The Lord of Victory is a card of fight, competition and eventual victory. It applies to areas of our lives where we feel we have had to fight very hard to achieve our goals. It can apply to any area of our lives where we have had to contest our position strongly.
So, for instance, it could indicate passing successfully through tough training courses; it could apply to spiritual development after a period of test and trial; it could show that we have managed to establish stable and harmonious relationships through hard work and tenderness; it could even indicate that we have finally managed to get our bank balances to match our desired level of spending after much difficulty!
It’s a card which indicates that we have achieved both a point of balance and a moment of ascension during which we feel justifiably proud of ourselves, but maybe just a little overwhelmed by our final breakthrough into good fortune.
There will always have been struggle before this card appears. We will have been striving – sometimes against frustratingly unhelpful influences – to grasp our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions, our needs. There will sometimes have been pain or confusion as a result of that struggle. But when this card comes up, we can relax a little, and enjoy the fruits of our labour.
A chyron on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, just beneath the talking heads of Carlson and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, reads Why America Should Embrace Masculinity—a clarion call for a divided nation to just give manhood a chance. “The numbers are really clear,” the host says. “It’s men in this country who are in deep trouble by every measure.”
Although he provides zero numbers or measures to back up this claim, the message is clear. According to two of America’s most prominent right-wing leaders, one of the greatest problems facing society at the moment is that the left just won’t let dudes rock.
They’re not the only ones who think so, either. A massive, manufactured masculinity panic is currently underway—and it’s missing an important point.
America’s eroding manliness has lately been discussed ad nauseam. Fox News host Laura Ingraham wants to know “Where have all the men gone?” According to Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, a 17-year old boy killing two protesters and wounding a third is just what happens when we “leave our boys without fathers.” And the idea that Pete Buttigieg, a male cabinet member, took three months off for paternity leave has exploded the brains of Joe Rogan, U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert, a cofounder of Palantir, and, of course, Carlson himself. This concern-trolling has gotten so pronounced and predictable in its frequency that The Onion nodded toward it last Thursday.
This territory is not exactly uncharted. Mega-selling author Jordan Peterson complained in early 2018 that “the masculine spirit is under assault,” perhaps not coincidentally right around the peak of the #MeToo movement.
But the topic of modern men not knowing quite how to Man has been fertile ground for ages, especially in entertainment. Fight Club satirically took on the male identity crisis in the late-1990s, not long after the launch of a Harley-Davidson-themed restaurant led comedian George Carlin to bemoan the “pussification of the American male.”The Sopranos seemed to delight in highlighting questionable ideas about traditional masculinity, like when the greater mafia community belittles Junior Soprano for . . . engaging in cunnilingus. And John Travolta and Tim Allen may not have realized they were skewering the anxiety of fading machismo with their accidental satireWild Hogs in the mid-aughts. Clearly, we’ve been here before.
The reason the topic has come roaring back in earnest as of late is that it fits in well alongside a number of recent and ongoing reactionary grievances.
On Halloween, Hawley beta-tested his new focus on how scary the modern world is for good old-fashioned men. Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, he asked, “Can we be surprised that, after years of being told that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, pornography, and video games?”
Hawley later confirmed to Axios that he plans on making masculinity his signature political issue moving forward—an odd choice, considering that pornography and video games are two of the only remaining areas where all political ideologies still overlap.
Elsewhere in the Axios interview, Hawley gives away the game. “I think you put together lack of jobs, you put together fatherlessness, you put together the social messages that we teach our kids in school, I think we’ve got to confront that and its effects,” he says. There you have it: His defense of traditional masculinity is just a Trojan Horse for attacking both the current labor shortage and the rising culture-war fear that Mr. Potato Head becoming more inclusive is tantamount to mass castration. Perhaps he can even squeeze in a few other hot-button GOP issues beneath this umbrella as well. It’s easy, after all, to get people upset about something if you define it broadly enough.
