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cressidagrey · 1 month ago

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Formidable

Pairing: Oscar Piastri x Felicity Leong-Piastri (Original Character)

Summary: Andrea Stella figures out that Felicity Piastri is more than “just” Oscar’s wife.

Notes: Big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble and checks my science-y mumbo jumbo 😂

(divider thanks to @saradika-graphics )

It started the way most breakthroughs did—not with a groundbreaking discovery, but with a tired engineer holding a half-wrinkled printout and a hopeful expression.

“Boss,” James said, hovering just inside the doorway of Andrea’s office. “I think you should read this.”

Andrea looked up from his laptop. “If it’s another CFD model from that Reddit forum, I swear—”

“It’s not. It’s from a paper. Academic. Legit. Published in Race Systems & Applied Motion last month.”

Andrea raised an eyebrow. “Obscure.”

“Very. It has like 20 readers,” the engineer agreed. “But I think it’s real. It’s clean. It’s sharp. It’s…” He hesitated. “We might want to test it.”

That got Andrea’s attention.

He took the paper and began to skim.

Title: Redefining Compliance: Adaptive Suspension Geometry Under Load-Sensitive Parameters for Mid-Field Chassis Configurations.

Andrea kept reading. It was dense—academic, yes—but it was also practical. It spoke the language of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. There were no ego traps. No unnecessary complexity. Just hard math and hard-earned insight.

Andrea flipped the page. Then another. His eyes caught a note referencing flex dynamics in chassis response curves and passive recovery lag.

It was correct. More than correct. It was insightful.

The author wasn’t spitballing ideas from afar—this was the work of someone who had lived in the theory and understood the application. Who referenced real-world tolerances. Racing examples. The math was sound. The diagrams were better than half the ones their CFD team managed.

Andrea flipped back to the byline.

Dr. F. Piastri.

Piastri.

James grinned. “Fun coincidence in the name, right? He’s smart.”

Andrea didn’t correct him.

Because yes—coincidence. Probably. But something about it stuck in his brain, like a whisper he couldn’t quite place.

He read the essay in full that night—twice. It was elegant, sharp, and frustratingly precise in the way only truly experienced voices ever were. The type of clarity that came from years of not just understanding a concept, but translating it into reality.

The next morning, Andrea sent out an internal email.

Subject: Additional Works by Dr. F. Piastri If anyone has access to prior publications by this author, please forward them to me.

By the end of the week, his inbox was full.

One essay became three. Three became eleven. Eleven became twenty.

Each one published under the name F.Piastri, buried in obscure journals and small-circulation engineering reviews that didn’t get traffic unless someone was either deeply curious or incredibly desperate.

Andrea was both.

Each article was smarter than the last—strange, elegant engineering thought-pieces published across the most obscure academic mechanical journals Andrea had ever encountered. Niche ones. The kind that only the most obsessive minds contributed to, with names like Thermoelasticity in Microstructured Materials and Lateral Load Adaptation Quarterly.

F.Piastri had written:

An article about Load-dependent understeer in transitional corners (with math that Andrea double-checked twice because it was too clean).

A 2019 think-piece on long-run stability under thermal degradation.

An essay about Aerodynamic oscillation buffering for short-track endurance vehicles.

An article about the economic viability of 3D printed carbon struts under rotational shear (he actually flagged that one for McLaren Applied).

A thesis that corrected a widely accepted torque model—buried in a conference archive.

A published rebuttal in Journal of Vehicle Design so politely worded it read like a love letter—until you realized she’d rewritten the reviewer’s assumptions line by line.

There was even one article on fluid dynamics that had been cited in a grad-level textbook from ETH Zurich.

Andrea devoured them all.

He—She?—wrote like someone who saw the car before it was built. Who understood not just how suspension worked, but how it felt. How energy passed through a chassis not as force but as intent.

The writing style was sharp. Practical. Absolutely ruthless in its logic. There was clarity there—an elegance—that reminded him of only a few people he’d ever worked with.

It was revolutionary. It was poetic.

By the time he tracked down the doctoral thesis from Oxford, Andrea wasn’t breathing properly.

Reinforcement Through Flexibility: Dynamic Adaptation in Composite- Structured Performance Environments.

By: F. Piastri.

Submitted: December 2022

Andrea stared at the name.

F. Piastri.

He stared for so long his tea went cold beside him.

His hands were shaking—not because of nerves, but because he already knew.

He opened the PDF. Skimmed past the table of contents. Scrolled through diagrams that made his heart stutter.

There was no photo. No biographical section. Just a clean Oxford University seal, 284 pages of dense, brilliant theory, and then—

A dedication.

To Oscar: For believing in a future that didn’t exist yet, and building it with me anyway. Every lap, every choice, every time—you’ve been my constant.

And to Bee: For reminding me that softness and strength aren’t opposites. You are the best thing I’ve ever helped create.

Andrea sat back in his chair like he’d been physically shoved.

Bee.

Oscar.

F. Piastri.

Felicity Piastri.

Felicity.

Oscar’s wife.

Dr. F. Piastri wasn’t some reclusive academic or distant uncle with a gift for simulation modeling.

She lived in Oscar’s house.

She packed his lunchbox.

She raised their daughter.

And she had published papers on suspension theory that half of F1 would kill to understand. Quietly. Efficiently. Correctly.

Andrea leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and whispered:

“…Of course it’s his wife.”

Of course the quiet, composed driver who rarely raised his voice and always had one hand on the bigger picture had married someone brilliant. Of course she wasn’t just talented—she was a published expert with a doctorate from Oxford.

Not a coincidence.

Not a mystery engineer.

Not some guy.

But Oscar’s wife.

Oscar Piastri—quiet, methodical Oscar—had married a genius.

A doctor of mechanical engineering from Oxford who wrote better technical documentation in a margin note than most engineers did in a year. Who published under initials. Who could probably solve half their handling inconsistencies while holding a toddler on her hip.

Andrea sat in silence for a full minute.

Then he exhaled. “...of course he did.”

He opened a new tab.

Email draft:

To: Technical Team

Subject: URGENT – Reference Reading Required Attached: Every single thing Dr. F. Piastri had ever published.

***

The meeting was meant to be quick.

Just a routine Monday touchpoint—debrief, run through media notes with Sophie, talk sponsor appearances, maybe discuss Oscar’s upcoming comms obligations.

Zak had rolled in with a protein shake.

Lando was lounging sideways in a chair like he’d melted into it.

Oscar had a protein bar and an expression of polite mildness, as usual.

Andrea, meanwhile, had not slept.

Not because of the race.

Because he’d spent the entire weekend reading Dr. Felicity Piastri’s entire body of work. Every published paper. Every obscenely niche journal article.

And her doctoral thesis.

He hadn’t meant to do it all in one sitting. He just couldn’t stop.

By 2 a.m. he was muttering things like “Of course she used Euler-Bernoulli assumptions, she’s too smart for non-parametric bullshit.”

By 4 a.m., he’d highlighted her proposed solution to dampen micro-vibration load in corner exits.

By 6 a.m., he had a headache, an existential crisis, and a desperate need to know: Why had Oscar Piastri never mentioned this?!

So at the end of the meeting—just as Sophie was wrapping up and Lando was aimlessly spinning a pen like a propeller—Andrea set down a file on the table.

Calmly. Casually. Like he hadn’t just had his entire mechanical worldview rattled by a woman who wasn’t even on the payroll.

“Oscar,” Andrea said, voice deceptively neutral. “Why didn’t you ever mention that your wife holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering?”

Oscar, halfway through eating his protein bar, blinked. “What?”

Andrea gestured vaguely, as if the thesis were still radiating brilliance from his desk. “Felicity. Doctorate. Thesis. Dozens of published papers. Half of them useful to our current car design issues. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Oscar blinked once. “Oh. Yeah. She gets bored sometimes.”

Andrea blinked back.

Lando stared like he’d been smacked with a front wing. “Wait—she got a doctorate?!”

Oscar nodded, chewing. “Yeah. Finished it in 2022. She was stuck in that horrible flat in Enstone while I was back and forth with Alpine, and she got bored. Wrote most of it at the kitchen table while Bee napped.”

Andrea just… stared.

He had read the thesis. Studied it. The mathematical modeling alone had kept him awake at night—and she had apparently written it during toddler nap times, while stuck in a damp shoebox flat in Oxfordshire.

Zak looked up slowly from his tablet. “Your wife was bored. So she got a PhD in mechanical engineering.”

Oscar shrugged. “She already had the research mostly done before Bee was even born in 2020. She just had to write it up. Bee was napping a lot anyway.”

Sophie blinked. “She wrote a 200-page dissertation with a toddler in the house?”

Oscar just shrugged. “It helped that Bee liked the sound of the keyboard.”

Andrea turned to Zak, still stunned. “She predicted the kind of high-frequency oscillation we’re seeing this season. Two years ago. In a footnote.”

Lando leaned forward like he was watching a live feed of someone discovering aliens. “She’s just, like, a genius?” he asked, voice too loud, too incredulous. “And you never brought it up?”

Oscar just sighed. “She hates that word.”

Andrea just stared at him. “Oscar, she’s not just good. She’s formidable. Has she ever applied anywhere formally?”

Oscar looked genuinely confused. “Why would she apply anywhere?”

Andrea stared. “To work. In engineering. In motorsport. Academia.”

Oscar blinked. “She does work. She manages our lives, Bee, the house, and the chickens.”

Lando leaned toward Andrea, wide-eyed: “I’ve never felt dumber in my entire life.”

Andrea sighed. “Join the club.”

***

The kitchen smelled like vanilla and wood polish and faintly like chicken coop — which meant Felicity had mopped and baked and wrangled Mansell, the escape artist hen, all while probably rebalancing one of their stock portfolios.

Oscar dropped his bag by the door and leaned against the kitchen entryway.

