bomberqueen17 - Tumblr blog

[bomberqueen17]

Went to make a post about Moth to a Flame and realised it comes out in one month and two days. Which is... soon. That is soon. And I have a major PhD deadline to meet and two conference papers to write and give between now and then. Yikes.

[bomberqueen17]

you guys literally are all so brave. even through the screen i can tell. keep going

[bomberqueen17]

Yet Another SSP

A short (1k) and rather self-indulgent scene showing how Glorfindel met Ecthelion.

And so, the story begins... and by the story I mean my story colection about these two.

[bomberqueen17]

“Why did you follow this person ? uwu”

I’ve been here for fourteen years, do you think I remember? I don’t know who any of these people are anymore. I don’t know why they’re on my dash. I allow them to stay because they haven’t pissed me off enough to unfollow them yet. “Why did you follow this person?” I’m not sure I ever did. They’re just part of my ecosystem now.

[bomberqueen17]

hood wrap

OK so when I bought my boring silver car i was like "i'm gonna find some art and put it on a hood wrap and then my car won't be so boring" and then of course i did not do that.

but this past... whenver that was, my mom came to visit and on THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS with several people in tow I tried to get into the WRONG SILVER CAR. Once it was a Crosstrek, understandable mistake. Once it was a fucking, Honda something. Like not even close! Ugh. And everyone's standing there and I'm clicking my clicker and all three times I look in and i"m like "that's not my stuff in the center console" and then I turn my head and there's my car, two spaces down, blinking forlornly at me. WHOOPS.

So I've got to get off my ass and actually do it, get some art and get this fucking hood wrap put on, because my car is Too Anonymous.

So the first step is, I'm gonna commission Sass to draw me something amazing. I already figure, two figures at least, some kind of action pose. A dragon and a unicorn maybe. IDK. No background, just some kind of gradient. A rainbow color scheme. This is all fine.

But i need some inspiration for what to request, so I'm just putting it out here. My original inspiration was "sick wizard van" but i don't want a wizard because people are going to keep trying to assign that to a specific fandom and i don't want a Fan Van, I just don't want to be tied down like that. i want something Generic Fantasy.

So anyway if you've seen any art like that or are stricken with any inspiration, please send me inspiration pictures or breathless descriptions of your awesome idea, so I can get this commission together. (I meanwhile have to research what kind of resolution and dimensions a hood wrap needs to be printed to, so.)

I need it to be kinda SFW and not anything that's going to inspire cops to persecute me or offend family members and all; i know i'd said "titty wizard" but honestly i should probably not put titties on my car just because we live in a society and i don't want to be tired about it all the time. Hence probably sticking with non-anthropormorphic figures.

though, i *could* have a smaller-scale titty wizard riding the unicorn into battle or something, if it wasn't the main focus of the composition. That of course makes this three figures rather than two but I can afford that, LOL, if I'm doing this at all. which i AM. so.

(gandalf big naturals in the background in morvran's baltimore robe)

[bomberqueen17]

[bomberqueen17]

[bomberqueen17]

tired

it's 8pm here and i just finally finished my thrice-weekly PT exercises which i didn't have time to do any earlier today and i was so tired and sore when i started and i'm so tired and sore now i'm done and i didn't want to do them and i groaned the entire time but i did do them and so i am posting here that i did them because i'm not exactly proud of myself and i'm not getting any serotonin or dopamine or whatever out of this but i feel like i should write it down so some other time when i'm not so tired i can say hey, b, that was good that you did that, and you deserve butt-pats.

I do deserve butt-pats.

instead I'm going to combine mucinex and sudafed and hope that gets me through the night. oh yeah! i got farmkid's cold, complete with stuffed, oozing sinuses and a wet, rippling full-chest cough, i'm doing fucking great.

I did package like 150 lbs of chicken sausage today, and managed to make at least some dick jokes, so we know i'm not dead. I suspected I was feverish though, and tried to take my temperature, and it came back between 89.9F and 92.4F, so it's possible I am dead, which wasn't the result I expected right then.

I guess we'll see if any bits of me fall off.

