one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

Ok so this is...not exactly accurate.

They ran the fMRI testing on the dead salmon to test the MRI machine before doing an experiment looking at humans' response to social stimuli. They wanted something "with good contrast, but also with several clearly defined and distinguishable types of tissue..." (1), so they got a fresh salmon from the grocery store. Having tested the machine, they laughed at the absurdity, set aside the results, and did their regular study. Years later, one of the authors was doing a seminar on analyzing fMRI data and used the salmon data they already had as a goofy example of improper analysis, and they found something interesting!

So when you do fMRI imaging, you get a lot of data. Like, 40-130k voxels (small cubes of your brain, like a 3D version of a pixel on a screen) showing changes in blood oxygen levels (which does seem to be a good indicator of mental activity, based on research like optogenetics looking at whether blood oxygen levels indicate brain activity*). (2, 3) From all over the brain, because the rest of your brain is still active and doing different things while the subject is answering your question or looking at the image you're showing them or doing whatever task you've asked them to do.

So now you have this fuckton of data, what now? Well, now you look at the information you got from each of the voxels from the duration of the scan, and you compare the data you got from each voxel at different times to see which ones are "activated," where those voxels are (are they clustered together or spread out randomly?), and what physical activity or stimuli it's correlated to (i.e. which question was asked or image was shown or task was done).

Figuring out what qualifies as a significant change in blood oxygen levels for each voxel is done using "a fair bit of stats" because it's a shit load of data, and picking out significant changes can come down to a fraction of a percent change. So now you're doing thousands of comparisons between voxels, and you can run into a well known issue called the "multiple comparisons problem," which basically means that if you run a lot of tests, some of them will come out positive even if they're not (i.e. false positives). They really fuck up research and are a problem when you're trying to figure out, say, "new MRI protocols to use with adolescents and adults" (4), so you have to correct for that when doing the "fair bit of stats" to make sure you aren't reporting on the false positives.

What "The Dead Salmon" study found was that among all the false positives (which is to be expected, as "just about any volume with 65,000 voxels is going to have some false positives with uncorrected statistics" (4)) there were 3 activated voxels that just happened to be clustered together right in the middle of the salmon's brain, which gave the appearance of brain activity in a dead fish because they hadn't used the proper corrections in their statistical model.

That's what led to it being an actual story instead of a fun anecdote, and it's why they submitted it to the conference. It was all to show support that the minority of researchers at the time who reported their statistics from fMRIs without correcting them to should stop doing that, but then neuroscience blogs discovered the poster and wrote about it, which led to it going viral (before the authors could publish their commentary on it) and being awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012.

Ultimately, it "doesn’t add anything to the technical discussion of how multiple comparisons correction is performed, it is simply a salient reminder of why proper correction is always necessary" (5), and it didn't invalidate that many previous studies or the entire field of neuropsychology (although it going viral did seem to have the desired effect, since by the time they got the Ig Nobel Prize 3 years after the fact only 10% of papers in the field of fMRI reported no multiple comparisons correction where before it was closer to 25-40%). It provided a goofy example for why it's important that researchers do the proper statistics to analyze fMRI data that has been widely used since the 90s and which most of them were already doing. (6)

Since tumblr hates reblogs with links I will reblog again with sources and additional information.

*The difficulty with using brain imaging to make any kind of claim about the way humans think or act or interact with others is more in how the data is interpreted, since brains are complex and several parts of the brain can be involved in a single thought or action, and a whole host of other things that can complicate it that would be an entirely different post. Typically tho, the "men think of women as objects because the same part of the brain is activated by women as by tools" type of reporting comes from journalists who are trying to interpret scientific papers that might say something more like "images of women, tools, and elephants elicited activity in the same areas of the brain in men...this may indicate a commonality between these images, but determining what that commonality might be is beyond the scope of the current study and further research is needed," the journalists just picked out the part that would be most sensational so people would read their story.

Fun facts:

The original Dead Salmon Study was originally a poster at the Human Brain Mapping Conference in 2009, which was later written into a paper and published in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results

Also, it doesn't appear that the activated voxel cluster in the dead salmon necessarily correlated with any significant part of the experiment, which they ran all the way through as if it were a human subject with the fish because they were also training their research assistants.

Sources:

(1) Scientific American (blog), IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study

(2) National Library of Medicine, Global and local fMRI signals driven by neurons defined optogenetically by type and wiring

(3) National Library of Medicine, Optogenetic fMRI sheds light on the neural basis of the BOLD signal

(4) Prefrontal.org (personal blog of Dr. Craig Bennett, one of the original Dead Salmon Study authors), The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon

(5) Prefrontal.org, The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon

(6) Neuroskeptic (blog) (via the WayBack Machine), fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish

Additional reading:

NPR, Study on Dead Fish's Thoughts Snags Ig Nobel Prize

Scientific American, New evidence that fMRI experiments are valid measure of neuron activity

Scientific American, What's a Voxel and What Can It Tell Us? A Primer on fMRI

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, The principled control of false positives in neuroimaging (a paper written by the original Dead Salmon Study authors on the same topic)

Prefrontal.org, Human Brain Mapping 2009 - Presentations (links to what Dr. Bennett presented at the 2009 conference along with the Dead Salmon Study poster)

Nature (scientific journal), Functional neuroimaging as a catalyst for integrated neuroscience (paper published in November 2023 talking about fMRI as a tool for measuring brain activity, its strengths/weaknesses, studies that have successfully used fMRI in different subdomains of neuroscience, and how to use it to integrate these subdomains to promote interdisciplinary cooperation--specifically mentions criticisms of fMRI and cites the Dead Salmon Study as an example of the need for caution and advances that have been made in the 15 years since that study was published)

Additional fun fact! They baked the Atlantic salmon and ate it for dinner, so were not reimbursed for it. In the blog post The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon that Dr. Bennett made at the time, he also lists some of the funniest comments he'd seen about the whole thing, and they are delightful:

In Plagiarism and You(Tube), Hbomb says "If you consider something so obscure you can get away with stealing it, you do not respect it." Save that line for the next time someone tries to tell you that Roy Lichtenstein brought respect to comics as art.

It's since been pointed out that while Lichtenstein did copy one of Russ Heath's drawings of an airplane getting hit, the painting depicted above was actually copied off Irv Norvick, because Lichtenstein did this so many times to so many comic artists.

In Lichtenstein's defense, he was doing this in a time when comic artists frequently weren't even credited in the issues themselves. In his condemnation, he never even tried to check, nor has he made any move to pay or credit any of the comic artists who recognized their own work later on. Rather than elevating the "low art" of comics, he was widening the gap of financial success and respect even further.

The Hbomberguy of this story is art historian David Barsalou, who has now spent decades tracking down the original art and the names of the original artists used in Lichtenstein's most famous output. Here's the full flickr gallery for the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project. Frequently copied were Tony Abruzzo, Ted Galindo, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti, and dozens more Golden Age artists who aren't very well known in comics circles, let alone art history books. Many of them died in poverty. That's something that the Hero Initiative, mentioned in Russ Heath's comic above, aims to prevent.

Also, Lichtenstein didn't even paint Ben-Day dots. That's a specific thing.

Another throughline here: Plagarized work is lazy work, and lazy work shows through in the final product.

In a massive stroke of irony, the commercial artists he copied from display much higher classical technical skill than his enormous-scale paintings. There's a delicacy to the brushstrokes, a level of expressiveness, and a clear understanding of form and shadow in those tiny newsprint originals.

The changes Lichtenstein made often omitted or simplified backgrounds and text, used garish primary colors, and—later in his work—undressed the women in the panels. Central to his "iconoclasm" was depicting comic art as even more simplistic and culturally shallow than it already was.

Copyright law offers no help to the original creatives, freelancers on exploitative short-term contracts. Russ Heath explains, “I couldn’t do anything because all the characters that I did draw for comic books were, at that time, owned by the comic book company. So, if they want to sue, they could sue and have a legitimate reason to sue. But they wouldn’t make enough to bother having a suit.” Most of the writers ripped off by Somerton, too, were on contracts which meant they do not have the rights to their own work.

Art historians are correct that Roy Lichtenstein's work raises interesting questions about mass reproduction, parody, and the border between "commercial" and "high" art. The answers to those questions, however, are not flattering to the art world at all.

While I agree with the underlying thrust of this argument in terms of spotlighting the exploitation of freelance artists, I think the equation with Somerton isn't entirely accurate or applicable here. Not out of moral grounds but functional grounds. Liechtenstein never denied that the panels were from pre-existing comics. The issue is that Liechtenstein was paid more than comics' artists, but that strikes me as the problem of the comics publishing industry first and foremost. Likewise, people praised Liechtenstein while ignoring the work of comics' artists themselves. A labor rights issue is being conflated with an aesthetic argument here. That is different from Somerton who plagiarized the work of others without attribution and passed others' work as his own. "The changes Lichtenstein made often omitted or simplified backgrounds and text, used garish primary colors, and—later in his work—undressed the women in the panels. Central to his "iconoclasm" was depicting comic art as even more simplistic and culturally shallow than it already was."

