#Training Symposium

[renegadephilosopher]

My fic that took me the better part of the last two weeks, and quite possibly the most insufferable thing I've ever written, 'Clevinger's Symposium'! In which Clevinger reads Plato's Symposium, and tries to figure out what it all means. It's the most canon-compliant thing I've probably ever written, and features classic Clevinger/Dunbar (as you probably inferred). Here are some headcanons of mine which are in it :-)

Dunbar's a textiles designer (think: bus seats, generic carpets, etc.) and is a skilled artist, mostly dealing in the abstract. The fact that it's textiles makes the work fairly monotonous, but not boring. He also likes to sketch. Meanwhile, Clev's a professor in moral philosophy for a university (when I first read c22 8 years ago, this was my idea for his profession. It seems silly not to stick with it).

Clevinger works in the Kantian tradition, although this is honestly clearer in the start of the story than the end. He gets tempered a little by the end, but he's still largely idealistic. He's just learned over time that Dunbar doesn't always benefit from this idealism, especially in his moments of disillusionment.

Both of them think they're self-aware, only Dunbar is.

Not pictured in the story, but because they can't adopt (adoption agencies wanted to place children with married straight couples in the late 1950s), they wind up negotiating with Wintergreen for custody of Milo's son that he doesn't want, M2. Clevinger and Dunbar rename him Jim, which is a portmanteau of their names, John and Tim. Clevinger is his legal guardian; Dunbar didn't want to be a parent, which is why Jim calls him by his first name. Despite this, Dunbar's still his favorite.

Dunbar does find Clevinger annoying (why he loves him, Clev makes the time go slow), but never tells him this. Even by the end, Clevinger doesn't know why he's loved.

My idea for their survival for this story: Clevinger's plane crashed, and he was the sole survivor, undergoing an odyssey to get back home again, after which he found there was no home remaining for him. Dunbar was taken and bashed on the head, and then left for dead by the military (they did intend to kill him, it just failed). He managed to survive and wound up back in the United States, but still continued to suffer with disillusionment and anger from his treatment. While this story does contain largely positive moments, please note that this is because it's third person limited for Clevinger's point of view.

Dunbar, I imagine, would still largely focus on making his life longer and would still hold a lot of ire due to his treatment--but he doesn't take this anger out on Clevinger (hence it's less of a factor in this story, but I feel like it's still important to mention).

[ourbastardofsorrows]

today is the second time someone's asked me if i was vegan after commenting on one of my rainbow items. i'm starting to think people are just asking me if i'm gay in a super roundabout way

[mtandtgroup-blog]

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[historyofguns]

The article, authored by Peter Suciu, details a specialized firearms training event at Gunsite Academy, featuring world champion shooter Rob Leatham. The Gunsite Performance Pistol Symposium, held at Gunsite's extensive Paulden, Arizona facility, offers a three-day course for experienced handgun users. Participants will benefit from Leatham's expertise in speed and accuracy, backed by his 24 USPSA National and seven IPSC World Championships. The symposium is guided by proficient instructors, including Gunsite Rangemasters Lew Gosnell and Randy Watt, both with substantial competitive and law enforcement experience. The event emphasizes advanced firearm handling techniques, with prerequisites ensuring attendees possess significant prior expertise. Gunsite Academy, founded by Jeff Cooper in 1976, maintains its status as a leading institute in defensive firearms training. The course promises to elevate participants' skills through rigorous, performance-building drills, underscoring the importance of speed, accuracy, and cognitive engagement in advanced shooting practices.

[lesmana-enterprise-ltd]

Lesmana Arta International School, High School and Auditorium Lot (NO CC)

About Lesmana Arta International School

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Unrivaled Educational Facilities at LAIS

At LAIS, we are committed to providing an unparalleled learning environment equipped with world-class facilities to foster academic excellence and creativity. Our cutting-edge classrooms are designed for interactive and immersive learning, featuring the latest educational technology to enhance student engagement. The expansive library offers a vast collection of international resources, digital archives, and quiet study spaces, ensuring that students have access to knowledge at their fingertips.

For the creatively inclined, LAIS boasts specialized music rooms with professional-grade instruments, state-of-the-art art studios that encourage artistic expression, and fully-equipped science laboratories for hands-on exploration in STEM fields. From innovation hubs to collaborative study areas, every aspect of our campus is designed to inspire, challenge, and support students on their journey to academic and personal success.

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At LAIS, we believe that excellence in academics goes hand in hand with physical well-being. Our state-of-the-art sports facilities set the benchmark for athletic development, offering students access to a world-class indoor swimming pool, a professional-grade gymnasium, and a private tennis court, all designed to foster discipline, teamwork, and peak performance. Whether training for elite competitions or engaging in recreational activities, LAIS provides the perfect environment for students to push their limits, stay active, and excel beyond the classroom.

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From wholesome breakfasts to energize the day to balanced and delicious lunches that fuel academic and athletic performance, LAIS prioritizes student well-being through exceptional dining services. Whether it's a quick bite or a full-course meal, our culinary team is dedicated to providing a five-star dining experience that nourishes both the body and mind.

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[ducksido]

I need more sebek longing. Out resident Yuu human crush denier, realizing he’s headlong into a crush and needs to court/ snatch her up ASAP before any other upstarts get to her or god forbid the RSA

(YEAHHHHHHH SEBEK!!!)

Sebek Zigvolt did not have a crush on the human.

No, that flutter in his chest every time Yuu laughed? That was indigestion. Or rage. Yes—rage. Because how dare a mere human have such a sunny smile? How dare they make his duties more difficult by existing so carelessly kind and so infuriatingly resilient?

And the fact that they’d managed to best every housewarden in a crisis? Trickery. Fluke. Luck.

But then there was that day—

The day a pigeon from Royal Sword Academy showed up on campus with a letter. A letter addressed to Yuu.

Sebek had been walking by when he overheard it. Saw it. The blushing on Yuu’s face as they read it. The way they giggled—giggle—and muttered, “That’s kind of sweet.”

Sweet. Sweet?!

“Human,” he barked, storming over without thinking. “Who dares court you with such cowardly methods as letter writing? Face your suitor with dignity, not this—this avian nonsense!”

Yuu blinked. “Huh? It’s just a thank-you letter from an RSA student I helped at the interschool symposium. They’re just being polite.”

Sebek scowled. “Politeness is a gateway to romantic corruption!”

“…what?”

“Nothing! Forget I said anything!”

