#It's a violation of their contract. I authorize you to deal with them in any way you see fit.

[maddymoreau]

[victonair]

“Where’s the trophy? They just come running over to me” - in which you, a popular ace in NRC’s basketball team, is tricked into a deal involving your servitude to the esteemed Dorm Head of Octavinelle, Azul Ashengrotto

Or rather

The rather long blurb that the author wanted to write due brainrot, added with a short drabble

Author’s Note: This was supposed to be an attempt at writing headcanons, but unfortunately, I realized it looked too much like a oneshot. Aside from that, I would really appreciate any requests in my inbox for me to write! I’ll be able to write almost anything except anything that violates my rules! Please do request, I’d be very appreciative! I usually write about 1k-5k words so if you specify the word count, I’ll do just that!

Content Warnings: A bit of hatred on the reader’s part in the first part due to Azul tricking them into a deal. Both Reader and Azul are emotionally constipated. Reader is gender-neutral and is not Yuu. However, reader is implied to be quite brutish and strong physically - also slightly mean on their part. But to be fair, aren’t almost all NRC students mean?

-

At an early point in his life, Azul had decided that he had hated anything remotely athletic;  if anything involved running, flying, and exerting effort into one’s body, he resigned himself to a more moody disposition. That’s why it was so ironic that he ended up coming to love someone who loved athletics and took to every sport, almost like their body was adapted to flying, running, and tackling - it was astounding how talented you were in sports. But there was one sport that he knew you had come to love the most: basketball.

You loved the teamwork, the strategy, and the physical exertion that took for you to run, jump, and shoot; it was exhilarating and for a time - he knew that it was the top priority in your life to stay on NRC’s prestigious team. That was until you met him, and at that point in time, it had been a gradual and slow descent into your relationship.

At first, he had thought you like one of those Savannaclaw brutes who took everything to the physical level, and well, you did. You tended to get physical with people who offended who you treasured, which meant your friends within the school. Despite your popularity, you had an infamous reputation for your opponents ending up in the school clinic with scars and bruises - you on the other hand, came out unscathed usually, sometimes with a bruise or two if your opponents were lucky.

However, unlike the students in Savannaclaw, you were surprisingly decent with your grades and student activity - it was more of your record that was a flaw, but that was overshadowed by your wins and your position as ace in the basketball team, winning over RSA as well, granting you popularity and favorable treatment by students who were either intimidated or respected you. Azul, however, thought you would be a valuable asset to carry out his bidding - influencing students to support his business or get students who were being unruly with their contracts to be on line. And really, all he needed to do was loop you into a deal.

And so he did, he took the opportunity to loop you into a deal, doing a deal with your friend first to trap them into servitude- service! The moment you heard about the incident, you came to threaten Azul with the intention of beating the ever living lights of him; however, this action came with Jade and Floyd standing behind him, looking at you menacingly - you could take at least one of them, but both of them? You would end up in the infirmary injured if you took both of them on. It was a losing battle, and so you listened to Azul’s proposition instead. Even though you were struggling not to punch the lights out of him.

The result was a frustrated yet resigned you, signing the contract that Azul offered - making you one of his lackeys, if you not being able to beat him up didn’t hurt your pride - then that did. From there, your relationship was quite rocky, you worked for him and some of things that your contract forced you to do were: to ‘gently’ remind (threaten) students who didn’t comply with their contracts or Azul’s demands, work in the Mostro Lounge for your fans to come there (you were basically free advertisement), and use your influence to promote Azul’s business. You were basically a lackey, and to make matters worse: sometimes, you were used as an errand runner. At those moments, you were tempted to just smash his head against the wall when he set you up for simple tasks.

Begrudgingly, you basically obeyed his commands and became someone he usually handed over tasks, even using your face and games to advertise you and himself to the general public. Now, to put it short how you felt with him - imagine a dartboard with his face plastered on a picture stapled on it, then imagine there being multiple darts thrown mid-air, landing perfectly on his face. That was how you felt about him. You wouldn’t say you hated him. No, that was rather too light - you despised him.

As a result of being in servitude to him, you were basically stuck around him for quite a lot of time. Your usual location if people wanted to find you was always in Octavinelle (if it wasn’t the gym or basketball court) and even then - Azul capitalized your time and appearance by requiring people to pay if they wanted to stay and chat with you. And due to being stuck with him, you repaid his ‘generosity’ ten-fold by proceeding to constantly banter and annoy him.

It was hell. Hell was in the form of one person and it was you. Azul tried his best to focus on working, but eventually he snapped back with insults as well; most of your time together was in the form of snarky comments and banter that took insults almost personal. Eventually, both of your insults lessened as you got to know each other better since you stayed by his side most of the time - however, it still didn’t change the despise you had for him. And this didn’t change for a while. Until the result of his breakdown and overblot.

Originally, when you saw the breakdown - you were supposed to say a snarky comment and insult him, thinking he got what he deserved. And well, he did - he successfully enslaved a majority of the student population and tried to involve the Prefect of Ramshackle into his schemes, but failed due to intervention. You were happy that he got what he deserved, and most of all: you were free. Free of the chains he had cast on you since the contract.

But when you saw him breakdown, something hurt inside you. You didn’t know why too, and as a result you ended up freezing as you saw tears coming out of his eyes. He had never displayed any type of genuine emotion, this was the only time that you had seen a genuine and vulnerable display from him. You didn’t interfere as he wailed in pain of losing everything he had worked for. Maybe in other worlds and timelines, you’d have been kinder, more patient, considerate - but in this one, you weren’t. You were selfish, brutish, and you had the capability to be cruel at times - you were the perfect example of an NRC student.

But maybe, you could be just somewhat kinder in this school, because clearly, most of these students couldn’t be. And for once, you didn’t make a selfish decision: you took off running and casting spells to eliminate the entity behind him. Putting your all, you fought alongside the students, despite almost getting injured many times. When all was said and done, and when he was defeated - you didn’t freeze this time. You took off running once more to his body, and quickly checked all his vital signs - and once the Head Master came, you took off to the infirmary and from there everything was a stressed blur.

Azul woke up with you beside him, sleeping on a chair - there were flowers on his bedside in the infirmary and there was only one question on his mind when you woke up: why were you here after everything he had done to you.

And with all honesty, you responded with the answer that you’ve been wondering yourself for all this time: you didn’t know. The clinic was white, everything smelled like alcohol and sterilized materials, and you two were the only people present there - both of you stared at each other with unknown emotions brewing within both of your eyes. Multiple conversations ensued and by the end of it, both of you were confused and unsure. It was a moment that both of you would never forget, as later in the future you would be thankful that this moment happened in the first place.

From there on out, despite your contract being eliminated, you took to staying by Azul’s side - albeit with general denial if you were asked and confusion of the public as well as your admirers and fans. Azul, himself, was confused with his development and at some point, asked what you wanted from him. Which you replied with the same answer that you answered with in the infirmary: you didn’t know.

Initially, you came to the conclusion that it was most likely a habit out of the time you had served under him. But that didn’t really explain your behavior; it didn’t explain why you stayed by his side like a guard dog and defended his name, both physically and verbally, when people bad-mouthed him. And somehow, you were almost…seemingly gentle with him.

Both you and Azul were baffled by your behavior, it was something that both of you wondered and analyzed, separately. Despite your unusual behavior though, he refused to let go of you, since you were the only one who ‘served’ under him since the dissolution of his contracts by the Dorm Head of Savannaclaw.

For some time, there was an awkward tension between the both of you; it was palpable to everyone that the both of you were in a sort of awkward stage. You didn’t know why you were defending and staying with Azul, while Azul wondered the same thing too. The awkwardness didn’t dissolve until the both of you settled into a routine with one rule, which was to never bring up why exactly in the first place you were still serving him without your contract.

The both of you got to know each other, despite your tense relationship - and through the routine, you took to staying in Azul’s office more - making sure to take care of him when he was overworking and generally trying to make life easier for him. And somehow, you ended up having a sort of complicated ‘relationship’ with him. With the both of you spending most of your time together, but denying any sort of relationship with each other, with Azul stating that he was paying you whilst you were saying that you just took an interest in him.

Rumors spread through the student body, and at first, you were okay with it. Until people began asking and you, yourself, was coming to a realization: you didn’t know what you felt for him at all. It wasn’t exactly a working relationship or a relationship at all. It was a secret third thing. Out of pressure and tension, you broke down - stopping your visits to him and avoiding him at all costs. To Azul, it provided its own realization, a slow realization that descended into hell for him. It was like Dante’s Inferno, except with the stages of grief - eventually going into acceptance that he felt something for you.

He was going to confront you. Eventually. The only problem was that you were avoiding at every turn, using either your fans, speed, and everything that was a force to be reckoned against to avoid him. When he realized, he couldn’t exactly confront you with the way you were using everything in your power to hide from his sight. It was only through Jade and Floyd catching you and threatening you, then proceeding to drag you to Azul’s office is when both of you were able to talk.

From there, it was a conversation between two emotionally constipated and repressed people that had never talked vulnerably in their life. It was one of the hardest conversations you had in your life, but at the end of it - you were trembling as you hugged him. You weren’t exactly dating yet, more in the middle ground.

But from then on, you stayed by his side most of the time and invited him to every one of your games. And through a lot of communication and painful slow burn, you eventually entered into a relationship.

That was why it wasn’t unusual for you to see him at one of the VIP spots in all your games, events, and sometimes, he’d even be seen at practices - handing you a small towel with a snarky comment on the tip of his lips because even after all this time, both of you had never stopped bantering.

It was well-known that you were devoted to him, and that was seen in every event, but it was established in one particular event which were the championships ending with two schools facing against each other: NRC and RSA.

-

The stadium roared with cheers as you landed the last point that would score you one point over RSA, it was a close play and you had thrown the ball in at a far length. The moment you did, you didn’t go running to your teammates, you didn’t run to your coach, nor did you run to your friends who were cheering you on from a podium. You didn’t freeze either; you were sweating and your ears rang with the victory you had scored - the big smile on your face was palpable. Despite your feet racing on the ground, you didn’t run to any of the people just mentioned. Instead, your eyes zoomed in into one face in the crowd: one face that you had your eye on the entire time you were playing and whenever there was a break.

You ran to Azul. You ran quickly with the biggest grin on your face, and when you reached him - you hugged him while murmuring repeatedly three words that echoed in your own little world.

“I love you.”

It was the only thing you repeated as you cupped his face, looking at him with pure adoration and devotion; you didn’t even notice how red he was and how the cameras were zooming onto you - the stadium screen focused on the both of you. And with the repitition of the three words, you did one last thing that staked your claim on him and the establishment of your love to the world. You kissed him.

The entire stadium roared, but really - you couldn’t care less. All you knew is that he was the constant in your life that you’d make sure stayed with you for as long as you lived. And you knew Azul thought the same thing as he cupped your cheek and planted a soft kiss on your lips once more.

[seekers-who-are-lovers]

Some people are a bit panicking. They like to know if Yana Toboso encounters pressure concerning the upcoming release of the anime. Yana T is very open the last few days. She resumed posting her thoughts today. Particularly going back to the past adaptations of Kuroshitsuji.

When I say, ``I've never had my dignity as a writer violated or my contract violated,'' it's sad to hear people say, ``It's gross to have such an obvious appeal.''

If a work is said to belong to the original author, I wish they wouldn't tell authors who accept changes that they have no love for their work or that they are being dishonest to their readers.

During the first season of Black Butler, the first question was, "Can I let Ciel die in the final episode?" I was surprised, but thought, ``If an anime that is mostly original can end in an interesting way.'' Thankfully, it turned out to be an interesting anime and a sequel was made. Regarding the second season, he requested, ``I would like to see a final episode that is completely different from the first season and the original work.''

For the live-action movie, I heard that ``Ciel will be a woman,'' and although I had no say in the casting, I asked, ``I would appreciate it if there was no romance with the butler.'' It was just a verbal promise, but he kept it. I am still grateful to Mizushima-san, Gouriki-san, and everyone else involved.

There are many things that surprised me, made me angry, made me sad, and made me happy about anime, live action, musicals, and games. But I don't regret any of it, it's all about me. This is not a story about telling or forcing anyone to give a correct or incorrect answer. I told you that you should take a break and not push yourself too hard. ( to herself )

I only met Ayame Goriki (the “Ciel” in the live action ) once after cranking up the engine. She was wearing a chic and lovely black dress, and when I told her, ``It suits you very well.I would be happy if we could use this as an opportunity to get more opportunities to see you in fashionable clothes,'' she happily shook my hand with trembling hands. Please give it to me. It was beautiful.

Hiro Mizushima and the other performers' hands were shaking when they shook hands in greeting. I was at a loss for words when I thought about how these gorgeous and beautiful people were dealing with so much stress and pressure. I am very grateful to have been given this difficult experience.

This is the end of this story.

There were many people who expressed concern after that sad incident (Hinako Ashihara’s death must have shaken the core of this problem among the mangaka community), so I took this opportunity to speak to them. Of course, readers are free to make their own opinions. I am me, you are you. I would be happy if you could enjoy it together with me in the future. [Toboso]

[ x x x x x x ]

Reading this litany of Yana’s tweets, Ashihara’s suicide made her contemplate of the past and talked to people about it.

Remember that Yana was younger (and probably inexperienced) when they adapted her work into an anime and the pressure was immense. And now that she is an established manga author/artist, popular and well respected, this gave her the opportunity to think back. Especially considering the amount of feedback that she received. I just hope that she’s doing self-care as often as she needs it be.

[literaticat]

What recourse does an author have if an agent/agency refuses to honor contract terms upon termination of the agreement?

My former agent/agency is taking liberties, refusing to pull my sub book, and continuing to nudge editors with deadline for response, though there is no written clause to support their actions.

So, usually in agency agreements, it is specified that the agent is the agent of record for any deal that happens that they submitted. And, agencies get some span of time in which to wrap things up.

This is for the agent's protection, so that authors don't get the brilliant idea to make an agent do a bunch of work, get an offer, etc -- then fire them before the contract is signed to get out of paying the commish -- Nope! Sorry! -- but it's also for the AUTHOR's protection, because if there are things just *dangling out there*, contracts mid-negotiation, offers pending, whatever it is -- presumably you'd prefer to not have a bunch of loose ends that you wouldn't understand or necessarily know about and would have to figure out how to deal with.

Now, if there's nothing on submission or pending or anything like that, likely the agent will just say that it's fine, go with god, I don't need the 30 days. But IF you and your agent part ways while you are actively on submission, they'd certainly want to wrap up that submission -- by nudging editors and giving them a deadline for response. And yes, they'd be the agent if they sold it to one of those editors.

So this doesn't seem like bizarre behavior to me, from the outside, knowing no specifics - this seems to be pretty much what I might expect an agent to do in most cases? But are you saying that it's been significantly longer than 30 days (or whatever it says in the agreement?) -- or that the agreement says they will pull submissions immediately or something? I just have no idea what your agreement says, or what they might have told you.

Basically: If you think they are violating their own agency agreement or doing something wildly out of bounds -- In MY opinion, your first step is to send them an email detailing the problem, and what you propose:

Like, "According to your agency agreement, you have 30 days post-termination to conclude any active dispositions, and it has been over three months. Please withdraw any still-pending submissions and confirm that we're officially terminated effective immediately." (Or whatever the problem is and what you want, this is a for-example)

Usually most agents are reasonable? They don't actually WANT to represent somebody who doesn't want to be repped by them -- like, sure, they'd like to get a deal if there is a deal to be gotten, but they don't have any desire to *trap* an unwilling author. So they should be able to explain what is up / do what you want / whatever.

If they are still acting up, your next step is to get advice from a publishing lawyer, and perhaps get them to write a cease and desist or something. Organizations like the Author's Guild and SCBWI often have lawyers that can give advice to members.

Good luck!

[moldybits]

I need to bitch for a minute here so hold on a sec

I understand most people don’t understand how pharmacies work. I don’t think corporations adding in things like drive thrus has helped retail pharmacy’s image either. But holy shit, this video (and especially the comments) fucking infuriate me

First off, I want everyone to know, a pharmacist has the 100% legal right to not fill your prescription for any reason. Now, normally when there is an issue with the prescription, the pharmacist will attempt to contract the prescriber to have something fixed, changed, clarified, etc. Rarely will a pharmacist ever outright refuse a prescription. I’ve seen it happen only a few times- and those few times came with good reasons. Remember, this is their license on the line. If they were to allow a prescription to get filled that could hurt or even kill you, and something did happen to you, then legal authorities come back at the pharmacist first for allowing it to be dispensed. I hate seeing comments like “this is between me and my doctor!!”. Your pharmacist knows more about medications and drug interactions than your prescriber. Your pharmacist is a healthcare professional. For the love of god they’re not fucking fast food workers that stand around and approve every medication they see.

Second, also in response to the comments, if you’re gonna complain about HIPAA, you better at least spell it right. It isn’t “HIPPA” 🙄. Anyway, yes a pharmacist can ask you any medical question they’d like. I can ask you any question I’d like as a pharmacy tech! I just can’t take your medical information and just tell the next random person in line. That is what HIPAA is. We’ve had a woman complain in the pharmacy that asking for her birthday- which is how we look up your medication in the first place- is a violation of HIPAA. It’s fucking not.