[bomberqueen17]

I love the subtle little local accents that aren't easy to pin down or explain to outsiders - like, do I have a distinctive accent? When I'm talking to people from a thousand kilometres away, I don't sound distinct to them. I've tried, but I can't switch from one accent or the other to demonstrate them.

And then one day my Youtube background noise played someone whose vowels itched in the back of my mind but didn't really ping me, until he had to recite the letters of a common acronym

at which point my head whipped around and I said, "That bastard's from [local AM radio station] broadcast range."

And he was! He's from my fucking city! I think my brother met him once!

Academics actually hotly (read: tepidly) debate whether my region has a distinct accent, which I understand, because like I said, it's incredibly subtle and it mostly comes out in informal settings or when falling into the singsong chant of reciting some memorized speech.

Our society delights in recording and analyzing and cataloguing knowledge, and that's actually a good thing on the whole. But every once in a while it's nice to know something Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary or Yelp doesn't.

[bomberqueen17]

I'm getting depressingly good at identifying the formula for Pop Academic Books About ADHD.

Regardless of their philosophy it pretty much goes like this:

1. Emotionally sensitive essay about the struggle of ADHD and the author's personal experience with it as both a person with ADHD and a healthcare professional.

2. Either during or directly following this, a lightly explicated catalogue of symptoms, illustrated by anecdotes from patient case studies. Optional: frequent, heavy use of metaphor to explain ADHD-driven behavior.

3. Several chapters follow, each dedicated to a symptom; these have a mini-formula of their own. They open with a patient case study, discuss the highly relatable aspects of the specific symptom or behavior, then offer some lightweight examples of a treatment for the symptom, usually accompanied by follow up results from the earlier case studies.

4. Somewhere around halfway-to-two-thirds through the book, the author introduces the more in-depth explication of the treatment system (often their own homebrew) they are advocating. These are generally both personally-driven (as opposed to suggested cultural changes, which makes sense given these books' target audience, more on this later) and composed of an elaborate system of either behavior alteration or mental reframing. Whether this system is actually implementable by the average reader varies wildly.

5. A brief optional section on how to make use of ADHD as a tool (usually referring to ADHD or some of its symptoms as a superpower at least once). Sometimes this section restates the importance of using the systems from part 4 to harness that superpower. Frequently, if present, it feels like an afterthought.

6. Summation and list of further resources, often including other books which follow this formula.

I know I'm being a little sarcastic, but realistically there's nothing inherently wrong about the formula, like in itself it's not a red flag. It's just hilariously recognizable once you've noticed it.

It makes sense that these books advocate for the Reader With ADHD undertaking personal responsibility for their treatment, since these are in the tradition of self-help publishing. They're aimed at people who are already interested in doing their own research on their disability and possible ways to handle it. It's not really fair to ask them to be policy manuals, but I do find it interesting that even books which advocate stuff like volunteering (for whatever reason, usually to do with socialization issues and isolation, often DBT-adjacent) never suggest disability activism either generally or with an ADHD-specific bent.

None of these books suggest that perhaps life with ADHD could be made easier with increased accommodations or ease of medication access, and that it might be in a person's best interest to engage in political advocacy surrounding these and other disability-related issues. Or that activism related to ADHD might help to give someone with ADHD a stronger sense of ownership of their unique neurology. Or that if you have ADHD the idea of activism or even medical self-advocacy is crushingly stressful, and ways that stress might be dealt with.

It does make me want to write one of my own. "The Deviant Chaos Guide To Being A Miscreant With ADHD". Includes chapters on how to get an actual accurate assessment, tips for managing a prescription for a controlled substance, medical and psychiatric self-advocacy for people who are conditioned against confrontation, When To Lie About Being Neurodivergent, policy suggestions for ADHD-related legislation, tips for activism while executively dysfunked, and to close the book a biting satire of the pop media idea of self-care. ("Feeling sad? Make yourself a nice pot of chicken soup from scratch and you'll feel better in no time. Stay tuned after this rambling personal essay for the most mediocre chicken soup recipe you've ever seen!" "Have you considered planning and executing an overly elaborate criminal heist as a way to meet people and stay busy?")