He stomped away, fists clenched, brain on fire.

This wouldn’t do.

If Royal Sword Academy—those peacocking, pretentious, princely pipsqueaks—were going to start sniffing around his human (NOT his human), he would have to act. Swiftly. Strategically.

He spent the next few nights writing out a “Yuu Containment & Courtship Plan” in his diary.

Step 1: Increase proximity. Become her guard. For safety. Obviously. Humans are fragile and need protection.

Step 2: Intimidate rivals. Use volume and intensity. Works on Grim. Should work on RSA pretty boys.

Step 3: Gift giving. Non-romantic. Functional gifts. Armor polish. Anti-poison herbs. Possibly a sword.

Step 4: Praise them (in code). “You’re adequate” → “You are the least incompetent student I’ve met” → “You’d make a strong foot soldier under Lord Malleus.”

Step 5: Confess feelings before anyone else does. Maybe. Eventually. If necessary. (He underlined this part five times.)

Meanwhile, Yuu had simply assumed Sebek was going through… something. He started showing up wherever they went—“by coincidence.” He handed them strange, rare monster-repellent herbs in a sack labeled “FOR YOU. NOT THAT I CARE.” and glared daggers at any boy who stood within ten feet of them.

The final straw came when Yuu caught him shouting romantic poetry (he claimed it was a “verbal training exercise”) in the woods behind Ramshackle.

“Sebek… are you okay?”

He looked at them, face redder than a Heartslabyul rose.

“I HAVE DETERMINED,” he said, voice cracking only slightly, “THAT YOU ARE WORTHY. AS A HUMAN. FOR COURTSHIP. I SHALL DEFEND YOUR HONOR UNTIL YOU DECIDE ON A SUITOR. WHICH SHOULD BE ME. EVENTUALLY. PREFERABLY NOW.”

Yuu blinked. “So… you like me?”

Sebek sputtered. “I—LIKE—I—THAT IS TO SAY—MAYBE?!”

Yuu laughed, and suddenly it wasn’t so scary. “Okay. You can court me.”

He stood still for a full minute before falling to one knee like he was being knighted.

“I ACCEPT THIS MISSION.”

BONUS: Lilia’s reaction: “Oh ho~ My little Sebek is growing up~ Planning campaigns of love now, are we?”

Silver: (Asleep in the background) “He’s been reciting love poems in his sleep. I think it’s serious.”

[fatehbaz]

Edit: Removed the screenshot so as not to share dm stuff, but I got a message from someone who couldn't send an ask, inquiring: "i was wondering what book it was that you mentioned about the philippines? i'd be interested in reading it." Sorry to post; figured it would be a subject worth sharing with interested others. Good news: It's an article, so it's relatively easier to access and read.

Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. Hosted and published by Antipode Online. 4 January 2024.

Basically:

Explores connections between plantations in US-occupied Philippines and the policing institutions and technologies of Chicago. Martinez begins with racism in Chicago in the 1870s. Coinciding with Black movement to the city (from the South during Reconstruction and the Great Migration) Chicago was, in Martinez's telling, a center of white apprehension. Chicago public, newspapers, and institutions wanted to obsessively record information about Black people and labor dissidents, including details on their motivations and inner life. Between 1880-ish and 1910-ish Chicago then became a center of surveillance, records-keeping, classification systems, and new innovations in collecting information. Within a year after the labor rebellions, the Adjutant General of the US Army who led Chicago's militarized crackdown on the 1877 Great Railroad Strike immediately moved to DC and proposed establishing "the Military Information Division" (MID); eventually founded in 1885, MID started collecting hundreds of thousands of Bertillon-system intelligence cards on dissidents and "criminals." Meanwhile, National Association of Chiefs of Police headquartered their central bureau of identification (NBCI) in Chicago in 1896. At play here is not just the collection of information, but the classification systems organizing that information. The MID and related agencies would then go on to collect mass amounts of information on domestic residents across the US. In Martinez's telling, these policing beliefs and practices - including "management sciences" - were then "exported" by MID to the Philippines and used to monitor labor and anticolonial dissent. Another Chicago guy developed "personality typing" and psychological examinations to classify criminality, and then trained Philippines police forces to collect as much information as possible about colonial subjects.

The information-gathering in the Philippines constituted what other scholars like Alfred McCoy have called one of the United States' first "information revolutions"; McCoy described these practices and social/professional networks as "capillaries of empire." Martinez suggests that it's important to trace the lineage of these racialized anxieties and practices from Chicago to the Philippines, because "such feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant." And "[u]ltimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures [...] and feelings emanating from Chicago [...] that extended from the image of the American South."

Important context: 1899/1900-ish is when the US occupied or consolidated power in Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

---

Side-note:

The Bertillon system (bertillonage) was standardized at about this same time, 1879-ish, and in similar social and racial contexts, becoming popular in other Midwest/Great Lakes cities, especially to track Black people (though it was also rapidly and widely adopted famously as an essential approach across Europe). The system used body measurements to identify and classify people, especially "criminals," significantly involving photography, such that Bertillon is also sometimes credited as the originator of "the mugshot."

I'd add that the aforementioned police chiefs National Bureau of Criminal Identification (NBCI) stayed in Chicago from 1896 until 1902, when the killing of President McKinley frightened officials with potential of wider popular movements; at that point, it was moved to DC, as William Pinkerton (co-director of the Pinkerton agency) donated the agency's photograph collection to build the new bureau, and NBCI strengthened itself by collecting fingerprints and became the precursor to the FBI, founded 1908. (After 1895-ish especially, European authorities were transcending their petty rivalries to attempt forming international police agencies and share documents, tracking each others' domestic radicals/dissidents.)

---

You could compare the colonial use of Bertillon-style intelligence card systems in Chicago and US-occupied Philippines to the rise of fingerprinting as a weapon of Britain in India.

Edward Henry was the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, appointed 1891, basically the top cop in British India. He exchanged letters with notorious eugenicist Francis Galton, wherein they specifically talked about the importance of developing a classification system for fingerprints that could be used alongside the Bertillon system of anthropometric identification. (Another British imperial administrator in India, Sir William Herschel, had previously been the first to pioneer fingerprinting by taking hand-prints.) By 1897, police forces in India had been adopting the so-called Henry Classification System, and the Governor-General of India personally decreed that fingerprinting be adopted across India. By 1900, Henry was sent to South Africa to train police in classification systems. By 1903, Henry was back in Britain and became head of the Metropolitan Police of London, now the top cop in Britain. (Compare dates with US developments: British police in India adopt fingerprint identification system the same year that Chicago police found their proto-FBI central identification bureau. Less than a year after the US head-of-state gets killed, Britain super-charges the London police.)

