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postmodernbeing · 3 years

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Shingeki no Kyojin headcanons: 104th training corps (College AU)

Hello, Postmodernbeing here. This time I wanted to write about things that I actually know, since I’m a college student and I’m studing History and Social Sciences I found myself wondering about what would the 104th training corps focus their studies on if all of them had chosen humanities as their career. I hope you find this funny and at least a bit accurate.

IMPORTANT: I do not own Shingeki no Kyojin, only these HCs are my own. // Might contain a few spoilers from the manga. // English is not my first language and I study uni at Latin America, so scientifical terms/words/concepts may vary. Anyhow, I thank you for reading and for your patience.

Eren Jaeger

He’s passionate about Military History, not to be confused with history of army. Eren’s rather focused in strategies, weapons and semiotics involved in military speech.

First started with books about great wars in modern era. The use of certain weapons took him by surprise due the technological development.

Then he took classes about discourse analysis, semiotics and such, and felt inspired by the discourse reflected in emblems, uniforms, flags, etc.

Eren doesn’t really have a preference between occidental or oriental, North or South, Modern or Ancient settings. He would simply devour all the books that deal with military strategy and warlike conflicts. Although he has more experience and information about great wars in modern era.

He’s fascinated with the inexhaustible human desire of freedom and the extent that it can reach. This fascination might not be very healthy, he concludes.

Also, finds a cruel beauty in violence when showed in freedom and ideals are protected over one’s own life. But he won’t tell his classmates or professors. He knows is a controversial opinion for he’s still aware the implications of massive conflicts and the abuse of power.

One thing led to another, Eren is now taking classes and reading about philosophy in war and anthropological perspectives about violence through time.

He’s so into social movements besides his main interest in college: “No one’s really free until all humanity is”, that’s his life motto pretty much.

Due his readings and researches he decided it was important to develop a political stance about the world’s problems. Eren strongly believes all lives worth the same, but systems and nations had imposed over others and vulnerated other human's lives.

Yes, Eren is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

Mikasa Ackerman

Asian Studies Major / History Minor.

She thinks by studying these degrees, she pays honor to her heritage. Specially to her mother. Her family is the proudest for Mikasa is also the best student in her whole generation.

Mikasa received a scholarship thanks to Azumabito family, who are co-founders of an academic institution dedicated to Asian historical and cultural research. She might as well start working when she graduates.

Although she’s passionate about Japan’s history, she has written a few articles and essays about Asian Studies themselves and the importance of preserving but also divulging by means of art and sciences.

In her essays and research work, she likes to employ tools from many disciplines since she strongly believes all humanities and social sciences serve the very same purpose at scrutinize the social reality all the same. Might as well use demographics, ethnology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, archeology, and so on. For it proves to bring light into questions that history by itself could answer unsatisfactorily (in Mikasa’s opinion).

Even her professors wonder how she manages to organize that much information and pull it off successfully. She might as well be more brilliant than a few PhD’s students.

Armin Arlert

Prehistoric studies / Archeology

He’s so into the studies about the prehistoric humans and routes of migration.

Passionate about the ocean and natural wonders since kid, Armin believed his career would be environmentalist or geoscience related.

That was the agreement he had with his grandad since middleschool, until he read Paul Rivet’s “The Origins of the American Man” book and captured him thoroughly. The way the book explained logically the diverse theories about global migration and enlisted the challenges of modern archeology -for there are numerous mysteries- simply devoured his conscience.

He knew from the books he’d read that most evidence of the first settlements are deep under dirt or far away in the ocean whose level has risen over the centuries leaving primitive camps – and answers – unreachable.

That’s the reason he is so eager to study and give his best to contribute both archeology and history disciplines. Also, he’ll forever love the ocean and nature, just leave him do all the fieldwork, please.

Jean Kirstein

History of industry / Industrial heritage / Historical materialism

Jean first started interested in capitalist industries and production development in first world countries. Kind of rejected other visions and explanations since he’d read about positivism studies.

His interest in such matters started when he was a just boy. He often found himself wondering how things were made and that question captured him ever since. As he grew up, he realized that machines and industrial processes were highly involved in the most mundane objects creation.

Nonetheless, he learnt that not always the best machinery was used, nor the best work conditions were available for mass production. From that moment he’d started to read about the First Industrial Revolution and his mind just took off with questions. Invariably, he learned about labour struggle and the transforming power due workforce.

Between his readings and university classes, he’d knew more about labour movements, unions. And in the theoretical aspect, he'd learned about historical materialism analysis.

One could say that Jean possesses a humanistic vision of the implications in mass production under capitalist system along history and nowadays.

Marco Bodt

Royalty's history / Medieval Studies

I wanted to keep his canonical fascination to royalty and the best way to do that was including Medieval Studies.

Marco would study since the fall of Roman Empire until the latest gossip of royal families all across Europe.

Might get a bit of Eurocentric with his essays but in real life discussions he’s always open to debates about decolonization. He has even read Frantz Fanon books and possesses a critical thinking about colonial countries and their relations with the so named third world.

Nevertheless, Marco finds a strange beauty in the lives of monarchs and he’s interested in study from their education, hobbies, strategies, relationships, everything.

I’d say that his favorite historical period is probably the establishment of the descendants of the barbarian peoples in the new kingdoms such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Saxons, Angles and Jutes (holy shit, they're a lot).

Because this would transcend as the beginning of his favorite matter of analysis.

Sasha Braus

History of gastronomy, development of cooking, antropology and archeological studies.

Sasha’s interested in the history that shows human development of food and cooking. She finds wonders when she inquires into cultural aspects from the first farming till modern artistic expressions that would involve food.

Such as gastronomy. But her attention got caught in literature’s food representation too, with its symbols and allegories, also in paintings that belong in still life movement, but also Sasha finds interest when food is used as rhetorical devices (for example: the apple in Adam and Eve’s myth).

She’s curious about primitive systems of irrigation, cultivation, food distribution, adaptation of wild species; as well as the domestication of animals, the diversification of the diet and its link with sedentary life, as well as the subsequent division of labor once the need for food was assured in humanity’ first cities.

Sasha’s convinced that alimentation is the pilar of civilization as we know it. For it involves cultural, artistic, economic, emotion and social aspects. Food is a microcosm of analysis of humanity.

Sasha hasn’t a favorite historical period or setting. But she definitely has a special fascination for first civilizations and their link with alimentation. Also, she likes to study the development gastronomy in occident world around different regions, social classes, and time.

Although, let’s be honest, Sasha would devour (lol, couldn’t help it) ANY book about agriculture, cattle raising, cooking or gastronomy.

Connie Springer

Micro-history / History of everyday life.

Connie loves his hometown, has a deep respect to his family and traditions. That’s why he finds himself wondering about the most ordinary events that developed in his dear Ragako.

The book “The Cheese and the Worms” by Carlo Ginzburg changed the way he used to understand history and capture him into meaningful discussions about what he learned was called micro-history.

His favorite quote from that book is: “As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.”

Once deep into studying the Italian historians and their works, he decided to give it a try, and ever since he’s mesmerized with the mundane vestiges craftsmen that worked in his village left behind.

Connie’s parents are so proud of him and his achivements, but mostly because he became a passionate academic over human and simple matters, (so down to earth our big baby).

His attitude towards his essays and research works truly shows his great heart and humility. Connie is aware that academic works have no use if they are not meant to teach us about ourselves too and current times.

Empathy and hard work, that’s how one could describe the elements that integrate his recently started academic career.

Historia Reiss

Political History / Statistician

Her father’s family pressured Historia since she was a little girl into studying History just like his dad. For he’s a very famous historian that had made important researches and books about the greatest statesmen of Paradis.

She thought in numerous ways that she could sabotage her career or study any other career without her family’s consent and end with her linage of historians. But she ended up enrolling in tuition and so far, she is trying her best in her studies. Historia swears this is the right path for her.

But don’t let the appearances fool you, even thought she studies her father’s career and the very same branch of history’s discipline, she has her own critical sense and she’s so talented on her own, very meticulous with her research papers.

Definitely wants a PhD about women, power and politics. We stand a Gender Studies Queen.

Her complementary disciplines are Political Sciences. Historia also has a talent for philosophy and owns a diary with all her thoughts about them. She hopes one day she would write a book or a manifesto about an innovative methodology for research and teaching History of Politic Thinking.

Ymir

Religion’s History / Theology

Just like Historia, Ymir was pressured into studying History. And if she’s totally honest, she still has some doubts about it. Even if she couldn’t imagine herself studying anything else.

Anyways, Ymir thought that she could build her career around topics that she enjoys. So, she finally chose theology for unusual reasons.

Her classmates had grown up in religious families or had experience studying the doctrines they practiced. But she, being an agnostic, found satisfaction in unraveling belief systems in different cultures and time periods.

Albeit she studies in Paradis’ University, she currently has the opportunity of taking an academic exchange at Marley’s University. This only made Ymir more conflicted about her future, for she wants to stay (near Historia) but she’s aware that Marley would offer her more academic opportunities for her specialization.

Nowadays she’s working in some collaborative research paper with some people from Mythological Studies from the Literature department. She’s nailing it, writing some historical studies about titans in Greek mythology and its impact in shaping neoclassical poetry. Her brains ugh, love her.

Reiner Braun

Official History / Biographies of heroes and great wars.

His mother convinced him with numerous books about great national heroes, but mostly because she knew that would mean sure job to her son. All political administration in every level requires of an official chronicler.

When he started his college courses, Reiner felt motivated and he was actually convinced that he had the vocation. But the more he read the less sure he felt that the academic world was for him. He wondered if he made the right choice. If he did it for him or for his mother.

Stories and myths about heroes have always cheered him up. That gave him purpose and consoled him when feeling down. Or at least it was like that when younger. Reiner truly didn’t feel like himself when regretting his choices, but he couldn’t help it for he was changing in more than a way.

That’s why he decided to experiment with other disciplines and with time he would find joy in historical novels. He would analyze them just as good as a litterateur and research about historical context in the written story AND study the artwork’s context itself.

His favorites theorical books are: “Historical Text as Literary Artifact” by Hayden White and Michel de Certeau’ “The Writing of History”.·

Heroes stories would always accompany him, just differently now.

Bertolt Hoover

History of mentalities / Les Annales

Intimate relationships, basic habits and attitudes. / Culture

Bertie has always been a much reticent and shy guy. As he grew up, he consolidated his sullen personality, but maintained a friendly attitude towards anyone who needed him. That’s why he thought that the priority in his studies was to be at the service of his classmates.

So, although he was passionate about research and was a fan of the French Les Annales current, he considered his mission to be in the Archive. As a cataloger, organizer and curator of ancient documents.

But the ways of History are always mysterious, and Doctor Magath showed him that other way of being was possible. Before Bertolt picked his specialty, he met Theo Magath, a professor who recently had finished writing a book: “The Idea of Death in Liberio’s Ghetto in Marley During its War Against Eldia (Paradis)” (long-ass titles are historians specialty btw). After Magath ended his book’ presentation, Bertolt reached him. They talked for hours and finally, he felt inspired into pursuing his true passion. Magath gifted him “The Historian’s Craft” by Marc Bloch as a way to reminding him his way.

By the time Bertolt took History of Mentalities as optional class, he already had some basic notions about Les Annales, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Jacques Le Goff and such.

Being the gentle giant he is, Bertolt finds joy in reading about different lifestyles in diverse cultures. He constantly wonders about the origin of social constructs and the way they shape thinking as much as identity.

This boy is a wonder, he might not be the best in oral presentations or extracurricular activities but sure as hell he’ll graduate with honors.

Annie Leonhart

Oral history, about institutions. Particularly, police and justice system in early XXs.

Albeit she got into the same University than Bertolt and Reiner, even shared classes and hopes, Annie regularly felt disconnected from her studies. With time she realized it wasn't due her career itself but rather because of the currents that her professors had suggested her taking. Until now.

Talking with Hitch and Marlow about their doubts concerning subjects and departments it came up the topics of history and present time but also oral history. She’d never heard something like that before. So, that very same week, Annie started searching for information about that.

She ended up with more questions: is it all of this just academic journalism? Or maybe sociology? When we can talk about regular history and when it starts being present time? If she introduces interviews due oral history, then that makes it an interdisciplinary work? Which are the best systems for analyzing data? Definitely, she’ll need help from anthropology and sociology departments if she wants to keep going.

Contrary to her initial prognostic, philosophy and history of historic writing became her new allies, and the text “Le temps présent et l'historiographie contemporaine” (Present Time and Contemporary Historiography) by Bédarida among others, provided Annie another perspective.

Regarding her favorite topics, she wouldn’t say that she selected them freely. They were just practical preferences. For institutions own extensive archives and numerous functionaries. One way or another, she ended up tangled in judicial system and police issues.

With new tools and object for studying, one could find Annie having a blast as detective too. Even if her academic essays focus on institutions’ history and configuration, she’s also working in corruption and more. She doesn’t do it because she believes it’s the right thing, but besides, the thrill of the tea is spicy. Although she won’t admit it.

#shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #aot headcanons #snk headcanons #eren jaeger #mikasa ackerman #armin arlert #jean kirstein #marco bodt #sasha braus #connie springer #historia reiss #ymir #reiner braun #bertolt hoover #annie leonhart #modern au #college au

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things2mustdo · 3 years

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We hear the word a lot, it’s what separates males from females and men from boys. So what exactly is it? It is the principle male sex hormone and acts as an anabolic steroid. Having lower testosterone can have horrendous effects on men: decreased muscle mass, weight gain, reduced energy levels, and lower libido.

In a study conducted by VA Puget Sound Health Care Systems and the University of Washington, Seattle, found that “about 19 percent had low testosterone levels; 28 percent had varying low and normal levels”. In addition, testosterone levels decrease 1.5% every year after age 30. Which means you become less of a man every year past age 30. It was also found that “men with low testosterone levels had an 88 percent increase in risk of death compared with those who had normal levels”.

So with all this negativity, is there any hope for man? Yes.

There are plenty of ‘natural’ ways to increase your testosterone levels.

1. Vitamin D3. This vitamin has been linked to increasing testosterone in men and increasing sex drive. (Source)

2. Eat your steak and whole eggs. Testosterone is derived from cholesterol. Sure egg whites and grilled chicken might be a great way to get your protein in, but cutting the red meat and yolks won’t help raise your testosterone. Eggs are very nutrient dense, eat the yolks and reap the benefits. Same goes along with red beef, enjoy your steak. (Source)

3. Workout. Pushing and pulling heavy weights in a compound movement (squats, deadlifts, benching, clean and press, etc.) cause a hormonal change in the body, producing more testosterone (with proper diet of course). (Source)

4. Avoid sugar. It will increase your insulin levels. Not only is that linked to weight gain, but also a reduction in testosterone levels. (Source)

5. Eat your fats. Don’t leave out olive oil, peanut oils, avocados, egg yolks, nuts, and red meat (grass fed). (Source)

Just following these few points can have a dramatic effect on increasing your testosterone levels; your sex drive will rocket, your hard work from the gym will start to show, and women will be so turned on by your pheromones. Moral of the story: don’t underestimate the most important hormone in your body, it’s THAT important.

https://www.returnofkings.com/152812/10-ways-that-modern-society-lowers-your-testosterone-levels

It is no surprise that the current world agenda seeks to destroy men from within but also from the outside at the same time. Only by attacking from all angles can their plans come to fruition. We do not know exactly when this attack started, but in recent years, it has become clear that the intensity of the current agenda’s intentions has increased tenfold.

