Hey tumblr,

So ive been thinking a lot about the pro ship and anti communities, and i feel like my stance aligns somewhere in between.

i, nineshrines, am NOT a pro-shipper. i am however kink and fetish positive, and all for dark themes and topics being written about in media. I believe that people should be able to enjoy their interests, no matter how “strange” they might be to others.

what i do NOT support, however, is extreme paraphilias and traumatic experiences being romanticized. People should be allowed to write about dark things, because they are VERY real, and shouldn’t be treated like they don’t exist. romanticization gives way to normalization in fandom spaces, and these things should NOT be made normal. instead, they should be written as they are; literal real world crimes that scar people for years afterwards.

That’s not to say i support the demonization of things like mental illness and whatnot. The stigma that it creates within a community often hurts people. just like the romanticization of harmful things does the same.

Fiction does affect reality, while not directly. it depicts and perpetuates different views and ideas to the consumer, some of which they will pick up and use in the real world. Why do you think people spread around fake news?

TLDR; I think that people can write about whatever they want (i.e. incest, pedophilia, abuse, etc.) as long as they’re portrayed REALISTICALLY.

i’ve been trying to come up with a term for it. Anti rom (anti romanticization) is what im calling it for now.

We sort of started this discussion at Chimeras' Othercon panel, but I wanted to keep it going so I figured I would send an ask. What do you think it would mean for our community to drop the focus on voluntary and involuntary identities? I agree that we fundamentally should, but a bunch of things immediately jump to mind.

Our community has spent years leaning heavily into the lines between voluntary and involuntary identities and taken special care to make massive distinctions between them, leaving little to no room for grey area. It's no bit surprise that alterhuman spaces have had actual, legitimate, longstanding issues of grilling and gatekeeping. Nonhumans with nuanced and complicated identities are forced to shove themselves into a box to fit into the community, and the ideas we have about certain identities needing to be involuntary are absolutely baked into many aspects of our community and its history.

At the same time, we have used this unjustified gatekeeping in part to protect the community from genuine threats and appropriation of our terminology. The way we have limited our concepts of who is allowed to identify in what ways is generally wrong and has no doubt harmed a subset of kin, but at the same time is understandable in the sense that it has a cause. Yes, this was an issue even before KFF, but KFF certainly don't make it easy to create space for genuine voluntary kin and other voluntary alterhumans.

How do we create the space for nuance and fluidity and complexity in these terms and identities after we have spent so long defensively creating rigid boundaries and restrictions regarding the ways people are allowed to identify? How do we address community gatekeeping while also protecting our community from the people who use our identities and terminology in bad faith?

I have a lot of ideas, but this is obviously a very complex topic that we can't just solve in a day. I was just curious to hear your thoughts, if you had any. Hopefully once our personal website is up one of our first essays will be about this issue. (Also, how is Page? /hj)

So I know we’ve been sitting on this ask for... -checks watch- ...almost two weeks now, but it’s genuinely because I just wasn’t sure how to answer it for a good long while, and I didn’t just want to throw out some haphazard, half-hearted answer to such important questions. So here’s our thoughts on the debacle.

Voluntary and involuntary is a focus I doubt we’ll ever see any of the alterhuman communities permanently drop, for several reasons.

The first and foremost being that, by the definition of the term “alterhuman,” defined here as “a subjective identity which is beyond the scope of what is traditionally considered ‘being human’,” both experiences at their most extremes technically fall underneath the label, rendering the distinction (to some) vitally important to helping understand and define their identity/identity labels. The difference between KFF as an alterhuman identity and forms of otherkinity as an alterhuman identity, for instance, as you mention.

And then there’s the societal factors to consider. People like nice, neat little boxes: people like to be able to compartmentalize their communities, with no overlap, with no spillage, with no complications or grey areas or nuance. It’s a fact of life that people often instinctively want to water down labels and identities into more easily digestible formations, though there are arguments around why people precisely do it. And, as you point out, that often means alterhumans and nonhumans with more complex or nuanced identities typically get shoved into one box or another that they may not perfectly fit into.

When we zero in on specifically the otherkin community, this becomes even more complicated given the community’s rife history: abusive p-shifter groups, the appropriation of language by roleplayers and fiction writers, zoophiles attempting to forcibly associate otherkinity with pro-bestiality movements, and the blatant general misinformation spread by laymen and academics alike, just to name a few relevant problems the community has faced and continues to face. The community is stubborn to a fault, largely because it’s had to be in order to survive. It holds to its preconceived notions and rigid boundaries like a dog with toy aggression to their favorite plush stegosaurus. Fittingly so, really.

So how do we take that stubbornness and change it to be more inclusive to our own? How could we, while still surviving all that onslaught and more? That’s the big question.

In regards to the larger alterhuman community, we’re blessed in the fact that it’s still such a young concept: it hasn’t quite yet had to face the “pathological anger” Religious Studies professor Joseph Laycock has described otherkin as bearing the brunt of. It’s still a community figuring itself out, with much of the anger you find related to it aimed at specific subsets of community within it, rather than at alterhumanity as a whole. And I think the fact that the alterhuman community is still metaphorically air-drying on a table means we have the opportunity to prevent anti-nuance and anti-complexity attitudes from taking hold in it. How we do that is another battle in itself-- I feel like the encouragement of inclusive dialogue, of open discussion intermingled with considerate or civil attitudes, within alterhuman-marketed spaces is a good starting point. I also think that the encouragement and legitimization of “alterhuman” as its own standalone term would be a positive force, where it functions as a broad, diverse identity label in addition to being an overarching, joining umbrella label. A label where someone doesn’t have to give details away of their identity if they don’t feel comfortable doing so, or shove themself into a box they may or may not actually feel they fit into. Something functionally similar to how many people use “queer,” if you will.

But that still leaves aside the issue of identity and terminological misuse, I am aware. And that is...an abstract thing to ward against, at absolute best. I think that the defining of our own spaces not only through our words but also through our actions would perhaps be the best thing we could do, realistically. The cultivation of websites, of group projects--books, zines, comics, pictures, forums, anything!--, of community-led conventions and meet-ups and howls and gatherings. Things which foster and build a community identity of sorts is the best defense against those who would try and distort that which makes us, us.

Zooming back in on the otherkin community, these answers change slightly, because--going back to the clay metaphor--the otherkin community has already metaphorically been glazed and baked (in the fires of hell). That history is cemented, the ways people have wronged it and continue to try and wrong it is cemented, the assumptions and attitudes are cemented.

With the otherkin community, I think that the burden of changing minds and pervasive attitudes falls a bit more onto the shoulders of “community leadership,” because of how the community functions and values both community experience and articulation. There’s a reason we don’t have a term comparable to “greymuzzle” in any of the other alterhuman communities, after all-- it’s a well-known and often aggravating quirk of the otherkin community, to hold certain individuals in such high esteem and put them on a pedestal because of their longevity and the things they’ve done and said. I hate to say that they have to set an example, but in the otherkin community that really is one of the best ways to advocate for change, or to push against those gatekeeping and grilling attitudes--by those who are largely well-respected putting forward ideas that have previously been mocked or disavowed, pushing debates on their legitimacy into community consciousness until it eventually trickles into community normalcy and foundation.

(This is, as you can imagine, a double-edged sword depending on how it’s used. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

That’s not to say that the ideas of creation and creativity with the goal of cultivating an inclusive community identity, like I suggested for the alterhuman community, is inapplicable to the otherkin community: but the otherkin community already has a long-term community identity, so it’d moreso be creation and creativity for the sake of formative inclusion. “History is always written by the winners” is a very, very literal phrase in its application to the otherkin community. Our community memory, for lack of a better way to put it, sucks from individual-to-individual. The future of the otherkin community, its eventual-history, is determined by its historians and creators of today: day-to-day arguments and discussions, unless deemed historically relevant by one archivist or another, disappear to the sands of time, and much more long-term recordings such as essays, websites, comics, etc., often go far beyond just its creators hands and get passed around and down for years, potentially. If you want a more nuanced and inclusive community, you have to dig up the clay for it, shovel by shovel, and bake it yourself, brick by brick, and eventually, with luck, or enough backing prestige, or just because those bricks are so astoundingly solid people can’t resist taking some to build their own foundations to nonhumanity, things will change. It will take time above all else, but once it’s there it will be impossible to remove, because people will just assume those bricks have always been there given enough years.

But those are just some of my thoughts and opinions on it. It’s an issue with so many layers of complexity to it, that there’s really no perfect answer out there that I can offer, and I know even what I’ve shared here has its flaws and drawbacks. I’m sure plenty of my followers also have additional thoughts on the subject, and I’d love to hear from other people what they think in the replies and reblogs.

(Also, Page is a very tired boi.)

Diversity in Fiction: Stephen King & Disabilities

Diversity is a hot topic in the writing industry right now, in both the traditional and self publishing spaces. If you’ve kept up with writing advice columns, or follow other writers on social media, you’ve heard the debates. There are arguments for and against people writing certain types of characters, rules around what certain characters should be or not be, discussions of stereotypes and so on.

While it can be a complex field to navigate, there’s a form of diversity I’ve found that’s overlooked, even by authors with plenty of LGBTQ representation and racially diverse casts. Though it’s a form of diversity that’s mentioned, it often seems to be tagged on towards the end.

To my mind, only one mainstream author has actually tackled this form of diversity in his work, and done so naturally - though Stephen King has taken flak for certain character portrayals, he remains the only major author to include disabilities in his stories and characters. I’m sure there are other writers tackling this overlooked form of diversity, but I can’t name them off the top of my head (which should be telling).

In at least three of Stephen King’s books I’ve encountered a character in a wheelchair. In two of these stories, the characters are major (and in one of the two, the character in the wheelchair is the protagonist).

In The Cycle of the Werewolf, Marty, a boy on the edge of his teens in a small town, attempts to discover who the local werewolf is. The original book is a novella, but the film adaptation, Silver Bullet, expands Marty’s role considerably, making him the hero of the piece. In addition to being one of my favourite films to watch at Halloween, Silver Bullet is also the only film I know where the protagonist has a significant disability: Marty is in a wheelchair.

It’s my opinion that the story treats Marty’s disability with nuance. While his mother worries that his disability could hurt him in life, his best friend and uncle, Uncle Red, believes in Marty - he doesn’t see Marty’s disability as ruining Marty’s life, but as something Marty can overcome. To him, there’s much more to Marty than “him not being able to walk,” and, while Marty’s disability plays an important role in the story, particularly in regards to his bond with his uncle, there are also plenty of instances where Marty functions as a character beyond his disability. 

Ultimately, Marty is a little boy trying to solve a supernatural murder; he goes through the typical pre-teen struggles of having a crush and disagreeing with his best friend; like any little brother, he quarrels with his big sister; and he has the same hopes as any kid, looking forward to seeing his uncle or being apart of the town’s local fair and fireworks show.

Silver Bullet offers a solid story about a character with a disability, showing that Marty can still be human or save the day despite an inability to walk. However, Stephen King includes disabilities in his other stories too. In It, many of the kids have disabilities of some kind. Ben has asthma, needing an inhaler, and I suspect that Richie may have ADHD or something similar. In The Stand, Stephen King even allows somebody who likely has Down Syndrome, or something similar, act in a heroic role (despite the disability, the character in question is able to spy on the “bad guys” before returning with important information, making him a crucial participant in the fight against evil). The Stand also features a character who is deaf - again, despite his condition, this character contributes greatly to the forming of a new society, even acting in a leadership role.

I’m not saying Stephen King is perfect, but he’s tackled the issue of disability in fiction in a way I haven’t seen other authors attempt. What’s more, he was including these characters in his work decades ago, before mainstream media was even focusing on the issue of diversity.

Whatever his faults, Stephen King remains ahead of other authors in portraying disabilities, whether physical or mental, and with a surge in rep for gay, trans, or Black characters, it may be time to focus on the overlooked issue of disabled characters in stories - it’s something for us to consider, and I have to thank Stephen King for exploring this form of diversity when nobody else was.

