 hours before boarding their flights to Portugal and there is no need to quarantine for COVID-19 when returning home. Back at home, most British people will be free once again to hug, albeit cautiously, drink a pint in their pub, sit down to an indoor meal or visit the cinema after the ending of a series of lockdowns that imposed the strictest ever restrictions in peacetime.

Afghans who helped the US now fear being left behind (AP) He served as an interpreter alongside U.S. soldiers on hundreds of patrols and dozens of firefights in eastern Afghanistan, earning a glowing letter of recommendation from an American platoon commander and a medal of commendation. Still, Ayazudin Hilal was turned down when he applied for one of the scarce special visas that would allow him to relocate to the U.S. with his family. Now, as American and NATO forces prepare to leave the country, he and thousands of others who aided the war effort fear they will be left stranded, facing the prospect of Taliban reprisals. “We are not safe,” the 41-year-old father of six said of Afghan civilians who worked for the U.S. or NATO. “The Taliban is calling us and telling us, ‘Your stepbrother is leaving the country soon, and we will kill all of you guys.’” At least 300 interpreters have been killed in Afghanistan since 2016, and the Taliban have made it clear they will continue to be targeted, said Matt Zeller, a co-founder of No One Left Behind, an organization that advocates on their behalf. He also served in the country as an Army officer. “The Taliban considers them to be literally enemies of Islam,” said Zeller, now a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. “There’s no mercy for them.”

A Desperate India Falls Prey to Covid Scammers (NYT) Within the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, few treasures are more coveted than an empty oxygen canister. India’s hospitals desperately need the metal cylinders to store and transport the lifesaving gas as patients across the country gasp for breath. So a local charity reacted with outrage when one supplier more than doubled the price, to nearly $200 each. The charity called the police, who discovered what could be one of the most brazen, dangerous scams in a country awash with coronavirus-related fraud and black-market profiteering. The police say the supplier—a business called Varsha Engineering, essentially a scrapyard—had been repainting fire extinguishers and selling them as oxygen canisters. The consequences could be deadly: The less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode if filled with high-pressure oxygen. A coronavirus second wave has devastated India’s medical system. Hospitals are full. Drugs, vaccines, oxygen and other supplies are running out. Pandemic profiteers are filling the gap. In many cases, the sellers prey on the desperation and grief of families.

Full-blown boycott pushed for Beijing Olympics (AP) Groups alleging human-rights abuses against minorities in China are calling for a full-blown boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a move likely to ratchet up pressure on the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and sports federations. A coalition representing Uyghurs, Tibetans, residents of Hong Kong and others issued a statement Monday calling for the boycott, eschewing lesser measures that had been floated like “diplomatic boycotts” and further negotiations with the IOC or China. “The time for talking with the IOC is over,” Lhadon Tethong of the Tibet Action Institute said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “This cannot be games as usual or business as usual; not for the IOC and not for the international community.” The push for a boycott comes a day before a joint hearing in the U.S. Congress focusing on the Beijing Olympics and China’s human-rights record, and just days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes.

Grief Mounts as Efforts to Ease Israel-Hamas Fight Falter (NYT) Diplomats and international leaders were unable Sunday to mediate a cease-fire in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to continue the fight and the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on a joint response to the worsening bloodshed. The diplomatic wrangling occurred after the fighting, the most intense seen in Gaza and Israel for seven years, entered its deadliest phase yet. At least 42 Palestinians were killed early Sunday morning in an airstrike on several apartments in Gaza City, Palestinian officials said, the conflict’s most lethal episode so far. The number of people in killed in Gaza rose to 197 over the seven days of the conflict, according to Palestinian officials, while the number of Israeli residents killed by Palestinian militants climbed to 11, including one soldier, the Israeli government said.

Israel, Hamas trade fire in Gaza as war rages on (AP) Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes on what it said were militant targets in Gaza, leveling a six-story building, and militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Tuesday. Palestinians across the region observed a general strike as the war, now in its second week, showed no signs of abating. The strikes toppled a building that housed libraries and educational centers belonging to the Islamic University. Residents sifted through the rubble, searching for their belongings.

Israel’s aftermath (Foreign Policy) In Israel, the aftermath of days of violence in mixed Arab-Israeli towns has led to a one-sided reaction from state prosecutors: Of the 116 indictments served so far against those arrested last week, all have been against Arab-Israeli citizens, Haaretz reports. Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, whose centrist Yesh Atid party’s chances of forming a coalition government has crumbled since the violence broke out, placed the blame on Netanyahu. If he was in charge, Lapid said on Sunday, no one would have to question “why the fire always breaks out precisely when it’s most convenient for the prime minister.”

Long working hours can be a killer, WHO study shows (Reuters) Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend that may accelerate further due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Monday. In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. “Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health. The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. It also showed that people living in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region were the most affected.

#headlines #news

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

For months now, President Trump has carefully planted the seed that he might not leave the office of the presidency willingly if he loses.

Whether it’s tweeting that the election should be delayed as it “will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history” or that there will be widespread voter fraud because of the expected uptick in mail ballots due to the coronavirus, Trump seems intent on undermining the electoral process.

This, in turn, raises a rather thorny and unprecedented question: What happens if Trump won’t go? The answer is bleak. Experts tell me that the president actually has a lot of power at his discretion to contest the election, and some of the scenarios that could bring us to the edge of a crisis are actually very plausible.

Consider this one: It’s late on Election Day, and hundreds of thousands of votes in key battleground states still have to be counted due to the increased use of mail and absentee voting because of the pandemic. As a result, media outlets have largely avoided calling the race, but based on the votes that have been counted, Trump leads in enough states to reach at least 270 electoral votes, which would be enough to win the election if his election-night lead holds. Trump claims victory, but because Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, Joe Biden eventually pulls ahead because of the Democratic lean of the remaining votes — a phenomenon known as the “blue shift.”

That’s just one of the many scenarios the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan collection of over 100 experts, explored this summer while researching how a possible election crisis could unfold.

Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School who co-founded the Transition Integrity Project, told me she and her colleagues weren’t interested in predicting the likelihood of any one scenario they looked at, but more so in understanding the range of possibilities. Ultimately, they don’t know to what extent this year’s election result will be contested — would Trump deploy federal agents from the Department of Justice to secure vote counting sites or would he just take to Twitter to bemoan the results? — but Brooks told me they do think the election will be contested at least on some level. So the question they’re asking is: How much?

One big takeaway from the Transition Integrity Project’s simulations was just how much power Trump has at his disposal should he choose to contest the election. “You have just a tremendous differential between the president of the United States of America, who has just awesome coercive powers at his disposal, and a challenger who really has no power whatsoever in our system,” said Brooks. “Joe Biden can call a press conference; Donald Trump could call on the 82nd Airborne.”