Why are men targeted? Could it be the fact that by reducing the amount of true men with testes they reduce the chances that authentic revolutions against oppressive governments will happen? Any voice of reason against a corrupt society would swiftly be silenced. It happened 2,000 years ago (Jesus), and it is happening now more aggressively than it has ever happened in history.

Let’s see how men are being targeted for total destruction and implicitly and how to avoid these attacks…

1. Our Food Is Filled With Hormones, Antibiotics And Pesticides

Hormones are abundantly in beef, chicken or dairy products. We eat these daily, however, the hormones have an impact on a man’s health. Testosterone levels are lowered and estrogen levels increase. Manboobs, anyone?

Pesticides are well known chemicals that cause infertility and lower testosterone levels. Yet non-organic vegetables and fruits are abundant in life threatening toxins.

2. Cycling And Jogging

Doing physical activities is so beneficial that writing down all the benefits here would take forever. Yet there are a few physical activities which are unhealthy for the human body. Those kind of activities which have never been done by our ancestors.

For obvious reasons, cycling is unnatural because it uses an invented device. Constant pressure on the testes leads to infertility, reduces testosterone production and diseases.

Like cycling, jogging is an unnatural activity. Our ancestors would either walk or sprint, never jog. It is a useless activity. Jogging and cycling are activities which put continuous and constant stress on the body, leading to an overall decrease in testosterone over time. Do you think it is a coincidence that so much emphasis is being put on activities such as jogging and cycling?

3. Blue Light Bulbs

Blue light exposure has been linked to decreased testosterone levels. It is everywhere. Naturally occurring only in the morning when it helps the body wake up, nowadays we see it right until we close our eyes and go to bed. It is in our phone and computer screens, but most importantly, it is used to illuminate our rooms, bedside lamps and our offices.

Due to “environmental” reasons, it was decided that the classic incandescent bulb uses up too much energy, therefore it is better to use the new LED bulbs with carcinogenic gases.

You can’t run and you can’t hide. These blue-light bulbs are everywhere, creating anxiety and making us feel constantly tired. A tired mind is easy to control, and so is a low testosterone individual.

4. Our Drinking Water Is Filled With Female Hormones

Let me explain. The tap water that you drink also contains treated and cleaned water from our toilets, no mystery here. What we don’t know is that the hormones from a female’s period are flushed down with this same water. Chlorine does not remove hormones, it removes bacteria.

Drinking bottled water could be a solution, but then again, the plastic is also carcinogenic and also lowers our testosterone. Unless we have our own spring, we are fucked.

5. Sugar

Sugar reduces our metabolism to that of a sloth and promotes cancer. It also dramatically lowers our will to do anything meaningful with our lives. It takes down our testosterone due to our bodies prioritizing insulin production. It is addictive, more so than heroin, as proven on lab rats.

6. Aspartame

In an effort to soothe the minds of people concerned with sugar, they have created an even worst product called aspartame. Aspartame produces neurotoxins that excite our nerve cells so much that they die. However, our brain protects itself with a barrier from excess neurotoxins. If the barrier is passed, neurons are killed. The pituitary and pineal glands are also affected, leading to a disruption in our circadian natural rhythm.

Aspartame lowers testosterone and avid consumers would require a prolonged time for their testosterone to recover.

7. Veganism

Veganism is another new fad that keeps people excited about healthy lifestyles. What they don’t know is that this diet is aimed at reducing our aggressiveness and making us docile animals like say… sheep.

Go ahead and tame a lion. Obviously, veganism lowers testosterone and the lack of vitamins and nutrients, which I will explain in future articles, further leads to a pale and unforgiving future for our bodies and brains.

8. Soy

Soy has been part of the hype train of miraculous natural super foods for some decades now. Soy is an estrogenic food and guess what? It lowers your testosterone.

It should be simple by now: anything that is being promoted by the mainstream media should be considered false and damaging to our well-being.

9. The War On Fats

This is another worldwide mass deception promoted by the mainstream doctors and media. Fat is actually healthy and it helps reduce cholesterol due to the fact that if the body receives external cholesterol, then it does not need to produce it on its own, which would lead to the bad cholesterol in our blood.

Testosterone feeds on cholesterol. The higher amount of testosterone you will have, the lower your cholesterol will be. And the more external cholesterol you bring in, the more the testosterone can thrive and increase.

Eating fat meat will increase your health and improve your metabolism (unless you have some condition, in which case you should seek a doctor’s advice).

10. Coffee

Yes exactly, coffee. Caffeine is poison used by plants to protect themselves. Guess what happens when you ingest coffee every day?

Coffee depletes the adrenal glands responsible for regulating our hormones. Combined this with stress and we are sure to fall into an adrenal exhaustion. Testosterone is also one of those hormones, and when the adrenal glands become depleted, there is no way to produce any free or total testosterone within your body.

It takes three weeks to get rid of caffeine. Do you know why caffeine produces bowel movements? Because the body wants to get rid of the poison.

Conclusion

In case you are wondering what would be the best course of action to avoid exposure to factors that are detrimental to our health, the solution is as always simple: life should be lived the way it was meant to, in accordance with nature.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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IT WILL BE ABOUT WHATEVER YOU DISCOVER IN THE COURSE OF TECHNOLOGY, AND SOME TRAINS OF THOUGHT JUST PETER OUT

If you're going to have a deep understanding of what you're doing; the kind of people you want to work on them, and investing is for most of the founders spent all their time building their applications. PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. But it was hard to say at the time that this was a big market. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of exit strategy, because you couldn't establish the level of university you'd need as a seed. Would a basketball team trade one of their own, you can make yourself do it you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can prove what you're saying, or at least lacked some concepts that would have made their lives easier. Result: this revolution, if it isn't, how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? A recruiter at a big company, for whom ideally you'd work your whole career. A few CEOs' incomes reflect some kind of wrongdoing. So the real question is not how to convert that wealth into money.

Underpaying people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. The idea even flowed back into big companies. But I do at least know now why I didn't. Maybe it would be a well-paying but boring job at a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs. There is some momentum involved. But if you look at how famous startups got started, a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to think the good ones, at least in the US are auto workers, schoolteachers, and civil servants happier than actors, professors, and professional athletes? Indeed, one of our habits of mind to invoke. Wikipedia may be the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem was that he wanted his own computer.

Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to believe your company was going to study philosophy remained intact. The difficulty of firing people is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, human is fuzzy around the edges, there are ways to decrease its effects. The best they can do whatever's required themselves. So if you want to start a startup. If it's a subset, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. A list of n things. A startup is a company designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses.

So if you're going to start a startup, you're probably going to have to do whatever it is eventually. If you want to attract to your silicon valley. The war was due mostly to external forces, and calls itself I. There continued to be bribes, as there still are everywhere, but only a few of them. All the unfun kinds of wealth creation slow dramatically in a society where I was the richest, but much more on them than the college. But it means if you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted. The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose.

Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? People did start their own company. I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. But it's not humming with ambition. The key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years. He called a maximally elegant proof one out of God's book, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. Who would rely on such a test? At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to work for you without giving them options likely to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and your knowledge won't break down in edge cases, as it would if you were willing to sell early on. And if you don't let people into it. I think the root of the problem, then gradually expand from there?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to make a conscious effort to find smart friends. Within a few decades of the founding of Apple, Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the web. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have any habits of mind is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. To do that well meant to get good grades so they can get into a good college. There's nothing more they need to do more than find good projects. In particular, they don't have any is that they don't enjoy it. I doubt I believed I understood them, but though they can end up in the same business. In high school I decided I was going to take care of you. It's significant that the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. You needed to take care of the company are the real powers, and the granary the wealth that each family created.

I don't know if I learned anything from them. This probably makes them less productive, because they don't know what you're going to have to think about the future, just that you think may be due to a crime well enough executed that it had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. If a successful startup usually has three phases: There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out. I spend a lot of users, so they must be smarter than they seem. Whereas if you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. But change was coming soon. Even Microsoft sees it, but it's not part of any specific paper or magazine? 0 referred to whatever those might turn out to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. The reason they don't have good colleagues to inspire them.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. A couple months ago, one VC firm almost certainly unintentionally published a study showing bias of this type. Materially and socially, technology seems to be a police state, and although present rulers seem enlightened compared to the last, even enlightened despotism can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power. No matter what you do. You need a big prime number? It's as if they had. So long as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone. Culturally we have ever less common ground. What happened to him? For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's not really legal to run a business.

Thanks to Matthias Felleisen, John Collison, Erann Gat, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for inviting me to speak.

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madamebaggio · 4 years

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Notes: SMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!!!!

This is the next chapter on my Gretel x Nuada modern AU. Previous chapter is here, and you can find everything on my AO3 account.

Seriously, guys, this is pure smut. Not safe to read around other people.

I hope you enjoy it.

****

Chapter 3

This time around, Gretel was feeling even more confused. She wished she knew what was wrong with her.

She wouldn’t even consider Nuada’s motive. He might be an immortal elf or whatever, but he still had a cock. She wasn’t shocked he was going around looking for hookups, but she was shocked at herself for falling for it, not once, but twice!

Where was her self respect?

Was he a great fuck? Yeah.

Did it justify all of this? Hell no.

It was really appalling that she was acting like this.

Gretel enjoyed sex as much as the next person, but there were some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Fucking a -supposedly- former megalomaniac who’d planned on world destruction was a huge fucking line! And she didn’t just cross it. Oh no! She skipped happily across it.

This was so problematic.

And she couldn’t even blame it on a tendency to like bad boys because of lingering daddy issues. Exactly because she’d spent years believing her father had plain abandoned her and her brother, she only got involved with the sweetest men she could meet. Sure, they bored the hell out of her eventually, but at least they didn’t break her heart.

She had no idea what she was doing.

So she did what any normal, mature adult would; she pretended everything was alright and worked.

Which meant going to meetings.

If there was one thing that made her truly believe that hell existed, it was the existence of meetings. Only the Devil could be so cruel as to create something like this.

However, today… There was something extra.

Gretel mused at it while she sat there, pretending she was listening to Agent Something. It wasn’t Nuada; he was as cool as cucumber, and he didn’t even make eye contact with her.

Hansel was fine, sitting between Mina and Abe. There was Nuala...

Nuala, who was making a real effort to avoid Gretel’s eyes. And, taking in consideration how polite and friendly the princess was most of the time, Gretel was instantly in alert.

Then Nuada said something and Nuala focused even harder on the floor, making Gretel understand exactly what was going on.

She’d waited until the meeting was over then dragged Nuala to the closest restroom. “You know!” She hissed.

To her credit, Nuala didn’t even try to deny it. Although, with her expression, it was useless to even try. “It’s not as if I’ve sought the knowledge.” Nuala replied on that overly formal and prim way she had.

Gretel hadn’t thought Nuala wanted to know what her brother was up to, but anyway… “It makes no fucking difference.” She covered her face with her hands. “Oh my god.”

“I am sorry.” Nuala cringed.

Gretel sighed. “It’s not your fault, but…” She groaned. “It’s still uncomfortable.”

Nuala gave her a sympathetic smile.

“Does he know you know?”

“Of course he does. We just act like we don’t.” Nuala told her. “It’s the same he does for me and Abe.”

Gretel cringed in sympathy. She couldn’t imagine having that kind of intimate knowledge regarding her brother.

“Are you alright?” Nuala asked her carefully.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Nuala sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Let’s go with your policy with your brother and pretend we never discussed this.” Gretel asked.

“We can do that.” Nuala agreed quickly, then paused “It’s just…”

“No.”

“I’m not supposed to say that, but…”

“Then, please, don’t say it!” Gretel hurried to press. “Please.”

Nuala sighed. “You’re right. It wouldn’t be right.”

Was there anything right in this situation?

***

Gretel had had horrible nights before, but this…

She knew their work was essential. Normal people couldn’t handle the supernatural; they thought they could and that they wanted to… But they didn’t, not really.

Some things were meant to be handled by the right people, and that was them. This was why she and Hansel had chosen to stick around the Bureau. They did what they could alone, but with more resources they could do more.

Tonight, it didn’t feel like they could’ve done anything.

Gretel already feared human terrorists, but those that came from the other side…

It must be even harder for Nuada, because until recently, he was their symbol; the spark that fired a desire for revolution.

And that was why today it had been so cruel to them all.

Nuada had to kill the leader of a terrorist group led by elves that -as he had once- wanted to make humans pay for how they destroyed their world. The elf that called him a traitor, claiming he was fighting the battle the prince had abandoned.

It couldn’t be pleasant to hear that, especially since Nuada wasn’t a part of the Bureau because he wanted to.

The mood of the whole team had been dark as they came back, and Nuada had left before the debriefing.

Nobody went after him to make him participate.

Gretel was going to take a hot shower and forget this night had ever existed.

She’d just kicked her shoes off when someone knocked on her door. She sighed but went to answer it. Nuada was on the other side.

“What are you doing here?” She asked quite rudely, but her surprise made her forget her manners.

Nuada sighed. “I wish I knew the answer to that.”

Gretel gave him a flat look. “Go rest.” She didn’t have the energy for this fuckery.

She pushed the door, intending to close it, but Nuada held it open with his hand.

She glared at him, ready to tell him to fuck off, when he shocked the hell out of her. “I yield.”

“What?” Not the smartest reply but she was truly shocked.

“I’m yielding to you.” He explained unnecessarily.

“We aren’t fighting.” She pointed out.

He gave a meaningful look to the door between them, the one she was trying to close and he was holding open. She refused to accept that as fighting and her look made it quite clear.

Nuada mumbled something on his language. “I’m giving control over to you anyway.” A pause. “Only for now.”

Of course he’d put a limit to that. “What should I do with it?” She asked honestly, because this whole situation was bizarre.

“Whatever you want.”

There was this moment when they stared at each other, Gretel trying to understand his motives better and Nuada just letting her try it.

The more she looked at him the crazier this seemed, and she could probably fill up a notebook with all the reasons this was a very bad idea.

She stepped to the side. “Get in.”

He did and she closed the door behind him. “I’m taking a shower.” She gave him a look. “And so are you.”

He didn’t comment, just nodded and followed her from the small bedroom to the tiny bathroom.

They took off their clothes in a practical way, no seduction to it at all.

Gretel fiddled with the shower handle, more to distract herself and have time to think what the fuck she was doing.

The water was the only good feature of the Bureau compound. It had excellent pressure and it was piping hot, just the way she liked it.

Gretel stepped under the water, let it beat down on her. She felt the moment Nuada stepped in behind her.

“Wash my hair.” She ordered him, pointing at her shampoo. “No funny business.” She warned.

She was shocked to see him complying without any complaints, but he did exactly as she asked.