Felicity was sitting at the table in her old university hoodie, feet bare, Bee curled up under her arm asleep with Button the frog as a pillow. There were spreadsheets open on one side of her laptop screen, a half-watched nature documentary on the other, and one of Bee’s plastic toy bulls standing solemnly in the middle of the table for reasons unknown.

He smiled.

God, he loved her.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Felicity glanced up. “Hey. Dinner’s in the oven. Bee passed out mid-pie crust.”

“Excellent,” Oscar said, dropping into the chair beside her. “Because I need carbs.”

She raised an eyebrow, equal parts amusement and curiosity. “Bad day?”

“No. Just... intellectually humbling.”

Felicity made a low amused noise and went back to her laptop. “Did Lando try to explain crypto again?”

Oscar snorted and reached over to carefully lift Bee into his lap, her curls warm against his hoodie. She barely stirred.

He could have let it sit. Saved it for later. But it was buzzing under his skin.

“Stella read your papers.”

That got her attention.

Felicity paused, her fingers stilled mid-scroll. “Which one?”

“All of them,” Oscar said. “Apparently it started with one of the engineers, who brought an article in from Race Systems & Applied Motion. Then he spiraled.”

“Ah,” Felicity murmured, unsurprised. “That one had a good diagram.”

“He found your thesis,” Oscar added.

This time she didn’t answer right away.

He reached for one of Bee’s crayons and twirled it idly in his fingers, watching her.

“He read the dedication,” he said, voice quieter now.

Felicity’s eyes softened in that way that always undid him a little. Always had.

“Did he say anything?” she asked.

Oscar smiled faintly. “He said you’re formidable.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Felicity laughed—not loud, not startled, just warm and wry and a little disbelieving.

“God help the man,” she said. “He must have hit the rebuttal piece from the Vehicle Design Journal. That one made a few engineers cry.”

Oscar grinned. “Yeah, well. He was halfway to building you a shrine by the end of the meeting. I also told him you got bored in Enstone and wrote your PhD while Bee was napping.”

Felicity gave him a look. “You make it sound like I was scrapbooking.”

“Weren’t you also doing that at the time?”

Felicity blinked. “...Okay, fair.”

Bee stirred slightly in his lap, a tiny sigh escaping her lips as she nuzzled deeper into his hoodie sleeve.

Oscar looked down at her—this tiny human they somehow made and raised—and then back at the woman across the table.

Her hair was messier than usual, strands escaping her braid, and there was a faint flour smudge near her temple. She hadn’t bought herself a new pair of jeans in two years. She sometimes forgot to eat when she was buried in simulations. She once fixed the bathroom plumbing at midnight because she didn’t like how the guy from the hardware store spoke to her.

She was the smartest person he knew.

Oscar knew most people wouldn’t think it when they first met her. She smiled too easily. She didn’t correct anyone. She let others assume things—that she was just the girlfriend, just the wife, just the mother.

But she had a doctorate from Oxford, and more published academic papers than most career professors. She could hold court with race engineers and theoretical physicists in the same breath, then go home and teach Bee how to build a pulley system out of Lego and twine. She spoke in quiet, exact terms, and when she challenged people, she did it so gently they sometimes didn’t notice until it was too late.

He’d long since stopped being surprised by her. He’d just—normalized it. Integrated it. Felicity being a genius was like oxygen to him: invisible, essential, and easy to take for granted until someone else nearly passed out from the realization.

She was just Fliss to him.

The woman who sold her designer bags to pay rent when her family cut her off. The mother of his child. His fiercest critic and his most devoted supporter. The one person he trusted without hesitation.

She didn’t want headlines or praise. She wanted quiet mornings and clever puzzles. She wanted Bee to grow up confident. She wanted Oscar to remember to eat something green.

She was the smartest person he knew — and she hated being called smart. So he didn’t. He just came home.

“He called you formidable,” he repeated. “And I agree. For what it’s worth.”

Felicity smiled then—slow and quiet, the kind that reached all the way to her eyes.

She leaned across the table and kissed his temple. “Thanks,” she said. “But if he asks me to consult, I’m charging him triple.”

Oscar laughed softly and ran a hand through Bee’s curls. “Deal.”

And he meant it. Because maybe it was easy for him to forget sometimes, tucked into the quiet rhythm of their life, that the world hadn’t caught up to how brilliant she was.

But he never stopped being proud of her.

Not for a second.

#formula 1 #f1 fanfiction #formula 1 fanfiction #f1 smau #f1 x reader #formula 1 x reader #f1 grid x reader #f1 grid fanfiction #oscar piastri fanfic #oscar piastri #Oscar Piastri fic #oscar piastri x reader #oscar piastri imagine #op81 fic #op81 imagine

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mossy-aro · 7 months ago

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sorry but i am SO deeply tired of the 'aphobia isnt real' arguments because they are literally always being conducted in such bad faith. NO there is not specific societal or legal discrimation against aces and aros BECAUSE we are asexual and or aromantic. you cannot hold specifically bigoted beliefs towards a group you do not even know exist. there ARE, however, underlying and deeply pervasive systems and beliefs that actively erase, dehumanise and make life tangibly more difficult for aro and ace people on a social, economic and legal basis. most of this is due to hyperinvisibility, the medicalisation of any nonnormative + misunderstood orientations, the elevation of romance + romantic structures as the most important aspects of interpersonal relationships in society, as well as the nuclear atomisation of the family. among other things. like. amatonormativity has never been ABOUT aromantic people specfically oh my GOD. its simply the underlying social belief that everyone is expected to be in monogamous romantic relationships and that those relationships are expected to the default centre of one's life. its something that affects EVERYONE! but within that it affects aromantic people in a specific and heightened way because of our inability to participate in it in a societally acceptable way. like these are not 'aromantic' or 'asexual' or 'polyamorous' issues specifically. these are theories and terms that originated within feminist + queer sociology studies! its all part of the wider underlying social fabric! aspec people are simply pointing out that we are often affected by these things in unique and often unseen ways.

the idea that we believe people actively 'hate' us for being asexual or aromantic is completely ridiculous. most people i know do not even know the definition of those words! so how could they hate me for it. they could however, for example, hold the pervasive + societally unchallenged belief that not experiencing sexual or romantic attraction is a medical issue or something concerningly abnormal in a human being + something i should get fixed. and its not uncommon that when you DO explain that its simply your orientation to them, they continue to medicalise it and see it as some sort of issue. genuinely so deeply tired of having to explain this to people time and time again when they only want to cherry pick the most ridiculous arguments to respond to and then act as if that's a majority held opinion in the aspec community. like i actually think we are aware of how society views us we're not fucking deluded and stupid. we don't have victim complexes we are just pointing out facts that yall are so desperate to ignore. UGHHHHH

#aromantic #mossy posts #sorry i just saw the most irritating shit ive had to lay eyes on for a bit and it evoked a bit of rage from me. i dont want to be that #person but its like. no one is saying 'aphobia' = the idea people hate aspecs BECAUSE we are X thing. its the PRODUCT OF OTHER #SOCIAL FACTORS AND BELIEFS THAT COALESCE INTO DISCRIMINATION which is often unintentional. like these are just as #much feminist and queer issues as anything else. the way some of these people act like we're stupid when they are literally #just putting words in our mouths and misconstruing everything we say in the worst faith ways possible just. sends me over the edge #aro #asexual #ace discourse tw #sorry i HATE to engage or even touch on this stupid ass discourse in the slightest but genuinely. some of you are fucking stupid

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cryptotheism · 7 months ago

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To call Sophia Xafa a fringe thinker would be an understatement. During her time as professor of business at the Athens University of Economics and Business Xafa garnered a reputation for her idiosyncratic blend of psychology and economics.

Her work made use of controversial ideas from Jungian psychology, with the idea of the collective unconscious playing a key role in her theories. To Xafa, economies had no individuals, only a complex chain of nested rational actors who instantiate the market. Quote: “The mind is the market, the market is the mind.”

Her first book, Economy of the Unconscious went relatively unnoticed during its initial print run in 1961. Prof Xafa would continue to languish in obscurity until 1967 when the nascent project clover discovered her work. Through a series of shell organizations, project leaders were able to provide Prof. Xafa with significant funding and resources to develop her theories.

After four years of development, Xafa published A General Theory of Hypnoeconomics, the text that would provide the foundation for the field of the same name. Now backed by experimental evidence for a oneness of mind and market, Xafa’s theories became mainstream, sparking a new era for psychology and economics.

While Hypnoeconomics was revolutionary, few consider it a perfect text. The writing is dense, almost mystical in many passages. Even Xafanian purists will admit the text draws little in the way of concrete conclusions. It was not long until the tree of Xafanian Economics splintered into multiple competing branches.

The most common evolution of Xafan’s work can be found in Austrian hypnoeconomist Stefan Graf, who argues that if a market is a mind, it must be kept healthy. Specifically, he argues for Unbwegetgeist, a state in which a generally laissez-faire market is regulated at key points to mitigate risk as much as possible. Quote: "The thumb of government must weigh heavy on the scale towards the free market." Graf takes a maternal stance on Xafanian hypnoeconomic theories. The market-mind must be nurtured, given everything a mother would give a child.

Hypnoeconomist William Landry argues for a more holistic approach. The Landrian school argues that if a market is a mind, then it can be taught, trained like any other mind. Landry’s work directly criticizes Grafian modes of thought, placing heavy emphasis on “The Ritual of Stability” the idea that in many circumstances, the only thing that determines market stability is popular belief in its stability. While some still deride Landrian thinkers as “mystics,” it is generally understood that Landrian theories of Ritual Markets do hold water. However, there is little consensus around how they can be usefully applied.