In response to the video- no one refused to fill the prescription. What most likely happened is this: Mounjaro is currently only FDA approved for type 2 diabetes. Not weight loss. Insurance rarely covers Mounjaro anyway. Won’t cover it at all for weight loss. There is a manufacturer discount card that can bring it down to $25 (this has changed). In order to bill the discount card, it basically needs to be billed thru insurance first, then be rejected, then billed thru the discount card which would usually bring it to the $25. They changed this for the new cards. Because of auditing, it now only covers the prescription if there is a type 2 diagnosis on the prescription. It will not cover it without it. So what probably happened is that the pharmacist tried to contact the prescriber for a diagnosis when the discount card didn’t go through, the provider didn’t get back to them, so they’re asking the patient (which they can legally do!) if they are using it for weight loss or diabetes. If course, a chain retail pharmacy can fill it for cash, if you’re willing to pay over $1000 out of pocket for it. Which I doubt the patient being mentioned in this video wanted to do. I specify chain pharmacy btw, because an independent might out right refuse to fill it solely based on profit alone. What if they order in Mounjaro, which has a huge cost, and you say you’ll pick it up for cash, but you never do? Now that pharmacy is out major $$$. Not as big of a deal for chain pharmacies, but it can hurt an independent. At the end of the day though, it wasn’t a refusal to fill, it just wasn’t covered and the patient didn’t want it. I’m sure had this woman just called and asked the pharmacist would’ve told her that. 

I do have 1 final point though. I’d like to point out this woman is a NP- Nurse Practitioner- and NOT a doctor. I know a lot of people don’t know the difference between PA/NPs and actual doctors, but I can’t emphasize enough that while she can diagnose and treat, she did NOT go to an actual medical school a doctor went to. Looking at her profile, she works at a place called “Lotus Healthcare and Aesthetics”, which while they say they offer physicals and vaccinations… it seems to me they focus heavily on “beauty and aesthetics” such as spray tanning and lash extensions…. Ya know, real medically important shit. If you wanna learn more about this shit just look over at r/Noctor and you’ll see what I mean

I’m not shocked this woman doesn’t know shit about pharmacies. But she spreads a message that I have to deal with every day at work. Pharmacies, as a whole, are not your enemy. Drug manufacturers and insurance companies will cause most of your headaches. Corporations that overwork and underpay both the pharmacists and techs are also the problem too. (Look, I’m not saying there aren’t shit pharmacists and you can’t have a bad experience. I’ve met awful pharmacists and techs. But most people I’ve met truly care about their work and their patients).

[annekihagisf]

My first three Property acquisitions in San Francisco, came after I had sold several buildings in Los Angeles-Anne Kihagi

My first three Property acquisitions in San Francisco, came after I had sold several buildings in Los Angeles. I hated hearing that my own sisters could not enjoy the City because of the high rents. So I decided to sell some of my best properties in Los Angeles, so I could buy some in San Francisco where my siblings and I could happily live in.All my buildings are my favorites. But, specifically 1000 Filbert Street, San Francisco, (1000 Filbert St — Google Maps), I acquired it for a price of $3,100,000 in August 2013. I borrowed from a Sterling Bank 65% of the purchase price and put down my own money for a sum of $1,000,000. This means I had a loan of $2.1 million dollars. When any property owner borrows from a Bank, they enter into a Loan Agreement — which is comprised of a mortgage contract and another agreement to create a Security Agreement — in which the borrower agrees that the property title will be held in a Trust, until it the loan is paid in full, at which time the bank reconveys the Title Deed. As part of the Mortgage Contract, the parties agree to certain conditions, for example, that the Bank can seek control of the property to dispose of it in event you ever fail to make your monthly mortgage payments. In my case, I had NEVER missed a single payment to my lender. In fact, the payments were automatically drawn from my bank account as I gave the bank authorization to take the payments each 10 th of the month. I NEVER had any issues with the lender. Sometime in 2015, Sterling Bank was acquired by another bank — UMPQUA Bank from Portland, Oregon. By this time, I had a total of 10 loans with Sterling which I had enjoyed an immensely great relationship with. Imagine — NEVER having missed any mortgage payment, that Umpqua Bank, represented by greedy attorneys, came to Court and misrepresented the law to the Court. Most judges rely on the attorneys to properly inform them of the law, and the attorneys can be punished for misrepresenting the law. However, this has NOT happened and dirty lawyers, like Robert Kaplan of Jeffer Mengel —https://www.jmbm.com/robert-b-kaplan.html has been breaking the laws just to bring in fees for his company. It should be a big deal to throw away a sale without permission of someone’s property. But this is clouded in formalities. [Another article to see how the attorneys made over $1.3 million in fees by misleading the judge and how he hopes to get away with violation of CalBar Rule 3.3A.] Property Laws are so important that the legislature has created very solid laws to protect property rights. The most important area of law is summarized by the Supreme Court statement: “In California, as in most states, a creditor#39;s right to enforce a debt secured by a mortgage or deed of trust on real property is restricted by statute” — Supreme Court Walker v. Community Bank, 10 Cal.3d 729, 733–34 (Cal. 1974) If any bank has a claim against its borrower, and seeks to enforce that debt, it must slavishly adhere to the laws. These laws are spelled out : https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=2924

Thank you.

Contact: Annekihagica.com — Tweeter @Annekihagi1  

annekihaginews@gmail.com

[destielficarchive]

@kiwilapple said: Yo wtf if the author is deleting their shit that usually means they want it gone, not secretly passed around like a high school joint.

Normally I'd probably completely ignore this comment, but 1. this is the second time this week someone has said something like this to me, and 2. I am running on fumes due to a full week of insomnia and high pain, so fuck it, I'm answering.

You're wrong.

I'm sorry, but you're very wrong. There are as many reasons to delete as there are people, but there's an apparent belief among the people who delete for one specific reason - namely, because they want it gone forever - that everyone is like that.

They're not, and that people like you assume it causes more problems than it solves.

Actual reasons I know of that people have deleted:

1. they've left the fandom and they just don't want to be involved anymore, but don't care what people do with their work.

2. they've left all fandom, and don't want to risk an employer or family member or whoever finding their work, but they're proud of what they're created and they're more than happy to have some version of it shared after they leave, as long as it can't be tied to their identity.

3. the website they posted the work on changed their policies (looking at you, fucking LJ) and they just can't be fussed to re-post it to a different place.

4. having it up makes them sad, reminds them of a time when they were more able to write, brings back memories of friends who've left fandom, etc, but again, they don't mind if people read it, they just can't bear to see it any more.

5. they don't realize orphaning is an option (or they didn't post on AO3 in the first place) and think it's the only way to get the content not associated with them.

6. they're suffering depression or other mental issues, and they think everything they've ever done is absolute shit and should disappear from the world (a proxy for self-immolation, perhaps?) and then two weeks or two months or two years later when they feel better they regret it.

7. THEY didn't delete it - they're accounts were broken into or otherwise accessed by people who want to harm them, and THOSE people deleted.

8. they got a book deal to convert the work into original fiction, and distribution of the fanfic would be a violation of their contract terms, so they need it deleted and copies buried.

9. And, yes, some people delete because they want the work gone and they don't want anyone to have it for any of who-knows-what-other-reasons.

All of these, and any other reason people have, are valid! But if they don't tell us their preferences then we don't fucking know them, because no one can read your fucking mind and this bare assumption that "the only reason to delete is because they never want it seen again" is, using the nicest vocabulary I can manage right now, simplistic and reductionist.

Unlike you, I don't make that assumption - instead, I actually fucking investigate to try to find out because - again - not everyone is the same as you and not everyone does things for the same reason you would.

I make posts like the deathbanjo post, and others, because, unlike what your ill-thought-out two-second comment suggests about your actual interest and level of engagement in this topic (and hey, I don't know you any more than you know, if you're actually deep in this shit good for you and I'm glad to hear it but I'll own atm I'm extremely skeptical), I actually do give a shit what an author prefers and - when I'm able to get a hold of them at all - about as many say "do whatever you want" as say "please don't." And, if clearing houses of information like this side blog of mine (hi, my main is @unforth) don't exist, then no one fucking knows that the author even has a fucking preference, especially if they've eschewed social media and haven't made an announcement. Like, seriously, how do you see my post begging for information about their preferences and go from there to "secretively passing it around" when that's literally the exact fucking opposite of what I'm doing.

You know what happens if something like this post doesn't go around, and no word is heard from the author?

Everyone who has it shares the work, covertly, through whatever means they can. You know, like you're accusing me of doing by commenting on my (checks notes) extremely public post saying "I won't distribute if they say don't distribute" that has 700 notes.

Downloading works is an inherent function of AO3, and the instant an author chooses to post there, they lose the ability to control what happens to copies of their works. Honestly, asking preferences as I do is a fucking courtesy, and one that I personally think is really fucking important, which is why I do it, and why I insist that people who interact with me and who ask for resources from my archive respect those preferences. But if an author really never wants a PDF made they should never upload to AO3 in the first place, because the ability to convert any fanfic into an e-book is literally a single button click that cannot be disabled, and the vast majority of people in fandom don't make a fraction as much effort as I do to be respectful.

I know I'm being repetitive, and swearing too much, I'm sorry, I got less than 3 hours of sleep and I'm a fucking mess and, unlike you who get to make a pithy comment and then fuck right off and never think about it this again, I've been wrangling with the ethics of how to handle this for four fucking years and I'm also the one who fucking routinely has to tell people, "sorry, I won't make an exemption, even for you, because the author has said 'don't distribute.'"

The existence of my post, and my archive, is literally the opposite of what your fucking idiotic comment suggests. In a vacuum of information, common practice is that everyone shares whatever they have and they have virtually no recourse to find out the author's preference even if they care. I

I've created a single, well-known, ever-growing resource that conserves stories for a specific ship in a specific fandom, organizes them, stores them, maintains them, investigates deletions, publicizes issues, outreaches to authors, and then once I know I do my absolute fucking damnedest to both spread the news about their preferences and enforce their request. Also, if I find out (for example) that they've chosen to sell convert the work to original fiction, I help boost and spread the word that their original work exists, and if someone asks me for the fanfic, I say, "no I won't give it to you but here's the link to where you can buy the edited, original fic version1"

So, which of us do you think is doing more to help authors maintain autonomy of their works? To gain monetary remuneration for their efforts? To protect fic, promote writers, and support readers as well? Tell me, what the fuck do you think is the better alternative to "Hey I found out this is deleted, I'm gonna spend a month trying to find out more information, and if I hear even a whisper of don't distribute, I won't, so don't even ask" cause hey, I'm all ears. I'd love to hear more of your bullshit-stupid-ass opinions.

[meinkampfortzone]

Who Was Hans-Joachim Marseille’s Fiancee?: An Opinion-Based Commentary, Part 2

(cont. from Part 1): 

HJM’s Family’s Attitude Toward Hanne-Lies

So one of the things I noticed when I first started getting curious about finding out who HJM’s fiancee was was the fact that she seemed so comfortable around his mom. That was, in fact, one of the first indicators to me that she was a bit older than him, other than her face. Had she been around his age, most of their interactions would have taken place outside of the house, away from his parents, so that they could make the most of their time alone together. That was, in fact, the norm among young people in the 40s, especially with the growing availability of cars which made getting around a lot easier and faster. When in the presence of each others’ parents, both parties had to act very reserved toward each other, and refrain from things such as holding hands or kissing, etc. (their parents would have been from the generation born in the 1800s, where doing things like that in public was inappropriate and prospective couples were meant to act with restraint when together). Therefore, the fact that 85% of the interactions between Hanne-Lies and HJM (except for the outing in Bad Saarow and their trip to Rome) took place at his parents’ apartment in Berlin was something that stood out to me. I took this to mean that Hanne-Lies was either a friend of the family or mature enough to want to spend time with and build a relationship with her future mother-in-law. As my research later proved, the latter ended up being true. 

After Hans-Joachim Marseille’s death, Hanne-Lies was allowed to live in Bad Saarow in Charlotte Marseille’s summer house that she owned there. I found this strange because Hanne-Lies had only known HJM and subsequently his family for approximately 7 months (they met in March 1942; he died in September 1942), which was hardly a long enough time for Charlotte Marseille to get to trust her enough to give her her house and allow her to live in it. Hanne-Lies remained in that house, keeping it as her main residence, until she got married in 1944 to former LSSAH member Martin Stephani. This led me to think that perhaps, like her son, Charlotte Marseille saw something in Hanne-Lies that reminded her of her dead daughter Inge, and due to the fact that she had lost her daughter so recently, she built a good relationship with Hanne-Lies. After HJM died, I believe that Charlotte Marseille sort of saw Hanne-Lies as the last thing she had left of her deceased son, and decided to let her have the house and stay there for as long as she needed as a sort of gesture of goodwill.

This is a picture of HJM at a bar in Berlin called the Regina Bar (between the two girls) and Hanne-Lies (at the other end of the table). This was taken during his leave in 1942, during which he met Hanne-Lies and became engaged to her. Notice that even in the presence of his fiancee HJM has no issue cozying up to other women. Judging by the look on her face, she doesn’t seem too pleased about it either. 

HJM’s Comrades/Contemporaries’ Attitudes/Opinions Concerning His Engagement

Another thing that I find sort of striking is the complete lack of commentary on the part of HJM’s comrades and friends concerning his engagement, or rather, his lack of commitment to his fiancee. According to Colin Heaton, the news of HJM’s engagement “shocked” those who knew him, only because of his playboy nature. However, once that shock subsided, and everyone saw HJM going back to his old ways and sleeping with various women, not one of his comrades thought to mention how they found it strange that he was engaged and yet having all of these publicized affairs. Although sex outside of marriage, etc. was common in the 1940s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it became the norm. Up until then, infidelity and sexual promiscuity was kept carefully under wraps, more so for women than men. However, back in those days engagement was essentially a binding contract--the couple was considered married for all intents and purposes until they actually went and legally tied the knot. I found it strange that Marseille’s comrades and those who knew him, when interviewed about him, had no problem talking about his various sexual escapades but didn’t mention how he still did these things while he was engaged. I would have expected at least one of them to mention how it was strange that he continued to do this even after he was committed to one woman. It was almost as if the existence of Hanne-Lies in HJM’s life was unknown to them. This led me to believe that maybe HJM never bothered to tell anyone he was engaged or probably only mentioned it in passing and never really made a big deal about it, or perhaps his comrades knew that this was just part of his nature and that it was foolish to think that he could ever be faithful to one person. 

When asked to describe the nature of HJM and Hanne-Lies’ relationship, Hans-Rudolf Marseille (HJM’s half-brother) proceeded to talk about how he convinced her to go to Rome. 

Of all the things he could have said that would demonstrate that they really loved each other and that there was something between them, he chose this anecdote, which really doesn’t demonstrate anything between them. 

Even the members of the Nazi high command who had interacted with Marseille, when interviewed by Colin Heaton, had no issue talking about how, when receiving a complaint from an Italian officer who stated that Marseille had “violated the family honor”, they all had a good laugh about it, and one of them even said, “Damn it, Marseille, have some shame, man.” However, none of them bothered to point out that this was going on while he was engaged, which was something he had even mentioned to Hermann Goering. Overall, none of the members of the high-ranking Nazi hierarchy seemed surprised at his behavior in the slightest.

Some Miscellaneous Points 

1- All of the people who were close to HJM gave interviews about him or attended events commemorating him and gave speeches/contributed to the event in some way, shape, or form. Many of the primary sources used in Colin Heaton’s book come from interviews conducted with many of Marseille’s comrades, such as Eduard Neumann, Ludwig Franzisket, and Emil Clade. Marseille’s mother, Charlotte, attended the premier of the 1957 film “Stern von Afrika”, and an article appeared in Der Spiegel featuring her and the actor who played her son, Joachim Hansen. In the article, she thanks Hansen for his stellar portrayal of her son. 

Hans-Rudolf Marseille assisted authors and historians writing and researching about HJM, such as Franz Kurowski and Walter Wubbe, and also gave interviews, snippets of which were included in a 1999 documentary about HJM’s life. It was because of the efforts of Eduard Neumann and other airmen who had flown with Marseille that a set of Luftwaffe barracks in Appen were renamed the “Marseille Barracks” (Marseille-Kaserne in German). Even Marseille’s batman, Mathew “Matthias” Letulu, gave an eulogy for Marseille in Germany during a ceremony held at the monument for Marseille in the Egyptian desert. 

The only person who had been closer to him than most of the people mentioned above, his ex-fiancee, was strangely absent from all of these efforts. Other than making an appearance at the 1967 Fighter Pilots’ Reunion event at Furstenfeldbruck, where she attended as a guest of honor with Charlotte Marseille (and this appearance isn’t even documented, as there are no photos of her at the event), she never gave any interviews about her ex-fiance, nor did she contribute to the efforts being made by those who knew him to keep his memory alive. 

2- During his interview, Hans-Rudolf Marseille showed a plethora of letters he had collected that had been sent by HJM to various members of his family--his mother, his sister, even his father. Some of these letters were reproduced and included in Walter Wubbe’s book “Hauptmann Marseille”. But with regards to any written correspondence between Hanne-Lies and HJM, there are absolutely no letters or anything whatsoever between them. Given the fact that they got engaged during one of HJM’s leaves, and they only saw each other once more after that when he was on vacation, it would make sense that they would be constantly writing to each other. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sort of correspondence between them, at least as far as Hans-Rudolf Marseille’s cache of letters is concerned. The only testament to their relationship is the scarf that Hanne-Lies gave to HJM, and the photo she gave him of herself with “Ich habe dich sehr liebe!!” written on the back. 