So, the guy who pioneered fingerprinting classification for use in maintaining order and imperial power in India and other colonies was eventually brought in to deploy those tactics on Britons in the metropole.

The kind of colony-to-metropole violence thing described by many theorists. (Britain also developed traditions of police photography in context of rebellions in Jamaica and India. Outside of London, the first permanent "modern" police forces across the rest of Britain were legally provisioned for with the Irish Constabulary of 1837 and County Police Act of 1839, "coincidentally" just before/during a 27th of July 1838 "Vagrancy Act" law that made "joblessness" a crime which was put into effect JUST FOUR DAYS before the 1st of August 1838 date when emancipation of Black slaves in the British Caribbean was allowed. As in, four days before nearly a million Black residents of the Empire got legal freedom, Britain outlawed vagrancy and was building permanent national police forces.)

---

The 1890s were outrageous. Japan's domestic 1880 Penal Code was built on French models. The Ottoman Empire built a system of passport requirements to monitor movement; France did something similar in Algeria. In 1898, the Austria-Hungary imperial foreign minister called for the formation of an "International Police League." This prompted an Italian radical at the time to write:

"The police are the same in all parts of the world. Laws have been fabricated by the bourgeoisie on the same model; in this, the bourgeoisie is more international than we are."

And Great Lakes cities, after the Great Migration, were notorious for this kind of police violence. Consider how the Bertillon system was used early-on by Minneapolis police to track and target Black "alley workers" (try keyword-searching "Minneapolis Bertillon alley workers"). Or how Chicago was a focal point of antiblack violence in the Red Summer of 1919. Or how Milwaukee has some the most distinct Black-white segregation of any large urban area in the US. Or how, after Elliot Ness lionized law enforcement officials in Chicago during the Al Capone case, he then led policing operations in Cleveland culminating in the mass eviction and the burning of Kingsbury Run shantytown. (Chicago is like a funnel, a node, a hub. Especially after the 1860s: Center of railroad networks. Center of telegraph networks. Destination for Texas/Kansas cattle shipped to Chicago meatpacking houses. Destination for Corn Belt prairie agricultural products. Hence the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and Chicago's turn of the century image as a modernist metropolis. So they had to keep the laborers in line.)

---

Anyway, the other story that I mentioned regarding Philippines was from:

Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017.

For context, I'd note that this takes place in the midst of the US's "conquest of the mosquito" in its militarized occupation of Panama, where the canal was completed by the US between 1904 and 1914. (Again, US was occupying Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.)

In Mitman's story, Richard P. Strong was appointed as director of the brand-new Department of Tropical Medicine at Harvard in 1913. Shortly thereafter in 1914, as he toured plantations in Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, etc., Strong simultaneously took a job as director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of the United Fruit Company (infamous for its brutal labor conditions in plantations, its land-grabbing in Central America, and its relationship to US corporate power). Harvard hired Strong partially on the recommendation of General William Cameron Forbes, who was the military governor of US-occupied Philippines from 1909 to 1913. When Harvard hired Strong, he had been living in the Philippines, where he was the personal physician to Governor Forbes, and was also the director of the Philippine Bureau of Science's Biological Laboratory, where he had experimented on Filipino prisoners without their knowledge; Strong fatally infected these unknowing test-subjects with bubonic plague. Then, Governor Forbes, after leading the US occupation of the Philippines, himself became an overseer to Harvard AND a director of United Fruit Company (also Forbes was a banker and the son of the president of Bell Telephone Company). Meanwhile, Strong also became a shareholder in British rubber plantations; Strong approached Harvey Firestone to help encourage the massive rubber company to negotiate a deal to expand plantations in West Africa, where Firestone got a 99-year-long concession to lease a million acres of land in Liberia. So there's an intimate relationship between military, plantations, colonization, medical professionals, corporate profiteering, land dispossession, etc.

---

So, in each case, there is imperial anxiety about the threat of potential subversion from recalcitrant laborers. Imperial authorities cooperate and learn from each other. The rubber plantation owner is friends with the military general, who's friends with the laboratory technician, who's friends with the railroad developer, who's friends with the cop, who's friends with the forestry minister, who's friends with banana plantation owner. There are connections between the exercise of power in the Philippines and Panama and West Africa and Bengal and Chicago. Connections both material and imaginative.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!

I've been talking about fair use with laypeople for more than 20 years. I've met so many people who possess the unshakable, serene confidence of the truly wrong, like the people who think fair use means you can take x words from a book, or y seconds from a song and it will always be fair, while anything more will never be.

Or the people who think that if you violate any of the four factors, your use can't be fair – or the people who think that if you fail all of the four factors, you must be infringing (people, the Supreme Court is calling and they want to tell you about the Betamax!).

You might think that you can never quote a song lyric in a book without infringing copyright, or that you must clear every musical sample. You might be rock solid certain that scraping the web to train an AI is infringing. If you hold those beliefs, you do not understand the "fact intensive" nature of fair use.

But you can learn! It's actually a really cool and interesting and gnarly subject, and it's a favorite of copyright scholars, who have really fascinating disagreements and discussions about the subject. These discussions often key off of the controversies of the moment, but inevitably they implicate earlier fights about everything from the piano roll to 2 Live Crew to antiracist retellings of Gone With the Wind.

One of the most interesting discussions of fair use you can ask for took place in 2019, when the NYU Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy held a symposium called "Proving IP." One of the panels featured dueling musicologists debating the merits of the Blurred Lines case. That case marked a turning point in music copyright, with the Marvin Gaye estate successfully suing Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copying the "vibe" of Gaye's "Got to Give it Up."

Naturally, this discussion featured clips from both songs as the experts – joined by some of America's top copyright scholars – delved into the legal reasoning and future consequences of the case. It would be literally impossible to discuss this case without those clips.

And that's where the problems start: as soon as the symposium was uploaded to Youtube, it was flagged and removed by Content ID, Google's $100,000,000 copyright enforcement system. This initial takedown was fully automated, which is how Content ID works: rightsholders upload audio to claim it, and then Content ID removes other videos where that audio appears (rightsholders can also specify that videos with matching clips be demonetized, or that the ad revenue from those videos be diverted to the rightsholders).