Hawley’s histrionics conflate an attack on masculinity altogether (an assault that does not exist, nor should it) with an attack on toxic masculinity (which does exist, and rightfully so). The senator and his cohort either don’t understand this distinction, or refuse to acknowledge it. They pretend there is a broad, Democratic National Convention-approved effort to make cisgender men feel bad for being born in their skin, when all that’s happening is that people now regularly call out the negative elements seeded into traditional gender norms. Generations of boys grew up constantly receiving the message that women are objects, queerness is a sin, and violence is the solution to everything. Now those boys exist in a world that has begun to reject that toxic doctrine, and the resulting alienation of those who can’t accept it has turned some of them into deadly “incels” like Elliot Rodger.
In that sense, there certainly is a crisis in masculinity, just not the one Hawley and company are talking about. To them, the cure is the disease. Just as with critical race theory, the problem isn’t the way that men have been taught to behave historically; it’s the fact that any kind of realignment whatsoever is currently happening. Conservatives are worried that if the Pandora’s box of possibilities for men opens up—if their sons catch a glimpse of Harry Styles wearing a dress, as Kurt Cobain did 30 years before him—masculinity itself will somehow cease to exist. But manhood isn’t in danger, it’s simply in transition.
The way we talk about gender has changed so fast that it’s already difficult to imagine a major publication like Vanity Fair running a lengthy think piece called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” as it did 14 years ago. (And only partly because women are now in charge of all the newsrooms.) Meanwhile, at the same time that Hawley whines about an epidemic of “fatherlessness,” men in record numbers have taken on more parenting responsibilities and consider it extremely important to their identity. Rather than support this trend, the Tucker Carlsons of the world seem to consider it evidence that manhood is under attack.
Why wouldn’t American men who are proud of being fathers want to join the all-but-six countries in the world that have paid leave so they can spend more time bonding with their newborn babies? What exactly is it that makes the men who mock that idea, like Carlson or Joe Rogan, more manly than a dad on paternity leave?
The moment currently unfolding is full of exciting ways for how men can define themselves going forward. They don’t need to be terrified, like Rogan, that owning a soy candle will make them less of a man—an idea spawned from the same lineage as the early-aughts ad in which a dude feeling self-conscious for buying too much tofu must purchase a Hummer to restore his manhood. Having to worry about this kind of thing all the time sounds like a nightmare!
Hawley and Carlson are still free to shackle themselves to the strictly traditional definition of masculinity. Nobody is trying to take that option away from them. With any hope, though, the next generation of men will feel freed from it.
Vision Video The Gospel of John | Full Movie | Christopher Plummer | Henry Ian Cusick | Stuart Bunce This is a fresh release of the Gospel of John: The Visual Bible and is a word-for-word masterpiece depicting all the drama of Christ’s life—from his powerful teachings and miracle-filled ministry to his death and resurrection. Director: Phillip Saville Starring: Christopher Plummer, Henry Ian Cusick, Stuart Bunce Cast Christopher Plummer as The Narrator Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus of Nazareth Stuart Bunce as John Daniel Kash as Simon Peter Stephen Russell as Pontius Pilate Alan Van Sprang as Judas Iscariot Diana Berriman as Mary, mother of Jesus Richard Lintern as Leading Pharisee Scott Handy as John the Baptist Lynsey Baxter as Mary Magdalene Diego Matamoros as Nicodemus Nancy Palk as Samaritan Woman Elliot Levey as Nathanael Andrew Pifko as Philip Cedric Smith as Caiaphas Tristan Gemmill as Andrew Stuart Fox as Blind Man David Meyer as Lame Man Nicolas Van Burek as Young Levite William Pappas as Elderly Levite
We have another Ukraine Emergency Translation Group meeting scheduled for this Friday, March 11 at 11:00 AM Pacific time, noon Mountain time, 1pm Central time, 2pm Eastern time, 9pm Greece, 10pm Turkey
We will share your Translation with the group, if you like. You can email your Translation to me at zonta1111@aol.com.
Or perhaps you have a sense testimony you’d like to share. Or other insights or questions you may have.
By Ross Pomeroy June 29, 2015 (realclearscience.com)
The world runs on oil. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, in 2011, the 6.965 billion people on Earth collectively used about 3,669,353,105 gallons of the stuff, combusting it in cars as gasoline, laying it down in asphalt, and processing it into lubricants.