This, of course, would be a doomsday scenario, and one reason why so much of this is hard to fathom. A cornerstone of American elections has been the peaceful transition of power, but as research from the Transition Integrity Project and others underscores, there are multiple ways to contest an election. And it’s not limited to just Trump either. It’s very possible were Trump to win in the Electoral College, where he has an advantage, but lose the popular vote to Biden, that Democrats would dismiss the election as unfair.

We, of course, do not have to look too far back in our electoral history to know that Americans have survived a disputed election before — see the 2000 presidential race. But experts I talked to were worried, given Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric around the election and his own track record of openly flouting democratic norms, that the country wouldn’t be able to handle another full-throttle election dispute. Take how low the public’s trust in the election already is. Last week, an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll found that 59 percent of Americans were not too confident or not confident at all that the election would be conducted in a free and equal way, in line with its polling since early August on this question.

It might be hard to remember now, but in the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s GOP-controlled state legislature was on the verge of appointing a new slate of electors to vote for George W. Bush had a court-ordered manual recount imposed by the Florida Supreme Court dragged on. Of course, it ultimately didn’t come to that because the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and halted Florida’s recount, famously deciding in a 5-4 decision that the state Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds and that a recount could not be held in time to meet the federal deadline for the selection of presidential electors.

Edward Foley of Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law thinks something similar could happen this year if the president and his backers contest the results in the Electoral College.

In Foley’s scenario, Trump leads in the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania on election night, but because of Democratic gains in ballots counted in the following days, Biden pulls ahead by a few thousand votes. What happens next quickly devolves into a partisan dispute. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signs Pennsylvania’s certificate of ascertainment, confirming Biden’s victory by listing the Democratic electors as the state’s official slate for the Electoral College, while the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature appoints a different set of electors at Trump’s behest as he has claimed there was widespread election fraud.

This, were it to happen, would likely be met immediately with legal challenges in state and federal court, perhaps followed by another intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court. But the significance is that even if a court ruled against the validity of one set of electors, Congress still has the power to consider both sets of electors as long as they have in hand the certificate naming them.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs the electoral vote counting process, was designed to help Congress decide how to handle such a situation. But it is especially ambiguous on what would happen if the Senate and House disagree on which set of electors should count, which could happen if the GOP retains control of the Senate and Democrats keep the House.

In Foley’s scenario, Vice President Mike Pence — as president of the Senate, he would oversee the count in Congress — follows one interpretation of the law, arguing that neither set of electors should count because they conflict. That removes Pennsylvania’s votes from the total number of electors and gives Trump a majority based on the remaining 518 electoral votes.1 Democrats, however, counter, claiming the certificate bearing the governor’s seal, which supports Biden, is given preference by the law.

Ultimately, though, neither side finds a compromise and we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis. In this scenario, the Supreme Court could become involved if, for instance, Democrats seek an injunction to stop Pence from not counting Pennsylvania’s votes. But it’s also possible the court would try to avoid making a ruling on the counting dispute, in keeping with a dissent from Bush v. Gore that argued neither the Constitution nor the Electoral Count Act provided a role for the judiciary in this process.

Under the 20th Amendment, we know someone must take office on Jan. 20 as president, yet the amendment is curiously silent on how to deal with a dispute over whether someone has actually qualified to take office. “The thing that we know for sure is the current term ends,” said Foley, but he added that doesn’t mean it would be straightforward to figure out who should take office next if there’s a disagreement.

In fact, it’s possible that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could claim that under the Presidential Succession Act, she is next in line to become president and that she would be willing to resign her House seat to serve as president until Biden is ruled the election winner. But if Republicans claimed Trump had won reelection, they very well might object to Pelosi being sworn in. Given a crisis on this scale, it’s hard to unpack what exactly might happen, but it’s very likely things would spiral out of control, and the resulting uncertainty could spark unrest and protests that could very well lead to violence.

Gaming out these different scenarios demonstrates that, should Trump dispute the result, a key factor will be the extent to which leading Republican officials at the federal and state level cooperate with him. Brooks pointed out that while Trump has significant power to contest the results as president, he can ultimately only go so far if supporters don’t follow his lead.

For instance, in one of its simulations, the Transition Integrity Project found that GOP leaders might support some of Trump’s claims of fraud or maneuvers to manipulate the vote count, but that didn’t mean they’d go along with every move he tried. For instance, it found many Republicans might oppose an attempt to federalize and deploy the National Guard. And in Foley’s scenario, much hinged on what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans — including Pence — chose to do when it came to deciding which Pennsylvania electors should count.

The relative closeness of the election is a factor here, too. In a different simulation the Transition Integrity Project looked at that put Biden in a stronger position on election night, Trump attracted less support from Republican leaders and Biden’s campaign was able to get some degree of bipartisan cooperation so that the country didn’t slide into a full-blown electoral crisis. Still, throughout its different scenarios, the project found it likely that the Trump campaign would try to raise enough doubts about the vote so as to undermine what might even seem like a clear result. Considering Trump claimed millions of people illegally voted when he won in 2016, it doesn’t take much to imagine he’d do the same this year if he thought it would improve his chances of winning a contested election. That’s one reason researchers at the Transition Integrity Project rank Trump’s allegations of voter fraud among the most dangerous threats currently facing the election.

Of course, considering how high the existential stakes seem to be in this election, it’s not out of the question that Biden might be the one who disputes the result. Tellingly, in another simulation the Transition Integrity Project played out, a crisis unfolded after Trump won in the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote by 5 points. Trump claimed it was fraud that explained Biden’s popular vote edge, but Biden retracted an election night concession and pushed Democratic governors in Michigan and Wisconsin to send appointed slates of electors to Congress, in conflict with the elected ones backing Trump. In his work, Foley also explored an alternate scenario in which Arizona was the tipping-point state and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey refused to certify the results to give Biden the state’s electors. During Congress’s counting, congressional Democrats argued that Arizona’s electors should be disqualified to give Biden the victory — the same argument Pence made in the Pennsylvania scenario to claim Trump had won.

The scenarios laid out by the Transition Integrity Project and Foley shouldn’t be taken as definite outcomes, but they do make clear that the rickety apparatus governing our electoral process could collapse if key actors decide to push against it.

Worryingly, the public may be especially vulnerable to attempts to delegitimize the election, too. Faith in the Electoral College is already shaky because of the possibility of a popular vote-electoral vote split like in 2000 and 2016, and worse yet, support for the Electoral College is increasingly polarized by party. A conflict over which electors should count would only exacerbate those concerns. And because many Americans still expect to know who won on election night, this could create a situation where much of the public isn’t ready for — or is ready to reject — sizable shifts in the vote after Election Day, which could make it easier to cast doubt on the outcome.

