#cognitive elites

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ostromizing democracy

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?’” That same “realism” is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled “libertarian elitists,” who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn’t work — and can’t work.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

You’ve likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you’ve heard about how our cognitive biases make us incapable of deliberating, that “reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Or maybe you’ve heard that voters are “rationally ignorant,” choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn’t have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

There’s the “backfire effect,” the idea that rational argument doesn’t make us change our minds, but rather, drives us to double-down on our own cherished beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the Asch effect, which says that we will change our minds based on pressure from the majority, even if we know they’re wrong.

Finally, there’s the fact that the public Just Doesn’t Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths as “we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?” These fools just can’t understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it’s growing overall!

That’s why noted “realist” Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the “science” of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn’t starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people. Thus do we find ourselves on the road to serfdom:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (Chicago School) economists shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy.”

Add it all up and you get the various “libertarian” cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because “markets impose an effective ‘user fee’ for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

Others say we should limit voting to “Vulcans” who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is “negatively correlated” with familiarity with “politics,” then so mote be it. After all, these groups are “much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need”:

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-demographic-argument-for-compulsory-voting-with-a-guest-appearance-by-the-real-reason-the-left-advocates-compulsory-voting/

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg (Mercier’s research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/analytical-democratic-theory-a-microfoundational-approach/739A9A928A99A47994E4585059B03398

What’s “Analytical Democracy Theory?” It’s the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren’t completely, utterly wrong — there are times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

This isn’t the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You’ve probably heard of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which claims to be a “realist” account of what happens when people try to share something — a park, a beach, a forest — without anyone owning it. According to the “tragedy,” these commons are inevitably ruined by “rational” actors who know that if they don’t overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we’ve all experienced some version of it — the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic — he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn’t true. What’s more, Hardin — an ardent white nationalist — used his “realist’s account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn’t have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually saving the colonized from their own tragedies.

Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of “lifeboat ethics,” a greased slide to mass-extermination of “inferior” people (Hardin was also a eugenicist) in order to save our planet from “overpopulation.”

Hardin’s flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped “”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Hardin asked himself, “If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?” And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that’s what the other realists would do if he didn’t get there first.

Hardin didn’t go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists’ term for this is microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a “macro” account of how to structure whole societies.

Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:

Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds — but not always.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of “rational ignorance” theory, people who care about specific issues become “issue publics” who are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates’ positions:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650

Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics in general, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

“Myside” bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out “erroneous messages” that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237827

Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the consensus of majorities, when the majority view is implausible, or when the majority is small, or when the majority is not perceived as benevolent. The Asch effect is “folklore”: yes, people may say that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds:

https://alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_2020.pdf

Notwithstanding all this, democracy’s cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

“social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent”:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-2601(05)37004-3

“shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement”:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080

“group size and the need to represent diversity”:

https://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/uploads/DiscussionCrowds-Mercier-2021.pdf

“pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation”:

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30811

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable — that we shouldn’t even bother trying to create public goods.

The Ostrom method — actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you — is a powerful tonic to this, but it’s not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

It’s a radical proposition. Don’t just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s the foundation of Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology. Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be “so easy a child could use them” in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning 2022 novel “A Half-Built Garden” is a tour-de-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, “The Lost Cause,” is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it’s out in November):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.]

[gutwrenchflowerbomb]

X

[immaculatasknight]

Don't believe your lying eyes

[calicojack1718]

Unraveling the Psychology Behind Political Polarization

We've all heard the contradictory bullshit that conservatives at all levels regurgitate upon us. None of us can understand the level of cognitive dissonance necessary for it, but here are three psychology studies that will help.!

SUMMARY: The blog post delves into the psychological reasons behind why some individuals believe in seemingly unbelievable political rhetoric. It discusses the illusory truth effect, the complex relationship between anxiety and right-wing populism, and the role of envy in radicalization. The post suggests that the GOP is purposefully radicalizing its base and emphasizes the importance of…

[qqueenofhades]

I think the Aaron Sorkin fic people are writing about the convention to be extremely silly. It's going to be Biden. And if Biden's health takes a downturn and he feels the need to step down its going tk be Harris. This fantasy where we skip over her to whip up two random white guys(or like maaaybe Witmer) and somehow cruise to victory instead of fragmenting the party months before the election is simply not going to happen.