I read the recent post about divination, and now I have some serious doubts. Like did I misunderstood entirely what the whole divination thing canonically is? I’ve read books couple of times, seen movies once, but it’s been awhile. I’ve read a small library of fanfics (99% Dramione), so I am no way a HP canon-lore expert. But that post left genuinely puzzled, like how does it go canonically? Was Hermione basically right or not? I would be grateful, if someone could either correct or confirm, whether my understanding of HP canon is true or not, please! As I understood it, divination sort of is “real”, but in a quite nuanced way, and that Trelawney’s class didn’t (and probably couldn’t) teach “true divination”, and it was a waste of time for students wishing to learn that skill. Certain people simple are “true seers”, and this clairvoyance ability cannot be acquired or learned (at least in a controlled or widely understood way). It was heavily hinted at, that the talent is in-born, and possibly entirely hereditary, or at least considerably so (the reason for Trelawney’s job interview was that she was related to a famous seer). Although, it’s also implied that astromancy is an exception, and via astronomy even those who are not seers can foresee future events to some degree (though it seems there’s large qualitative difference between these predictions and those made by “true seers”. Astromancy seems to be predicting very generalized trends, instead of specific events or happenings of individual people). However, this is more an impression one gets by the gravitas and dignity granted to Firenze and centaurs contra Trelawney (I think, Firenze did make accurate predictions, but they were so board and vague, thus is not clear whether they were just educated guesses or true foresight). If I recall no true predictions are made by any other method (Trelawney taught and practiced at least cartomancy, tasseomancy, and crystallomancy. Maybe also chiromancy and some others, which I don’t remember atm). More than that, it seems that true prophecies are not produced via any method, but rather received uncontrollably and involuntarily without any conscious effort or will. All this leaves many open questions and a lot of room for quite different interpretations. The only seer we see in a great detail is Trelawney, and it’s not clear whether her circumstances were universally applicable or just particular to her. Like, do all true seers make their predictions by falling into an uncontrollable trance, or do some of those methods work for some other seers at least? Can this talent be cultivated or honed in any way? Can one manipulate circumstances for receiving these predictions? At least some portion of the wizarding world seems to believe, that divination is accessible to basically anybody, because the ministry approves teaching of it, and there’s learning material and curriculum beyond Trelawney. Though, the ministry seems to treat reading tealeaves different from true seers’ predictions, which are gathered and organized in by the department of mysteries, unlike Harry’s or Ron’s schoolwork. There’s also a faint possibility that some form of milder divination is possible (something like predicting whether you will have a good day at the work by reading tarot cards), and Trelawney was just incompetent at teaching it. Existence of true seers doesn’t exactly logically contradict existence of lesser divination by non-seers. Still, the view that the only real divination is by done true seers (and possibly astromancy) seems to be canonically most likely, or the one JKR tried to convey. These other forms of divinations and omens are just wizarding superstitions some believe, including at least partly the ministry itself (like do the wizengamot or ministers consult diviners before making decisions. Or is it taught simply due a political inertia, like some atavistic custom or tradition from the past. Or perhaps divination is not there to teach the art, but to screen for potential seers from the youth). I think, Hermione did acknowledge fairly early that there are true predictions, by true seers (at least I don’t think she ever objected when the whole chosen one prophecy was brought up, and she seemed to treat the affair with a total sincerity). Even if Trelawney was mostly a fraud, and her class a waste of time (my canonical understanding), and she was right in her criticism. It might not still be the real reason she quit the class, or it could’ve been at least only partial reason. If we imagine a different turn of events, and let’s say that Trelawney would’ve taken an instant liking to her, and praised her efforts and rewarded her with approval and good grades. Would’ve she dropped the course anyway, or rationalized herself believing truthiness and benefits of Trelawney’s class? Would her general opinion about divination change, if she was admired and accepted by her female peers, instead of ignored and shunned? As I interpret Hermione’s character, it’s impossible to give a good answer to that, because in the canonical version the truth about Trelawney and divination in general is also both socially and emotionally convenient to Hermione. Being a multidimensional character, it’s very hard to say, how she would act in different circumstances, or what are all factors, which possibly influence her behavior and choices. I think, it’s a fair characterization to say that she clearly prices truth and objectivity in knowledge, beyond simple social or emotional utility. She pursues knowledge and truth at least partly for her own curiosity, pleasure and integrity. In the other hand, it’s also true that she places a great importance and trust on authorities and she can be extremely authoritarian in knowledge (though her hierarchy is not exactly the official authority like the ministry, or the Daily Prophet, but this informal community of wizarding experts and academics who produce the books she loves, relies and trusts so much. And of course Dumbledore and Mcgonagall, and other exemplary Light side wizards and witches). She craves attention, praise and acceptance and recognition of not only authorities and the wider wizarding world, but also those around her. I don’t think, there’s plausible answer for that, if she had a serious internal conflict between those two different sides of her personality. Canonically there’s no conflict, and her course is relatively clear on the matter. I would rate both outcomes in the case of conflict equally likely. That she would’ve continued divination, if she was “good” at it, and also that she would’ve dropped it, because her academic integrity. There are situations in which, she socially and personally inconveniences herself greatly, like telling Mcgonagall about the Firebolt, but it’s not exactly comparable, because she also believed that Harry could’ve been in a mortal danger. Besides, even if there was exactly comparable situation canonically, people are not always consistent on their priorities, and they might sometimes act quite differently in almost exactly similar situations. Personally I am quite conflicted about JKR’s whole “Hermione is not like the other simpering girls”-bit. In most situations, when it raises its head, I find it quite infuriating (especially with her appearance). Often it is just a desperate and egotistical way to promote oneself, and denigrate feminine traits and behavior. In the other hand, I’ve witnessed this happening in my own life (not to myself, but to people around me). Not a gender dysphoria or anything, but more like tomboys and girls who simply were not interested in things almost all other girls in their age-group were, and they got heavily ostracized and bullied for that by majority of girls. I can understand that certain women genuinely feel like that, and kind of objectively are not like other girls (in good and ill), and have issues with female friendships and female peer-groups. It’s hard to say how common that is, but also I don’t like this idea of trying meme into reality that all women are automatically natural friends and allies with each other, and that the fiction should also reflect this. Or that only reason why this isn’t so, is some outdated beliefs or cultural practices, which can be easily remedied by simple education. Frankly, I don’t think it’s real to that extent, and trying to pretend it is, will lead to harmful outcomes for women, who will go in their lives trusting in it. Women do have shared interests as women, and there’s shared commonalities with other women, which are not shared by men. There’s kind of a sisterhood of mutual understanding and joy in friendships and kinship with other women as women. But in the other hand, there’s also a lot of rivalries and conflicts within the same sisterhood.    Still, the way she disparagingly frames Lavender’s and Parvati’s interest in a divination, as silly, superfluous and fake, is more in line with the former approach. It’s rather cheap jab towards astrology and women who enjoy or practice it. It’s hard to know even where to start with that, because women basically never base serious decisions in it. Mostly it provides them a framework and starting point to discuss different temperaments and personality types in people. Also, it’s just a little (harmless) excitement and bringing some enchantment back to the dreary and banal world and mundane routines most people suffer through. Nobody lost their house because of astrology, unlike men’s many astrologies, like cryptocurrency and “beating the markets” investment models and schemes. Besides, interestingly enough there’s some truth to astrology. unlike I-LOVE-SCIENCE midwit sceptic-bros believe :P

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Edit:

According to the HP WIKIA:

Divination is a subject taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It teaches methods of divining the future, or gathering insights into future events, through various rituals and tools. The magic taught in this class, as well as the ability to say prophetic things is a branch of magic referred to as "divination."

So basically, while yes you have to possess the ability to "see", you as a regular witch or wizard can learn certain skills for divining. (Divining is an actual thing; To divine is the discover something by guesswork or intuition).

The WIKIA also says:

Divination is an elective subject available beginning in a student's third year. Students study a myriad of ways to scry information about the future, including tea dregs, crystal balls, visions, and Astrology and horoscope charts. Other methods of divining the future include smoke patterns, dreams, tarot cards, and the interpretation of prophecies, though the latter is quite rare. Guides and textbooks allow students of Divination to discern or translate what observed symbols intend to mean.

It's like here in the real world, some people believe in these things, others don't. But I think in the magical world, I'll personally will be more likely to believe in these things. And they seem like something kids should be exposed to a bit.

I think the problem was with the teacher. She probably wasn't the best person to teach and introduce these ancient and maybe not so widely used methods to the children. She is seen in the books/movies as bit of a nutjob, but she made that predicition about Voldy and Harry and so Dumbledore hired her to keep close incase she made probably more prophecies. It's funny though, everyone laughs about this subject and mocks it's teacher, but they whole heartedly believe the prophecy because Dumbledore says he believes it. Harry and his friends even broke into the Ministry to find it. So they take his word, but completely disrespects the actual person who made the prophecy in the first place. Makes sense -_-.

Hermione, she is a muggleborn, so of course she immdiately goes with logic and reasoning and science. It must have been hard for her to learn that magic is real and learn about this new world (even if she was excited about it). The thing with other subjects is that the results are immediate. When she casts a spell, it works automatically, it does what she told it to do. When she makes a potion, it looks/smells they way the books said it would and after using it, she sees/feels the effects. Divination isn't like that, you cannot get immediate results. You have to wait years for some things to happen but it may not always since other factors can influence it and completely change it.

So even in this magical world, she still operates with logic and facts and immediate results, just like in the muggle world. That's why it was difficult for her to "get" divination. Add on a rather incompetant teacher, a stressful third year where she overloads herself; it makes sense for her to just call it bullshit and quit. Maybe if the teacher did indeed like her and gave her praises, she may have not left so easily; she gets praises in other subjects and yes it does seem like she craves it. Hermione is incredibly Type A!

JKR admitted to basically modelling Hermione as herself. So if you think that Hermione's character was unnecessarily mean to Lavender and Parvati, JKR wrote it that way, maybe because she herself feels that way about women/girls like that. Should she have done that? No. Many girls loved Hermione, many saw themselves as her. There isn’t many nerdy girls who save the day in movies and shows and books. So reading about Hermione being popular and smart and liked and having awesome friends and saving the world, defeating evil, was amazing! But as an adult, looking back on things, you realise that Hermione is very much a  "not like other girls" girl, and not in a good way. She is very condesending especially to other girls or people who are not as smart as her. And that isn't a good message to send to girls who relate to this character. And it tells you a lot about JKR herself (if her twitter didn't already)!

- Lisa

WHAT ARE INFORMATION SOURCES IN RELIGION?

Much has been said on the issue of information sources. Some of the people who have commented on this issue have sometimes been restricted by their knowledge and/or faith, thus they have vocalized different opinions.

According to the Islamic perspective, there are three types of information sources:

Knowledge obtained through the five senses or relating to these senses. These include, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. For example, something that is seen is there, and something that is felt through touching exists.

According to the trend which accepts only this source of information, anything beyond the perception of these senses cannot be a subject of knowledge. This positivist trend has lost its influence over recent decades; however it was widely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The second source of information is the “mind.” When the “mind” is mentioned, an unbiased decision-making entity, capable of evaluating matter within its pure form, and competent of making an objective decision is implied. The importance of a non-degenerate, unbiased, non-oppressed, functional mind is undeniable for information. In the modern world, rationalism is the representative of this tendency. Since its emergence, Rationalism has always advocated the “mind” as the only source of information. However, even rationalism is not sufficient to achieve true knowledge.

Another source of information is “authentic narration.” Authentic narration should be understood in two ways. Firstly, it is knowledge that has been transmitted by a number of different people and accepted as true. For example, a narration about a continent or a country to which one has never been is an authentic narration. To illustrate further, for a person who has never visited the continents of Australia or America, any accurate information, or first-hand information, obtained is of this type. It is possible that we may not have visited or seen these places, however millions of people live on these continents and hundreds of thousands of people visit these continents every year. The information gathered from these people is so powerful and trustworthy that anyone who has not seen these places cannot doubt their existence.

Secondly, authentic narration can also be considered to be that of “Divine Revelation.” In other words, this would consist of the Divine Books revealed to the messengers by God Almighty, where the revelations were brought by the Angel Gabriel (pbuh).

Human beings are not capable of seeing or hearing everything that exists, and thus they are not capable of knowing everything that exists. The mind cannot comprehend everything that exists. There are so many things that exist but which are not sensed through our senses or understood by our minds, or even, if the mind does understand them, can never be sensed or reached. Hence, the human being can only learn these facts through the teachings of a Divine Being whose knowledge, power, and will surround everything. We can only learn the things He knows to the extent that He teaches us in His Divine Books; in this way we become knowledgeable of those matters.

In order to discover the wonders of the universe and to achieve a better and more accurate knowledge with our five senses and mind, we must make evaluations under the light and wisdom of Divine revelations. Only when manipulated to work under these principles will science be able to accomplish its task of producing the fruit that it should.

Otherwise, partial falsification or incorrect interpretations of the Divine Books is inevitable. Moreover, if only the senses and experience will be the basis of information, then one will be forced to say “I do not believe in anything other than what I see, hear...” This is tantamount to rebelling against everything that the mind puts forward. In fact, if only sensory information is taken as the basis of knowledge, then people will be forced to search for compatibility between their deduced knowledge and the universe that is Created by God Almighty. In such a system, whatever facts agreed with their theorems would be true, anything else would be false. However, as God says in the Qur’an: “We did not take the human beings as witnesses to the creation of the Heavens and the Earth” (18:51). When the Divine revelation is not taken into consideration, every explanation is no more than a theorem or a guess.

Unfortunately, because only the first two types of sources were accepted, many Divine Revelations were rejected. With the progress of science, their validity has once again been proved. For example, the stages of an embryo in the mother’s womb have been well defined. When Omer Khayyam, who was an extreme rationalist, was asked about these verses, his response was to comment against the Qur’anic truth by commenting that the verses were not meant literally. Some other scholars thought that a person can only have faith in the “resurrection,” as it cannot be understood by the mind; however, The resurrection is like the spring that follows the winter. We do not have any actual sensory knowledge that this will happen, we know from observation and reasoning that the spring will come. Since some people only trust in the two types of sources, they had to twist what they read in the Divine Book, even the fundamentals of faith . For example, through the influence of philosophy, Farabi and Ibn-i Rusd, even though they were geniuses of their time, considered the Divine Revelations and the prophethood as being man-made concepts.

Some thought that philosophers were higher in status than the Messengers of God. The All-Knowing God was aware of how the Messengers would perform their duty of conveying the message; i.e. with an extraordinarily superior performance. This is why they were given the prophethood in advance; yet philosophers could not see this fine nuance. Moreover, it can be concluded that philosophers are only translating what Aristotle had earlier said to suit their time.

If the Islamic World is considered as a whole, it can be seen that not everybody fell into these traps. Many did not fall into these traps; they were very religious, and they were very influential in their times. Some of them with their work in sciences that led their fields of study for many centuries, even in the West, were still able to maintain their faith without experiencing any conflict and lived for the most part as religious, pious people.

In conclusion, it would be proper to say that all sources of information must be handled together if one is to achieve an end result. Discriminating between these information sources and taking them discretely will open up pitfalls for humanity. The same pitfalls will continue to open if the same mistakes are repeated. Humanity will have to say “True” to those things it claimed as “False” the day before. However, using the Divine Revelations as the foundations of knowledge, and surrounding and framing them with the information attained from the senses and mind is the only path that will lead us in a true direction.

Hi. I'm interested in joining your group, but I'm curious as to how you handle it when actors are accused/found guilty of various offenses to our community. I know that Chris Pratt has attended a homophobic church for years, and while there's no proof of him being homophobic just yet, that's something that makes a lot of marvel fans uncomfortable. Another such actor is Benedryl Cummerbund, who has proved time and time again that he's classist, ableist, and autistiphobic with his commentary 1/2

interviews. Lastly, I would like to address RDJ’s touchy history with both black and yellow face. How open is this group to banning problematic fc’s like the above when these histories come to light? 2/2

Hello,

Thanks for your ask.

We'd like to take this opportunity to clarify SOI's position on a number of issues since this follows on the heels of a similar discussion on Discord, and to provide further context to our response below.

First, we’d like to make SOI’s position on discrimination clear - we are an inclusive group, and we have a zero tolerance policy towards homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, and any other form of discrimination. We are also firmly against pedophilia and any form of exploitation of minors or other vulnerable persons. Members who are in breach of this will be asked to leave.

Second, how does this translate to FCs?

In order to address that, it is first important to understand why an FC should be banned. Since actors do not derive income from use of their FCs in an RP scenario, the banning of FCs is predominantly to take a stand within the RP community against discrimination, and to ensure a place that's comfortable for our members.

In order to understand how banning an FC equates to taking a stand, it is important to remember that banning an FC does not directly address issues of discrimination unless there is clear and incontrovertible proof that an actor is homophobic, transphobic, racist, etc - only then would an FC ban send a clear message that certain conduct is not tolerated.

We would also highlight another important principle of law that is overlooked in the modern day world - the law requires that people are innocent until proven guilty. This is why the legal process is rigorous and demands a clear process of submission of evidence, allowing both sides to present their side of matters, and for professionals to consider the issue. This is important because it is easy to launch allegations at people, including malicious ones, but an allegation itself is not proof of an offence.

This ask has assumed that these actors are problematic enough to warrant banning, which requires a more in-depth consideration of the specific issues and allegations concerning them.

Taking the example of Chris Pratt first - the allegation against him was made by one person, but this has essentially been taken as fact. In response, Pratt issued a public statement setting out his position, excerpts of which may be read here [x]

The article also lends further context to the original allegation.

In particular, Pratt's response stated, "We need less hate in this world, not more. I am a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgement of their fellow man." which reads as LGBTQ supportive.

To ban someone regardless of their personal beliefs, even where there is a clear statement in support of LGBTQ rights, does more damage than good.

Realistically, a vast majority of Christian churches are still on the record as being anti-LGBTQ. There are other religions which are or which have members that are anti-LGBTQ. If we start banning FCs on the basis of membership or affiliation with an organisation, taking this further – should we ban everyone who voted for Trump? Everyone who is a Republican? Everyone who is an in way shape or form associated with an organisation, state, or country that is shown to be intolerant?

As LGBT rights activists and advocates in the real world, a major problem that we face nowadays is witchhunting and policing from within the community. This disrupts the very work that advocates and allies are trying to do.

To use hearsay to wrongfully accuse someone is in itself extremely harmful - it alienates potential allies, it causes infighting, it requires time and effort to resolve - time and effort which is far better spent doing actual, concrete advocacy. Furthermore, it creates a wedge between us and fractures allies, which is the very effect that opponents are aiming to cause.

Furthermore, banning FCs is an all or nothing, zero sum game. There is no grey about it. There is no “this person is an ally but has made some mistakes" nuance to it. As such, bans come with a cost that needs to be considered in making a decision whether to utilise them.