But even if the worst scenarios don’t come to pass, the fact that we lack a neutral electoral arbiter is surely a ticking time bomb for our democracy. Such an institution may sound difficult to create, but many individual states have used judicial panels to successfully sort through close elections, and other democratic nations have far better laws to adjudicate contested elections. For now, though, in the absence of such measures, the peaceful transfer of power hinges on the expectation that that is how American elections work, but that may be increasingly hanging in the balance, as anyone living in this incredibly polarized era of U.S. politics will tell you.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

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fyexo · 5 years

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191016 Breaking Down the SuperM Phenomenon: The K-Pop Debut Group With the No. 1 Album in America

When K-pop super label SM Entertainment was deciding where to launch its new all-star boy band, it settled on an emerging growth market for the genre: the U.S. Now at the top of the Billboard charts, the group may have revealed a path for other Korean acts to follow.

K-pop fandom in America is an increasingly accessible way of life, but never has the industry catered to U.S. fans as directly as it did in Hollywood this month. In early October, new seven-member boy group SuperM made their official international debut at Capitol Records, notably choosing to focus on the American market from day one. Compiled from several established SM Entertainment acts—SHINee, EXO, NCT 127, and WayV—and created in partnership with Capitol, the all-star supergroup took over Los Angeles, shutting down Hollywood streets for their first showcase and popping up everywhere from billboards and posters to an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

SuperM’s self-titled EP dropped on October 4, and the group promptly made history as the first debut Korean act to hit no. 1 on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart—they are the only K-pop group other than BTS to reach the top spot. To those unfamiliar with the industry, it may seem like SuperM came out of nowhere, but the group was constructed from some of SM’s most popular boy groups for a reason—they brought with them a dedicated legion of fans. SuperM’s immediate sales success could reveal a path to follow for other K-pop groups hoping to make it in America.

SuperM’s first week of U.S. promotion was designed with their established fans in mind, and there were plenty to be found in L.A. alone. The weekend began with a live Q&A broadcast from Capitol Records, during which the group answered Twitter questions, interacted with fans, and watched their new music video from casual seats in the audience. Then they closed down Hollywood for a live performance on the following Saturday, performing three of their new songs for a crowd of thousands on a giant stage built outside Capitol Tower. And on Sunday—once they’d been deposited practically on my doorstep—it was time to get to know the boys in real time.

When I walked into the interview room at Capitol Records, I was greeted by raucous hellos and bursts of recognition from the seven members of SuperM: SHINee’s Taemin, EXO’s Baekhyun and Kai, NCT 127’s Taeyong and Mark, and WayV’s Ten and Lucas. No, we’re not longtime BFFs, nor had I interviewed them before; the group had been inexplicably seated directly behind me in the press section for the first viewing of their “Jopping” music video a few days before. After offering to move several times, dodging photographers, and enduring a series of increasingly ridiculous interactions, I finally gave up and appreciated my literal front-row seat for SuperM’s video premiere. Despite my best efforts to make sure they could actually see their hard work play on the big screen, several members—Baekhyun especially—became extremely well acquainted with the back of my head.

On Sunday, it was clear that they were slightly less familiar with the front of it. As I got set up, the guys chatted among themselves in Korean, laughing quietly. It was only when I heard Mark (born in Canada, and the group’s most fluent English speaker) ask, “Wait, should I translate?” that I looked up and realized I was on the receiving end of a table full of amused gazes. “Are you talking about me?” I asked. Group leader, eldest member, and unofficial comic relief Baekhyun nodded mischievously and gestured to Mark—no matter that there were several professional translators in the room—who said, “They’re asking whether you were at the afterparty yesterday.” I replied that I hadn’t known there was one—“Sick invite, though!” I added. When Mark sheepishly relayed my answer, Baekhyun erupted out of his seat with a shout of indignation, which quickly turned into an embarrassed bow.

I tried to start the official interview, but Baekhyun refused to move on until he figured out how he knew me, if not from the afterparty. Mark helped me explain, and when Baekhyun realized I was the one awkwardly slouching in front of him so that he could see his own music video, he decided there was no recovering from our rough start. “Sorry, I’ll go!” he said in English, dramatically shoving away from the table and pretending to walk out with a flippant wave. The exchange was scored by giggles from the rest of the group—a constant soundtrack to just about everything Baekhyun does.

He returned with a grin, and Mark got things back on track—already a familiar scenario from the first month of promotion, as the youngest member of SuperM stepped up into his role as the unofficial English voice of the group. The 20-year-old’s original awe of his older, more experienced groupmates has been an ongoing narrative during the first few weeks of their debut, but it’s hard to imagine him as shy or intimidated now. Many fans may still think of Mark as the endearingly goofy NCT youngster of years past, but SuperM has brought out a new side of him—confident, eloquent, and thoughtful. As their primary English speaker, he was under a lot of pressure during the group’s first week in the U.S., but he said he left the anxiety in Korea.

“You always worry the most before the actual thing happens, so I guess I was worried before we came to America,” Mark said. “But once I was here, I realized that we’ve all worked so hard. To see everyone learn even the shortest English lines took my worries away.”

The members of SuperM said they’re invested in learning English because they want to communicate with American fans, but fans aren’t the only ones appreciative of their hard work. SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo Man attended Thursday’s Q&A, serving as SuperM’s biggest hype man. Every time a non-fluent member attempted a sentence in English—which was impressively often, for their first U.S. appearance—Lee erupted in whoops from the audience. That energy extended through the first live “Jopping” viewing, as Lee sat with and practically tackled the boys during standout moments in the video. It’s no surprise that Lee has made his support painfully obvious—they’re his golden boys, and he has a lot riding on this venture. Providing a little hype is perhaps the least he can do.

Despite the fact that many of SuperM’s members have never worked together in a group setting, most of them have known each other for years. Longtime best friends Taemin and Kai are the main dancers of their respective groups, and widely considered two of the best dancers active in the industry; it’s not the first time they’ve collaborated, but it’s their first time working together as fellow group members, which inevitably ups the stakes. In the room, I asked both of them, sitting side-by-side like two perfectly coiffed peas in a pod, whether they’ve learned anything new about each other now that they’re groupmates. They turned to each other simultaneously and seemed to be at an utter loss. “We know everything, right?” Kai asked. Taemin agreed; both were smiling, but clearly serious. “They’re so close,” Mark told me. Everyone nodded.