3- When I read that Hanne-Lies had given HJM a picture of herself with “Ich habe dich sehr liebe” written on the back, I was curious because “Ich liebe dich” is “I love you” in German. Thus, I set out to find the difference in meaning between “Ich habe dich liebe” and “Ich liebe dich.” I found an answer to this on a German language learning forum that I’ll include below. 

In Closing...

When I think of what Hans-Joachim Marseille’s love life should have looked like, I immediately think of the relationship between Alain Delon and Romy Schneider (not how it ended, Alain cheated on her with another woman and she refused to get back together with him, but just how aesthetically pleasing they were and how big of a power couple they were in the years they were together.)

 I believe that he only got engaged to Hanne-Lies because of the emotional turmoil he was going through at the time. I think that even if they had gotten married, their marriage would have never lasted long. After all, grief isn’t forever, and eventually he would have realized that with that therapist aspect gone, there isn’t actually anything that binds him to Hanne-Lies at all. Hanne-Lies, too, would have had a hard time putting up with his infidelity and flighty personality, especially since she would have been reaching that age when she wants to have children and start a family and settle down (she was almost 30 when she got engaged to HJM). I honestly just wish that Inge Marseille wouldn’t have died so that HJM could have actually gone and found someone who had the personality and temperament to be his other half. I feel like, had he met someone like that, they would literally have been the power couple of the Third Reich. 

I’d love to hear your guys’ comments/opinions regarding this in the comments. Thanks for reading!

[christinaroseandrews]

Eighteen years ago, Rachel had a summer camp prank romance with Jacob. They were twelve. Ketchup was involved. But it ended badly. Now chronically ill, Rachel writes romance for a living. But not just any romance... oh no.. the dutiful Rabbi's daughter writes schmalpy and sensual Christmas-themed romances. In fact, she's written 20 of them. She's even got 4 movie deals out of them. Now her publisher wants more diverse works and so they give her an ultimatum... Write a Hannukah-themed Romance or they won't renew her contract. Rachel doesn't know what to do, until she hits upon an idea. An idea that puts her squarely in the path of her summer camp nemesis - Jacob.

This review is going to contain some spoilers. And there are some very frank discussions about difficult topics including bullying, chronic illness, ableism, and suicidal ideation. Also, as in many romantic comedies, there may be a lot of secondhand discomfort with the situations the characters find themselves in. Make sure you're in a good place before reading this.

I'm really quite torn in how I feel about this novel. Like seriously torn. I loved parts of it and hated others, so I'm going to explain why I think this book is really good and I'm glad it exists, but also why I don't love it fully.

On one hand, I absolutely loved the Jewish representation and the very excellent way that the author explained very Jewish concepts so that non-Jewish people wouldn't feel left out. I liked that there were people who had varying levels of observation. While the author didn't identify which sect of Judaism Rachel and her family practices, it felt like Conservative Judaism as opposed to Reform, Orthodox, or Reconstructionist. From my experience, there is definitely different levels of observance from people who will eat shrimp and definitely have a bacon pan to those who have wholly separate kitchens for cooking and at least 6 sets of dishes. It felt real. And I loved that.

On the other hand, I didn't love the Hero. His actions in many instances really landed wrong with me. For instance he treats Rachel very poorly refusing to listen to her when she says "No, I can't do something." and constantly pushes her to share her secrets with him without being willing to share his own. He does something to her that quite literally had me crying because what he did brought back memories of my own bullying both as a child and later as an adult. Then, once his prank backfires, he does performs a sweeping gesture that removes a lot of her agency and doesn't give her a way out. (I'm going to come back to this) Even later still, he violates her privacy in her home reading a document that is confidential... and then doesn't even apologize for that. I didn't like him.  Rachel deserved better.

I did like Rachel for the most part. In fact, my biggest complaint with her is something wholly personal--she doesn't stand up for herself--but it's part of her storyline so... I did like that Rachel is chronically ill and her feelings about it echo my own as a spoonie. Rachel lives with ME/CFS and the author nails what that is like -- likely because she has lived it.

That said (and here's your second spoiler alert) when the hero hires an executive assistant to oversee cleaning up Rachel's apartment, cooking her food, and caring for her while she is recovering from a series of triggered bad days brought on by the hero's bullying -- I told you I'd get back to this -- he does so without checking with her first. Worse, the executive assistant  doesn't take her no as an answer. And while in the story it is presented with kind intentions there's a problem with this and how it's handled in real life. So yes, Rachel is overwhelmed. Yes, she is having a bad day to the point that heating up soup isn't possible. But she's the one who needs to decide what she can live with. It's like grabbing the handlebars of a disabled person's wheelchair and pushing them... the intentions are pure but they are often misguided. Worse, it builds into the very damaging real world consequence that disabled voices are ignored and infantilized. The way that Jacob and the Executive assistant treat Rachel is infantilizing. They are overriding her wishes. They aren't talking to her. They are treating her like a child. I really, really, really had issues with this whole scene and what it stood for. And while in the end, Rachel was okay with the help... it's bad consent. Really bad consent. And people learn from fiction and I feel like this is modeling bad behavior and rewarding it narratively.

I really adored how the publishing industry was portrayed. Especially the big push by publishers to have their authors out themselves as ownvoices and to write about their lived experience.... often when they aren't ready.

I didn't like how the event planning industry was portrayed. Some of the things that the author had volunteers doing would never be allowed in a union town like NYC. Look, I work in the convention industry. Teamsters or Hotel employees set up tables, chairs, etc... They also don't tend to allow things to be hung on the walls. or have things dangle from the ceiling. While I'm letting this go and it didn't affect my rating of the story, it was something I noted. There was a lack of research done.

What I did like was that at the end the author acknowledged that their experience isn't a universal experience. No marginalized person is a monolith. And that was actually lovely to see.

So yeah, I was torn.

I liked this, but I didn't love it. Parts of it really bugged me. It's got great character voices and wonderful representation. This is a nice sweet romance with no sex and very minor swearing. But because I'm so torn I'm going to rate this:

Three Stars

If this is your jam, you can get it here.

If you like these kind of honest reviews, please consider supporting us here!

I received an ARC via NetGalley.

[koreaunderground]

(2021/04/02) LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE

[theintercept.com][1]

  [1]: <https://theintercept.com/2021/04/02/ice-database-surveillance-lexisnexis/>

# LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE

Sam Biddle[email protected]​theintercept.com@samfbiddle

10-13 minutes

* * *

_The popular legal research_ and data brokerage firm LexisNexis signed a $16.8 million contract to sell information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to documents shared with The Intercept. The deal is already drawing fire from critics and comes less than two years after the company downplayed its ties to ICE, claiming it was “not working with them to build data infrastructure to assist their efforts.”

Though LexisNexis is perhaps best known for its role as a powerful scholarly and legal research tool, the company also caters to the immensely lucrative “risk” industry, providing, it says, 10,000 different data points on hundreds of millions of people to companies like financial institutions and insurance companies who want to, say, flag individuals with a history of fraud. LexisNexis Risk Solutions is also [marketed to law enforcement agencies][2], offering “advanced analytics to generate quality investigative leads, produce actionable intelligence and drive informed decisions” — in other words, to find and arrest people.

  [2]: <https://risk.lexisnexis.com/law-enforcement-and-public-safety/crime-and-criminal-investigations>

The LexisNexis ICE deal appears to be providing a replacement for CLEAR, a risk industry service operated by Thomson Reuters that [has been crucial][3] to ICE’s deportation efforts. In February, the Washington Post [noted][4] that the CLEAR contract was expiring and that it was “unclear whether the Biden administration will renew the deal or award a new contract.”

  [3]: <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.html?login=email&auth=login-email>   [4]: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-private-utility-data/>

LexisNexis’s February 25 ICE contract was shared with The Intercept by Mijente, a Latinx advocacy organization that has [criticized links between ICE and tech companies][5] it says are profiting from human rights abuses, including LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. The contract shows LexisNexis will provide Homeland Security investigators access to billions of different records containing personal data aggregated from a wide array of public and private sources, including credit history, bankruptcy records, license plate images, and cellular subscriber information. The company will also provide analytical tools that can help police connect these vast stores of data to the right person.

  [5]: <https://theintercept.com/2019/11/14/ice-lexisnexis-thomson-reuters-database/>

Though the contract is light on details, other ICE documents suggest how the LexisNexis database will be put to use. A [notice][6] posted before the contract was awarded asked for a database that could “assist the ICE mission of conducting criminal investigations” and come with “a robust analytical research tool for … in-depth exploration of persons of interest and vehicles,” including what it called a “License Plate Reader Subscription.”

  [6]: <https://beta.sam.gov/opp/dd2901df29274e49921fdc232bb18d8d/view#general>

LexisNexis Risk Solutions spokesperson Jennifer Richman declined to say exactly what categories of data the company would provide ICE under the new contract, or what policies, if any, will govern how agency agency uses it, but said, “Our tool contains data primarily from public government records. The principal non-public data is authorized by Congress for such uses in the Drivers Privacy Protection Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act statutes.”

ICE did not return a request for comment.

The listing indicated the database would be used by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations agency. While HSI is tasked with investigating border-related criminal activities beyond immigration violations, the office frequently works to raid and arrest undocumented people alongside ICE’s deportation office, Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO. A[ 2019 report ][7]from the Brennan Center for Justice described HSI as having “quietly become the backbone of the White House’s immigration enforcement apparatus. Its operations increasingly focus on investigating civil immigration violations, facilitating deportations carried out by ERO, and conducting surveillance of First Amendment-protected expression.” In 2018, The Intercept reported on an [HSI raid][8] of a Tennessee meatpacking plant that left scores of undocumented workers detained and hundreds of local children too scared to attend school the following day.

  [7]: <https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/social-media-surveillance-homeland-security-investigations-threat>   [8]: <https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/ice-raids-tennessee-meatpacking-plant/>

Department of Homeland Security[ budget documents][9] show that ICE has used LexisNexis databases since at least 2016 through the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, a division of ERO that[ assists][10] in “locating aliens convicted of criminal offenses and other aliens who are amenable to removal,” including “those who are unlawfully present in the United States.”

  [9]: <https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/u.s._immigration_and_customs_enforcement.pdf>   [10]: <https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-ice-das-september2017.pdf>

> It’s exceedingly difficult to participate in modern society without generating computerized records of the sort that LexisNexis obtains and packages for resale.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the enormity of the dossiers LexisNexis creates about citizens and undocumented persons alike. While you can at least attempt to use countermeasures against surveillance technologies like facial recognition or phone tracking, it’s exceedingly difficult to participate in modern society without generating computerized records of the sort that LexisNexis obtains and packages for resale. The company’s databases offer an oceanic computerized view of a person’s existence; by consolidating records of where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, what you’ve purchased, your debts, run-ins with the law, family members, driving history, and thousands of other types of breadcrumbs, even people particularly diligent about their privacy can be identified and tracked through this sort of digital mosaic. LexisNexis has gone even further than merely aggregating all this data: The company [claims][11] it holds 283 million distinct individual dossiers of 99.99% accuracy tied to “LexIDs,” unique identification codes that make pulling all the material collected about a person that much easier. For an undocumented immigrant in the United States, the hazard of such a database is clear.

  [11]: <https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/public-records/powerful-public-records-search.page>

For those seeking to surveil large populations, the scope of the data sold by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters is equally clear and explains why both firms are[ listed as official data “partners” of Palantir][12], a software company whose catalog includes products designed to [track down individuals][13] by feasting on enormous datasets. This partnership lets law enforcement investigators ingest material from the companies’ databases directly into Palantir data-mining software, allowing agencies to more seamlessly spy on migrants or round them up for deportation. “I compare what they provide to the blood that flows through the circulation system,” explained City University of New York law professor and scholar of government data access systems Sarah Lamdan. “What would Palantir be able to do without these data flows? Nothing. Without all their data, the software is worthless.” Asked for specifics of the company’s relationship with Palantir, the LexisNexis spokesperson told The Intercept only that its parent company RELX was an early investor in Palantir and that “LexisNexis Risk Solutions does not have an operational relationship with Palantir.”

  [12]: <https://www.palantir.com/partnerships/data-providers/>   [13]: <https://theintercept.com/2019/05/02/peter-thiels-palantir-was-used-to-bust-hundreds-of-relatives-of-migrant-children-new-documents-show/>

And yet compared with Palantir, which eagerly sells its powerful software to clients like ICE and the [National Security Agency][14], Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis have managed to largely avoid an ugly public association with controversial government surveillance and immigration practices. They have protected their reputations in part by claiming that even though LexisNexis may contract with ICE, it’s not enabling the crackdowns and arrests that have made the agency infamous but actually helping ICE’s detainees defend their legal rights. In 2019, after [hundreds of law professors, students, and librarians signed a petition][15] calling for Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis to cease contracting with ICE, LexisNexis sent a mass email to law school faculty defending their record and seeming to deny that their service helps put people in jail. Describing this claim as “misinformation,” the LexisNexis email, which was shared with The Intercept, stated: “ **We are not providing jail-booking data to ICE and are not working with them to build data infrastructure to assist their efforts.** … LexisNexis and RELX **does not** play a key ‘role in fueling the surveillance, imprisonment, and deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants a year.” (Emphasis in the original.) The email stated that “one of our competitors” was responsible for how “ICE supports its core data needs.” It went on to argue that, far from harming immigrants, LexisNexis is actually in the business of empowering them: Through its existing relationship with ICE, “detainees are provided access to an extensive electronic library of legal materials … that enable detainees to better understand their rights and prepare their immigration cases.”

  [14]: <https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/>   [15]: <https://theintercept.com/2019/11/14/ice-lexisnexis-thomson-reuters-database/>

> “Your state might be down to give you a driver’s license, but that information might get into the hands of a data broker.”

The notion that LexisNexis is somehow more meaningfully in the business of keeping immigrants free rather than detained has little purchase with the company’s critics. Jacinta Gonzalez, field director of Mijente, told The Intercept that LexisNexis’s ICE contract fills the same purpose as CLEAR. Like CLEAR, LexisNexis provides an agency widely accused of systemic human rights abuses with the data it needs to locate people with little if any oversight, a system that’s at once invisible, difficult to comprehend, and near impossible to avoid. Even in locales where so-called sanctuary laws aim to protect undocumented immigrants, these vast privatized databases create a computerized climate of intense fear and paranoia for undocumented people, Gonzalez said. “You might be in a city where your local politician is trying to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, you’re welcome here,’ but then ICE can get your address from a data broker and go directly to your house and try to deport you,” Gonzalez explained. “Your state might be down to give you a driver’s license, but that information might get into the hands of a data broker. You might feel like you’re in a life or death situation and have to go to the hospital, but you’re concerned that if you can’t pay your bill a collection agency is going to share that information with ICE.”

Richman, the LexisNexis spokesperson, told The Intercept that “the contract complies with the new policies set out in President Biden’s Executive Order [13993][16] of January 21, which revised Civil Immigration Enforcement Policies and Priorities and the corresponding DHS interim guidelines” and that “these policies, effective immediately, emphasize a respect for human rights, and focus on threats to national security, public safety, and security at the border.” But Gonzalez says it would be naive to think ICE is somehow a lesser menace to undocumented communities with Donald Trump out of power. “At the end of the day, ICE is still made up by the same agents, by the same field office directors, by the same administrators. … I think that it is really important for people to understand that, as long as ICE continues to have so many agents and so many resources, that they’re going to have to have someone to terrorize.”

  [16]: <https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-01768.pdf>

[dettiot]

Fic: late-night interruption 3/?

late-night interruption 3/? Author: dettiot Rating: G (for now) Summary: When Obi-Wan receives a late-night comm from Sabé, he’s not sure what to expect. But what he learns will change many lives . . . and the fate of the Republic.

Also available on AO3!

XXX

Despite her high rank and all the honors she had achieved, Padmé Amidala had experienced plenty of pain in her life. Emotional pain was most prominent: when her planet was invaded, when her people gave their lives to protect each other and her. When she had to pretend former colleagues were no longer friends when their systems became part of the CIS. When she had to lie to her family and friends. When Cordé was killed. 

There had been physical pain, as well: trudging through the desert on Tatooine. Falling out of the transport on Geonosis. Being hungry and thirsty and exhausted to a breaking point. 

But none of those events had prepared her for childbirth. 

“Breathe, Senator,” Healer Gahan said, holding Padmé’s hand. She could feel the suction cups on the Mon Calamari’s hand as she squeezed it. “Easy does it, Senator,” she reminded her. 

“I--I’m trying,” Padmé panted, trying not to lose her temper. 

She felt like her body was being slowly split in half, inch by inch. The baby was insisting on coming now, so early--was it was too early? What if something was wrong? And worst of all, Anakin wasn’t here and Sabé hadn’t been able to make contact with him. 

Where was he? 

The contraction finally eased and Padmé slumped back against the pillows, letting go of Healer Gahan’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, moving both her hands onto her extended belly. 

“It’s quite all right, Senator,” the healer said, her large, glassy eyes shining. “Your body is under great stress. But everything is going well. I’m going to review some data from your file, and then take another look to check your dilation. All right?” 

Nodding, Padmé did her best to smile. “Thank you.” 

As the healer stepped out of the room, Sabé entered, her eyes immediately locking with Padmé’s. 

“Did you get through to Anakin?” Padmé asked quickly, lifting her head to hold her friend’s gaze. 

“Not directly,” Sabé said, stepping over and picking up a glass of water to hold it to Padmé’s lips. “Drink some of this.” 