For instance, in the case of RDJ, the issues of black face and yellow face are not issues of racism when taken in their broader context that goes beyond just "an actor played the role of a person of colour". In the first place, it was clear in both instances that he was playing a role within a role. Tropic Thunder was clearly stated to be a satire - a mockery at the ridiculousness of the very lengths that actors will go to in method acting. Furthermore, if there is harm (however unintended), the fault arguably lies with the scriptwriters, the producers, and the director rather than the actor. On the other hand, RDJ has done the LGB community a service by being active in gay roles even before this became mainstream. In this situation, and others like this, an FC ban not only doesn’t achieves nothing for persons of colour, it downplays and even destroys the good that he has done for the LGB community (and that is speaking as a person of colour personally).

Finally, in the case of Benedict Cumberbatch, many of the allegations about him are accusations that have erupted into full blown witchhunts. Some of those quotes, taken without further context, are troublesome. But again, taken within their intended context, they take on completely different meanings.

To truly progress from simple mudslinging to actually being an effective ally, it is necessary to move beyond just cherry picking lines from interview quotes. Unfortunately, far too many people are not willing to invest the time and research into understanding an issue before going straight to the accusation stage, making it difficult to decipher what is actually the truth.

Banning an FC is not the same as denying an actor a job or firing them. It does not hold them accountable. It does not send any message to them. It barely sends any message to the RP community when grey and remote and unproven allegations are pulled up to use against a person. Rather, it ends up in a mess where most if not all FCs are banned – which is a natural consequence when we use the ban stick against any tiny perceived slight.

Society itself is evolving and learning. Things that were tolerated ten years ago are not tolerable now. Is there transphobia in early Marvel films? Yes there is. Should we ban all the actors who appeared in them? Should we ban all Marvel films written by those teams? That wouldn’t help gender nonconforming people today. Actors too, are people, and they are learning along with the rest of us. In fact, we need to recognise that the entirety of Hollywood and perhaps the entire film industry globally is homophobic, transphobic, sexist and racist. Majority of the world out there is as such. Even within the ally community, allies still require time and opportunities to learn how to be better allies.

The solution, therefore, doesn’t lie in banning everyone and dismantling Hollywood. Speaking as a professional – the times that we see real change is when we sit down and engage in dialogue and education, not in drawing lines in the sand.

Are there FCs that we would ban? Yes – examples include 1) situations where there has been a conviction and no sign of change, 2) where there is clear evidence of e.g. homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism etc on public record in the actor’s own capacity (and not saying lines that are written by a script writer), and which are verifiable by independent sources, and again, where the actor has not provided a retraction or apology and/or 3) where is clear consensus between the players and the admin team that an actor is problematic and should not be tolerated. We would state for the record that the named examples in this ask do not fall within any of these categories.

In addition, we have asked, and continue to ask, that regardless of personal opinions, players be respectful of the persons they are talking about. Corruption of a person’s name in the context of making allegations about their personal character is disrespectful, because it is construed as mockery rather than a joke in good fun. It is entirely possible to have a civil discourse about the flaws of a person without resorting to mockery. Again, true change does not come through name calling and putting others down - it comes from raising up the ones who have been sidelined by society.

Finally, a personal appeal to persons reading this – if you are passionate about issues of civil and human rights, there are massive fires out there that need to be fought. The advocacy community is horribly overwhelmed and always in need of volunteers. You can make a real difference by getting involved.

we can’t criticize grad students for being influenced by toxic academia

//NOTE: This was originally posted to Wordpress on 05.22.2021//

It’s 9:26 am as I type this. I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday, and I spent all of Thursday night–and into the wee hours of Friday morning–with a low-grade fever and a splitting headache. Ibuprofen helped, but I was in a fog all day yesterday. I worked, but only on tasks that I could manage–nothing too rigorous, just training and reading. I feel better today but am still a little sore under my left arm. Needless to say, I’m thankful to be (almost) fully vaccinated and to be feeling better. It’s Saturday, and I was looking forward to crocheting all day. I had no intentions of writing anything because I didn’t have much to say.

I’m 8 minutes into a 20-minute Ask a Mortician video. All of her videos are incredibly fascinating, and she seems like a real doll, but this video is an exceptionally interesting one. I happened to check Facebook, the site where dreams go to die, and I came across a post by TPII responding to an article written by a then-first-year grad student, Andy Greenspon. It’s titled “9 things you should consider before embarking on a PhD” and it’s shared on Elsevier Connect. Of the article, TPII writes, “Gaslighting by a Harvard PhD candidate, masquerading as grad school advice. To write this in 2021…. ffs.”

I’m not linking either of these things because I don’t want some algorithm to trace them back to me, but I think that’s enough information for someone reading this blog to go find these, if they still exist.

About Greenspon’s article: the title pretty much gives the plot. It’s a first-year student’s take on the lessons they’ve learned during their first year of grad school. As they put it in the first paragraph, the point of this article is to “save you [the prospective grad student] from anguish and help you make better decisions as you embark on that path to a PhD.” The author is now a PhD candidate in the sciences, which tells you more about the way publishing works than possibly anything else–except that maybe the author has stuck with grad school despite the negative aspects of the lessons in this article.

I won’t rehash the contents of Greenspon’s article because a truly interested reader will go find it for themselves. In some sense, the article quite clearly functions as a time capsule reflecting a particular stage in this particular grad student’s educational trajectory. I’d be curious to see how they feel about some of the things they wrote. As with any advice, everything this author says needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If there are any prospective grad students reading this, my main advice–advice that I think anyone will agree with–is that you need to get as many opinions and as much advice as possible because one person’s opinion of, perspective on, or experience during grad school will differ considerably from that of another person. Some of Greenspon’s recommendations simply won’t work for certain people, and that’s okay. If you’re considering going to grad school, you’re already probably a good critical thinker; you know how to approach something critically and without embracing it wholesale, so you should have no problem determining, for instance, if taking a year off between undergrad and grad school is an option for you. It wasn’t for me, and I don’t think it would’ve changed much if it had been.

All that being said, I don’t actually think all that much of what Greenspon says is especially controversial–except for point #7 and point #9 (the second is the source of the TPII controversy, if you can call it that). So, though I don’t think every bit of advice in the article will be advice every read should follow, I do think it’s advice worth hearing and considering. If nothing else, it’s good to get another perspective.

Greenspon’s seventh point is the point I’d take issue with–or, maybe, ask to be a bit more nuanced–as someone who has a PhD in a humanities discipline. In my experience, a program’s reputation matters quite a bit. It might not matter as much as location in the sense that someone probably shouldn’t go to a school that is in a location where they know they will be miserable, but names do tend to matter in academia. Let me explain. I went to a PhD program in the middle of the Midwest because that program and the university housing it have very good reputations (good names). This university isn’t Harvard or Yale, which have better names, but there’s no way I would’ve gotten into an ivy. My institution’s small town was just that, a small town with small things to do. I didn’t even know where it was when I applied (and when I got in), but I knew it would be fine for at least five years. The town wasn’t as uninhabited and without entertainment as, say, Mars, but it was no Chicago or Boston or Manhattan. You had to get creative and make your own fun because the town didn’t just provide it for you. The trade-off, though, was that the school and the program had strong reputations, which brought opportunities (and entertainment) that made it worthwhile. As someone who didn’t continue on in academia in a traditional way, I’ve found that my institution’s name has been a talking point in interviews and other networking opportunities. Hell, my dad received comments on my university (it’s football team, maybe) because he was wearing a t-shirt from there while on vacation halfway across the country from the university. I’m not sure I so much disagree with Greenspon here as I think the way the point is phrased here needed to be refined a bit. That is, Greenspon’s point isn’t wrong, but the way it’s stated is a bit misleading because so much time is devoted to advising that the reader go somewhere fun. Maybe I’m misreading Greenspon, but it seems to me that Greenspon is, in actuality, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to a program’s full package. If that’s the case, then I agree with Greenspon that “the reputation of the individual department you are joining — and sometimes even the specific research group you work in — are . . . important.” Indeed, when I say that going somewhere with a “good name” matters, I’m speaking about both the university itself and the particular grad program. Both of those things constitute a “good name.” The decision to go to a particular PhD program is informed by a whole assortment of choices, including its reputation, its location, finances, and departmental culture, among other things. Within that list of decisions, reputation might rank lower on the list of important decisions than location; for someone else, it may rank higher. That’s normal. In any case, Greenspon is right to point out that these things need to be considered. I guess I just think the phrasing in this section could’ve been clearer.

So, on to the point that received TPII’s attention: point #9, “There are no real breaks.” According to TPII, this is “Gaslighting by a Harvard PhD candidate, masquerading as grad school advice.” Scrolling through the comments on this Facebook post, a lot of readers are calling out TPII’s use of the word “gaslighting.” It seems like TPII, whose comment on the article is remarkably limited for someone who made such a strong comment on this article, is taking issue with the last third of this point, where Greenspon advises that “you should have passion for the research you work on (most of the time), so you should be excited to think up new experiments or different ways to consider that data you have collected.” I’m not fond of the “you should” phrasing here, and I do think Greenspon sounds a bit naive here. Most grad students feel that passion, but passion can take different forms and evolve over time. Think of passion in a relationship: early on in a relationship, you may feel passion in the form of lust for your partner, but that lust may evolve into a different form of passion as time goes on, becoming a deep commitment or trust in that partner. By my fourth year of the PhD program, I still cared about my topic, but I wasn’t brimming with excitement at the newness of it; that passion and devotion had evolved with time.

Back to the “you should” of it all, though. The problem with this phrase is not, as the Facebook commenters point out, that it’s “gaslighting” readers. Calling this “gaslighting” undermines instances where people actually are gaslit. The reader isn’t being made to question their judgment, memory, or interpretation of their experiences. The reader isn’t being forced to turn to Greenspon for emotional support/validation after having had their own experiences delegitimized and called into question by deception, contradiction, etc. Rather, the problem with this type of phrasing is the way it proselytizes a particular “right way” of doing graduate school. The problem is that is may potentially imbue guilt in a reader who, at the time of reading this piece, doesn’t feel that passion. There are a million reasons why this might be the case, and I’d be shocked to learn that there’s even one grad student–Greenspon included–who didn’t, at some point in their education, feel less-than-passionate about their research. It happens because we’re humans and sometimes get burnt out when work on the same thing for a number of years. But from the perspective of taking this as it was intended, this argument is a testament to how early on Greenspon was indoctrinated into the grad school mentality that one must be passionate about and devoted to one’s topic. And frankly, as someone who completed a PhD program relatively recently, having interest in one’s topic makes grad school a lot more bearable, so in a lot of ways, I think Greenspon is right to emphasize it.

Do I think passion is necessary? No, but as I said, passion can take a lot of forms. So, again, we’re back to the point that maybe Greenspon’s language isn’t great; maybe an editor should’ve recommended a few revisions here, or maybe Greenspon should’ve written this as a fifth-year student rather than a first-year student. Whatever. But this isn’t gaslighting. And as at least one Facebook commenter pointed out, are we really going to criticize a graduate student for being a product of the culture in which they’re being indoctrinated rather than criticizing the culture itself? I’m not down with that. I may disagree with some of the words Greenspon uses or the ways Greenspon makes certain points, but I’m not a public page with 1,000s of followers calling out a grad student for sharing advice about how they’ve survived the first year of an incredibly difficult experience–an experience that is known to have produced a wide range of negative effects, including PTSD, CPTSD, depression, anxiety, and so on.

And if you think I’m being extreme here, look at the first two thirds of Greenspon’s ninth point. This is where Greenspon emphasizes the amount of time that a grad student is expected to devote to their studies and research, and what gets sacrificed in the process. This is about survival. Greenspon says,

In a stereotypical “9-to-5” job, when the workday is over or the weekend arrives, you can generally forget about your work. And a vacation provides an even longer respite. But in a PhD program, your schedule becomes “whenever you find time to get your work done.” You might be in the lab during regular work hours or you might be working until 10 p.m. or later to finish an experiment. And the only time you might have available to analyze data might be at 1 a.m. Expect to work during part of the weekend, too. Graduate students do go on vacations but might still have to do some data analysis or a literature search while away.

As a PhD student, it might be hard to stop thinking about the next step in an experiment or that data sitting on your computer or that paper you were meaning to start. While I imagine some students can bifurcate their mind between graduate school life and everything else, that’s quite hard for many of us to do. No matter what, my research lies somewhere in the back of my head. In short, your schedule is much more flexible as a PhD student, but as a result, you never truly take a break from your work.

The only thing that shocks me about these two paragraphs is that Greenspon might know of grad students who go on vacation. I’m absolutely shocked. Where are they going? Are these vacations actually part of conference travel or visits to family so they can attend funerals or weddings? I’m mostly being sarcastic because I know the answers to these questions. And anyone who has been a grad student in the last decade will know that everything Greenspon says here is true. Anyone who doesn’t see the truth here is sorely out of touch with what grad students across academia experience.

And that brings me to my other point about TPII–the book and the blog. They’re products of an earlier time of academia–the book especially.

The book was published in 2015, and by then its approach to grad students finding jobs was already getting tiresome.

Let me start by saying that I’m the target audience for this book. I graduated high school in 2008, the same year as the academic job market apocalypse. I started my MA program in 2012, and I started the second year of my PhD program in 2015. Between 2012 and 2015, I attended plenty of career workshops and lectures. By my second year of the PhD, I was already thinking extensively about what I’d do after the PhD, and I’d already been seeking out extra opportunities that would give me as many skills as possible.

By 2015, I had heard more than my fair share of the same relentless, cloying negativity that characterizes the tone of the TPII book. It was all the rage at that time. Professors considered themselves “cool” if they grumbled and groaned about how hard it was for grad students to find jobs. But for grad students, it was no longer “cool”; it was over-played, out-of-touch, and unproductive. It was negativity for the sake of negativity, and all it did was shatter dreams or serve as a brutal wake-up call without offering something else in its place. That negativity wasn’t matched with some opposite–some other place to invest one’s hope for the future.

At that time, and I’m assuming today as well, the “cool” professors were the ones who embraced students seeking alt-ac or non-ac opportunities, the ones who encouraged their students to develop other skills and seek other forms of knowledge. The coolest were the ones who helped their students do these things by brainstorming and researching opportunities with them, who found resources on campus that could help when the professors themselves didn’t have firsthand knowledge in certain areas, and who generally and genuinely supported students seeking careers outside of academic.

At a certain point (and I’d argue that this point came well before 2015), it was no longer ethical to advise that any grad student pursue an academic job without any other options. But this book was published in 2015, and it was still the “gold standard” for job market advising in 2019 and 2020. I’m sure it still is, but 2018/2019 was when my advisor handed me a copy of the book and said something about it helping me get a job.

It did help me, but probably not in the intended way. Tucked at the back of the book is a short chapter on “Leaving the Cult.” That’s what helped me–that’s the section where TPII isn’t outdated. That’s the section where the book doesn’t try to play the part of “cool, moody, negative aunt” and actually is the cool aunt. In 2015, that short chapter shouldn’t have been relegated to the last few pages of the book; it should’ve been expanded to at least half of the book’s length.