“We’ve known each other for such a long time, there’s nothing new to learn,” Kai said in Korean. “But if I had to add something … we’ve been friends for such a long time, but we’ve never worked together as artists. We’ve had separate groups and careers, so coming together on the same team like this has changed the way we communicate, because we’re teammates now. We’re not just friends, and we’re not just giving each other advice, but we share the same goal and create team synergy. So that’s something that’s changed with our dynamic.”

Before SuperM officially debuted, theories abounded that Taemin would be named the group leader—a designated role in nearly every K-pop group that amounts to an official team captain of sorts. At 27, Baekhyun is one year older than Taemin, but the latter has been active in the industry longer and has an impressive solo career to boot. In fact, early teasers seemed to paint Taemin as the architect of SuperM. But Taemin appeared to have no interest in the role, and when Baekhyun was officially announced as the leader, it became clear that Baekhyun’s primary focus would be on keeping everyone happy and relaxed at all times.

Thus far, I’d been addressing different members at random, trying to follow the natural flow of conversation, and I’d unintentionally ignored the leader’s corner of the table after our initial chaotic beginning. As I swiveled toward Baekhyun, he made an exaggerated “Finally!” expression, rolling his shoulders, leaning forward, and sucking in a deep breath as if he was about to hit one of those iconic high notes. But no, this time it was just a steadfast commitment to the bit. The other members craned their heads, already grinning, as he pretended to psych himself up for my incoming question. I asked Baekhyun whether he had any newfound empathy for Suho, the leader of his other group, EXO, now that he is a leader himself.

“I can’t really relate, because I feel like I don’t actually do much,” Baekhyun said in Korean. “My biggest role here within this team is to keep the spirits high, and that’s easy for me—because I’m usually in high spirits myself, and it’s really easy for me to do that with these guys.”

Fellow EXO member Kai laughed at Baekhyun’s over-the-top delivery, but piped up in disagreement. “I’ve been in EXO with Baekhyun for a long time, but before he was just a member. Now, with him as a leader, I definitely see the difference. I can see that he has more sense of responsibility for what he does, and he really goes out of his way to care for each of the members. When it’s hard for us to voice our opinions or complaints, Baekhyun makes sure that everyone’s opinions are relayed, and that everything is communicated. He doesn’t realize he’s good, but I’m 100 percent satisfied with his leadership.”

Language barriers aside, Kai was feeling talkative—our Korean translator was forced to scribble intricate outlines to keep up with several of his elaborate answers. At one point, Kai told a story about shooting the “Jopping” music video, complete with dramatic gestures and poses.

“It was my first time in a helicopter,” he said. “They told me it was going to fly really low, and I thought I could handle it. But all of a sudden, they put me up in the helicopter, and it flew around the area four times. The director and cameraman yelled, ‘Keep your eyes open! Have good facial expressions! Fight the wind!’” Kai imitated the shouting crew members, then leveled his signature intense gaze at me in a re-creation of the action-star pose he was going for.

It was a lot.

“I tried my best, and kept my eyes open for as long as possible, and when I came back down, there was sand in my eyes and I couldn’t open them. I thought, ‘OK, I did a good job,’ but when I saw the final cut, none of the footage was used! Nothing at all!” He burst out laughing as Lucas clapped him on the back. Ever the optimist, Kai continued. “It was still a good experience. It’s motivated me to work harder until I can ride a helicopter again—maybe from Korea to America.”

The younger boys seemed impressed by his goal, but Taemin was skeptical. “Wouldn’t it take too long?” he asked. Baekhyun had other concerns: “From Korea to America? You’d get shot down with a missile.”

Ten and Lucas had their own iffy encounters with heavy machinery on the “Jopping” set. There were no helicopter rides for them, but they posed on a giant tank in Dubai in the summer. Lucas summed it up nicely. “So hot!”

Ten elaborated: “We couldn’t really touch the tanks, but we needed to pretend that we were cool on top of the tank.” He struck a pose as if he was leaning against the combat vehicle, then flipped back one stylish sleeve to gesture at his elbow. “I got burned a little,” he said. “But it was pretty cool. It’s not every day you get to sit on top of a tank and like, take a selfie.”

Ten, born in Thailand, collects languages like he collects earrings, and they were all on full display during our chat. In a light, lilting accent, Ten said that his (near-perfect) English hadn’t gotten much practice during the past few years in Korea and China, as he and Lucas promoted with NCT and WayV in quick succession, and he’s still self-conscious about using it around native speakers in the U.S.

That said, Ten loves getting the opportunity to learn about new cultures and languages. “If you know multiple cultures, it’s easier for you to express yourself in performance. You learn more about dancing, singing, and expressing. It makes you grow and mature, I think. You don’t need to care about people’s race. No matter what, you can empathize with them. That’s the most important thing.”

It’s not immediately obvious from his answer, but Ten was demonstrating his aptitude for learning in real time. According to fellow reporter Elizabeth de Luna, who was helping record the interview from the other side of the room, Ten had leaned over to Mark earlier as I asked Baekhyun about having newfound empathy for his EXO group leader. “What does ‘empathy’ mean?” Ten asked Mark. After a whispered discussion, Ten nodded and returned to attention. Then, just a few minutes later, he inserted the word perfectly into his own sentence. So goes the quadrilingual life–and, to a certain extent, the future of K-pop as an ever-evolving, increasingly global industry.

To wit, Ten and Mark aren’t the only SuperM members juggling several languages. WayV’s Lucas is Chinese, born in Hong Kong, and he’s actively working on his English and Korean. Still, he doesn’t have any trouble communicating with his groupmates, four of whom are native Koreans. “Anything can be overcome by music,” Lucas told me in Chinese. “Cultural differences do exist, but music gets rid of all that. I just use music to simplify everything, and I don’t think too much about the differences.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, but music can’t do it all—Lucas and the rest of the boys devote immense effort and concentration to even simple interviews like this one. When I first posed a question to Lucas via the Korean translator, there was a flurry of activity and laughter as the game plan was decided upon: First, Kai suggested in Korean that Lucas answer in Chinese, and Lucas turned with his ever-present smile to address a Chinese translator who was seated against the wall. Ten was then recruited to help from the other side of the room (“I will try, but my Chinese is not that great!” he chirped) and Lucas just leaned back in his rolling chair, swiveling his head around, and looking massively entertained by the commotion. In the end, Lucas gave his answer—with various interjections from Ten—to the Chinese translator, who relayed it to the Korean translator, who then gave it to me in English. It was like a game of multilingual hot potato. Lucas was rewarded for his efforts with scattered applause and high fives from Kai and Baekhyun. The group effort, energetic as it was, is painfully representative of the extra effort K-pop groups have to expend in order to break out in the U.S. market.