This argument is partially "reactionary" imo. Because you can accuse Francis Bacon of doing a bad drawing of Velazquez's Portrait of Innocent with Screaming Popes, as well as accuse Andy Warhol of ripping off the graphic design of the Coke logos and other brands. Liechtenstein's work was never a pure reproduction and yes altered the panels and stuff out of his own style. In terms of him being anatomically weaker than the original comics...I mean that's a case of style. Whether that's good or better, I don't know. The fact is that Liechtenstein's style is solid enough that it's been homaged in superhero comics like this cover of an ASM comic by Marcos Martin.

As I said the Liechtenstein issue highlights labor rights problems in comics, and the exploitation of freelance labor by artists in other fields. The Liechtenstein issue and the fine art world is a culprit but so is the movie business at a far greater remove. Kevin Feige has earned far more than every Marvel freelancer combined while Ed Brubaker and others fail to get a proper invitation for the premier among other things.

I actually agree with this addition! The long, historically unfair arrangement of the comics industry can't be scapegoated onto Lichtenstein any more than it can be onto comic book movie magnates, but they certainly made money off it. Direct comparison to Somerton, who was being consciously predatory, is unfairly bandwagon-y of me.

But what prompted this post was how illustrative that quote about respect and obscurity is. The notes indicate a that a LOT of laypeople, especially now, did think his compositions were ~inspired~ by comics, not traced from them. Current copyright law and public perception of comic art has long insulated him from reasonable critique.

It's a common reactionary take to dismiss modern art for lack of talent or technique. My goal was to push that line of thought in the other direction. (If we consider Duchamp's readymades like Fountain to be art, what does this say about the industrial designers who created the originals? Is there something intentionally classically beautiful about symmetrical curves of white ceramic? What does it mean that the signature + date added by Duchamp resemble the "low art" of bathroom graffiti? What skills or ideas might those industrial designers bring to the gallery that no "real art" there matches?)

I brought up classical "realist" technical skills in my second reblog as an example of what many people imagine the line is between "fine art" and "commercial art". But to complete the thought, I should have continued to point out the non-realist, non "fine" art technical skills developed by comics workers that Lichtenstein's work displays limited understanding of or interest in: page layouts, the four-color process, hand-lettering and word balloons.

When it comes to personal taste, heavily stylized and anatomically "creative" character work—like Marcos Martin's—is actually my favorite kind of comic art. I LOVE his use of Lichtenstein-isms in ASM #560. This isn't just "homage" but redrawing specific paintings for a comic book fight in a modern art gallery! It's a neat conversation with Lichtenstein's work that ties into the story's themes: pop culture, celebrity, romance media, and the ethics of being paid to produce images the public wants. The villain is a young romantic who is literally two dimensional.

Compare and contrast Secret Wars: Secret Love's cover. This isn't referencing a real Lichtenstein—but as you say, his style is very recognizable. And part of that style is that this, too, is a flattened redraw of someone else's romance comic cover.

I see no connection between the themes of Lichtenstein's gallery work and the stories inside. He's just a famous middleman to catch people's attention. The cost is further overwriting the craftspeople who created the cultural symbols Lichtenstein used in the first place—in the same medium (hell, the same company!) that the new work is in.

A John Romita tribute becomes a Roy Lichtenstein tribute, and the work of Morrie Kuramoto on the comics-specific art of hand-lettering and text layout replaced entirely, to what I would argue is its detriment. I'd be last to claim that this should be illegal, or classified as "not art" compared to the original cover... but it's just kind of a sad reinforcement of a long, unfairly weighted status quo.

Okay, let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.

In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).

As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:

By which I mean literally one result.

For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.

But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:

(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)

We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.

Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.

Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.

After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.

Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?

The day after I sent the email I got this response:

My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”

The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.

A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:

(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)

At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.

So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!

So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.

…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.

Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…

Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:

THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.

My dad found it! He found the book!!

Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.

In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.

The English Teacher and the Mysterious Translation: A Coda

It was Christmas.

An English Literature teacher had fallen down a rabbit-hole of curiosity, and with the aid of several different persons and resources, discovered after much effort the origin of a long-beloved translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in determination to know at last the name of the translator, purchased a copy from an online vendor, settling in to wait in eager expectation.

As the days went by, I was kept busy with the ever present exigencies of lesson prep, grading, and teaching, but eventually I noticed that it was several days past when the package was due to arrive, and resolved to check the tracking number.

Keep reading

Hey All,

I've been away for some time, as we've been working really hard on something quite exciting:

let me present to you the world's first ever global ocean drainage basin map that shows all permanent and temporary water flows on the planet.

This is quite big news, as far as I know this has never been done before. There are hundreds of hours of work in it (with the data + manual work as well) and it's quite a relief that they are all finished now.

But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of you asking? A couple of years ago I tried to find a map that shows which ocean does each of the world's rivers end up in. I was a bit surprised to see there is no map like that, so I just decided I'll make it myself - as usual :) Well, after realizing all the technical difficulties, I wasn't so surprised any more that it didn't exist. So yeah, it was quite a challenge but I am very happy with the result.

In addition to the global map I've created a set of 43 maps for different countries, states and continents, four versions for each: maps with white and black background, and a version for both with coloured oceans (aka polygons). Here's the global map with polygons:

I know from experience that maps can be great conversation starters, and I aim to make maps that are visually striking and can effectively deliver a message. With these ocean drainage basin maps the most important part was to make them easily understandable, so after you have seen one, the others all become effortless to interpret as well. Let me know how I did, I really appreciate any and all kinds of feedback.

Here are a few more from the set, I hope you too learn something new from them. I certainly did, and I am a geographer.

The greatest surprise with Europe is that its biggest river is all grey, as the Volga flows into the Caspian sea, therefore its basin counts as endorheic.

An endorheic basin is one which never reaches the ocean, mostly because it dries out in desert areas or ends up in lakes with no outflow. The biggest endorheic basin is the Caspian’s, but the area of the Great Basin in the US is also a good example of endorheic basins.

I love how the green of the Atlantic Ocean tangles together in the middle.

No, the dividing line is not at Cape Town, unfortunately.

I know these two colours weren’t the best choice for colourblind people and I sincerely apologize for that. I’ve been planning to make colourblind-friendly versions of my maps for ages now – still not sure when I get there, but I want you to know that it’s just moved up on my todo-list. A lot further up.

Minnesota is quite crazy with all that blue, right? Some other US states that are equally mind-blowing: North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. You can check them all out here.

Yes, most of the Peruvian waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the maps of Peru, if you want to take a closer look.

Asia is amazingly colourful with lots of endorheic basins in the middle areas: deserts, the Himalayas and the Caspian sea are to blame. Also note how the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra are divided.

I mentioned earlier that I also made white versions of all maps. Here’s Australia with its vast deserts. If you're wondering about the weird lines in the middle: that’s the Simpson desert with its famous parallel sand dunes.

North America with white background and colourful oceans looks pretty neat, I think.

Finally, I made the drainage basin maps of the individual oceans: The Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian and the Pacific. The Arctic is my favourite one.

I really hope you like my new maps, and that they will become as popular as my river basin maps. Those have already helped dozens of environmental NGOs to illustrate their important messages all around the world. It would be nice if these maps too could find their purpose.

Retelling The Hobbit Chapter 16: The Song of the Lonely Mountain First chapter / Previous / Next (coming TBD!)

To view full comic: Webtoon/A03 / Tumblr post with links to all chapters

Other blogs: TikTok/Instagram/Tumblr Sideblog

*crumbles into dust after finishing this* Thank you for reading! This The Hobbit webcomic adaptation thing takes a lot of effort to put together and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate every comment. I also really appreciate the people who’ve spread the word of this comic to their friends! <3

And finally, we’re at the Song of the Lonely Mountain! Within Tolkien’s canon, The Hobbit is an in-universe book that was “written” by Bilbo Baggins, who occasionally lies/embellishes/exaggerates things. The tonal differences between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are explained by Bilbo and Frodo/Sam being different kinds of storytellers, with different relationships to “the truth.” This idea is the core of how I’m adapting the novel!  Bilbo is an unreliable narrator who is literally ‘drawing’ from his own limited experiences;  the different art styles reflect the different perspectives of other characters.   The “dwarf art style” in this chapter is inspired by stonework/metalwork in general— but especially by a mix of art deco, Celtic art, and European folk art. 

The central tension of the comic is between Bilbo and Thorin, who each have wildly different ideas about what kind of  story they’re in. Thorin is in a grand fantasy epic, while Bilbo is in a lighthearted children’s book adventure.  The tragedy is, obviously, that only one side of the story ever gets to be fully told.