#research is ongoing

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johnbierce · 5 months ago

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It's finally launch day for my new book! The City That Would Eat the World, book one of the More Gods Than Stars Trilogy, is out now on Amazon and Audible! More Gods Than Stars is socialist sword and sorcery progression fantasy starring a pair of wandering lady adventurers, set on a gas giant's habitable moon, featuring a mimic-based ecosystem, uncounted millions of gods ranging from ones for individual teakettles to gods of entire cities, a ridiculously complex magic-based economy in the vein of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, anime-inspired fight scenes, a trans deuteragonist (and plenty of other queer characters), a pseudomedieval megastructure arcology spreading uncontrollably across the landscape, and last but definitely not least, the god of counting flagstones.

"An incredibly imaginative adventure through the corrupt underbelly of a world-devouring and ever-expanding city and its gods-blessed inhabitants. Magical engineering, economics, divine blessings and human corruption combine into an adventure through a truly original setting."

Cameron Johnston, Author of Age of Tyranny & The Maleficent Seven

Art by Lukas Ketner, Cover Design by Virginia McClain

Thea is a washed-up mimic exterminator who expected more out of life, not some hero from stories. Aven is an impulsive wandering adventurer whose personal goddess is constantly getting her into trouble. Neither of them have the slightest interest in getting involved in world-shaking historical events. History doesn’t care what they want, unfortunately, and it’s fallen right into their laps in the shape of a godslaying weapon from a fallen civilization. Thrown together out of chance, Thea and Aven will have to learn to work together if they want to survive their pursuers. Because if they fail, and the weapon falls into the wrong hands? The results won’t be pretty. No one’s going to be using it on some random street corner goddess, teakettle god, or any of the other countless teeming millions of divinities on Ishveos. No, there’s one target that sits above all others. Cambrias, Whose Watch Never Ends. Cambrias, whose power has given rise to Cambrias’ Wall, the greatest city in the known multiverse- a city that has already covered much of a continent, and is strip mining entire mountain ranges for space and building material. A city that threatens to spread across the entire surface of Ishveos. And there’s no shortage of folks willing to kill Thea and Aven in order to stop the Wall, no matter the consequences.

I'm incredibly proud of this one- I spent years on the research behind its world, reading literally dozens of books on architecture, economics, leftist political theory, and theology. Though, for all that I genuinely tried to say something important with The City That Would Eat the World, I also did my best to keep it a fun, high-octane fantasy adventure- and I'm pretty dang confident I succeeded on that latter part. It draws heavily in inspiration from Terry Pratchett, China Mieville, and Max Gladstone; as well as the classic sword and sorcery adventure stories like Jirel of Joiry, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and their ilk. More Gods Than Stars is set in the same multiverse as my other books, the magic school series Mage Errant and the standalone epidemiological fantasy novel The Wrack, but you don't need to have read either of them to read this, or vice versa.

"The City That Would Eat The World is easily one of the most impressive books I've ever read. Not only has Bierce conjured up a hell of an adventure from page one, but he's also crafted a strange and gritty world with stunning depth, jammed it full of fantastic characters, then topped it all off with an explosive ending. The next book can't come soon enough."

Kyle Kirrin, author of The Ripple System

#progression fantasy #fantasy novels #New books #fantasy #More Gods Than Stars #mage errant #Yes Aven has antlers and Thea fights with a big tuning fork

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elysiansparadise · 1 year ago

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In a world where everything seems superficial, they seek to get to the truth and know the essence behind everything.

Sagittarius Rising: The Wanderer

There is an air of mystery in their relaxed and contemplative appearance. Natives with a strong physique, gifted with the charisma and wisdom of Jupiter, these natives tend to look older when they are young and younger when older. A charming enigma, they can go from being hilarious, witty and jovial, to being rational, analytical and observant. An insatiable thirst to see beyond appearances, seemingly perfect systems and the masks people seem to wear. Strong will and mind, endowed with courage and bravery, no obstacle seems greater if they take a look at everything that forged them. They are people devoted to the beliefs they have and, no matter how open-minded, making them change their minds is not an easy task. Adventurous and curious when something catches their attention, rooted when making a decision. An inquisitive mind with idealistic overtones, a strong need for independence and a character with ambivert tendencies.

When we see Capricorn in their 2nd house, we can define that they firmly believe in the value of hard work and effort. From a very early age they learned that the best things in life or the most valuable things require work, sometimes giving up things that, although deep-rooted, only cause pain. They are willing to make sacrifices and work intensely long hours to achieve their goals. They do not usually take unnecessary risks and prefer safe and stable investments, both economic and time and energy. They have a strong ambition to achieve success and feel proud of themselves. They set high goals for themselves and are willing to work hard and persevere to achieve them. These natives are the clear representation of valuing quality over quantity, and can be considered picky by other people. Their self-esteem and self-worth are often linked to their achievements of all kinds, leading them to feel that sense of security when they have achieved their goals. They think long term and plan their future with vision and strategy. Their focus is on building a solid foundation that will provide them with lasting security and prosperity. It is likely that they grew up feeling that many things were missing in their lives, materially, emotionally or even spiritually.

Since they have Aquarius in the 3rd house, these natives are very open to new and different ideas, a trait that is often constantly associated with this rising. They enjoy discussing and debating theories and concepts on many diverse topics, from the simplest to the most profound. They have the quality of adapting well to different communication styles and are able to speak with people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, ironically, they hardly feel that other people understand their way of thinking. Sometimes they may even feel judged for the way they communicate and think. They value mental independence and prefer to think for themselves rather than blindly following what others say. Their thinking is free and they do not easily conform to traditional opinions, nor are they afraid to question them. They have strong intellectual intuition and can reach conclusions quickly through intuitive perceptions. They are not afraid to question or debate regardless of the person they are dealing with. They are prone to feeling creative during short trips and can be inspired by things that to others may be very mundane or simple. Their rational nature helps them find ingenious solutions to complex problems. They have an insatiable intellectual curiosity and love to learn about a wide range of topics. There are chances of being only children, having some kind of distance from their siblings, or feeling very different from them. They can treat friends fraternally.

There is a lot of depth in the overlay of Pisces in the 4th house, as it is a part of the natives that others do not have a notion of so easily. In their childhood they could have been sensitive children, with that curiosity about the world around them, to understand how things worked, the people around them and, even at their young age, how life worked. There may have been that feeling of being lost, of not finding your place and a longing for that security that is associated with the word 'home'. For these natives, it is an important refuge for them, a place where they can retreat and recharge their energies, and I clarify, this does not necessarily have to be the one in which they were born, but rather the one they create. They dream of a quiet home, in which they can lower the volume of the outside chaos. Many of these natives need a serene space to maintain their emotional balance. They can find comfort in movies, books, music or even in the art they create, whatever it may be. This placement sometimes suggests someone who from an early age had to take care of someone else, whether it was a sibling, an older relative, or even their own parents. They are very perceptive people of the emotions of others, especially those that are deeper, those that others seek to hide. They can also be very intuitive with the emotional needs of their family members. They like to create a welcoming and hospitable environment in their home, as they enjoy making others feel welcome and comfortable in their space. They need a space where they can escape the demands of the outside world and find solace. They look for an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity at home.

With Aries in the 5th house, these natives tend to have a passionate approach to romances. Romance with them feels like an awakening, the awakening of excitement, intrigue, and a desire to explore new things with them. An emotion that drives you in your daily life, that motivates you and drives you to live the day as if it were your last. They greatly value their independence but once they know that you are what they want, they jump in with enthusiasm and can be very direct and honest in expressing their feelings. They like certainty and indecision in a person may seem unattractive to them. There are no grey tones, half-hearted feelings or unfinished ideas, they are looking for a lover as willing, daring and passionate as they are. Love makes them feel alive, fills them with enthusiasm and the desire to go after what they want. It is very likely that once they find love they will feel more ambitious, creative and confident. They value their independence and freedom in love, so they will not tolerate any type of relationship that restricts them or makes them feel limited or incapable of being themselves. They will always focus on motivating their partner and encouraging them to do what they are passionate about, they will never limit them in any way. These natives attract a lot of attention and stand out for their attractiveness, confidence, and sexy and independent aura. Many of them enjoy playful competitiveness. Their self-expression is direct and unfiltered. They are not afraid to be themselves and express their opinions and desires clearly and forcefully. If they decide to have children, they will be active, expressive, playful and very authentic. They can be parents who prioritise that their children have a strong sense of self-acceptance, that they are not afraid of anything and that they feel empowered.

Something that these natives will prioritise a lot no matter what their well-being is, from physical, to emotional and mental, which we attribute to Taurus in the 6th house. When they see that something is not positive in their lives, they do not hesitate to keep it away from them, because they are in constant search to keep what gives them pleasure and comfort close, distancing themselves from what sinks them and prevents them from growing. They can be very selective about what they make part of their day to day, and this includes the people they surround themselves with. They are people who will make part of their routine things that they find pleasant or comfortable, so they may have problems doing chores or things that they find boring or repetitive, postponing them and falling into procrastination tendencies. Taking care of their body and emotional tranquillity is something of great importance to them, so it is common for natives with this placement to exercise, do or have skincare routines, read constantly, meditate or practise similar activities. Many of them have this need to stay active, to be constantly doing things and even if they stay busy, they may have that feeling that they are not using properly most of their time or that they could be doing even more productive things. This placement tells us about the importance of comfort for them when choosing a job, without forgetting that it can also indicate earning a lot of money doing something that they really like and gives satisfaction. In their work they can enjoy not only a good reputation, but lasting bonds and courtesy with others. Taurus being here shows us natives who can be very devoted and constant with any task they have to do, investing a lot of time in it. A good work ethic is possible and a calm and relaxed way of working, as they dislike putting themselves under constant stress.