She took a sip but wouldn’t let herself be distracted from the matter at hand. “What do you mean, ‘not directly’?” 

“Your suggestion about contacting Master Kenobi was a good one--he said he would alert Anakin himself and they would be here as quickly as they could. But it will probably be about five hours,” Sabé said, holding the glass to her lips again. 

Frowning, Padmé tried to push away the glass, but Sabé insisted, “Drink a little more and I’ll explain everything.” 

Rather than argue, since it would be useless to do so, Padmé drank some more and then looked at Sabé with an arched eyebrow. 

Her friend took a seat on the edge of her bed. “I told Master Kenobi that I needed to talk to Anakin, but he wouldn’t put me through to him. So . . . I told Master Kenobi that you needed him here, because the baby was coming.” Sabé paused, then said, “I also told him that you and Anakin are married.” 

Padmé stared at Sabé, before letting out a quiet groan. “What?”

“I’m sorry! I had no idea that Master Kenobi didn’t know--I didn’t think Anakin would have been able to keep such a big secret like being married from him, especially not once you were going to have a baby,” Sabé said, sounding equal parts regretful and annoyed. 

Sighing, Padmé lifted a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes. 

“I really am sorry, Padmé.” 

“I know you are,” she said, lowering her hand and reaching out to take Sabé’s. “It’s all right. I always thought Obi-Wan should have known, but Anakin wouldn’t hear of it.” 

“I wonder why,” Sabé said. 

With a shrug of her shoulders, Padmé took a deep breath as she felt another contraction gaining strength. “I don’t know. Whenever I encountered Obi-Wan before I got pregnant, I always thought he suspected something was going on between Anakin and I. But now he knows.”

“I don’t think he suspected anything like this,” Sabé said, gesturing towards Padmé’s stomach. “Although I think he was more surprised about the marriage, to be honest.” 

That was interesting, Padmé acknowledged to herself. But the pain gripped her body again, making her squeeze Sabé’s hand tightly, and all she could focus on was what was happening to her. 

Oh, Anakin, get here quickly . . . 

XXX

Getting jerked out of a sound sleep by his master wasn’t something that happened often to Anakin Skywalker. Well, no–Obi-Wan had woken him up plenty of times, when there was a battle at hand or a mission to leave for. But having his master’s feelings reach through their bond and shake him awake?

That was new. 

Waiting for Obi-Wan to reply to his comm felt like a lifetime. And his anxieties weren’t eased when he saw Obi-Wan, who looked pale even in the blue holo-display. 

“Obi-Wan? What’s wrong?” Anakin asked, leaning closer to the display as if it would make his master’s face easier to read. 

But then Obi-Wan spoke and Anakin felt like nothing made sense anymore.

“Your baby is coming and your wife wants you there.”

Padmé? The baby? Now? That--that couldn’t be good--it was so early--but the baby! The baby was coming! They’d find out if it was a girl or a boy and finally settle the argument he and Padmé had been having. 

But--but what about his nightmares? What if--what if Padmé was in danger? How could he save her if he was on a ship hundreds of lightyears away from her? He needed to get to her--now!

Suddenly, as if a bucket of ice-cold water was dumped over his head, the worry and fear and excitement was wiped away. Because it had just registered on Anakin exactly who had given him the most important news of his life. 

Obi-Wan knew. Obi-Wan knew that he had violated the Jedi Code. Not just violated--smashed into pieces. Which meant Anakin had disappointed the man who was the closest thing to his father, brother and teacher. The last person Anakin ever wanted to disappoint. 

And Obi-Wan was incredibly disappointed. Disappointed, worried, confused. But swamping all those emotions was the hurt. 

His master wasn’t one to reveal his feelings. Even in the Force, Obi-Wan kept himself under tight control. From his earliest days, Anakin had delighted in those times he could make Obi-Wan break his rigid discipline. When he was young, it was to get Obi-Wan to laugh--really laugh. As he grew older, Anakin pushed and prodded Obi-Wan to admit he agreed with Anakin on something. No matter what, Anakin treasured seeing the real Obi-Wan, not the perfect Jedi Master. 

Now he was really seeing his master for the man he was. And that man was incredibly hurt by Anakin’s actions. 

“Obi-Wan–” Anakin said, searching for the words to make this better. To make him understand that he hadn’t wanted to keep these secrets from him, but–but Obi-Wan wouldn’t have understood. After all--he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, the ideal Jedi. He gained his strength from the Force, he didn’t let his emotions sway him, he fought against attachment. He had walked away from the woman he loved for the sake of the Order. And he had watched that woman die and had just kept going, without pause . . . 

No, Obi-Wan wouldn’t have understood Anakin’s feelings.  

He would have understood, a voice in his head whispered. A voice that sounded like his mother.  

Before Anakin could mess up any more than he already had, Obi-Wan held up a hand. “Sabé contacted me when she wasn’t able to reach you. She said Padmé is receiving excellent care, but she wants you there for the birth of your child. I will alert the Council that a matter has arisen that you need to deal with. You can take the Resolute to Coruscant while I proceed back to the Outer Rim.” 

“Obi-Wan, you can’t--you’ll need the 501st in the next battle. I don’t need to take the Resolute, I can get on a shuttle and go by myself,” Anakin protested weakly, because he wasn’t sure what else to say. Not when Obi-Wan clearly did not want to talk about his feelings, even as those feelings were overwhelming his attempts at shielding. There was so much guilt and regret inside Obi-Wan . . . 

“I’m sure the Council will provide me with any necessary assistance,” Obi-Wan said. He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was slightly softer. “I will not tell them the reason for your absence.” 

Anakin swallowed. How many times had they been in this position? With Anakin letting down Obi-Wan by his choices? How many times had Anakin apologized and vowed to do better, both to Obi-Wan and himself? And yet, he kept making the same damn mistake over and over again, not trusting Obi-Wan, assuming his master, his father, would shun him for what he had done. 

Not trusting the Council, not trusting politicians--that made sense. They would punish him to exert their power over him. But would Obi-Wan really do the same? Anakin had lost track of the number of times he had thought about telling Obi-Wan the truth about Padmé, about the upcoming baby, but he had always held back. 

He had always been too scared to be honest with him. But maybe . . . maybe it was time to stop being so scared. Not when he knew--really knew--how Obi-Wan felt. 

For kriff’s sake, he was about to become a father. He--he needed to be better. And that had to start now. 

“Obi-Wan–I’m sorry–” he said, trying to inject as much sincerity into his voice as possible, only for Obi-Wan to interrupt him.

“I know you are,” Obi-Wan said, his voice still soft. “But that does not change your actions, and I . . . ”

His voice trailed off, a flash of emotion spiking through the hurt. Anakin felt his mouth go dry as he realized it wasn’t just hurt and guilt on the verge of consuming his master.

It was envy. 

Obi-Wan was envious of Anakin, for having what Obi-Wan didn’t have: a wife and soon a child. He had never realized his master might want those things, too. He thought Obi-Wan had made his peace with leaving Satine, had even accepted her loss, but . . . 

“Obi-Wan, I’m sorry I didn’t trust you–that I didn’t tell you about me and Padmé,” Anakin said quickly, the words pouring out of him, his face heating from the embarrassment and shame. “I just–I thought you’d be mad or upset and I didn’t want to hurt you, I didn’t want to disappoint you. Or make you have to tell the Council how much I’ve messed up. But–but that was wrong of me, and I’m sorry, and–and you don’t have to tell the Council anything, I’ll comm them and tell them everything and I don’t care what happens, I’ll tell them you didn’t know anything about this, you’ll be safe, you’ll be–” 

“Like kriff you’ll do that!” Obi-Wan roared. 

XXX

The vehemence in his voice--the volume of his protest--surprised Anakin, Obi-Wan could tell. His padawan actually jerked back, shock washing through his Force sense.

To be honest, Obi-Wan was a bit surprised, too. Because this wasn’t the first time Anakin had stumbled over his words as he attempted to apologize for some action or another. There had been several times that Anakin had made promises, only to break them in the heat of the moment. But Obi-Wan knew that in Anakin’s judgement, his heart was always in the right place. 

But Anakin had never radiated such sincerity, such remorse, as he did right now. And the thought of Anakin throwing away everything in order to protect him . . . 

He couldn’t let him do that. 

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Do you really think I could tell the Council what you’ve done and not fight for you to remain in the Order? I couldn’t. I would forgive you anything. And if you don’t realize that, if you don’t realize how proud I am of you, my brother . . . ” 

That was what hurt the most. That Anakin just assumed he would go to the Council, without talking to Anakin first. That he assumed Obi-Wan wouldn’t be able to forgive him for his mistakes and his choices. 

It hurt the most, and made Obi-Wan question everything that had happened since he began training Anakin. Made all those old insecurities and doubts and fears come to life again. And they were so strong, so powerful, he wasn’t able to hold them back behind the walls he had built within himself. 

Because . . . Anakin was married. He was about to have a child. And Obi-Wan hadn’t known any of it. Certainly had suspected Anakin of a partiality towards Padmé, but this? 

Was it part of being the Chosen One? To be able to make such choices, to be so certain he was doing the right thing? And was it part of being the merely competent Jedi that Obi-Wan was that when he was in the same position to make such choices, had made such a different choice--even though his heart was just as taken as Anakin’s?

“I’m sorry,” Anakin said, wiping at his eyes to brush away a tear. “I’m so sorry, Obi-Wan. I just . . . I was wrong. So wrong.” 

The guilt was rolling off Anakin in waves. It was exhausting, how much Anakin felt. Perhaps that was why Anakin was able to do what Obi-Wan couldn’t. He loved so much and so deeply, how could he attempt to hide it? 

Obi-Wan just felt so tired. Exhausted to a point where he couldn’t act like his normal self. 

“It’s all right, Anakin,” he promised him. 

Anakin shook his head. “No, it isn’t. We . . . we have a lot to talk about, I think.” 

“We do,” he said, nodding in agreement. “But . . . most of it will have to wait, of course.” 

“Until after the baby,” Anakin said, his face lighting up. It was all Obi-Wan could do not to covetously, vicariously live through Anakin’s emotions. Because that sweep of excitement and joy, with a bit of fear . . . it was enough to make Obi-Wan wonder what might have been. 

He felt so fragile. Like a fine ceramic with a hairline crack. With just the slightest amount of pressure applied in the wrong place, he might shatter, with no one to repair him. Because who would care to put back together a broken, tired Jedi like him? 

This was why he wouldn’t let himself think about his past. About all the choices he might have made and how those choices might have turned out. Because the thought of his life being better than what he had . . . it wasn’t proper for a Jedi to have such thoughts. They reflected too great an attachment to specific people, a lack of respect for the here and now . . . 

“You … you could tell the Council we both have a matter to attend to,” Anakin said quietly, hesitantly. Like he wasn’t sure what Obi-Wan’s reaction would be. 

He blinked, staring at Anakin’s blue-tinged expression. 

“So you could be there when the baby comes,” Anakin continued, taking a deep breath. “I would–I would really like you to be there, Obi-Wan.” 

Obi-Wan leaned back in his chair, feeling a knot in his chest loosen. Anakin wanted him there? Not out of pity or obligation, but . . . simply because he wanted him there?

“You would?” Obi-Wan asked softly, not sure he believed Anakin, even though he couldn’t read anything in him to make him discount his sincerity. “But . . . this is something for family . . .”

“I know,” Anakin said, looking him straight in the eye. “But you and Ahsoka and Padmé are my family. The Council can send anyone to the next battle--but right now, Padmé needs me. And I need you.” 

For once, Obi-Wan had no interest in hiding his reaction. He tilted his head to the side, smiling slowly, feeling like the bright light of hope was clearing up the dark clouds of hurt and doubt inside him. 

“You really mean that, Anakin?” he asked, because those dark clouds weren’t fully gone.

“I really mean it--of course I do, Obi-Wan,” Anakin said, smiling widely. 

“Then . . . yes, all right,” Obi-Wan replied, feeling the warmth of Anakin’s Force presence sink into his bones like the sun. 

And it felt so good. To be on the same wavelength as Anakin, for the first time in a long time. Maybe ever? Obi-Wan didn’t know. He just knew he liked this feeling. 

Perhaps he wasn’t as broken as he thought he was. 

“We need to contact the Council and inform them we need a leave of absence,” Obi-Wan said. “Rex and Cody can command the 501st and 212th just as well as we can.”

“Better,” Anakin said with a grin. “They’re not half as reckless as we are.” 

Letting out a quiet chuckle, Obi-Wan nodded in acknowledgment. “I’ll contact the Council. You can prep a shuttle and come over to pick me up.” 

“Sounds good,” Anakin said, his grin fading a little. “Hey, Obi-Wan?” 

“Yes, Anakin?” he asked, sensing a turn in Anakin’s mood. He was more serious, more resolved. 

“There’s . . . there’s something I wanted to talk to you about, on our trip back to Coruscant,” Anakin said slowly, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck. 

Before he could assure Anakin that he would be happy to listen and help, Anakin rushed on. “I’ve been having dreams about Padmé dying in childbirth.” 

End, Chapter 3

[spectraspecs-writes]

Tatooine - Chapter 108

Link to the masterpost. Chapter 107. Chapter 109.

@averruncusho @ceruleanrainblues @chubbsmomma @strangepostmiracle thank you for reading, you get a tag. @skelelexiunderlord thank you for support, you get a tag.

——–

I find myself waking up early, far earlier than I meant. But then I’m amazed I got to sleep at all, or even stayed asleep. The nightmares were awful, but I couldn’t wake up. I felt like I was being suffocated by that mask but I couldn’t pull it off. Revan’s mask. My mask. No. No. Revan’s mask. Because I’m not Revan, I don’t know what she knows, she doesn’t know what I know. Or knew - what she knew. I’m a scout. Revan was a killer. A murder. A Sith Lord. I’m not Revan. I’m not.

T3 stayed with me the whole night after Carth changed our course. And the engine isn’t making any noise, so I guess we’re here. Tatooine.

And it’s morning. I suppose I should go check, shouldn’t I?

The cockpit is empty. Carth’s not there. He’s not in the main hold, either. And I don’t sense him in the port side quarters. I guess he left. Not that I blame him.

I’ve got to get out of here. But not like this. Not these robes. This isn’t me. I’m not a Jedi, I’m a scout. And out there is a world I haven't explored. All I looked for was the Star Map. All I cared about was the Star Map. But this is not a dead world. Not even a desert is dead. Where there is life, there is water, and where there is water, there is life. That’s one of the first things you learn as a scout.

But did I even learn it? If I’m Revan, then…

No. No.

A Jedi robe does not a good scouting outfit make. The copious lack of pockets alone makes it a poor choice. I tie up my hair so it’s off my neck, and pull out a soft white tunic. And my vest. I’m torn between shorts for the heat and pants to fight the sand, but I eventually settle on a loose pair of pants and sturdy boots. I keep only a single lightsaber in my pack, opting for my swords instead. I’m not a Jedi. I'm a scout. A lightsaber is a weapon. A sword is a tool, far more versatile in use. I have my sunglasses. Now all I need is my droid. T3 doesn’t need much prompting. Like he doesn’t want to leave my side.

Much as I hate it, Czerka is the only game in town. They’re the only ones sending people into the desert. I could go alone, but that’s not a good idea. The clients always have insurance if something happens - it’s in your contract. They pay for whatever you find, even if all you find is pain. You never go out alone. I need to be myself, even if that means taking one job with Czerka.

This is good. I missed this. Missed my vest. Missed myself. But it isn’t myself, is it? Who the hell even am I? I remember being a Republic scout, I remember turning over rocks, discovering insects I’d never seen before. Watching eggs hatch and documenting what I saw. Seeing lemurs hang from trees by prehensile tails. Leaves no one had ever seen, trees no one had ever seen! I remember finding a hot springs on Utapau! Spending the nights on the rocks while we analyzed water quality, microbial landscapes, geological makeup, or just plain swimming! Are those memories even real? Do those insects even exist? Those eggs, those lemurs, those leaves, those trees? Is there a hot springs on Utapau? Where did the data come from? What was real?

But I know. Whether any of that was real or not, anything I see today, anything I find today will be real. Anyone I meet today will be real. My memories here will be real. Maybe I wasn’t a scout before. But I will be today.

I step into the Czerka office - the same representative is there from the last time. “Greetings from the offices of Czerka Corporation.” The disgust I feel is thankfully different than the disgust I’ve been feeling for myself. “How can I help you?”

I pull up my Republic file, my fake scouting record. Doesn’t feel fake. “I’m a scout,” I say, “with a specialty in ecology and droid repair. Do you have any expeditions going out?”

She hums a bit, reading over my record. “According to this, the Republic holds your contract. Czerka corporation has no interest in any legal disputes with the Republic.”

“You won’t have to worry about that,” I assure her, “The Republic violated my contract, and the mission I was on came to an abrupt end when the Sith destroyed the ship I was on.

She hums again. “I suppose that is a risk when your employer is at war.” Tell me about it. “For long-term employment, however, you would have to fill out an application with Czerka headquarters. Business hours only, please.”

“I’m not looking for long-term contract negotiation,” I say, “This is just for a one-off freelance gig.”

“I don’t think our teams would have much use for an ecologist,” she says, looking back at my file, “but I am interested in your technical skills.” Better than nothing, I guess. “Our mining teams have had difficulty keeping the machinery functioning. As I’m sure you know, sand has a tendency to interfere with machinery. How soon would you be able to start?”