But Content ID has a safety valve: an uploader whose video has been incorrectly flagged can challenge the takedown. The case is then punted to the rightsholder, who has to manually renew or drop their claim. In the case of this symposium, the rightsholder was Universal Music Group, the largest record company in the world. UMG's personnel reviewed the video and did not drop the claim.

99.99% of the time, that's where the story would end, for many reasons. First of all, most people don't understand fair use well enough to contest the judgment of a cosmically vast, unimaginably rich monopolist who wants to censor their video. Just as importantly, though, is that Content ID is a Byzantine system that is nearly as complex as fair use, but it's an entirely private affair, created and adjudicated by another galactic-scale monopolist (Google).

Google's copyright enforcement system is a cod-legal regime with all the downsides of the law, and a few wrinkles of its own (for example, it's a system without lawyers – just corporate experts doing battle with laypeople). And a single mis-step can result in your video being deleted or your account being permanently deleted, along with every video you've ever posted. For people who make their living on audiovisual content, losing your Youtube account is an extinction-level event:

https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

So for the average Youtuber, Content ID is a kind of Kafka-as-a-Service system that is always avoided and never investigated. But the Engelbert Center isn't your average Youtuber: they boast some of the country's top copyright experts, specializing in exactly the questions Youtube's Content ID is supposed to be adjudicating.

So naturally, they challenged the takedown – only to have UMG double down. This is par for the course with UMG: they are infamous for refusing to consider fair use in takedown requests. Their stance is so unreasonable that a court actually found them guilty of violating the DMCA's provision against fraudulent takedowns:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

But the DMCA's takedown system is part of the real law, while Content ID is a fake law, created and overseen by a tech monopolist, not a court. So the fate of the Blurred Lines discussion turned on the Engelberg Center's ability to navigate both the law and the n-dimensional topology of Content ID's takedown flowchart.

It took more than a year, but eventually, Engelberg prevailed.

Until they didn't.

If Content ID was a person, it would be baby, specifically, a baby under 18 months old – that is, before the development of "object permanence." Until our 18th month (or so), we lack the ability to reason about things we can't see – this the period when small babies find peek-a-boo amazing. Object permanence is the ability to understand things that aren't in your immediate field of vision.

Content ID has no object permanence. Despite the fact that the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel was the most involved fair use question the system was ever called upon to parse, it managed to repeatedly forget that it had decided that the panel could stay up. Over and over since that initial determination, Content ID has taken down the video of the panel, forcing Engelberg to go through the whole process again.

But that's just for starters, because Youtube isn't the only place where a copyright enforcement bot is making billions of unsupervised, unaccountable decisions about what audiovisual material you're allowed to access.

Spotify is yet another monopolist, with a justifiable reputation for being extremely hostile to artists' interests, thanks in large part to the role that UMG and the other major record labels played in designing its business rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to capture the podcasting market, in the hopes of converting one of the last truly open digital publishing systems into a product under its control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

Thankfully, that campaign has failed – but millions of people have (unwisely) ditched their open podcatchers in favor of Spotify's pre-enshittified app, so everyone with a podcast now must target Spotify for distribution if they hope to reach those captive users.

Guess who has a podcast? The Engelberg Center.

Naturally, Engelberg's podcast includes the audio of that Blurred Lines panel, and that audio includes samples from both "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up."

So – naturally – UMG keeps taking down the podcast.

Spotify has its own answer to Content ID, and incredibly, it's even worse and harder to navigate than Google's pretend legal system. As Engelberg describes in its latest post, UMG and Spotify have colluded to ensure that this now-classic discussion of fair use will never be able to take advantage of fair use itself:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/news/how-explaining-copyright-broke-the-spotify-copyright-system/

Remember, this is the best case scenario for arguing about fair use with a monopolist like UMG, Google, or Spotify. As Engelberg puts it:

The Engelberg Center had an extraordinarily high level of interest in pursuing this issue, and legal confidence in our position that would have cost an average podcaster tens of thousands of dollars to develop. That cannot be what is required to challenge the removal of a podcast episode.

Automated takedown systems are the tech industry's answer to the "notice-and-takedown" system that was invented to broker a peace between copyright law and the internet, starting with the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA implements (and exceeds) a pair of 1996 UN treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and most countries in the world have some version of notice-and-takedown.

Big corporate rightsholders claim that notice-and-takedown is a gift to the tech sector, one that allows tech companies to get away with copyright infringement. They want a "strict liability" regime, where any platform that allows a user to post something infringing is liable for that infringement, to the tune of $150,000 in statutory damages.

Of course, there's no way for a platform to know a priori whether something a user posts infringes on someone's copyright. There is no registry of everything that is copyrighted, and of course, fair use means that there are lots of ways to legally reproduce someone's work without their permission (or even when they object). Even if every person who ever has trained or ever will train as a copyright lawyer worked 24/7 for just one online platform to evaluate every tweet, video, audio clip and image for copyright infringement, they wouldn't be able to touch even 1% of what gets posted to that platform.

The "compromise" that the entertainment industry wants is automated takedown – a system like Content ID, where rightsholders register their copyrights and platforms block anything that matches the registry. This "filternet" proposal became law in the EU in 2019 with Article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

This was the most controversial directive in EU history, and – as experts warned at the time – there is no way to implement it without violating the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, so now it's stuck in limbo:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eus-copyright-directive-still-about-filters-eus-top-court-limits-its-use

As critics pointed out during the EU debate, there are so many problems with filternets. For one thing, these copyright filters are very expensive: remember that Google has spent $100m on Content ID alone, and that only does a fraction of what filternet advocates demand. Building the filternet would cost so much that only the biggest tech monopolists could afford it, which is to say, filternets are a legal requirement to keep the tech monopolists in business and prevent smaller, better platforms from ever coming into existence.

Filternets are also incapable of telling the difference between similar files. This is especially problematic for classical musicians, who routinely find their work blocked or demonetized by Sony Music, which claims performances of all the most important classical music compositions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

Content ID can't tell the difference between your performance of "The Goldberg Variations" and Glenn Gould's. For classical musicians, the best case scenario is to have their online wages stolen by Sony, who fraudulently claim copyright to their recordings. The worst case scenario is that their video is blocked, their channel deleted, and their names blacklisted from ever opening another account on one of the monopoly platforms.