Our reliance on this energy-dense liquid prompts questions. For starters, what the heck is it? Oil consists of hydrocarbons — compounds containing carbon and hydrogen — and other carbon-containing (organic) compounds. When combusted, oil’s hydrogen-carbon bonds split apart, releasing a large amount of energy, energy that can be harnessed.
Oil is cheered by some and maligned by others. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it. Out of the incessant discussion, myths have arisen. Here are five of them.
Myth #1: Oil is mostly dinosaur bones. Oil is a “fossil fuel,” formed from the remains of organisms that died millions of years ago. Dinosaurs certainly fit this description, and we dig up their fossilized bones all the time! But though dinosaurs reigned for 135 million years, not many of them died in a position where they could be buried and crushed over the eons into coal, natural gas, or oil.
“If you took all of the dinosaurs that ever lived and… squished them up in order to get the oil out of them, we’d probably go through that oil in… a couple of days,” paleontologist Jack Horner told Vsauce.
In actuality, the oil used to make the gasoline in your car almost certainly formed from oceanic microorganisms like plankton and algae that lived millions, if not billions, of years ago. When they died, they sank to the bottom of the ocean and began to decompose. Over time, they became buried. As more and more sediment formed on top of them, heat and pressure crushed them into fossil fuels.
Myth #2: Americans use the most oil. This is only partly true. By far and away, the U.S. consumes the most oil of any other country. But on a per capita basis, Americans aren’t the world-leading gas-guzzlers. We rank 22nd, behind countries like Singapore, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Bermuda, and our neighbor to the north: Canada.
Myth #3: All crude oil is black. When you think of oil, you probably picture a black sludge. Most oil is black, but it can be yellow, red, or even green in hue. Crude oil’s color is a clear indicator of quality — the more contaminants that are present, the darker it will be. The highest quality oil will actually resemble the vegetable or olive oil in your kitchen: amber or golden in color.
Myth #4. The first commercial oil well was in the U.S. Though Edwin Drake’s relatives might claim otherwise, their ancestor’s commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania was not the first of its kind. Wells in Russia, Poland, and Romania were already in operation. Drake’s well did, however, attract the first great wave of investment into oil drilling and refining.
Myth #5. The world will run out of oil very soon. Oil’s demise has been greatly exaggerated for decades. There’s no question that fossil fuels are finite, but predicting when they will run dry is no easy task. Proven reserves continue to increase the more we explore and as technology advances. It may be more likely that humanity will phase out the use of fossil fuels before we even run out. But with demand still increasing, nobody precisely knows when that will be, either.
“We get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family.
“This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything.
“But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists.
“And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people.
“Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?”
— Excerpted from the essay, “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway,” by Rebecca Solnit
A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
The Devil is numbered fifteen and shows a figure, usually male and satyr-like, half-man and half-animal. Sometimes, male and female forms are shown chained or trapped at his feet. The Thoth deck (shown here) has the Devil as a goat, appearing against a background of the male sex organs. His third eye represents the Eye of God and the staff across his chest is topped with the Winged Disk symbol and double-headed snakes.
The Devil card is often misunderstood and feared. However, before Christianity became a leading religion, there were several pantheons which contained fertility gods and they were often depicted as animals – the Horned God of the Wicca for example, servant and consort of the Goddess. The Devil does not therefore necessarily represent an evil being.
The Devil is the personification of the animal, instinctual and even bestial parts of us. Pre-occupation with matters connected to the Devil can lead to degradation and sheer ugliness, but by identifying and accepting the darkness within we learn to discover that it is simply the dark side of our light.
The author on the campus of the University of Virginia.Credit…Eze Amos for The New York Times
By Emma Camp
Ms. Camp is a senior at the University of Virginia. She has written about free speech on campus for The Cavalier Daily, a student newspaper there, and interned with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Each week, I seek out the office hours of a philosophy department professor willing to discuss with me complex ethical questions raised by her course on gender and sexuality. We keep our voices low, as if someone might overhear us.
Hushed voices and anxious looks dictate so many conversations on campus here at the University of Virginia, where I’m finishing up my senior year.
A friend lowers her voice to lament the ostracizing of a student who said something well-meaning but mildly offensive during a student club’s diversity training. Another friend shuts his bedroom door when I mention a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism. His roommate might hear us, he explains.
I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.
