Darthvoxpo - Refugee From The Great Twitter War

Where do you get your modern war and foreign policy news? Trying to figure out what's happening in with Turkey and Russia from a a strategic point of view but I can only find pieces from the big news outlets bogged down with unrelated politics and iffy knowledge on the subject.

In no particular order:

Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Defense One, The Cipher Brief, Brookings, RAND, Center for New American Security, Brookings, War on the Rocks, The Strategy Bridge, The Diplomat, School of Advanced International Studies, The Soufan Center, Divergent Opinions podcast, among others. Some of those require subscriptions, some do not. You might also want to look for the experts that are employed in places like RAND or Brookings for the AOR you’re interested in.

Thanks for the question, Luke.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

For the love of…

Look. Let’s address the obvious first off: Fandom has problems with women. We all know this. We also know that “has problems” is putting matters rather mildly.

That is a fine premise. Plenty to go on from there.

What is NOT a fine follow up is defending the idea that “fandom hates women” by pointing to the reaction to R*ylow. Because that entire ship? That is a dumpster fire in its own right even before getting to the whole dust up where, because of him making a harmless joke about sex, specifically his character in Star Wars and Rey, another fictional character in Star Wars, having sex, there’s a movement within that group to discredit and tear down John Boyega. 

Like, we’ll get to that business in a bit. But let’s address the fact that the majority of R*ylows are shipping CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT SHOWN. 

The whole business of this ship is to use Rey to “redeem” “Ben Solo,” a character who metaphorically killed himself in TFA through the literal killing of his father. The two meetings of Rey and Kylo Ren in TFA were first him rendering her unconscious and kidnapping her, and then her attempting to kill him for his murder of Han Solo and attack of Finn - killing her mentor and attacking her friend.

But those who ship this transplant the characteristics that defined Finn onto Kylo Ren, who they refer to as Ben Solo, a name he rejects until about the last hour of the most recent movie. They make him into a tortured character who is tragically torn between the light and the dark, has not made a decision on where he stands and needs to be pulled back. EXCEPT Kylo Ren was introduced ordering the slaughter of an innocent village - a slaughter that Finn refused to participate in. 

All of this is, let’s not mince words, based off the fact that Kylo Ren is a white man and Finn is a black man. Because we saw, back before TFA released, a heaping TON of abuse hurled towards him purely for BEING a black man - I remember vividly all the anti-blackness going around when we had no more than a trailer for the sequel trilogy. 

I am not - let me repeat this NOT - shaming anyone, male, woman, enby, whatever you identify as, for wanting the narrative of “saving the monster.” As a queer person, yeah, I get that, considering that a lot of my narratives growing up that I can identify with have all kinds of queercoding throughout them, even when involving straight pairings. But the defining difference has always been that in those stories, the monster wanted to be accepted as a person. TFA gave us a monster who chose to be monstrous.

And TLJ only added into this narrative - Rey refused to join Kylo. ONCE AGAIN, he spurned her offers of coming back to the light, choosing to take the leadership of the First Order. We also saw in flashback that he chose to respond to Luke briefly flirting with the idea of killing him by BURNING THE ACADEMY TO THE GROUND. Whatever you want to say about Luke’s moment of weakness, that is definitely overreacting, that is taking out your pain on innocent others.

TRoS even brings this to a conclusion, a similar one to the redemption of Anakin Skywalker, being unable to live in the world that he saved, that no act he could do could balance the scales to allow him to be a part of that world, considering the deaths and pain at his hands in specific.

So that - THAT - is who Kylo Ren was on screen.

The R*ylow version of him, however, is some scared teenager/young adult, who has been ignored, emotionally neglected by his parents, nearly murdered by his uncle, and drowning in the darkness, in need of a rope.

The canon version of him, to sum up, is a roughly thirty-ish adult man, raised by loving parents who had a galaxy to rebuild and couldn’t devote every second to him, his uncle had a moment of weakness where he pointed a weapon at who he perceived as a threat (I can give this, or I would, had Kylo stayed and even TRIED to get answers, but the indications are that he ran and proceeded to destroy the academy), and at every turn gave in to the darkness until his mother gives her life to drag him back to the light side.

I don’t care what your fantasy is, what bothers me is the ignoring and VERY HIGHLY SELECTIVE reinterpreting of the on screen material to justify this idea of Kylo Ren being a broken and abused bird in need of kindness. Because on screen, he spurns all the kindness he gets until Leia sacrifices herself. And THAT I only accept because of the filming limitations of Carrie Fisher’s last content.

And then we return to the issue of this backlash to John Boyega’s tweets. All of this is because he made a joke about sex, implicitly his character and Rey - the character that R*ylows have designated “belongs” to Kylo - having sex. And this has led to him being harassed (and not for the first time, because TFA did seem to be building to something between Rey and Finn), and by these same people.

We led with “fandom has problems with women.” This? This is “fandom hates black people.” And “fandom REALLY hates interracial couples.”