On a sillier note, a few years ago I had my first gay crush on a lesbian who sang while playing the piano. This chapter is dedicated to the piano lesbian. I hope they’re doing well, wherever they are. XD

I think I might need a bit of a break but I’m hoping for the next chapter, titled “Dawn,” to arrive on January 13th. And your comments/support really do help motivate me to get more done! ^_^

Hōkū Cody began journeying to the islands of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2013. […] Cody is part of a cultural working group that advocates on behalf of Native Hawaiians in Papahānaumokuākea, which encompasses the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. After over a century of militarization and destructive colonial projects in the region, beginning with James Cook’s arrival on the main islands in 1778, a crucial avenue of that reclamation is researching and creating Hawaiian names that were lost during this period of Western encroachment. 

“For us in Hawai‘i, a name is everything,” says Cody. “A name says that you’ve acknowledged that existence and that life.” 

This past December [2020], that acknowledgement was extended to four species of seabirds – the last of the 21 seabirds in Papahānaumokuākea to receive a Hawaiian name. “They are Hawaiian birds, they should have a Hawaiian name,” says Cody. […]

The names were developed through the cultural working group’s nomenclature subcommittee, which since 2012 has brought together an array of experts, including cultural practitioners, scholars, resource managers, and scientists.

Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele, an esteemed kūpuna, or elder, helped guide the group. “When we got stuck,” says Cody, “she flipped us on our head and asked us a different question in a different way, and helped us move along in the thought process.” Kanahele, otherwise known as Aunty Pua, is a key figure for Papahānaumokuākea; in 2007, she developed the monument’s name.

——-

When renaming the Bonin petrel, Cody drew on her own experiences in the field, where she witnessed the sky blacken with the swarming birds as they returned to the islands to breed. Her account of their epic congregations led the group to the word nunulu, a Hawaiian word meaning growling, warbling, or reverberating.

Another committee member, Noah Gomes, called on his expertise researching historical Hawaiian texts and taxonomic systems; in 2017, he uncovered the name of an endemic songbird, ‘alawī, which had been lost for over a century. In similar fashion, Gomes, a research consultant for the Kamehameha Schools of Hawai‘i, located the traditional name for the Tristram’s storm petrel – ʻakihikeʻehiʻale – in a Hawaiian scholarly text published in 1860. […]

Unlike its English counterpart, named after a British ornithologist, ʻakihikeʻehiʻale translates to “the bird that steps on water” and alludes to how the bird patters its feet on the ocean’s surface as it feeds. Gomes says Hawaiian names often convey information about a species, while Hawaiian taxonomic systems can impart how birds have been traditionally perceived. […]

For the Christmas shearwater, the group chose the onomatopoeic ʻaoʻū to evoke the bird’s nocturnal flight call.

Notably, the blue-gray noddy was given two names: hinaokū and manuohina. In Hawaiian, a species can have multiple names to correspond, for instance, with stages of growth or behavioral differences, says Cody. For the blue-gray noddy, the group settled on two names to collectively encompass the bird’s full suite of characteristics, from its gray color (hina) to the fact that it forages close to shore.

——-

While the era of exploitation in the archipelago has passed, sea-level rise remains a critical threat to the islands’ seabirds. Most of the land in Papahānaumokuākea rises less than two meters above water, and two of the newly named species, the nunulu and ʻakihikeʻehiʻale, are especially vulnerable. […]

“When you speak of that bird now, you’re going to speak of the multitudes and you’re going to give it that power,” says Cody. […]

“It is because of endangerment of our language that we have taken action to bring our language back to life,” says Larry Kimura, a Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies expert at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. He says it’s very encouraging to see the cultural working group’s effort to rename plants and animals in the archipelago. “It’s important that we have Hawaiian names that we can bring back to life […].”

——-

Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Jason Gregg. “Decolonizing Seabirds.” Hakai Magazine. 12 May 2021.

The. Deal. Is. So. Good.

Couldn't get the link to the side-by-side of the WGA offer, the AMPTP counter offer from May, and the final deal, because it's a document to download and too many pictures to take for this post that probably wouldn't be legible, but it's in this tweet (click the link below the tweet to go to said tweet):

Don't forget,the fight isn't over for SAG-AFTRA and next year, contracts are up again for IATSE, including The Animation Guild.

If you're a fan of movies, film, and animation, keep helping the guilds fight the good fight!

Also, please support the other unions that are out their now fighting their own fights including Amazon workers, Local 11 in LA, and Flight Attendants!

And of course, big thanks to strike hero Drew Carey for paying for probably THOUSANDS of meals for striking writers in LA these past five months.

Congratulations WGA and Pre-WGA for your amazing wins with this contract!

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it’s plug-and-play: you don’t have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don’t have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian–to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is… everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that’s taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We’re going to come back to how Christianity isn’t actually modular, but for the moment, let’s talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don’t have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that’s modular. It’s deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can’t just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture’s indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of “religion” full stop, it’s actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn’t actually succeeded in that–the US is a thoroughly Christian culture–but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are “religious” versus which are “secular”. That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can’t separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label “religious.” But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn’t one or the other, or neither, or both. It’s that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn’t actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It’s easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures’ colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place–the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic–and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It’s more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn’t come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn’t just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized–they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It’s the “natural order” to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you’re basically telling the person you’re proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of “that’s how everyone is, though.”

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to “fix” them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it’s definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It’s all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It’s all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they’ve accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn’t something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as “religious” and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as “neutral” or “normal” actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they’d look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN’T neutral. So the idea that that’s what “secular society” should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, “enlightened” life that most Christian atheists envision is one that’s still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don’t see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It’s obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn’t truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they’re not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it’s actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it’s invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it’s definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It’s basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from “primitive” animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that’s the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is “normal” religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren’t white and European-derived, the tacit demand is “okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem ‘religious.’”

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren’t to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity–a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture–to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just …swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s… not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism–it’s fine to just… be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

In the 18th century the roles in anal intercourse were known as “pathic” or “patient” (bottom) and “agent” (top). We often assume that men on the receiving end of anal intercourse were always more stigmatised than their partners, however Rictor Norton suggests this wasn’t necessarily true in 18th century England. Looking at the records of the Old Bailey Norton observes that “the one who is stigmatised and hence given an identity is the one who expresses a homosexual desire, regardless of the sexual role or specific act,” while “the one who submits to the sexual request, even if it involves ‘passive’ sex, does not feel implicated in the desire, hence escapes the stigmatisation and the identity.” (Recovering Gay History from the Old Bailey, p20)

The language used by the Old Bailey is that of one man (the agent) “assaulting” another (the pathic), even in explicitly consensual cases.

For example Samuel Taylor was found guilty of “assaulting John Berry, and committing with him the horrid and detestable Crime of Buggery.” But John Berry was found guilty of “wickedly consenting with Taylor the said unnatural Crime”. Taylor was found with Berry “sitting in his Lap” with “both their Breeches being down”. (Trial of Samuel Taylor & John Berry, 22 February 1738)

William Hollywell was found guilty of “an Assault, with an Intent to commit the detestable Crime of Buggery” on William Huggins, who was found guilty “for consenting and submitting to the same.” A witness discovered them in the “upper part of the Cathedral of St. Paul's” and “surpriz’d them in the following Posture; Huggins’s Breeches were down, he stooping very low, so that he could not see his Head, his Shirt was turn’d up on his Back, and his Back-side was bare; Hollywell was standing close by, with his fore Parts to the other’s Posteriors, and his Body in Motion”. (Trial of William Hollywell & William Huggins, 4 December 1730)

Sodomy was often presented as an awful thing to do to another man, the agent doesn’t escape stigmatisation for acting the traditionally masculine role as he is seen as “assaulting” the pathic; even in consensual cases.

However we see push back against this view of sodomy as innately an “assault” in Jeremy Bentham’s defence of sodomy Offences Against One’s Self. Bentham states plainly that “it is evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary it produces pleasure”. He clarifies “If either of them be unwilling, the act is not that which we have here in view: it is an offence totally different in its nature of effects: it is a personal injury; it is a kind of rape.”

In fact Bentham argues “it is not the pain that angers them but the pleasure.” He explains; “according to the notions of these moralists and these religionists, that is, of the bulk of moralists and religionists who write, pleasures that are allowed of, are never allowed of for their own sake”.