NCT 127 leader Taeyong is no stranger to the multilingual interview scene. As the face of the NCT megaunit, he’s worked with group members from China, Thailand, Canada, the U.S., and just about everywhere in between. He’s also unique in that he’s the only SuperM member with a producing credit on the EP. When I asked Taeyong to talk about his work on “No Manners,” which is basically a song about savagely dumping someone, I received a brief panicked look. “Speak from your heart,” Baekhyun suggested. Taeyong did his best. “At first, it was difficult to understand what the song was trying to say, so I tried to make my rap into a story to help listeners understand. I’m not saying that breaking up is always the answer, but a bad breakup is … ” he trailed off, and looked around for an assist. Baekhyun stepped in, saying that the song is about how sometimes it’s best to cut a relationship off before it hits rock bottom.

In our current context, it was hard to imagine Taeyong as an expert on breakups of any kind. He’d been engaged and friendly, but very quiet—mostly just watching the other members speak with wide-eyed attention. As he sat tiny in his seat, in an oversized T-shirt and fluffy purple hair, it was difficult to reconcile him with the fierce, steely-eyed Taeyong of the stage. Next to him, Taemin was quiet and serene as well, but no less attentive—just beaming cherubically as he sipped on his Starbucks. Such is the duality of some of K-pop’s most arresting performers.

After all, no matter how transcendent they can seem on stage—they’re called “idols” for a reason—at the end of the day, they’re just guys. It’s something they reminded us of during their showcase stage for “Super Car,” when it was revealed that the official choreography is centered around hitting the woah.

As soon as I brought up the viral dance move, I was faced with an entire room of boys hitting the woah, like it was impossible for them to talk about it without doing it. Lucas jumped out of his seat to put his whole body into it. “It’s just a feeling!” he exclaimed in English. The guys persuaded me to try hitting the woah a few times myself—unfortunately, it appeared to be a feeling I couldn’t quite grasp, but they very sweetly pretended I nailed it.

Always ready with the polished take, Mark weighed in. “We feel like ‘Super Car’ has a really trendy vibe to it. We wanted to include a movement that the American audience would find familiar. The woah has been popular for awhile now, but it’s all a cycle–it started in America and took a while to make its way over to us, so we brought it back. It just made sense for us to perform it in America.”

American music fans may think it would have made more sense for a group to incorporate the woah a few years ago when it first became popular here, but Mark is self-aware enough to know that it takes time for things like this to make the rounds in Korea. Besides, we all have a teenage cousin who refuses to stop dabbing—viral dances don’t come with expiration dates. Incorporating the woah into “Super Car” seems less like an attempt to cater to American audiences, and more a statement that this is what K-pop looks like in its current state—even if SuperM knows that the woah is passé in American culture, K-pop groups still love it. So, by god, they’re going to hit it as hard as they can.

“Super Car” was one of the three songs the group performed at their debut performance on a massive stage outside Capitol Records. It was a highly anticipated moment—for a group made nearly entirely of idols known for their dance skills, the first live show felt like a make-or-break moment for SuperM.

No one should have worried. SuperM’s first performance proved that they know how to play to each member’s specific strengths, numerous as they are. Need a standout high note? Baekhyun and Taemin are on it. Time for a rapid-fire dance solo? Ten is your man. What about a blue-steel gaze directly into the camera? Well, options vary, but Kai and Taeyong have turned it into an art form. Mark and Lucas have thrived both onstage and off, as the official crowd-pleasing charmers. It’s an all-star formula, and it’s no surprise that it has been a success. But the extent of that success in the U.S.—the blanket press coverage, the Billboard chart record—has exceeded expectations. SuperM’s immediate impact, both on the charts and in the history books, raises the question: If SM can beat the odds by debuting a new group in the U.S. market, who will follow? Other K-pop labels may now focus on America from the get-go, or create their own collaborative groups, following SuperM’s lead.

That, of course, is not SuperM’s concern. As we wrapped up the interview and said our goodbyes, Baekhyun dragged Mark over to apologize for him once more, and dramatically resolved our short-lived beef—as any good leader would. I told them I’d see them again on their upcoming U.S. tour, which kicks off in Fort Worth, Texas, in November.

To the person who will be sitting behind me at said concert, apologies in advance. You’ve got a tough act to follow.

source: Kate Halliwell @ The Ringer

#exo #baekhyun #kai #t: info #album: superm

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Alice Bolin, The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime, Vulture (August 1, 2018)

The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgement of a centuries-long obsession: People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism. The serial fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins was influenced by the British public’s obsessive tracking of sensational true-crime cases in daily papers, and since then, we have hoarded gory details in tabloids and pulp paperbacks and nightly news shows and Wikipedia articles and Reddit threads.

I don’t deny these stories have proliferated in the past five years. Since the secret is out — “Oh you love murder? Me too!” — entire TV networks, podcast genres, and countless limited-run docuseries have arisen to satisfy this rumbling hunger. It is tempting to call this true-crime boom new because of the prestige sheen of many of its artifacts — Serial and Dirty John and The Jinx and Wild, Wild Country are all conspicuously well made, with lovely visuals and strong reporting. They have subtle senses of theme and character, and they often feel professional, pensive, quiet — so far from vulgar or sensational.

But well-told stories about crime are not really new, and neither is their popularity. In Cold Blood is a classic of American literature and The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer; Errol Morris has used crime again and again in his documentaries to probe ideas like fame, desire, corruption, and justice. The new true-crime boom is more simply a matter of volume and shamelessness: the wide array of crime stories we can now openly indulge in, with conventions of the true-crime genre more emphatically repeated and codified, more creatively expanded and trespassed against. In 2016, after two critically acclaimed series about the O.J. Simpson trial, there was talk that the 1996 murder of Colorado 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey would be the next case to get the same treatment. It was odd, hearing O.J.: Made in America, the epic and depressing account of race and celebrity that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, discussed in the same breath with the half-dozen unnecessary TV specials dredging up the Ramsey case. Despite my avowed love of Dateline, I would not have watched these JonBenét specials had a magazine not paid me to, and suffice it to say they did very little either to solve the 20-year-old crime (ha!) or examine our collective obsession with it.

Clearly, the insight, production values, or cultural capital of its shiniest products are not what drives this new wave of crime stories. O.J.: Made in America happened to be great and the JonBenét specials happened to be terrible, but producers saw them as part of the same trend because they knew they would appeal to at least part of the same audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about these gaps between high and low, since there are people who consume all murder content indiscriminately, and another subset who only allow themselves to enjoy the “smart” kind. The difference between highbrow and lowbrow in the new true crime is often purely aesthetic. It is easier than ever for producers to create stories that look good and seem serious, especially because there are templates now for a style and voice that make horrifying stories go down easy and leave the viewer wanting more. But for these so-called prestige true-crime offerings, the question of ethics — of the potential to interfere in real criminal cases and real people’s lives — is even more important, precisely because they are taken seriously.