They highly value their independence, it is difficult to get their attention, and it is even more difficult to awaken in them that desire to have a long-term relationship, and it is not because of fear of commitment, but on the contrary, they think deeply and are very clear about what they want in a relationship and a partner for the long run. This rational and analytical, but above all precise approach is thanks to Gemini in the 7th house, as it means that Mercury is ruling this house. These natives do not have a long list of requirements that you have to meet to be their life partner, but they know perfectly well what things they do not want to deal with. Their discernment makes them realise this easily, and their blunt personality makes them not hesitate to make it clear. They want a partner who makes them look twice, who awakens their curiosity, interest and that has a magnetism that attracts them. They are fascinated by people who always have something to say, those with a clever and agile mind that fills them with excitement and makes them discover sides of themselves that they didn't even know they had. Someone that speaks their mind, that turns daily and boring into exciting and pleasant. They have a fear of deception and sudden distancing from their special person, so they will look for a partner who seeks to be present without the native asking for it. They are people who think a lot when it comes to being with another person. They want to find someone who will erase their doubts with actions and words, a person who will constantly let them know their intentions, feelings and thoughts, someone who will surprise them, not necessarily with seemingly big and outlandish things but by showing that they are not the same as the rest of the people that the natives to found throughout their lives. Good communication is something of utmost importance when thinking about a potential long-term partner, much more than other aspects even. For them it is crucial that this person can talk to them about anything regardless of the weight of the situation. Their future spouse is a person with great intelligence, good social skills and a person who uses his resources and knowledge astutely, someone who is difficult to catch off guard, open-minded and often a fascinating communicator. They will enjoy a marriage with adventures, fun and many learnings. Both the natives and their partners will feel intrigued and strongly attracted to each other, they will be intellectually stimulated and may even feel that they are both friends and partners.

One of the aspects of their personality that is less talked about but that is very determining in them is Cancer in the 8th house. These natives experience their emotions in a very intense and deep way. Their emotional world is rich and complex, and they can be very sensitive to the energies and emotions of others. Although they are protectors and caregivers, they can hide their own emotional vulnerability. Many of them, due to their experiences, are often afraid of showing their weaknesses and tend to build a protective shell around their emotions. They have an innate capacity for emotional healing, both for themselves and for others, transforming themselves and those around them internally. They can be excellent counselors, therapists, or emotional healers. They are firm protectors of what they consider family [whether biological or not], they will keep those they love safe and will not hesitate to attack to defend them if necessary. Their approach to sexuality is deeply tied to their emotions as it is crucial for them to feel a strong emotional connection to fully enjoy their sex life. They may have deep fears of abandonment or betrayal in their intimate relationships. They need to feel a deep emotional and spiritual connection with their partners and can be very protective and nurturing in their intimate relationships, being attentive to their partner's needs. They love the idea of having a relationship where both can be vulnerable with the other and where both fiercely defend the other, giving themselves body and soul to the other.

These natives usually have Leo in the 9th house, which tells us that their pride lies in their intelligence, talents and abilities. They are excellent and fierce debaters who will always seek to speak their truth without filters and without trying to win the good side of others. Strongly tied to their convictions, they give great importance to justice and will always act according to what they consider optimal and most correct in certain situations. Since I mention their strong and fixed opinions, it is worth mentioning that it is difficult to change their minds. If the native is not grounded enough, they are likely to believe that they have the absolute truth and refuse to listen to other people. Their intelligence and ability to create is great and they can bring many interesting and successful projects to life. They will have a lot of happiness traveling or connecting with other cultures, as well as a source of ideas and the ability to create warm memories in places far from home. They may feel very different from people from whatever group they belong to, from school, or even from the stereotypes of their countries. They have a strong passion for knowledge and education, as they love to learn and may have a great interest in philosophical, spiritual or cultural topics. They can communicate their ideas passionately and effectively, motivating others to learn and explore. They have academic ambition and in some cases this placement leads them to seek high achievements in their education.

With Virgo in the 10th house, these natives are seen as reliable and responsible people in their professional field, coupled with their serious and committed approach to their work, earning them the respect of their colleagues and superiors. Their integrity and work ethic are fundamental to them, and they do everything they can to avoid mistakes or failures. For them it is always crucial to charge and show that they act based on their principles, seeking to do things correctly. They stand out for being adaptable and able to adjust to the changing demands not only of the professional environment, but of what they experience throughout their lives. They are extremely dedicated to their work. They have a strong and admirable work ethic and are diligent and meticulous in everything they do. Always seeking to improve and achieve high quality standards. They can be very critical of themselves and others, especially those who boast of being superior in role or morals. They can be excellent in roles that involve analysis, administration, or any type of detailed work. They may choose jobs in which they maintain order, have control of a specific area or a specific group of people, that are related to analysis and research, or something that involves supporting or helping others. They do not seek recognition or glory, but are satisfied with doing their job well. They are not interested in pleasing others or meeting other people's expectations, rather they constantly strive to meet the expectations of a single person, themselves.

Natives with Libra in the 11th house are selective with friends, thinking a lot before giving that title to someone; Despite their initial wariness, they remain cordial enough. As friends these natives can be very supportive and caring, giving not only sympathy and affection, but also bringing realism to the lives of their friends and colleagues. This placement gives them the tendency to be popular and/or recognized either in their environment or on the internet. They value their friendships very much and will always focus on them being fair relationships in which they get the same as they give to others. They can create very strong ties with friends and vice versa, in some cases it can be expressed in friends being very attached to the native and relying on them, although there may be a risk of dependence on either party. They are very good at working as a team and can count on diplomacy. They are the kind of people who seek social justice, can defend others from injustice and prevent them from getting hurt. They hate injustice and discrimination, because they believe in equality regardless of gender, age, race or beliefs. They are skilled at mediating and resolving conflicts within their social groups. Their natural diplomacy allows them to find fair and balanced solutions to disagreements. They have the ability to positively influence the groups to which they belong. Their ability to see both sides of a situation allows them to provide balanced and fair perspectives. This house is also related to earnings through their work, with Venus ruling this house we can also determine that they can have many economic benefits in a job that they genuinely like.

What lies within you, love? How does Scorpio in the 12th house play a role? When someone sees you they immediately perceive your strength, they sense your impetus and courage, many even tremble at the power that you naturally emanate, but only those who dare to look directly into your intense and sharp gaze, realize the pain that has forged your shell and attitude. You are secretive with many aspects of your life, you deeply bury the gray and overwhelming tints that life has poured on you. You don't let anyone know for fear that it will be used against you. You have learned to watch you back, that trust is not something that is given to just anyone. From betrayals, disappointments, people's cruelty and prejudices... you have been through a lot and yet you remain firm, because you know that you yourself are your most faithful companion and your strength. Fear of betrayal, revealing too much of yourself and being judged or ignored, fear of loving someone who doesn't love you with the same depth. You have a fascinating mind, a fervent desire to get to the bottom of things, and the ambition that allows you to achieve it. It is difficult to hide things from you, because your keen intuition accompanied by your need to discover the truth are your most lethal weapon. You feel things deeply, many times more than you would like, and for you there is no middle ground. You are decisive and do not hesitate, things may be black or white, yes or no, all or nothing… Unlike other people, you find refuge in the spaces where you are on your own. At the end of the day it is better than the masked crowds, those who smile in front of you and conspire behind your back. You have the ability to sense when someone is not what they seem, you can detect people who have shady intentions for miles, a gift that experience has given you. All of these traits protect your noble and loyal heart, the one that makes you capable of completely surrendering to something or someone that makes you feel safe and comfortable. It's never too much for you when it comes to someone you love or something you're passionate about.

#astrology #natal chart #birth chart #sagittarius #sagittarius rising #sagittarius ascendant #sagittarius asc #ascendant #rising #asc #sagittarius in the 1st house #sagittarius in the 1h

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whencyclopedia · 5 months ago

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Eyewitness Accounts of the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the murder of 6 million Jewish people by the SS, Gestapo, and other organisations of Nazi Germany and its allies in the years prior to and through the Second World War (1939-45). Innocent men, women, and children were shot in mass executions, or, if not too young or too old, they were sent to labour camps where they worked until they could do so no longer. The ultimate fate of millions was to die in the gas chambers of extermination camps like Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

In this article, accounts are presented by those who witnessed the Holocaust genocide firsthand, both its victims and those involved in its execution who were obliged to give evidence in, for example, the post-war Nuremberg trials of 1945-6.

Unburied Corpses, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

Wislon-Oakes - Imperial War Museums (CC BY-NC-SA)

The Nazis & the Jews

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) established himself as the dictator of Nazi Germany in 1933, and he identified Jewish people as the main enemy of the state. Based on dubious and inconsistent racial theory as propounded by such Nazi figures as Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), Hitler and the Nazi Party began a propaganda campaign against German Jews, which presented them as an inferior race who were holding Germany back from achieving its full economic potential.

Hitler wanted to remove all Jews from German territory, but the first step was to identify who exactly was a Jew. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws loosely identified Jews since even having a single Jewish grandparent placed an individual in that category. A series of 'solutions' to what Hitler called the "Jewish problem" were rolled out, such as encouraging emigration and persecuting Jewish business owners. Jews were then attacked in such pogroms as the Kristallnacht of November 1938. Next, Jews were rounded up and obliged to live in segregated areas such as ghettos in cities or in concentration camps. Jews were deprived of citizenship and other basic rights.

From 1942, the Nazis began what was secretly described as the 'Final Solution', that is the plan to murder all European Jews. Jews were transported to labour camps where they worked on state projects until they died from disease, extreme malnutrition, or physical exhaustion. Other Jews, and those who could no longer work or were too young or too old to work, were transported directly to death camps like the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in occupied Poland where they were killed in gas chambers and their remains were communally cremated. Jews were not the only victims since the Nazis also targeted Romani people, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, homosexuals, political rivals, prisoners of war, and those with physical or mental disabilities, amongst others. In addition, hundreds of thousands more victims were murdered in mass executions in occupied territories during the Second World War by mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen. The Jews made up by far the majority of those killed, and it is estimated that 6 million died in what is today called the Holocaust. The sheer scale of the Nazis' programme means that determining the precise number of victims is not possible.