Every case study or personal anecdote in the book will have a different name and demographics attached but will also make it obvious that they are all really just me, in the prose equivalent of a cheap wig, writing about my life. "Kelly, age seven, says she struggles to stay organized using the systems neurotypical children might find easy. I had to design my own accounting spreadsheet in order to make sure I always have enough in checking to cover the mortgage, she told me, fidgeting with the pop socket on her smartphone."

I feel a little bad making fun, because these books are often the best resource people can get (in itself concerning). It's like how despite my dislike of AA, I don't dunk on it in public because I don't want to offer people an excuse not to seek help. It feels like punching down to criticize these books, even though it's a swing at an industry that is mainly, it seems, here to profit from me. But one does get tired of skimming the hype for the real content only to find the real content isn't that useful either.

Les (not his real name) was diagnosed at the age of 236. Charming, well-read, and wealthy, he still spent much of his afterlife feeling deeply inadequate about his perceived shortcomings. "Vampire culture doesn't really acknowledge ADHD as a condition," he says. "My sire wouldn't understand, even though he probably has it as well. You should see the number of coffins containing the soil of his homeland that he's left lying forgotten all over Europe." A late diagnosis validated his feelings of difference, but on its own can't help when he hyperfocuses on seducing mortals who cross his path and forgets to get home before sunrise. "I have stock in sunburn gel companies," he jokes.

[bomberqueen17]

btw if you're annoyed with Google search giving you results for stuff that's similar to but not actually what you typed in, go to search tools, go to where it says "all results" and change that to "verbatim" and then it will search for what you actually asked for

why this is not the default is beyond me other than obvs enshittification but it has rescued a bunch of searches for me lately where the top results were completely unhelpful until i switched to that so. might be helpful for others

[bomberqueen17]

new work: nothing greater for a man to get

newest fill for @vrsos 🙏

foltest/roche, explicit, blasphemy, confessional sex, worldbuilding, inappropriate use of religious metaphors

It takes a moment for him to recognise his commander in the lean figure he passes in line, cowled head bowed low over a little scrap of paper prayer. Without his trappings of office, Vernon Roche is easy to glance right past, a trait no doubt he’s cultivated under Thaler’s abusive verbal teachings and makes use of on a regular basis during his more clandestine dealings. He looks plain, underfed and average, rather than the deadly knife Foltest has made of him. Foltest slips into line behind him, grinning beneath the cover of his hood. “I didn't take you for a religious man,” he says, gripping him by the elbow and steering him out of line. Vernon has better presence of mind than to start a fight in a temple, but the way he goes stiff and electric means he's restraining himself beautifully. He whips around as Foltest yanks him into the shadows, a snarl on his face and then his eyes go very wide and round at the sight of Foltest beneath his ragged cloak. “Your Majesty?” he gapes.

bingo card hereerererrrrreee now i actually have to do the isengrim one lol

[bomberqueen17]

Must Farm musings, cont'd

As I've continued to mull over what I wrote in the last post, it strikes me that it'd be good to kind of inventory what was, and what was not, found in the settlement, so that we can more effectively speculate on what we can't know, which is: what actually happened.

Some things weren't found in the settlement because they would not have been preserved. Animal fiber textiles, for example; wool would burn differently than linen or lime fiber; the plant-based stuff was charred and preserved, but wool burns to a crumbly ash, and furthermore the ph of the mud was such that protein-based things like wool and skin would not have survived even if they were not burnt to ash. There were potentially as many bobbins of spun wool thread as linen, but the wool would not have survived at all, so we have no way to know. Likewise, certainly these people knew how to work leather, but there is no evidence of it-- but it would not have survived, and so there being no sign of it doesn't mean it wasn't there. Every bed could have had a sheepskin coverlet and we just wouldn't know.

