Techne Writing - Persuasive Craft

We all know the performative male; but what interests Maybelle is another kind of aestheticized person, an intentional male, who’s celebrated on online dating websites and self-improvement spaces. 🧘🏽‍♂️Maybelle asks if the intentional male–who is perfectly optimized and happy on his own–is just another kind of performative male, because he presents himself according to how others (ie. potential female romantic partners) view him.👔 So, is the intentional male another performance? And what if he is just another form of capitalism, because intention = productivity = more means to spend? Those matcha lattes add up 🍵

Knowing that the core conflict of the Odyssey is the perversion of philoxenia (or xenia, aka guest culture), and that Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey also holds this as a central conflict, and that Nolan has chosen to cast black actors as Helen and Athena, and that conservatives are crying about this, and that many non-western cultures hold this same concept of philoxenia as core to their values🤔 — Junaid can’t help but connect these many dots to determine that the Western world has co-opted Ancient Greeks for themselves, even though Ancient Greece was an eastern culture. It in fact continues to be an eastern culture. Greeks are not out here eating yorkshire pudding and sloppy joes; they’re eating BAKLAVA.

We can trace this western co-opting of Ancient Greece back to the European Renaissance, when the west used Greek art and ideas to boost themselves out the Middle Ages. The reality, though, is that the Arab and Middle-Eastern/North African world were already holding down that Greek knowledge, and experiencing their own period of flourishing 🎭

So yes, this means Diane Kruger (from Lower Saxony, Germany) as Helen in the 2004 film, Troy, is actually a weirder casting choice than Kenyan Lupita Nyong’o as Helen in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation 😂 …. also, thank you to Greek language consultant and pronunciation coach Miyo (美葉) !

’sLaw

Showcasing how the art of debate is dead — we need look no further than the culture wars surrounding Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey. Some key players in this fight: Emily Wilson stans wjocc bc pain to be feminists, Nolan film bros who are into artsy male heroic journeys, conservatives appalled by Black Helen and Athena, history purists, and mythology purists. So… the internet/social media has killed dialectic: the process of reasoned debate in which different sides of an argument go at it with one another in order to seek truth. I’m drawing on Greekbohilosopher Aristotle, German enlightenment/Romantic era philosopher Hegel, and American psychologist Carl Rogers in this, my first conventional, up-close, talking head video 😅 I prefer the camera further back so no one can see how I ain’t getting enough sleep…… also my bad for messing up the captions. a lot of editing mishaps with this one 😮‍💨

Following up on my thoughts re: Emily Wilson’s critique on Nolan’s Odyssey. This time, I address her treatment/expectations of Homerian female characters. CW: r**e. 🏛️

After going through a humanities university education surrounded by postmodernism-loving hipsters🧐 and profs🎩 who would refuse to define postmodernism because they believed a definition would be a disservice to the concept, Junaid decides to go all the way to the Cree community in Moose Factory, Ontario (an island🏝️ near where the Moose River flows into Hudson Bay), to experience life in an Indigenous community whose culture has been under threat in the past, and arguably continues to remain under threat due to the postmodern borderless ideal — a concept lauded by liberals. Could conservatism actually be a remedy here?
It is nice to finally offer a simple definition of this elusive concept 😮‍💨

Thank you to Miyo (美葉) for recording this reel in a part of the island where historic Hudson Bay buildings are still standing🏛️ (way back, the English set up shop here for fur trading, and a rival French company - Revillon Frères, set up shop across the river in Moosonee).


Sources:
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 3rd ed.
Kite’s (Dr. Suzanne Kite) “Postmodernism Is Not Permission” on forgeproject.com
Acting Good (TV show starring Paul Rabliauskas)

After being washed 🌊 by Christopher Nolan/Odyssey hate content 🥀 (the algorithm must’ve noticed we watched The Odyssey), Maybelle decides to push back against the haters — many of whom take the stance of Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s epic and chief critic of Nolan’s recently released Odyssey film 🌊🎥 (Fun fact: Nolan actually used Wilson’s translation when adapting the story).

Of course it’s okay to have opinions and critique things (we do it all the time), but the rules of evaluation need to be fair in the first place, and Emily Wilson’s rules ain’t fair. Maybelle sees this lack of fairness as a kind of academic elitism; she argues that Wilson evaluates Nolan on slippery terms that themselves need contesting.