This revision would’ve fundamentally altered the function and purpose of the book, but I think that’s what would’ve made the book worthwhile in 2015 and after. It’s what would’ve made the book stand the test of time. Don’t get me wrong, the book is still made out to be the “gold standard,” but it isn’t actually serving its target demographic as well as it could because it’s so focused on finding them jobs in a market where those jobs simply don’t exist–or they don’t exist in the way the book suggests they do.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Back to my video.

XOXO, you know.

we can’t criticize grad students for being influenced by toxic academia

//NOTE: This was originally posted to Wordpress on 05.22.2021//

It’s 9:26 am as I type this. I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday, and I spent all of Thursday night–and into the wee hours of Friday morning–with a low-grade fever and a splitting headache. Ibuprofen helped, but I was in a fog all day yesterday. I worked, but only on tasks that I could manage–nothing too rigorous, just training and reading. I feel better today but am still a little sore under my left arm. Needless to say, I’m thankful to be (almost) fully vaccinated and to be feeling better. It’s Saturday, and I was looking forward to crocheting all day. I had no intentions of writing anything because I didn’t have much to say.

I’m 8 minutes into a 20-minute Ask a Mortician video. All of her videos are incredibly fascinating, and she seems like a real doll, but this video is an exceptionally interesting one. I happened to check Facebook, the site where dreams go to die, and I came across a post by TPII responding to an article written by a then-first-year grad student, Andy Greenspon. It’s titled “9 things you should consider before embarking on a PhD” and it’s shared on Elsevier Connect. Of the article, TPII writes, “Gaslighting by a Harvard PhD candidate, masquerading as grad school advice. To write this in 2021…. ffs.”

I’m not linking either of these things because I don’t want some algorithm to trace them back to me, but I think that’s enough information for someone reading this blog to go find these, if they still exist.

About Greenspon’s article: the title pretty much gives the plot. It’s a first-year student’s take on the lessons they’ve learned during their first year of grad school. As they put it in the first paragraph, the point of this article is to “save you [the prospective grad student] from anguish and help you make better decisions as you embark on that path to a PhD.” The author is now a PhD candidate in the sciences, which tells you more about the way publishing works than possibly anything else–except that maybe the author has stuck with grad school despite the negative aspects of the lessons in this article.

I won’t rehash the contents of Greenspon’s article because a truly interested reader will go find it for themselves. In some sense, the article quite clearly functions as a time capsule reflecting a particular stage in this particular grad student’s educational trajectory. I’d be curious to see how they feel about some of the things they wrote. As with any advice, everything this author says needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If there are any prospective grad students reading this, my main advice–advice that I think anyone will agree with–is that you need to get as many opinions and as much advice as possible because one person’s opinion of, perspective on, or experience during grad school will differ considerably from that of another person. Some of Greenspon’s recommendations simply won’t work for certain people, and that’s okay. If you’re considering going to grad school, you’re already probably a good critical thinker; you know how to approach something critically and without embracing it wholesale, so you should have no problem determining, for instance, if taking a year off between undergrad and grad school is an option for you. It wasn’t for me, and I don’t think it would’ve changed much if it had been.

All that being said, I don’t actually think all that much of what Greenspon says is especially controversial–except for point #7 and point #9 (the second is the source of the TPII controversy, if you can call it that). So, though I don’t think every bit of advice in the article will be advice every read should follow, I do think it’s advice worth hearing and considering. If nothing else, it’s good to get another perspective.

Greenspon’s seventh point is the point I’d take issue with–or, maybe, ask to be a bit more nuanced–as someone who has a PhD in a humanities discipline. In my experience, a program’s reputation matters quite a bit. It might not matter as much as location in the sense that someone probably shouldn’t go to a school that is in a location where they know they will be miserable, but names do tend to matter in academia. Let me explain. I went to a PhD program in the middle of the Midwest because that program and the university housing it have very good reputations (good names). This university isn’t Harvard or Yale, which have better names, but there’s no way I would’ve gotten into an ivy. My institution’s small town was just that, a small town with small things to do. I didn’t even know where it was when I applied (and when I got in), but I knew it would be fine for at least five years. The town wasn’t as uninhabited and without entertainment as, say, Mars, but it was no Chicago or Boston or Manhattan. You had to get creative and make your own fun because the town didn’t just provide it for you. The trade-off, though, was that the school and the program had strong reputations, which brought opportunities (and entertainment) that made it worthwhile. As someone who didn’t continue on in academia in a traditional way, I’ve found that my institution’s name has been a talking point in interviews and other networking opportunities. Hell, my dad received comments on my university (it’s football team, maybe) because he was wearing a t-shirt from there while on vacation halfway across the country from the university. I’m not sure I so much disagree with Greenspon here as I think the way the point is phrased here needed to be refined a bit. That is, Greenspon’s point isn’t wrong, but the way it’s stated is a bit misleading because so much time is devoted to advising that the reader go somewhere fun. Maybe I’m misreading Greenspon, but it seems to me that Greenspon is, in actuality, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to a program’s full package. If that’s the case, then I agree with Greenspon that “the reputation of the individual department you are joining — and sometimes even the specific research group you work in — are . . . important.” Indeed, when I say that going somewhere with a “good name” matters, I’m speaking about both the university itself and the particular grad program. Both of those things constitute a “good name.” The decision to go to a particular PhD program is informed by a whole assortment of choices, including its reputation, its location, finances, and departmental culture, among other things. Within that list of decisions, reputation might rank lower on the list of important decisions than location; for someone else, it may rank higher. That’s normal. In any case, Greenspon is right to point out that these things need to be considered. I guess I just think the phrasing in this section could’ve been clearer.

So, on to the point that received TPII’s attention: point #9, “There are no real breaks.” According to TPII, this is “Gaslighting by a Harvard PhD candidate, masquerading as grad school advice.” Scrolling through the comments on this Facebook post, a lot of readers are calling out TPII’s use of the word “gaslighting.” It seems like TPII, whose comment on the article is remarkably limited for someone who made such a strong comment on this article, is taking issue with the last third of this point, where Greenspon advises that “you should have passion for the research you work on (most of the time), so you should be excited to think up new experiments or different ways to consider that data you have collected.” I’m not fond of the “you should” phrasing here, and I do think Greenspon sounds a bit naive here. Most grad students feel that passion, but passion can take different forms and evolve over time. Think of passion in a relationship: early on in a relationship, you may feel passion in the form of lust for your partner, but that lust may evolve into a different form of passion as time goes on, becoming a deep commitment or trust in that partner. By my fourth year of the PhD program, I still cared about my topic, but I wasn’t brimming with excitement at the newness of it; that passion and devotion had evolved with time.

Back to the “you should” of it all, though. The problem with this phrase is not, as the Facebook commenters point out, that it’s “gaslighting” readers. Calling this “gaslighting” undermines instances where people actually are gaslit. The reader isn’t being made to question their judgment, memory, or interpretation of their experiences. The reader isn’t being forced to turn to Greenspon for emotional support/validation after having had their own experiences delegitimized and called into question by deception, contradiction, etc. Rather, the problem with this type of phrasing is the way it proselytizes a particular “right way” of doing graduate school. The problem is that is may potentially imbue guilt in a reader who, at the time of reading this piece, doesn’t feel that passion. There are a million reasons why this might be the case, and I’d be shocked to learn that there’s even one grad student–Greenspon included–who didn’t, at some point in their education, feel less-than-passionate about their research. It happens because we’re humans and sometimes get burnt out when work on the same thing for a number of years. But from the perspective of taking this as it was intended, this argument is a testament to how early on Greenspon was indoctrinated into the grad school mentality that one must be passionate about and devoted to one’s topic. And frankly, as someone who completed a PhD program relatively recently, having interest in one’s topic makes grad school a lot more bearable, so in a lot of ways, I think Greenspon is right to emphasize it.

Do I think passion is necessary? No, but as I said, passion can take a lot of forms. So, again, we’re back to the point that maybe Greenspon’s language isn’t great; maybe an editor should’ve recommended a few revisions here, or maybe Greenspon should’ve written this as a fifth-year student rather than a first-year student. Whatever. But this isn’t gaslighting. And as at least one Facebook commenter pointed out, are we really going to criticize a graduate student for being a product of the culture in which they’re being indoctrinated rather than criticizing the culture itself? I’m not down with that. I may disagree with some of the words Greenspon uses or the ways Greenspon makes certain points, but I’m not a public page with 1,000s of followers calling out a grad student for sharing advice about how they’ve survived the first year of an incredibly difficult experience–an experience that is known to have produced a wide range of negative effects, including PTSD, CPTSD, depression, anxiety, and so on.

And if you think I’m being extreme here, look at the first two thirds of Greenspon’s ninth point. This is where Greenspon emphasizes the amount of time that a grad student is expected to devote to their studies and research, and what gets sacrificed in the process. This is about survival. Greenspon says,

In a stereotypical “9-to-5” job, when the workday is over or the weekend arrives, you can generally forget about your work. And a vacation provides an even longer respite. But in a PhD program, your schedule becomes “whenever you find time to get your work done.” You might be in the lab during regular work hours or you might be working until 10 p.m. or later to finish an experiment. And the only time you might have available to analyze data might be at 1 a.m. Expect to work during part of the weekend, too. Graduate students do go on vacations but might still have to do some data analysis or a literature search while away.

As a PhD student, it might be hard to stop thinking about the next step in an experiment or that data sitting on your computer or that paper you were meaning to start. While I imagine some students can bifurcate their mind between graduate school life and everything else, that’s quite hard for many of us to do. No matter what, my research lies somewhere in the back of my head. In short, your schedule is much more flexible as a PhD student, but as a result, you never truly take a break from your work.

The only thing that shocks me about these two paragraphs is that Greenspon might know of grad students who go on vacation. I’m absolutely shocked. Where are they going? Are these vacations actually part of conference travel or visits to family so they can attend funerals or weddings? I’m mostly being sarcastic because I know the answers to these questions. And anyone who has been a grad student in the last decade will know that everything Greenspon says here is true. Anyone who doesn’t see the truth here is sorely out of touch with what grad students across academia experience.

And that brings me to my other point about TPII–the book and the blog. They’re products of an earlier time of academia–the book especially.

The book was published in 2015, and by then its approach to grad students finding jobs was already getting tiresome.

Let me start by saying that I’m the target audience for this book. I graduated high school in 2008, the same year as the academic job market apocalypse. I started my MA program in 2012, and I started the second year of my PhD program in 2015. Between 2012 and 2015, I attended plenty of career workshops and lectures. By my second year of the PhD, I was already thinking extensively about what I’d do after the PhD, and I’d already been seeking out extra opportunities that would give me as many skills as possible.

By 2015, I had heard more than my fair share of the same relentless, cloying negativity that characterizes the tone of the TPII book. It was all the rage at that time. Professors considered themselves “cool” if they grumbled and groaned about how hard it was for grad students to find jobs. But for grad students, it was no longer “cool”; it was over-played, out-of-touch, and unproductive. It was negativity for the sake of negativity, and all it did was shatter dreams or serve as a brutal wake-up call without offering something else in its place. That negativity wasn’t matched with some opposite–some other place to invest one’s hope for the future.

At that time, and I’m assuming today as well, the “cool” professors were the ones who embraced students seeking alt-ac or non-ac opportunities, the ones who encouraged their students to develop other skills and seek other forms of knowledge. The coolest were the ones who helped their students do these things by brainstorming and researching opportunities with them, who found resources on campus that could help when the professors themselves didn’t have firsthand knowledge in certain areas, and who generally and genuinely supported students seeking careers outside of academic.

At a certain point (and I’d argue that this point came well before 2015), it was no longer ethical to advise that any grad student pursue an academic job without any other options. But this book was published in 2015, and it was still the “gold standard” for job market advising in 2019 and 2020. I’m sure it still is, but 2018/2019 was when my advisor handed me a copy of the book and said something about it helping me get a job.

It did help me, but probably not in the intended way. Tucked at the back of the book is a short chapter on “Leaving the Cult.” That’s what helped me–that’s the section where TPII isn’t outdated. That’s the section where the book doesn’t try to play the part of “cool, moody, negative aunt” and actually is the cool aunt. In 2015, that short chapter shouldn’t have been relegated to the last few pages of the book; it should’ve been expanded to at least half of the book’s length.

This revision would’ve fundamentally altered the function and purpose of the book, but I think that’s what would’ve made the book worthwhile in 2015 and after. It’s what would’ve made the book stand the test of time. Don’t get me wrong, the book is still made out to be the “gold standard,” but it isn’t actually serving its target demographic as well as it could because it’s so focused on finding them jobs in a market where those jobs simply don’t exist–or they don’t exist in the way the book suggests they do.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Back to my video.

XOXO, you know.

Preparing for the wedding: where to start

The cherished words have already been said, the decision has been made, the main news has been learned by all relatives and friends. It’s time to start real action – to carry out what we dreamed about in the evenings together. The ideal picture in my head is about to come true, but it turned out that everything is not so simple. It’s easy not to go crazy after the engagement , the main thing is to take control of the situation from the very beginning. Simple tips will help you organize your first holiday planning time. Choose a seat or make a guest list first ? Looking for hairstyles or buying a dress? Think over what beauty treatments you need or discuss the menu? So that all actions do not get completely confused in the head, we have written where it is better to start today. Check our checklist and proceed.

Things to do for both of you

Organizing a wedding seems like a dream job as long as you only dream about it. The closer to direct planning, the more understanding – it will be in the real world, and not in a fairy tale, which means that many factors need to be taken into account. Before “hammering” all weekend in search of the perfect place for celebration, we advise you to create a “foundation” together for any subsequent action:

Decide exactly when you want the wedding. Want it as soon as possible? Excellent, so you need to be prepared for the fact that the celebration will be either rather modest (and that suits you!), Or rather expensive. Should the wedding be in the summer? Then, in order to do everything, it’s time to start organizing. No need to rush anywhere? So there is time to carefully plan your budget in order to afford the celebration “in grand style”. Do not forget that the world around you has not stopped and the most important day for you will be surrounded by other, often routine events. When will it be convenient to take a vacation? Are there any important projects at work? Check your calendar to make sure the holiday doesn’t coincide with other people’s birthdays.

Discuss your budget . 

It’s worth doing this before you think about the concept of a celebration. It is very important to understand how much money you are willing and able to spend on your wedding. This will save time and immediately discard options that do not work for you. So you can understand how many guests to count on, decide on the format of the site you will be looking for, and most importantly, protect yourself from unnecessary frustration. For example, no one will dream of a wedding on a warm island with the whole family and a crowd of friends, and as a result, they will be disappointed when it turns out that there is only enough money for plane tickets for so many people.

Listen to others.

You need to discuss the wedding not only among yourself – it would be nice to find out the opinion of your loved ones. Parents and best friends do not have to dictate their vision, but they can suggest or remind of something. It may turn out that your extravagant plans and ideas will not only be coldly greeted, but will seriously upset your grandfather, and your mother for 30 years hid that she dreams of her daughter standing under the aisle in her wedding dress. Even if you decide that the wedding will be “your” day, it is better to know and keep in mind all the nuances in advance.

Things just for you

When a wedding is a hypothetical something that you will someday encounter, it is easier to reason about it and make decisions. In order not to go crazy a month before the holiday, it is better to tune yourself in advance in the right way.