While Bentham’s defence of sodomy is quite academic and logical Thomas Cannon’s is somewhat more cheeky. Hal Gladfelder describes it as “veering in style from erotic rhapsody, to scholarly essay, to dirty joke.” (In Search of Lost Texts, p30)

Cannon acknowledges the homophobic preconception that people “commonly conceive the P-th-c’s (meaning Pathic’s) Part disagreeable” but counters that the pathic can share “in the accurst Rapture” and enjoy the “Lewdness.” (Hal Gladfelder, The Indictment of John Purser, p45)

Cannon portrays anal intercourse as pleasurable for both agent and pathic in the story of Amorio and Hyacinth. In this tale a “young and blooming Amorio” meets a Lady at a Masquerade, but when he gets her to bed he finds “a Body past Imagination delicate; but of Gender masculine.” Amorio is surprised but not deterred:

After they awake in the morning they “love away an Hour or two; then rise and recruit with a long Breakfast.” (Hal Gladfelder, The Indictment of John Purser, p47-50

It’s perhaps worth noting that John Cleland once called Cannon a “white-faced, rotten catamite” and referred to him as “Molly Cannon” so perhaps Cannon is speaking from experience when he mentions the pathic “sharing in the accurst Rapture” and “over and over enj-y’d (meaning enjoyed) urges on the detestable Lewdness.” Although Cleland also accused Cannon of poisoning him “five times with common arsenic” so who knows what went on between Cleland and Cannon. (Hal Gladfelder, In Search of Lost Texts, p25)

While John Cleland didn’t publish a defence of sodomy per se he did include a male-male sex scene in his erotic novel Fanny Hill Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. In the book Fanny finds a peep-hole between her room and that next to it. Looking through she observes two “young sparks” having sex. Fanny at first doesn’t believe anal sex is even possible based on “the disproportion of parts” but she is soon cured of this disbelief.

Throughout the scene Fanny represents the perspective of the general public, at first disbelieving the possibility of it, then assuming the pathic to be a “sufferer”, but she soon observes that “every thing seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance;” and that indeed while the pathic was “like his mother behind,” he “was like his father before” (i.e. he had an erection).

Of course the fact that the pathic could enjoy sodomy did not stop bigots from being bigots. Bentham hit the nail on the head when he wrote “it is not the pain that angers them but the pleasure.” William Pulteney in A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel; Intitled, Sedition and Defamation Display’d, argues that the pathic and agent are “equally guilty” in cases where the pathic finds sodomy enjoyable:

Montesquieu argued that sodomy “ought to be proscribed were it only for its communicating to one sex the weaknesses of the other”. (The Spirit of Laws, b12, ch6) Bentham critics Montesquieu, pointing out that sodomy has a no greater “enervating” effect than that of “the regular way of gratifying the venereal appetite”. He argues that to justify sodomy laws for this reason there must be evidence that this is the case:

However Montesquieu isn’t arguing that sodomy weakens both men equally but that it weakens the pathic specifically. “This distinction does not seem very satisfactory in any point of view” argues Bentham;

(Jeremy Bentham, Offences Against One’s Self)

The parts were indeed as Bentham puts it “convertible”. In spite of the legal language of one man ‘assaulting’ another, in reality of molly sex had less strict roles. While one man may very well have had a preference for one role over the other, there were certainly men who enjoyed both roles. For example after meeting at the molly house Muff’s House in White-Chappel Isaac Milton and Jonathan Parrey went to the Three-Nuns where they “lay together”. Milton “would have had him [Parrey] committed Sodomy with him, but he refused it;” then Milton “offered to act the same Crime of Sodomy with him, but he would not suffer him.” (Trial of Isaac Milton, 16 October 1728)

Its also important to remember that anal sex was not the only kind of sex enjoyed by mollies. There are numerous references to fondling; William Brown took Thomas Newton “by the Hand, and (I shewing no dislike) he guides it to his Breeches, and puts his Privities into it.” (Trail of William Brown, 11 July 1726) Richard Challoner and John Branch Harris “put their Hands into each other’s Breeches, after which they went out of the House into an Arbour in the Garden”. (Trial of Richard Challoner, 16 October 1728) Richard Manning and John Davis were caught “sitting facing one another with their knees jammed in together,” “kissing one another” with “Manning’s hand in Davis’s breeches” and “then Davis had his hand in Manning’s breeches”, they “kissed one another for some time”. (Trial of Richard Manning and John Davis, 16 January 1745) Of course all of this could be precursory to anal sex but thats not necessarily the case.

There is one reference to fingering precursory to anal sex from the late 17th century. Preparing to “F—” William Minton, Capt Edward Rigby “pulled down Mintons Breeches, turn’d away his shirt, put his Finger to Mintons Fundament” (An Account of the Proceedings against Capt Edward Rigby, 1698)

Norton notes that “all of the available evidence, however, suggest that oral intercourse, fellatio, was rarely practised by the mollies.” However rarely is not never. In 1704 John Norton took hold of John Coyney’s privates “putting them into his mouth and sucking them” (Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, p107) In 1735 John Holloway testified that Henry Wolf “pull’d down his own Breeches and mine, and - in his Mouth”. (Trial of Henry Wolf, 22 May 1735)

In reviewing the proceedings of the Old Bailey Norton found “ample evidence that so-called ‘sodomites’ enjoyed an extended range of activities, including kissing, cuddling, love talk, fondling, sexual display, masturbation, oral intercourse, and reciprocal anal intercourse.” (Recovering Gay History from the Old Bailey, p15)

the thing you need to realize about localization is that japanese and english are such vastly different languages that a straight translation is always going to be worse than the original script. nuance is going to be lost and, if you give a shit about your job, you should fill the gaps left with equivalent nuance in english. take ff6, my personal favorite localization of all time: in the original japanese cefca was memorable primarily for his manic, childish speaking style - but since english speaking styles arent nearly as expressive, woolsey adapted that by making the localized english kefka much more prone to making outright jokes. cefca/kefka is beloved in both regions as a result - hell, hes even more popular here

yes this

a literal translation is an inaccurate translation.

localization’s job is to create a meaningful experience for a different audience which has a different language and different culture. they translate ideas and concepts, not words and sentences. often this means choosing new ideas that will be more meaningful and contribute to the experience more for a different audience.

There was an example during late Tokugawa period in Japan where the translator translated, "Я люблю Вас” (I love you), to “I could die for you,” while translating  Ася, ( Asya) a novel by Ivan Turgenev. This was because a woman saying, “I love you,” to a man was considered a very hard thing to do in Japanese society.

In a more well-known example,  Natsume Soseki, a great writer who wrote, I am a Cat, had his students translate “I love you,” to “the moon is beautiful [because of] having you beside tonight,” because Japanese men would not say such strong emotions right away. He said that it would be weird and Japanese men would have more elegance.

Both of these are great examples of localization that wasn’t a straight up translation and both of these are valid. I feel like a lot of people forget the nuances in language and culture and how damn hard a translator’s job is and how knowledgeable the person has to be about both cultures. [x]

Important stuff about translation!

Note that you can apply this to your own translations even if they aren’t big pieces of literature or something. Don’t feel bad about not translating word for word. An everyday sentence may sound odd translated literally - it’s okay to edit a little bit so it feels right!

Oh my god, I’m about to go on a ramble, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. I’m so sorry. The thing is–there is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.  It’s literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesn’t cut it. Sense for sense doesn’t cut it, because then you’re potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesn’t really cut it, because that means you’re prioritizing the audience over the author, and you’re missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target culture–(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded “trousers” for “pants”, and “Mom” for “Mum”. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as “snog” and “porridge.”)–also doesn’t cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning.  Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.  In the original Italian, that’s Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. That’s beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you can’t keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We don’t have a gendered hope. It doesn’t work, can’t work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem? You’re always going to miss something–the cool part is that, knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure?  My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sure–but sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules.  My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translator’s joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a “perfect” translation of “A une Damoyselle Malade”, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patron’s daughter, who was sick, in 1537.  This is the poem:  Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour; Le séjour C’est prison. Guérison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Votre porte Et qu’on sorte Vitement, Car Clément Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne. Seems simple enough, right? But it’s got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if you’re translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?)  Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstader’s “failed” translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the “failed” translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!)  The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. It’s the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that they’re a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to another–translation is always subjective, it’s always individual, it’s always inaccurate, it’s always a failure.  It’s always, in other words, art.  Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! You’re definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you can’t fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesn’t match everyone else’s*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! It’s all in your hands, miseries and splendors both. 

this in particular has bearing on more than just translation, but possibly in any adaptive or interpretative creative work: 

knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail

which is actually quite freeing, once you think about it

A first-hand account (originally from a Salon.com message board circa 1999) of a woman whose two primitive-type dogs – a Basenji and a New Guinea Singing Dog – found an elk carcass, holed up inside it, and refused to leave it.

An assorted list of my favorite excerpts:

It’s brilliant, and I am so glad it exists on the internet. 

@why-animals-do-the-thing please tell me I can laugh at this

Yes, yes you can. Sometimes living with dogs is not graceful - this is a great example. 

I hadn’t read this one in YEARS! Still hilarious!

Since reading old message board archive format is more than most people want to wade through, here is 1) just the main story without message board clutter and 2) her letter of validation, in a format easier to read.  I have eliminated the comment thread which, while funny, is nowhere near this funny - you can read it at the link above.

AnneV -  Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC -  Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

AnneV -  They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

AmyC -  Oh. My. God. What sort of carcass is big enough to hold a couple of dogs inside? Given the situation, I’m afraid you’re not going to be create enough of a diversion to get the dogs out of the carrion, unless they like greeting company as much as they like rolling around in dead stuff. Which seems unlikely. Can you turn a hose on the festivities?

Ase Innes-Ker -  I’m sorry Anne. I know this is a problem (and it would have driven me crazy), but it is also incredibly funny.