“I’m willing to head out now,” I say, “What’s the pay rate?”

“When you return at the end of the day, you will receive 150 credits.” She transfers a file to my datapad. “This is a standard contract. It stipulates that Czerka corporation is not liable for any harm sustained on the Dunes. Any disputes you may have with Czerka Corporation will be settled through binding arbitration. When you return to this office you will receive 150 credits in exchange for your work.” I don’t expect any problems, nothing I can’t deal with. And despite what she says, you can’t absolve yourself of all liability when you send out scouting teams. It’s been galactic law for the past two hundred years or so and there are scouting organizations who take it very seriously. Czerka tries to skirt the law but it never lasts. Scouts who know what they’re doing hold them to it, or threaten to call in the authorities. And Czerka tries to keep all that on the down-low, paying off officials, making donations, counting on the ignorance of the people signing the contracts. If I was doing anything other than a one-off gig… well, actually, you should just shoot me if this was anything other than a one-off gig. But anyway, if it were anything but that, I’d get into it myself. No one is expendable and they can’t pretend to be ignorant of the hell they’d catch if they tried to say otherwise. Even so, I sign the contract but I’m not even sure it’s legally binding. Rena Visz doesn’t exist. I’d have to sign Revan’s name but I don’t know what it is.

Nope. Nope. Nope, I don’t want to think about that.

“Excellent,” she says as I transfer the signed contract back, “There's a speeder outside - input your datapad and it’ll direct you to a set of coordinates. You’ll meet one of our mining teams there.”

And that’s that. I load T3 into the pilot’s side of the speeder and input my datapad, like she said, and off we go, onto the Dune Sea. The speeder takes us past the Czerka marker points, past even the Star Map. I can feel it calling out to me as we pass it. And it feels different, so different, from how it felt… oh God, it was barely last week. It felt like such a long time, so much has happened. I met Jolee, Bastila and Canderous got together, Kashyyyk was liberated, Carth’s son, Carth… Carth! That happened! That happened two days ago! And now… he probably hates me now. And I can’t say I blame him. If T3 wasn’t driving, I would have stopped. Because its call is so loud, so strong. And I can’t tell if it’s calling for Rena or Revan. But T3 drives on, and with distance the call fades. It doesn’t go away but it fades.

The speeder pulls up to a cave and slows to a stop. The sand is different out here. Still sand, of course, and a very fine sand, at that, but it’s dirty,. Soot and smoke from the machines. Polluted. To think what this sand could have given with care. Something like this doesn’t happen naturally. There’s nothing I could do about the state of this world now. As if anyone would listen to me if I could. Not even the Sand People, I think - they would surely feel the same way, but I can never know the same as they do. They should be the ones to rehabilitate the planet. I am only another outsider with an opinion. And besides, this is a stable state now, any massive changes, if not done slowly and carefully, could just as easily land the world in a worse state as it could a better one. And it’s not my place.

I have to assume it’s the site foreman who comes up to me. I get T3 out of the speeder. “You the Czerka droid tech?” he asks.

“Droid tech, yes, Czerka, no, but suffice it to say I’m here to help,” I say.

He chuckles. “You hate the bastards, too, huh?” he asks rhetorically, and I shrug and nod. “I don’t know why we're still out here, the ore’s no good, and the machines hardly work with all the sand. You’ve got your work cut out for you with fixing.”

“I’m hoping for it,” I say, “in fact, I’ve got something that should make everything easier.”

“What? You’ve got a way to teleport us off this rock?”

“I wish,” I say. I set my pack down on the speeder and open it. I’ve got an old shirt in here. “The machines stop working because sand gets into the vents and clogs with the gears and the works. Close off the vents and the machine overheats, but leave them open and the sand gets in and they’re useless.” There’s the shirt. “So what you need is a way to keep the sand out and prevent overheating. And we’re gonna do it the same way the animals do.”

“But that fabric will hold the heat in,” he objects.

I scoff. “Yeah,” I say sarcastically, “because I’m stupid.” I indicate T3. “Check out his vents - does he look like he’s overheating?”

He stoops to look. Sees the fabric under the vents, and around the joints. “I don’t believe this.”

“Then watch me. Got a machine down?”

He indicated a machine near the mouth of the cave. “Just pulled it out a little while ago. Started sputtering and smoking. We’re down to just one - if that one craps out, we’re stuck mining by hand.”

Easy enough. “T3, help me get this open.” T3 has a laser cutter, and he carefully lasers off the seal on the large access panel. I can pop it open with my panel tool once the seal’s off. Tool, panel, open - yep, the wires are loaded with sand. I shut the vents off, because the first step is to get the sand out, and I don’t want it getting to other parts of the machinery. Too big to tip over and dump out, so I get in and sweep.

This is a good feeling. I can do something with this, and the machine won’t care who I am or what I’ve done. Won’t care that I had no idea who I was when I woke up this morning and I still don’t. Won’t care that I can’t help but hate myself for atrocities I don’t even remember committing. Won’t care that I have two people in my head, two sets of memories even if I can’t access one set, and no way to reconcile them. Because I can fix this. And even better? Revan can’t take this away from me. Because I invented sand shields, not Revan.

Okay. Sand’s all out. I tear the fabric to a more reasonable size, popping the panel closed with my foot and T3 welds it shut again. The vent should be… there we go. Doing this outside could prove a little tricky, more sand could get in while I’m putting the cover on. Quick work is needed. I pull my vest off and use it to cover the majority of the vent, except for the bolts, which I set to work getting off. Once the bolts are off, I quickly whisk the vent cover off and put the fabric in its place. Then I put the cover back on, and replace the bolts. “That should be good for most of the time. It might need replacing after a sandstorm, but as you could see it wasn’t that difficult to do,” I say to the foreman, “And this is more basic that what T3 has, but like I said. It gets the job done.”

Still skeptical, the foreman turns the machine on. With a healthy whir it comes to life. He comes around to the vent and holds his hand in front of it. Waiting. A few seconds later, he looks at me, then back, then me, then back again. “I can feel air coming out,” he says simply, surprised, “This… but it’s so simple! But it works!” He turns the machine back off. “This could solve half our problems. This is great. Did you come up with this?”

Yes, as a matter of fact, I… wait.

I… I remember.

No.

“The sandstorms aren’t the worst of it, Master Jedi.” Someone said that. A long time ago. “It’s the sand. It chokes out the machinery. Our engineers tell us there’s nothing they can do to stop it, but it’s leaving us like sitting ducks out there.”

“And the Mandalorians don’t have the same problems?” That’s me. That’s my voice. But… not me. No.

“Not that we’ve seen, though damned if we know why.”

“Maybe they’re using a different power source,” Hanna said. Who’s Hanna? She was my best friend, but who was she? I don’t know. I don’t know.

But a thought struck me. I don't know why or how. But it came to me. Revan. Me. Revan. She pulled her robe off and tore it. “The insides of the machines are sealed up tight, with no way in or out. Except the vents.” She pulled out her lightsaber. Green one. Held it on the metal, where it met the fabric. The metal melted and fused with the fabric, and when she removed her lightsaber it cooled and the fabric stayed. Sand shields. The very first sand shields. And she must have refined the process… because that looks exactly the same as the sand shields on Hk-47. Revan built HK. I built HK.

“No,” I finally say, “I didn’t.” Because she took it from me. Revan took this from me. That was my accomplishment, something that I did, something I achieved and she took it from me. My stomach turns. This is going to be the rest of my life - every single thing I’ve ever done, every good thing that’s ever happened to me, poisoned by Revan. I’ve done nothing. Revan has. Nothing good ever happened to me. It happened to Revan. Carth was the only good thing and Revan spoiled that too. I can’t have anything. Revan will only take it away.

I don't feel so good.

I fall to my knees and retch into the sand. I can’t stop it. Everything hurts. Everything burns. “Get some water!” the foreman shouts, “She’s got sun sickness!”

“It’s not sun sickness,” I manage to say, forcing the words out.

“I’m not willing to take that chance,” he says, “I’ve lost more than a few miners to sun sickness, I’m not about to risk another.”

“I’ll be fine,” I repeat, “It’s not sun sickness, I’m positive.”

“Oh, yeah, doctor?” he says sarcastically, “Then what else could it be?”

Well… there really is no way to tell a perfect stranger you used to be a Sith Lord and it’s destroying your life. So I shake my head a bit. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

He doesn’t believe me. He hands me some water. “Drink this slowly. And let’s get you back to Anchorhead.”

“You send all your miners back to Anchorhead when this happens?”

“You’re not one of my miners. You’re from the company, and in their eyes you matter more than these miners.” T3 gets loaded into the speeder first, then the foreman helps me in. Makes me feel even more like shit now - not only did Revan take sand shields away from me, she’s taking away what could have been a good day’s work. I wasn't even out here for an hour!

I try my hardest not to cry. No one would get it anyway, and I’d just come off as a pitiful little girl. Because it turns out none of my memories of dealing with that are real and I have no idea how Revan would have dealt with that. Because it turns out that at heart I’m a terrible person even though I don’t want to be.

“I know it doesn't seem like it,” the foreman says, “but you did a lot of good today. Those machines are a lifesaver for my miners. If even just one of them keeps working because of this, you’ve saved us a lot of pain.”

Maybe so. But none of that makes up for all the pain Revan caused. There is a massive debt of blood owed that Revan accrued, that I could hardly begin to pay back. I've already, personally, accrued a debt, but it was easy to justify - I was trying to stop Malak, stop the war, and in doing so would save countless lives. But Revan started the war. Revan is responsible for the deaths of billions, Republic and Sith. Not even counting the Mandalorians from the last war! Saving the lives and limbs of a handful of miners doesn’t begin to make up for that.

When we get back to Anchorhead, the foreman tells me to wait in the speeder, so I do. He’s gone for maybe five minutes before he comes back. “You’ll find 250 credits transferred to you,” he says, “She wasn’t happy about it, but you saved the company way more than that, so I persuaded her to increase your cut.” He gets T3 out of the speeder while I pull myself out. “I’ll make sure the rest of our machines get shielding under the vents. And thanks again, really.” And he speeds away, back to the mine.

I don’t want to go back to the Hawk. I don’t want to go to Manaan. I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t. Maybe I can get passage on a freighter out of here. Actually join the Republic scouting corps. Or, hell, maybe the Sith. Mandalorian. Aratech. Free-lance - just to actually do something. To feel something other than hatred and anger. Because there’s no way I could hope to make up for all the shit I’ve done that I don’t even remember. Not by finding the Star Map, not by ending the war, nothing. And staying and doing all that only increases the chance that I’ll hurt the people I care about. The only way to avoid that is to just… go. Run away. Take T3 and just go.

I find myself at the cantina. That feels about right. So I go in. “Hey!” the bartender shouts to me, "You can’t bring that droid in here. It’ll have to wait outside.”

Oh, hell, no. I’m not leaving him. And I think I could get away with a little intimidation. I look at a bottle resting on the bar. Reach out with the Force and lift it high above his head. “How about now?”

He looks from the bottle, to me, to T3, and back to the bottle. Decides it’s not worth it to argue. “Just don’t cause any trouble.” I gently set the bottle back down and take a seat.

[96thdayofrage]

Chris Hedges: The Price of Conscience

Drone warfare whistleblower sentenced to 45 months in prison for telling the American people the truth.

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced today to 45 months in prison.

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.

Hale, in a handwritten letter to Judge Liam O’Grady on July 18, explained why he leaked classified information, writing that the drone attacks and the war in Afghanistan “had little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors.”

At the top of the ten-page letter Hale quoted US Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque, speaking to a reporter in 1995: “We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away … Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse … and then we come home in triumph.”

“In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants,” Hale explained to the judge. “To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator, would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed.”

He recalled the first time he witnessed a drone strike, a few days after he arrived in Afghanistan.

“Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika province around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea,” he wrote. “That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering, purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.”

This was his first experience with “scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair.” There would be many more.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions,” he wrote. “By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Never mind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.”

He and other service members were confronted with the privatization of war where “contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary.”

“Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute,” he wrote. “Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood — theirs and ours. When I think about this, I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I’ve done to support it.”

He described to the judge “the most harrowing day of my life” that took place a few months into his deployment “when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster.”

“For weeks we had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad,” he wrote. “Car bombs directed at US bases had become an increasingly frequent and deadly problem that summer, so much effort was put into stopping them. It was a windy and clouded afternoon when one of the suspects had been discovered headed eastbound, driving at a high rate of speed. This alarmed my superiors who believe he might be attempting to escape across the border into Pakistan.”

Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.

— Daniel Hale, of learning about children killed by indiscriminate US drone attacks he participated in.

“A drone strike was our only chance and already it began lining up to take the shot,” he continued. “But the less advanced predator drone found it difficult to see through clouds and compete against strong headwinds. The single payload MQ-1 failed to connect with its target, instead missing by a few meters. The vehicle, damaged, but still driveable, continued on ahead after narrowly avoiding destruction. Eventually, once the concern of another incoming missile subsided, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka. As astounding as it was to have just learned there had been a woman, possibly his wife, there with the man we intended to kill moments ago, I did not have the chance to see what happened next before the drone diverted its camera when she began frantically to pull out something from the back of the car.”

He learned a few days later from his commanding officer what next took place.

“There indeed had been the suspect’s wife with him in the car,” he wrote. “And in the back were their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3 years old. A cadre of Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had stopped the following day. It was there they found them placed in the dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated. As my commanding officer relayed this information to us, she seemed to express disgust, not for the fact that we had errantly fired on a man and his family, having killed one of his daughters; but for the suspected bomb maker having ordered his wife to dump the bodies of their daughters in the trash, so that the two of them could more quickly escape across the border. Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.”

“One year later, at a farewell gathering for those of us who would soon be leaving military service, I sat alone, transfixed by the television, while others reminisced together,” he continued. “On television was breaking news of the president giving his first public remarks about the policy surrounding the use of drone technology in warfare. His remarks were made to reassure the public of reports scrutinizing the death of civilians in drone strikes and the targeting of American citizens. The president said that a high standard of ‘near certainty’ needed to be met in order to ensure that no civilians were present. But from what I knew, of the instances where civilians plausibly could have been present, those killed were nearly always designated enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise. Nonetheless, I continued to heed his words as the president went on to explain how a drone could be used to eliminate someone who posed an ‘imminent threat’ to the United States. Using the analogy of taking out a sniper, with his sights set on an unassuming crowd of people, the president likened the use of drones to prevent a would-be terrorist from carrying out his evil plot. But, as I understood it to be, the unassuming crowd had been those who lived in fear and the terror of drones in their skies and the sniper in this scenario had been me. I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing what I’d been a part of, I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong.”

Hale threw himself into anti-war activism when he left the military, speaking out about the indiscriminate killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of noncombatants, including children in drone strikes. He took part in a peace conference held in Washington, D.C. in November 2013. The Yemeni Fazil bin Ali Jaber spoke at the conference about the drone strike that killed his brother, Salem bin Ali Jaber, and their cousin Waleed. Waleed was a policeman. Salem was an Imam who was an outspoken critic of the armed attacks carried out by radical jihadists.

“One day in August 2012, local members of Al Qaeda traveling through Fazil’s village in a car spotted Salem in the shade, pulled up towards him, and beckoned him to come over and speak to them,” Hale wrote. “Not one to miss an opportunity to evangelize to the youth, Salem proceeded cautiously with Waleed by his side. Fazil and other villagers began looking on from afar. Farther still was an ever present reaper drone looking too.”

“As Fazil recounted what happened next, I felt myself transported back in time to where I had been on that day, 2012,” Hale told the judge. “Unbeknownst to Fazil and those of his village at the time was that they had not been the only watching Salem approach the jihadist in the car. From Afghanistan, I and everyone on duty paused their work to witness the carnage that was about to unfold. At the press of a button from thousands of miles away, two hellfire missiles screeched out of the sky, followed by two more. Showing no signs of remorse, I, and those around me, clapped and cheered triumphantly. In front of a speechless auditorium, Fazil wept.”

A week after the conference Hale was offered a job as a government contractor.  Desperate for money and steady employment, hoping to go to college, he took the job, which paid $ 80,000 a year.  But by then he was disgusted by the drone program.

“For a long time, I was uncomfortable with myself over the thought of taking advantage of my military background to land a cushy desk job,” he wrote. “During that time, I was still processing what I had been through, and I was starting to wonder if I was contributing again to the problem of money and war by accepting to return as a defense contractor. Worse was my growing apprehension that everyone around me was also taking part in a collective delusion and denial that was used to justify our exorbitant salaries, for comparatively easy labor. The thing I feared most at the time was the temptation not to question it.”

“Then it came to be that one day after work I stuck around to socialize with a pair of co-workers whose talented work I had come to greatly admire,” he wrote. “They made me feel welcomed, and I was happy to have earned their approval. But then, to my dismay, our brand-new friendship took an unexpectedly dark turn. They elected that we should take a moment and view together some archived footage of past drone strikes. Such bonding ceremonies around a computer to watch so-called “war porn” had not been new to me. I partook in them all the time while deployed to Afghanistan. But on that day, years after the fact, my new friends gaped and sneered, just as my old one’s had, at the sight of faceless men in the final moments of their lives. I sat by watching too; said nothing and felt my heart breaking into pieces.”