Yes, this moment has come! You can now legally view bridal magazines and bookmark. That’s where you need to start. In no case should you make a decision about a dress or hairstyle right away. Please be patient and flip, flip, flip. No kidding, the “perfect” dress, bought out of emotion in the first month of the engagement and long before the celebration itself, is likely to become the subject of frustration or will be replaced by another. Statistics don’t lie! You will be the main heroine of the evening, and your dress will be an integral part of the whole holiday, which means that the vision of the perfect outfit will be formed gradually, while the general concept of the event is being thought out.

Something related to appearance needs to be planned today. So, stop cutting your hair if you are considering a high hairstyle. The dress will be white, so you need to think about a smile. It’s too early to rush headlong into cleaning, but improving daily dental care is a completely working idea. Modern manufacturers have created everything you need for this. For example, Philips electric brushes are equipped with Sonicate technology, with which you can whiten teeth by 1-2 shades. Some models work with an application that will monitor the process and remind you if you miss a “session”. By the way, it will also help preserve the whiteness of your teeth after professional cleaning, which can be done a week or two before the celebration.

It is very important to be in shape on day X. No, this is not about going on a strict diet – this just cannot be done. But it is very important to find yourself an active hobby that will not waste your emotional resource, but, on the contrary, replenish it. It will become an outlet in the days when it will seem that everything has gone awry and will keep the nervous system intact until the celebration, and there is already a honeymoon soon!

How to tell your parents that you will have a wedding for your friends: 4 basic rules

Most parents see their children’s wedding as their own personal celebration. And it is not surprising that they want to tell the whole world about the celebration and invite about half of those to whom they told. How do you tell them that this is not part of your plans?

If you dream of a chamber wedding, and your parents are eager to invite all distant relatives, friends and colleagues, you will have a difficult conversation. Stick to these 4 rules so that it runs smoothly and no one is left offended.

Rule 1. Communicate it carefully.

Avoid negativity in your conversation. Parents will be upset anyway, so don’t start a conversation with a statement that they have no right to tell you. Tell us about the reasons for your decision: that you would like to share this moment only with those closest to you; that you have a limited budget; that the venue you chose for the wedding cannot accommodate 200 people. Be honest and considerate.

Rule 2. Let your parents suggest their own.

It’s up to you to decide, but still let your parents tell you how they see your wedding. If your budget is the only issue, your parents may be willing to offer financial assistance so you can invite more guests. But if it’s not about money, of course, you don’t have to agree.

Another compromise option is to invite only loved ones to the ceremony, and arrange a small brunch or a light buffet on another day for numerous relatives and friends of the parents.

Rule 3. Tell us how many guests your parents can invite.

Immediately stipulate how many people your parents can invite, whether it is zero or 10. Otherwise, later you cannot avoid another unpleasant conversation when they pass on a list of the names of 50 relatives who just need to be called to the celebration.

Rule 4. Remember that this is your wedding, not theirs.

You should not inform your parents about this at every opportunity, but you know that all decisions regarding your own celebration are made only by you and your loved one. And even if your mums and dads were counting on a large-scale reception for 150 people and were upset that everything would be wrong, on their wedding day they will certainly be happy and contented. By the way, at a dinner for 10 people, they will be able to see your happy faces all the time (not like in a huge hall) – this is another great argument in favor of a chamber celebration.

Courtesy: best marriage halls in Lahore

deep space - stage 2 (part 1)

So, if you’ve made it this far, you will have by now completed Stage 1 and all of the administrative processes that go with it, and have been given the all clear to proceed onto Stage 2, or as it’s better known the “home study”. This is where your adoption journey is likely to feel much more “real”, and you’ll notice the pace and intensity ramp up. This is such a huge area to explore that I thought I’d break it down in to 2 blogs – this blog will focus on what stage 2 actually is – how it’s conducted, what you can expect, and general top tips for getting the most from it to reach your end goal of becoming an approved prospective adopter. In the next blog, we’ll look at the specifics of the type of discussions and topics you will cover in Stage 2 with your social worker.

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Stage 2 is centred around the creation of a PAR (Prospective Adopter’s Report), a huuuuge document which is compiled in collaboration with your social worker (don’t worry, they are doing all the official stuff!) which is taken to the first of 2 official panels you will attend – approval panel. We’ll visit the panel of its own accord in a future blog, but this is the official process by which you will be rubber stamped to become an adopter, and move on to finding a match. The PAR acts as an in-depth guide to everything about you the panel may need to know to make a decision on how well-equipped you are to become an adoptive parent. It’s their road map to your lifestyle, your relationships, your likely parenting style, your life experiences, and your commitment to the process, so you (and your Stage 2 worker) will live and breathe the PAR for about 4 months (timeframe depending on a whole host of factors but this is the official guidance of how long you can expect it to take). It will also tell the panel what is unique about you (and your partner if applicable). What can you specifically bring to an adopted child’s life? The PAR also comes into its own in the matching stages so you shouldn’t think of this as a “tickbox” exercise. You may feel sceptically like it is when you begin, but by panel, and certainly by matching, you will realise how vital it is to getting you out there and helping you to find a child.

You can think of the PAR as a twin to another report, a CPR (you’ll get used to lots of mundane acronyms!). CPRs are children’s equivalent report – in theirs, similar to you, will be the story of their life to date, their time in care, their needs and the type of adopters sought for them, and what is known about their birth history, including medical and developmental information. When matching PARs and CPRs are compared by social workers to help “shortlist” you for a child and these documents are swapped between parties to consider potential matches. For this reason, they need to be incredibly thorough and leave no stone unturned.

To facilitate this process, you will typically meet with your stage 2 social worker (probably a different worker to stage 1) to have a series of in-depth discussions or interviews over the course of a few months. As a guide, you can expect to meet with them between 10 and 15 times for about 2-3 hours, as well as lots of frantic emailing and phone calls as approval panel looms. Agencies approach this differently; you may, like us, be asked to complete written reflective work before each discussion, and you expand on this in the conversation with your social worker, who will then lift crucial parts from your workbook to compile the PAR. This seems to be the most common way, but the alternative is that you will just have verbal discussions that your social worker will take notes of and type up themselves. You will get the opportunity to read and edit the final report, minus redacted information about your medical (for some reason prospective adopters aren’t allowed to view their medical part of the report!) and confidential references. In addition, the PAR will include any observations your social worker has made about you independently that are pertinent to your approval. You may or may not be asked to complete some e-learning modules also. Through the process, the nearest thing I can describe Stage 2 as is a hybrid of doing some kind of NVQ whilst undertaking intense counselling therapy! It’s no joke that so many adopters refer to the home study as better than therapy, and I promise you you will learn so much more about yourself and your psyche than you ever thought possible – for free I might add! It really is fascinating. You’ll get the chance to really reflect on the person you’ve become and what that may say about your parenting approach, your strengths and weaknesses, and how your life experiences inform your world view. You’ll also be encouraged to think about any learning that’s arisen from life’s key events.

Throughout Stage 2, you are also forming a view with the support of your social worker, about matching considerations: the type of child you feel you can parent. In a couple blog’s time, I’ll be sharing what this may involve and some ways you may wish to approach this. Whilst it’s almost certain your views on matching will evolve and become more specific as you progress through Stage 2, it’s never too early from this point to start thinking about it, as it’s a huge aspect of the process that strangely, doesn’t always get afforded as much time as it should, so I’d recommend checking out my blog on matching asap on beginning your home study and starting to have conversations with your partner (if applicable). Very occasionally, your agency may have a specific child in mind when assessing you. If this is the case, most won’t share this with you until after panel, as to not distract you from the process, although there are exceptions. And I certainly wouldn’t assume that this is the case (as we’ll come to, framing your expectations at matching stage is important). However, it is a stance some agencies take to be more proactive in matching, and there are certainly benefits to this approach. Some agencies will begin to share some profiles on their books with you towards the end of stage 2 – this may not be for actual matching, but to begin to get you ready for processing that kind of information.

Typically, you will meet in the home, although there may be occasions you’re asked to meet your social worker at their offices. It is also not unusual to have 1 appointment or so where a third-party joins to give an official “second opinion” on anything from your PAR, usually towards the end of the sessions. There are a couple of times throughout the process you will be asked (if you have a partner) to be interviewed separately. Please don’t worry – this isn’t to “catch you out” on anything and isn’t a test – there are just certain areas where it’s important social workers get a sense of you as individuals, which will become clear.

So now we have some of the practicalities out the way, here are my top tips for making it through:

·        Your stage 2 worker is a key relationship – this is the person you are entrusting to handle confidential and nuanced information about you, champion you as adopters, get you to panel efficiently, “hold” any worries or concerns, and maybe support you in finding your child. For this reason, you should feel that they “have your back”. It can take time to warm to some people, and you may not be paired with someone who is a natural “fit” for your personality. A lot of working with social workers through the journey is about learning to work within the parameters of the process and be adaptable to their requirements, despite this being inconvenient or infuriating at times! It’s also about demonstrating your ability to form lasting, professional relationships with people who may test you at times, and so your ability to work out any potential challenges with your social worker will be seen as symptomatic of your likelihood of rising to challenges that adoptive parenting may present. So do try your hardest to work with them. However, if for any reason worries about them are festering, don’t sit with this for too long. The earlier you tackle issues, or if necessary, request a change of worker, the easier it is to iron things out without causing complications. This all said, most people cannot praise their stage 2 worker enough. Ours was absolutely brilliant and we couldn’t have asked for someone more in tune with us.

·        I’ll repeat this so much, but honesty is always the best policy. It can be tempting to try to present your best self by hiding or minimising aspects of your life that you feel may get in the way of assessment. My experience is that actually most issues can be discussed and resolved, but it will be a problem if something problematic arises at a later date that you’ve been seen to purposely conceal. Social workers are trained to support you through and help you to overcome obstacles. They want you to succeed as much as you do, so as hard as it is, taking that leap of faith and presenting them with the reality and not the rose-tinted stance will pay dividends in the end. You want your PAR to represent who you really are, warts and all, so you find the best child for you. You won’t feel like it so many times during this process, but as a “survivor” (!) of it, I can tell you it really is true that no-one is expecting perfection. You are being held to a higher standard than the average parent, but that is for good reason – adoptive parenting is “parenting plus”. Parenting an adoptive child takes reserves of emotional energy that many people will never have to draw upon, so it’s vital there is a rigorous process. But try to believe me, this doesn’t mean you have to be flawless. They just want you to be a good-enough human!

·        Wearing your heart on your sleeve doesn’t come easy to everyone. I get it. The adoption process will require emotional openness. Your social worker will coach you through this, but it’s worth preparing for the fact you will be asked to be open and reflective about a host of quite personal issues that may feel uncomfortable and/or taboo. These will include details of your childhood, past and present relationships, any trauma you may have experienced and intimate subjects concerning things like infertility and even attitudes to sex. This is done with the goal of assessing your resilience, strengths, and perseverance, as well as understanding the world view you bring with you to parenting. Social workers will often tell you it’s the life experiences that you may attach shame or sadness to that actually turn out to be the things that really recommend your ability to be there for an adoptive child. The process mines for these for good reason and for a purpose. I found debriefs after appointments helped to shake off some of the emotional residue.

·        On a practical level, make things as easy as possible for yourself. If your company has an adoption policy, you’ll usually find an entitlement to up to 5 adoption appointments during work time. Not all will offer this but it’s becoming the general norm, so do take advantage of this where possible. If you’re lucky like I was to work for an employer who are flexible, you may want to talk to your manager about how you could adapt working days so that you don’t necessarily use annual leave. I appreciate the concerns some may have with discussing adoption with their manager early on, but I would advise wherever possible to have a discrete confidential chat about it with your boss if at all possible, so you can mutually decide on some of the logistics of how you’ll balance appointments with work, and any impact it may have on your work life. For me the impact was mostly having to juggle around appointments and for my manager to know that I may need to make use of my personal phone at certain times. Thankfully, my company is very big on flexible working and has modern policies, so I was able to use a combination of the allotted 5 appointments, flexible hours, some home working on days it made sense to be at home around an awkward appointment time, and then my agency being willing to come for evening appointments which I appreciate isn’t an option for all. You’d be surprised when you think creatively how possible it is to cram it all in though, and you will find a way.

·        It’s so much easier said than done, but something that helped me was having “adoption-free days”. As stage 2 wears on, you’re likely to find it increasingly intense and hard to wind down from in your spare time. You’ll probably be experiencing a mix of excitement and anxiety and researching anything and everything you can get your hands on, and while there’s a place for that, it can cause you to lose perspective, struggle to concentrate on other priorities, and more importantly, leave you feeling a little depleted of energy. It’s hard to step away as sometimes we can feel that the best way to feel in control of the journey is to think of nothing else, but trust me, you’re going to need times throughout stage 2 where you allow yourself time off. For me, this meant days where I tried to limit phone time (so I wasn’t endlessly googling things and posting/reading adoption forums incessantly), plan something fun and distracting that was in line with something just for me (this could be a hobby or interest I already had), having QT with my partner where we banned adoption talk, and physically just being kinder to myself by resting more and placing less expectations on myself. For someone who wanted children so much, I was then taken aback when I found myself craving a break from it all at times, but that’s just normal.

·        Strike a balance between preparation and protection. Some agencies will expect within stage 2 for you to start making your house ready for a child. One of the more bizarre aspects I found was that a lot of agencies (mine wasn’t as big on this) expect people to have their baby’s room ready and set up, as well as some other fixtures and fittings like stair gates, and childproofing etc before even reaching approval panel. The rationale for this was that it helps your readiness and evidences to panel you’ve taken practical steps, but it can feel very surreal. Agencies differ and mine was laid back, and in fact I actually resisted most impulses to shop or decorate until after approval panel because I felt superstitious. It’s really difficult because those of us adopting due to infertility can feel robbed of many of the aspects of parenthood that others get – the pregnancy, the visible sign that you’re expecting, the ability to go out and shop for little baby clothes and toys – and so it can be tempting to do this to make it all “real”. I had some real highs and lows during the matching stages, and I did learn that it can be very heart-breaking at times to be surrounded by too much baby stuff while you’re desperately waiting. It’s tough, but try to think about what you could cope to se every day if matching took, say 6 months. Do you feel comfortable to walk into a nursery and see stuffed toys and a wardrobe full of clothes or is this going to affect your wellbeing longer term? It’s a personal decision. For me, it felt much more positive to do many of these things once I was formally an approved adopter and when I had a real child to prepare for but each to their own.

·        Particularly in the matching stages (I’ll go into this in the separate blog), but throughout stage 2, it’s important not to say what you think the social workers want to hear, or the politically correct version, but what you truly feel inside is right for you. In the end, honesty will ensure that you are matched to the right child, with the highest likelihood of a successful placement, so that means getting brutally honest with yourself about what you feel you can take on, where you stand on certain sensitive issues, and your world views. For example, you may be asked if you feel you can parent a child with significant developmental needs. Or you may be asked how you would feel about parenting a child from a different religious or ethnic background to your own. Or maybe if you would be willing to take future siblings of an adopted child should the birth parents go on to have more pregnancies. There are lots of very legitimate, nuanced reasons why some matching criteria may not be suited to you, and you’ll need to be able to feel comfortable to be honest about this with your social worker. Its their job to be approachable so that you can be honest with them and once again, you do not have to be a perfect person open to all possibilities. You just need to be real, and yourself. Much more on this in an upcoming blog.