Arrested Jews, Baden-Baden

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-86686-0008 (CC BY-SA)

Hugh Greene, a British newspaper journalist, recalls what he saw of the Kristallnacht in 1938:

I was in Berlin at that time and saw some pretty revolting sights – the destruction of Jewish shops, Jews being arrested and led away, the police standing by while the gangs destroyed the shops and even groups of well-dressed women cheering.

(Holmes, 42)

Avraham Aviel, a Polish Jew and survivor of a mass execution, gives the following account of his experience in May 1942:

We were all brought close to the cemetery at a distance of eighty to a hundred metres from a long, deep pit. Once again everybody was made to kneel. There was no possibility of lifting one's head. I sat more or less in the centre of the town people. I looked in front of me and saw the long pit then maybe groups of twenty, thirty people led to the edge of the pit, undressed probably so that they should not take their valuables with them. They were brought to the edge of the pit where they were shot and fell into the pit, one on top of another.

(Holmes, 319)

An anonymous survivor from a ghetto massacre in Lviv, Ukraine, in August 1942 gives the following description of its aftermath:

I went with my mother to the office of the Jewish community regarding an apartment and there in the light breeze, dangled the corpses of the hanged, their faces blue, their heads tilted backward, their tongues blackened and stretched out. Luxury cars raced in from the center of the city, German civilians with their wives and children came to see the sensational spectacle, and, as was their custom, the visitors enthusiastically photographed the scene. Afterwards the Ukrainians and Poles arrived by with greater modesty.

(Fiedländer, 436)

Nazi Classification of Jewish People

VolksVeritas (CC BY-SA)

Rivka Yoselevska, a Polish Jew, describes her experience and that of her family in the Hansovic ghetto massacre in August 1943:

Some of the younger ones I got out naked covered with blood…I was still alive. Where should I go? What should I do?

(Holmes, 320-1)

The SS lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), in charge of the Final Solution's transportation requirements, here lies to Jews to make sure they do not create trouble as they are transported by train from a ghetto to the concentration camps:

Jews: You have nothing to worry about. We want only the best for you. You'll leave here shortly and be sent to very fine places indeed. You will work there, your wives will stay at home, and your children will go to school. You will have wonderful lives.

(Bascomb, 6)

The death camps were deliberately located in remote Poland to provide the Final Solution project more secrecy. Rudolf Höss (1901-1947), a camp commandant at Auschwitz, stated:

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

(Neville, 49)

New Arrivals at Auschwitz

Bernard Walter (Public Domain)

The typical conditions of the train journeys to the camps are described here by Avraham Kochav, an Auschwitz survivor:

There were twenty to twenty-five cars in every train…I heard terrible cries. I saw how people attack other people so as to have a place to stand, how people push each other so that they could stand somewhere or so that they could have air for breathing. It was terribly, terribly stifling. The first to faint were the children, women, old men, they all fell down like flies.

(Holmes, 332)

Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish hospital director, describes the train journeys for Jewish people sent to the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland:

On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin people witnessed small children being thrown through windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.

(Friedländer, 358)

Yaacov Silberstein, a Jewish teenager, describes his arrival at Auschwitz in October 1942:

When we arrived we saw how the Jews were running to the electrified fence. There they stuck. They were tired of life; they could not continue in this fashion.

(Holmes, 330)

Dr Lucie Adelsberger, a prisoner of Auschwitz, describes the processing of new arrivals destined for the labour camps:

We undressed, had our hair cut – no actually our heads were shaved to stubble; then came the showers and finally the tattoos. This was where they confiscated the very last vestiges of our belongings; nothing remained…no written document that could have identified us, no picture, no written message from a loved one. Our past was cut off, erased…

(Cesarini, 656)

Aerial View of Auschwitz

South African Air Force (Public Domain)

Bernd Naumann, a survivor from the Birkenau camp, describes the prevalence of rats in the camp:

They gnawed not only at corpses but also at the seriously sick. I have pictures showing women near death being bitten by rats.

(Neville, 50)

Seweryna Smaglewska, a prisoner in the Birkenau women's camp, describes the living conditions there:

There were no roads, no paths between the blocks. In the depths of these dark dens, in bunks like multi-storied cages, the feeble light of a candle burning here or there flickered over naked, emaciated figures curled up, blue from the cold, bent over a pile of filthy rags, holding their shaved heads in their hands, picking out an insect with their scraggly fingers and smashing it on the edge of the bunk – that is what the barracks looked like in 1942.

(Cesarini, 528)

The SS, which managed the camps, made sure there was a hierarchy amongst the prisoners such as trustees who survived a little longer than the rest by being 'favoured' with certain duties such as burning the bodies in the crematoriums or beating other prisoners. SS Lance Corporal Richard Bock, a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls:

A block chief would call out the kapo very fiercely, 'Kapo, come here.' The kapo came over and – boom – he hit the kapo in the face so hard that he fell over…And then he said, 'Kapo, can't you beat them any better than that?' And the kapo ran off and grabbed a club to beat up the prisoner squad quite indiscriminately. 'Kapo, come over here,' he shouted again. The kapo came and he said, 'Finish them off,' and then he went off again and he finished the prisoners off, he beat them to death…a kapo had to beat and club to save his own life.

(Holmes, 325)

Luggage of Auschwitz Victims

Jorge Láscar (CC BY)

Those meant for the gas chambers were often unaware of their fate. Bock describes the procedure that he witnessed with a colleague called Holbinger who was responsible for the Zyklon B tins that would produce the lethal gas:

…the new arrivals had to get undressed, and then the order came, 'Prepare for disinfection'. There were enormous piles of clothing…Lots of them hid their children under the clothes and covered them up and then they shouted, 'Get ready' and they all went out, they had to run naked approximately twenty yards from the hall across to Bunker One. There were two doors standing open and they went in there and when a certain number had gone inside they shut the doors. That happened about three times, and every time Holbinger had to go out to his ambulance and they took out a sort of tin – he and one of his block chiefs – and then he climbed up the ladder and at the top there was a round hole and he opened the little round door and held the tin there and shook it and then he shut the little door again. Then a fearful screaming started up and approximately after about ten minutes it slowly went quiet…They opened the door…then a blue haze came out. I looked in and I saw a pyramid. They had all climbed up on top of each other…They were all tangled, they had to tug and pull very hard to disentangle all these people.

(Holmes, 334-5)

Dov Paisikowic, a Russian-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, was part of the team responsible for taking bodies out of the chambers, removing valuables such as rings and gold teeth, and then taking the corpses to the crematoria. He recalls:

…the doors were suddenly opened to the gas chambers. People, naked people, started falling out. We were all frightened, no one dared ask what it all was. We were immediately taken to the other side of this house and there we saw hell on this earth – large piles of dead people, and people dragging these dead to a long pit, about thirty metres in length and ten metres in width. There was a huge fire there, with tree trunks. On the other side fat was being taken out of this pit with a bucket.

(Holmes, 335)

Thousands of detainees in the camps were subjected to unnecessary and often horrific medical operations and experiments. One of the most infamous SS doctors was Josef Mengele (1911-1979), who performed all kinds of macabre operations at Auschwitz. Mengele was, though, only one part of a large SS medical team, which operated in many different camps. Dr Franz Blaha, a Czech detainee at the Dachau concentration camp, was obliged to work in this area of Nazi terror, specifically performing autopsies. Blaha reported:

From the middle of 1941 to the end of 1942 some 500 operations on healthy prisoners were performed. These were for the instructions of the SS medical students and doctors and included operations on the stomach, gall bladder and throat. These were performed by students and doctors of only two years' training, although they were very dangerous and difficult….Many prisoners died on the operating table and many others from later complications…These persons were never volunteers but were forced to submit to such acts.

(MacDonald, 59)

Auschwitz Bunks

Bookofblue (CC BY-SA)

Hertha Beese, a Berlin housewife and underground resistance worker, recalls that, unlike the general public, the resistance network was more informed about the camps. She states:

We knew that the concentration camps existed. We also knew where they existed, for example Oranienburg just outside Berlin. We sometimes knew which of our friends were there and we also knew of the cruelties in them right from the beginning.

(Holmes, 315)

Anthony Eden (1897-1977), British Foreign Secretary during WWII, notes:

…as the war progressed some horrifying reports began to come out. At first it was very difficult to assess their accuracy and they were so horrible it was hard to believe they could be true.

(Holmes, 314)

Wynford Vaughn-Thomas, a British journalist, recalls the conditions of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany when it was liberated in 1945:

In the huts typhoid, everything, had broken out and you couldn't hear yourself speak for the death rattle. There were people lying on top of each other, sick, vomiting, withered bodies crawling on their hands and knees…It was sealed off in this dark north German plain and you felt you'd reached the cesspit of the human mind.

(Holmes, 337)

Mass Grave, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

H. Oakes-Imperial War Museums (Public Domain)

The British Lieutenant Colonel J. A. D. Johnson described what he saw when he arrived at Bergen-Belsen:

The prisoners were a dense mass of emaciated apathetic scarecrows huddled together in wooden huts, and in many cases without beds or blankets, and in some cases without any clothing whatsoever…There were thousands of emaciated corpses in various stages of decomposition lying unburied. Sanitation was to all intents and purposes nonexistent.

(Cesarini, 759)

Hans Stark, Gestapo staff member at Auschwitz, stated, like so many others, that he had merely been following orders:

I took part in the murder of many people…I believed in the Führer, I wanted to serve my people. Today I know that this idea was false. I regret the mistakes of my past, but I cannot undo them.

(Neville, 57)

Rabbi Frankforter, who died in the Holocaust, which Jewish people often call the Shoah or Ha-Shoah in Hebrew, gave this last wish to survivor Yaacov Silberstein:

You are still young and you will remain alive. I have only one request for you that you should never let people forget. Tell everyone what they did to us at this small camp, in Buchenwald. Wherever you go tell this, also to your children so that they should pass it on. To remember and not to forget.