Like the sensational tone, disturbing, clinical detail, and authoritarian subtext that have long defined schlocky true crime as “trash,” the prestige true-crime subgenre has developed its own shorthand, a language to tell its audience they’re consuming something thoughtful, college-educated, public-radio influenced. In addition to slick and creative production, highbrow true crime focuses on character sketches instead of police procedure. “We’re public radio producers who are curious about why people do what they do,” Phoebe Judge, the host of the podcast Criminal, said. Judge has interviewed criminals (a bank robber, a marijuana brownie dealer), victims, and investigators, using crime as a very simple window into some of the most interesting and complicated lives on the planet.

Highbrow true crime is often explicitly about the piece’s creator, a meta-commentary about the process of researching and reporting such consequential stories. Serial’s Sarah Koenig and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki wrestle with their boundaries with the subjects (Adnan Syed and Robert Durst, respectively, both of whom have been tried for murder) and whether they believe them. They sift through evidence and reconstruct timelines as they try to create a coherent narrative from fragments.

I remember saying years ago that people who liked Serial should try watching Dateline, and my friend joked in reply, “Yeah, but Dateline isn’t hosted by my friend Sarah.” One reason for the first season of Serial’s insane success — it is still the most-downloaded podcast of all time — is the intimacy audiences felt with Koenig as she documented her investigation of a Baltimore teenager’s murder in real time, keeping us up to date on every vagary of evidence, every interview, every experiment. Like the figure of the detective in many mystery novels, the reporter stands in for the audience, mirroring and orchestrating our shifts in perspective, our cynicism and credulity, our theories, prejudices, frustrations, and breakthroughs.

This is what makes this style of true crime addictive, which is the adjective its makers most crave. The stance of the voyeur, the dispassionate observer, is thrilling without being emotionally taxing for the viewer, who watches from a safe remove. (This fact is subtly skewered in Gay Talese’s creepy 2017 Netflix documentary, Voyeur.) I’m not sure how much of my eye-rolling at the popularity of highbrow true crime has to do with my general distrust of prestige TV and Oscar-bait movies, which are usually designed to be enjoyed in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons as any other entertainment, but also to make the viewer feel good about themselves for watching. When I wrote earlier that there are viewers who consume all true crime, and those who only consume “smart” true crime, I thought, “And there must be some people who only like dumb true crime.” Then I realized that I am sort of one of them.

There are specimens of highbrow true crime that I love, Criminal and O.J.: Made in America among them, but I truly enjoy Dateline much more than I do Serial, which in my mind is tedious to the edge of pointlessness. I find myself perversely complaining that good true crime is no fun — as self-conscious as it may be, it will never be as entertaining as the Investigation Discovery network’s output, most of which is painfully serious. (The list of ID shows is one of the most amusing artifacts on the internet, including shows called Bride Killas, Momsters: Moms Who Murder, and Sex Sent Me to the Slammer.) Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “seriousness that fails,” and camp is obviously part of the appeal of a show called Sinister Ministers or Southern Fried Homicide. Network news magazine shows like Dateline and 48 Hours are somber and melodramatic, often literally starting voice-overs on their true-crime episodes with variations of “it was a dark and stormy night.” They trade in archetypes — the perfect father, the sweet girl with big dreams, the divorcee looking for a second chance — and stick to a predetermined narrative of the case they’re focusing on, unconcerned about accusations of bias. They are sentimental and yet utterly graphic, clinical in their depiction of brutal crimes.

It’s always talked around in discussions of why people like true crime: It is … funny? The comedy in horror movies seems like a given, but it is hardly permitted to say that you are amused by true disturbing stories, out of respect for victims. But in reducing victims and their families to stock characters, in exaggerating murderers to superhuman monsters, in valorizing police and forensic scientists as heroic Everymen, there is dark humor in how cheesy and misguided these pulpy shows are, how bad we are at talking about crime and drawing conclusions from it, how many ways we find to distance ourselves from the pain of victims and survivors, even when we think we are honoring them. (The jokey titles and tongue-in-cheek tone of some ID shows seem to indicate more awareness of the inherent humor, but in general, the channel’s programming is almost all derivative of network TV specials.) I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but in its obvious failures, I enjoy this brand of true crime more straightforwardly than its voyeuristic, documentary counterpart, which, in its dignified guise, has maybe only perfected a method of making us feel less gross about consuming real people’s pain for fun.

Crime stories also might be less risky when they are more stilted, more clinical. To be blunt, what makes a crime story less satisfying are often the ethical guidelines that help reporters avoid ruining people’s lives. With the popularity of the podcasts S-Town and Missing Richard Simmons, there were conversations about the ethics of appropriating another person’s story, particularly when they won’t (or can’t) participate in your version of it. The questions of ethics and appropriation are even heavier when stories intersect with their subjects’ criminal cases, because journalism has always had a reciprocal relationship with the justice system. Part of the exhilarating intimacy of the first season of Serial was Koenig’s speculation about people who never agreed to be part of the show, the theories and rabbit holes she went through, the risks she took to get answers. But there is a reason most reporters do all their research, then write their story. It is inappropriate, and potentially libelous, to let your readers in on every unverified theory about your subject that occurs to you, particularly when wondering about a private citizen’s innocence or guilt in a horrific crime.

Koenig’s off-the-cuff tone had other consequences, too, in the form of amateur sleuths on Reddit who tracked down people involved with the case, pored over court transcripts, and reviewed cellular tower evidence, forming a shadow army of investigators taking up what they saw as the gauntlet thrown down by the show. The journalist often takes on the stance of the professional amateur, a citizen providing information in the public interest and using the resources at hand to get answers. At times during the first season of Serial, Koenig’s methods are laughably amateurish, like when she drives from the victim’s high school to the scene of the crime, a Best Buy, to see if it was possible to do it in the stated timeline. She is able to do it, which means very little, since the crime occurred 15 years earlier. Because so many of her investigative tools were also ones available to listeners at home, some took that as an invitation to play along.

This blurred line between professional and amateur, reporter and private investigator, has plagued journalists since the dawn of modern crime reporting. In 1897, amid a frenzied rivalry between newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, true crime coverage was so popular that Hearst formed a group of reporters to investigate criminal cases called the “Murder Squad.” They wore badges and carried guns, forming essentially an extralegal police force who both assisted and muddled official investigations. Seeking to get a better story and sell more papers, it was common for reporters to trample crime scenes, plant evidence, and produce dubious witnesses whose accounts fit their preferred version of the case. And they were trying to get audiences hooked in very similar ways, by crowdsourcing information and encouraging readers to send in tips.