·        I joked earlier about stage 2 feeling like an NVQ – this wasn’t entirely said in jest! We got through mountains of written questions for our workbook prep, and it easily took us 2-3 hours each a week to complete. It’s worth knowing this in advance as I had no idea how in-depth some of our “homework” would be, so it can help to factor this into your diary. Looking back, I have always made myself too busy at the most ridiculous times. I was still scheduling in loads of meetups with friends and family around the process, and with hindsight a few nights “off” a week so I could focus on homework and then chill out would have been a saving grace. Choose a time you truly have the space and energy to be reflective, and where you can take the time you need.

·        Don’t be too prescriptive from the get-go – you’ll learn so much about yourself and the child that might be right for you through stage 2 that while I’d advocate for preparing some thoughts, it helps not to box yourself in too soon. A good example of this is the age range of children. You will typically be asked to choose category of age you would like to be approved for at panel. This can emerge during stage 2 and you don’t really need to decide until your PAR is formally submitted at the end. Our age bracket and lots of other matching considerations chopped and changed a lot so keep an open mind and utilise the process as the best teacher. What’s right for you will naturally emerge with the right coaching from your social worker. One caveat to this is that social workers will usually want a sense reasonably early on for whether you would like to adopt siblings or a single child as this does fundamentally change how you will be assessed and the types of conversations you need to have.

·        Keep the lines of communication open with your partner (if applicable) – a golden rule in adoption is if something’s a no for one of you, it should be a no for both. Are you on the same page? How do you feel about the issues you’ve discussed? Are you moving in the same direction? We tried to do regular check ins, and this helped us feel like we were a team rather than going through it as two individuals. I’d actually day the adoption process really brought us together as a couple – it’s the first time we had to “work” together for want of a better phrase and it helped our communication and sense of togetherness enormously. There will be times you are in different head spaces and that’s okay – sometimes this is just a case of processing a particularly difficult issue or challenge before arriving at a decision, but do keep talking.

·        Think about what you’re comfortable telling who, and when. My partner and I had a broken match which got to very late stages before breaking down (more of that in a later blog) and it was probably to this day the most heart-breaking experience of my life. I’m close with my family and friends, and naturally had wanted to share with them my journey but I look back now and would play it all so differently. Consider how wearing it might be to have to continually answer well-meaning questions about your progress and if you’ve been matched. Adoption is still quite a mystery to many, and people are naturally and understandably curious about it so with the best of intentions people often will ask quite invasive questions which can feel draining to keep repeating. Add that to any underlying grief you may be re-experiencing in relation to infertility…it’s a lot. You need to do what’s right for you. I certainly couldn’t have got through the process if I’d have not told a soul – I had a village of a support network that massively held me up in the most trying times, but I did also have times I really wish I didn’t have to keep re-living all of it with everybody. Whatever you decide – whether to share the whole roller-coaster with everybody – or to choose a select group you trust before trekking the wider world, try to do so consciously. It’s another cruelty of infertility (if this applies to you) that that preparation excitement that biological parents get to experience is a little tarnished by the anxiety of the process, but believe me, when you find your child, you’ll want to shout it from the rooftops and it’ll all be worth it. Equally, I would say that it will be incredibly isolating if you choose to not tell a soul. I think I would have found it impossible to try to keep all my plates spinning at work for example, if I hadn’t have been able to explain to my manager the likely impact, or to have met up with friends and them not know such a massive aspect of my life was changing, so make sure you have some close buddies beside you to walk with you too.

·        Finally, expect the process to bring up big feelings. There’s probably not a human out there who hasn’t experienced some form of grief, loss, bereavement, or trauma, and as I mentioned earlier, these times will be touched upon throughout in the context of understanding how you’ve come to be the person you are today. Some examples of issues you might need to discuss are infertility, infant loss, miscarriage, childhood traumas, health conditions, life challenges…and there will inevitably be days where this level of scrutiny and revisiting the past takes its toll. I’d bring you back to debriefing and self-care. I found it was the smallest things that helped me cope with this; little rituals I made for myself like a bath with a candle and a book, some alone time, or perhaps journaling any persistent feelings to get them out on to a page. Sometimes just getting a decent night’s sleep made all the difference.

So, I hope this has been helpful in preparing you for what to expect from stage 2 in a more general sense. Next blog, I’ll be taking you through the specific topics you are likely to discuss with your social worker for your PAR in your appointments, with prompts on some things it may be worth starting to reflect on already.

Until next time!

BlendKit 2017 Reading respose week5

Questions to Ponder  Chapter 502/04/2017

 ·         How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it? How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded?

Engaging with week 5 was, for me, one of the most interesting chapters. I use this reflective blogging to the chapter to engage with the many questions I have in delivering a new blended curriculum. After the webcast of week 4, I had a eureka moment, where the words; “Keep it simple, and start slowly, ” eased the ever building tension in my mind as I passed through the several MOOCs on blended learning and being a student of the process. It was useful in the sense that I can reflect that my mind has been as if a child let loose in a sweet shop! I have been so excite by all the different apps and researching how I could actually realise my dreams of what I wanted my class and teaching to be at university level. I have harbored a deep resentment at the system (teaching and education), since completing my doctoral studies in education and curriculum design. I struggled to make sense of the conflicting goals of university education in many countries and was mindful of how easy it would be to become a colonization agent. I chose to walk a path that allowed me to build curriculum in new ways that would enable learners to develop skills of inquiry and praxis in the art, craft and science of nursing. Yet, I had to fight daily with faculty, for no matter how much you read about the benefits of blended learning approaches, those in institutional power in my context were unable or unwilling to engage, support or champion the evolution of new teaching strategies. The lived experience of this, and its cost to me, hovers, over my creative thinking like a cloud. My curriculum was radical to tradition University faculty as being unscientific (healing Arts), unproven (Teaching Nurses to touch).I have read a lot on the issues confronting the blended learning domain. Understandably, find the main thrusts of most publications are positivist in overall flavor. The balanced configuration of this chapter was a sharp reminder to be the researcher I am and look for all the arguments. The links in the text open yet more doors and the stream of information continued to flow, answering many of my own questions on reliability and rigor. As stated in the text;

“it is the lived experiences of the students and teachers, their actual interactions, in which teaching and learning are made manifest. Limiting the scope of blended or online course quality to considerations of the designed environment results in a significant blind spot. This should be avoided”.

 The Online Course Evaluation Project (OCEP) was a scary document with just how far I have to go in developing in practice the ideas and designs studies, But what an achievement when I get there!!

 ·         With which of your trusted colleagues might you discuss effective teaching of blended learning courses? Is there someone you might ask to review your course materials prior to teaching your blended course? How will you make it easy for this colleague to provide helpful feedback?

Huuum, this is such a good a good set of questions that are very hard to give answers, for I simple do not know. I am working in a context that is not my culture, in a new space that has asked me to develop a new curriculum. No one that I can find at this point has done this before, which is not usual for me, as I get to pioneer new curricula. In my present context, having a trained teachers  is not deemed necessary and is highly problematic when I try and introduce educational issues, audit or advice that continued professional development should move beyond how to use a spreadsheet, PowerPoint or software and evolve a basic higher education teachers course. Then we can start building a professional curriculum. This is a highly sensitive situation. I always promised myself that, after all the bad, abusive, educationally corrupted practices I found in my career. One day, if I ever reached the position of Professor, I would never repeat what I experienced. As a Buddhist monk, we see all as teaching even the negative, and I have been blessed by some great teachings. Smile. Now, I am actually a Professor, it is time to put my promise into action. Slowly, simply, I will evolve this programme to the potential it has to join others in bringing about change in education and educational practices.

 ·         With which of your trusted colleagues might you discuss effective teaching of blended learning courses? Is there someone you might ask to review your course materials prior to teaching your blended course? How will you make it easy for this colleague to provide helpful feedback?

As above, this is highly problematic. I will start a circle group for any faculty wishing to explore living action research and blended learning. I will invite student participation in the group as they are very digitally literate more so that faculty as they were born to this technology. I will seek someone from the International community to join with as a critical friend, peer reviewer.

 ·         How are “quality” and “success” in blended learning operationally defined by those whose opinions matter to you? Has your institution adopted standards to guide formal/informal evaluation?

The answer is No, not yet as the institution is new. I am certain that I will introduce this idea at the appropriate meetings. There is some expression of an opinion as to the use of digital learning in the classroom. It could use some updating as to what blended learning actually is. This may help members change their minds to what is and is not teaching. It will be a slow process of educating through example, which will win the day rather than one of confrontation.

  Which articulations of quality from existing course standards and course review forms might prove helpful to you and your colleagues as you prepare to teach blended learning courses?

 This is the third course that I have done under MOOC and found it stimulating to do as a student. I fully agree with the ideas that the nuances of a course can make a huge difference. I have had both things I want to include in my design and some that I must make sure that I do not do. In terms of quality? It differs as quality judged is by the lived experience. The student sees an easy to flow through project as being of good quality as it was a good experience. A harder more challenge curriculum and structure would be seen as not so good even if the stricter course was highly developed and structured. Personal circumstances of resources, time and access also cloud the judgement, one thing that I feel is of critical importance between the success and failure of the quality issue is the response of staff to problems, posting and concerns. If staff say they will do something they have to actually do it. Because of my isolation in educational terms and language, The peer to peer conversations were very different in all the courses I have taken, one outstanding and easy, the second more harder to develop any connection, the third was a disaster. It brings home the point that no matter how well you are resourced, or how well structured your course is, simple conversations make or break the success of the whole project. Far from being removed from more work. The teacher has to work harder and develop more sensitive skills in communication. As the data collection methods are astounding, quick throw away responses when you are tired with immediate access to communications is highly damaging when you get it wrong. The next issue is more sensitive to the providers. If they focus on members on the course and it is in the thousands, how then can they maintain good communications? Staffing has to be an issue in the development of these projects? In my own context, it will be a major problem after the piloting has been assessed asking the question of economics, does blended learning give good value for its costs? That question can only be answered at the end of a four-year cycle.

The Unusual Grey Space of 13 Reasons Why: Boundary-Pushing Storytelling vs. Irresponsible Media

Everyone and their mom (actually, especially their mom) currently has an opinion on 13 Reasons Why, the new Netflix original series about a teenage girl’s suicide. Before her death, Hannah leaves behind a series of audio tapes that detail why she killed herself and who was to blame. It’s an inherently dark premise, and it just gets darker as you learn more and dig further into Hannah’s mind and experiences.

I binge watched this show in two days. I hit it hard. I was immediately impressed with it (and its soundtrack, but I won’t go into that here). I couldn’t look away from the dark story, and by the end, my immediate impression was that this show was impactful, meaningful, shocking, and important. The takeaway message for me was “We can do better. We’re not doing enough.” It felt like such a strong statement, and I was on board. Then came the opinion pieces from all over the globe.

There are two arguments going on here:

a) 13 Reasons Why is an intensely realistic portrayal of what teenagers are currently facing in American high schools. It portrays how mental health resources can be scarce or ill-equipped. How social media has changed everything for teens in the face of public shaming. How politics and money can take precedent over justice. Even how young females in crisis are often dismissed as being “over-dramatic.” The show is brave in not shying away from the brutal reality of teen suicide. It teaches teens that their actions have consequences and affect others in ways they may not realize. Teenage viewers, especially, have claimed the depiction of high school culture is devastatingly accurate.

b) 13 Reasons Why romanticizes and glamorizes suicide. It has serious potential of triggering copycats or inspiring the use of suicide as revenge. It’s irresponsible to depict horrific scenes such as Hannah’s suicide and Jessica’s rape in such detail, given that the show is marketed to teens and young adults.

As a person, I generally have opinions that swing harshly one way, but on this, I can see both sides. 13 Reasons Why is a very rare piece of work that straddles the line between boundary-pushing storytelling and irresponsible media. And it just so happens that I care deeply about both of these issues. I am deeply against censorship - I think art and media should be able to say whatever they want through any visuals, language, or method they want. But, as we’ve come to uncover in the last several decades of storytelling, media has direct correlation to how our culture develops and sees itself, and more so every day. From violent video games to dark films to a toxic social media feed, they all have real-life consequences. The way we portray marginalized groups has real-life consequences. We have to be cognizant of that. We don't have a choice.

So where does brutally realistic art turn into irresponsible media that has real potential of damaging our culture? It isn’t black and white. There is no fine line. There are dozens of nuances and considerations to look at here. So we should. We need to.

Media, especially television, is just going to get more complicated around these issues from here on out. The medium is becoming increasingly uncensored, thanks initially to HBO, and now Netflix, which has taken unprecedented reigns on artistic freedom. It’s led to the creation of some magnificent art, available for viewing at any time from any place. But with 13 Reasons Why, we’re beginning to see the dangers and concerns that can arise from such blatant artistic freedom in television, especially television that is thematically on par with R-rated movies and that children and teens can now access completely on their own.

The complications around Hannah’s death scene could easily be its own essay. Before I finished the series, I came across a headline that read, “Is Hannah Baker’s death scene the most disturbing depiction of suicide?” I figured the writer was probably hyperbolizing, but then I watched the scene. It’s irrefutably disturbing. You cannot describe the scene without using that word, and it’s very possible it is the most disturbing depiction of suicide on film. I flinched, covered my eyes, and cried for Hannah and her family. But is “disturbing” automatically cause for outrage? Or is “disturbing” an effective motivator to frighten young people out of choosing suicide themselves, as executive producer, Selena Gomez, claims it does? I’m not sure it’s either.

This is where artistic storytelling vs. real-life consequences really comes to a head. Because if we’re looking at this as a 13-hour movie, a fictional story, a purely narrative experience, there is also the issue of viewer investment and payoff. I realize that sounds a bit fucked up because we’re talking about a young girl’s death, but she is fictional, and more importantly, this series wouldn’t be structurally sound without a death scene, at the very least. While wading through the episodes, I thought about how much of a disservice it would be to the show, the viewers, and the character of Hannah Baker if her suicide was glossed over. We spent 13 hours learning about Hannah and why she was going to kill herself. We knew she was going to kill herself. When you look at the story in a vacuum (which most of us do as we binge-watch it in our bedrooms, entrenched in the story itself, not yet the ramifications of the story), it requires that end payoff, climax, grounding moment, whatever you want to call it.

The converse opinion is that this scene is unnecessarily graphic, triggering, and drawn-out. This article by an LCSW claims that Hannah’s death scene is literally “a tutorial on how to complete the act of ending your life.”

When one side claims something can take lives, and the other side claims it can save lives, it’s a pretty good indicator that we have no idea where we stand as a people on freely-accessible graphic material. And I don’t think it has anything to do with seemingly irreconcilable differences of our country like political party. I think it’s just comes down to the fact that technology, art, media, and our children themselves, are all growing faster than they have in any other generation. And until we figure it out, children and young adults are going to continue to feel confused when they see these kinds of graphic material. And they will be seeing more.

Every day, television is turning more and more into an art form, rather than a frivolous, mind-numbing, time-waster like our parents drilled into us. And artistic television comes with much more responsibility than mindless television. The same way you theoretically can put whatever you want in an art gallery, doesn’t mean you should. TV is taking on new formats we aren’t used to, like 13-hour movies you can watch in one sitting, and it’s asking more out of us in the process. I strongly believe the answer to these quandaries of responsibility, triggering material, and cultural acceptability lies in media literacy. Alongside English, math, science, and art, children and teens need to start being taught how to interpret what they’re seeing on their screens every day. They need to understand what’s real, what’s fake, what’s fictional, how it affects them, how it doesn’t affect them, what they can learn from what they’re seeing, and how to better choose what they want to see, rather than the current mentality that they need to see everything.