(Holmes, 339)

#History #ConcentrationCamp #FinalSolution #Genocide

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teh-tj · 9 months ago

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Greenbelt Maryland. Or, how America almost solved housing only to abandon it.

**I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I AM JUST AN ENTHUSIST! DO NOT TREAT MY OPINIONS/SPECULATION AS EDUCATION!**

During the Depression America faced a housing crisis that rhymes with but differs from our own. It’s different in that there wasn’t a supply issue, there were loads of houses in very desirable areas, but they were still unaffordable as people’s incomes collapsed causing a deflationary spiral. While the housing supply subtly grew and succeeded demand, people simply couldn’t pay the meager rents and mortgages. Herbert Hoover failed to manage the Depression, while his inaction is greatly exaggerated, his policy of boosting the economy with works projects and protecting banks from runs failed and the depression only got more pronounced in his term. In comes Franklin Roosevelt, a progressive liberal much like his distant and popular cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy. Franklin’s plan was to create a large safety net for people to be able to be economically viable even if they’re otherwise poor. These reforms are called the New Deal and they did many controversial things like giving disabled and retired people welfare, giving farmers conditioned subsidies to manipulate the price of food, a works program to build/rebuild vital infrastructure, etc. One of these programs was the USHA (a predecessor of America’s HUD), an agency created to build and maintain public housing projects with the goal of creating neighborhoods with artificially affordable rents so people who work low-wage jobs or rely on welfare can be housed.

In this spirit, the agency started experimenting with new and hopefully efficient housing blueprints and layouts. If you ever see very large apartment towers or antiquated brick low-rise townhouses in America, they might be these. The USHA bought land in many large and medium-sized cities to build “house-in-park” style apartments, which is what they sound like. Putting apartment buildings inside green spaces so residents can be surrounded by greenery and ideally peacefully coexist. Three entire towns were built with these ideas outside three medium-sized cities that were hit hard by the depression; Greenbelt outside DC, Greenhills outside Cincinnati, and Greendale outside Milwaukee. The idea was to move people out of these crowded cities into these more sustainable and idyllic towns. There were many catches though, the USHA planned for these towns to be all-white, they used to inspect the houses for cleanliness, they required residents to be employed or on Social Security (which basically meant retired or disabled), they also had an income limit and if your income exceeded that limit you were given a two-month eviction notice, and you were expected to attend town meetings at least monthly. While the towns didn’t have religious requirements they did only build protestant churches. Which is an example of discrimination by omission. While a Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc could in theory move into town they also couldn’t go to a Catholic church, synagogue, or Islamic center without having to extensively travel. Things planned communities leave out might indicate what kind of people planned communities want to leave out. Basically, the whole thing was an experiment in moving Americans into small direct-democracy suburbs as opposed to the then-current system of crowded cities and isolated farm/mine towns. This type of design wasn’t without precedent, there were famously company towns like Gary and Pullman which both existed outside Chicago. But those lacked the autonomy and democracy some USHA apparatchiks desired.

The green cities were a series of low-rise apartments housing over a hundred people each, they were short walks from a parking lot and roads, and walking paths directly and conveniently led residents to the town center which had amenities and a shopping district. Greenbelt in particular is famous for its art deco shopping complex, basically an early mall where business owners would open stores for the townspeople. These businesses were stuck being small, given the income requirements, but it was encouraged for locals to open a business to prove their entrepreneurial spirit. Because city affairs were elected at town meetings the city was able to pull resources to eventually build their own amenities the USHA didn’t originally plan for like a public swimming pool or better negotiated garbage collection.

These three cities were regarded as a success by the USHA until World War II happened and suddenly they showed flaws given the shift in focus. These towns housed poor people who barely if at all could afford a car, so semi-isolated towns outside the city became redundant and pointless. The USHA also had to keep raising the income requirement since the war saw a spike in well-paying jobs which made the town unsustainable otherwise. During the war and subsequent welfare programs to help veterans, these green cities became de facto retirement and single-mother communities for a few years as most able-bodied men were drafted or volunteered. Eventually, the USDA would make the towns independent, after the war they raised the income limit yet again and slowly the towns repopulated. As cars became more common and suburbanization became a wider trend these towns would be less noticeably burdensome and were eventually interpreted as just three out of hundreds of small suburban towns that grew out of major cities. They were still all-white and the town maintained cleanliness requirements; after all they lived in apartments it just takes one guy’s stink-ass clogged toilet to ruin everyone’s day.

By the 1950’s these towns were fully independent. Greendale and Greenhills voted to privatize their homes and get rid of the income limit all together so the towns can become more normal. Greenhills, Ohio still has many of these USHA-era houses and apartments, all owned by a series of corporations and private owners. Greendale, Wisconsin property owners have demolished most of these old houses and restructured their town government so most traces of its founding are lost. But Greenbelt, Maryland still maintains a lot of its structure to this day. Greenbelt has privatized some land and buildings, but most of the original USHA apartments are owned by the Greenbelt Homes, Inc cooperative which gives residents co-ownership of the building they live in and their payments mostly go to maintenance. Because Greenbelt was collectively owned the House Un-American Activities Committee would blacklist and put on trial most of Greenbelt’s residents and officials. Though they didn’t find much evidence of communist influence, the town was a target of the red scare by the DMV area, residents were discriminated, blacklisted, and pressured into selling their assets. While Greenbelt did commodify some of the town, the still existing co-ownership shows the town’s democratic initiative to maintain its heritage. The green cities desegregated in the 50’s and 60’s depending on state law, Greenbelt was the last to desegregate under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while discrimination persisted for years by the 1980’s the town would become half non-white, today the town is 47% black and 10% Asian.

Though these towns largely integrated with a privatized and suburbanized America, they do stand as a memorial to an idea of American urbanism that died. They were designed for walkability and were planned to be more democratic and egalitarian towns, with the conditions that came with segregation and government oversight. You can’t ignore the strict standards and racism in their history, but you can say that about many towns. How do you think America would be different if more cities had green suburbs that were more interconnected and designed for community gatherings?

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drdemonprince · 4 months ago

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I see you post against the global blackout on insta and I understand the sentiment, that it doesn’t make a difference but actually we’ve got major Palestinian civilian advocacy groups saying This is what we’re doing and why, and it feels like the West goes “oh there’s no point let’s not bother”. But in actual fact it’s Something. Which is better than nothing. It’s so easy for us to say it’s not worth it. Because we don’t want to give up a day of paid work, social media and online shopping. But when people in Palestine and the major charities actually on the ground working with them want this, isn’t it actually a show of solidarity regardless of our views on it, the actual impact, and our own in inconvenience? Regardless of impact.

Not shopping for one day isn't all that inconvenient. I don't know about you but I have no buy days all the time. It's not much of a sacrifice, if a person wants to do it and feels that it's a good exercise or symbolic or what-have-you, they should do what they feel is right. But showing respect to a people and a cause means being willing to discuss tactics, express disagreement, identify whose political ideals are in alignment with yours, and convey what one personally thinks is right.

Just because a person is Palestinian doesn't mean that their political ideology or theory of how political change happens aligns with your own, or with any kind of leftist politics. There are a great many Palestinian public figures who are not in any way revolutionary or liberationist. The majority of the charities that exist in Gaza are created and controlled by people in imperial countries, and all these charities operate with harsh restrictions placed upon them that limit how challenging to the existing status quo they can be. Many of them have explicit policies of normalizing the apartheid regime.

And just because a person is affected directly by the genocide doesn't mean they have expertise in tactics or economics -- in fact, it is outrageous that the entire Western world is relying upon a people who are actively being genocided, still, to give us our marching orders and plan our wing of resistance for us. Solidarity isn't just standing around waiting for a people in crisis to tell you what to do. It's organizing and tacting action, lending your support, your expertise, your money, your time, taking a stand for something, asking questions, suggesting alternatives, proposing new acts, participating actively in resistance on every level.

It's also important to keep in mind that the calls we see that come from Palestinians the most often are the ones who have been elevated to the status of Influencer or Head of a Nonprofit-- with all the competing motivations and financial and social incentives that involves. We are not hearing from a lot of Palestinian people on the ground who lack a sizeable platform, who do not have internet or phone access, and whose organizing and resistance take forms that are not social media friendly. The call to "listen to Palestinian voices" is a lot more complex than simply doing what a person on social media -- even a number of popular figures! -- has to say. No person or group can speak for a whole people, or a whole movement.

I believe that taking a single day off from shopping is appealing because it asks so little. It demands almost no organizational work or effort from Americans. It's inert and ineffectual, provably so, but something a person can pat themselves on the back for doing and then go back to their day. It's like almost every form of "activism" that has been promoted on social media for years now -- and it's telling that people won't learn, won't build the infrastructure necessary to make something more dramatic or longer-lasting happen, that members of the imperial core just keep sitting around on social media expecting other people to tell us what we should do to end the imperialism and genocide we are complicit in.

We need to do a whole lot more than not shopping for one day, and we need to do a lot of things that cannot be posted about on social media.

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brbievivi · 1 month ago

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THEORIES .ᐟ

RSA – Sage’s Islands Other Enchanted Academy

Synopsis : RSA/Royal Sword Academy is NRC’s rival school, and is implied to enroll the heroes, or as the NRC boys call it the “goody two shoes” of our favorite fairytales. Nonetheless, let’s exchange some theories about RSA, and dive into an arc of magic.

A/N : Contains small spoiler from Jade's coral sea event. This is simply a little discussion; this is in no way a bash on any of the characters. You are free to have your own opinion and let me know your thoughts in the comments .ᐟ

MASTERLIST

The Nature of RSA

While the NRC boys (mainly Leona and Ruggie) might say that the RSA boys are just some "goody two-shoes" snobs, I don't believe that to be the case. Yes, it's clear that RSA enrolls students who are twisted off of the heroes or companions of our beloved fairy tales, but TWST is very good at giving complex characters. I theorize that the RSA boys have more personality than being Prince Charmings.