(I personally think, if they built this site over the winter, and were there through high summer, but it burned in late summer or early autumn-- see the flax processing debris from late July, emmer wheat spikelets from July or August, but no hazelnuts or berry seeds?-- they didn't have much wool from their flock in storage. They'd've sheared them in the spring, though I'd have to look up Bronze Age sheep to be sure-- they might be the kind you roo rather than shearing? i don't know if we know, but it seems reasonable that the wool would be a springtime product, and so would all have been spun/woven by now, and they'd recently switched over to linen because the flax had come ripe. So there were likely many finished items of wool lost in the fire-- bedding, clothing, wall hangings??-- but not bobbins or in-progress weavings, that was all likely flax.)

Some things were not found in the settlement that absolutely would have been preserved-- buckles, pins, clothing accessories. Things we know from other Bronze Age artifact assemblages, preserved in other contexts-- often as grave goods. They would be there, if they'd been left behind.

So it's safe to assume that the people left wearing most of their clothing and normal accessories. Even a wealthy person of this era would likely not have multiples of accessories like belt buckles and shawl pins, so we can assume they'd have worn them more or less daily. This doesn't necessarily mean anything, except that the fire did not happen at night. They weren't rousted out in their pajamas. But that goes with my earlier conclusion, that they weren't home at all when the fire began.

(Why were beads left behind? Well, evidently, they weren't worn daily. Possibly they were part of the decor of the houses, or were incorporated into protective amulets over the door, or incorporated into some kind of altar-like area within the house, or something along those lines. Possibly these people had even more beads than what were left here, and did wear necklaces as part of their daily adornment! Possibly the other beads we've found as jewelry in grave offerings from the period are not representational of what people actually would wear, and they're ceremonial adornments! Maybe the necklace needed restringing and was hung up waiting for someone to take it apart and get to it. There are many things that we cannot know.)

And likewise, swords and other weapons. (There's a bronze knife, among the discovered artifacts, but it is for various reasons likely not to have belonged to anyone in the settlement. The older Middle Bronze Age causeway that runs straight through the site was a place where offerings were deposited, and the sole knife was one such offering.) But this could either mean that there weren't warriors living in this settlement, OR that the warriors had taken their weapons with them when they walked out for the last time and never came back.

As far as religion/spiritual beliefs, we know very little of course. But we do know a couple of things from the wider context. One is that culture-wide, there were complicated beliefs about death. We know that some bodies in that era were enbalmed or in other ways given ritualistic treatments immediately after death-- put in bogs and then later recovered, or defleshed with knives, or exposed to birds to be defleshed. There's evidence that some people were eviscerated soon after death, to slow decay-- a person's gut flora sort of digests them after death, to an extent (which leaves traces in the bones), and the people of this era clearly knew that and for their own reasons, sought to prevent it in some cases (which we know, from the absence of those traces). Fragments of bone were then curated, kept among people's possessions, and later deposited in other contexts. (A paper about this, mentioned in the Must Farm report, is here, from Cambridge University Press, published in Antiquity in 2020.)

The Must Farm settlement was no exception: the only human remains found in the site are just such curated bits of bone, most of them likely deposited during the construction of the site, or possibly even during its brief occupation. (This is discussed in chapter 27 of Vol II.) A near-entire human skull with extensive wear-handling was deposited near what we think was the gate of the site. The bones were radiocarbon dated and are roughly contemporaneous with the site. They also had been handled in ways that to us seem disrespectful-- one fragment of tibia had been gnawed by dogs, and had wear as if it had been trampled. Like it had been kept on the floor of an occupied house for a time. The near-complete skull was that of a youngish person, probably in her twenties, likely female, and she'd had her jaw and part of her cheekbone cut off right around the time of death, and had also had the base of her skull chopped around the same time to make it sit flat on a surface, as if for display. She was not a venerated ancestor-- at least not as we'd understand it. She likely had been dead less than twenty years when the settlement was built, though the radiocarbon dating isn't precise. And there's part of a human femur from just outside the palisade, worn and much-handled, that seems to have been deposited after the site was abandoned, which is really interesting.