But when it comes to free expression, the role that notice-and-takedown and filternets play in the creative industries is really a sideshow. In creating a system of no-evidence-required takedowns, with no real consequences for fraudulent takedowns, these systems are huge gift to the world's worst criminals. For example, "reputation management" companies help convicted rapists, murderers, and even war criminals purge the internet of true accounts of their crimes by claiming copyright over them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Remember how during the covid lockdowns, scumbags marketed junk devices by claiming that they'd protect you from the virus? Their products remained online, while the detailed scientific articles warning people about the fraud were speedily removed through false copyright claims:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud

Copyfraud – making false copyright claims – is an extremely safe crime to commit, and it's not just quack covid remedy peddlers and war criminals who avail themselves of it. Tech giants like Adobe do not hesitate to abuse the takedown system, even when that means exposing millions of people to spyware:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#gnash

Dirty cops play loud, copyrighted music during confrontations with the public, in the hopes that this will trigger copyright filters on services like Youtube and Instagram and block videos of their misbehavior:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

But even if you solved all these problems with filternets and takedown, this system would still choke on fair use and other copyright exceptions. These are "fact intensive" questions that the world's top experts struggle with (as anyone who watches the Blurred Lines panel can see). There's no way we can get software to accurately determine when a use is or isn't fair.

That's a question that the entertainment industry itself is increasingly conflicted about. The Blurred Lines judgment opened the floodgates to a new kind of copyright troll – grifters who sued the record labels and their biggest stars for taking the "vibe" of songs that no one ever heard of. Musicians like Ed Sheeran have been sued for millions of dollars over these alleged infringements. These suits caused the record industry to (ahem) change its tune on fair use, insisting that fair use should be broadly interpreted to protect people who made things that were similar to existing works. The labels understood that if "vibe rights" became accepted law, they'd end up in the kind of hell that the rest of us enter when we try to post things online – where anything they produce can trigger takedowns, long legal battles, and millions in liability:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

But the music industry remains deeply conflicted over fair use. Take the curious case of Katy Perry's song "Dark Horse," which attracted a multimillion-dollar suit from an obscure Christian rapper who claimed that a brief phrase in "Dark Horse" was impermissibly similar to his song "A Joyful Noise."

Perry and her publisher, Warner Chappell, lost the suit and were ordered to pay $2.8m. While they subsequently won an appeal, this definitely put the cold grue up Warner Chappell's back. They could see a long future of similar suits launched by treasure hunters hoping for a quick settlement.

But here's where it gets unbelievably weird and darkly funny. A Youtuber named Adam Neely made a wildly successful viral video about the suit, taking Perry's side and defending her song. As part of that video, Neely included a few seconds' worth of "A Joyful Noise," the song that Perry was accused of copying.

In court, Warner Chappell had argued that "A Joyful Noise" was not similar to Perry's "Dark Horse." But when Warner had Google remove Neely's video, they claimed that the sample from "Joyful Noise" was actually taken from "Dark Horse." Incredibly, they maintained this position through multiple appeals through the Content ID system:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

In other words, they maintained that the song that they'd told the court was totally dissimilar to their own was so indistinguishable from their own song that they couldn't tell the difference!

Now, this question of vibes, similarity and fair use has only gotten more intense since the takedown of Neely's video. Just this week, the RIAA sued several AI companies, claiming that the songs the AI shits out are infringingly similar to tracks in their catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/record-labels-sue-music-generators-suno-and-udio-1235042056/

Even before "Blurred Lines," this was a difficult fair use question to answer, with lots of chewy nuances. Just ask George Harrison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord

But as the Engelberg panel's cohort of dueling musicologists and renowned copyright experts proved, this question only gets harder as time goes by. If you listen to that panel (if you can listen to that panel), you'll be hard pressed to come away with any certainty about the questions in this latest lawsuit.

The notice-and-takedown system is what's known as an "intermediary liability" rule. Platforms are "intermediaries" in that they connect end users with each other and with businesses. Ebay and Etsy and Amazon connect buyers and sellers; Facebook and Google and Tiktok connect performers, advertisers and publishers with audiences and so on.

For copyright, notice-and-takedown gives platforms a "safe harbor." A platform doesn't have to remove material after an allegation of infringement, but if they don't, they're jointly liable for any future judgment. In other words, Youtube isn't required to take down the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel, but if UMG sues Engelberg and wins a judgment, Google will also have to pay out.

During the adoption of the 1996 WIPO treaties and the 1998 US DMCA, this safe harbor rule was characterized as a balance between the rights of the public to publish online and the interest of rightsholders whose material might be infringed upon. The idea was that things that were likely to be infringing would be immediately removed once the platform received a notification, but that platforms would ignore spurious or obviously fraudulent takedowns.

That's not how it worked out. Whether it's Sony Music claiming to own your performance of "Fur Elise" or a war criminal claiming authorship over a newspaper story about his crimes, platforms nuke first and ask questions never. Why not? If they ignore a takedown and get it wrong, they suffer dire consequences ($150,000 per claim). But if they take action on a dodgy claim, there are no consequences. Of course they're just going to delete anything they're asked to delete.

This is how platforms always handle liability, and that's a lesson that we really should have internalized by now. After all, the DMCA is the second-most famous intermediary liability system for the internet – the most (in)famous is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This is a 27-word law that says that platforms are not liable for civil damages arising from their users' speech. Now, this is a US law, and in the US, there aren't many civil damages from speech to begin with. The First Amendment makes it very hard to get a libel judgment, and even when these judgments are secured, damages are typically limited to "actual damages" – generally a low sum. Most of the worst online speech is actually not illegal: hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are all covered by the First Amendment.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment, there are categories of speech that US law criminalizes: actual threats of violence, criminal harassment, and committing certain kinds of legal, medical, election or financial fraud. These are all exempted from Section 230, which only provides immunity for civil suits, not criminal acts.

What Section 230 really protects platforms from is being named to unwinnable nuisance suits by unscrupulous parties who are betting that the platforms would rather remove legal speech that they object to than go to court. A generation of copyfraudsters have proved that this is a very safe bet:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

In other words, if you made a #MeToo accusation, or if you were a gig worker using an online forum to organize a union, or if you were blowing the whistle on your employer's toxic waste leaks, or if you were any other under-resourced person being bullied by a wealthy, powerful person or organization, that organization could shut you up by threatening to sue the platform that hosted your speech. The platform would immediately cave. But those same rich and powerful people would have access to the lawyers and back-channels that would prevent you from doing the same to them – that's why Sony can get your Brahms recital taken down, but you can't turn around and do the same to them.