“Your Honor,” Hale wrote to the judge, “the truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called-upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured. The crux of PTSD is that it is a moral conundrum that afflicts invisible wounds on the psyche of a person made to burden the weight of experience after surviving a traumatic event. How PTSD manifests depends on the circumstances of the event. So how is the drone operator to process this? The victorious rifleman, unquestioningly remorseful, at least keeps his honor intact by having faced off against his enemy on the battlefield. The determined fighter pilot has the luxury of not having to witness the gruesome aftermath. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated?”

“My conscience, once held at bay, came roaring back to life,” he wrote. “At first, I tried to ignore it. Wishing instead that someone, better placed than I, should come along to take this cup from me. But this too was folly. Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person. So, I contacted an investigative reporter, with whom I had had an established prior relationship, and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale, who has admitted to being suicidal and depressed, said in the letter he, like many veterans, struggles with the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, aggravated by an impoverished and turbulent childhood.

“Depression is a constant,” he told the judge. “Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways. The tell-tale signs of a person afflicted by PTSD and depression can often be outwardly observed and are practically universally recognizable. Hard lines about the face and jaw. Eyes, once bright and wide, now deep-set, and fearful. And an inexplicably sudden loss of interest in things that used to spark joy. These are the noticeable changes in my demeanor marked by those who knew me before and after military service. To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history.”

Feature photo | People carry the shrouded casket of a villager killed by a US drone attack on the Afghanistan border in Bannu. Ijaz Muhammad | AP

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.

[ishkah]

Beyond Compassion and Humanity; Justice for Non-human Animals by Martha Nussbaum

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This is a great essay vegans can draw on for a virtue ethics answer to the question of why do we hold the principle that it's almost always wrong to breed sentient life into captivity?

So for myself and this strain of virtue ethicists it would be because you know you could leave room for other animals to enjoy happy flourishing, being able to express all their capabilities in wild habitat.

Therefore not wanting to parasitically take away life with meaning for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.

The distinction between this philosophy and consequentialism would simply be if you wished to act this way because fundimentally it’s about who you want to be and who you want to let animal be:

It goes beyond the contractarian view in its starting point, a basic wonder at living beings, and a wish for their flourishing and for a world in which creatures of many types flourish. It goes beyond the intuitive starting point of utilitarianism because it takes an interest not just in pleasure and pain [and interests], but in complex forms of life. It wants to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is. . .[and] that the dignity of living organisms not be violated.

Counter-intuitively the author does still cling to a hedonistic view of the right to take life, but hopefully not for much longer:

If animals were really killed in a painless fashion, after a healthy and free-ranging life, what then? Killings of extremely young animals would still be problematic, but it seems unclear that the balance of considerations supports a complete ban on killings for food.

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BEYOND “COMPASSION AND HUMANITY”

Justice for Non-human Animals

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals… The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case. I shall not attempt to explain these considered beliefs. They are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extend the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way.

—JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice

In conclusion, we hold that circus animals…are housed in cramped cages, subjected to fear, hunger, pain, not to mention the undignified way of life they have to live, with no respite and the impugned notification has been issued in conformity with the…values of human life, [and] philosophy of the Constitution… Though not homo-sapiens [sic], they are also beings entitled to dignified existence and humane treatment sans cruelty and torture… Therefore, it is not only our fundamental duty to show compassion to our animal friends, but also to recognise and protect their rights…If humans are entitled to fundamental rights, why not animals?

—NAIR V. UNION OF INDIA, Kerala High Court, June 2000

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“BEINGS ENTITLED TO DIGNIFIED EXISTENCE”

In 55 B.C. the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then ―entreated the crowd, trying to win their compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation.‖ The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey, feeling, writes Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race. [1]

We humans share a world and its scarce resources with other intelligent creatures. These creatures are capable of dignified existence, as the Kerala High Court says. It is difficult to know precisely what we mean by that phrase, but it is rather clear what it does not mean: the conditions of the circus animals in the case, squeezed into cramped, filthy cages, starved, terrorized, and beaten, given only the minimal care that would make them presentable in the ring the following day. The fact that humans act in ways that deny animals a dignified existence appears to be an issue of justice, and an urgent one, although we shall have to say more to those who would deny this claim. There is no obvious reason why notions of basic justice, entitlement, and law cannot be extended across the species barrier, as the Indian court boldly does.

Before we can perform this extension with any hope of success, however, we need to get clear about what theoretical approach is likely to prove most adequate. I shall argue that the capabilities approach as I have developed it—an approach to issues of basic justice and entitlement and to the making of fundamental political principles [2] —provides better theoretical guidance in this area than that supplied by contractarian and utilitarian approaches to the question of animal entitlements, because it is capable of recognizing a wide range of types of animal dignity, and of corresponding needs for flourishing.

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KANTIAN CONTRACTARIANISM: INDIRECT DUTIES, DUTIES OF COMPASSION

Kant’s own view about animals is very unpromising. He argues that all duties to animals are merely indirect duties to humanity, in that (as he believes) cruel or kind treatment of animals strengthens tendencies to behave in similar fashion to humans. Thus he rests the case for decent treatment of animals on a fragile empirical claim about psychology. He cannot conceive that beings who (in his view) lack self-consciousness and the capacity for moral reciprocity could possibly be objects of moral duty. More generally, he cannot see that such a being can have dignity, an intrinsic worth.

One may, however, be a contractarian—and indeed, in some sense a Kantian— without espousing these narrow views. John Rawls insists that we have direct moral duties to animals, which he calls ―duties of compassion and humanity. [3] But for Rawls these are not issues of justice, and he is explicit that the contract doctrine cannot be extended to deal with these issues, because animals lack those properties of human beings ―in virtue of which they are to be treated in accordance with the principles of justice‖ (TJ 504). Only moral persons, defined with reference to the ―two moral powers,‖ are subjects of justice.

To some extent, Rawls is led to this conclusion by his Kantian conception of the person, which places great emphasis on rationality and the capacity for moral choice. But it is likely that the very structure of his contractarianism would require such a conclusion, even in the absence of that heavy commitment to rationality. The whole idea of a bargain or contract involving both humans and non-human animals is fantastic, suggesting no clear scenario that would assist our thinking. Although Rawls’s Original Position, like the state of nature in earlier contractarian theories, [4] is not supposed to be an actual historical situation, it is supposed to be a coherent fiction that can help us think well. This means that it has to have realism, at least, concerning the powers and needs of the parties and their basic circumstances. There is no comparable fiction about our decision to make a deal with other animals that would be similarly coherent and helpful. Although we share a world of scarce resources with animals, and although there is in a sense a state of rivalry among species that is comparable to the rivalry in the state of nature, the asymmetry of power between humans and non-human animals is too great to imagine the bargain as a real bargain. Nor can we imagine that the bargain would actually be for mutual advantage, for if we want to protect ourselves from the incursions of wild animals, we can just kill them, as we do. Thus, the Rawlsian condition that no one party to the contract is strong enough to dominate or kill all the others is not met. Thus Rawls’s omission of animals from the theory of justice is deeply woven into the very idea of grounding principles of justice on a bargain struck for mutual advantage (on fair terms) out of a situation of rough equality.

To put it another way, all contractualist views conflate two questions, which might have been kept distinct: Who frames the principles? And for whom are the principles framed? That is how rationality ends up being a criterion of membership in the moral community: because the procedure imagines that people are choosing principles for themselves. But one might imagine things differently, including in the group for whom principles of justice are included many creatures who do not and could not participate in the framing.

We have not yet shown, however, that Rawls’s conclusion is wrong. I have said that the cruel and oppressive treatment of animals raises issues of justice, but I have not really defended that claim against the Rawlsian alternative. What exactly does it mean to say that these are issues of justice, rather than issues of ―compassion and humanity? The emotion of compassion involves the thought that another creature is suffering significantly, and is not (or not mostly) to blame for that suffering. [5] It does not involve the thought that someone is to blame for that suffering. One may have compassion for the victim of a crime, but one may also have compassion for someone who is dying from disease (in a situation where that vulnerability to disease is nobody’s fault). ―Humanity I take to be a similar idea. So compassion omits the essential element of blame for wrongdoing. That is the first problem. But suppose we add that element, saying that duties of compassion involve the thought that it is wrong to cause animals suffering. That is, a duty of compassion would not be just a duty to have compassion, but a duty, as a result of one’s compassion, to refrain from acts that cause the suffering that occasions the compassion. I believe that Rawls would make this addition, although he certainly does not tell us what he takes duties of compassion to be. What is at stake, further, in the decision to say that the mistreatment of animals is not just morally wrong, but morally wrong in a special way, raising questions of justice?

This is a hard question to answer, since justice is a much-disputed notion, and there are many types of justice, political, ethical, and so forth. But it seems that what we most typically mean when we call a bad act unjust is that the creature injured by that act has an entitlement not to be treated in that way, and an entitlement of a particularly urgent or basic type (since we do not believe that all instances of unkindness, thoughtlessness, and so forth are instances of injustice, even if we do believe that people have a right to be treated kindly, and so on). The sphere of justice is the sphere of basic entitlements. When I say that the mistreatment of animals is unjust, I mean to say not only that it is wrong of us to treat them in that way, but also that they have a right, a moral entitlement, not to be treated in that way. It is unfair to them. I believe that thinking of animals as active beings who have a good and who are entitled to pursue it naturally leads us to see important damages done to them as unjust. What is lacking in Rawls’s account, as in Kant’s (though more subtly) is the sense of the animal itself as an agent and a subject, a creature in interaction with whom we live. As we shall see, the capabilities approach does treat animals as agents seeking a flourishing existence; this basic conception, I believe, is one of its greatest strengths.

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UTILITARIANISM AND ANIMAL FLOURISHING

Utilitarianism has contributed more than any other ethical theory to the recognition of animal entitlements. Both Bentham and Mill in their time and Peter Singer in our own have courageously taken the lead in freeing ethical thought from the shackles of a narrow species-centered conception of worth and entitlement. No doubt this achievement was connected with the founders’ general radicalism and their skepticism about conventional morality, their willingness to follow the ethical argument wherever it leads. These remain very great virtues in the utilitarian position. Nor does utilitarianism make the mistake of running together the question “who receives justice?” With the question “who frames the principles of justice?” Justice is sought for all sentient beings, many of whom cannot participate in the framing of principles.

Thus it is in a spirit of alliance that those concerned with animal entitlements might address a few criticisms to the utilitarian view. There are some difficulties with the utilitarian view, in both of its forms. As Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen usefully analyze the utilitarian position, it has three independent elements: consequentialism (the right choice is the one that produces the best overall consequences), sum-ranking (the utilities of different people are combined by adding them together to produce a single total), and hedonism, or some other substantive theory of the good (such as preference satisfaction). [6] Consequentialism by itself causes the fewest difficulties, since one may always adjust the account of well-being, or the good, in consequentialism so as to admit many important things that utilitarians typically do not make salient: plural and heterogeneous goods, the protection of rights, even personal commitments or agent-centred goods. More or less any moral theory can be consequentialized, that is, put in a form where the matters valued by that theory appear in the account of consequences to be produced. [7] Although I do have some doubts about a comprehensive consequentialism as the best basis for political principles in a pluralistic liberal society, I shall not comment on them at present, but shall turn to the more evidently problematic aspects of the utilitarian view. [8]

Let us next consider the utilitarian commitment to aggregation, or what is called ―sum-ranking. Views that measure principles of justice by the outcome they produce need not simply add all the relevant goods together. They may weight them in other ways. For example, one may insist that each and every person has an indefeasible entitlement to come up above a threshold on certain key goods. In addition, a view may, like Rawls’s view, focus particularly on the situation of the least well off, refusing to permit inequalities that do not raise that person’s position. These ways of considering well-being insist on treating people as ends: They refuse to allow some people’s extremely high well-being to be purchased, so to speak, through other people’s disadvantage. Even the welfare of society as a whole does not lead us to violate an individual, as Rawls says.

Utilitarianism notoriously refuses such insistence on the separateness and inviolability of persons. Because it is committed to the sum-ranking of all relevant pleasures and pains (or preference satisfactions and frustrations), it has no way of ruling out in advance results that are extremely harsh toward a given class or group. Slavery, the lifelong subordination of some to others, the extremely cruel treatment of some humans or of non-human animals—none of this is ruled out by the theory’s core conception of justice, which treats all satisfactions as fungible in a single system. Such results will be ruled out, if at all, by empirical considerations regarding total or average well-being. These questions are notoriously indeterminate (especially when the number of individuals who will be born is also unclear, a point I shall take up later). Even if they were not, it seems that the best reason to be against slavery, torture, and lifelong subordination is a reason of justice, not an empirical calculation of total or average well-being. Moreover, if we focus on preference satisfaction, we must confront the problem of adaptive preferences. For while some ways of treating people badly always cause pain (torture, starvation), there are ways of subordinating people that creep into their very desires, making allies out of the oppressed. Animals too can learn submissive or fear-induced preferences. Martin Seligman’s experiments, for example, show that dogs who have been conditioned into a mental state of learned helplessness have immense difficulty learning to initiate voluntary movement, if they can ever do so. [9]

There are also problems inherent in the views of the good most prevalent within utilitarianism: hedonism (Bentham) and preference satisfaction (Singer). Pleasure is a notoriously elusive notion. Is it a single feeling, varying only in intensity and duration, or are the different pleasures as qualitatively distinct as the activities with which they are associated? Mill, following Aristotle, believed the latter, but if we once grant that point, we are looking at a view that is very different from standard utilitarianism, which is firmly wedded to the homogeneity of good. [10]

Such a commitment looks like an especially grave error when we consider basic political principles. For each basic entitlement is its own thing, and is not bought off, so to speak, by even a very large amount of another entitlement. Suppose we say to a citizen: We will take away your free speech on Tuesdays between 3 and 4P.M., but in return, we will give you, every single day, a double amount of basic welfare and health care support. This is just the wrong picture of basic political entitlements. What is being said when we make a certain entitlement basic is that it is important always and for everyone, as a matter of basic justice. The only way to make that point sufficiently clearly is to preserve the qualitative separateness of each distinct element within our list of basic entitlements.

Once we ask the hedonist to admit plural goods, not commensurable on a single quantitative scale, it is natural to ask, further, whether pleasure and pain are the only things we ought to be looking at. Even if one thinks of pleasure as closely linked to activity, and not simply as a passive sensation, making it the sole end leaves out much of the value we attach to activities of various types. There seem to be valuable things in an animal’s life other than pleasure, such as free movement and physical achievement, and also altruistic sacrifice for kin and group. The grief of an animal for a dead child or parent, or the suffering of a human friend, also seem to be valuable, a sign of attachments that are intrinsically good. There are also bad pleasures, including some of the pleasures of the circus audience—and it is unclear whether such pleasures should even count positively in the social calculus. Some pleasures of animals in harming other animals may also be bad in this way.

Does preference utilitarianism do better? We have already identified some problems, including the problem of misinformed or malicious preferences and that of adaptive (submissive) preferences. Singer’s preference utilitarianism, moreover, defining preference in terms of conscious awareness, has no room for deprivations that never register in the animal’s consciousness.

But of course animals raised under bad conditions can’t imagine the better way of life they have never known, and so the fact that they are not living a more flourishing life will not figure in their awareness. They may still feel pain, and this the utilitarian can consider. What the view cannot consider is all the deprivation of valuable life activity that they do not feel.

Finally, all utilitarian views are highly vulnerable on the question of numbers. The meat industry brings countless animals into the world who would never have existed but for that. For Singer, these births of new animals are not by themselves a bad thing: Indeed, we can expect new births to add to the total of social utility, from which we would then subtract the pain such animals suffer. It is unclear where this calculation would come out. Apart from this question of indeterminacy, it seems unclear that we should even say that these births of new animals are a good thing, if the animals are brought into the world only as tools of human rapacity.

So utilitarianism has great merits, but also great problems.

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TYPES OF DIGNITY, TYPES OF FLOURISHING: EXTENDING THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

The capabilities approach in its current form starts from the notion of human dignity and a life worthy of it. But I shall now argue that it can be extended to provide a more adequate basis for animal entitlements than the other two theories under consideration. The basic moral intuition behind the approach concerns the dignity of a form of life that possesses both deep needs and abilities; its basic goal is to address the need for a rich plurality of life activities. With Aristotle and Marx, the approach has insisted that there is waste and tragedy when a living creature has the innate, or ―basic,‖ capability for some functions that are evaluated as important and good, but never gets the opportunity to perform those functions. Failures to educate women, failures to provide adequate health care, failures to extend the freedoms of speech and conscience to all citizens—all these are treated as causing a kind of premature death, the death of a form of flourishing that has been judged to be worthy of respect and wonder. The idea that a human being should have a chance to flourish in its own way, provided it does no harm to others, is thus very deep in the account the capabilities approach gives of the justification of basic political entitlements.

The species norm is evaluative, as I have insisted; it does not simply read off norms from the way nature actually is. The difficult questions this valuational exercise raises for the case of non-human animals will be discussed in the following section. But once we have judged that a central human power is one of the good ones, one of the ones whose flourishing defines the good of the creature, we have a strong moral reason for promoting its flourishing and removing obstacles to it.

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Dignity and Wonder: The Intuitive Starting Point

The same attitude to natural powers that guides the approach in the case of human beings guides it in the case of all forms of life. For there is a more general attitude behind the respect we have for human powers, and it is very different from the type of respect that animates Kantian ethics. For Kant, only humanity and rationality are worthy of respect and wonder; the rest of nature is just a set of tools. The capabilities approach judges instead, with the biologist Aristotle (who criticized his students’ disdain for the study of animals), that there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of animal life.