AnneV -  Elk. Elk are very big this year, because of the rain and good grazing and so forth. They aren’t rolling. They are alternately napping and eating. They each have a ribcage. Other dogs are working on them from the outside. It’s all way too primal in my yard right now. We tried the hose trick. At someone elses house, which is where they climbed in and began to refuse to come out. Many hours ago. I think that the hose mostly helps keep them cool and dislodges little moist snacks for them. hose failed. My new hope is that if they all continue to eat at this rate, they will be finished before the houseguests arrive. The very urban houseguests. Oh, god - I know it’s funny. It’s appalling, and funny, and completely entirely representative of life with dogs.

Kristen R. -  I’m so glad I read this thread, dogless as I am. Dogs in elk. Dogs in elk.

AnneV -  It’s like that childrens book out there - dogs in elk, dogs on elk, dogs around elk, dogs outside elk. And there is some elk inside of, as well as on, each dog at this point.

Elizabeth K -  Anne, aren’t you in Arizona or Nevada? There are elk there? I’m so confused! We definately need to see pics of Gus Pong and Jake in the elk carcass.

AnneV -  I am in New Mexico, but there are elk in both arizona and nevada, yes. There are elk all over the da*n place. They don’t look out very often. If you stand the ribcage on end they scramble to the top and look out, all red. Otherwise, you kinda have to get in there a little bit yourself to really see them. So I think there will not be pictures.

CoseyMo - “all red;” I’m not sure the deeper horror of all this was fully borne in upon me till I saw that little phrase.

AnneV - Well, you know, the Basenji (that would be Jake) is a desert dog, naturally, and infamous for it’s aversion to water. And then, Gus Pong (who is coming to us, live, unamplified and with a terrific reverb which is making me a little dizzy) really doesn’t mind water, but hates to be cold. Or soapy. And both of them can really run. Sprints of up to 35 mph have been clocked. So. If ever they come out, catching them and returning them to a condition where they can be considered house pets is not going to be, shall we say, pleasant.

CoseyMo - What if you stand the ribcage on end, wait for them to look out, grab them when they do and pull?

AnneV - They wedge their toes between the ribs. And scream. We tried that before we brought the elk home from the mountain with dogs inside. Jake nearly took my friends arm off. He’s already short a toe, so he cherishes the 15 that remain.

Linda Hewitt - Have you thought about calling your friendly vet and paying him to come pick up the dogs, elk and letting the dogs stay at the vets overnight. If anyone would know what to do, it would be your vet. It might cost some money, but it would solve the immediate crisis. Keep us posted.

ChristiPeters - Yikes! My sympathy! When I lived in New Mexico, my best friend’s dog (the escape artist) was continually bringing home road kill. When there was no road kill convenient, he would visit the neighbor’s house. Said neighbor slaughtered his own beef. The dog found all kinds of impossibly gross toys in the neighbor’s trash pit. I have always had medium to large dogs. The smallest dog I ever had was a mutt from the SPCA who matured out at just above knee high and about 55 pounds. Our current dog (daughter’s choice) is a Pomeranian. A very small Pomeranian. She’s 8 months old now and not quite 4 pounds. I’m afraid I’ll break her.

Lori Shiraishi - Bet you could fit a whole lot of Pomeranians in that there elk carcass! Anne - my condolences on what must be an unbelievable situation!

AnneV - I did call my vet. He laughed until he was gagging and breathless. He says a lot of things, which can be summed as *what did you expect?* and *no, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog.* He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home. Thanks, Lori. I am almost surrendered to the absurdity of it.

Lori Shiraishi - “He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home.” So he can fall down laughing in person?

AnneV - Basically, yeah. That would be about it.

AmyC - “No, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog.“ Oh, sweet lo*d, Anne. You have my deepest sympathies in this, perhaps the most peculiar of the Gus Pong Adventures. You are truly a woman of superhuman patience. wait – you carried the carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?

AnneV - “The carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?” no, well, sort of. My part in the whole thing was to get really stressed about a meeting that I had to go to, and say *yeah, ok, whatever* when it was suggested that the ribcages, since we couldn’t get the dogs out of them and the dogs couldn’t be left there, be brought to my house. Because, you know - I just thought they would get bored of it sooner or later. But it appears to be later, in the misty uncertain future, that they will get bored. Now, they are still interested. And very loud, one singing, one snoring.

Lori Shiraishi - “And very loud, one singing, one snoring.” wow. I can’t even begin to imagine the acoustics involved with singing from the inside of an elk.

AnneV - reverb. lots and lots of reverb.

AnneV - I’ll tell you the thing that is causing me to lose it again and again, and then I have to go back outside and stay there for a while. After the meeting, I said to my (extraordinary) boss, “look, I’ve gotta go home for the rest of the day, I think. Jake and Gus Pong are inside some elk ribcages, and my dad is coming tonight, so I’ve got to get them out somehow.” And he said, pale and huge-eyed, “Annie, how did you explain the elk to the clients?” The poor, poor man thought I had the carcasses brought to work with me. For some reason, I find this deeply funny. (weekend pause)

AnneV - So what we did was put the ribcages (containing dogs) on tarps and drag them around to the side yard, where I figured they would at least be harder to see, and then opened my bedroom window so that the dogs could let me know when they were ready to be plunged into a de-elking solution and let in the house. Then I went to the airport. Came home, no visible elk, no visible dogs. Peeked around the shrubs, and there they were, still in the elk. By this time, they had gnawed out some little portholes between some of the ribs, and you got the occasional very frightening glimpse of something moving around in there if you watched long enough. After a lot of agonizing, I went to bed. I closed the back door, made sure my window was open, talked to the dogs out of it until I as sure they knew it was open, and then I fell asleep. Sometimes, sleep is a mistake, no matter how tired you are. And especially if you are very very tired, and some of your dogs are outside, inside some elks. Because when you are that tired, you sleep through bumping kind of noises, or you kind of think that it’s just the house guests. It wasn’t the house guests. It was my dogs, having an attack of teamwork unprecedented in our domestic history. When I finally woke all the way up, it was to a horrible vision. Somehow, 3 dogs with a combined weight of about 90 pounds, managed to hoist one of the ribcages (the meatier one, of course) up 3 feet to rest on top of the swamp cooler outside the window, and push out the screen. What woke me was Gus Pong, howling in frustration from inside the ribcage, very close to my head, combined with feverish little grunts from Jake, who was standing on the nightstand, bracing himself against the curtains with remarkably bloody little feet. Here are some things I have learned, this Rosh Hashanah weekend: 1. almond milk removes elk blood from curtains and pillowcases, 2. We can all exercise superhuman strength when it comes to getting elk carcasses out of our yard, 3. The sight of elk ribcages hurtling over the fence really frightens the nice deputy sheriff who lives across the street, and 4. the dogs can pop the screens out of the windows, without damaging them, from either side.

AnneV - What I am is really grateful that they didn’t actually get the damn thing in the window, which is clearly the direction they were going in. And that the nice deputy didn’t arrest me for terrifying her with elk parts before dawn.

AmyC - Imagine waking up with a gnawed elk carcass in your bed, like a real-life “Godfather” with an all-dog cast.

AnneV - There is not enough almond milk in the world to solve an event of that kind.

.

Authentication:

The Validity of the Dogs in Elk Story

From http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/validity.htm

[Rob]: Since publishing the pumpkin version of the Dogs in Elk story, I’ve received dozens of e-mails from people curious about the story’s validity. I’ve also received e-mail from AnneVerchick, owner of the “real” dogs in elk.

I’ve never seen the dogs myself, and I’ve as yet to see a picture of the actual event, but here are some snippets of what Annie had to say. She sent me this 10/28/99:

Hi, Rob - This is AnneVerchick, owner of the dogs in elk. The pumpkin carving is lovely, and, on a smaller, more vegetative scale, really pretty faithful to what was one of the messier experiences of my recent life.

Thanks, and take care. Annie

.

After a couple of e-mail volleys, I finally mustered up the nerve to ask Annie to attest to the validity of the story. She wrote back:

Rob,

Sure, I can attest. I mean, I can tell you that it really did happen. I can ask a couple of people who stopped by to admire the whole scene to get in touch with you, or give you their email addresses and phone numbers.

Does that help at all? I think that it’s easy for me to lose track of how atypical my dog experiences are, in some ways, because like everyone else, what I compare the world to is my experience.

The thing about the dogs in elk thing is this - with the dogs I have, especially Gus Pong, who is a New Guinea Singing Dog, and a complete freak of primitive dogdom, dogs in elk is in some ways a fairly minor event, in that it involved fewer people than usual. Sharing a house with a very primitive, deeply attached and wildly inspired animal has led me into all sorts of situations I never anticipated as a pet owner.

