Bells ringing for the end of history
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spatch convinced me that after two in the morning while still sick was not the best time to write angrily about how much I did not enjoy the double whammy of discovering the Jewish analogues in Attack on Titan right before receiving an e-mail from one of the progressive organizations on whose mailing lists I've gotten over the years that in the same back-to-back sentences disavowed anti-Semitism while encouraging its readers not to be silenced from calling out "AIPAC's negative impact on our politics." So I just yelled about it a lot in the shower, especially the part where the actual influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is massively outweighed by the Armageddon money of Evangelical Zionists. I don't like the rhetoric of diversion, but it does feel once again like divide and conquer: the marginalized tear each other's throats out and the status quo keeps hegemonically quo'ing on. [edit] This article by David Schraub is extremely on point. See also this petition by Bend the Arc.For obvious current reasons, this post is making the rounds of my friendlist again: "How to Criticize Israel Without Being Anti-Semitic." It is almost impressive how easily the old conspiracies shift shape, except I just wish they wouldn't. It's not an impersonal process. I wish people wouldn't do it.
Most of the snow melted out of the streets overnight, but there are still gull-colored furrows of slush on the sidewalks and rain-flattened drifts in the lees of the houses; the clouds have remembered we're a seaside city and are piling up as over a tide-line, Vorticist grey and blocky with startling breaks of blue. Meltwater off the gutters sounds like rain plinking and gurgling in the downspouts. At least we didn't get ice dams this time. Frustratingly, I feel worse today than I did yesterday, and I have to remind myself that healing is not a flick-switch binary process. I suspect I will not actually leave the house for a movie this evening, however. Have a few links. I could use some more nice ones.
1. Ed Simon on Jewish horror: "There is the upsetting ambiguity of monotheistic horror—not that God's actions are the devil's, but that they could be."
2. Relatedly: is it impolite that I want to communicate with Tumblr for the sole purpose of pointing out my own Jewish demon stories? (Or Rebecca Fraimow's. Or Veronica Schanoes'. Or Jane Yolen's. Or Elana Gomel's. Now I want an anthology.)
3. I like both of these poems: Bev Yockelson's "The Trans Haggadah Companion" and Syl Cheney-Coker's "The Colour of Stones."
4. The Reckless Moment (1949) is being released for the first time ever on Blu-Ray! I wish my computer could play those!
5. I get that Miquel Carbonell i Selva's Safo (1881) depicts the legendary moment before the poet throws herself into the sea for unrequited love of the ferryman Phaon, but she really looks to me like she's summoning the sea-storm. Maybe that's what she decided to do about that dude instead.
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What price the protocols of the elders of Zion?
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The gift that keeps on giving.
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I saw that in comments. I had really known nothing about the series beyond the title and the premise; I'm dismayed but also on some level really pissed off that this is what there was to know.
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I wanted to write though; I seriously wanted to write.
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I understand how weird that is to say.
I wanted to write though; I seriously wanted to write.
Me too.
*hugs*
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I don't have a Blu-Ray player, but yay The Reckless Moment!(And yay Dragonwyck!)
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It would certainly simplify my life.
I don't have a Blu-Ray player, but yay The Reckless Moment!(And yay Dragonwyck!)
I am thrilled it's getting the release! I just want to know if it would have killed them to have included a DVD which I would have thrown money at immediately.
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"We are “represented,” if you can call it that, by Glenn Greenwald on the one side and Lee Zeldin on the other (surely, this is the definition of Jewish hell), both of whose elevated stature in public discourse about Jews is almost exclusively a feature of gentile, not Jewish, interests," from the Schraub link, is such a depressingly accirate summation of the current state of discourse.
Thank you for all the links. I found them all edifying, especially the Schraub one. I had been inclined to wave away Omar's comments after she apologized, until i read in that article that she actually has a pattern of making shitty comments, then backtracking. (I would still rather see Trump resign than Omar, but that won't stop me from calling her staffers and expressing disapproval)
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It was from MPower Change—I didn't even see the one from JVP! Great.
such a depressingly accurate summation of the current state of discourse.
Agreed. Although the definition of Jewish hell made me laugh in the middle of an otherwise awful afternoon, which I value.
Thank you for all the links. I found them all edifying, especially the Schraub one.
You're welcome. I'm very glad they were useful.
(I would still rather see Trump resign than Omar, but that won't stop me from calling her staffers and expressing disapproval)
I am in a similar position of having been very impressed by her recent apology, then somewhat less impressed by her succeeding dogwhistles, and either way feeling very strongly about the blaringly obvious double standard on display. I really liked Schraub's:
"There is a familiarity to Omar's case—of needing to acknowledge genuine wrongs worthy of critique, but also needing to acknowledge that the obsessive focus on these wrongs stems from baser instincts. The real parallel of how we talk about Muslim women like Omar is to how we talk about Israel itself—where real misdeeds and wrongdoings nonetheless cannot explain or justify the never-ending torrent of abuse, opprobrium and conspiracy theorizing."
There are so many conversations that have to be had and right now it seems impossible even to have the conversations about having the conversations. I am glad there are people with the energy to do it. I hope there are enough people really listening.