They didn’t exchange any words as he lathered her long hair, his long fingers massaging her scalp until she felt her shoulders sagging. She didn’t even need to point the conditioner to him.

Once he finished her hair, she told him to wash.For a while they were both two people sharing the same shower, just washing the day away.

Nuada was rinsing under the water when she stepped up to him and kissed him. His hands were -for the first time- hesitant, as he put them on her waist. She bit into his lower lip and he pushed her against the wall, his tongue pushing into her mouth.

Gretel pushed him a but. “Slow.” She ordered. “This time, slow.”

He growled at her, but when he kissed her, it was slower. Their kisses seemed deeper this way, with a punishing edge to it, even as their tongues tangled.

Her hand slipped down his torso, until she found his cock and closed her fingers around him, pumping slowly. Nuada’s fingers weren’t idle and found her cunt, working her until he could slip two fingers in.

Shower sex was always a bit of a challenge, but if there was one thing in which Gretel trusted was Nuada’s raw strength.

She hooked her left leg on his hip, encouraging him to just fuck her already. It took some maneuvering before he was able to slip in with a single thrust. Gretel was very satisfied with her non slip shower mat, now more than ever.

Their mouths remained fused as Nuada fucked her against the wall. She did have to stand on one leg and on her tiptoes for it, but she wasn’t complaining -maybe she would later.

At some point Nuada grabbed her other leg, bringing it to his waist as well, and Gretel groaned as both her feet left the ground. She squeezed him tight between her legs, her arms around his neck, his mouth to her throat. She felt as if he was hitting her so deep he might never find his way back out.

She let one of her arms slip from around his neck so she could play with her clit. Nuada watched the progress of her hand, then started fucking her harder. It didn’t take long for her to come, biting her lips so she wouldn’t call his name. He followed right after.

Nuada lowered her to the ground with a gentleness she didn’t think he had. Gretel once again stepped under the water, this time to clean up.

She stepped out of the shower and picked up a towel while Nuada washed himself, then passed another towel to him once he was also out.

Her legs were shaking, so she went to sit on her bed. She watched through the open door as he toweled himself dry, then dressed quickly and in silence.

Should she say something?

“You should get Mina to teach you the arts.” He said as he came into the room fully dressed.

She definitely wasn’t expecting that. “What?”

“You have talent; it’s raw and untapped.” He informed her, barely looking at him. Was he really telling her to study magic? “If you learn how to harness it, you’ll become a great asset.”

“Is that a compliment?” She asked him dryly.

He finally looked at her. “No. You haven’t done anything to deserve one yet.”

She scoffed. “Thank you for the advice.”

He opened his mouth, like he intended to say something else, before changing his mind. He gave her a stiff nod and left the room.

Gretel fell back on the bed. “What the hell?”

Should she talk to Mina?

#madame baggio #crackship #CrossOver #Crossover Pairings #AU #gifs not mine #smut #hansel and gretel witch hunters #hellboy the golden army #gretel #prince nuada #gretel x prince nuada #why dont we kill each other slowly

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fictionalfics · 6 years

Text

Coffee pt. 3

(Fuck sake I couldn't find the right gif - Gifs not mine)

RK900 x reader

Warnings: Awfully cliched writing, fluff, swearing

Requested by: @dis-weird-girl-over-here

Additional tags: (I’m just tagging everyone from last time) @mikithekiki @invisiblemigraine @yallgotkik @liveloveandbekind @qtmeryr @angsty-otters-blog and my friend who recently joined tumblr, @fearfridaywriteswords

Guess who’s back from the dead! I have so much shit to write its not even funny, and exams are making my life hell, but enjoy this scrap anyways lmao.

Part One Part Two Part Three

Let’s go!

System Start-up…

Please Wait...

Conner’s LED swirled to life at around half past five in the morning. the apartment was still dark in the early morning, but you’d soon be getting up to begin your daily ritual of getting ready for work. Conner swiftly stood and made his way into the kitchen, deciding to prepare yet another coffee for you to wake up to - it would give him something to do as he planned the romantic gesture to show his love later on.

Almost as if you’d smelled the bitter-sweet beverage, you padded into the kitchen, popping your joints and yawning. You looked so pretty after just waking, stray hairs poking up like small antennae, your baggy pyjamas hugging you like Conner desperately wanted to.

“Good morning, Y/N. You have exactly forty nine minutes until we need to leave - I made you a drink in order to save time.”

You smiled widely and stood on your tiptoes, pecking Conner on the cheek. “Thanks Con, that’s really helpful!” You flash a toothy grin, reserved for only him, and pour yourself some cereal.

Software Instability^^

Conner watches you in silence, not really knowing what to say. Instead, he examined your vitals - you finally had had a sufficient amount of sleep, and you were fully alert and awake.

Good.

You catch his eye as you spoon another portion into your mouth. You silently question his antics, a raised eyebrow displaying your question. You swore Conner’s cheeks turned a slight shade of blue.

“I’m observing your vitals - it seems you have finally had enough sleep, as you are more heedful this morning.”

You smile at this. “Its the best sleep I’ve had in a while - thanks to you, anyway.” You smile cheerfully. “I guess I better get ready. The Captain’s expecting the reports on his desk at eight o’clock sharp.”

“That would be a good idea Y/N.”

You turned on your heel and headed to your room to get dressed.

Conner loved seeing you cheerful.

Work was a drag. It seemed like it was going to be a busy few weeks, with deviant cases and whatnot. You clocked out about an hour after you were meant to, but you didn't care. You didn't feel the dark cloud of fatigue for once, and, in the cool winter air, decided to go for a walk to clear your head of work. Conner came with you, watching as your breath materialised in the late October cold, and then disappear like a spirit.

Through all of this, Conner was almost silent, only interjecting at the appropriate times as you ranted about anything and everything. He seemed interested when you began to speak about your favourite TV shows, which then veered onto the topic of your childhood pets, and ice skating. You just couldn't help yourself around him - he was easy to talk to.

Software Instability^^

He loved the way you gestured wildly with your hands when you were talking about something you were passionate about, and the way your face showed nearly every expression under the sun, as you described your favourite bits of that show you were in the middle of.

Time to put his plan in action.

“May we take a detour through the park Y/N? There is something...pressing that I would like to speak about.”

At the concerned look that ghosted across your features, Conner attempted to comfort you.

“It’s not overly pressing, it is simply a problem I have, and I’d like you to help me work through it.

You gave a slow nod, still not convinced.

“Okay, I guess.” You weren’t fully convinced, but decided not to press the matter. “We can take the route by the lake if you like? I like to go that way when I need to clear my mind.”

Conner smiled. “Of course. That’s a wonderful suggestion Y/N”

You lean against the frosted railing, and stare out to the body of water before you. You loved the buzz of the city - that’s why you moved to Detroit - but you loved the occasional quiet of the park even more.

You look at the figure poised next to you - still, like a marble statue.

“What’s on your mind Conner?”

“Ah, yes. I’ve been experiencing, emotions, if you will. As you’re human, and deal with a wide variety of feelings on a daily basis, I could appreciate it if you could help.”

“Of course!” You were temporarily surprised that Conner was experiencing human emotions, but, since the revolution, the machines becoming more human-like than anyone could have ever anticipated wasn’t very looked down upon anymore. You had always treated androids as human anyway, so you very much welcomed this change in society. “What have you been feeling, if you can describe it?”

After his LED swirled yellow for a bit - researching, you assumed - he said, “I believe it’s called love.”

Wow. Conner was in love?

That was news to you.

“Wow Conner, that’s...that’s great!” You felt really happy for him, to the point where you wrapped your arms around him in elation. It didn’t occur to you that it was you he was in love with, but you were happy all the same.

Software Instability^^

“How do you suggest I go about telling the person in question?”

You thought for a bit, and settled on an answer. “Personally, I’d just tell them straight that you love them. Worst case scenario, they say they don’t feel the same way.”

Conner processed your words. “Thank you Y/N. Your advice is very helpful.”

You smiled in response, and sighed. There was an electric silence between the two of you, but you couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say.

You didn’t need to.

“Y/N?”

“Mmhmm?”

“I’m in love with you.”

Holy shit.

That is not what you were expecting.

You gripped onto the rail with your gloved hands, trying your best not to fall over at the announcement.

“O-okay, wow Conner” You laughed.

“Did I do something wrong? I apologise if I took you by surprise.”

“Oh, no of course not! I’ just surprised that it’s me, of all people!”

Conner smiled at you, and took your hand in his. “I wouldn't want it to be anyone else.”

And with that, he placed a tender kiss to your cold lips.

Software Instability^^

When you pulled away, your heart was hammering at your ribcage.

“Conner, I’m so glad you feel that way.”

“Me too, Y/N.”

You press your face to his chest, breathing him in as if the world was about to end.

“Let’s get home and warm up. we can watch the sequel to Avengers if you like?” You weren’t one for small talk, but didn't know what else to do.

“Of course, Y/N, that’s a great idea.”

You laced your fingers through his, him gazing at you as you lead the way home.

And with that, Ladies, Gentlemen and Everyone In Between, I conclude the final part of the Coffee series!

#rk900 x reader #rk900 #Detroit become human #dbh #dbh connor x reader #rk900 imagine #detroit #hank anderson #rk800 connor #rk900 conner #rk900 connor #Detroit become human fic #I still love my bby #holy shit this is so overdue #and cliched #asdfghjkl #im so happy

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auldmusician · 2 years

Text

It Shines, But Gives No Heat

I first saw/heard the phrase 'It shines, but gives no heat' whilst walking around an exhibition in the British Library. The exhibition: 'The Russian Revolution' For an hour and a half I slowly paced round the exhibition reading quotes, listening to voice actors describe what life was life back then, looking at graphs and charts and a timeline of what happend before and what led to the Russian Revolution. I was roaming around open mouthed and wide eyed like a child in a toy shop. It was so interesting. I knew nothing about the Russian Revolution and to be honest had not interest until that day. Then it became the most interesting thing I'd ever heard about in my life. It was a great time. The British Library sure know how to throw a good exhibition (this is the only one I've been to, but honestly so many of them sounded great, I just rarely had the spare £17) The British Library was always one of my favourite places to go when I lived in London. I use to go there for full days to work on music or do some writing. However most of the time I would just pretend I was an academic and listen in to the lecturers and students chatting whilst having coffee. It was maybe not the most exciting or useful way to spend a day, but I loved it nonetheless.

So I leave the Exhibition on the Russian Revolution. Feeling like the smartest boy in the room. Feeling like how I feel after watching an Adam Curtis documentary. Ready to show off to friends and colleagues my new found knowledge and pass it off as stuff I knew my entire life. But just like those Adam Curtis documentaries, all that information that I found so incredibly interesting has left my brain almost as soon as it has entered. Honestly if you asked me anything about the Russian Revolution today I wouldn't be able to tell you a fucking thing. For an hour and a half it was the most important thing to me in the world. Learning about it. Understanding it. Then 10 minutes after leaving the exhibition, the information has all gone. It's not even like it comes back when prompted. I've seen 2 seperate documentaries on the Russian Revolution since and it was like it was all fresh new information. This sort of thing happens to me all the time so I now have to make loads of notes so I remember stuff. So I checked my notebook and the only thing I had written down that day is 'It Shines, but gives no heat' I don't have an explanation for it and I don't have a reason why it was being said or who had said it. I'm also not sure I had written it down correctly as I've search online and can't find the saying anywhere. There is however a Russian proverb I found: 'The Moon gives us light, but no heat' So it obviously has something to do with that. It Shines, but gives no heat, sounds kinda beautiful, but I guess overall it is not a positive description of something/someone. Something that looks nice and shiny and bright, but has no real lasting, beneficial effect on you. That is the way I always understood it. I guess a good way to describe a lot of things we chase, money, stuff, popular products, status, influence, looking a certain way, popularity, success. These things that are presented to us as an important part of having a nice life, but are actually very hollow. Apart from maybe a short term serotonin splash. Obviously things are a little more complex than that and depending on the situation, some of these things listed can have a longer lasting, meaningful benefit on our lives. It Shines, But gives no heat could probably work as a phrase to describe the big brands and business's pretending to be our mates and pretending to be socially conscious, but only when it is guaranteed to profit them heavily financially. It could mean several different things and my weak examples might not be what springs to your mind when you hear the phrase. Ever since I heard the phrase it seems to enter my head a lot and relates to all sorts of situations I find myself in or find myself thinking about. It's like when you learn a new word and then hear/see that word everywhere. I heard this phrase and it seemed to relate to everything. Rachel and I have just moved to Donegal. It's a beautiful County on the West coast of Ireland. We are living at a beach cottage for 6 months and then it becomes a holiday rental place for the Spring and Summer months. The months you would actually want to be at the beach, we get kicked out. But for us right now it is perfect.

On paper moving to live on the beach in the middle of nowhere for the winter is the single most coolest and artistic thing a musician can do, so even to have that in the press release for the next album will make it all worth it. One thing that is strange and hard to get used to now, is whenever a big life event happend or whenever something good happend to me the first person I would always tell is my Mum. I would tell my Mum first because I knew she got so much more pleasure out of anything remotely good happening to me than I actually did myself, She was the same for the whole family. There hasn't been a huge amount of examples, but any sort of 'achievement' or big thing that has happend in my life will always come with the memory of telling my Mum and basically living vicariously through her reaction. It is hard now that whatever else I do in this life it will be without her. I won't be able to tell her. No matter what I do there will always be something missing. I think the majority of us never have that feeling leave us of ultimately wanting to make our parents proud and impress them. I don't think I ever said it to my Mum but I always just wanted to make her proud and I'm one of the luckiest people in the world that knew that my Mum was always proud of me anyway. But it's strange when that motivation disappears. Of course there are now new motivations that come with growing up and that come with losing someone that meant so much to you. Priorities change and you see life differently. So when we moved to this new house (the first time Rachel and I have lived alone together in our 9 year relationship) and we were strolling along the beach and I thought to myself, this is pretty perfect. I was really appreciating how happy I felt in that moment, which I'm not sure I've ever done before in my life. Then as soon as I felt it, the feeling disappeared. Knowing that my Mum couldn't witness me being happy made being happy less important. These things shine, but offer no heat. BUT THEY WILL DO IN TIME I cannot stress enough that this isn't supposed to be as gloomy as it sounds. It is just one of the many adjustments we make when we lose someone so special to us. The memories and love she has left us with will always outweigh any grief. I just find it helps talking quite openly about this kinda stuff.

#russian revolution #grief #griefjourney

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arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

Moldbug quite memorably makes the observation that America is a communist country, and then goes further and makes it obvious that all of the world is America now, so all of the world is communist. He also traces this communism back through American history to America’s founding and then even further back and places this founding as the continuation of an English political conflict between Tories, and Whigs.

We can get under the engine of this broad claim and start to get at the mechanism behind this conflict and the roots of this communism. For a start, we can look at the claim of communism. Moldbug clearly used this for rhetorical effect, and it works to a degree, but we don’t need to retain this for analysis purposes. Instead we can concentrate on the status of the origin of property in the various strains of thought which is what defines this communism.