Another thing we know is that pile-dwelling settlements like this were, in Central mainland Europe where they were quite common, frequently deliberately burned. The inhabitants would remove all their belongings, then they'd set fires in a number of places, piling fuel near the walls to make the fire burn hotter. They'd wait until it died down entirely, then come clean up the site, and rebuild over it. This was possibly a spiritual practice, but it was also practical: these kinds of dwellings are not terribly durable and are very hard to repair. It was just more economical to destroy them and start fresh, about every ten to twenty years-- much more labor-intensive to pull down the old buildings, and if it was a good site then the inhabitants would want to stay in the same place, so burning was the quick easy way to do it. (Interesting echoes of the southeastern European Neolithic phenomenon of the Burned House Horizon, but much more straightforward actually.) Must Farm's settlement was built in a similar way to those European ones, clearly not designed for long-term use-- many of the pilings were ash, which doesn't hold up all that well to alternately wet and dry conditions. The buildings would have decayed, would have needed repair within five years, would have needed major repairs in ten, would have possibly been beyond repair in fifteen. And the builders were experienced enough to surely know that.

But it made no sense to burn it down after less than a year, the wood still green and completely free of insects, and it certainly made no sense to leave so much in them, including the live animals. And there are no signs of the kind of deliberate burning found in those European sites, the extra fuel and multiple ignition points, so it's highly unlikely this settlement was burned intentionally. I really do think it was abandoned, and then immediately accidentally burned from an improperly-extinguished cooking fire. If this was done because of some spiritual or other belief, it was an unusual example. Perhaps there was something dramatic, perhaps some event the inhabitants interpreted as supernatural.

Maybe there was a really big spider.

[bomberqueen17]

don't know where else to put it

I was going to do a big wrap-up of Everything I Learned From The Must Farm Site Report PDFs but then life got super busy. So I only have the things I turned over and over in my mind, just now, and I want to go back and reread but now's not the time, I'll have to do another pass through at a later date.

But the one tiny vivid little factoid I've got in my mind that I just have to write down-- that necklace, with the big amber bead? Some of the glass beads were shattered from the heat but the amber bead was only charred a little on one side. So obviously some of the necklace was closer to the fire than the rest. I had initially connected that it was found near where there was probably a door, and I vaguely imagined someone dropping it as they fled. But now I'm convinced that's not it at all.

It was hanging up. It was hanging on a peg or a hook or a twig or something, right near the door, maybe even on display, and the big heavy amber bead was hanging at the bottom, and the glass beads were hanging at the top, and the fire at that point spread down from the roof and it burned through the string, and the glass beads shattered and the necklace fell down and when the floor collapsed it wound up in the mud.

The other thing I keep thinking is that the fire has to have started while no one was home. And modern people don't think about this, but in a premodern society where you've got a group of people living in a house, where you don't have appliances you can turn on and off, where starting a fire takes serious effort and getting it to a state where you can cook on it takes hours, where the food served at daily meals has to be the full-time job of several people because it's so labor-intensive--

there's never going to be a time where everyone is out of the village. There's going to be a sickly or elderly person who can't really get out of bed or move far, or a new mother who's just given birth and can't travel, and there'll be someone home to tend to whoever that is, and while they're home they're tending the fire and getting dinner started. There's just always someone there. I could see maybe one house being unoccupied for a brief time, but a village, that probably had at least ten houses if not more, and each house had ten people in it? Someone would be home. And those who weren't home wouldn't be far. We know the wheat etc. that the village was eating was grown on dry land, and the flax they were processing into fiber, but it could not have been far away. And the Fenlands are flat. You'd see smoke. Before the first house was even engulfed someone would have noticed the smoke and they'd be hurrying home.

But nobody tried to fight the fire. Nobody spread it, but nobody fought it either. Nobody pulled any timbers out to save them. Nobody threw water on anything.

Nobody was there. The houses were empty. Nobody fled the fire, because they weren't there to see it start, or they would have been able to stop it.