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It is going to be interesting to see what happens with the anime, since, as of season three, hearsay tells me that they have gotten through all the non-Nazi content they can possibly animate. I'm hoping they just don't make any more of it-- an option they absolutely have, since sales, thankfully, haven't been doing as well since the worldbuilding was revealed to be literally evil. A chunk of the Japanese fanbase evaporated, a larger chunk of the international fanbase left. It sounds from the descriptions I've read as though most of the content people were actually following the series for-- action/horror/grimdark with splashy fight choreography and no characters having plot armor-- has also vanished, because that was the stuff the mangaka was using to suck people in so he could evangelize his ideology at them. (He absolutely is doing this on purpose, always has been.) So what I'm hoping is that it never gets a season four, the manga dies a quiet death for lack of sales, and the mangaka's tendency to go on outspoken political rants on the internet mean he doesn't get another Big Five publisher's interest. (Most Japanese manga publishers are against their mangaka having publicly known political opinions, period, which... is what it is and is not great, but might be helpful in this specific circumstance.)
If it does get a season four, that's when it'll be time to start writing to the U.S. licensing companies.
ugh, have nice line
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I would like very much to make this happen but I have at present the approximate energy of overcooked okra; that said, we should totally ask the hosts of Throwing Sheyd if they want to write the introduction.
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People had linked various panels as I fell down the rabbit hole of tweets-of-tweets, although I think mostly post-twist-reveal; it looked like an entire basket of yikes. I'd had the series recommended to me c. 2013 but never followed up. I do not regret this life decision.
as though most of the content people were actually following the series for-- action/horror/grimdark with splashy fight choreography and no characters having plot armor-- has also vanished, because that was the stuff the mangaka was using to suck people in so he could evangelize his ideology at them. (He absolutely is doing this on purpose, always has been.)
Is there any stage of the series that is perceptibly without fascist ideology? Or is just a matter of how fast a viewer can read the dogwhistles, before the mangaka discarded them and went for the bullhorn?
If it does get a season four, that's when it'll be time to start writing to the U.S. licensing companies.
Thank you. Good to know.
Re: ugh, have nice line
Thank you! That is nice and I am glad to see it!
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From what I know about the structure of the series, which isn't everything-- mostly what I hear from people complaining about it-- it's one of those works which starts with a relatively narrow focus, worldbuilding-wise, and then spirals gradually outward. So, though I don't think this is the exact trajectory, starting with a squad of soldiers, and then some of them die and others are promoted, and the viewer learns more as they do-- that kind of thing.
It takes a while for there to be even dogwhistles, because when the focus is narrowly on a set of characters and their desperate struggle for survival, the material is concentrated on the protagonists developing heroic virtues or failing to, the role of chance in war, all that sort of thing... which happens to be the single form of story in which Nazi ideology and normal human ideals coincide. Most humans are down with it being heroic to fight monsters and to save others from monsters; most people can empathize with a story about the unremitting horrors of an unavoidable war.
It's when the zoom outward starts that we start having problems, because one of the major questions of the series is of course where do the monsters come from. It could still have been okay for a while-- it was revealed that some people can turn into the monsters and various unscrupulous leadership is using that politically, sure-- but when the criteria for being able to turn into a monster was specified as, solely and entirely, based on ethnicity (a revelation which was foreshadowed for a while), well. The foreshadowing that it was going to be ethnicity-based is where I started seeing people eyeing the mangaka's politics uneasily. When that piece of worldbuilding was confirmed, there was nowhere the series could go but down.
However, the series is also hemorrhaging audience, because the audience has started to notice that the only setting in which a Nazi author can write characters who share a sane audience's ideas of virtue and who compel empathy is on a battlefield (and you notice he had to fudge the stakes of the battle to make it appear righteous to the uninformed). Once the characters are off the battlefield, they turn into assholes and evildoers; the fandom has rejected the long-term characterization of basically the entire cast pretty thoroughly.
At this point, the few people I am aware of who still follow the story actively want it to end with the entire cast dying, because that's the only way any of the characters could remain decent people. Of course, that's unlikely to happen, because what the readers consider to be assholes and evildoers the mangaka thinks of as the political exemplars of virtue he wanted to be writing about the whole time. *eyeroll*
I have to say, he did a remarkably good job of finding the place where his values match those of a larger audience; it's diabolically cleverly done, and I really worry about his effect on pop culture worldwide. Like, Ruth, for instance, wound up dropping the show because they thought it was being gratuitously cruel and horrific, and because they saw the foreshadowing of the anti-Semitism and were concerned-- but they didn't drop it until after having seen all of season three, and Ruth is generally pretty sensitive to undercurrents in fiction. I think the show has now gotten to the point where it can't hide what it is and where it's coming from, but that point was actually pretty recent.
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You're welcome.
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Thank you. That's distressing!
I am glad to hear it's losing audience. The fact that people can still be turned off a long-running favorite series by explicit Nazi content is the reassuring part of this story for me.
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You're welcome. I think I discovered him in the aftermath of Charlottesville; he has been extremely on point more often than not (and always interesting) since then.