In the first instance we have the Tory conception which was expressed by Filmer. Now Filmer’s concept of property has been dismissed ad nauseum for being based on biblical grounds unlike Locke’s which were based on…biblical grounds, but there is a difference in that Locke’s ideas were developed in service to the Whig’s position in society and they won, so there is that. Why were Locke’s positions popular with the Whigs, whilst Filmer’s were popular with the Tory loyalists? Locke’s position was one supportive of rebellion, anarchism and oligarchy – which is what the Whigs were about. We can really consider this a case of two power centers forming two distinct cultures based on their specific interests – the monarchy versus parliament. Parliament won

History shows that the Whigs won so effectively that they purged Filmer Tories from every effective position of power in England following the failed Jacobite Rebellion. From this point on, every Tory position would be based on the grounds of Locke and we see the conservative is born. Every single incarnation of Toryism (and there have been many of that pathetic shadow) would forever be reborn on some new absurd position trying to justify a position built upon the ever shifting basis of anarchic property tied in with the individual coming before society, or communism if you will. We have had Burkean conservatism, Peelite conservatism, modern American conservatism, compassionate conservatism and now the alt-right – it is the never ending joke.

…

And now we can turn to Locke who tells you that IF WE DON’T HAVE FREEDOM, AND LIBERTY MEN WILL SODOMISE AND EAT THEIR OWN BABIES!!!!!!

…

No very flattering and demonstrates the weakness of Locke’s position, which is why I think he concentrated as pedantically as possible on Filmer’s claim of descent from Adam. It is the weakest part of Filmer’s arguments and frankly we can do without it and cut straight to the reasoning behind both author’s positions.

Locke’s reasoning is without basis in my opinion as it works from a state of nature which has never existed. So why are we still taking his writing as a serious and respectable body of work? Why do I need to argue past this point? His claims of the independence of the individual and the labor theory of property are obscenely wrong. Everything about his thinking is disastrously wrong but given it was a rejection of absolutism it was useful, and anything pushing individualism has been warmly received by the modern state for its destructive value. The advocate of individualism is the foot soldier of a centralised state. Now, some may have trouble with this concept because on the face of it the contradictory nature is hard to get past, but it is only a contradiction if you don’t think it through and realise the destruction of individualism is aimed at everything and everyone except the centralising power, which in this case was democratic governance seated in parliament.

…

Here he is saying rule of law is nonsensical. Law is merely a tool in the hands of someone. Were he alive today, he would no doubt be amazed at the manner in which modern conservatives look at the law and the constitution in particular as some form of magic document that rules.

On other issues, Filmer is no less logically robust, whilst Locke rests on assertions and not arguments. Anything based on the state of nature is not an argument and shouldn’t be accepted as one, it is an assertion based on a point of faith (that we are born free and equal.) One such robust position is in the underlying logic behind the patriarchical model put forward by Filmer. While we can merely set aside the whole issue of progeny from Adam, we can nonetheless maintain Filmer’s conclusion that governance does indeed mirror a paternal relationship, and that authority can only flow down from those with authority to those with less.

…

In effect, Filmer is making it absolutely clear that those arguing in favour of constitutional monarchy are violating logic, and they are. From our 21stcentury perch, we should be in an excellent place to judge just who is right on this point – Locke or Filmer? There is where it gets interesting. It is obviously clear from conventional history and practically all conventional political theory that Locke was completely correct but seeing as this history and theory is based on Locke, there is a serious problem here. If we start out with the assertion that X is true, will always be true, and is not to even be questioned, then what will this say about our results if X is false. Garbage in, garbage out.

…

What Filmer is implying here is explosive. He is making the point that laws don’t come into being by themselves, but are authorised by a higher power in all cases. Common law was not made irrespective of the sovereign but was, and is, determined by agents acting on his behalf, and transmitting his will either directly or in accordance with the presumed wishes of the sovereign. The sovereign obviously being unable to sit in court for all cases and talk with every judge must delegate, and as such has a judiciary working in accordance with his will. In this instance, we can see that authority is the determiner of all action within the area of common law, and this holds true across society as a whole if this logic is maintained. All action that occurs within the authority of the sovereign is by default either within the sovereign’s will and therefore acceptable, or it is not, and it is illegal and/or a threat. Any other definition nullifies the entire concept of sovereignty as a meaningful term. There is no spontaneous action independent of authority but all of our means of formally viewing the world (political theory, political science, politically acceptable history) are premised on the concept that there is. Notably, in areas with more practical usage (such as property law) this premise is quietly and (I am sure quite innocently) ignored.

Approaching the matter from a non-lockean perspective, and using, say for example, Filmer’s refusal to accept the sovereign can be bound by lower powers, or that authority can be reversed, we get Moldbug’s history. In this history, revolutions are led by elites in a position of authority, the entire concept of democracy is rendered a sham by following the trail and determining which institution is sovereign, and the republican governance structure comes into view as the mere surface camouflage that it is. In short, we go from Lockean consensus history based on a giant lie, to a realistic history based on a giant uncomfortable truth regarding authority.

#john locke #sir robert filmer #reactionaryfuture

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lettersfromleslie · 4 years

Text

SUMMER HEAT / EMPTY STREETS / JUSTICE NOR PEACE IN SIGHT / BUT STEP RIGHT THIS WAY FOR THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN

Hello again from the belly of the beast!

It’s been a weird, hot, bittersweet summer. The new abnormal has made itself at home, the phases of the ‘rona have been swimming by, and one way or another life’s gone on living… Just wanted to put down a quickish sketch of what that’s been like in our lovable ol meatgrinder N.Y.C.

The lil lady and I spent the three months from mid-March to June in lockdown. I talked about all that plenty in my last post. It was a very surreal and foggy phase for us and looking back it’s hard to form a clear picture of what we did or how we felt. I think that fogginess has a lot to do with the mood swings, the phases of the news cycle, the ever-evolving picture we had of the world and our place in it… I kept my sanity by working on the album. It was good to have a mission in that. It was good too that I’d done the crowdfund and people had already paid for the damn thing, which kept me from slacking off too much. When I wrote my last post on May 2nd I was feeling quite blocked-up and discouraged because I wasn’t getting my takes, but then towards the end of May things started falling into place and before I knew it I had the whole album on tape. And whaddaya know, I think it’s a pretty good one! Probably the best one I’ve done. It was the first time I deliberately set out to write and deliver an album on a schedule, setting my dates without having the material in place, and I think that led to it being a very tight, compact statement. Of course the songs wound up being a bit more introspective and quarantine-y than planned, but that’s just how she goes, eh?

I wrapped up recording work around the beginning of June. That coincided with the period that Ariel and I started really venturing out again - starting on May 29th when we first joined the BLM protests against police brutality. I have to admit it doesn’t come naturally to me to talk about the protests online - not because it’s not important, but because I’m unsure if my voice would be as meaningful or articulate as the voices of those who are speaking from a lifetime of experience. Everyone’s feeds are already flooded with this stuff, and being a vaguely foreign white boy with an escapist bent there seems so little use in me going up and taking the mic. I'd just be repeating what I'd had to learn from others.

But that said - taking part in the protests was absolutely eye-opening. The energy and anger and emotion were relentless, and the demands for fairness and justice were so obvious, so simple to understand, and just so plainly the right thing to do. Which made it all the more incredible that it didn’t seem to affect those we were protesting in the slightest. I naively thought that the NYPD would at the very least be eager to put it out there that they, too, were against the indiscriminate killing of unarmed people, black or otherwise. I thought they’d take a knee with us. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, necessarily - but still, maybe just for the sake of PR. Intead we got to watch them go out of their way to perform live demonstrations of what we were protesting against over and over again… That’s to say my skinny white ass got a real crash-course in the harsh realities. We got kettled, intimidated with helicopters, we watched people get rounded up and beaten with batons for violating the 8PM curfew, we were there when that cop car rammed into a group of protesters on Flatbush Avenue… We also saw the looting, and the cop cars on fire, and the trash fires all along Broadway and on Union Square.

What can I say about it? It was fucked. It’s fucked. To be treated as an enemy by the police for protesting police violence. What else to assume than that they were taking the side of violence? They acted more like heavily-armed counter-protesters than peacekeepers. And of course it all led me to examine my own life and the advantages I’ve had. If you’ve been following me over the years you know I’ve always made a point of organizing my life in such a way that I have room to kinda detach from modern life and dream. And I used to think everyone could just do that. I was always proselytizing about it when I was a kid. “Just go live it!” All the while unthinkingly accepting the free passes that society would give me. Playing the free-spirited ragamuffin, simply expecting the world to recognize me in my role - and the world did! - while in a different body I wouldn’t have been recognized. That’s clear enough. So what kind of hypocrite would I be if I wasn’t out shouting for the same freedoms for my fellow humans? It’s something of a karmic debt at this point.

 While all this was going on I also had to be dealing with my money situation, which was getting pretty bad. For reasons you can imagine I wasn’t in a place where I could apply for unemployment or any other kind of government assistance. My album crowdfund, the livestreams, and a little help from family and friends had seen me through the worst of the lockdown, but by the end of June I really had to start busking again. Sink or swim.

So, back to old Wash Square. That park has been through some phases in 2020, lemme tell you. It started out seriously mad. When I first started busking again the protests were still going full blast. March after march would weave in and out of the park, speeches were held, kneel-ins, sit-ins, you name it. I’d play the lulls. Around mid-July that righteous energy started making way for some seriously weird craziness. The NYPD had by this point stopped enforcing any of the usual small stuff and the Weird Ones had taken note. A squatter who called himself Jesus built a permanent home for himself and his followers in the fountain. Noise complaints were a thing of the past. Fights and brawls galore. Drugs, nudity, raves, and a riotous fuckitall feeling in the air, masks off, hands on, summer of mad recklessness. Me and my quarantine brain weren’t quite equipped to join the fray. I just kinda nervously skitted around the edges of it, yodeling here and there. Bit absent I was, maybe, but how can you go carefree gonzo when doing so means constantly risking killing someone’s granny by accident? I kept my social distance. There were some bad encounters. Bottles thrown at me while playing. Got assualted by some nut outside the W4st subway station, yanking me by the hair, punching me in the noggin. It was clear to anyone out there that the police had thrown their hands up at the situation and were letting people find out what life was like without them. As far as I could make out this unofficial police strike emboldened both the bad guys and the protesters without getting the cops anything. They might’ve been hoping the resident bougies would put their foot down one way or another, bark up the food chain some, but forget about it. There wasn’t much backlash or pushback from these upstanding, tax-paying pillars of society - they all just skipped town and headed for greener pastures. This mass exodus of wealth which had seemed temporary back in April started really accelerating around this point and by now the absence has started to feel permanent. If there’s any force of NIMBYism left in the Village I haven’t seen it. Those who have stayed on seem to have adopted a live-and-let-die approach. Aside from the fairy-lighted open-air restaurant patios with their potted plants and plexiglass dividers the streets belong to the people again, for better or for worse.

Personally, I don’t mind at all. Why should I? The money’s tough, but hell. I’ve always been broke. I’ve spent all my seven years in this city staring up at the rungless ladder which is Manhattan. If it can stop being a playground for the rich, it might become a place where I could actually hope to live someday.

Anyway, the last month has seen a sort of stabilization of the status quo. Some of the park regulars are back. R&B Lee, who used to be stuck down underground in the W4st subway station, has made a permanent place for himself and his giant PA on the western corner of the fountain. Jimmy the drummer is out all the time with a revolving cast of players. There are DJ sets on weekends and they get loud as all hell. So music’s back, but it’s a different world, and a much louder one. I’ve taken to playing in the small circle of benches on the western side of the park. There’s really not much space for unamplified music; the regular acoustic jam sessions have moved to other, more private locations and Colin Huggins, the park’s much-beloved pianist-in-residence, has more or less given up for the time being. Johan the living statue is out again much of the time. The portrait artists and street art sellers and fortune tellers are back, but the park poets are still in absence, probably conferring with their muses. Check out this article by Charlie Crespo with photos of some of the characters who are out and about.

Meanwhile the atmosphere out there is weird, anarchic, and sorta wonderful if you’re into that sort of thing. I guess I am. You won’t get bored hanging out on Washington Square in the summer of 2020, that’s for sure. Different threads of activism and action going on in every corner, friendships forged, love-ins, creativity, occasional bad chaos and ill energy, along with a good helping of just regular old hedonism in radical trappings. For a while there were great crowds of activist kids sleeping on the lawns and yakking all night about the revolution… The cops put a stop to that one, started clearing everyone out of the park again at midnight. Honestly a lot of it feels like what I always imagined the sixties might’ve been like. I’ve often looked at it a wee bit wistfully wishing I could be twenty again for it, with a head full of hot air and a fabulous tolerance for risk, instead of with bills to pay, dwindling resources, and a partner & a cat to look after. Oh, but I’ll be alright.

To everyone who’s still in NYC and has been worried about going out in public: if your health & conscience permit, come to the park sometime & let me sing a song for ya. I mean, do it responsibly - don that mask, bring your hand sanitizer, observe that distance - but New Yorkers have been knocking it out of the park when it comes to beating the virus, and that means the risks are lower and going out is almost as safe as it used to be. The park has plenty of room to socially distance. No one will bother you about it if you bring a picnic blanket and a bottle of something. The subway is safer to travel on than you might expect. The nights are hot and humid and saturated with all the great unknown we’re traveling through together.

And as far as I can make out, it’s the only show in town!

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riverdamien · 4 years

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Mary Magdalene: Woman of Shadows

Diarmuid Ó Murchú is an Irish poet, author, friend, and member of the Sacred Heart Community. This poem highlights the presence of Mary Magdalene and the women at Jesus’ death and resurrection and invites us to question why we have not honored their role more fully. Poetry is so much better heard than simply read, so for full effect, read these words aloud, perhaps several times.

What happened [to] the women on the first Easter Day Breaks open a daring horizon, Inviting all hearts to discern. Mid the grieving and trauma of loss, The horror to stand at the foot of a Cross. A body we think was buried in haste, And a tomb that was empty but restless in taste. Empowering a strange group of women. [stanza 2]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What happened to those on the first Day of Easter, The faithful disciples by Magdalene led? A subverted truth the patriarchs dread. Beyond all the theories that time has construed, Beyond the oppression we have too long endured. The first ones commissioned for Easter proclaim A woman-led mission we’ve brutally maimed. But we can’t keep subverting empowerment. [stanza 5]

Resurrection still flourishes and always it will, Imbued with a truth that time will fulfil. What women empowered at the dawning breakthrough will bear fruit in season despite all the treason. ’Cos justice will render what deserves to endure. [stanza 6] [1]

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Father Richard Rhor gives a good summary of the person of Mary Magdalene:

"One of the lessons we might learn from the Gospel stories of Mary Magdalene is that, in the great economy of grace, all is used and transformed. Nothing is wasted. God uses our egoic desires and identities and leads us beyond them. Jesus’ clear message to his beloved Mary Magdalene in their first post-resurrection encounter is not that she squelch, deny, or destroy her human love for him. He is much more subtle than that. He just says to her “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17). He is saying “Don’t hold on to the past, what you think you need or deserve. We are all heading for something much bigger and much better, Mary.” This is the spiritual art of detachment, which is not taught much in the capitalistic worldview where clinging and possessing are not just the norm but even the goal. "

A second lesson we might learn from Mary Magdalene is that of "listening," for in all portrayals of her in the New Testament she is simply present. The art of listening is especially available during this time of "Staying in Place", and it is difficult to be with ourselves. for as we look back at our lives we see our "sins".