They hadn't been evacuated in any organized way, or surely the bead necklace would have been taken. Even if they were in a hurry, at least the pot full of cooked food would have been taken, or emptied into something more portable to bring along! There was so much prepared food lying around. And the thread bobbins-- bobbins and bobbins of painstakingly-spliced flax they'd grown and rippled and scutched, some of it then painstakingly plied, hours and hours of several people's labor, and it was on little bobbins, you could sweep that into a basket along with your bulkier household goods and barely take up any space at all and save hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of labor later when you needed to weave some new fabric. Thread like that was precious, and it's portable, and I can't believe they'd choose to leave so much of it behind if they had any chance to choose what they brought with them.

As I'd said, it's beyond possibility that everyone had gone out to do some job-- there would be people left behind in the houses for that. Maybe everyone had gone out for some religious observation, maybe. Maybe something was important enough to even haul out the oldsters and the infants, and to put off dinner until late. Maybe. it's possible. But someone (probably in Structure 1) just didn't bank the fire correctly, and it got away and got into the roof beams. A properly-banked fire wouldn't do that, and surely these people, managing cooking fires for their entire lives, would know how to do it. But even then I can't imagine them going that far, and again, they'd see the smoke and hurry home. Even if it was a religious rite they'd still hurry home from it, there's no way they wouldn't have come back.

So it seems to me that they had to have been forced out. No notice, no chance to pack, everything left where it was, last night's supper still in the pot, tonight's bread still rising on the trays, the lambs in their pens and the dog tied up in House 5.

I can't imagine what forced them out. It wouldn't be weather. It could be enemies. There were no weapons found in the houses, but that might mean they'd taken them with them-- except the spears, perhaps they were only hunting spears but you'd think still if everyone ran out to fight they would take them too, the spears and the axes; if it was a situation where they had to last-ditch defend themselves the non-warriors would certainly arm themselves with the wood axes and the hunting spears. But they didn't.

So my conclusion is that they all were forced to leave in a hurry, without banking the fires, without putting anything away, and they were prevented from returning. The cause could be human enemies-- perhaps the warriors of the settlement had gone out to fight and been defeated, and the victors came here and the survivors knew they could not fight and so came out unresisting to meet their fates.

The cause could be something religious or spiritual-- something they believed in made them leave and prevented them from returning. It would have to be incredibly compelling, however, because leaving without their food or their cooking pots or their domestic goods (the little bobbins of thread!!!!! you could easily carry those!!) would make it very hard for them to make their way in the world.

The cause could be-- I really don't know what else. Disease would maybe make them abandon a settlement, maybe leave no trace if they buried their dead on land, but they would pack first. Most things, they would pack first, they wouldn't leave cooked food sitting out, they'd bring the lambs and dog with them. Any orderly evacuation, they'd have brought the lambs and dog with them. They have to have left in a hurry without a chance to prepare. And there was no attempt at salvage afterward, they didn't come back to look for anything they'd left. The ruins of the burned buildings would have stood visible for decades, the ends of roof timbers above the water, much of structure 4 (possibly the gate house entrance) above the water, the palisade probably unburnt for much of its length. It would have been easy to find. There are only a couple of disarranged timbers in Structure 3 to suggest anyone ever poked through the wreckage at all, and that's not much to go on. Certainly nobody dug around in the mud, which would have been quite shallow at some times of year.

And while it's possible the evidence of what happened existed once, somewhere in the long-vanished sections of the village-- perhaps the fire started at that end, perhaps they tried to fight it there, perhaps they tried salvage over there and discovered the fire had burned too hot to make it worthwhile, perhaps the bodies of the villagers were all dumped into the channel over there after whatever battle there was-- perhaps there was all kinds of stuff. But I just think whatever it was left no trace. So many of the possibilities would now be invisible, three thousand years later.

All we have is the facts: They left in a hurry, leaving their lambs in their pens, their food on the table, the dog tied up in the house, the cooking fires not banked.

And whatever made them leave, they never came back.

[bomberqueen17]

fic update: fit for thrones chapter 11!!

I was like almost done with this for ages and there was one conversation I had to come up with one different line for, thanks to a couple of great line-edit suggestions from @bittylildragon, but then as I was working on it I realized a slightly different direction the conversation needed to go in order to actually get what I was imagining out into the actual page, and it meant I could introduce an entire new subplot and background, which was exciting, but--

well mostly I'm trying a different medication and suddenly I can write again, so that's amazing and I'm excited and the only downside is that this new medication costs $160 more for a two-week supply than the medication that almost-worked but meant I didn't so much as open a fic doc for four weeks.

mmmmyeah I love American healthcare. But I'll eventually hit my deductible I guess.