This is true of every intermediary liability system, and it's been true since the earliest days of the internet, and it keeps getting proven to be true. Six years ago, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that allowed platforms to be held civilly liable by survivors of sex trafficking. At the time, advocates claimed that this would only affect "sexual slavery" and would not impact consensual sex-work.

But from the start, and ever since, SESTA/FOSTA has primarily targeted consensual sex-work, to the immediate, lasting, and profound detriment of sex workers:

https://hackinghustling.org/what-is-sesta-fosta/

SESTA/FOSTA killed the "bad date" forums where sex workers circulated the details of violent and unstable clients, killed the online booking sites that allowed sex workers to screen their clients, and killed the payment processors that let sex workers avoid holding unsafe amounts of cash:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law-continues

SESTA/FOSTA made voluntary sex work more dangerous – and also made life harder for law enforcement efforts to target sex trafficking:

https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/

Despite half a decade of SESTA/FOSTA, despite 15 years of filternets, despite a quarter century of notice-and-takedown, people continue to insist that getting rid of safe harbors will punish Big Tech and make life better for everyday internet users.

As of now, it seems likely that Section 230 will be dead by then end of 2025, even if there is nothing in place to replace it:

https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/bipartisan-energy-and-commerce-leaders-announce-legislative-hearing-on-sunsetting-section-230

This isn't the win that some people think it is. By making platforms responsible for screening the content their users post, we create a system that only the largest tech monopolies can survive, and only then by removing or blocking anything that threatens or displeases the wealthy and powerful.

Filternets are not precision-guided takedown machines; they're indiscriminate cluster-bombs that destroy anything in the vicinity of illegal speech – including (and especially) the best-informed, most informative discussions of how these systems go wrong, and how that blocks the complaints of the powerless, the marginalized, and the abused.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/yt-fu-1b.png

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[louis-quatorze]

snippet

Wrote this out in notes on the train for the Discord, where we were discussing Aldo's theologian friends being even gayer than he is. it's too much of a little thing for me to put it on Ao3 but I did want to store it somewhere visible, so.

Vincent gingerly stepped out into the small garden, exhaling softly. High-level theology had never been an interest of his. At some point it all just got too abstract, and ultimately, he was a man of action. Endless discussions just made him restless. But, as he was constantly reminding himself, he was Pope now, and that came with responsibilities. There needed to be a theological plan for the Innocent papacy. Which meant he had to take this all seriously. 

Another reminder that, as dangerous as Kabul had been, it was so much more straightforward. 

A peal of laughter cut through the air, interrupting his thoughts. 

“You are such a liar, Jogi! Don’t think I won’t ask Karol myself.”

“Well, then it depends on whether he likes you or me more.”

Another burst of laughter. Vincent had been working with Aldo Cardinal Bellini for five months at this point and he’d never heard him laugh. He’d kept him on as Secretary of State based on the late Holy Father’s fondness for him and his need for someone who knew the Vatican, and had found him, as promised, diligent and dedicated, professional. What he hadn’t found was the warmth that his dear Thomas had promised, the sense of Aldo as a person and not an instrument. He was invaluable in the first months of Vincent’s papacy, but reserved, a mystery still.

But there were people who made Aldo laugh. 

The symposium had mostly been of Aldo’s design, and Vincent had left him to it. He had the contacts and interest. He’d known that Aldo was once a theologian, a promising one, before moving to the diplomatic service. He’d read Aldo’s file and knew the way the late Holy Father had described him. Somehow, though, Vincent hadn’t fully considered that Aldo might know these men beyond a list of names and publications.

His curiosity got the better of him, as it frequently did, and he pushed away from the column he was hiding behind, turning to see his Secretary of State sitting around a small wrought-iron table with two men. One was large and ruddy-faced, with a swoop of blond hair going white over his forehead, holding a cigarette languidly like an old Hollywood star. The other had a lined, narrow face, white hair streaked with gray cascading to his shoulders and a smirk playing at his lips. Their red zucchetto and clothing marked them for cardinals, which meant Vincent should probably have remembered them from the conclave, but it was all such a blur in his head. 

The long-haired one noticed him first, raising his considerable eyebrows, causing Aldo to turn. He rose, the mirth slipping off his face. “Your Holiness.”

Vincent raised his hand, gesturing for Aldo to sit back down. He’d worked him down to Vincent in private, but Aldo was always so aware of protocol. “My apologies, I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Nothing to interrupt, we’re just gossiping,” said the blond, a lilting, amused tint to his voice.

“Pieter!” Aldo snapped, huffing softly at the other man’s nonchalant shrug before smoothing down his cassock and turning back to Vincent. “Your holiness, let me introduce Pieter Cardinal Vandroogenbroek and Joachim Cardinal Löwenstein.”

“Charmed,” said Cardinal Vandroogenbroek, gesturing with his cigarette, and Vincent couldn’t help but be amused at the contrast between Aldo’s perpetually wound energy and that of his friends. He recalled their names from the dossier Aldo had passed to him last week. A former professor of theology, an Archbishop Emeritus from southern Germany, both thorns in the side of previous Papacies. Not easily intimidated, then. Aldo’s friends. Curious. 

“Come, sit down,” said Cardinal Löwenstein, waving at the remaining chair. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

Vincent felt suddenly nervous. He was no theologian. He didn’t know these men, their clear history together. But they were intriguing, in their connection to Aldo and their obvious effeminacy. It was something he got a glimpse of with Aldo on occasion, in the roll of his eyes or an acerbic comment to his secretary, but it was hard to get past his reserve. So he took the offered seat, arranging himself as neatly as possible. “Have you?”

Cardinal Vandroogenbroek took a drag of his cigarette and peered at Vincent curiously. “Well, dear, you are the Pope.”

“But more importantly, you’re keeping our Aldo employed, which is a good thing for us all.”

“Excuse me?” Aldo said, looking mildly affronted. 

Cardinal Vandroogenbroek patted Aldo’s shoulder reassuringly. “The world couldn’t handle you bored.” 

“Hmph.”

“How are you finding the circus?” Cardinal Löwenstein asked Vincent with a kind, conspiratorial smile.  

“The cir…oh.” Vincent laughed softly, amused at the impertinence. It was not a terrible description of the Vatican. “It’s…well…”

“Awful?” Cardinal Vandroogenbroek drawled. “We’ve never been sure whether Aldo is a martyr or masochist, staying like he does.” 