Most disturbing is when Wilson expects Nolan to replicate the ethics of Homer’s Greece, without acknowledging that these ethics wouldn’t make sense to a modern audience without extensive mediation. She’s really punching down — putting academic expectations on a Hollywood film, expectations that betray the social & narrative conventions of watching movies in the 21st century.

For an excellent critique of Nolan’s shortcomings, see Joel Christensen, A Homerist Reacts to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”

Many thanks to Maybelle’s mom for filming this vid 🎥

Sources:
Homer, The Odyssey
Emily Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man.”
Carl Rhodes, Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy

After seeing the sign 🪧of Tidewater Provincial Park in Northern Ontario, Junaid can’t help but randomly start walking and talking about the paradox of nature: how it is a cultural/political construct but also the very thing that allows us to distinguish what “culture” is — but how can we use it as a foil of what culture is if it’s inherently a cultural construct!?🤯

Amidst deafening winds during low tide on the Moose River, Junaid suggests that this paradox reveals itself when elites from the western world (allied with eastern elite politicians) take what is often considered a radical stance: putting biotic concerns over human ones. It sounds good on paper, but examples like Project Tiger in India show us that poor people who have lived on the lands for centuries are the ones being displaced by white elites whose ancestors are the ones responsible for overhunting tigers to near extinction, and who also should maybe focus on themselves and their governments because both are responsible for perpetuating the mass consumption that drives industrialism and climate change 🤔

It’s clear we have to do something to save species and reduce the harm of climate change. But what that is up for debate, and dependent upon how we choose to define “nature.”

Climate change deniers out there… you might change your mind if you experience the mosquito swarms that come with heatwaves in the Hudson Bay lowlands 🦟💀

Thank you to Miyo (美葉) for filming and braving the winds and the quicksand/quickmud by the water’s edge which revealed itself to us during low tide 💀

Sources:
Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique by Ramachandra Guha

Why do we like camping? 🏕️ Maybelle investigates the western world’s favourite paradoxical hobby: why we, blessed with running water and electricity, still choose to pack food and shelter onto our backs, go into the most remote location we can find, and live in the wild for days — at the mercy of weather, bugs, predators, and more ⛈️🦟🐻🦝

Do we go to the wild because of our desire to experience the sublime — a great and terrifying experience that we can’t comprehend 🌄, but need in order to feel alive (because modernity has made our lives mundane 🏭)? Or does camping let us cosplay homelessness… without its consequences?⛺ (Idea provided by ) Or, perhaps most likely of all, do we go because we already bought goretex jackets and shoes that signal to the world that we do indeed go, and that we are indeed putting our gear investments to use?😩🌧️

Maybelle also unpacks what it’s like to experience all of this in the rugged Hudson/James Bay lowlands, in the middle of Moose River, at Tidewater Provincial Park: a train-in and boat-in only site that luckily still had reception... so she caught a boat and made it out alive.

Is FIFA a delusion?⚽️ In our video back on June 17th, we proposed that it’s a fiction that at the same time organizes how we see the world–and how its order breaks down when scandals occur. 💔 Our comments have since shown how incredibly deluded and brainwashed people are by pro sports.

Junaid categorizes these delulu world cup fans into 2 different groups: 1) neoliberals who think the games bring everyone together on equal foot, in a happy globalism; 2) conservatives who think FIFA lets players pull themselves up by the bootstraps to escape poverty. But what if there’s 3) an aesthetic enjoyer who appreciates the games neutrally as what they are, moments that can be fun and nonsensical at the same time? 😶‍🌫️ They are just there to enjoy the sport in itself (and are also able to critique it)? Might this third type of fan offer a resistance to the ideology of liberals and conservatives?

Original vid: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZsSvTpRvxD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

In 2024, Maybelle watched the Skibidi Toilet video that started it all. 🚽 Now, she lays out its relevance in 2026. The technocrat overlords dominate our lives even more, owning our privacy and influencing our decisions at scale. We’re even more enslaved to the forces of technofeudalism and capitalism. ⛓️‍💥📲 In this landscape, the fusion of man + toilet in the Skibidi toilet brings body humour and waste to the fore. 💩
Although Skibidi Toilet is the evil guy in that series, it’s worth rereading history: what if the humanoids with camera/ipad heads are the bad guys, and the Skibidi Toilet (which overtakes the planet) is actually enacting revolution? 💪 And if we apply a Deleuze & Guattari reading, can we view the assemblage (Man + Toilet) as a new, hybrid kind of subjectivity? Are we doomed to become Skibidi Toilets?