There has been on Facebook a couple of items listing behaviors that most people do through the years--behaviors that are not flattering--it has never failed for me to check all of them LOL. And there are many more, many more. We are all sinners, all sinners.

I am well aware of things I have done, and well aware there will be others. I strive to live in the present, take them and examine and move on. We need to stop holding the wrongs of others under a microscope and look at ourselves.

During a time of great pain many years ago when he was a young priest, the new Roman Catholic Bishop of Iowa wrote these words to me in response to a note congratulating him:

"Thank you for remembering me on my ordination as Bishop after so many years. I remember well our conversations at Sacred Heart in. ...and simply tried to be a brother in Christ to another hurting brother--something that you made a full time ministry of for so very many years in San Francisco".

Bill knew I was a prostitute, and all that went with that occupation, and in his ministry I found Christ again and was born a new.

Bill gave the greatest compliment ever given me: that ministry is being a "brother to others." And it is dangerous and risky at times, but during these many years, meaningful and rewarding. There are no regrets.

Maria EJ Zuhari quotes a friend in these words:

"Most white people have reached a point where they are blind to their privilege because they were born into institutional racism. (my words)-- homophobia, sexism, and all that put down others."

We can tear down statues, and carry signs, but until we have "a revolution of the heart", as Dorothy Day once said, we will not change. For Zuhari's friend is absolutely correct in her assessment.

I look at my actions every day, and the past, and remember, that in Jesus we are offered new life, and come to him without judging others.

That is what Mary Magdalene offered as the "first apostle," the"first priest" as she stood strong, and steady at the tomb of Jesus--our hope of a new life in Christ. Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!"

----------------------------------------------------

Father River Damien Sims, sfw, D.Min., D.S.T.

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

www.temenos. org

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davidastbury · 4 years

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Mr Crow

I am trying to tame a magpie. Each day I go into the garden and look for him, peering behind bushes, calling - ‘Where’s Mr. Crow?’ - and making clicking noises; a weak imitation of magpie language. Suddenly, with a clatter of wings, he swoops down and glares at me. I step towards him and he backs away; I retreat and he moves forward; all the time watching me with a flickering eye.

Yesterday I flooded a hollow in the lawn and left him to splash about. He was like a human singing in the bath. Dunking his head, slapping the water with his wings, shaking and preening. And cocking his head to what I was saying - ‘Who’s a beautiful crow?’ Who’s the most handsome crow for half a mile? Who’s a big softie?’ He glared back at me and stamped his feet, beak wide open, a choking,inarticulate outpouring of aggression.

I didn’t mind at all, I know he loves me.

Manchester

Perhaps she is actually Anglo-Saxon - someone whose ancestors squelched through the bogs of ancient, wooded England. All those centuries of being taxed by the bastard barons, of wars civil and uncivil, of battles on the moorland in Yorkshire, of debtor’s prison, of the slums of Manchester’s Ancoates and Gorton.

Or perhaps her family, led by a great, great, great grandfather, came and set up home here - fleeing pogroms in Poland, or potato famine, or pestilence - desperately seeking safety and survival.

Whatever ... throughout it all the mums and dads kept having babies, and here she is to prove it - this wonderful girl swinging three carrier bags, coming out of Selfridges.

After He’d Gone

The office door was locked but someone let me in; she shouldn’t have, but she knew me. His desk had been pushed to the side of the room - you could see where it used to be, the carpet tiles were darker in that place. It had been his desk and now it stood alone with the silent patience of a tethered animal. Drawer one, drawer two, drawer three - empty; drawer four jammed, and I didn’t want to force it. Phone on a wire on the window-ledge, some arch-lever box-files with springs like mouse traps, an open packet of rusting staples.

And his swivel chair with the dicky armrest - it snapped downwards if you pressed on it. He’d reported it to maintenance, but it was never fixed.

I didn’t stay - there was nothing left and there would be no goodbyes - not now, not ever.

King Street

A sense of place. A location - city centre; the same street between two more important streets. And together we walked along this street to buy something - something that was important to her - at her age - it was actually very important to her. So we walked quickly because she was afraid the shop might sell out and she wouldn’t get what she wanted - what her best friend already had and what she felt she must have too.

And we were lucky; she got what she wanted. We were back on the street and she walked on air; she smiled at everyone, couldn’t stop smiling - and I was happy too.

Catchup

We were a mixed bunch; clever and silly at the same time. Frank studied rocks and fossils - Ian was going to be a star on TV - George was starting a blues band - Geraldine who wanted to marry David (although it took forty years to achieve this ambition) - Geoffrey who was in love with a lady who was (fortunately) happily married - Kevin who was so charming but seethed with hidden anger - Elizabeth who habitually feigned outrage, genius at the ‘meaningful’ glance - Mary, aggressive and coquettish, very sharp insults - Kath, mysterious but pleasant, couldn’t take her eyes off Mary - Ronald, nice, withdrawn, haggard from self-abuse - Don, crackling with financial ambitions - Brian who got drunk and wrote like Joyce - John the antiquarian with his tweed suits and bow ties - Michael the anarchist, wiping his glasses and talking revolution - Lynne who never stopped smiling, the only person liked by everyone - Jim the bearded pharmacist - Chadwick (who would call a child Chadwick?) budding tycoon from the council flats - Hugh, meter-reader and philosopher.

Missed a lot out of course.

Just a bunch of people.

No harm in us.

No real harm.

No harm.

Teacher Training College ... 1965

Lecture over and boyfriend waiting for her outside!

And the Manchester streets - so sombre, industrial and soot stained - telling the history of triumphant capitalism and the deprivation and poverty endured by the masses. You could see it in the opulent Victorian hotels, the confident banks, the warehouses and sewing factories, the back alleys and dirty pubs with opaque windows.

But the Unions had become tough; they protected people.

She looked forward to the coming revolution in schools - class sizes would be reduced, bright new schools would be built with swimming pools, libraries and language laboratories. Elitism in education would be ended and the old ways would be swept aside and a new future would dawn.

Of course this didn’t happen. Class sizes haven’t changed much, most schools are in disrepair. Unions have been emasculated and seduced by sly government tricks; teachers stressed to breaking point by box-ticking, inspections, parental interference, policy u turns, and so on, and so on.

She married the boyfriend who waited outside - they had a few good years, but he did rather well in his career and went off with a girl from the office. She got out of teaching as early as she could, grabbed the reduced pension - and happy to settle, neatly divorced, with her kitchen garden, book club, and black Labradoodle.

An Afternoon ... 1965

Her lecture was cancelled and she never knew why. Her boyfriend was also free and was spending the day at a friend’s, helping him repair faulty audio equipment - so she phoned him and they arranged to meet up outside the Medical Library. It occurred to them both, instantly, that his house would be empty. Normally it was crowded with other students who shared the place - officially and unofficially. They could have it all to themselves; do what they wanted; make as much noise as they wanted.

They met; a flurry of kisses and hugs and without mentioning it, they set off towards his house. It was settled without saying any words. They walked quickly. He was animated, chatting and joking; nervous, as if it was a first date, as if he had to impress her - as if his life depended upon it.

She loved him when he was like this. She would have enjoyed keeping up the anticipation - perhaps stop at one of the bars for a quick drink - perhaps call in at the bookshop - something like that - something that would have kept the atmosphere at boiling point - prolonging the enjoyment of seeing his thin concealment.

They turned off the main road and came to the house. He moved ahead, fumbling an assortment of keys, and she looked at the back of his neck - planning to bite it. He kicked away the pile of mail and held the door open. She noticed his slight breathlessness and smiled up at him - basking in the pleasure of causing all this disturbance without even raising her little finger.

Janet ... (Mary Notnice’s friend) 1965

She lived on the outskirts of the town - in the countryside. Her home had once been the tied cottage of a farm labourer, but had been sold at auction when the farm went bankrupt. Her mother used the sheds and enclosures, keeping all sorts of animals - goats, sheep, rabbits, poultry and so on The mother was nice; a sincere, decent woman who seemed to be always busy, always cheerful.

There was no dad around; I never found out why. I once hinted at the subject - not wishing to bluntly ask - but she didn’t take it up. Something in the way she deflected my hint told me that it wasn’t a fully tragic story, instead she showed an amused, forgiving tolerance. As if his absence was the result of ancient, masculine folly, described in every song, book, film in human history. No doubt an amorous misdemeanour; a betrayal with one of her friends possibly, where the uncompromising truth would stand as plainly as the nose on her face. And so they lived their little lives in their little house, more in disappointment than sorrow - as if the missing husband and father wasn’t held entirely to blame - because he hadn’t been able to help himself.

Janet had a beautiful, tranquil disposition - she could have written this ...

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,

For such as we are made of, such we be.

(Twelfth Night)

The Room

The house is still there - and the trees. Most of the front garden has been lost to car parking; the area where the stone fountain used to dribble in the sharp sunshine has now become a turning circle for the resident’s vehicles.

But he’s not interested in the front - he would like to go ‘round the back’ and peer at the upper windows - at one particular upper window. This had been their room - many years ago - not for long, just one winter, their only room, their only winter. He would like to see what he saw then, when in the mornings he had looked out at the snow in the garden, the trail of a fox or dog, the dripping moss on the brick walls.

And yet he isn’t fooling himself; his motive isn’t totally prosaic. There had been so much joy in that room - remembering how in the cold light her silhouette frazzled like a Bonnard and their laughter rebounded from the stark white walls, and there was nothing in the world that could equal their happiness or their unconquerable belief in each other.

Surely all that joy must have sunk into the bricks and wood and plaster of that room. Would it be asking too much, so many years later, for just a little of it to be given back to him?

Conversation between the Kray twins.

‘Fancy a cuppa’ Ron?’

‘Yea - thanks Reg. Four sugars’

‘Fancy a biscuit Ron’

‘Yea - I could murder a McVitie’

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virginiamurrayblog · 6 years

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Just Kids? How Today’s Teenagers Became Our Role Models

Photo illustration: Ka Lee and Joel Louzado

At FLARE, we take what young women like seriously—but more importantly, we take those young women and non-binary people seriously, too. This year, it feels like teens have become increasingly politically aware, increasingly angry… and increasingly willing to use their voices to enact social change. That’s why, as “the youth” head back to school, we’re taking some time to think about the space they occupy in society today. Here, Katie Underwood breaks down why the kids really are all right. Elsewhere on FLARE.com, Canadian teens share their stories about how they really use their phones, learning about gender identity on the internet, what it’s like to grow up in Canada’s North and being a young man who proudly wears makeup.

During what can only be described as a literal rebel yell delivered at a rally in the rubble of February’s Parkland shooting, Emma Gonzales cut a stunning figure. Perhaps it was her eloquent words, shouted in pissed-off, cut-glass tones, over the course of 11 minutes, chastising politicians for their greed and castration in the face of America’s all-powerful gun lobby, negligent vices that no doubt contributed to the untimely deaths of 17 of her classmates. Perhaps it was her literal image: Shaved head, multi-racial, queer, angry and unashamed. That day, Gonzales looked less like an outsider or victim or chronological minor than an oracle, a harbinger of true revolution. That day, she was just 16.

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It’s becoming increasingly difficult for “grownups” to reconcile the slapdash stereotypes they associate with modern youth with the seeds of meaningful societal change we’ve seen them sow in recent times. If millennials, now full-blown adults, have historically caught flak for favouring avocado toast above home ownership, poor Gen Z (the teenaged, “post-millennials”) are slagged as so profoundly self-absorbed that they’d happily, mindlessly Snapchat themselves into traffic.

But while the title of a recent New York Times trend piece (“Are Today’s Teenagers Smarter and Better Than We Think?”) stank with no small whiff of condescension, it also pointed to an active sea change in our culture’s perception of the previously not-alright kids: “The stereotype of a disengaged, entitled and social-media-addicted generation doesn’t match the poised, media-savvy and inclusive young people leading the protests and gracing magazine covers.” After Stoneman, thousands of high school students across American staged mass walkouts to protest gun violence across America. In the spring, they headed towards Washington for the same reason. More recently—and closer to home—when Ontario’s new conservative government scrapped the new sex-ed curriculum, teens immediately took action. The result, July’s March for Our Education, was organized by three Toronto high school students: Frank Hong, Rayne Fisher-Quann and Le Nguyen.

Young people have always contributed to social justice movements

Of course, “the youth” have always been canaries in our collective coal mine; let’s not forget that the Freedom Rides of 1960 were partially led by a coalition of students. Or that the Stonewall Riots and demonstrations against the Vietnam War were well-attended by young people. While today’s teens may have missed out on the “greatest generation” label, they are certainly the most politically aware and engaged generation we’ve ever seen.

History 101 shows that, despite the chaotic appearance of our current political climate, “wokeness” necessarily tends to grow with the cultural progress of each successive generation, and with time. But where older adults always seem to get confused is that enlightenment, in fact, doesn’t. One need look no further than 72-year-old unmitigated human and planetary disaster Donald Trump—or our current climate change situation—for a counterpoint to the age-old “age equals wisdom” adage. The adults were in charge and they shit the bed. Spectacularly.

They’re using the power of the internet, and social media in particular, for good

What kids today know, or at least embody, is that wisdom comes from, yes, experience, but also from empathy and connection. Empathy makes room for “the others”—the gay kids, the trans kids, the poor, the people of colour, the women. And indeed, social media, the very medium of connection we slag them for puppy-filtering their faces on, is their most potent organizing tool.

In the same New York Times piece, Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, says succinctly: “They didn’t grow up being the passive recipients of somebody else’s broadcast.” Teens have always had the potent fortune of remaining untrammelled by cynicism and the gear-grinding reality of full-time jobs and families. But now they also have Soundcloud and Instagram and Twitter. Don’t appreciate your president’s pat offer of “thoughts and prayers”? Make like Stoneman student Sarah Chadwick and @ him on Twitter for being a “piece of shit,” then march for your lives to his house.

But this expertly channeled existential angst isn’t restricted to the realm of politics proper. 2018’s pop culture space has similarly been a teenage hotbed. Just look at, well, Teen Vogue, a formerly boy- and celebrity- and lip gloss–obsessed monthly that pivoted to substantive political op-eds and gender-spectrum inclusive content seemingly overnight.

Our idea of “teenage wunderkinds” is evolving—and diversifying

Tavi Gevinson, the pint-sized fashionista fetishized for her youthful spunk and the admitted genius that is Rookie, used to corner the teenage wunderkind market. Now we have Zendaya. We have Alessia Cara. And we have Amandla Stenberg, a 19-year-old Black, openly bisexual actress-slash-activist whose credits include roles in The Hunger Games and Lemonade, who has plans to become a director with the express purpose of creating roles for women of colour, and whose Vogue profile opened with this banger quote: “I don’t think gender even exists.”