“Some of us,” Aldo said waspishly, although there was a smile at the edge of his mouth, “want to do more than sniping from the cheap seats.”

“My seats are never cheap,” Vandroogenbrook replied archly, and Aldo’s smile broke through.

Vincent smiled as well. There was a warmth, a camaraderie, that was palatable at the table. This was a hostile place, in many ways, but Aldo had carved out a community in it anyway. And maybe he could do something with that.

[renegadephilosopher]

"WHAT PLATO SHOULD I READ!!!!!!" (A HANDY GUIDE) (not all are represented)

"I hate myself!" - The sophists

"I wish I had experienced sex at some point in my lifetime! Or perhaps recently!" - The Symposium

Alternatively: "I am experiencing a terrible insatiable pining and am on verge of tears!" - The Symposium

"I love it when someone's a slightly arrogant asshole!" - The Euthyphro

"It really bothers me when people ignore their friends!" - The Crito

"I've always thought about how nice soldiers look in their little outfits but I think they should train naked instead sometimes!" - The Laches

"I want to imagine a place that may or may not suck for everoyne involved!" - The Republic

"I imagine Socrates would have enjoyed oiling up young Athenian men with olive oil granted the chance!" - The Charmides

"I need to understand the concept of hotness so I can do it myself!" - The Phaedrus

"Does Socrates experience love, and if so, what does it look like?" - The Alcibiades I

"How do I know if I even have friends?" - The Lysis

"I'm not a Socrates fan :(" - The Phaedo

Alternatively: "I am a huge Socrates fan and would like to see him surrounded by friends, but I also take pleasure in crying!" - The Phaedo

"Socrates did nothing wrong!" - The Apology

"I love to know about murder mysteries!" - The Hipparchus

"I'm a math major!" - The Theatetus, The Timeus

"I understood AND enjoyed Hegel!" - The Parmenides

"I don't think it's possible for people to get better!" - The Protagoras

"I forget things often!" - The Meno

[lavenderprose]

I think everybody has that one scene in a fic that they're gnawing at the bars of their enclosure to write and sometimes I'm so inclined to just write it and that's not how my creative process has ever worked but maybe it should be. I really really just want to get to the part in concrete flower where Rook goes to Emmrich's panel at a very stuffy and serious symposium on traditional Nevarran death care and lets all of the lingo wash over her head completely uncomprehended because Emmrich is very beautiful and powerful up on the stage in this 1500-seater auditorium with a lav mic band-aided to the side of his face picking up every sound his mouth makes when he licks his lips or sips water. He talks for forty five uninterrupted minutes and somehow Rook doesn't think anyone else finds it nearly as erotic as she does. When they meet up afterward, Rook immediately goes down on him and realizes that he's wearing lace underwear--something he apparently does as a confidence booster when he's particularly nervous about a lecture. Why was he nervous about this one? He knew Rook was going to be there.

And Rook is like, Why are you nervous about me, a Minrathous Garbage Person, coming to your very fancy necromancy symposium? This is said during brief breaks for breath while she sucks his soul straight out.

And Emmrich, who's trying very hard not to fall in love with her, just kind of blabbers that he tends to forget his train of thought when she's around, heedless of the fact that that is THE most besotted thing that anyone has ever said.

Rook, who's trying very hard not to fall in love with him, assumes that this is just another quirk of Emmrich's character and not a confession from deep in his soul and determinedly gargles his balls just to shut herself up.

Then she probably does something unhinged like leave her underwear in his pocket with a note telling him they're for his next lecture.

Anyway that's been one of my big things to rotate on my commute. There's something extremely wrong with me.

[world-of-wales]

THE CENTRE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD HAS ANNOUNCED FUNDING FOR AN INNOVATIVE MENTAL HEALTH PILOT ✨️

The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood announced that will fund an innovative new pilot to better understand how mental health experts in early education settings can support babies and young children’s social and emotional development.

Happy Little Minds is a collaboration between leading children’s charities Barnardo’s and Place2Be, and :

• mental health practitioners providing bespoke training and ongoing consultation about social and emotional development for nearly 50 early education practitioners in two nurseries in Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

• The practitioners will also provide guidance for parents and directly work with some children and families.

It is expected that around 150 babies, young children, and their families will benefit from the pilot, which starts this month and will take place over a 12-month period.

The Princess of Wales has long championed the importance of social and emotional development as critically important for enabling babies and young children to be mentally healthy, both in the short term and for the long-lasting impact on the rest of their lives.

Earlier this year, The Centre for Early Childhood published The Shaping Us Framework – aimed at improving awareness of and knowledge about social and emotional skills to inspire action across society.

The framework, and other supporting resources being created by the Centre, will be part of the package of training and support given to staff.

The idea for this project was sparked at the Shaping Us National Symposium in November 2023, when a leading infant mental health expert from Barnardo’s had a discussion with Catherine Roche, Chief Executive of children’s mental health charity Place2Be. Inspired by the content of the day, the two further developed the idea and approached The Royal Foundation for funding for this initial pilot, with a view to co-developing a model with families and practitioners to understand what is feasible and developing a model which could be delivered at scale in future.

The announcement of this pilot comes during Infant Mental Health Awareness Week.

[a-mythologynerd]

Alex Stern, Darlington, and Dante in Hell

DISCLAIMER: Okay so I'm realizing this post might have several parts as I'm only like half way through the Cantos and there are definitely more connections (i.e. Alex waking up on the second trip to Hell in the river of boiling blood and the 7th circle of Hell.) Also, people literally write whole ass academic articles about intertextuality and I do not have that much free time so if anyone is scholar of Dante please feel free to chime in. So. Also this is so long. I am both sorry and begging you to make the hours typing and looking into this worth it.

Okay, so as most folks know and probably connected, Dante's Inferno starts with:

"At one point midway on our path in life, I came around and found myself now searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost" -Inferno, Canto 1, lines 1-3

and when Team Murder awakes they find themselves in a similar orchard:

"She looked up and realized she was staring through the branches of a tree, many trees. She was in some kind of forest... no, an orchard, the branches black and glittering and heavily laden with fruit, its skin darkest purple." -Hell Bent, pg. 271

Now this is also connected to the Tree of Knowledge by Dawes (pg. 272) and of course we get some Hymn of Demeter like pomegranates from the orchard of Hades that Persephone eats.