I don't necessarily believe they are secretly evil or anything; in fact, I think people enjoy believing that theory so they can side with the NRC boys more. But honestly, we can still love NRC without RSA being plot twist villains. For example, with Neige, some think he's secretly two-faced with Vil, but not only does that undermine Vil's overblot, Vil himself says it's not Neige's fault and that Neige has his own life struggles as well.

The boys at NRC are a complex mix, and I theorize the same goes for RSA.

Do you agree? What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

Intertwined Connection

Considering NRC and RSA are the two academies on Sage's Island, it makes me speculate if the two schools were ever more connected together before becoming rivals. This is probably not the case, considering the two schools have been rivals for decades, but considering students like Chenya show up and disappear without fear or hesitation makes me wonder if there are other students who want to visit NRC or if there were students in the past who did so.

I say the past because the way the NRC Npcs reacted to Chenya being there was just full rage haha, so I don't see any RSA student attempting a stunt like that, but maybe some of them grow curious of NRC, especially after book 7. Yes, we all know Chenya loves to tease, but it shows that maybe there are some students at RSA who don't take the rivalry seriously, and then there are others that do.

Do you agree? What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

Prince Rielle

Despite not actually seeing him yet, many of us have taken that Rielle is a student at RSA, and if so, that means he was interested in going on land like Azul and the tweels.

What makes Rielle’s case interesting is, since he’s a prince and his kingdom is back in the Coral Sea, will he go the Ariel route and stay on land, or will he return to the sea? We know from Jade's coral sea events that human and mermaid relationships are rare, so it would be interesting to know what path he would choose.

What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

Magical Artifacts

We know from Glorious Masquerade that every school has a magic artifact of some kind. Noble Bell College has the Bell of Solace, and NRC has the magic mirror, but what about RSA?

Personally, I could see them having either the sword from The Sword in the Stone or the fairy godmother’s magic wand.

I could see Fairy Godmother’s magic wand being possible because the school castle screams Cinderella to me. However, I could also see it being the sword from The Sword in the Stone, because the headmaster of RSA, Ambrose, is twisted off of Merlin from the movie.

Do you agree? What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

Classes and Teachers

I feel the classes would be the same as NRC: science, homeroom, magic, and humanities, but maybe for physical education they have fencing along with flying. As for other courses, maybe instead of poison making, they make healing potions/ointments. I also see them having home economics for some reason, or at least something similar.

As for teachers, I could see them having a range of teachers. For fencing, I could see them having a twst!Prince Charming as the instructor, or for another physical activity club/class, I could see the instructor being twisted from Mulan; for culinary, I could see a twst! Tiana, etc.

Do you agree? What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

The Statues

I know some have discussed that the statues at RSA could be all of the princesses or at least most of them, and honestly that would be fun. Considering the RSA students seem to have a mix of the princesses/princes or their companions in terms of personality and character design. For instance, a dorm based off Beauty and the Beast with a twst!Lumiere would be fun.

Do you agree? What theories do you have on the matter? ♡

If you made it this far, tysm for reading .ᐟ

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yingdu-lover · 6 months ago

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if these lesbians can get a happy ending

what's stopping these faggots?!

btw, my beans

I am begging you all, please please read Jing Wei Qing Shang

it's an extremely painful, beautiful, heart wrenching love story between two useless lesbians who are INSANE for each other. No, it's WAY MORE THAN THAT. WAY MORE. SOMETIMES I FEEL it's a (nuanced) masterpiece historical fiction which accommodates the pining of queer people (there are many queer characters!) and their love story beautifully.

Those love stories are the best where love is not in the centre plot wise (but the greater significance of the plot and theme actually lead to love, yearning and sacrifice)

If you love Shiguang yearning, how they sacrifice themselves for each other, an impeccably mindfuck complex plot that will make you insomniac, powerful character developments of extremely well written side characters, politics, conspiracy, economic theory (it's getting unhinged), you will DEVOUR Jing Wei Qing Shang. It's heavy, tragic, graphic AND nuanced. It is an epic tragic love story (with a happy ending!)

if you wanna read, here is the carrd link!

also, a fun fact : It's getting a donghua adaptation! And an important figure behind this donghua is a fan artist, Melts! (She translated pdl novels in English)

Please please please at least go to youtube and-

wait lemme just paste it

youtube

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anghraine · 1 year ago

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Speaking of the social context of P&P and Austen in general, and also just literature of that era, I'm always interested in how things like precisely formulated hierarchies of precedence and tables of ranked social classes interact with the more complex and nuanced details of class-based status and consequence on a pragmatic day-to-day level. I remembered reading a social historian discussing the pragmatics of class wrt eighteenth-century English life many years ago and finally tracked down the source:

"In spite of the number of people who got their living from manufacture or trade, fundamentally it was a society in which the ownership of land alone conveyed social prestige and full political rights. ... The apex of this society was the nobility. In the eyes of the Law only members of the House of Lords, the peerage in the strictest use of the word, were a class apart, enjoying special privileges and composing one of the estates of the realm. Their families were commoners: even the eldest sons of peers could sit in the House of Commons. It was therefore in the social rather than in the legal sense of the word that English society was a class society. Before the law all English people except the peers were in theory equal. Legal concept and social practice were, however, very different. When men spoke of the nobility, they meant the sons and daughters, the brothers and sisters, the uncles and aunts and cousins of the peers. They were an extremely influential and wealthy group.

"The peers and their near relations almost monopolized high political office. From these great families came the wealthiest Church dignitaries, the higher ranks in the army and navy. Many of them found a career in law; some even did not disdain the money to be made in trade. What gave this class its particular importance in the political life of the day was the way in which it was organized on a basis of family and connection ... in eighteenth-century politics men rarely acted as isolated individuals. A man came into Parliament supported by his friends and relations who expected, in return for this support, that he would further their interests to the extent of his parliamentary influence.

"Next in both political and social importance came the gentry. Again it is not easy to define exactly who were covered by this term. The Law knew nothing of gentle birth but Society recognized it. Like the nobility this group too was as a class closely connected with land. Indeed, the border line between the two classes is at times almost impossible to define ... Often these men are described as the squirearchy, this term being used to cover the major landowning families in every county who were not connected by birth with the aristocracy. Between them and the local nobility there was often considerable jealousy. The country gentleman considered himself well qualified to manage the affairs of his county without aristocratic interference.

"...The next great layer in society is perhaps best described the contemporary term 'the Middling Sort'. As with all eighteenth-century groups it is difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation between them and their social superiors and inferiors. No economic line is possible, for a man with no pretensions to gentility might well be more prosperous than many a small squire. There was even on the fringe between the two classes some overlapping of activities ... The ambitious upstart who bought an estate and spent his income as a gentleman, might be either cold-shouldered by his better-born neighbours or treated by them with a certain contemptuous politeness. If however his daughters were presentable and well dowered, and if his sons received the education considered suitable for gentlemen, the next generation would see the obliteration of whatever distinction still remained. The solid mass of the middling sort had however no such aspirations, or considered them beyond their reach.

"...This term [the poor] was widely used to designate the great mass of the manual workers. Within their ranks differences of income and of outlook were as varied as those that characterized the middle class. Once again the line of demarcation is hard to draw..."

—Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (29-34)

(There's plenty more interesting information in the full chapter, especially regarding "the poor," and the chapter itself is contracted from a lengthier version published earlier.)

#anghraine babbles #long post #dorothy marshall #eighteenth century england #austen blogging #eighteenth century blogging #also thinking about this in terms of elizabeth spending so much of pride and prejudice /acutely/ conscious of a social divide #between her family (as in the bennets and mr collins) and darcy's status - so her claim to equality with him w/ lady catherine is- well #not a dry sociological statement but an important character moment for elizabeth (and lady catherine!)#realistically darcy's lifestyle politics and interests ARE far more allied with ppl like the fitzwilliams than ppl like the bennets #and elizabeth is not at all ignorant of that - it's why she initially thinks he's too much of a great man to be interested in her #even before she knows of his close connections to literal nobility #and that is probably the more ... normative? understanding of their respective positions.#so her later claim to equality with him - in a way that forces ly c to acknowledge elizabeth's own status - is not a simple neutral truth #but weighted in a way that's important thematically and for elizabeth's development - something that the pure sociological take misses imo #anghraine's meta #austen fanwank #sorta

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

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Tariffs and monopolies

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

For all that orthodox economists hate tariffs in all their forms, the question, "do tariffs work?" is a complex one, which can't be answered unless you specify which tariffs, in what context:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

The orthodox case against tariffs goes like this: tariffs raise the price of goods before they reach the market. Sellers will raise the price of goods to recover those costs from buyers, so it's you, the person buying a car, a phone, or a board-game, who will bear that additional cost:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/April_03_2025/Tariffs_Are_Driving_Up_Game_Prices_Now

As is ever the case with economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions. And as is especially the case with neoliberal economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions that are never tested for veracity – indeed, neoliberal economists pride themselves on their reliance on incorrect assumptions:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

The main assumption built into the orthodox case against tariffs is that sellers can't afford to eat the costs of tariffs. In the thought-experiment land of neoliberalism, market competition erodes sellers' profits so that everything being sold is only slightly marked up above the cost of making it, getting it to the store and selling it to you. Companies are said to be making a "competitive" rate of profit, which is tautologically defined as "whatever profit they're making." If Nike pays $20 to make a pair of shoes in Vietnam that it sells in America for $140, that $120 profit is "competitive" – if it wasn't, it would be lower, and it isn't, so it is.

Trump's own explanation for how the tariffs will work is no better. Trump has made a variety of incoherent claims about who will pay the tariffs. On the campaign trail, he insisted that the tariffs would somehow be paid by America's trading partners, either by their governments or by overseas companies. This is literally untrue: when you order something from overseas, the customs broker sends the bill to you, not the company that sold you the goods.