How dogs in elk began is a little odd, without considerable history - ignore now, if you’re not interested. Gus Pong is a New Guinea Singing Dog - currently, they are classified as a subspecies of Dingo, but what they look like is a cross between a German Shepherd and a Shiba Inu. And he is an incredibly fussy eater. In the highlands, they live as semi-pariah dogs in the villages, and their primary use is for hunting. So, after being unable to find a commercial dog food that he would eat at all, I contacted local game processors and butchers. I lucked out. I found a really nice guy who was willing to give me (since game can’t be sold) trim and bones, which turned out to be something Gus Pong (and my other two dogs, Jake and Stella) thought was just fine. You can see, I am sure, where this is going. They had a rich texan come in, and shoot his tags, and not want the meat. So they did a really rough field dress, and called and asked if I wanted to come pick up about 100 lbs of slabcut elk and so forth. I said sure, and mistakenly put Jake and Gus in the car before driving up. Well, they got out of the car (One of slider windows was cracked, which I didn’t realize) and you know the rest.

The original chain of posts begins here: http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.ee90352/1317 which is in TableTalk, a forum at Salon, an ezine that added a webcrossing forum to it. That’s why I am so astonished that it made it all over the web - and really all over. My mother has gotten multiple copies from friends, asking if my dogs are *really* that out of control.

Take care, and let me know if you’d like to speak to someone other than me who was there.

Annie

tools not rules: the importance of critical thinking

More than once, I’ve talked about the negative implications of Evangelical/purity culture logic being uncritically replicated in fandom spaces and left-wing discourse, and have also referenced specific examples of logical overlap this produces re, in particular, the policing of sexuality. What I don’t think I’ve done before is explain how this happens: how even a well-intentioned person who’s trying to unlearn the toxic systems they grew up with can end up replicating those systems. Even if you didn’t grow up specifically in an Evangelical/purity context, if your home, school, work and/or other social environments have never encouraged or taught you to think critically, then it’s easy to fall into similar traps - so here, hopefully, is a quick explainer on how that works, and (hopefully) how to avoid it in the future.

Put simply: within Evangelism, purity culture and other strict, hierarchical social contexts, an enormous value is placed on rules, and specifically hard rules. There might be a little wiggle-room in some instances, but overwhelmingly, the rules are fixed: once you get taught that something is bad, you’re expected never to question it. Understanding the rules is secondary to obeying them, and oftentimes, asking for a more thorough explanation - no matter how innocently, even if all you’re trying to do is learn - is framed as challenging those rules, and therefore cast as disobedience. And where obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a sin. If someone breaks the rules, it doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. Their explanations or justifications don’t matter, and nor does the context: a rule is a rule, and rulebreakers are Bad.

In this kind of environment, therefore, you absorb three main lessons: one, to obey a rule from the moment you learn it; two, that it’s more important to follow the rules than to understand them; and three, that enforcing the rules means castigating anyone who breaks them. And these lessons go deep: they’re hard to unlearn, especially when you grow up with them through your formative years, because the consequences of breaking them - or even being seen to break them - can be socially catastrophic.

But outside these sorts of strict environments - and, honestly, even within them - that much rigidity isn’t healthy. Life is frequently far more complex and nuanced than hard rules really allow for, particularly when it comes to human psychology and behaviour - and this is where critical thinking comes in. Critical thinking allows us to evaluate the world around us on an ongoing basis: to weigh the merits of different positions; to challenge established rules if we feel they no longer serve us; to decide which new ones to institute in their place; to acknowledge that sometimes, there are no easy answers; to show the working behind our positions, and to assess the logic with which other arguments are presented to us. Critical thinking is how we graduate from a simplistic, black-and-white view of morality to a more nuanced perception of the world - but this is a very hard lesson to learn if, instead of critical thinking, we’re taught instead to put our faith in rules alone.

So: what does it actually look like, when rule-based logic is applied in left-wing spaces? I’ll give you an example: 

Sally is new to both social justice and fandom. She grew up in a household that punished her for asking questions, and where she was expected to unquestioningly follow specific hard rules. Now, though, Sally has started to learn a bit more about the world outside her immediate bubble, and is realising not only that the rules she grew up with were toxic, but that she’s absorbed a lot of biases she doesn’t want to have. Sally is keen to improve herself. She wants to be a good person! So Sally joins some internet communities and starts to read up on things. Sally is well-intentioned, but she’s also never learned how to evaluate information before, and she’s certainly never had to consider that two contrasting opinions could be equally valid - how could she have, when she wasn’t allowed to ask questions, and when she was always told there was a singular Right Answer to everything? Her whole framework for learning is to Look For The Rules And Follow Them, and now that she’s learned the old rules were Bad, that means she has to figure out what the Good Rules are. 

Sally isn’t aware she’s thinking of it in these terms, but subconsciously, this is how she’s learned to think. So when Sally reads a post explaining how sex work and pornography are inherently misogynistic and demeaning to women, Sally doesn’t consider this as one side of an ongoing argument, but uncritically absorbs this information as a new Rule. She reads about how it’s always bad and appropriative for someone from one culture to wear clothes from another culture, and even though she’s not quite sure of all the ways in which it applies, this becomes a Rule, too. Whatever argument she encounters first that seems reasonable becomes a Rule, and once she has the Rules, there’s no need to challenge them or research them or flesh out her understanding, because that’s never been how Rules work - and because she’s grown up in a context where the foremost way to show that you’re aware of and obeying the Rules is to shame people for breaking them, even though she’s not well-versed in these subjects, Sally begins to weigh in on debates by harshly disagreeing with anyone who offers up counter-opinions. Sometimes her disagreements are couched in borrowed terms, parroting back the logic of the Rules she’s learned, but other times, they’re simply ad hominem attacks, because at home, breaking a Rule makes you a bad person, and as such, Sally has never learned to differentiate between attacking the idea and attacking the person. 

And of course, because Sally doesn’t understand the Rules in-depth, it’s harder to explain them to or debate with rulebreakers who’ve come armed with arguments she hasn’t heard before, which makes it easier and less frustrating to just insult them and point out that they ARE rulebreakers - especially if she doesn’t want to admit her confusion or the limitations of her knowledge. Most crucially of all, Sally doesn’t have a viable framework for admitting to fault or ignorance beyond a total groveling apology that doubles as a concession to having been Morally Bad, because that’s what it’s always meant to her to admit you broke a Rule. She has no template for saying, “huh, I hadn’t considered that,” or “I don’t know enough to contribute here,” or even “I was wrong; thanks for explaining!” 

So instead, when challenged, Sally remains defensive: she feels guilty about the prospect of being Bad, because she absolutely doesn’t want to be a Bad Person, but she also doesn’t know how to conceptualise goodness outside of obedience. It makes her nervous and unsettled to think that strangers could think of her as a Bad Person when she’s following the Rules, and so she becomes even more aggressive when challenged to compensate, clinging all the more tightly to anyone who agrees with her, yet inevitably ending up hurt when it turns out this person or that who she thought agreed on What The Rules Were suddenly develops a different opinion, or asks a question, or does something else unsettling. 

Pushed to this sort of breaking point, some people in Sally’s position go back to the fundamentalism they were raised with, not because they still agree with it, but because the lack of uniform agreement about What The Rules Are makes them feel constantly anxious and attacked, and at least before, they knew how to behave to ensure that everyone around them knew they were Good. Others turn to increasingly niche communities and social groups, constantly on paranoid alert for Deviance From The Rules. But other people eventually have the freeing realisation that the fixation on Rules and Goodness is what’s hurting them, not strangers with different opinions, and they steadily start to do what they wanted to do all along: become happier, kinder and better-informed people who can admit to human failings - including their own - without melting down about it.   

THIS is what we mean when we talk about puritan logic being present in fandom and left-wing spaces: the refusal to engage with critical thinking while sticking doggedly to a single, fixed interpretation of How To Be Good. It’s not always about sexuality; it’s just that sexuality, and especially queerness, are topics we’re used to seeing conservatives talk about a certain way, and when those same rhetorical tricks show up in our fandom spaces, we know why they look familiar. 

So: how do you break out of rule-based thinking? By being aware of it as a behavioural pattern. By making a conscious effort to accept that differing perspectives can sometimes have equal value, or that, even if a given argument isn’t completely sound, it might still contain a nugget of truth. By trying to be less reactive and more reflective when encountering positions different to your own. By accepting that not every argument is automatically tied to or indicative of a higher moral position: sometimes, we’re just talking about stuff! By remembering that you’re allowed to change your position, or challenge someone else’s, or ask for clarification. By understanding that having a moral code and personal principles isn’t at odds with asking questions, and that it’s possible - even desirable - to update your beliefs when you come to learn more than you did before. 

This can be a scary and disquieting process to engage in, and it’s important to be aware of that, because one of the main appeals of rule-based thinking - if not the key appeal - is the comfort of moral certainty it engenders. If the rules are simple and clear, and following them is what makes you a good person, then it’s easy to know if you’re doing the right thing according to that system. It’s much, much harder and frequently more uncomfortable to be uncertain about things: to doubt, not only yourself, but the way you’ve been taught to think. And especially online, where we encounter so many more opinions and people than we might elsewhere, and where we can get dogpiled on by strangers or go viral without meaning to despite our best intentions? The prospect of being deemed Bad is genuinely terrifying. Of course we want to follow the Rules. But that’s the point of critical thinking: to try and understand that rules exist in the first place, not to be immutable and unchanging, but as tools to help us be better - and if a tool becomes defunct or broken, it only makes sense to repair it. 