Like, take a stroll through AO3. How often do you see interracial M/F couples in the top of the listing of pairings? About the only serious example I can come up with off the top of my head is Sleepy Hollow and Ichabod/Abbie, which ended up never being canon. Because of the white showrunners and producers getting cold feet about it and deciding to repeatedly throw white women at Ichabod while continually sidelining Abbie until her actress finally decided to leave - given that she hadn’t even been invited to be part of the special features for the season two DVDs, and the fact that she’d already gotten reduced to the sidekick on a show where she should have been the lead.

Or even on a show where a non-white man is the lead - let’s look at Teen Wolf for another fine example. The show’s lead was a Latino teenager. The favored fandom pairing involves two white guys who, the initial episodes featuring them interacting showed, didn’t particularly care for one another. This led to the fandom turning that dynamic into “they secretly want to fuck,” and, as we see with Finn and Kylo, transplanted characterization and dynamics onto the other characters to prop up their ship.

I repeat myself above. I am not judging fantasy. Hell, I’m not even against writing alternate universe variations where the good guys are bad guys and vice versa. The problem I am seeing here, the reason that I cannot abide R*ylow, the reason that I see that specifically as a toxic fandom element, is because it actively diminishes the black man involved in matters - MANY fics will either downplay or completely trash Finn’s canon character in the name of making him the villain who Kylo must defeat to claim Rey.

These people claim to love “Kylo and Rey,” but frequently they are treating her as his redemptive sexy lamp, her purpose is to be his reward for reaching the bar that is basic human decency, having no interest in her beyond her being there to reward him for finally rejecting the darkness, when she has no canonical romantic interest in Kylo and only knows Ben as an idea. Even when the canon has her trying to reach to him, she is NOT doing it because of her intense love - love is not a switch, it is not some snap decision. It comes about because of knowing a person. Lust is instant. Attraction is instant. Love? That requires time. The ideal of Ben as a person could be attractive. But Kylo is not who Rey is or would be attracted to. 

All of this is still secondary to the fact that, because of an actor making a joke about his character and another character - a character who repeatedly has an inherently far kinder dynamic with his - having sex, there is a group of this fandom who has decided that this was an attack on them, and they must respond in kind. 

Whether or not you agree with ANY of what I have said of the interactions of Kylo and Rey, PLEASE tell me that you agree that THAT behavior is unacceptable. And THAT is the group that people are referring to when they speak so derisively about R*ylows. 

Because that is the group that speaks loudest. They’re who come to mind when the topic turns to this ship. You may not be part of it, but guilt by association comes into effect, because this group is hostile to anyone who doesn’t implicitly agree with them. And when you get this hostility from what comes across - whether it’s fact or perception - as a massive wing of total strangers, strangers who decide that, because you disagree with them, you are The Enemy, and you must be destroyed… Yeah, your reflex becomes “That group is trash, do not listen to them, do not engage with them, and god, aren’t they pathetic for devoting themselves to this ridiculous thing of made up characters.”

You want to go after the issue here? Root out the bad behavior that is the cause. Not the symptom. The symptom might be hating on women. But the cause is still the racism that started all of this.

You want to talk about how fandom hates women? Fine. Go right ahead. But don’t use a topic that came about because of racism to do it.

I feel like 99% of the “don’t vote for Biden because he’s a horrible person” (followed by a list) posts are not actually meant to promote Bernie Sanders. They are meant to keep you from voting in this year’s election, so Trump has a better chance at winning again.

The Russians have made it clear that their online campaigns this time around support Bernie Sanders - not because they want him to win, but because they want his supporters to feel as if it would be morally wrong to participate in the election, in case Bernie is not chosen as the Democratic candidate. They also know that the Bernie supporters are vulnerable to this kind of emotional manipulation.

Joe Biden may have many flaws - I’d prefer Bernie myself - but if it comes down to a Biden candidacy, please make sure to give him your vote. No ideology is important enough to risk another four years of Trump. And none of the flaws Biden doubtlessly has comes anywhere close to the ticking time bomb that Trump is in the White House.

Please consider this, especially if you’re privileged enough to make your choice with purely ideological considerations in mind.

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around Men at Arms.

It's a fantastic book, but it is also so different from Guards! Guards! in tone. And maybe that's where the key is. It's not that the villain of the story is perhaps one of the most proficient killers in all of Discworld (all two and a half of them... D'Eath, Cruces, and The Gonne) and their goal is to actually kill. It's not even that the crimes that the watch are investigating are murder, because even though paid assassinations are legal death and murder are part of the setting. Death is literally a character here, though much more briefly than G!G!. Frankly, I don't even think it's because of the racial allegories.

The tone in Men at Arms is different because the first one to die is a clown. Because Pratchett literally killed the joke (the entire thing and all of its subsets). There's nothing funny about a clown funeral, the dogs are the biggest allegory for racial issues, a gun really is evil, Cuddy literally draws the short straw. It's all literal. Everything is extremely literal. For once, Ankh Morpork isn't a joke. For once, the city feels like a city. And it's the book where Carrot, the most literal character there is, becomes a man (literally and in every sense) and takes his mantle of leadership.