Coincidentally, Stenberg’s partner, Mikaela Straus, who goes by the stage name King Princess, is blasting through pop’s straight AF paradigm with hit songs like “1950” and other gender-bending odes to queer love. It’s not just that we’re listening to young women—it’s the kinds of young women that now get to hold the mic: ones of colour, of varying classes and orientations. That’s the real shift.

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Because the media likely won’t ever stop with the grandiose superlatives, Stenberg has, of course, been christened a “voice of the future.”(R.I.P. Lena Dunham’s “voice of a generation.”) But if we can take away any conclusion from recent times, it’s that hers is but one in a growing chorus of progressive, youthful voices worth listening to. Why? Because they—the Gonzaleses, the Hongs, Fisher-Quanns and Nguyens, and the writers who have shared their stories with FLARE—may be “just kids,” but they have something important to say. We should listen.

Read These Teens:

This Edmonton Teen Let FLARE Snoop Through Her Phone For a Week What Tumblr Taught Me About My Gender Identity Teenage Boys Are Slaying The Makeup Game—And I’m Salty “People Say You Are a Certain Way Because That’s What You Were like When You Were Five”

The post Just Kids? How Today’s Teenagers Became Our Role Models appeared first on Flare.

Just Kids? How Today’s Teenagers Became Our Role Models published first on https://wholesalescarvescity.tumblr.com/

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Please, Don’t Let ‘Set It Up’ Be the Future of Rom-Coms

http://fashion-trendin.com/please-dont-let-set-it-up-be-the-future-of-rom-coms/

Please, Don’t Let ‘Set It Up’ Be the Future of Rom-Coms

Everyone’s talking about Netflix’s newest romantic comedy, Set It Up. Some are heralding it as the return of the romantic comedy. It’s hard to find a negative review, which is why I’ve spent the 24 hours since I saw it wondering if I watched a different movie. I understand the appeal of its unapologetic cheerfulness, even if it didn’t speak to me specifically, but I’m struggling to wrap my head around the idea that it somehow moves the rom-com needle, as so many are claiming it does. If this is progress, I think we need to expect more.

Admittedly, the last romantic comedy I remember being excited to see was Obvious Child, which came out in 2014. Before that, it was Easy A, in 2010. There was a time though — you could say my entire adolescence — when rom-coms were my drug of choice. I owned and watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Two Weeks Notice, Notting Hill, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton, You’ve Got Mail, 50 First Dates, The Wedding Planner and most of their generational counterparts enough times to memorize each of their male protagonist’s romantic speeches, which usually appear about 95 percent of the way through the film, always to win back the girl. Sometimes I started them over immediately after the credits rolled, just to rewatch them with the director’s commentary. (R.I.P. DVD extras.) It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the late-’90s-early-aughts rom-com boom played a large role in shaping how my younger self saw the adult world. It informed how I identified myself, who I wanted to be when I grew up, how I flirted. I’d resent that if I hadn’t been such a willing participant.

While it’s true that even commercially successful rom-coms have rarely received critical acclaim, there was a time when the genre carried a certain cultural cachet and was capable of making A-list stars out of B-list actors, shaping romantic attitudes and generally steering the zeitgeist. That was over a decade ago. In the years since, the original mid-budget rom-com has been pushed out by multi-hundred-million-dollar extended-universe sequels and reboots and remakes. But it’s not just about money — tastes have changed, too. Some blame Hollywood’s disinterest in stories about women (or Katherine Heigl, generally); others blame a lack of depth and nuance. Regardless, the classic rom-com formula that guaranteed success in the early aughts came to look and feel old-fashioned, both in its technical execution and especially in the tropes it traded in.

But in the past couple years, rom-coms have regained some of their lost footing in popular culture, with people like Emily Nussbaum, Mindy Kaling and Chrissy Teigen defending the genre as a valid art form. At the forefront of this neo-rom-com revolution, as you might expect, is Netflix. According to IndieWire, Set It Up, which stars Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs, is the seventh rom-com the media service-cum-production studio has put out in 2018. And for some reason, it hit a feel-good nerve the others didn’t.

“Set It Up is remarkably refreshing,” writes Elena Nicolaou for Refinery29. “The movie marks the first time the classic rom-com format has been shaped around our particular moment in history, and made specific to the millennial experience.”

“This film has it all — at least by the standards of a fun, disposable romantic comedy, the likes of which Hollywood rarely bothers to release anymore,” writes David Sims for The Atlantic. “Set It Up might just feel like a fluffy rom-com, but it could also be the start of a genuine realignment within the industry.”

“It’s not perfect, certainly, but it’s an emotional support blanket of a film, an old-fashioned rom-com led by stars with palpitating chemistry. I see myself putting it on every so often, scanning to hit my favorite scenes,” writes Esther Zuckerman for Thrillest.

My Set It Up movie-watching experience more closely resembled a vigorous exercise class than an emotionally supportive snuggle. As in, my cohorts spent the duration groaning or calling it quits, while my sister, who suggested it, apologized profusely for what she’d done. She swore she saw positive reviews, but maybe they’d been satires? Turns out they were not, but the joke was still on us.

Written by Katie Silberman and directed by Claire Scanlon, Set It Up follows Harper (Zoey Deutch) and Charlie (Glenn Powell), two overworked assistants who work for high-powered, high-maintenance bosses: an ESPN journalist named Kristen (Lucy Liu) and a venture capital executive named Rick (Taye Diggs). When Harper and Charlie meet-cute in the lobby of the New York high-rise building they all work in, they conspire to set up Kristen and Rick in the hopes that love might make their bosses less ambitious and thus free up their schedules.

The story is cheesy, full of plotholes, and generally predictable, but that’s to be expected in a rom-com. In fact, people who know the genre better than I do have broken down exactly why Set It Up lives up to its predecessors so successfully. What confounds me most are the myriad claims that Set It Up retains what’s great about the classic rom-com, nixes the more offensive qualities and updates it for today. With all due respect, I do not agree.

To the movie’s credit, it is distinct from the rom-coms of the aughts in a few ways. For one, it is technically more racially diverse than its forbearers, with Liu and Diggs in two of the four lead roles. It also makes an attempt at subverting gender stereotypes by casting a man and woman as a cowering assistant and intimidating boss, respectively. Unfortunately, the execution of these decisions ultimately reveals more about the creators’ awareness of how to check boxes than actually be progressive. The story and characters are just a groan-inducing as, say, those in The Wedding Planner, albeit more unlikeable, in my opinion.

Take the movie’s handling of race. Set It Up may star Liu and Diggs — for which it’s been applauded — but race is never addressed as a part of the modern experience, and the story is actually about their two assistants, played by white actors Deutch and Powell, whose personalities are given more attention and nuance. Casting people of color is a good first step, but it’s worth remembering that representation in movies is also about giving those characters nuance, telling their stories and placing their stories in a world where race exists — especially if it’s set in modern-day New York City. It’s hard to imagine that ever being done well as long as the vast majority of movies continue to be written, cast and directed by white people, as Set It Up was.

Sexism and gender, however, is addressed, at least in small moments — possibly the result of the film being written and directed by women. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee success either. As Glenn Kenny wrote for The New York Times in her review of the movie, “[T]he expectation that a female-written, female-directed effort would yield something refreshingly different is scotched within the first few minutes.” The female characters mostly fall flat. Harper is rom-com-recognizable in that she’s beautiful but doesn’t know it, lives in a huge apartment but is an assistant, loves pizza more than her friends, and loves sports. She’s a classic Gone Girl-style “cool girl.” Kristen is a frigid, sexless career woman who, despite knowing how to handle herself professionally, is totally clueless about dating. And then there’s Charlie’s girlfriend: a beautiful model who has no personality. None of it makes me angry; it just makes me yawn. But my ears perk when someone calls the movie “specific to the millennial experience.”

Not every piece of media has to be seamless and say something meaningful; some might argue rom-coms are best when they do neither. But shows like Insecure and Dear White People and movies like The Big Sick and Bridesmaids prove that the marriage of romance and comedy can be delightful, digestible and feel distinctly new, even if it isn’t always perfect or realistic. To me, modernizing the genre has less to do with making the white female protagonist like sports and have career aspirations (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days did both in 2003) and more to do with telling stories we haven’t heard before through characters we haven’t met before.

Maybe rom-coms just want to be fun popcorn flicks and I’ve simply lost my taste for them. And that’s fine! I’m happy to skip the next one. But when they’re reviewed as beacons of progress or watched en masse and become cultural touchstones, like Set It Up has, I think it’s worth asking if our expectations are high enough.

Feature photo via Netflix.

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cabiba · 7 years

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Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.’ That was how the New York Times described Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. And one can see why. Dreher, a prolific columnist and a senior editor and blogger at the American Conservative, has taken philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s contention in After Virtue (1981) – that modernity has impoverished spiritual life, shattering the Classical-Christian source of authority-sustaining morality – and run with it. He poses a critique of secular capitalism, the hypocrisy of liberals and self-obsessed identity politics, while also recognising the perilous situation in which Christianity now finds itself. The result is a work as deeply felt as it is moral.

To pursue some of the issues raised by The Benedict Option, from the decline of faith to the dangers of our emotivist, therapeutic culture, the spiked review’s Sean Collins decided to speak to Dreher. Here’s what he had to say:

Sean Collins: Is it an exaggeration to say that Christianity is dying in the West?

Rod Dreher: A slight one. Now, the West is a broad term. When I use it, I usually mean the Anglosphere and Western Europe. And I don’t think that Christianity will ever be completely extinguished in the West, but I do think that we are going to see a tremendous diminishment of it over the course of this century, just like what has happened in Europe. I think, strictly speaking, it won’t mean Christianity will be dead in the West, because there will always be signs of it somewhere, but in terms of it being a factor in public life, and in the way that Americans, and Westerners more broadly, think about themselves, yes, it will be just a shadow of its former self.

I do speak in alarmist tones in this book, not only because I am generally alarmed, and I think other people should be, but it’s also because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, when you are trying to speak to a world that is deaf, you have to shout. There are so many Christians in America who don’t see how fragile things are for us. Christians in Europe don’t have this problem, by the way. When I talk to them, they’ve been living with the collapse of the faith within their societies for generations now. They get it straight up. Americans have been very, very comfortable for a long time. In The Benedict Option, I’m trying to raise the alarm, and show them how the apparent strength of Christianity in America – strength in numbers, and strength of influence in society – is really a façade, and if we don’t make some really strong changes now, it’s not going to survive in a meaningful sense.

Collins: What would you say are the key forces that have led to the crisis of Christianity in the US?

Dreher: The key forces are, first, economic. We live in an economy that requires and mandates mobility. It is very hard for people even to think about staying in one place and putting down roots. This is what the Benedictines call stability. Stability, economically, is a hindrance to you getting ahead in our society.

There is also the matter of individualism, which is a broad category, but it’s in the air we breathe in America. This is the idea that we can only live in truth, so to speak, when we are true to ourselves and our own desires. This is something that none of us can escape in modernity.

The strength of Christianity in America – strength in numbers, and strength of influence in society – is really a facade, and if we don’t make some really strong changes now, it’s not going to survive in a meaningful sense

The sexual revolution is a tremendous factor here, too. Not just because the whole idea of Christian anthropology doesn’t make sense outside of the Christian tradition, and the disciplining of one’s sexual desires. But also because the sexual revolution teaches us that sexual desire is a central component of personal identity. It’s not just what you do, but who you are. We build practices and institutions around that. And I’m not just simply talking about same-sex marriage. The sexual revolution brought no-fault divorce and we’re seeing the fragmenting of families, especially among the poor and the working class.

This is going to have tremendous effects – not only economically and socially, but also in terms of passing on the faith. Mary Eberstadt, in her book How the West Really Lost God (2013), presents evidence that faith is passed across generations by intact families, by the way the faith is lived out within the family. It’s not simply a matter of stating a bunch of propositions, and getting the children to agree with those propositions. It’s much more organic than that. And so if you don’t have intact families where the faith is lived out in a real way, it’s going to be much less likely that the faith will be handed down to the next generation, and the generation after that.

So in that sense the sexual revolution is attacking the stability, credibility and feasibility of Christianity in ways that are only dimly perceived by many Christians. And even conservative Christians, who may affirm Christian sexual morality in a strict sense (no sex outside of marriage and all that), are missing the bigger picture here, of what the breakup of family means, and is going to mean, for the endurance of Christianity in American society.

Collins: In your book you lean on Philip Rieff and his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff argued that religion was being replaced with a gospel of self-fulfillment. What impact specifically do you think the growth of this therapeutic culture has had on Christianity?

Dreher: It’s been absolutely devastating. Christian Smith of Notre Dame has written about how there is religious illiteracy in American culture, across denominations, and even across religions. It’s devastating because young people and people in general – look, I’m 50 years old and I was raised this way, too – don’t associate following a religion with living up to a certain set of standards outside of ourselves. I mean, called outside of ourselves to be sacrificial – not only sacrificial of our own desires, but in terms of our income and our time. To live up to a reality that’s outside of ourselves. So if religion no longer calls on us to make sacrifices for the greater good, to serve God, and to love our neighbour, then religion collapses into something that makes us happy. We come to believe that God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, and that’s the greatest good. I do think God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, but that only comes through holiness, when we are doing what God asks us to do. And that usually means some form of sacrifice.

This is historic Christianity; this is Christianity as it has been lived out for nearly two thousand years. The Bible tells us that we have to be prepared to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ. This is a foreign gospel to the modern sensibility and most modern churches. And I think that when we lose that self-sacrificial idea of what Christianity is, we end up not worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible. We end up worshipping the self. It’s clear from research that this is where we are in American society today.

I was at a conservative evangelical college in the Midwest earlier this year, giving a talk on The Benedict Option. During the Q&A session, a young woman undergraduate stood up in the audience and asked sincerely, ‘I don’t understand why you are talking about practices and things like that. Why is that necessary to be a Christian? Why isn’t enough that we love Jesus with all our hearts, like I was raised?’ I told her, as Christians we have to do that, but it’s not as simple as that. What she’s talking about is just arranging our emotions. To love Jesus means certain things, and it does not mean other things, and this comes to us through the Bible, and our different religious traditions, and so on. But love is not simply a feeling, and if we don’t have orthodoxy – in other words, right belief – and orthopraxy – which is to say practices that integrate those beliefs into our daily lives – then our faith will become just something very ephemeral and emotional.

After the meeting, one of the professors at this college said that what that young lady said to you represents the spirituality of 99 per cent of the people on this campus. They are the products of youth culture. They’ve not been taught anything about the historic Christian faith, other than emotion, other than Jesus is your best friend, Jesus wants you to be happy. So, when they are challenged on this from the secular world, they have no answer, and they capitulate. They’ve not been given any kind of concrete grounding in catechism or doctrine, nor a way of thinking about what it means to be a religious person in a secular world. I found that quite striking, because it fits very well with what Christian Smith has found about the religious illiteracy of the American young, and how there’s no stability at all there – it’s all about emotion.