I am innately compelled to fight for artistic integrity, but I also care deeply about mental health, and the fact that so many licensed therapists and mental health professionals have spoken out against the show does speak volumes. As licensed therapist and YouTuber, Kati Morton, points out in her generally negative review, I agree that Netflix should have taken its many liberties to slip mental health resources into the storyline of 13 Reasons Why. It may have forced the writers to stray from the original text, but it could have saved face for the show and helped to paint it as a show that does indeed advocate for awareness and education of mental health issues as we trust that they originally aimed to do.

The reality is perhaps Selena Gomez & Team got exactly what they wanted with 13 Reasons Why: enough shock value to spark endless conversation, free advertising, and revenue from Netflix. But in this climate of polarization, we need to start acknowledging when something is grey, when we’re not sure how to proceed, when something has us divided on a topic as serious as teen suicide. The fact that so many of us can’t handle even thinking about the suicide of Hannah Baker, a fictional girl, could indicate deeper cultural issues surrounding shame and fear. But in a world where mental health concerns are becoming increasingly more prevalent, especially in adolescents, precautions also need to be prioritized. We can work on both. I hope the outcry to 13 Reasons Why doesn’t lead to widespread censorship, but I also hope with each of these debates, we get closer to a culture that creates and values responsible media, art, and all of its intersections.

Symposium: How to win the partisan gerrymandering cases

Daniel Tokaji is Associate Dean for Faculty and Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law.

No one said this would be easy. For decades, critics of partisan gerrymandering have been knocking on the U.S. Supreme Court’s door, seeking a ruling that extreme gerrymanders violate the U.S. Constitution. Even as the problem has worsened, the court has refused to open that door – though it hasn’t locked it shut either. Most recently, the Supreme Court denied relief last term in cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland. In the Wisconsin case (Gill v. Whitford), the court unanimously concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate their standing to assert that a Republican-drawn state legislative redistricting plan violated their right to vote. In the Maryland case (Benisek v. Lamone), the court affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction against a congressional redistricting plan drawn by Democrats.

Two partisan-gerrymandering cases are before the Supreme Court again this term. On March 26, the justices will hear arguments in challenges to North Carolina’s congressional redistricting plan (Rucho v. Common Cause) and Maryland’s congressional redistricting plan, which is back before the court (Lamone v. Benisek). Three-judge district courts granted relief in both cases. So there is hope. But after last term’s rulings and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy – long seen as a potential fifth vote to strike down partisan gerrymanders – there are reasons to doubt the plaintiffs’ chances in the Supreme Court.

If either of these challenges is to succeed, the plaintiffs will have to present the best argument that can be marshalled. That means pressing the claim that extreme partisan gerrymandering violates the First Amendment right of expressive association. Both the North Carolina and Maryland district courts accepted this idea, though a winning argument before the Supreme Court will look significantly different than either of the lower court opinions. In the remainder of this post, I offer three suggestions for the plaintiffs and their amici on the argument that is most likely to succeed.

Follow Justice Kagan’s lead

Although last term’s decision in Gill was unanimous in holding that the Wisconsin plaintiffs had failed to establish standing on their right-to-vote claim under the equal protection clause, four justices suggested an alternative legal theory. Justice Elena Kagan’s concurring opinion (joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor) offered a theory grounded in the First Amendment right of expressive association. Though the plaintiffs had made such an argument below, Kagan wrote that they “did not advance it with sufficient clarity or concreteness to make it a real part of their case.”

The concurring justices sketched out what a First Amendment association claim might look like – and how it would differ from the equal protection clause arguments that have been the focal point of partisan-gerrymandering litigation until now. As Kagan’s concurrence explained, representative democracy depends on citizens being able to “band together” with others to advance their shared political beliefs. The Supreme Court has long looked with disfavor on laws and practices that weaken a disfavored group’s ability to join together for this purpose. That includes political parties, ranging from major parties (i.e., Republicans and Democrats) to third parties and supporters of independent candidates.

Among the laws that the Supreme Court has struck down as violative of the First Amendment are restrictions on people joining with like-minded others through their votes. An example is Anderson v. Celebrezze, cited in Kagan’s concurrence. In Anderson, the court struck down Ohio’s restrictions on ballot access for third-party presidential candidates. Following previous cases like Williams v. Rhodes, another Ohio ballot-access case, the court held that the First Amendment right of association extends to state laws that limit access to the ballot, because elections are a critical forum for “expression of views on issues of the day, and a candidate serves as a rallying point for like-minded citizens.” On the other hand, the court recognized that some regulation of the electoral process is necessary, so not all restrictions imposed by the state are constitutionally suspect. Anderson prescribed a balancing test, under which the burdens on voting and association should be weighed against the state’s interest.

I was among a group of law professors who submitted an amicus brief in the Wisconsin case, explaining why extreme partisan gerrymanders violate the right of expressive association set forth in Anderson and other cases. Kagan’s concurring opinion develops this idea. She urges consideration of evidence outside the voting process itself – that is, evidence of effects on the disfavored party other than the defeat of their candidates in legislative elections. Citing Anderson, Kagan suggests that partisan gerrymandering may cause “difficulties fundraising, registering voters, attracting volunteers, generating support from independents, and recruiting candidates to run for office (not to mention eventually accomplishing their policy objectives).” These extra-electoral effects are among the burdens on expressive association that partisan gerrymandering may impose, and should be considered as a part of the balancing test.

The First Amendment association theory sketched out in Kagan’s concurrence presents the most promising basis for invalidating extreme partisan gerrymanders. First, the association theory is supported by over 50 years of Supreme Court precedent, which has understood voting and attendant political activities to be a form of association protected by the First Amendment. Holding that extreme redistricting also violates the right of association would be a logical and reasonable extension of this precedent. Second, it best captures the injury inflicted by partisan gerrymandering. That includes systemic injury inflicted on a group of people through the dilution of their votes, as well as effects on the disfavored party and its supporters outside the electoral process. Third, the right of association provides an appropriately nuanced legal standard. Anderson and its progeny require that the burdens imposed by partisan gerrymandering be weighed against the state’s legitimate interest. This avoids the trap of arguing that a redistricting plan is constitutionally suspect if there is any evidence of partisan intent. That argument is a nonstarter. There is probably some partisan motivation underlying virtually every redistricting plan. That’s a bridge too far for this court.

For those who remain unpersuaded by these arguments for pressing the First Amendment association theory, here is one more: Kagan and the three other justices who joined her concurrence suggested it. They and only they have the opportunity to talk with their colleagues at conferences. We should take these justices at their word about what arguments are most likely to persuade one or more of their colleagues.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Over the years, lawyers and legal scholars have engaged in lots of hand-wringing over the legal standard that should govern partisan-gerrymandering claims. That’s understandable, given the significant risk that the Supreme Court will declare partisan gerrymandering to be a nonjusticiable political question due to the absence of judicially discoverable and manageable standards. Four justices would have taken partisan gerrymandering claims off the table back in 2004, in Vieth v. Jubelirer, an equal protection challenge to Pennsylvania’s congressional redistricting plan.

As Kennedy suggested in his Vieth concurrence, the First Amendment right of association provides a constitutional standard that is both discoverable and manageable. Anderson and its progeny prescribe a balancing test, under which courts should first consider the “character and magnitude” of the burden on associational and voting rights. Next, it should consider the “precise interests” advanced by the state for the burden imposed, including not only their “legitimacy and strength” but the extent to which it is “necessary” to burden the rights of voters, candidates and parties. While emphasizing that there is no “litmus-paper test” and that “hard judgments” are necessary, the court said that “the State’s important regulatory interests are generally sufficient to justify reasonable, nondiscriminatory restrictions.” Under Anderson, courts should consider not only the magnitude of the injury, but also its character – and in particular, whether it discriminates against a particular group.

Courts have applied the Anderson balancing standard to a wide variety of election law cases over the years, including ones involving ballot access, write-in voting and primary systems. More recently, a majority of justices applied this standard in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, an unsuccessful 2008 challenge to Indiana’s voter ID law. Since then, lower courts have applied this balancing standard to various burdens on participation, including limits on early voting and the counting of provisional ballots. Courts have upheld some of these practices and invalidated others. But the standard has proven manageable, allowing courts to carefully review the evidence regarding both the burdens imposed by the law and the state’s legitimate justifications.

Such a standard is no less manageable in the context of partisan gerrymandering. To be sure, it is no bright-line rule. The reality is that partisan gerrymandering necessarily involves complicated questions about the effects of a redistricting plan on individual voters, parties and the system as a whole. Courts must also carefully consider the state’s legitimate reasons for drawing a plan that may have some discriminatory effects on the nondominant party – such as geographic features, preservation of communities and adherence to local government boundaries. To quote Anderson, there is no “litmus-paper test” that will distinguish extreme partisan gerrymanders from run-of-the-mill plans. Courts will have to consider a multitude of factors and exercise judgment, as they so often do in constitutional litigation.

That’s what the district court opinions in both the Wisconsin and Maryland cases try to do, although there are problems in how both courts characterize the First Amendment standard. The North Carolina opinion throws several First Amendment arguments up against the wall – viewpoint discrimination, speaker discrimination, retaliation and political association – evidently hoping that one of them will stick. It winds up adopting a three-part standard, cobbled together from these various lines of precedent, requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate (1) intent to burden supporters of the disfavored party, (2) an actual burden on their speech and association, and (3) a causal relation between the two. Although this captures the factors that courts should generally consider, the court would have been better off sticking with the balancing test prescribed by Anderson and its progeny.

The Maryland district court opinion has similar problems. In their previous trip to the Supreme Court, the Benisek plaintiffs argued that partisan gerrymandering should be considered a form of retaliation forbidden under the First Amendment. But retaliation is a poor fit for the injury effected by gerrymandering. Retaliation cases are backward-looking, tending to focus on the individualized harm done to someone because of perceived political beliefs or affiliations. Gerrymandering, by contrast, inflicts an injury that is systemic and forward-looking, denying a political group and its supporters a fair opportunity to compete for public support. Thankfully, the most recent district court opinion in the Maryland case subtly backs away from (without completely abandoning) the retaliation comparison. But it too endorses a three-part test, requiring (1) specific intent, (2) injury and (3) causation.

The plaintiffs and their amici are better off sticking with the tried-and-true First Amendment association standard set forth in Anderson and its progeny, with the refinement that Kagan suggested in Gill. They should focus on how partisan gerrymandering diminishes representation in legislative bodies and harms people who wish to associate with the disfavored party outside of elections.

Tell a story

This brings me to my third and most important point. If either the North Carolina or Maryland plaintiffs are to succeed, they will have to tell a compelling story about how the disfavored party and its members have actually been harmed by partisan gerrymandering. This requires a more granular presentation of the facts and law than we’ve seen before, what my colleague Ned Foley calls a “particularistic” approach.

Plaintiffs have done a great job of presenting empirical research on how gerrymandering systematically disadvantages the disfavored party. That’s especially true in the Wisconsin case last term and the North Carolina case this term. The record shows how partisan gerrymandering locks the dominant party in power while excluding the other major party, using multiple statistical measures that all point in the same direction.

I love a good scatterplot or S-curve as much as anyone. And this type of evidence will be necessary for plaintiffs to prevail. But it won’t be sufficient. This reality is best captured in Chief Justice John Roberts’ reference to empirical research as “sociological gobbledygook” at oral argument last term. This remark is unfair. Even so, it captures the reality that judges aren’t social scientists and can’t be expected to rely exclusively on statistical evidence of partisan disadvantage as a basis for striking down a district or plan.

What every great lawyer knows how to tell – and every judge loves to hear – is a good story. Missing from prior cases is a compelling narrative showing how real people are hurt by gerrymandered districts. This is one of the lessons from the unanimous opinion in Gill. The Supreme Court’s opinion emphasized the “individualized and personal” nature of the right to vote, insisting that plaintiffs show a “district specific” injury for standing. The evidence of statewide injury to the nondominant party and its voters wasn’t enough. I disagree with this ruling, because I think partisan gerrymandering by its nature inflicts a systemic rather than atomistic harm. And it’s still possible that the court could accept a statewide association claim, without proof of individualized harm to identified people. But such a ruling is unlikely.

If the plaintiffs in either the North Carolina or Maryland case hope to win, they will have to tell a more compelling story than they have so far. That requires evidence of real people who have been hurt – for example, by their communities being cracked or packed by redistricting. An example is the story that in 2006 moved the court to action – albeit on a different kind of claim – in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry. The court heard the story of Latino voters in Laredo, Texas, who were becoming more politically active and on the cusp of finally electing their candidate of choice before the mid-decade gerrymandering engineered by Tom DeLay stole away that opportunity.

The best stories have good guys as well as bad guys. So in addition to showing how the dominant party drew the plans to help themselves, the plaintiffs must show how real-life voters of the other major party were hurt. An example is how students at North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black institution, were split into two districts by that state’s congressional districting plan. One student explains here how “my vote and those of my peers were diluted and our ability to elect the representatives we chose was undermined” by the way these districts were drawn. The plaintiffs should also show how gerrymandered districts have stymied political organizing by the disfavored party and would-be members. The lower-court opinions in both the North Carolina and Maryland cases describe this evidence in general terms, but a more particularistic – and more humanized – account will be essential if plaintiffs are to prevail in either case.

Winning a partisan-gerrymandering claim has never been easy. But to have any realistic hope of prevailing, the plaintiffs and their amici will have to present the facts and law in a way that’s different from the lower-court opinions. That means following Kagan’s lead on seeing partisan gerrymandering as a violation of associational rights, applying the time-tested balancing test of Anderson and its progeny, and telling a story of how real human beings are harmed by gerrymandered districts.

* * *

Past cases linked to in this post:

Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780 (1983) Benisek v. Lamone, No. 17-333 (U.S. Jun. 18, 2018) Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008) Gill v. Whitford, No. 16-1161 (U.S. Jun. 18, 2018) League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 457 F. Supp. 2d 716 (E.D. Tex. 2006) Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267 (2004) Williams v. Rhodes, 393 U.S. 23 (1968)

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BASICS OF ISLAM :Positivism and Rationalism

Q: What Should be Our Attitude Against Ideas Like Positivism and Rationalism Which are Accepted as The Sources of Information in The West? To What Degree do they Reflect the Truth?

Much has been said on the issue of information sources. Some of the people who have commented on this issue have sometimes been restricted by their knowledge and/or faith, thus they have vocalized different opinions.

According to the Islamic perspective, there are three types of information sources:

Knowledge obtained through the five senses or relating to these senses. 

These include, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. For example, something that is seen is there, and something that is felt through touching exists.

According to the trend which accepts only this source of information, anything beyond the perception of these senses cannot be a subject of knowledge. This positivist trend has lost its influence over recent decades; however it was widely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The second source of information is the mind. 

When the "mind" is mentioned, an unbiased decision making entity, capable of evaluating matter within its pure form, and competent of making an objective decision is implied. The importance of a non degenerate, unbiased, non oppressed, functional mind is undeniable for information. In the modern world, rationalism is the representative of this tendency. Since its emergence, Rationalism has always advocated the "mind" as the only source of information. However, even rationalism is not sufficient to achieve true knowledge.

Another source of information is "authentic narration." 

Authentic narration should be understood in two ways. 