Rigid thinking teaches us to view the world through the lens of rules: to obey first and understand later. Critical thinking teaches us to use ideas, questions, contexts and other bits of information as analytic tools: to put understanding ahead of obedience. So if you want to break out of puritan thinking, whenever you encounter a new piece of information, ask yourself: are you absorbing it as a rule, or as a tool? 

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

This is perfect and the only thing missing is that when “thy” comes before a vowel it’s replaced by “thine”, i.e. “thy nose” but “thine eyes.” English used to do this with my and mine too (and still does with a and an).

The second person singular verb ending is -(e)st. In the present tense, it works more or less like the third person singular ending, -s: 

The -(e)st ending is only added to one word in a compound verb. This is where a lot of people make mistakes:

NOT

If you’re not sure, try saying it in the third person and replacing the -(e)st with -s:

In general, if there’s one auxiliary, it takes the -(e)st ending) and the main verb does not. If there are multiple auxiliaries, only one of them takes -(e)st:

You can reduce the full -est ending to -st in poetry, if you need to drop a syllable:

In some common words–mostly auxiliary verbs, or what you might have learned as “helping verbs”–the ending is always reduced:

Sometimes this reduction takes the last consonant of the stem with it:

Or reduces the -st down to -t:

However! UNLIKE the third-person singular -s, the second person -(e)st is ALSO added to PAST TENSE words, either to the past stem in strong (irregular) verbs or AFTER THE -ed in weak (regular) verbs: 

This is different from the third person!

It’s not wrong to add -(e)st to a long Latinate verb in the past tense, but it’s unusual; it’s much more common to use a helping verb instead:

And a couple last things:

1.) Third-person -(e)th is mostly equivalent to and interchangeable with third-person -s:

HOWEVER! Third-person -(e)th, unlike -s but like -(e)st, can, sometimes, go on STRONG past-tense verbs:

This never happens with weak verbs:

And even with strong verbs, from Early Modern (e.g., Shakespearean) English onward, it’s quite rare. But you will see it from time to time.

2.) In contemporary Modern English, we invert the order of subjects and auxiliary verbs in questions:

If there’s no auxiliary, we add one–do–and invert that:

In Early Modern English, this process was optional, and mostly used for emphasis; all verbs could be and were moved to the front of the sentence in questions:

Do-support was also optional for negatives:

3.) Imperative verbs never take endings:

4.) Singular ‘you’–that is, calling a singular person by a plural pronoun–arose as a politeness marker; and ‘thou’ fell out of use because it eventually came to be seen as impolite in almost all contexts. In general, once singular ‘you’ comes into use, it is used for addressing

‘Thou’ is used for

It is safer to ‘you’ someone who doesn’t necessarily warrant ‘you’ than to ‘thou’ someone who does.

5.) And finally, that ‘ye’? That’s the nominative form of you–the one that’s equivalent to ‘I’ or ‘we.’ 

Any time you’re using ‘thou’ for the singular, the second person plural– ‘y’all’– declines like this:

you don’t need to ask for jane anymore: a guide to coming to chicago for a safe, low-cost abortion

A lot of people in the US are super worried about the Supreme Court axing Roe v. Wade, but what they might not know is that some states have laws in place that will protect the right to reproductive choice and abortion if that happens. One of these states is the state of Illinois. In 2019, a law was passed that protects abortion rights within the state even if the federal right to an abortion falls. This means that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will still be a protected right in Illinois. Even before Roe, Chicago was a haven for safe abortions- you just called and asked for Jane.

Now, safe abortion access is the law of the land in IL, and there are several groups who can help you. This post is long, but I think it’s worthwhile. Even if you don’t read all the way through it, maybe save it for later. You or someone you know might need it. If you want to stop now, the TL;DR is this:

I’d like to start by saying that the closer to home you get your abortion, should you need one, the easier it will be for you… probably. It depends on your individual situation AND your safety. If I still lived in Indiana and I needed an abortion, I’d probably leave to get it done, even though there are abortion providers in Indiana, because Indiana is super hostile and there’s lots of clinic protestors- for example, when I was taking my GRE my senior year at Notre Dame, the testing center was in this little strip mall in Mishawaka next to Planned Parenthood. Despite the fact that the PP in Mishawaka does not provide abortions, there were protestors who yelled at me for going in there. I wasn’t even going to PP. I’d like to say that I said something devastatingly cool but I just ran in flustered. Point being: It really, really would have sucked if I was there for healthcare instead of a standardized test for graduate school. And that’s a very tame, mild situation! Real abortion clinic protests are often much more devastating! 

ANYWAYS. The less you have to travel, the easier things tend to be, if it’s safe to get an abortion where you are and if your state will have protected abortions if Roe is overturned. If you’re not sure what might happen in your state in that case, this map has a clear, succinct overview of the legal status of abortion in each state and all US territories. You will want to click through to that link, because this image isn’t interactive.

[ID: a map of the US with states and territories sorted by their legal protections for abortion into four categories: expanded access in the case of Roe v. Wade being overturned, protected, not protected, and hostile. IL is highlighted.]

So let’s say you live in any of those red states. (Yellow and blue are safe- abortion access is protected there.) Let’s say, worst case scenario, Roe gets overturned and you get pregnant and you want to terminate. You will be able to do that in IL, and it’s relatively easy to do that in Chicago for a relatively low cost and with the benefit of a robust support network of people who want to reaffirm your reproductive choices.

First, if you’re a minor and you don’t want to tell your parents because it’s not safe for you to do so, get a judicial waiver of parental notification. The IL ACLU has a judicial bypass hotline. This will come at no cost to you. Do this ASAP, because it takes time to get it set up! You can do this by calling the hotline at 877-442-9727, texting 312-560-6607, or emailing [email protected].

Next, you need to get an appointment set up. You could get a referral from someone local to you, but this can be tricky- 87% of counties in the US don’t have an abortion provider, and google can lead you to a crisis pregnancy center. They will not help you. If you have a local Planned Parenthood, call them. Even if they don’t provide abortions, they can refer you to someone who can. If you’re coming to Chicago, which this post… kind of assumes you are… you can call any of these groups to talk about your options and what clinics can help you. I recommend starting with FPA or PP; those are two actual clinics. MAC and CAF are funds- they can direct you but they can’t schedule an appointment for you.

Family Planning Associates (FPA): 312-707-8988 or use their online schedule tool, found here: https://www.fpachicago.com/schedule-now/ Chicago Abortion Fund (CAF): Phone: 312-663-0338 (note: the helpline is only staffed MWF from 3:30-6:30 PM CST, or email [email protected] Midwest Access Coalition (MAC): 847-750-6224 or email [email protected] Planned Parenthood of Illinois (PP): 1-800-230-7526

You might want to shop around and see which clinic costs the least, and is the most practical for you to get to. FPA has a lot of patient resources, as does PP. Don’t be afraid to ask for financial assistance. The people staffing those organizations have extensive networks and deep compassion for their patients- if the clinic can’t help, they might know who can.

Once you’ve made an appointment, now’s the time to start gathering financial aid. Some insurance, including IL Medicaid, covers it. If yours does not, or if the copay is still too much, this is where abortion funds come into play. Many states have their own abortion funds for state residents, so you might have to look around to see who can help you. I’d start with the National Network of Abortion Funds.

You also need to figure out transportation and housing while you’re in the city to get your abortion. This isn’t super necessary if you’re just coming for the pill abortion, but if you’re coming for a d and c or other surgical procedure, you will be staying for a couple of days. THIS is why I’m writing this up, because abortion funds typically only are able to help cover the financial cost of the procedure. It’s expensive to stay somewhere and it can be absolutely terrifying if you’re on your own! Navigating while you’re in pain from the procedure can be an absolute devil of a time, too! However, Chicago has MAC (contact info above), which is a practical access fund, which means that they help pay for transportation to the city (bus tickets and train tickets) and around the city (volunteer drivers or volunteers who take rideshares with clients), food, aftercare medicine (painkillers, etc.), and housing, and there’s also free access to emotional support staff throughout your stay. This is not just open to IL residents; it’s open to anyone coming to the city for an abortion. ALSO if you go through FPA, they have a partnership with the Hampton Inn a block away from their location where their patients get a discount. If you go that route, just talk to FPA about housing and they’ll hook you up. This can be super helpful if you need some evidence that you’re on a “business trip” or something like that- if you are in a position where you need an excuse for your safety, that might work well.

Hopefully you won’t need this post- but if you do, I hope it helps. Feel free to share it around. If you have anti-choice opinions and you feel the need to share, don’t. This isn’t the space for it; you will be blocked and your comments removed. And then remember that criminalizing abortion won’t stop abortion. It’ll just stop safe abortions. Also, increased access to abortion, funnily enough, tends to be the thing that lowers abortion rates, because increased access to abortion comes part and parcel with increased access to birth control and general health and sex education.