Of course the producers of Serial never did anything so questionable as the Murder Squad, though there are interesting parallels between the true-crime podcast and crime coverage in early daily newspapers. They were both innovations in the ways information was delivered to the public that sparked unexpectedly personal, participatory, and impassioned responses from their audiences. It’s tempting to say that we’ve come full circle, with a new true-crime boom that is victim to some of the same ethical pitfalls of the first one: Is crime journalism another industry deregulated by the anarchy of the internet? But as Michelle Dean wrote of Serial, “This is exactly the problem with doing journalism at all … You might think you are doing a simple crime podcast … and then you become a sensation, as Serial has, and the story falls to the mercy of the thousands, even millions, of bored and curious people on the internet.”

Simply by merit of their popularity, highbrow crime stories are often riskier than their lowbrow counterparts. Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker about the ways the makers of the Netflix series Making a Murderer, in their attempt to advocate for the convicted murderer Steven Avery, omit evidence that incriminates him and put forth an incoherent argument for his innocence. Advocacy and intervention are complicated actions for journalists to undertake, though they are not novel. Schulz points to a scene in Making a Murderer where a Dateline producer who is covering Avery is shown saying, “Right now murder is hot.” In this moment the creators of Making a Murderer are drawing a distinction between themselves and Dateline, as Schulz writes, implying that, “unlike traditional true-crime shows … their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel.” But they were not only trying to invalidate Avery’s conviction; they (like Dateline, but more effectively) were also creating an addictive product, a compelling story.

That is maybe what irks me the most about true crime with highbrow pretensions. It appeals to the same vices as traditional true crime, and often trades in the same melodrama and selective storytelling, but its consequences can be more extreme. Adnan Syed was granted a new trial after Serial brought attention to his case; Avery was denied his appeal, but people involved in his case have nevertheless been doxxed and threatened. I’ve come to believe that addictiveness and advocacy are rarely compatible. If they were, why would the creators of Making a Murderer have advocated for one white man, when the story of being victimized by a corrupt police force is common to so many people across the U.S., particularly people of color?

It does feel like a shame that so many resources are going to create slick, smart true crime that asks the wrong questions, focusing our energy on individual stories instead of the systemic problems they represent. But in truth, this is is probably a feature, not a bug. I suspect the new true-crime obsession has something to do with the massive, terrifying problems we face as a society: government corruption, mass violence, corporate greed, income inequality, police brutality, environmental degradation, human-rights violations. These are large-scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming. Focusing on one case, bearing down on its minutia and discovering who is to blame, serves as both an escape and a means of feeling in control, giving us an arena where justice is possible.

Skepticism about whether journalists appropriate their subjects’ stories, about high and low, and about why we enjoy the crime stories we do, all swirl through what I think of as the post–true-crime moment. Post–true crime is explicitly or implicity about the popularity of the new true-crime wave, questioning its place in our culture, and resisting or responding to its conventions. One interesting document of post–true crime is My Favorite Murder and other “comedy murder podcasts,” which, in retelling stories murder buffs have heard on one million Investigation Discovery shows, unpack the ham-fisted clichés of the true-crime genre. They show how these stories appeal to the most gruesome sides of our personalities and address the obvious but unspoken fact that true crime is entertainment, and often the kind that is as mindless as a sitcom. Even more cutting is the Netflix parody American Vandal, which both codifies and spoofs the conventions of the new highbrow true crime, roasting the genre’s earnest tone in its depiction of a Serial-like investigation of some lewd graffiti.

There is also the trend in the post–true-crime era of dramatizing famous crime stories, like in The Bling Ring; I, Tonya; and Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Crime Story, all of which dwell not only on the stories of infamous crimes but also why they captured the public imagination. There is a camp element in these retellings, particularly when famous actors like John Travolta and Sarah Paulson are hamming it up in ridiculous wigs. But this self-consciousness often works to these projects’ advantage, allowing them to show heightened versions of the cultural moments that led to the most outsize tabloid crime stories. Many of these fictionalized versions take journalistic accounts as their source material, like Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting in Vanity Fair for The Bling Ring and ESPN’s documentary on Tonya Harding, The Price of Gold, for I, Tonya. This seems like a best-case scenario for prestige true crime to me: parsing famous cases from multiple angles and in multiple genres, trying to understand them both on the level of individual choices and cultural forces.

Perhaps the most significant contributions to post–true crime, though, are the recent wave of personal accounts about murder and crime: literary memoirs like Down City by Leah Carroll, Mean by Myriam Gurba, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, and We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle all tell the stories of murder seen from close-up. (It is significant that all of these books are by women. Carroll, Perry, and Carlisle all write about their mothers’ murders, placing them in the tradition of James Ellroy’s great memoir My Dark Places, but without the tortured, fetish-y tone.) This is not a voyeuristic first person, and the reader can’t detach and find joy in procedure; we are finally confronted with the truth of lives upended by violence and grief. There’s also Ear Hustle, the brilliant podcast produced by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison. The makers of Ear Hustle sometimes contemplate the bad luck and bad decisions that led them to be incarcerated, but more often they discuss the concerns of daily life in prison, like food, sex, and how to make mascara from an inky page from a magazine. This is a crime podcast that is the opposite of sensational, addressing the systemic truth of crime and the justice system, in stories that are mundane, profound, and, yes, addictive.

#true crime #adnan syed #media #ethics #The Way We Live Now #culture #andrew jarecki #james ellroy #criminal justice #detective fiction

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tswiftdaily · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on "Lover" and haters

You might say Taylor Swift's happy place is at the piano in her Nashville home. "There have been so many songs that were written at this piano," she said.

"And it's often the middle of the night?" asked correspondent Tracy Smith.

"It's usually in the middle of the night," she replied. "Or if I'm trying to get to sleep and I can't and then I get an idea. And I'm, like, 'Well, I'm not tired anyway!' And then kind of wander over here."

It's kind of a rare sight, not just because "Sunday Morning" was there ("I haven't serenaded someone in a while, hope you know that!"), but because, for the moment, Taylor Swift was actually sitting still.

I promise that you'll never find another like Me-e-e, Ooh ooh ooh ooh I'm the only one of me Baby, that's the fun of me – "Me!" by Taylor Swift, Joel Little and Brendon Urie

And there never really has been another like Taylor Swift. After only 13 years in the business, she's become a musical force of nature, with an armload of #1 hits, more Grammy Awards than The Rolling Stones, and (according to Forbes) the distinction of being the highest-paid celebrity on the planet.

By any measure, she's an amazing young woman. But there were times, she says, that being young, and a woman, worked against her.