In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.
When a class discussion goes poorly for me, I can tell. During a feminist theory class in my sophomore year, I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows. This idea seems acceptable for academic discussion, but to many of my classmates, it was objectionable.
The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.
I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
Throughout that semester, I saw similar reactions in response to other students’ ideas. I heard fewer classmates speak up. Eventually, our discussions became monotonous echo chambers. Absent rich debate and rigor, we became mired in socially safe ideas.
Being criticized — even strongly — during a difficult discussion does not trouble me. We need more classrooms full of energetic debate, not fewer. But when criticism transforms into a public shaming, it stifles learning.
Professors have noticed a shift in their classrooms. Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor here, told me that he believes that two factors have caused self-censorship’s pervasiveness. “First, students are afraid of being called out on social media by their peers,” he said. “Second, the dominant messages students hear from faculty, administrators and staff are progressive ones. So they feel an implicit pressure to conform to those messages in classroom and campus conversations and debates.”
The consequences for saying something outside the norm can be steep. I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative. At U.Va., where only 9 percent of students surveyed described themselves as a “strong Republican” or “weak Republican,” that puts him in the minority.
He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, and sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”
This anxiety affects not just conservatives. I spoke with Abby Sacks, a progressive fourth-year student. She said she experienced a “pile-on” during a class discussion about sexism in media. She disagreed with her professor, who she said called “Captain Marvel” a feminist film. Ms. Sacks commented that she felt the film emphasized the title character’s physical strength instead of her internal conflict and emotions. She said this seemed to frustrate her professor.
Her classmates noticed. “It was just a succession of people, one after each other, each vehemently disagreeing with me,” she told me.
Ms. Sacks felt overwhelmed. “Everyone adding on to each other kind of energized the room, like everyone wanted to be part of the group with the correct opinion,” she said. The experience, she said, “made me not want to go to class again.” While Ms. Sacks did continue to attend the class, she participated less frequently. She told me that she felt as if she had become invisible.
Other campuses also struggle with this. “Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education,” Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, told me. He felt this firsthand. In 2018, after he wrote an Opinion essay for The Times criticizing what he viewed as a lack of ideological diversity among university administrators, his office door was vandalized. Student protesters demanded his tenure be reviewed. While their attempts were unsuccessful, Dr. Abrams remains dissatisfied with fellow faculty members’ reactions. In response to the incident, only 27 faculty members signed a statement supporting free expression — less than 10 percent of the college’s faculty.
Dr. Abrams said the environment on today’s campuses differs from his undergraduate experience. He recalled late-night debates with fellow students that sometimes left him feeling “hurt” but led to “the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas.” He worries that self-censorship threatens this environment and argues that college administrations in particular “enforce and create a culture of obedience and fear that has chilled speech.”
The solution to self-censorship cannot merely be to encourage students to be more courageous. Is it brave to risk your social standing by saying something unpopular? Yes. Is it reasonable to ask college students — the 48 percent of us who feel uncomfortable sharing our views — to solve this problem independently? No.
And believe me, I’ve tried.
I protested a university policy about the size of signs allowed on dorm room doors by mounting a large sign of the First Amendment. It was removed by the university. In response, I worked with administrators to create a less restrictive policy. As a columnist for the university paper, I imploredstudents to embrace free expression. In response, I lost friends and faced a Twitter pile-on. I have been brave. And yet, without support, the activism of a few students like me changes little.
Our universities cannot change our social interactions. But they can foster appreciation for ideological diversity in academic environments. Universities must do more than make public statements supporting free expression.We need a campus culture that prioritizes ideological diversity and strong policies that protect expression in the classroom.
Universities should refuse to cancel controversialspeakers or cave to unreasonable student demands. They should encourage professors to reward intellectual diversity and nonconformism in classroom discussions. And most urgently, they should discard restrictive speech codes and bias response teams that pathologize ideological conflict.
We cannot experience the full benefits of a university education without having our ideas challenged, yet challenged in ways that allow us to grow. As Ms. Sacks told me, “We need to have conversations about these issues without punishing each other for our opinions.”
Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) is a senior at the University of Virginia. She has written about free speech on campus for The Cavalier Daily, a student newspaper there, and interned with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