Aristotle’s scientific spirit is not the whole of what the capabilities approach embodies, for we need, in addition, an ethical concern that the functions of life not be impeded, that the dignity of living organisms not be violated. And yet, if we feel wonder looking at a complex organism, that wonder at least suggests the idea that it is good for that being to flourish as the kind of thing it is. And this idea is next door to the ethical judgment that it is wrong when the flourishing of a creature is blocked by the harmful agency of another. That more complex idea lies at the heart of the capabilities approach.

So I believe that the capabilities approach is well placed, intuitively, to go beyond both contractarian and utilitarian views. It goes beyond the contractarian view in its starting point, a basic wonder at living beings, and a wish for their flourishing and for a world in which creatures of many types flourish. It goes beyond the intuitive starting point of utilitarianism because it takes an interest not just in pleasure and pain, but in complex forms of life. It wants to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is.

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By Whom and for Whom? The Purposes of Social Cooperation

For a contractarian, as we have seen, the question ―Who makes the laws and principles? is treated as having, necessarily, the same answer as the question ―For whom are the laws and principles made? That conflation is dictated by the theory’s account of the purposes of social cooperation. But there is obviously no reason at all why these two questions should be put together in this way. The capabilities approach, as so far developed for the human case, looks at the world and asks how to arrange that justice be done in it. Justice is among the intrinsic ends that it pursues. Its parties are imagined looking at all the brutality and misery, the goodness and kindness of the world and trying to think how to make a world in which a core group of very important entitlements, inherent in the notion of human dignity, will be protected. Because they look at the whole of the human world, not just people roughly equal to themselves, they are able to be concerned directly and non-derivatively, as we saw, with the good of the mentally disabled. This feature makes it easy to extend the approach to include human-animal relations.

Let us now begin the extension. The purpose of social cooperation, by analogy and extension, ought to be to live decently together in a world in which many species try to flourish. (Cooperation itself will now assume multiple and complex forms.) The general aim of the capabilities approach in charting political principles to shape the human-animal relationship would be, following the intuitive ideas of the theory, that no animal should be cut off from the chance at a flourishing life and that all animals should enjoy certain positive opportunities to flourish. With due respect for a world that contains many forms of life, we attend with ethical concern to each characteristic type of flourishing and strive that it not be cut off or fruitless.

Such an approach seems superior to contractarianism because it contains direct obligations of justice to animals; it does not make these derivative from or posterior to the duties we have to fellow humans, and it is able to recognize that animals are subjects who have entitlements to flourishing and who thus are subjects of justice, not just objects of compassion. It is superior to utilitarianism because it respects each individual creature, refusing to aggregate the goods of different lives and types of lives. No creature is being used as a means to the ends of others, or of society as a whole. The capabilities approach also refuses to aggregate across the diverse constituents of each life and type of life. Thus, unlike utilitarianism, it can keep in focus the fact that each species has a different form of life and different ends; moreover, within a given species, each life has multiple and heterogeneous ends.

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How Comprehensive?

In the human case, the capabilities approach does not operate with a fully comprehensive conception of the good, because of the respect it has for the diverse ways in which people choose to live their lives in a pluralistic society. It aims at securing some core entitlements that are held to be implicit in the idea of a life with dignity, but it aims at capability, not functioning, and it focuses on a small list. In the case of human-animal relations, the need for restraint is even more acute, since animals will not in fact be participating directly in the framing of political principles, and thus they cannot revise them over time should they prove inadequate.

And yet there is a countervailing consideration: Human beings affect animals’ opportunities for flourishing pervasively, and it is hard to think of a species that one could simply leave alone to flourish in its own way. The human species dominates the other species in a way that no human individual or nation has ever dominated other humans. Respect for other species’ opportunities for flourishing suggests, then, that human law must include robust, positive political commitments to the protection of animals, even though, had human beings not so pervasively interfered with animals’ ways of life, the most respectful course might have been simply to leave them alone, living the lives that they make for themselves.

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The Species and the Individual

What should the focus of these commitments be? It seems that here, as in the human case, the focus should be the individual creature. The capabilities approach attaches no importance to increased numbers as such; its focus is on the well-being of existing creatures and the harm that is done to them when their powers are blighted.

As for the continuation of species, this would have little moral weight as a consideration of justice (though it might have aesthetic significance or some other sort of ethical significance), if species were just becoming extinct because of factors having nothing to do with human action that affects individual creatures. But species are becoming extinct because human beings are killing their members and damaging their natural environments. Thus, damage to species occurs through damage to individuals, and this individual damage should be the focus of ethical concern within the capabilities approach.

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Do Levels of Complexity Matter?

Almost all ethical views of animal entitlements hold that there are morally relevant distinctions among forms of life. Killing a mosquito is not the same sort of thing as killing a chimpanzee. But the question is: What sort of difference is relevant for basic justice? Singer, following Bentham, puts the issue in terms of sentience. Animals of many kinds can suffer bodily pain, and it is always bad to cause pain to a sentient being. If there are non-sentient or barely sentient animals—and it appears that crustaceans, mollusks, sponges, and the other creatures Aristotle called ―stationary animals‖ are such creatures—there is either no harm or only a trivial harm done in killing them. Among the sentient creatures, moreover, there are some who can suffer additional harms through their cognitive capacity: A few animals can foresee and mind their own deaths, and others will have conscious, sentient interests in continuing to live that are frustrated by death. The painless killing of an animal that does not foresee its own death or take a conscious interest in the continuation of its life is, for Singer and Bentham, not bad, for all badness, for them, consists in the frustration of interests, understood as forms of conscious awareness. [11] Singer is not, then, saying that some animals are inherently more worthy of esteem than others. He is simply saying that, if we agree with him that all harms reside in sentience, the creature’s form of life limits the conditions under which it can actually suffer harm.

Similarly, James Rachels, whose view does not focus on sentience alone, holds that the level of complexity of a creature affects what can be a harm for it. [12] What is relevant to the harm of pain is sentience; what is relevant to the harm of a specific type of pain is a specific type of sentience (e.g., the ability to imagine one’s own death). What is relevant to the harm of diminished freedom is a capacity for freedom or autonomy. It would make no sense to complain that a worm is being deprived of autonomy, or a rabbit of the right to vote.

What should the capabilities approach say about this issue? It seems to me that it should not follow Aristotle in saying that there is a natural ranking of forms of life, some being intrinsically more worthy of support and wonder than others. That consideration might have evaluative significance of some other kind, but it seems dubious that it should affect questions of basic justice.

Rachels’s view offers good guidance here. Because the capabilities approach finds ethical significance in the flourishing of basic (innate) capabilities—those that are evaluated as both good and central (see the section on evaluating animal capabilities)—it will also find harm in the thwarting or blighting of those capabilities. More complex forms of life have more and more complex capabilities to be blighted, so they can suffer more and different types of harm. Level of life is relevant not because it gives different species differential worth per se, but because the type and degree of harm a creature can suffer varies with its form of life.

At the same time, I believe that the capabilities approach should admit the wisdom in utilitarianism. Sentience is not the only thing that matters for basic justice, but it seems plausible to consider sentience a threshold condition for membership in the community of beings who have entitlements based on justice. Thus, killing a sponge does not seem to be a matter of basic justice.

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Does the Species Matter?

For the utilitarians, and for Rachels, the species to which a creature belongs has no moral relevance. All that is morally relevant are the capacities of the individual creature: Rachels calls this view ―moral individualism.‖ Utilitarian writers are fond of comparing apes to young children and to mentally disabled humans. The capabilities approach, by contrast, with its talk of characteristic functioning and forms of life, seems to attach some significance to species membership as such. What type of significance is this?

We should admit that there is much to be learned from reflection on the continuum of life. Capacities do crisscross and overlap; a chimpanzee may have more capacity for empathy and perspectival thinking than a very young child or an older autistic child. And capacities that humans sometimes arrogantly claim for themselves alone are found very widely in nature. But it seems wrong to conclude from such facts that species membership is morally and politically irrelevant. A mentally disabled child is actually very different from a chimpanzee, though in certain respects some of her capacities may be comparable. Such a child’s life is tragic in a way that the life of a chimpanzee is not tragic: She is cut off from forms of flourishing that, but for the disability, she might have had, disabilities that it is the job of science to prevent or cure, wherever that is possible. There is something blighted and disharmonious in her life, whereas the life of a chimpanzee may be perfectly flourishing. Her social and political functioning is threatened by these disabilities, in a way that the normal functioning of a chimpanzee in the community of chimpanzees is not threatened by its cognitive endowment.

All this is relevant when we consider issues of basic justice. For a child born with Down syndrome, it is crucial that the political culture in which he lives make a big effort to extend to him the fullest benefits of citizenship he can attain, through health benefits, education, and the reeducation of the public culture. That is so because he can only flourish as a human being. He has no option of flourishing as a happy chimpanzee. For a chimpanzee, on the other hand, it seems to me that expensive efforts to teach language, while interesting and revealing, are not matters of basic justice. A chimpanzee flourishes in its own way, communicating with its own community in a perfectly adequate manner that has gone on for ages.

In short, the species norm (duly evaluated) tells us what the appropriate benchmark is for judging whether a given creature has decent opportunities for flourishing.

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EVALUATING ANIMAL CAPABILITIES: NO NATURE WORSHIP

In the human case, the capabilities view does not attempt to extract norms directly from some facts about human nature. We should know what we can about the innate capacities of human beings, and this information is valuable, in telling us what our opportunities are and what our dangers might be. But we must begin by evaluating the innate powers of human beings, asking which ones are the good ones, the ones that are central to the notion of a decently flourishing human life, a life with dignity. Thus not only evaluation but also ethical evaluation is put into the approach from the start. Many things that are found in human life are not on the capabilities list.

There is a danger in any theory that alludes to the characteristic flourishing and form of life of a species: the danger of romanticizing nature, or suggesting that things are in order as they are, if only we would stop interfering. This danger looms large when we turn from the human case, where it seems inevitable that we will need to do some moral evaluating, to the animal case, where evaluating is elusive and difficult. Inherent in at least some environmentalist writing is a picture of nature as harmonious and wise, and of humans as wasteful overreachers who would live better were we to get in tune with this fine harmony. This image of nature was already very sensibly attacked by John Stuart Mill in his great essay ―Nature,‖ which pointed out that nature, far from being morally normative, is actually violent, heedless of moral norms, prodigal, full of conflict, harsh to humans and animals both. A similar view lies at the heart of much modern ecological thinking, which now stresses the inconstancy and imbalance of nature, [13] arguing, inter alia, that many of the natural ecosystems that we admire as such actually sustain themselves to the extent that they do only on account of various forms of human intervention.

Thus, a no-evaluation view, which extracts norms directly from observation of animals’ characteristic ways of life, is probably not going to be a helpful way of promoting the good of animals. Instead, we need a careful evaluation of both ―nature‖ and possible changes. Respect for nature should not and cannot mean just leaving nature as it is, and must involve careful normative arguments about what plausible goals might be.

In the case of humans, the primary area in which the political conception inhibits or fails to foster tendencies that are pervasive in human life is the area of harm to others. Animals, of course, pervasively cause harm, both to members of their own species and, far more often, to members of other species.

In both of these cases, the capabilities theorist will have a strong inclination to say that the harm-causing capabilities in question are not among those that should be protected by political and social principles. But if we leave these capabilities off the list, how can we claim to be promoting flourishing lives? Even though the capabilities approach is not utilitarian and does not hold that all good is in sentience, it will still be difficult to maintain that a creature who feels frustration at the inhibition of its predatory capacities is living a flourishing life. A human being can be expected to learn to flourish without homicide and, let us hope, even without most killing of animals. But a lion who is given no exercise for its predatory capacity appears to suffer greatly.

Here the capabilities view may, however, distinguish two aspects of the capability in question. The capability to kill small animals, defined as such, is not valuable, and political principles can omit it (and even inhibit it in some cases, to be discussed in the following section). But the capability to exercise one’s predatory nature so as to avoid the pain of frustration may well have value, if the pain of frustration is considerable. Zoos have learned how to make this distinction. Noticing that they were giving predatory animals insufficient exercise for their predatory capacities, they had to face the question of the harm done to smaller animals by allowing these capabilities to be exercised. Should they give a tiger a tender gazelle to crunch on? The Bronx Zoo has found that it can give the tiger a large ball on a rope, whose resistance and weight symbolize the gazelle. The tiger seems satisfied. Wherever predatory animals are living under direct human support and control, these solutions seem the most ethically sound.

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POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE, CAPABILITY AND FUNCTIONING

In the human case, there is a traditional distinction between positive and negative duties that it seems important to call into question. Traditional moralities hold that we have a strict duty not to commit aggression and fraud, but we have no correspondingly strict duty to stop hunger or disease, nor to give money to promote their cessation. [14]

The capabilities approach calls this distinction into question. All the human capabilities require affirmative support, usually including state action. This is just as true of protecting property and personal security as it is of health care, just as true of the political and civil liberties as it is of providing adequate shelter.

In the case of animals, unlike the human case, there might appear to be some room for a positive-negative distinction that makes some sense. It seems at least coherent to say that the human community has the obligation to refrain from certain egregious harms toward animals, but that it is not obliged to support the welfare of all animals, in the sense of ensuring them adequate food, shelter, and health care. The animals themselves have the rest of the task of ensuring their own flourishing.

There is much plausibility in this contention. And certainly if our political principles simply ruled out the many egregious forms of harm to animals, they would have done quite a lot. But the contention, and the distinction it suggests, cannot be accepted in full. First of all, large numbers of animals live under humans’ direct control: domestic animals, farm animals, and those members of wild species that are in zoos or other forms of captivity. Humans have direct responsibility for the nutrition and health care of these animals, as even our defective current systems of law acknowledge. [15] Animals in the wild appear to go their way unaffected by human beings. But of course that can hardly be so in many cases in today’s world. Human beings pervasively affect the habitats of animals, determining opportunities for nutrition, free movement, and other aspects of flourishing.

Thus, while we may still maintain that one primary area of human responsibility to animals is that of refraining from a whole range of bad acts (to be discussed shortly), we cannot plausibly stop there. The only questions should be how extensive our duties are, and how to balance them against appropriate respect for the autonomy of a species.

In the human case, one way in which the approach respects autonomy is to focus on capability, and not functioning, as the legitimate political goal. But paternalistic treatment (which aims at functioning rather than capability) is warranted wherever the individual’s capacity for choice and autonomy is compromised (thus, for children and the severely mentally disabled). This principle suggests that paternalism is usually appropriate when we are dealing with non-human animals. That conclusion, however, should be qualified by our previous endorsement of the idea that species autonomy, in pursuit of flourishing, is part of the good for non-human animals. How, then, should the two principles be combined, and can they be coherently combined? I believe that they can be combined, if we adopt a type of paternalism that is highly sensitive to the different forms of flourishing that different species pursue. It is no use saying that we should just let tigers flourish in their own way, given that human activity ubiquitously affects the possibilities for tigers to flourish. This being the case, the only decent alternative to complete neglect of tiger flourishing is a policy that thinks carefully about the flourishing of tigers and what habitat that requires, and then tries hard to create such habitats. In the case of domestic animals, an intelligent paternalism would encourage training, discipline, and even, where appropriate, strenuous training focused on special excellences of a breed (such as the border collie or the hunter-jumper). But the animal, like a child, will retain certain entitlements, which they hold regardless of what their human guardian thinks about it. They are not merely objects for human beings’ use and control.

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TOWARD BASIC POLITICAL PRINCIPLES: THE CAPABILITIES LIST

It is now time to see whether we can actually use the human basis of the capabilities approach to map out some basic political principles that will guide law and public policy in dealing with animals. The list I have defended as useful in the human case is as follows:

The Central Human Capabilities

Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a ―truly human‖ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.

Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us and to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial to our development.)

Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)

Affiliation. (A) Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.) (B) Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. (This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.)

Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

Control over One’s Environment. (A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation; protections of free speech and association. (B) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

Although the entitlements of animals are species specific, the main large categories of the existing list, suitably fleshed out, turn out to be a good basis for a sketch of some basic political principles.

In the capabilities approach, all animals are entitled to continue their lives, whether or not they have such a conscious interest. All sentient animals have a secure entitlement against gratuitous killing for sport. Killing for luxury items such as fur falls in this category, and should be banned. On the other hand, intelligently respectful paternalism supports euthanasia for elderly animals in pain. In the middle are the very difficult cases, such as the question of predation to control populations, and the question of killing for food. The reason these cases are so difficult is that animals will die anyway in nature, and often more painfully. Painless predation might well be preferable to allowing the animal to be torn to bits in the wild or starved through overpopulation. As for food, the capabilities approach agrees with utilitarianism in being most troubled by the torture of living animals. If animals were really killed in a painless fashion, after a healthy and free-ranging life, what then? Killings of extremely young animals would still be problematic, but it seems unclear that the balance of considerations supports a complete ban on killings for food.

Bodily Health. One of the most central entitlements of animals is the entitlement to a healthy life. Where animals are directly under human control, it is relatively clear what policies this entails: laws banning cruel treatment and neglect; laws banning the confinement and ill treatment of animals in the meat and fur industries; laws forbidding harsh or cruel treatment for working animals, including circus animals; laws regulating zoos and aquariums, mandating adequate nutrition and space. Many of these laws already exist, although they are not well enforced. The striking asymmetry in current practice is that animals being raised for food are not protected in the way other animals are protected. This asymmetry must be eliminated.