"You're always gonna have people going, 'Did she write all her own songs?'" she said. "Talking about your personal life, talking about your dating life.

"There's a different vocabulary for men and women in the music industry, right?"

"Gimme an example," asked correspondent Tracy Smith.

"Okay. A man does something, it's 'strategic'; a woman does the same thing, it's 'calculated.' A man is allowed to 'react'; a woman can only 'over-react.'"

And it seems her usual reaction is to get to work. Swift writes or co-writes all of her songs. And what's more, her music videos are all her vision, from the pastel wonderland in "Me!"…to the giant dollhouse in her latest video, "Lover."

That's also the title of her critically-acclaimed new studio album, her seventh. She wrote "Lover" on her piano at home, and polished it up in the studio. And once she recorded the music, Swift (accompanied by and her cats) went to Hollywood to make the music video, and she invited Smith along to watch.

There's a love story here, and like a lot of Swift's work, it's an echo of her real life.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift discovered her love for music as a toddler. She set her sights on a career in country music, and eventually her parents and younger brother moved to Nashville to help her do it.

"My brother's a real bro for doing that," Swift said.

"Yeah, they all upended their lives," Smith said.

"For sure."

"It worked out well!"

"Yeah, I buy 'em lots of presents," she laughed.

The rest reads like a fantasy: Swift became a country music phenomenon, and, in the last few years, a pop icon. But the superstar is, by her own admission, as emotionally fragile as any other 20-something, "I'm still someone who is the first to apologize when I'm wrong," she said. "But I think I'm better at standing up for myself when I've been wronged. So, that's something that I think also comes with growing up."

Which brings us to Scooter Braun. Earlier this summer, Braun, a talent agent with whom Swift says she has a contentious relationship, acquired the rights to her previous recordings – her masters – when his company bought Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Label Group for a reported $300 million. Borchetta, who worked with Swift for years, says she and those close to her (including her dad, who was an investor), knew about the deal in advance, and that Swift had previously been offered the chance to buy her own masters.

She remembers it differently, and told Smith she didn't see it coming: "I found out when it was online, like, when it hit the news."

"Nobody in your inner circle knew?" Smith asked.,

"Nobody knew."

"And you didn't smell it?"

"No. I knew he would sell my music; I knew he would do that. I couldn't believe who he sold it to, because we've had endless conversations about Scooter Braun. And he has 300 million reasons to conveniently forget those conversations."

With the sale of the masters to her first six albums, there has been speculation that Swift might re-record her back catalog, in order to control the recordings of her songs.

Smith asked, "Might you do that?"

"Oh, yeah," Swift replied.

"That's a plan?"

"Yeah, absolutely!"

Scooter Braun may not agree with her side of the story, but he did reach out to Swift in a tweet last week, calling her new album "brilliant."

It's clear that Swift wants to control her music: When it's time to release one of her new songs, she does it personally, talking to her fans live on Instagram. This personal connection has earned her a loyal following. But her openness comes at price: She's followed just about everywhere she goes these days, by people who are crazy about her – or just plain crazy.

Smith asked, "Where is home for you now?"

"It's a very good question," she said. "I try not to ever really say where I am the most, because since all my addresses are on the internet, people tend to show up uninvited. Like, you know, dudes that think we have an imaginary marriage."

"And you mentioned that you keep wound dressing with you?"

"Yeah. I've had a lot of stalkers show up to the house, armed. So, we have to think that way."

And she's come under attack in other ways: You need only glance at the tabloids to see some very well-publicized feuds, and she often hits back at her haters through her music. For instance, in "You Need to Calm Down," she calls out anti-gay protesters and online trolls:

You are somebody that we don't know But you're comin' at my friends like a missile Why are you mad? When you could be GLAAD? Sunshine on the street at the parade But you would rather be in the dark ages …

Control your urges to scream about all the people you hate 'Cause shade never made anybody less gay – "You Need to Calm Down" by Taylor Swift and Joel Little

Smith asked, "I'm curious, because I feel like almost every album, you have a song where you address the haters, at least one song. Sometimes more than one song."

"I probably do have that habit. I imagine that I might have that habit, yeah."

"Why is that? Why sing to the haters?"

"Well, when they stop coming for me, I will stop singing to them," Swift replied. "You know, people go on and on about, like, you have to forgive and forget to move past something. No, you don't. You don't have to forgive and you don't have to forget to move on. You can move on without any of those things happening. You just become indifferent, and then you move on."

"Do you believe in forgiveness?"

"Yes, absolutely, like, for people that are important in your life who have added, you know, who have enriched your life and made it better, and also there has been some struggle and some bad stuff, too. But I think that, you know, if something's toxic and it's only ever really been that, what are you gonna do?"

"Just move on?"

"Just move on. It's fine."

Taylor Swift's music is always personal, sometimes intensely so. "There's one song on the album called 'Soon You'll Get Better' that it's, I can't even really hear. I can't even listen to it."

She won't talk specifically about her inspiration, but it comes at a time when her mother Andrea, who was battling cancer, suffered a relapse.

Swift said, "It's really interesting because I don't think I have written a song quite like that before. And it's just sort of, like, it's just a tough one."

"I can imagine. But I can also tell you, having listened to it, that it's universal."

"It's just not something that we deal with until we have to, until we see it, until we experience it, until someone close to us is going through something like that. And so, writing about it was really emotional. And I'm just gonna stop talking about it now."

She's more comfortable plunging into her work. On the Hollywood set, a large glass tank will become a symbolic fish bowl in the "Lover" music video.

"I very oftentimes remark that my life is like a fish bowl, and that, like, if I were to, like, fall in love, you know, somebody's choosing to be in that fish bowl with me. To jump into the fish bowl with me and live in that world just with me – it's not as depressing as it sounds, I promise! It's just symbolic!"

Talk about fish bowls: she's been dating British actor Joe Alwyn for three years. Seems he's up for a swim.

At the moment, Swift is, well, fully immersed in today. Beyond that, she says she doesn't know … and doesn't really want to.

Smith asked her, "Do you think about, you know, 'What am I gonna do in 20, 30 years?'"

"No, 'cause that puts me into what I call a panic spiral," Swift replied. "Like, I cannot do that. I've never been able to do that."

Why? "It just freaks me out. When I zoom out too far, I freak out. Do I know where I'm gonna be or even wanna be in 20 years? Absolutely not. Like, not taking a single day for granted."

"So, how far ahead do you look?"

"Six months. Just 'cause I have to plan shows and stuff. But I don't know what I'll do after this album. And I think that's great. I tell myself, like, it's actually really ungrateful to just assume that you have 20 years. Like, be stoked that you have today."

(x)

#cbs sunday morning #interview

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