Reblogging this because it’s always relevant… and because an administrative decision by MAC’s incredible leadership means they don’t just do bus and train tickets anymore. They will also help pay for airline tickets if you need to fly. If you are in the US and need to come to Chicago for an abortion, MAC’s got your back.

In light of recent events.

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a37668369/abortion-funds-crisis-where-to-donate-end-of-roe/

https://abortionfunds.org/

http://www.sparkrj.org/

https://keepourclinics.org/

https://www.nirhealth.org/local-reproductive-freedom-index/

Also, if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t travel, and you catch it early, you can do a medication abortion at home. This can either be clinician supported through telehealth or it can be a self-managed abortion (SMA). Either way, you can do this entirely online without ever having to go into a doctor’s office or clinic.

http://www.sparkrj.org/website/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/SMA-1-Pager.pdf

Now, this only works early in a pregnancy (up to 11-12 weeks), so if you’re in a situation where you suspect you may become pregnant and you don’t want to be, test early and often if you can. The various help lines can also help you figure out how far along you are.

More resources: https://www.reprolegalhelpline.org/- this link is a good resource for talking about your legal options. If you’re a pregnant person of color, immigrant, or low-income (and using Medicaid) in an abortion-hostile state, I HIGHLY recommend talking through your legal options because you are absolutely targeted by politicians and the US legal system.

https://www.plancpills.org/

https://abortionhotline.org/

Also, if you would like to do something IRL to help, why not print out some stickers? These have a QR code that leads to Plan C’s website.

https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5f7e0692875fa8243cac6673/613fac241151daf59881d89e_PlanC_DIY_StickerSheet_2x2.pdf

You can print these on sticker paper at home if you have it. It’s a good way to get the word out.

As of… thirty minutes ago on Monday, 2 May 2022, Politico got hold of Justice Alito’s draft statement on Roe. It’s not good. We’re probably gonna lose Roe vs. Wade in two months, and that means if you live in a red state, you’re VERY probably going to lose the right to a safe abortion.

I know this is a long post, but if Roe is overturned, it’s not going to stop abortions. It’s just going to stop safe abortions. Abortion access is reproductive healthcare, and a lot of states are going to get really restrictive. Indiana, my home state, has already put a woman in jail for having a miscarriage. Oklahoma lawmakers would rather let women with ectopic pregnancies die than allow lifesaving medical procedures. This is bad, but! Underground abortion networks did exist before Roe vs. Wade, and now we have the internet. We have robust networks in place to help people that the government would rather see dead or imprisoned. Even if Roe is overturned, some states will be safe havens for abortion. Travel to these states can be difficult, but not impossible– that’s what abortion networks and abortion funds are for.

Please save as much of this information as may be relevant to you. And if you’re “pro-life” and feel the need to comment on this post? Don’t. Your opinions and input are neither valued nor wanted. Abortion access is a vital, necessary part of reproductive healthcare.

Frodo Didn’t Fail

The climactic scene of The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and Sam reach the Cracks of Doom, is one of my favorite scenes in all of literature. So I was very interested a little while back when noted Tolkien scholar Stephen Colbert laid out a neat little analysis of the scene. Frodo seems to fail at his appointed task – rather than throwing the ring into the fire, he claims it for himself, and the ring is only destroyed by the coincidental intervention of Gollum. Colbert then notes that Gandalf should have known that Frodo would fail. Back in the second chapter, Frodo demonstrated to Gandalf his inability to throw the ring into the much cooler fires of his own hearth, after having only possessed the ring for a few hours. Therefore, one may assume, Gandalf must have intended for one of the other members of the Fellowship to intervene and ensure the ring’s destruction.

Colbert’s analysis is clever, in the same way that the theory that Gandalf had intended all along to use the eagles to reach Mordor is clever. In its cleverness, though, I think such analyses risk treating LotR as a D&D campaign and thus losing sight of the real literary themes of the story.

One of Tolkien’s key themes is the Augustinian view of evil. Most genre fiction takes a decidedly Manichean view of evil – a view that holds that evil and good are two great opposing forces in the world, like the light and dark sides of The Force. In a Manichean view, good must triumph by opposing evil, either to eradicate it or to restore a balance to the universe.

Manichean views of evil lead to a very common type of climax to stories: the contest of wills. Our hero confronts the villain, and through superior courage, grit, love, or what-have-you, they overcome the villain and their evil power. It’s Harry going wand-to-wand with Voldemort, Thomas Covenant laughing at Lord Foul, Meg breaking IT’s hold over Charles Wallace, Luke facing down Vader and Vader facing down the Emperor.

Any other writer could have given us a very typical Manichean Cracks of Doom scene. Frodo approaches the fire, and the ring’s temptation overtakes him. He puts the ring on and begins to claim it. But a tiny voice somewhere deep inside him insists that this is wrong. Sam cries out, and thinking about Sam’s love and devotion rekindles a spark in Frodo. His Hobbitish desire for food and good cheer wells up, and he tears the ring off and throws it into the fire. A dramatic ending and a nice echo of the moral of The Hobbit.

But that’s not what happens. Frodo’s goodness – even the innocent goodness of a little old Hobbit – can’t go toe-to-toe with Sauron’s evil. Indeed, Isildur proved it. He defeated Sauron by opposing him with the force of good, and defeated him. But Isildur couldn’t destroy the ring, and within the year it had destroyed him.

Tolkien holds instead to an Augustinian view of evil. Evil, according to St. Augustine, is not a force of its own, but rather is the absence or corruption of good. We see this most explicitly in the idea that Morgoth and Sauron can’t create anything of their own, but only corrupt and warp what has been created by others. We also see it when Gandalf and Galadriel describe what would happen if they took the ring – it would warp their own desire to do good until they became evil.

An Augustinian climax can’t involve a contest of wills between good and evil. In an Augustinian world, evil can only exist by leeching off of good. So evil must be given an opportunity to destroy itself, much like the self-defeating band of thieves described by Plato (on whose philosophy Augustine drew heavily). Good wins by renouncing evil, not by overcoming it.

And that’s exactly what happens at the Cracks of Doom. The ring isn’t destroyed because Frodo’s force of good overcame the ring’s evil. Nor is Gollum’s intervention a coincidence or deus ex machina (like the series of disarmings that happened to make Harry the master of the Elder Wand). Rather, the ring’s evil collapsed in on itself by drawing Gollum. The very corruption of Gollum that enabled the ring to escape the river drove him to wrestle desperately with Frodo for it and ultimately fall to his doom, ring in hand.

An Augustinian view of evil has definite moral implications, which are also shown throughout The Lord of the Rings. A Manichean world is a consequentialist world. To defeat the forces of evil, we need to think strategically. Sometimes we may even need to indulge in a little short-term evil in order to be able to achieve the greater good. But an Augustinian world can’t allow that kind of pragmatic approach. In an Augustinian world, any compromise with evil can only strengthen it, giving it an infusion of good that delays its self-destruction. An Augustinian world demands a deontological ethic, doing the right thing regardless of the outcome.

Again and again in The Lord of the Rings, we see that strategically pursuing the greater good fails, while remaining true to moral principles succeeds even when it looked foolish. On the cautionary side, we have Saruman and Denethor. Though they may point to the palantir as an excuse, they each ultimately made a thoroughly reasonable choice in the face of Sauron’s overwhelming advantage – to ally with him while playing the long game, or to give in to despair. Our heroes, on the other hand, repeatedly make foolish decisions based on hope. Aragorn is a good example – he decides to pursue Merry and Pippin because he owes them protection even though Frodo is the one who holds the fate of the world in his hands. Later, he decides to make a suicide attack on the Morannon rather than hunkering down in Minas Tirith, in the hopes of Frodo’s quest succeeding.

But the most important instance of doing the right thing despite the consequences comes from Frodo himself: he refuses to kill Gollum. Killing Gollum would have been an eminently reasonable idea – he’s a slinker and a stinker, and we know that he never redeemed himself or turned over a new leaf. Indeed, his main accomplishments were to lead Frodo and Sam into a death trap, then to try to kill them with his own hands at the Cracks of Doom. Both Sam and Faramir were right when they said that killing Gollum would have been a good idea!

But Frodo showed Gollum pity and spared his life because it was the right thing to do. And just like Gandalf could see Frodo’s unwillingness to destroy the ring back in Bag End, he also addressed this very issue. He instructed Frodo:

And in the end, that pity was what saved the world. Frodo’s pity made it possible for Gollum to be there at the Cracks of Doom to take the ring. Frodo refused to give in to the small, reasonable evil of killing Gollum, and so he left the great evil of the ring exposed to destroy itself. That was Gandalf’s backup plan, not Aragorn’s strength to take the ring and destroy it. And so Frodo didn’t really fail. He succeeded at his quest back when he saved Gollum’s life, when he did the right thing even though it seemed foolish.