Everything in Men at Arms is literal. Because the villain killed the joke to death and it was the shining moment for Carrot to step up.

There's also an extensive running bit that even the silly construction of the silly, courtesy of Bloody Stupid Johnson, is actually stupid. Within the narrative itself, the book is calling itself out. It is saying that this absurd veneer that we have found ourselves on is just that. This city was built on itself, on its own bones, on the the bones of empires--fueled with the blood of many. The architecture beneath Johnson's flawed works, the aqueducts and sewer systems below the city, are vast and strong and powerful--maybe even beautiful. But they're dangerous. The past is incredibly dangerous. Even Carrot, whose potential is very much rooted in the past of the city, is dangerous. His victory is not one I expected in the moment it came. The line about how you must hope that whoever is looking at you from the other end of their weapon is an evil man... Was harsh and true and honestly a little frightening for a story which also contains a scene where a sentient rock man chucks a dwarf through the skylight of Schrodinger's pork warehouse to save both of their lives.

Perhaps this puts the rest of the book in context as well. Especially the things that made me cringe when I read them. Like everything about Coalface, Angua being included in the story because she was a woman and every book needs at least one (preferably one that can leap over a building or deadlift a draft horse), the high school clique-ificarion of all the guilds, Vimes talkin to the nobles after dinner and almost letting himself believe he could be like that (even though he ends up laying into them with some excellent biting sarcasm), Vetinari not being in control and not realizing it. It's all very real, but real like a real serial killer in real life and not a crime drama. Maybe even real like a normal guy in a costume with their mask off.

Maybe not.

It's not a perfect book (which bites, because G!G! was nearly there), but it remains a very intentional book. I feel like less people have read it than G!G!, and I can see why. It's messier, it's not as funny, there's a lot more allegory and it's a lot more blunt.

But it's still extremely topical (sadly). I retain my opinion that it may be one of the most important books I've ever read. And I'm beginning to understand, finally, why.

Listen, I liked Sanders. But the Supreme Court is the only thing I care about right now.

If you vote for anyone that isn't the Democrat nominee, we are looking at a 7-2 right-wing SCOTUS. For how long? 30-40 YEARS.

RBG is 87. Breyer is 81. Chances of them making it to 2024 are not great.

For the record, I think this system is FUCKED and this isn't how SCOTUS composition should be decided, but it is how it is right now.

If you care about the rights of women, of minorities of any kind, you really need to vote for the democrat nominee. No third parties or write ins. No abstaining. And for crying out loud, no assuming that Trump won't win even if you don't vote. VOTE BLUE.

Having read Dracula all the way through now, every adaptation of the story that puts Mina and Dracula together and frames them as being in love makes me physically ill.

Dracula didn’t love Mina. He assaulted and violated her after doing the same thing to her best friend. She was an object to be coveted and nothing more. How anyone can read that and see a love story baffles and infuriates me.

Jonathan and Mina loved each other. They were willing to condemn themselves to hell just so that the other wouldn’t be alone there. Both of their characters get gutted in so many adaptions to make way for sexy vampire shit, it’s infuriating. Making Mina be in love with her assaulter is fucking rage-inducing.

Gimme an adaptation where Mina loathes this pestilential demon with every fiber of her being. Where she’s just as driven to stamp out this stain upon the world as her husband is. He murdered her friend. He violated her body and soul. He mentally tortured and traumatized her husband. Gimme a Mina with all the fury of Hell behind her.

it’s been said before, of course, but i just love the scene at the end of guards! guards! where the men are offered a reward, and it’s just… vimes hadn’t even considered it, and as to the others – well, vetinari calls it a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil. and a dart board. a hogswatch present, basically, and a yearly raise.

the sort of thing you get for being a decent employee of a boss who vaguely appreciates you: five extra dollars a month, and a dart board. oh, and we’ll replace the lost kettle.

vetinari expected them to ask for a reward that matched the heroism of their deeds, and was completely taken-aback by the pettiness of their request, but that’s the point: they did ask for a reward that matched, to them, the heroism of their deeds. because they weren’t Heroes. they were just some guards who thought it was wrong that a fine lady was going to be sacrificed. who believed that the city wouldn’t stand for feeding one of their own to a dragon. who, when left without supervision or leadership, said well we might as well try and got on top of a distillery to shoot an arrow in a million-to-one chance that maybe they could do something about it.

and a lot of that is carrot’s inspiration, but it’s also worth noting that colon and nobby are repeatedly shown to be the quintessential men of the street. in later books, vimes asks them how they feel and what they think to get an idea of how the city is reacting to the events at-hand, because they represent the common people of ankh-morpork. 

and these two common people, out of shape and cowardly and bumbling, just a couple of guys – when the new recruit says it didn’t ought to be like this, and says, what are we gonna do next?

these two common people say, well what the hell, let’s give it a try. the city, the people, with no one left on their side but themselves and the dragon crowned triumphant, look to one another and decide to try.

and to them, that isn’t heroism, because it’s… just common. they’re just people. they’re just doing what people do.