So we all get what was supposed to be a couple thousand words of Morvran&Lu banter, but it's a whole chapter instead. I didn't figure anyone would mind, there's new plot points all through it. They're very effective, those two.

Now I have to rewrite several future chapters almost in their entirety, though.

Fit For Thrones, Ch 11, on AO3

[bomberqueen17]

❝ These are the Rohirrim, as we name them, masters of horses, and we ceded to them the fields of Calenardhon that are since called Rohan; for that province had long been sparsely peopled. And they became our allies, and have ever proved true to us, aiding us at need, and guarding our northern marches and the Gap of Rohan. ❞

[bomberqueen17]

On my mind: why has there been such an increase in adulation and loyalty toward obviously defective people like Trump and Musk? Have people become more gullible than they were when I was younger? Seems unlikely. We internalized all sorts of stupid shit too, but it wasn't so focused on personalities. Then it struck me: the problem is that we've lost faith in institutions and personalities are what's left. Consider...

Politicians: believe it or not, we used to trust that they were at least sane and working generally for some vision of public good, even when we disagreed. Not since Nixon, Reagan, Dubya, etc.

Journalists: we used to trust them to report the facts in a reasonably objective way, even when that isn't necessarily what they were doing. Then came Fox and that all went out the window.

TV/radio media became all about engagement, a form of entertainment, not actual reporting. Now it's all podcasts and TikTok or YouTube, but basically same. There are some who believe one particular favorite speaks the truth, but few who would say these folks in general are trustworthy.

Print media failed in a different way, partly by being partisans for the establishment (e.g. NYT and the Iraq war) but mostly by totally missing the boat on going online. They could have agreed on a single shared subscription or micropayment system, but they each had to be greedy with their own paywalls etc. So their lunch got eaten by social media (who bear their own share of blame for eroding trust), and the press got even more unhinged about it.

Science, engineering, academe: we used to believe promises about new miracle materials, chemicals, drugs, etc. Even before anti-vaccine lunacy became a thing, a long string of disasters - microplastics, DDT, thalidomide - changed that.

Unions: they've experienced a resurgence very recently, but that's almost a "dead cat bounce" after being moribund for decades. Some people would blame Reagan and PATCO. I think the collapse of major union-heavy industries - auto, steel, mining - had more to do with it, but the result was the same.

I could go on - there's a whole other post I could write about the mixed role of churches in this context - but you get the idea. The fact that in many cases there were good reasons to withdraw our trust doesn't change the fact that such a general withdrawal creates a vacuum which we've filled with hero worship instead. That's where people like Musk and Trump come from.

Here's the kicker: it's not an accident. Undermining trust in institutions has been part of the authoritarian playbook since forever. Julius Caesar is the earliest example that most people would be familiar with, hence the silly illustration, but the phenomenon goes back much further than that. Creating that vacuum is central to authoritarian strategy. Remember Reagan's "nine most terrifying words"? Some people think of that as a libertarian statement but, with the so-called Moral Majority and various militia groups (then as now galvanized by immigration) behind him, that misses the mark. It was part of an authoritarian strategy, demeaning the administrative state and permanent civil service (i.e. institutions) in favor of raw executive power (i.e. personalities).

I'm all for unions, co-ops, mutual aid, etc. but they can't stand alone. Never have. Without a government enforcing rules (including against itself), anarchy will always evolve toward autocracy. If you think the role of government should be minimized, then congratulations, you're part of the Reagan Left ... or worse. A red hat with a hammer and sickle on it is still a red hat. You are effectively supporting authoritarianism whether you mean to or not. Also, since there's no significant left-authoritarian element in US politics - no Stalin or Mao and thank FSM for that - that means you're supporting right-authoritarians. You should stop, especially if you're a member of a group that would suffer most under such a regime.