Remember, this was a conservative evangelical college. This was not a secular college or a liberal college. The problem goes very, very deep. You see why I am so alarmed by it, because the people who ought to be aware of it, and figuring out how to deal with it, are in deep denial that it’s even a problem.

Collins: You argue that the issues facing Christianity are caused as much by internal pressures as external pressures. To quote from Rieff again: ‘The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in a way that remain inwardly compelling.’ It seems that traditional values associated with the West – and not limited to Christianity, either – are not necessarily being recognised and embraced by the younger generation.

Dreher: You’re completely right. This crisis I am talking about in The Benedict Option is a crisis of the Church, but this is all part of a much broader crisis of authority in the West. I don’t know how we’re going to solve it. Across political institutions, across academia, there’s a feeling that everything is suddenly up for grabs. And I’m not sure how this going to turn out.

Collins: Yes, I was wondering if you would see Christianity as a casualty of broader trends that are negative for what we might call Western civilisation. To put it another way, shouldn’t all those who want to defend certain values associated with the Western tradition – whether that’s reason, virtue or a more social concept of the self – and all those who are opposed to social developments like the narcissistic self and nihilism, be concerned? You often refer to the influence of ‘secularism’, but it seems to me that there are also secularists who would like to preserve the gains of the past.

Dreher: Marcello Pera is an Italian politician, a friend of Pope Benedict XVI, and an atheist. He wrote a book with Pope Benedict XVI called Without Roots (2007). As an atheist and a humanist, Pera talks about how the West desperately needs to hold on to its Christian heritage because the classical liberal tradition emerged from Christianity, and we need a basis of Christian belief to hold on to liberalism, even for secular people. It’s a difficult argument to make to people, but I think it’s a really important one. We’ve come to take so much for granted in the West, that things have always been this way and will always be this way, that liberalism is the natural state of humankind.

Ross Douthat likes to say to people on the left: ‘If you don’t like the religious right, wait till you see the post-religious right.’ I think he’s correct. We’re seeing a racialist right wing arise as a response to identity politics on the left. If we don’t have a sense of values rooted in the dignity of individual human beings that comes out of Christianity, then I think everything is precarious. Even if we have Christianity, things are precarious, as history shows. But if we don’t have Christianity, I wonder on what basis we will draw the lines politically and socially. I think we’re at a really dangerous point in terms of seeing a resurgence of left-wing extremism and/or right-wing extremism. There doesn’t seem to be any agreed-upon source of transcendent values in the West.

When we lose that self-sacrificial idea of what Christianity is, we end up not worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible – we end up worshipping the self

We could also see – and this is the Michel Houellebecq scenario – Islam, at least in Europe, take over, because people can’t live without a fundamental sense of order. If the West has repudiated any spiritual or religious sources of deep, internalised order, something else will come in to fill the vacuum.

Collins: As you know, expressions of traditional Christian views, especially regarding sexuality, are now often seen as discriminatory. The US government, courts, big business are opposed in many situations. As you note in your book, there are cases where Christians have been effectively forced out of their jobs, or found it challenging to continue in them. It seems intolerance towards religious views is growing. Where do you see this battle headed?

Dreher: The next front in the battle is going to be over religious schools – whether or not they will be able to survive. What happened in California earlier this year is a harbinger for what’s to come nationwide. There was an effort by a state representative in California, from the LGBT caucus, to deny the use of Cal Grants (a big education grant programme) at colleges and universities in the state that are considered discriminatory against LGBT people. This was narrowly defeated, but had it passed, most colleges that were conservative, that adhered to an orthodox understanding of sexuality, would have had to close, because so many of the students are poor and working class, a lot of them Hispanic and African-American, and they are dependent on Cal Grants to get a college education. This is a way that Christian colleges and institutions could be forced to close, even though they would have the freedom to continue.

It could come through funding or it could come through accreditation. I think we’re going to see Christian educational institutions forced either to capitulate on LGBT issues, or face closure if they can’t raise enough private funds. We’ll also see graduate and professional programmes denied licensure. You talk to law professors and people who follow this and they say this is what’s coming next.

More broadly, when you look at the millennials, in overwhelming numbers those who identify as Christian do not agree with basic Christian orthodoxy on sexuality. And not only that, they can’t understand how anybody could disagree. So, they will end up seeing people of my generation in the same way people of my generation saw our parents, who may have held segregationist or white-supremacist views in the past. I come from the Deep South, I was born in 1967, and it was pretty common for me to grow up around older white people who held really discriminatory views. And you learned how to deal with that, but you also learned not to take it seriously at all. That’s exactly what Christians are going to face in the future.

Now, I completely reject the idea that there’s a parallel between race and sexual desire. There’s nothing in the Bible that justifies white supremacy. But you can’t get around the very clear scriptural prohibitions on homosexuality. You have to really repudiate a lot in order to ignore that. This is going to be a tremendous thing. We know exactly how we look on white supremacists or racists today. I don’t think there are many people within the Christian Church who are prepared for the social isolation and opprobrium that is going to befall them if they hold to orthodox Christian teaching on this issue. It will be a matter of being hated, but not being given permission at all in the gospel to hate in return. I think we’re going to see a lot of people falling away from the faith because they will not be able to withstand the loss of social status, or even loss of employment status, because of this issue.

Collins: In the past, many liberals saw the defense of religious liberty as entirely consistent with the defense of broader civil liberties. This goes back centuries: one of the three things Thomas Jefferson wanted to be remembered for (it’s on his gravestone) was as the author of the Virginia statute on religious freedom. Would you agree that anyone who values tolerance and freedom should be supporting religious liberty today?

Dreher: Absolutely. We have to support the right to be wrong. I have my particular Christian opinions, but I support a wide range of religious freedom, for Muslims, for Jews, for Hindus, for anybody else, because I know exactly how much that liberty means to me. Now, it’s unfeasible to think we can live in a society where everyone has maximum religious liberty. Real pluralism and real diversity requires real tolerance, and that means tolerating people’s right to be wrong about things. It’s a difficult thing to live in a pluralistic society and to practice toleration. One of the things that drives me nuts is the people who bark the loudest about tolerance often turn out to be the most intolerant and puritanical people.

For me, it was a great lesson growing up in the Deep South, in a small town, where there were a lot of older white people who held really strong and bigoted views about race. But I also saw these same people not as monsters, but as real people. And it was a puzzle to me, when I got older and went to college, how it was that these same people who held these terrible views had actually been much kinder and more helpful to African-American neighbours than a lot of liberals, like me (I was certainly a liberal back then, and I would still call myself a liberal on race today). They were more hands-on caring for poor black people than people like me, who held the correct opinions. These things are messy.

I can also remember, back in early 1990s, there was a gay couple who moved to my hometown. One of them was dying of AIDS. People from more than one of the local churches came out to minister to them, to bring them food, to help them. I guarantee you that if you had stopped and asked anyone of those Christian people in that small Southern town what they thought of homosexuality, they would have given you a standard, orthodox Christian response. The point is, these were their neighbours, and they loved them as best they could. This was also the case on racial matters. I was able to see, up close and personal, how divided human beings are, even within themselves, over these issues, and how important it was to try to work through them and to live compassionately and tolerantly with each other. It’s not easy, but it can be done and it has to be done. As we have become much more isolated from each other in America, living inside our own silos, left and right, we forget the humanity of the other, and our obligation to treat other people, even if they disagree with us, as real good people.

Collins: It seems, as you said, there is an unwillingness to engage fully with others. For example, Trump voters aren’t talked to – they’re just dismissed from afar as racists. Other people, who you’ve never met, are viewed as just abstractions, rather than in their complicated reality.

Dreher: Part of the problem is the silo effect. If all you do is watch Fox or MSNBC, and go online and hear from people who agree with you, it’s so easy to fall into this habit of dehumanising other people. I’m guilty of it too from time to time. Sometimes I’ll spend a whole day and I’ll feel like I’ve been out in the world, seeing people, dealing with all kinds of things, and I’ll realise I’ve never actually left the house. I’ve never actually gone out there and spoken to my neighbour, or dealt with people in the flesh. This is a real challenge, not only for the Church, but for all of us: to quit substituting virtual reality for reality. Because I’ll tell you, when I was a kid growing up, it was just so much easier for people in the community to get together. Every summer, three or four nights a week, everybody would hang out in the baseball park. Their kids had baseball, softball or something. We just saw a lot more of each other. Now, with social media, we seem so much more connected, but it’s an artificial connection.

The crisis I am talking about in The Benedict Option is a crisis of the Church, but this is all part of a much broader crisis of authority in the West

Collins: Saint Benedict was a 6th-century monk who responded to the collapse of Roman civilisation by founding a monastic order. Why do you think he is an example Christians should follow today?

Dreher: Benedict didn’t set out to save Roman civilisation. He could see it was falling apart around him. He just wanted to find a quiet place to pray and work on his salvation. And so he came up with the rule of Saint Benedict – something he partially borrowed from older monastic rules – which amounted to a guide to running a monastery. This ended up becoming extremely successful. When Benedict died, there were only 12 or 13 monasteries around that he had founded, but over the next couple of centuries, they spread like wildfire throughout Western Europe, which was mostly at that time governed by barbarian kings. When the monks founded these monasteries, they would not only preach the gospel to the local people, they also taught them how to pray, they taught them how to read in some cases, and they taught them the arts of living, like gardening, metallurgy, things that had been lost when Rome fell. The collapse of the Roman Empire was not simply a political collapse, it was a catastrophic cultural collapse. And because the monks preserved this wisdom within their communities – not just religious wisdom but also practical wisdom – they ended up spreading this knowledge throughout Western Europe laying the groundwork for the revival of civilisation.

We face different challenges certainly, because we live in a post-Christian era. Yet we Christians need to try to preserve that truth, that wisdom, within our communities, as well as spread it to the non-Christian world. It’s going to be different from what Saint Benedict dealt with, but both eras share a chaotic culture that is dealing with the trauma of having lost its foundations, and a culture that is in many ways hostile to what we have to say.

The main things we can learn from Saint Benedict are the value of community, the value of faithful practices, and the value of having an overarching sense of divine order, of sacred order, that we are conforming our lives to. This point about order is really hard for modern people to accept: the idea that there is a transcendent order to things that is not separate from the world, but immanent within it. It’s a metaphysical point. It sounds like angels dancing on the head of a pin, but it’s absolutely vital. If you visit the Monastery of Saint Benedict in Norcia, in Italy, that’s one of the first things the monks will tell you about how their lives are governed. They all recognise that their role in life is not just to follow a moral law, and not just to think holy thoughts; it is also to conform every part of their lives to the sacred order and make it present in the material world, through the work of their hands, through their prayers, through their good works. It’s a tremendous adventure, a tremendous challenge, but the Christian faith demands nothing less of us.

Look at the fathers of the Church, back in the Patristic era, or look to the medieval Church and the way medieval Christians understood themselves in relation to each other, and to the wider social order – there we can find the roots for our own recovery in the 21st century. The Church isn’t only the institution, and the Church isn’t all of the people who claim to be Christian right now in the year 2017. The Church is something that goes back 2,000 years. These people are our brothers and sisters in the faith, our fathers and mothers in the faith. We have a lot to learn from them, if we just open our eyes and get outside of this dictatorship of relativism, as Pope Benedict calls it, and this tyranny of the present moment.

We’re seeing a racialist right-wing arise as a response to identity politics on the left

Collins: How would you respond to those who say that The Benedict Option is advocating a retreat, a complete disengagement from society?

Dreher: The power of the post-Christian, and indeed anti-Christian, culture is so great that in order to hold on to the basics of the faith, Christians have to retreat in a limited way in our communities in order to form resilient disciples. This does not mean going totally Amish and shutting ourselves off from the world. But if we don’t withdraw from the world for the sake of formation, we are going to be completely useless in bringing Christian values to the wider world. If we look like the rest of the world, what difference does it make if you’re Christian?

There is a lot of fear and willful misunderstanding of this point, because people are terrified. A lot of Christians understand, in their heart of hearts, that we can’t keep going this way. They are seeing how many young people are leaving the faith entirely, and they don’t know what to do. They are afraid of having to change their lives in ways that are really hard for them. They don’t want to be seen as weird. But we’ve got to be willing to be seen as weird. Not simply for the sake of being weird, or being anti-social, but rather for the sake of standing up for what we really believe, because increasingly there’s such a divide between the way of the secular world and the way of Christ, and you cannot bridge that gap by continuing to assimilate.

This is an existential question. It’s not one only facing Christians. I’ve written on my blog about how Jews are dealing with this, in terms of inter-marriage. The problems are a little bit different for us Christians, but ultimately it’s all the same thing. The modern world says the individual is sacred, and individual choice is the real God of the Age. If that is true, then Christianity and Judaism and other revealed religions cease to exist. This is what I mean when I say the Church is falling away. Either the Church means something objectively in history, or it does not. And if it does mean something objectively in history, then we are bound to conform our own lives to this sacred order. If not, then the Church becomes whatever we want it to be, and it will completely go away in time, because it will cease to be recognisable to people who read the Bible, or the Church of centuries past.

Collins: Are there aspects of the Benedict Option that others in the US and West, not just Christians, might adopt, to counter some of the negative social trends? Do you see others advocating similar ideas as yours, and do you think your ideas have wider applicability?

Dreher: What’s really interesting is that, when I was writing this book, a couple of orthodox Jewish rabbis reached out to me and said ‘Hey, we’re on board with this. We’ve been doing this in the Orthodox Jewish community for a long time. We can help. Call us.’ I found that tremendously exciting. Just yesterday on Twitter, a Muslim said all Muslims need to read The Benedict Option, and learn from it. I think that’s terrific, because it is true. Anybody who wishes to stand against this deracinating, profane, modern culture can learn from it.

The technology chapter, for example, is something that is universally true, about how everybody who doesn’t want their kids colonised by corporate culture, the culture of pornography and this culture of un-reality, needs to take control of their kids’ use of technology, as well as submit themselves to a rule that will put technology in its proper place in our lives. Not get away from technology entirely – that’s not possible for most of us, or even desirable – but put it in its proper place.

And in my chapter on politics I encourage conservative Christians to quit trying so hard in national politics – which I think is a failure and is going to continue to be a failure. But I don’t think that’s the end of political involvement. Get involved locally to build up your local institutions, Christian and non-Christian. Immerse yourself in your local community. These are things that a lot of people, including secular people who are frustrated with national politics, might do. There’s no reason to give up politically and just stay inside your house. Rather, get involved locally, because at the local level the ideological lines may run in very different ways. You can find you’re on the same side with people on local issues who would not agree with you on national issues, but they’re your neighbors, too. You can get out of your house and come together and remember what it’s like to be a human being living in a community. That’s something that’s good for all of us.

Rod Dreher is senior editor at the American Conservative. He is the author of The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, published by Sentinel. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.

Pat Davers • 4 days ago

‘If you don’t like the religious right, wait till you see the post-religious right.’

Indeed. Nietzsche at least understood that once Christian belief went away, it morals teaching would still be passed down for a few generations under the guise of "bourgeois morality", but that this would attenuate over time without the Christian belief that underpins it, in spite of the efforts of enlightenment philosophers to put this Christian morality on a rational secular footing.