But the smarter elements in the Trump orbit have a slightly more reality-based theory: they claim that importers, faced with tariff costs, will push back on sellers and insist that they discount their products to offset the tariff bill. That's how the costs end up being paid by foreign sellers – and if their governments step in to help pay the bill, that's how foreign governments will pay the bill.

This explanation has the benefit of actually being an explanation, in that it is a series of cause-and-effect relationships that end up with the costs being borne by someone other than stateside buyers. However, this explanation is also founded on (at least) two demonstrably untrue assumptions: first, that buyers have the power to force sellers to lower their prices; and second, that this power comes from the availability of substitute goods that are made (or could be made) in the USA.

It's possible for there to be a market economy in which buyers can force sellers to eat tariff costs. For that to happen, the sellers have to be in real competition with one another. Competition requires competitors: companies that consider themselves rivals, directly attacking one another's margins. But that's not how American big business operates: 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has produced an American economy in which nearly every sector is dominated by a monopoly, a duopoly, or a cartel:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Take Nike: Nike controls 86% of the US athletic shoe market. Nearly all the remaining market share is owned by its main rivals, Adidas and Reebok – companies that merged in 2005. It's clear that Adidas/Reebok would like to get some of Nike's market share, but in 20+ years of duopoly rule over the sector, neither Nike nor Adidas/Reebok have tried a serious discounting strategy to win that market. Instead, the duopoly has found it easy to tacitly collude to rig margins of more than 600%. What's more, the collusion may have been explicit, not tacit – when a sector is dominated by two giant firms, the upper ranks of both companies are dominated by people who've worked at both companies. These people aren't rivals, they're peers. They're executors of one another's estates, godparents to one another's children, members of the same charitable boards and pickup sports leagues. They're lifelong pals. If you think they never explicitly conspire to rig markets – over drinks at someone's wedding or funeral, say – then I envy you your touching faith in humanity.

A market controlled by a handful of firms doesn't have to solve the thorny "collective action problem" of deciding on a regulatory priority and then holding that line as the cartel captures its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

That means that these companies end up with pricing power, because they can maintain solidarity while they raise prices. If everyone hikes prices together, consumers can't exert market discipline by buying from someone less greedy. And the same solidarity that confers pricing power to a cartel also insulates it from regulatory discipline, because all the companies will tell the same lie to regulators about why prices went up.

This was on display for all to see during the covid inflation shocks. Companies like Pepsi boasted to shareholders that "consumers are willing to pay more for our brands," as they hiked prices way above any inflationary rises, meaning that they didn't just force buyers to cover their higher costs, they actually raised prices more than was needed to cover those costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Needless to say, Coke didn't respond by slashing its prices in order to capture Pepsi's customers. They did the opposite: they also raised prices over and above the inflationary costs. Coke and Pepsi might be rivals on paper, but when it comes to questions like, "Should sugar-water have higher margins?" they are the best of friends.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry, another highly concentrated sector with sky-high margins that raised prices over inflation during the covid supply-chain shocks, and boasted about it on investor calls, without facing any regulatory scrutiny:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich

Neoliberal economists have an answer to this kind of thing: "it's fine." In the self-referential world of economism, whatever happens was meant to happen, because markets are efficient, so whatever happens in the market is efficient, and can only be made worse by state intervention. This theory of efficient markets is full of beautiful, self-equilibriating processes that can be precisely modeled using equations, but only because the field discards all the nonquantifiable elements of society, assuming that because you can't do math on these qualitative factors, they must not matter:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Of all the qualitative factors that clearly matter that are treated as if they don't matter, the most obvious, glaring omission is power. Power is hard to measure, but if you try to model a transaction without factoring power in, you end up in very dark places, for example, in systems where people should be allowed to "voluntarily" sell themselves into slavery.

It goes without saying that a theory of economics without a theory of power relationships is a great deal for powerful people. In Careless People, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams's excellent new tell-all memoir about Facebook, Wynn-Williams recounts how shocked and offended Sheryl Sandberg became when she was told that other countries wouldn't allow her to go and buy a kidney for her son, should he ever need one (her kid wasn't sick – she just wanted to know that if he ever did get sick…):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

This is economics without a theory of power: if I offer to buy your son's kidney, and you accept my offer, then we have achieved a voluntary exchange of value that is – tautologically – assumed to be fair. Indeed, this transaction isn't merely a way for kidneys to change hands – it's a way to "discover" the "market price" of a kidney. We're not just buyers and sellers, we're brave explorers of the vast, uncharted space of market prices.

Economics without power relies on tautology: if you assume the market is efficient, then whatever you get is what you were supposed to get. If Nike can charge a 600% markup on a $20 pair of shoes, then that is the "natural" price. Everyone in the chain – the workers who made the shoes, the subcontractors who employed the worker, the freighters who shipped the shoes, the logistics company that brought the shoe to the store, the clerk who rang up the purchase – is making what the market says they should be making. The price you pay? That's the price you should pay.

Perhaps you've heard people say that the most important thing is to "grow the pie," and that it's foolish to argue about how big any given "slice of the pie" is:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/405403/abundance-ezra-klein-building-costs-housing-energy-democrats-polarization

But this doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. If your slice of the pie is way too small to live on, and the pie grows, and your slice doesn't grow with it – or if it does, but not by enough to keep you solvent, then the size of your slice of the pie is the only thing that matters.

Economists call this the "distributional outcome" question, and orthodox economists insist that only fools and ideologues talk about distributional outcomes. They consider distributional outcomes to be a trap that sucks in well-meaning people who back "market-distorting interventions" that end up making everyone else poorer.

But you know who really cares about distributional outcomes? The finance sector. Think of the 2015 American Airlines pilot strike, which ended with a raise for pilots. When the company announced this on an investor call, Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Investors have a lot of power. After all, capital is concentrated into just a few hands, with trillions being wielded by institutional investors – index funds, hedge funds, etc – and they get to elect the board, who have the power to hire and fire corporate executives. A corporate board is like a trade union for wealth, a small committee that wields solidaristic power to threaten companies with dire consequences if their interests aren't given priority over the interests of workers and buyers.

No wonder that corporations are so ardently opposed to other forms of solidaristic power, like trade unions – who might shift value from investors to workers – and regulators – who might shift value from investors to buyers. Without these sources of countervailing power, unified capital will not only pass on any additional costs to workers and shoppers, they'll raise prices over and above any inflationary hikes. This does indeed "grow the pie" – while beggaring both shoppers and workers.

In other words, Nike could eat the tariff costs on its goods, but it won't because it doesn't have to, because it's part of a duopoly that both tacitly and explictly colludes to screw its customers and workers. Indeed, the cartelized big businesses that run the US economy just spent the pandemic years doing greedflation – using the excuse of the pandemic and their monopolistic pricing power to raise the prices of everything, from your rent to a dozen eggs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

If you've got the right kind of especially smooth market-pilled brain, you insist that this is impossible. These giant margins are so tempting that they will inevitably coax "new market entrants" into opening competing businesses. That does happen – sometimes. But not when the dominant companies can figure out how to build Warren Buffett's cherished "moats and walls" around their businesses. For example, if you're Amazon and 90% of middle class US households prepay for their shipping through Prime, you can charge sellers whatever the traffic will bear, because they have to go through your chokepoint in order to reach their best customers. That's how Amazon ended up taking 45-51% out of every dollar platform sellers earn:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

In Trumpland, the point of tariffs is to create friction on imports so that investors back businesses that do their production onshore. There's plenty of reasons to want things to be made in America. Manufacturing key resources in the US creates resiliency against geopolitical events (like wars), environmental disasters (like shipping-disrupting superstorms), and epidemiological events (like pandemics). Moreover, the low cost of overseas manufacturing often comes at the expense of human rights and environmental protection: making things in the US is no guarantee that they'll be made by fairly compensated workers in safe workplaces that don't pollute their environments, but it's a lot easier to enforce those priorities when production is within US borders.

But US investors spent the past 40 years gleefully demolishing the capacity of America to make things. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

[V]ocational expertise is very deep here [in China]. And I give the educational system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even as others were de-emphasizing vocational.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/17/how-much-would-an-iphone-cost-if-apple-were-forced-to-make-it-in-america/

The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/with-high-tariffs-has-trump-ended

Trump's tariffs, weak antitrust and weak consumer regulation are a recipe for shifting billions from the American public to the investors in the largest companies. It's still going to result in a huge economic collapse, but the most profitable companies of today will be best poised to stay on top of the pile after the crash. One hopeful outcome of this is that a bunch of the One Percenters are extremely fucked off about the plan:

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/06/is-the-conservative-crackup-finally-here/

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is a nonprofit impact litigation shop funded by Leonard Leo, the mastermind of the Federalist Society and its takeover of the Supreme Court. They're the ones who got Chevron Deference overturned last year, and now they're suing the Trump administration over the tariffs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/05/trump-tariffs-sink-conservatives-challenge-whether-theyre-legal/

As Corey Robin writes, tariffs have a long history of breaking up conservative coalitions, "the leading edge of political conflict in the 19th century." Robin writes that the conservative movement has spent years shifting tariff power from Congress to the president, never anticipating that someday, a president might preside over a Mad King tariff strategy. Now, Robin says:

The tariff is going to be the major issue that leads the judicial right to confront the empowered executive that they’ve turbo-charged in so many other ways.

Last year, Rick Perlstein pointed out that the true significance of Project 2025 lay in its contradictions, the irreconcilable, mutually exclusive policy prescriptions found in its pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein said that these contradictions were a map of the fracture lines in the Trump coalition. Trump's tariffs clearly represent a major fault-line, and we need to seize this opportunity when it presents itself.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

#tariffs #monopolies #monopolism #too big to care #trumpism #trump tariffs #distributional outcomes #economics #power #law and political economy #big tech #price controls #pluralistic

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