But Leigh Bardugo in her many connections of cthonic stories (love Darlington's line about who is Dante, Virgil, Beatrice, Orpheus, and Eurydice) is of course pulling directly from the Inferno in more ways than the opening. In Dante's Inferno, of which I am no expert, as Dante is being guided through the underworld by Virgil he passes through several circles of hell each focused on the punishment of a certain sin and sinner.

Now Darlington is trapped in Hell after being eaten by the Hell Beast, specifically because he mercy killed his grandfather and is therefore a murderer. But here's the thing. He's not punished for murder. He's sent to Golgarot who is a demon prince of greed.

"Turner tapped the book he was reading. 'You thought Darlington got eaten, right? By Mammon?' 'Maybe,' Dawes said cautiously. 'There are a lot of demons associated with greed. Devils. Gods.' Greed is a sin in every language. That was what Darlington had said. Sandow's hunger for money. Darlington's desire for knowledge." -Hell Bent pg. 311

Darlington is ambitious. This goes as far as his Hell vision from Golgarot. He doesn't dream of tenure or just a filled house or feeling like the hero. My guy dreams of being able to know everything ever in a never ending symposium where he also has traveled the world and absorbed the wisdom of mystics and scholars by simply touching them. That's not just ambition that drives someone to train and hone himself for adventures to come, that's greed. And his mortal soul's punishment is tragic and narratively fitting surrounded by the ruins of a legacy he has barely been keeping afloat with odd jobs and his bare hands:

"He had a rock in his hands, and as they watched, he lugged it over to what might have been the beginning or end of a wall and laid it carefully atop the other stones...He didn't stop moving, didn't alter his gaze...Darlington didn't break his stride, but Alex could see his chest rising and falling as if he was fighting for air. 'Please,' he gritted out. 'Can't...stop.'" -Hell Bent pg. 277

Except it's more than just narratively fitting. It's quite similar punishment for greed and avarice Dante describes in the 4th circle of hell where the guilty push stones or weights (depending on the translation) over and over again and do not speak to Dante and Virgil, other souls guilty of anger and melancholy babble nonsense. The Canto begins with Plutus, the Greek and Roman god of riches, wealth, and abundance, speaking nonsense words to Virgil and Dante. Virgil, a great speaker himself, responds in telling him to be silent and calls him a wolf. The Commentary in my translation by Robin Kirkpatrick discusses how Dante equates greed and the pursuit of specifically money as a pervision of intelligence. The lack of speech and inability to speak in contrast to Virgil is as Kirkpatrick puts it,

"Dante combines an irrepressible linguistic inventiveness with a profound sense that corruptions of mind and sensibility are directly reflected in corrupted applications of language, or in the lessening of a capacity for coherent thought and word...Intelligence here is reduced to the rolling of boulders, a subjection of mind and energy to mere materiality."- Commentary and Notes, pg. 341-342

And um. Yeah.

"Darlington had been frightening to the shades of the Veil and even to himself. It had been...If he was honest, it had been exhilarating. He had been a creature of the mind since he was a boy– languages, history, science. The rest of it, the training he'd put himself through–fighting, swordplay, even acrobatics– had all been in service to the future adventures he'd been sure he would have. But the great invitation had never come...And now? Was he human enough? He had been able to sit at the table and hold a conversation. He hadn't growled at anyone or broken any furniture, but it hadn't been easy. Demons were not thinking creatures. They operated on instinct, driven by their appetites. He had prided himself on being nothing like that. Never rash. Guided by reason. But now he wanted in a way he never had. He had been tempted to bury his face in his soup bowl and lap at it like a greedy animal. He wanted to place himself between Alex's legs now and do the same to her." -Hell Bent, pg. 414

and

"He had been prepared to speak, a quote from... His demon mind couldn't manage it. He remembered Alex with her book of poems. Hart Crane. He grasped at the words." -Hell Bent, pg. 465

But the connection doesn't stop there. Dante sees several beasts when he first enters the woods. They are warped versions of a leopard, a lion, and a wolf. One is a leopard who is often interpreted as a representation of lust, the other is lion for pride, and finally and most relevant to us, a wolf for greed. The wolf that Virgil calls Plutus. The wolves that guard Golgarot's realm that are not quite wolves. That chase our Team Murder and become their demons.

So. Long story short. Darlington and his demon form are not just a metaphor for beast like animal instincts of the inhuman. It's another reflection of greed and what in pursuing it and worshiping it, leaves one without human reason, speech, the mind. All things that define Darlington and he sees as integral to his personhood. Except his greed in pursuing those very things of knowledge and magic and wisdom and the unknown leave him with less than he started with. And its tragic and amazing and I need to read more analyses of Inferno and the rest of the Comedy and the third book needs to come out so we can see how else Leigh Bardugo combined the circles of hell and New Haven.

[kuroshitsuji-wiki]

Season 5: Blu-Ray/DVD Volume 2 and store benefits

(Source)

The cover of the second Blu-ray/DVD volume was revealed!

Volume 2 information:

Release date: August 13, 2025 Content: Episodes 4-6 Limited bonus content: Setting Material Collection Vol. 1, Special card with cast talk Vol. 2, Special Event Priority Ticket (Nighttime) Item numbers: ANZB-17844〜17846 (DVD; limited), ANZX-17844〜17846 (Blu-Ray; limited)

The special event will be held on January 17, 2026 at the Makuhari International Training Center's Symposium Hall.

The volume comes in a three-sided box illustrated by Character Designer Yumi Shimizu and with a booklet.

Some of the special store benefits were revealed as well!

Scented illustration card: Available with purchases at Aniplex Online, anime, Amazon ([Amazon.co.jp only] products only), Rakuten Books (only for carts with benefits), Seven Net Shopping, Sofmap anime, amiami (online shop), HMV, and Animaru.

A4 Artboard/Acrylic stand: You can get either the artboard or the acrylic stand when you purchase all volumes at Animate.

A5 Character Fine Graph/Acrylic keychain set: You can get either the fine graph or the keychain set when you purchase all volumes at Rakuten Books (only for carts with benefits).

(Source)

Eco bag: Available when you purchase all volumes at Seven Net Shopping.

2L Character Fine Mat: Available when you purchase all volumes at Amazon.co.jp.

A5 Acrylic Character Plate: Available when you purchase all volumes at amiami (online shop).

(Source)

There will be more store benefits (for Aniplex, Animaru, and another one for Animate), but their designs have not been unveiled yet.