Bodily Integrity. This goes closely with the preceding. Under the capabilities approach, animals have direct entitlements against violations of their bodily integrity by violence, abuse, and other forms of harmful treatment—whether or not the treatment in question is painful. Thus the declawing of cats would probably be banned under this rubric, on the grounds that it prevents the cat from flourishing in its own characteristic way, even though it may be done in a painfree manner and cause no subsequent pain. On the other hand, forms of training that, though involving discipline, equip the animal to manifest excellences that are part of its characteristic capabilities profile would not be eliminated.

Senses, Imagination, and Thought. For humans, this capability creates a wide range of entitlements: to appropriate education, to free speech and artistic expression, to the freedom of religion. It also includes a more general entitlement to pleasurable experiences and the avoidance of non-beneficial pain. By now it ought to be rather obvious where the latter point takes us in thinking about animals: toward laws banning harsh, cruel, and abusive treatment and ensuring animals’ access to sources of pleasure, such as free movement in an environment that stimulates and pleases the senses. The freedom-related part of this capability has no precise analogue, and yet we can come up with appropriate analogues in the case of each type of animal, by asking what choices and areas of freedom seem most important to each. Clearly this reflection would lead us to reject close confinement and to regulate the places in which animals of all kinds are kept for spaciousness, light and shade, and the variety of opportunities they offer the animals for a range of characteristic activities. Again, the capabilities approach seems superior to utilitarianism in its ability to recognize such entitlements, for few animals will have a conscious interest, as such, in variety and space.

Emotions. Animals have a wide range of emotions. All or almost all sentient animals have fear. Many animals can experience anger, resentment, gratitude, grief, envy, and joy. A small number—those who are capable of perspectival thinking—can experience compassion. [16] Like human beings, they are entitled to lives in which it is open to them to have attachments to others, to love and care for others, and not to have those attachments warped by enforced isolation or the deliberate infliction of fear. We understand well what this means where our cherished domestic animals are in question. Oddly, we do not extend the same consideration to animals we think of as ―wild. Until recently, zoos took no thought for the emotional needs of animals, and animals being used for research were often treated with gross carelessness in this regard, being left in isolation and confinement when they might easily have had decent emotional lives. [17]

Practical Reason. In each case, we need to ask to what extent the creature has a capacity to frame goals and projects and to plan its life. To the extent that this capacity is present, it ought to be supported, and this support requires many of the same policies already suggested by capability 4: plenty of room to move around, opportunities for a variety of activities.

Affiliation. In the human case, this capability has two parts: an interpersonal part (being able to live with and toward others) and a more public part, focused on self-respect and non-humiliation. It seems to me that the same two parts are pertinent for non-human animals. Animals are entitled to opportunities to form attachments (as in capability 5) and to engage in characteristic forms of bonding and interrelationship. They are also entitled to relations with humans, where humans enter the picture, that are rewarding and reciprocal, rather than tyrannical. At the same time, they are entitled to live in a world public culture that respects them and treats them as dignified beings. This entitlement does not just mean protecting them from instances of humiliation that they will feel as painful. The capabilities approach here extends more broadly than utilitarianism, holding that animals are entitled to world policies that grant them political rights and the legal status of dignified beings, whether they understand that status or not.

Other Species. If human beings are entitled to ―be able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature,‖ so too are other animals, in relation to species not their own, including the human species, and the rest of the natural world. This capability, seen from both the human and the animal side, calls for the gradual formation of an interdependent world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and mutually supportive relations with one another. Nature is not that way and never has been. So it calls, in a very general way, for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.

Play. This capability is obviously central to the lives of all sentient animals. It calls for many of the same policies we have already discussed: provision of adequate space, light, and sensory stimulation in living places, and, above all, the presence of other species members.

Control over One’s Environment. In the human case, this capability has two prongs, the political and the material. The political is defined in terms of active citizenship and rights of political participation. For non-human animals, the important thing is being part of a political conception that is framed so as to respect them and that is committed to treating them justly. It is important, however, that animals have entitlements directly, so that a human guardian has standing to go to court, as with children, to vindicate those entitlements. On the material side, for non-human animals, the analogue to property rights is respect for the territorial integrity of their habitats, whether domestic or in the wild.

Are there animal capabilities not covered by this list, suitably specified? It seems to me not, although in the spirit of the capabilities approach we should insist that the list is open-ended, subject to supplementation or deletion.

In general, the capabilities approach suggests that it is appropriate for nations to include in their constitutions or other founding statements of principle a commitment to animals as subjects of political justice and a commitment that animals will be treated with dignity. The constitution might also spell out some of the very general principles suggested by this capabilities list. The rest of the work of protecting animal entitlements might be done by suitable legislation and by court cases demanding the enforcement of the law, where it is not enforced. At the same time, many of the issues covered by this approach cannot be dealt with by nations in isolation, but can only be addressed by international cooperation. So we also need international accords committing the world community to the protection of animal habitats and the eradication of cruel practices.

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THE INELIMINABILITY OF CONFLICT

In the human case, we often face the question of conflict between one capability and another. But if the capabilities list and its thresholds are suitably designed, we ought to say that the presence of conflict between one capability and another is a sign that society has gone wrong somewhere. [18] We should focus on long-term planning that will create a world in which all the capabilities can be secured to all citizens.

Our world contains persistent and often tragic conflicts between the well-being of human beings and the well-being of animals. Some bad treatment of animals can be eliminated without serious losses in human wellbeing: Such is the case with the use of animals for fur, and the brutal and confining treatment of animals used for food. The use of animals for food in general is a much more difficult case, since nobody really knows what the impact on the world environment would be of a total switch to vegetarian sources of protein, or the extent to which such a diet could be made compatible with the health of all the world’s children. A still more difficult problem is the use of animals in research.

A lot can be done to improve the lives of research animals without stopping useful research. As Steven Wise has shown, primates used in research often live in squalid, lonely conditions while they are used as medical subjects. This of course is totally unnecessary and morally unacceptable and could be ended without ending the research. Some research that is done is unnecessary and can be terminated, for example, the testing of cosmetics on rabbits, which seems to have been bypassed without loss of quality by some cosmetic firms. But much important research with major consequences for the life and health of human beings and other animals will inflict disease, pain, and death on at least some animals, even under the best conditions.

I do not favor stopping all such research. What I do favor is (a) asking whether the research is really necessary for a major human capability; (b) focusing on the use of less-complex sentient animals where possible, on the grounds that they suffer fewer and lesser harms from such research; (c) improving the conditions of research animals, including palliative terminal care when they have contracted a terminal illness, and supportive interactions with both humans and other animals; (d) removing the psychological brutality that is inherent in so much treatment of animals for research; (e) choosing topics cautiously and seriously, so that no animal is harmed for a frivolous reason; and (f) a constant effort to develop experimental methods (for example, computer simulations) that do not have these bad consequences.

Above all, it means constant public discussion of these issues, together with an acknowledgment that such uses of animals in research are tragic, violating basic entitlements. Such public acknowledgments are far from useless. They state what is morally true, and thus acknowledge the dignity of animals and our own culpability toward them. They reaffirm dispositions to behave well toward them where no such urgent exigencies intervene. Finally, they prompt us to seek a world in which the pertinent research could in fact be done in other ways.

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TOWARD A TRULY GLOBAL JUSTICE

It has been obvious for a long time that the pursuit of global justice requires the inclusion of many people and groups who were not previously included as fully equal subjects of justice: the poor; members of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities; and more recently women, the disabled, and inhabitants of nations distant from one’s own.

But a truly global justice requires not simply that we look across the world for other fellow species members who are entitled to a decent life. It also requires looking around the world at the other sentient beings with whose lives our own are inextricably and complexly intertwined. Traditional contractarian approaches to the theory of justice did not and, in their very form, could not confront these questions as questions of justice. Utilitarian approaches boldly did so, and they deserve high praise. But in the end, I have argued, utilitarianism is too homogenizing—both across lives and with respect to the heterogeneous constituents of each life—to provide us with an adequate theory of animal justice. The capabilities approach, which begins from an ethically attuned wonder before each form of animal life, offers a model that does justice to the complexity of animal lives and their strivings for flourishing. Such a model seems an important part of a fully global theory of justice.

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NOTES

This essay derives from my Tanner Lectures in 2003 and is published by courtesy of the University of Utah Press and the Trustees of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The incident is discussed in Pliny Nat. Hist. 8.7.20–21, Cicero Ad Fam. 7.1.3; see also Dio Cassius Hist. 39, 38, 2–4. See the discussion in Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 124–125.

For this approach, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and ―Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice, Feminist Economics 9 (2003): 33–59. The approach was pioneered by Amartya Sen within economics, and is used by him in some rather different ways, without a definite commitment to a normative theory of justice.

All references are to John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), hereafter TJ.

Rawls himself makes the comparison at TJ 12; his analogue to the state of nature is the equality of the parties in the Original Position.

See the analysis in Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 6; thus far the analysis is uncontroversial, recapitulating a long tradition of analysis.

See Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, introduction to Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3–4.

See the comment by Nussbaum in Goodness and Advice, Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Tanner Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), discussing work along these lines by Amartya Sen and others.

Briefly put, my worries are those of Rawls in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), who points out that it is illiberal for political principles to contain any comprehensive account of what is best. Instead, political principles should be committed to a partial set of ethical norms endorsed for political purposes, leaving it to citizens to fill out the rest of the ethical picture in accordance with their own comprehensive conceptions of value, religious or secular. Thus I would be happy with a partial political consequentialism, but not with comprehensive consequentialism, as a basis for political principles.

Martin Seligman, Helplessness: On Development, Depression, and Death (New York: Freeman, 1975).

Here I agree with Thomson (who is thinking mostly about Moore); see Goodness and Advice.

Peter Singer, ―Animals and the Value of Life,‖ in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays on Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1980), 356.

James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Daniel B. Botkin, ―Adjusting Law to Nature’s Discordant Harmonies,‖ Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum 7 (1996): 25–37.

See the critique by Martha Nussbaum in ―Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,‖ Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–31.

The laws do not cover all animals, in particular, not animals who are going to be used for food or fur.

On all this, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, ch. 2.

See Steven Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), ch. 1.

See Martha C. Nussbaum, ―The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Implications of Cost-Benefit Analysis,‖ in Cost-Benefit Analysis, ed. Matthew D. Adler and Eric A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 169–200.

[didanawisgi]

Following the science

“Please, follow the science (even if it has now become inconvenient and uncomfortable)

Today, I was made aware of the following publication:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1.full.pdf

This is one of the most abominable publications I’ve ever read. It’s simply unthinkable that this would pass peer review. I am truly sorry to say so, but this article is really an unprecedented violation and misrepresentation of the science. I have no choice but to react to this and copy the corresponding author (venky@nreference.net). Clearly, these guys have a mission that is all but inspired by science. I am truly wondering who is financing this type of fancy ‘machine-taught science’.

The corresponding author is the ‘rchief evangelist for nference’ and ‘has led multi-year R&D data-science alliances with global biopharma companies… ‘. This may already explain why pedantic messages are conveyed, which, unfortunately, are not supported by any data in this paper (‘This study demonstrates that mass vaccination may serve as an antigenic impediment to the evolution of fitter and more transmissive SARS-CoV-2 variants, emphasizing the urgent need to stem vaccine hesitancy as a key step to mitigate the global burden of COVID-19’) and why the title is misrepresenting the impact of mass vaccination.

Instead of ‘COVID-19 vaccines dampen genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2: Unvaccinated patients exhibit more antigenic mutational variance’, the title should read: ‘COVID-19 vaccines dampen genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2: Vaccinated patients exhibit diminished antigenic mutational variance’! This at least would reflect the increasing trend of convergence of immune escape mutations to a limited set of Sars-CoV-2 S protein-associated epitopes. This trend coincides, indeed, with mass vaccination and has extensively been documented by a number of molecular epidemiologists (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33688681/) and is now considered a serious ‘Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein’ (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/).

In all of the section reporting on the results of this study, there is literally only one sentence that deals with the comparison of variants in vaccinates versus non-vaccinated patients (see under results: Whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 genomes from unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals reveals different mutational profiles):

‘We find that the known B-cell epitopes exhibit more mutational diversity in the unvaccinated individuals than in the vaccinated individuals (Figure 4b,c).’

None of this is even further debated under Discussion! So what is justifying their title and gospel message?

My comments: OMG, really? Is it this what prompts them to preach the gospel of mass vaccination? Do they have any notable background in immunology or vaccinology? They seem to seek whatever data they can get their hands on to confirm the mantra of mass vaccination evangelized by the WHO: ‘The more viral replication, the more mutations and hence, the more mass vaccination will prevent new variants from arising’. Don’t they read what their peers are publishing (see reference above) and what I’ve been reiterating in my most recent contributions? (“Critical opinion article: Why is the ongoing mass vaccination experiment driving a rapid evolutionary response of SARS-CoV-2?” and “The chicken-and-egg problem”)? Don’t they understand that you cannot do mass vaccination with these C-19 vaccines without having the vaccinees exerting major S-directed immune pressure on the virus and without providing a steadily growing breeding ground for the selected immune escape variants? Don’t they understand that precisely this widespread immune selection pressure is now promoting convergent evolution of immune escape variants to the same antigenic sites within the S protein and thereby enabling the virus to adapt to its altered host environment? That this is eventually going to lead to dominance of variants of concern? That those are predominantly shed by vaccinees? (almost according to their own findings: ‘Furthermore, a larger fraction of the vaccinated (82.6%) cohort had alpha variant compared to the unvaccinated cohort (60%) (Table S1). Availability of a larger number of sequenced genomes in the future can help understand whether specific variants of concern are more likely to cause breakthrough infections’).

Of course, the spectrum of mutational diversity in non-vaccinated people will be higher as these individuals do not exert selective immune pressure on S protein, even if naturally infected. Moreover, non-vaccinated populations do not provide a suitable environment for immune escape variants to propagate as there is no competitive advantage for them to gain.

I am stunned at the immunological and epidemiologic illiteracy of the authors. If you really want to study the effect of mass vaccination on the evolution of mutations, you compare HEALTHY vaccinees with HEALTHY non-vaccinated people! Why? because the selective immune pressure (towards S protein) is highest in healthy vaccinees and (presumably) lowest in healthy non-vaccinated subjects (as they clear the infection rapidly). So, in terms of the degree of S-targeted immune selection pressure one expects the following gradation: unvaccinated <breakthrough vaccinated < healthy vaccinated or, in terms of (irrelevant!) mutational diversity: unvaccinated >breakthrough vaccinated > healthy vaccinated.

Mass vaccination at the height of a pandemic enables selection and adaptation of S-directed immune escape variants and leads to dominant circulation of variants of concern (VoCs), not the other way around as the authors try to make readers believe! Indeed, they erroneously pretend: ‘Dominance globally results in increased mutation of antigenic sites’! Conclusions as drawn by the authors reflect, indeed, the risk of bias and scientific misinterpretations when the analysis of complex phenomena such as the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic is reduced to an exercise in computational stamp collection. Teaching machines how to read biological data can be extremely dangerous as lack of holistic insights lead to correlations that some tend to interpret as causation. For example, the current study results do not seem to take into account the impact of a number of tricky confounders, probably due to lack of knowledge in other biological fields (in this case: immunology, virology, evolutionary biology, vaccinology). For example: What about the impact of differences in the infectious pressure (number of active infections) in those different countries? What about the influence of the infectiousness of the circulating variants? Differences in the level of immune pressure? (e.g., which percentage of vaccinees only received a single injection of a 2-shot vaccine)? Differences in the total vaccine coverage rate? Differences in the speed of the mass vaccination campaigns? Differences in the type of vaccines used? Differences in flanking infection prevention measures?

Also their reasoning in regard of co-morbidities seems confusing. Although they did not find a statistically significant association between mutation count and rates of complications, they seem to suggest that co-morbidities resulted from Covid-19 rather than constituting a predisposing factor to Covid-19 disease. In this regard, the fact that vaccinated patients had lower rates of comorbidities would even suggest that vaccination was rendering them more susceptible to the disease! As underlying co-morbidities augment the risk for C19 disease, it is logical, indeed, that the majority of their unvaccinated subjects only contracted C19 disease provided they had an underlying health issue.

It’s amazing that in the key limitations of their study they didn’t even think about mentioning their full ignorance of the immunologic context that is deeply and massively altered by mass vaccination campaigns!

Their interpretation of how T cell responses may ‘buffer’ viral evolution is of course only hypothetical but nevertheless completely irrational. The large diversity of T cell peptides combined with the extensive heterogeneity of peptide-matching MHC class I alleles already explains why it is highly unlikely for a naturally infected population to place widespread selective immune pressure on a particular T cell epitope. I would not understand how degeneracy of T cell recognition would need to be involved in protecting against immune escape, especially not since degenerated T cell recognition has rather been associated with auto-immune disease (which is almost the opposite of immune escape!).

Last, their suggestion that T cell-based vaccines may offer a perspective to successful immune intervention is not based on sound scientific grounds either! Or do they think there is on or more promiscuous or universal MHC class I-dependent T cell epitope(s) that has the capacity to induce T cells capable of eliminating virus-infected cells? If this approach would work, we would already have several T cell-based vaccines on the market. It’s not the case as T cell antigens are only protective in individuals who are genetically predisposed to controlling the pathogen by virtue of their protective alleles.”