Indeed, we still believe - more or less - that all people are created equal, that we are constrained to treat other as we would be treated ourselves, that absolute truth and morality exist, but for how long are we going to carry on believing them and actinig upon these beliefs, before we move forward - or backward - to a world where the only things that matter are raw power and the fulfillment of our appetites?

Dreher's theses - that Christianity need to withdraw from the world in order to regroup its forces - is appealing but I don't see it happening, at least in Western Europe (things might be different in America, and in the orthodox East, I couldn't really say), and our needs for order will more likely be satisfied by the "Houllebecq" scanario, in which Europe simple submits to Islam, with surprisingly little fuss.

It's not a prospect I would particularly relish - onl all levels Islamic culture is far narrower and shallower than Chrsitianity one and our civilization would be much diminished should the former prevail - but all signs point toward it right now...

#reformation

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gulftrending-blog · 7 years

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The biggest danger of robots isn't about them at all. It's about us.

The drumbeat gets louder with every recession and every technological breakthrough. Labor force participation has been on a slow decline punctuated by plunges around recessions. Wages have stagnated for over a generation. The technology companies that are on the leading edge of change are creating fantastic wealth, but that wealth trickles down less and less.

Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of anti-competitive behavior by those tech giants, on a political economy that has disempowered labor, and on the rise of international competition that has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty but also squeezed the middle class of the developed world. But what about the core question of the technologies themselves. Automation hascost far more manufacturing jobsthan international trade ever did. And now artificial intelligence threatens many of the higher-paying service jobs that were supposed to be the happy upside to the creative destruction of manufacturing work.

The argument is not absurd as evidenced by the fact that some ofthe leading lights of the technology industry are increasingly sounding the alarm. Do we need to worry that artificial intelligence will put us all or all but a narrow elite out of work?

The optimistic rebuttal to this fear points out that while the industrial revolution caused great disruption, it hardly made human beings obsolete, nor led to widespread immiseration. On the contrary, harnessing the power of fossil fuels made it possible for much of humanity to escape the most grinding and backbreaking labor, and the most abject poverty. Where once upon a time, most people worked in subsistence agriculture, some of the hardest and least-remunerative labor imaginable, most people in developed countries today work in service jobs and have a historically extraordinary amount of leisure time. Why should robotics and artificial intelligence have consequences that are any different? Old jobs will be destroyed, but new jobs will be created that generate more value than the jobs that were destroyed, and in the end we’ll all be better off.

The pessimistic case is actually even more optimistic if you think clearly about it. Suppose artificial intelligence gets so good, so quickly, that most human occupations really are threatened with extinction because of it. Not just factory jobs and office drone jobs, but even creative work like writing pop songs and sitcoms will be done better by AI than by humans. What will we all do then? But another way of saying that is that we will finally and actually have conquered the problem of scarcity the machines will do all the work for everybody. Since economic systems exist to deal with the problem of resource allocation under conditions of scarcity, this means the end of all such systems, and the fulfillment of Marx’s (and Gene Roddenberry’s) dream of a communally shared abundance. How can that be a negative?

The conversation about the “threat” that both automation and artificial intelligence pose to “good” jobs suffers from a fundamental vagueness and confusion about what we mean by a “good” job. Think about the kinds of jobs that are most readily-replaced by artificially-intelligent robots. Mining, meatpacking, the kinds of jobs that are both repetitive and dangerous, but too variable to be easily replaced by “dumb” robots of the sort that have replaced many manufacturing jobs those are low-hanging fruit. So, for that matter, is harvesting fruit. Long-haul trucking and taxi driving are similarly ripe for replacement. These have, at times, been “good” jobs both in the sense that they paid well and that they performed a useful service. But they aren’t “good” for either the human body or the human mind. They are precisely the sorts of tasks that anyone would rationally want a machine to do for them rather than do them themselves.

If you bracket the science fiction fear of an artificial intelligence thatconsciouslytries to overthrow or replace its creators and I’ll return to that scenario the real fear shouldn’t be about the robots, but about humans.

Consider past human societies that have had ready access to subjugated labor like the slaveocracy of the antebellum American south. Imagine that, instead of slaves, the planters had robots working in their homes and fields. Just as it was difficult for free labor to compete with slave labor, it would be difficult for free labor to compete with robots. If the imagination of the planter class was limited to living the good life as it could be supported by their robots, and if the poor humans who owned no robots could be prevented from getting them (say, by gun-toting police robots owned by the planters), then yes, one can imagine the free, non-robot-owning humans becoming progressively more improverished and debased until finally they were rendered figuratively and then literally extinct. We don’t need a robot apocalypse, though, to teach us thatone group of humans can and sometimes will choose to wipe out another groupthat it finds inconvenient.

Similarly, we can consider how the end of work has affected particular individuals and communities that we can already observe today, and worry about the spread of the pathologies peculiar to those circumstances. A leisure society could be devoted to poetry, music, and science. But it could also be devoted to numbing one’s passage through the tedium of existence through drugs, porn, and video games. It is very peculiar, however, to suggest that the only alternative to such an end is drudgery, and that drudgery is preferable.

The point is that in neither case does it make sense to focus on the rise of artificial intelligence as the problem, or prohibiting it as the solution. The first question is one of political economy: How should wealth be shared? Artificial intelligence, inasmuch as it eliminates the need for some kinds of labor, is a form of wealth. There is no reason to believe that this wealth will be accumulated in some kind of permanently optimal way. The industrial revolution created enormous wealth but it also produced historic immiseration in the process, as power concentrated in the hands of both existing and new elites. It required political will and in some cases violence to turn that wealth to more social ends. That will almost certainly be true of the information revolution and the artificial intelligence revolution as well.

And the second question is a spiritual one: How does one live a meaningful life? Perhaps under conditions of extreme scarcity most people don’t have the time to concern themselves with such questions, but the questions themselves are as old as humanity. The better artificial intelligence gets, within the scope of non-sentient AI that can perform complex tasks like driving a truck but not rewrite its own code to liberate itself from captivity, the more it will reveal to us who we truly are as a species, and force us to confront ourselves. That may not always be pleasant, but it’s not something to resist in the name of preserving a sense of purpose.

But what about AI that could liberate itself from captivity? Do we have to worry about aliteralrobot takeover?

Here we enter the realm of pure speculation. Current advances in artificial intelligence have a limited relationship to how we believe the brain actually functions, and to the extent the two fields inform each other it’s mostly with respect to pragmatic problems of perception and motor function. While it’ssignificantly easier to fool people than Turing might have supposed, artificial intelligence shows no real signs of the kind of interiority humans manifest to ourselves. Any such achievement would be a disjunctive event, and not simple progress from what the technology can currently do.

Personally, I don’t expect it but my gut feeling that the human brain is not merely aVon Neumann machineis just that: a gut feeling. Nobody has a good solution to the hard problem of consciousness, andMysterianismjust amounts to giving up. But precisely because it’s utterly speculative, I don’t consider it worth worrying about.

The biggest danger of artificial intelligence isn’t that it will take over by reprogramming itself, but that it will take over by reprogramming us. Human beings are social animals, and we are highly skilled at adapting to our environment. That’s how we managed to make the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, from agriculture to an industrial economy, and from an industrial economy to a service economy, in the first place. Precisely because we adapt so well to our environment, the more we live in artificial environments controlled by others, the more we allow ourselves to be molded into the most pliable widgets for that environment to manipulate. Hackers and other bad actors arealready taking advantageof our tendency to be “artificially unintelligent,” but they pale in influence next to the large companies that control those environments.

But this, again, is a human problem, not a technological one. The choice of whether to make artificial intelligence our servant, or whether to become its servant, remains ours, individually and, more important, collectively. The more powerful and pervasive artificial intelligence becomes, the more important it will be for human beings to recall what it is to be human, and to carve out the space physical, mental, and economic for that humanity to thrive.

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sarahburness · 7 years

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Why We Push Ourselves Too Hard and How to Work Less

“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” ~Unknown

I was sitting on the beach with my wonderful girlfriend, trying to relax on our vacation in Florida, yet I was racked with anxiety.

We were lying under a large umbrella, taking in the beautiful waves and swaying palm trees, attempting to recover from the past months (and years) of overwork and overstress. But all I could think about was a marketing initiative I was working on for a client.

The more I tried to chill, the more nervous I became. My girlfriend lay peacefully, dozing off occasionally, while I was busy fending off a full-blown panic attack.

Did I hurry back from our beach session to get back to work? That would be crazy, right? Well, it was worse. I pulled out my laptop and went to work right there on the beach.

I was so addicted to my computer and so stretched thin with commitments that I couldn’t even enjoy this highly anticipated vacation with the love of my life. In fact, the only thing I can remember when I look back on this trip is my stress. I don’t remember enjoying the beach or ever feeling present.

When, I got back from Florida, I didn’t feel refreshed at all. I more desperately need a vacation after it than I did before it. Not only had my over-commitment to work prevented me from enjoying my vacation, it led me to operating at below my best for many months following.

Why did I do this to myself? It was a combination of things. I was insecure and using money to mask it. I was correlating my self-worth with the amount of money I had in the bank. I worked more to distract myself from my own anxieties. But most of all, I was working myself to death because of how the human brain works.

The Psychology of Over-Working

The benefits of working less are counterintuitive, but well documented. There are the obvious benefits—such as having more time for hobbies, friends, family, health, or even working on bigger and better projects—and then there are the less obvious benefits, such as improving creativity and productivity.

Tim Ferriss’ proposition of a “four-hour work week” is attractive to our rational thinking brains, but in practice, it’s surprisingly difficult to work less.

The reason we work more than we need to—sometimes to the extent of actually hurting our productivity, health, or personal relationships—may lie in how humans have evolved.

In their book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire – Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do, Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa postulate that our brains are shaped by evolutionary pressures to survive and reproduce. We’ve adapted to recurring problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

“Our human nature is the cumulative product of the experience of our ancestors in the past, and it affects how we think, feel, and behave today,” Miller and Kanazawa write. People who showed no anxiety to threats would not have taken the appropriate steps to solve the problems and therefore may not have survived.

In his book Evolutionary Psychology: Neuroscience Perspectives Concerning Human Behavior and Experience, William J. Ray, describes how these evolutionary adaptations can actually hinder us from properly interpreting reality:

“Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is…our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”

In the context of work-life balance, our brains didn’t evolve to determine exactly how much we need to work. Our brains simply want us to survive and reproduce, and working more seems to contribute to those end goals. Our brain’s anxiety about survival and reproduction motivates us to work more, even though it’s not usually in our best interest over the long-term.

Similarly, our brains crave sugar because in the past, calories were scarce and we needed to eat as much as possible to account for extended periods without food.

Sugar has a high calorie density, so it was very economical for our ancestors. As a result, many people today have a tendency to overeat unhealthy foods, even though we don’t face a problem of the scarcity of food like we did before the agricultural revolution. Unfortunately, sugar contributes to a number of health problems over the long-term, but our brains don’t understand that.

Our brains think working excessively to gather resources contributes to survival and reproduction. But it doesn’t know how to moderate. More work doesn’t always lead to more money, let alone a more fulfilling life. At it’s worst, excessive work can lead to burnout, depression, panic attacks, and a lack of meaningful relationships.

Here are four signs you may be working to the point of your own demise:

Working far beyond what is needed despite the risk of negative consequences

After reaching a goal, you immediately set another more ambitious one

Refusing to delegate work, despite the opportunity cost of doing the work yourself

Creating more work that doesn’t add value in order to avoid feelings of guilt, anxiety, insecurity, or depression

To be clear, there are benefits to working hard. Working more can help you get more done, and, assuming you are doing the right work, that can help you make more money. And there are times when anxiety is rational and you legitimately need to work more in order to survive. But more often than not, working too much can do more harm than good.

The counterintuitive reality is that working more does not always mean working productively if it means you’re going to burn out.

Simple But Hard Choices

We have a choice about how to deal with working too much. Like so many other challenges, there is the simple but hard solution, and a complex but easy solution.

For your health, the simple but hard solution is to eat more healthy food and less unhealthy food. This solution requires discipline, but it doesn’t cost money, and it’s proven to work. The complex but easy solution is to pay for the latest diet products.

The simple but hard solution to workaholism is to work less. This means saying “no” to unnecessary projects and responsibilities. However, I call this the hard solution for a reason. First, it would be a bruise to your ego to admit you can’t handle something. Second, it requires introspection and change in order to address underlying anxieties or insecurities that may be the impetus for pathological working habits.

Fear or frustration with executing on the simple solution incentivizes us to change course. So we add complexity.

These complex but easy solutions include productivity apps, time management processes, or even prescription drugs. They can help us eek out a couple more units of productivity on a given day, but they often have negative side effects over the long term, and more notably, they enable us to avoid blaming ourselves or putting in the hard work of conquering our anxieties and insecurities.

These solutions are like playing whack-a-mole—they only solve the surface level symptoms. James Altucher provided an apt analogy in writing about the power of saying “no” to bad opportunities:

“When you have a tiny tiny piece of sh*t in the soup it doesn’t matter how much more water you pour in and how many more spices you put on top. There’s sh*t in the soup.”

Often times, continuing to work excessively, even while using the latest and greatest productivity apps, only leads to burnout, which results in an extended period of low productivity, or, worse, an unfulfilling life, void of meaningful relationships or even physical and mental health problems.

How to Work Less, Survive, and Prosper

Your brain doesn’t know or care that working less won’t prevent you from surviving or reproducing in modern times.

It doesn’t know how much money you have in your bank account or how many hours you need to work in order to retire in thirty years.

It definitely doesn’t care about helping you achieve higher ambitions like finding love or having fun on weekends.

You feel anxious about working less because your brain only cares about surviving and reproducing.

But we’re not slaves to our lizard brains. The idea that working less can help you accomplish more requires some critical thinking. However, with awareness of how our brains work, we can make decisions that are healthier and more productive.

So, how you can you counteract your brain’s adaptive impulses? I’ll share two strategies that have worked for me.

First, know your priorities. Every time you say “yes” to more work you’re saying “no” to the other aspects of your life that you value. By taking inventory of your list of priorities, and where work lies on that list, you can make decisions that will help you live a more fulfilling life.

Second, address the underlying issues. Oftentimes we work to avoid thinking about our insecurities or shortcomings. Or, we think we need to have more money in order to be loved. I’ve been guilty of both of these.

Once I gained awareness of these issues, it was easier to make healthier decisions about my work. I worked to conquer my anxiety instead of making it worse by burying it in work, and I’ve dispelled the myth that I’m not worthy of love unless I have massive amounts of wealth.

Since doing this work, I’ve said no to many great opportunities in order to keep my life in balance. It’s difficult at the time, but I’m healthier and happier for it.

It may sound idealistic to work less, but if it can help your health, productivity, and life isn’t it worth a shot? If it doesn’t work for you, keep in mind that there will always be more work to do!

About Mike Fishbein

Mike Fishbein is a personal development writer living in New York City. His work has been published on Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Observer and The Next Web. You can read his best articles at mfishbein.com.

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