Firstly, it is knowledge that has been transmitted by a number of different people and accepted as true. For example, a narration about a continent or a country to which one has never been is an authentic narration. To illustrate further, for a person who has never visited the continents of Australia or America, any accurate information, or first hand information, obtained is of this type. It is possible that we may not have visited or seen these places, however millions of people live on these continents and hundreds of thousands of people visit these continents every year. The information gathered from these people is so powerful and trustworthy that anyone who has not seen these places cannot doubt their existence.

Secondly, authentic narration can also be considered to be that of "Divine Revelation." In other words, this would consist of the Divine Books revealed to the messengers by God Almighty, where the revelations were brought by the Archangel Gabriel.

In order to discover the wonders of the universe and to achieve a better and more accurate knowledge with our five senses and mind, we must make evaluations under the light and wisdom of Divine revelations. Only when manipulated to work under these principles will science be able to accomplish its task of producing the fruit that it should.

Human beings are not capable of seeing or hearing everything that exists, and thus they are not capable of knowing everything that exists. The mind cannot comprehend everything that exists. There are so many things that exist but which are not sensed through our senses or understood by our minds, or even, if the mind does understand them, can never be sensed or reached. Hence, the human being can only learn these facts through the teachings of a Divine Being whose knowledge, power, and will surround everything. We can only learn the things He knows to the extent that He teaches us in His Divine Books; in this way we become knowledgeable of those matters.

Otherwise, partial falsification or incorrect interpretations of the Divine Books is inevitable. Moreover, if only the senses and experience will be the basis of information, then one will be forced to say "I do not believe in anything other than what I see, hear. . ." This is tantamount to rebelling against everything that the mind puts forward. In fact, if only sensory information is taken as the basis of knowledge, then people will be forced to search for compatibility between their deduced knowledge and the universe that is created by God Almighty. In such a system, whatever facts agreed with their theorems would be true, anything else would be false. However, as God says in the Qur'an: 

We did not take the human beings as witnesses to the creation of the Heavens and the Earth (Kahf 18:51). 

When the Divine revelation is not taken into consideration, every explanation is no more than a theorem or a guess.

Unfortunately, because only the first two types of sources were accepted, many Divine Revelations were rejected. With the progress of science, their validity has once again been proved. For example, the stages of an embryo in the mother's womb have been well defined. When Omar Khayyam, who was an extreme rationalist, was asked about these verses, his response was to comment against the Qur'anic truth by commenting that the verses were not meant literally. 

Some thought that philosophers were higher in status than the Messengers of God. The All Knowing God was aware of how the Messengers would perform their duty of conveying the message; i.e. with an extraordinarily superior performance. This is why they were given the prophethood in advance; yet philosophers could not see this fine nuance. Moreover, it can be concluded that philosophers are only translating what Aristotle had earlier said to suit their time.

If the Islamic World is considered as a whole, it can be seen that not everybody fell into these traps. People like Molla Husrev and Khwarizmi, with their work in sciences that led their fields of study for many centuries, even in the West, were still able to maintain their faith without experiencing any conflict and lived for the most part as religious, pious people.

In conclusion, it would be proper to say that all sources of information must be handled together if one is to achieve an end result. Discriminating between these information sources and taking them discretely will open up pitfalls for humanity. The same pitfalls will continue to open if the same mistakes are repeated. Humanity will have to say "True" to those things it claimed as "False" the day before. However, using the Divine Revelations as the foundations of knowledge, and surrounding and framing them with the information attained from the senses and mind is the only path that will lead us in a true direction.

Five Reasons to Be Bullish About Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Future of Crypto

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/05/five-reasons-to-be-bullish-about-bitcoin-ethereum-and-the-future-of-crypto/

Five Reasons to Be Bullish About Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Future of Crypto

The cryptocurrency market recently experienced a bearish run driven by a range of factors including Mt Gox “Tokyo Whale” sell-offs, delayed institutional investor participation, and regulatory pressure. With the crypto market dropping 18% since May 20, investor sentiment has been wavering over the past few weeks. There are, however, many reasons to remain bullish on crypto outside of chart action.

1. Adoption Rates Are Growing Rapidly

Cryptocurrency adoption is currently accelerating at a high rate. The total amount of active Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets have dramatically increased — data available from BitInfoCharts assembled by Chris McCann indicates that the total number of active Bitcoin wallets is steadily increasing at over $24 million:

Similarly, the total number of Ethereum addresses is growing rapidly, tripling since the beginning of 2017:

A recent survey conducted by Finder reveals that over 16.3 million Americans currently own some form of cryptocurrency, over 8% of the total US population. A similar report published by Lendingblock in March 2018 found that 55% of survey respondents believe that cryptocurrency purchases will be widely available in retail stores within the next 7 years.

One of the primary barriers to mainstream consumer adoption is arguably the separation between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies — crypto debit cards provide a solution to this issue, but have become less widely-used subsequent to the early 2018 culling of Visa-backed crypto cards.

Cards that facilitate crypto-to-fiat payments, however, are making a comeback — independent of solutions such as Wirex and the upcoming Crypterium project, there are currently 17 different crypto debit cards allowing real-world crypto purchases.

2. Scalability Solutions Nearing Completion

Scalability remains a pivotal issue in the development of cryptocurrencies — the current transaction capacity of Ethereum and Bitcoin is still far from payment platforms such as Visa or PayPal. Scaling solutions for both networks, however, are close to implementation, opening the door to widespread adoption and large-scale distributed apps.

Related Story: Bitcoin Lightning Network Reaches Record Node Count

The Lightning Network solution, which is set to dramatically improve the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network, is currently growing steadily.

The total Lightning Network node count has increased from 29 in January 2018 to over 1,500 active nodes, boasting a higher node count than Bitcoin Cash.

Lightning Network node count has exceeded Bcash node count. In addition 70%+ of the BCash nodes are hosted on a “Hangzhou Alibaba” servers which you can check here: https://t.co/g8HC8bAkIX https://t.co/iIUyGaftvQ pic.twitter.com/g1tmAMkXPz

— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) March 27, 2018

Related Story: Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin: Sharding is Coming

Ethereum’s scaling solution has been under development for several years now and is beginning to yield results. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently revealed a minimal sharding protocol initiative that allows developers to create and test infrastructure using compounds of the sharding solution.

The recent submission of Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP) 1011, or Hybrid Casper FFG, demonstrates that a significant improvement to Ethereum’s transaction capacity is on the horizon.

3. Enterprise-Scale Adoption is Accelerating

The underlying technology that drives cryptocurrencies is beginning to capture the attention of enterprise organizations. Major Fortune 500 companies are now investing heavily in blockchain technology — Outlier Ventures, a UK-based venture firm, maintains an active corporate research tracker that lists over 280 companies that are currently conducting intensive research into distributed ledger technology, including Boeing, IBM, Amazon, and Western Union.

Related Story: EEA Aims to Standardize Blockchain Implementation With New Enterprise Ethereum Architecture Stack

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance has recently released a new Enterprise Ethereum Architecture stack that standardizes the specifications of enterprise Ethereum solutions, streamlining the process of creating private Ethereum blockchains. Similarly, Amazon AWS has launched a new “instant blockchain” service that allows enterprise organizations to quickly deploy blockchain networks on the AWS service.

The implementation of blockchain solutions within large-scale enterprise organizations is set to not only dramatically enhance operational efficiency but also serves to legitimize the use of blockchain technology across multiple industries.

4. Nuanced Regulation is Coming

The regulatory debate that surrounds cryptocurrencies is a frequent cause of volatility within the cryptocurrency market — regulatory authorities around are still scrambling to establish a functional framework for the regulation of cryptocurrencies despite ongoing research, G20 Summits, and closed-door meetings.

Related Story: Cryptocurrency Market Bounces Back on Positive G20 Watchdog Statements

The overall international regulatory stance on cryptocurrencies, however, appears to be developing into a nuanced, accommodating perspective that takes the highly variable nature of digital assets into account. The US SEC has recently hinted toward a clear separation between tokens sold during initial coin offerings and those that function strictly as utility tokens, and appears to be considering the exemption of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum from strict regulatory action.

More recently, the US DOJ has taken an active role in the investigation of price manipulation in cryptocurrency markets, while countries such as South Korea move to legalize and regulate initial coin offerings. With the St. Louis Federal Reserve likening Bitcoin to “regular money” and NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman stating that the exchange would consider adding cryptocurrencies alongside traditional securities, it’s clear that positive regulatory action is just around the corner.

5. The ICO Paradigm Shift

The initial coin offering ecosystem has become a double-edged sword for cryptocurrencies in general, simultaneously increasing overall awareness of cryptocurrencies and the digital asset market while providing a platform for fraudsters in what is a largely unregulated environment.

Related Story: Reactions to the Alarming Frequency of ICO Scams

Recent research signifies that almost 20% of all ICOs are scams, demonstrating the need for reform within the ICO market.

UK-based investment banking company GP Bullhound predicts a 2018 shift in the ICO model in a recent report entitled “Token frenzy, the fuel of the blockchain,” foreseeing the creation of the first “corporate ICO” that will launch as an alliance of multiple corporate entities.

In order to comply with SEC ICO guidelines, many initial coin offerings are likely to seek issuance as securities, which will catalyze the entrance of venture capital and institutional investors at the pre-ICO stage via accelerators or incubators.

It’s highly likely that the “new normal” of token distribution will focus strictly on the establishment of network effects, shifting to airdrops in order to achieve immediate impact and rapid growth.

Alternatively, the creation of “tokenized asset offerings” that follow guidelines developed by SEC, FINRA and CFTC could create a hybridized token that functions as a security while maintaining derivative utility function, allowing the ICO industry to mature.

Crypto Market Matures

With crypto adoption rates growing, enterprise organizations capitalizing on the blockchain, a possible solution to the scalability problem, regulation for a safer and more efficient ICO ecosystem— the crypto market is far from bearish.

Commitment to Transparency: The author of this article is invested and/or has an interest in one or more assets discussed in this post. CryptoSlate does not endorse any project or asset that may be mentioned or linked to in this article. Please take that into consideration when evaluating the content within this article.

Disclaimer: Our writers’ opinions are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion of CryptoSlate. None of the information you read on CryptoSlate should be taken as investment advice, nor does CryptoSlate endorse any project that may be mentioned or linked to in this article. Buying and trading cryptocurrencies should be considered a high-risk activity. Please do your own due diligence before taking any action related to content within this article. Finally, CryptoSlate takes no responsibility should you lose money trading cryptocurrencies.

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Is Your AI Right For You?

If the recent, very public war of words between two of the world’s most prominent technology CEOs, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, has taught us anything it’s that the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) is still a highly contentious one. For the uninitiated, Musk made headlines recently when he publicly stated that AI, in his opinion, posed a significant threat and was in dire need of regulation, going so far as to call it a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilisation”. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, called such warnings “pretty irresponsible”, choosing instead to accentuate the benefits AI could provide in saving lives through medical diagnoses and driverless cars.

Clearly, it’s very easy for technologists to put AI into a box and wax lyrical about their vision of how it will impact humanity. The truth is that it’s a far more nuanced debate than you might think – largely because AI can come in a number of shapes and sizes. To be clear, the form that is being discussed by Musk and Zuckerberg relates primarily to artificial intelligence that has ‘human level’ cognitive skills, otherwise known as AGI or ‘Artificial General Intelligence’, which despite impressive progress in a bunch of specialities (from driving cars to playing Go) is not close to imminent.

However, what this debate ignores is that AI is something that’s already in widespread use by many in a business context today, and that the current risks associated with it are not about whether it will leave us all in a smouldering pile of rubble. Instead of worrying about such apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, we should be focusing our energies on the very real dangers posed by this technology in the here and now if it is used incorrectly. These risks can include regulation violations, diminished business value and significant brand damage. While not cataclysmic in their repercussions to humanity, they can still have a major impact on the success or failure of organisations.

When addressing AI risks in a business context, it’s important to remember that not all AI is created equally. Specifically, artificial intelligence comes in two distinct flavours – Transparent and Opaque, and both have very different uses, applications and impacts for businesses and users in general. Here’s the technical bit: Transparent AI is a system whose insights can be understood and audited, allowing one to reverse engineer each of its outcomes to see how it arrived at any given decision. Opaque AI, on the other hand, is an AI system that cannot easily reveal how it works. Not unlike the human brain, any attempt to explain exactly how it has arrived at a certain insight or decision can prove challenging for it.

But while it’s true that the names ‘Opaque’ and ‘Transparent’ each have emotive connotations to them, it’s important that we do not let these influence us. Try to remember that there’s no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ AI – only appropriate or inappropriate use of each system, depending on your own needs. Opaque AI has a number of positive aspects to it which can prove useful in the right circumstances. Being transparent is a constraint on AI and will limit its power and effectiveness, and so in some instances an Opaque system might be preferable.

In highly regulated industries this choice becomes even more important. For example, in the financial services industry, proper use of Opaque AI in lending will result in improved accuracy and fewer errors. However, if banks are required to demonstrate how these operational improvements were achieved though reverse engineering the decision process (as mandated by the EU General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR – for instance), it becomes a challenge or even a liability.

Another potential problem with an Opaque system is that of bias creeping in. Without your knowledge, an Opaque AI system could start favouring policies that break your organisation’s brand promise. Believe it or not, it’s easy for an AI system to use neutral data to work out customer details which it can then use to make non-neutral decisions. So, for example, an Opaque AI in a bank could interpret customer data and use it to start offering better deals to people based on race, gender or other demographics – all of which would, for obvious reasons, be a disastrous outcome.

So, how do you know whether or not you are using AI correctly, and whether or not Transparent or Opaque AI is best for you? The answer lies in how much organisations are willing to trust it. In order to fully trust an AI system one or two things need to happen. Either the AI needs to be transparent so that business management can understand how it works or, if the AI is Opaque, it needs to be tested before it is taken into production. These tests need to be extensive and go beyond searching for viability in delivering business outcomes; they must also search for the kind of unintended biases that I’ve just outlined.

As suggested earlier, there are other considerations to be taken into account, particularly for those organisations who use AI as part of a customer engagement system. When GDPR comes into effect in Europe in May 2018, it will mandate that companies must be able to explain exactly how they reach certain algorithmic-based decisions about their customers. What this means is that organisations who are able to use some sort of a switch – let’s call it a ‘T-Switch’ – to increase transparency by forcing the methods your AI uses to make decisions from Opaque to Transparent will have a distinct advantage as they’ll be much more easily able to comply.

The fact remains that no matter what Messrs Musk and Zuckerberg may argue, we’re not yet at a stage where AI will prove to be either the downfall or the salvation of human civilisation. However, what’s becoming clear that businesses are increasingly finding themselves at a crossroads when it comes to selecting which system is right for them. In theory, you might think that a transparent system would be the preferred choice of many if they could make it unencumbered, but in reality it may be a very tough decision to make.

Would you, for example, insist on a ‘Transparent’ AI doctor to diagnose patients if you knew that an Opaque alternative was available which was more likely to diagnose correctly and save lives? The point is that in some cases the deciding factor may be marginal, with a number of issues relating to profitability, customer experience and regulation to consider before organisations are able to make a decision. Dystopian views of AI rising up against humanity tomorrow may well grab the headlines, but let’s not to overlook the risks posed by artificial intelligence in the here and now and make sure you’re asking yourself the all-important question: is your AI right for you?

Guest Author: Dr. Rob Walker, Vice President, Decision Management & Analytics at Pegasystems

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2017/11/20/is-your-ai-right-for-you/