Look, I'm just saying, I got an email from the Biden campaign this morning where they seemed pretty darn happy with the actual (i.e. not-bloviating media) results of the debate: $38 million raised in 4 days ($30 million from individual small-dollar donors), 10K new volunteers in a week, 3x surge in campaign volunteers for battleground states, essentially no change or even a modest boost in the polls. So I think at this point, we can cautiously conclude the following things:

The debate looked bad for Biden, perhaps, but doesn't seem to have hurt him nearly as much the incredibly bad-faith BIDEN NEEDS TO STEP DOWN NOW takes being pumped out by the NYT and its other compatriots would suggest. Especially when these same media outlets have been gleefully sabotaging Biden at every turn for years already and whose fake-sanctimonious hand-wringing "for the good of the nation" pieces honestly should get them dropped into Superhell for Bad Journalists;

Biden went to Raleigh NC right after the debate and gave a fiery rally speech that was very well received. Now, I don't know why we didn't have that Biden at the debate, but it was the same night and there clearly was not any "cOgnItiVe dEcLinE" happening there (also Biden has a stutter and has for literally his entire life, and had a cold on debate night, so it was just an unfortunate confluence of factors)

There are very few actually undecided voters in this election (once again: HOW???) and those who tuned into the debate were largely already convinced of which candidate they were voting for and this didn't do much to change their minds. Just like, you know, pretty much every other debate in the history of presidential elections.

Ordinary voters, and not mainstream media outlets with BIDEN IZ BAD goggles clamped over their eyes, were able to see Trump's insane Gish gallops, lies, and full-blown dementia; this isn't going to get any better for him when he's already lost 20%-25% of GOP voters in every state primary and still is going to be sentenced in his criminal trial;

The D.C. political elite screaming about how Biden should step down (FOUR MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION) and leave the Democrats to start from scratch with some Star Chamber-selected candidate with no money and no incumbency record and no organization apparatus and a divided party are either fucking weapons grade morons or working secretly for Trump, because that IS in fact the best way to lose the election;

Such speculation seems to fall chiefly on Gavin Newsom, who (to his credit) has shut down any and all suggestion that he should try to step in and take the place of an incumbent who has won every state primary with 90% or more, because he's remotely sane and understands that this year is too important to fuck around with;

I've somehow never seen any suggestion that Biden should step aside for the duly elected (brown, female) Vice President, because everyone seems to think some Young Miraculous White Guy is coming and/or should step in;

All this while SCOTUS is clearly so confident of Trump getting back in that it's willing to grant him Absolute God King status pre- and post-emptively;

Yes, Biden needs to up his game before the next debate (though that's on Fox News iirc, blargh), but I think it's far enough post-debate that we can say it was bad but did not sink him, and if anything, reinforced the fact to many ordinary, non-brainwormed voters that Biden is old (which has been the number one chief theme of news coverage for four years and is no surprise to anyone) but is a decent and principled man doing a good job, while Trump is an absolute gibbering insane orange shitmonger fascist. I don't think he did himself any favors in that regard.

....anyway. The point is, do not be fucking insane people, Biden is not going to step down and frankly shouldn't, don't read the NYT (as noted, they've openly admitted to sabotaging him for personal ego reasons so I don't know why the hell anyone would listen to what they have to say about him), this is still an eminently winnable election, and let's go get those motherfucking fascists. I want Trump in jail and all of SCOTUS and the MAGAGOP fucking crying over it because they fucking suck. Let's go.

[bootleg-nessie]

Things that will happen in the future (based on my own experiences with time travel):

***FAQs at the end***

*All of these observations are copied directly from my notes in roughly the order I took them in

*Don’t ask about the interchanging use of past/present/future tense, you know how that stuff is with time travel

Women just started all growing three boobs instead of two. Scientists baffled

Genetically engineered catboys (no literally)

The great pyramid of Giza has been converted into a Bass Pro Shop

The entire state of Rhode Island was bought by some rich tech CEO who promptly dug a 500 foot wide trench around the entire state so that it could in fact be an island. It was soon converted into the world’s largest parking lot

Pollution has gotten so bad that fresh oxygen is now delivered straight to most homes via a subscription service

Basic necessities such as food, water, and housing are now provided for free by the government, but only for the top 1% of wealth holders

Insulin now costs twice as much as rent. “Get fucked,” say pharma companies

92.6% of new electronic appliances now have smartphone integration and require a monthly subscription to use

Most billionaires have real estate on earth’s moon

As an ongoing film experiment, Taika Waititi successfully convinced a Nebraska man that he’s been raptured and is now in heaven. He actually got Truman Show’d and now millions of viewers tune in every week to watch God (played by John DiMaggio) manipulate Robert into confronting his own views, battle cognitive dissonance, and face the realization that he might not have been as good of a person on Earth as he thought he was

Carrots have gone extinct, as have highland cows

Species of extinct animals and plants now are being posthumously renamed after the billionaires and elites most directly responsible for killing then off

Researchers discovered a sentient colony of fungus off the coast of Chile, it prefers to go by Fleebo and appears to have a incredibly complex intelligence far greater than any other observed organic being

Nobody knows where Ireland went. It literally just disappeared off the face of the earth one day and nobody bothered to question it. The story couldn’t compete in the news cycle with the recent news about a company in China that made the first real life pokemon. An entire civilization of people gone and I’m the only one who seems to remember it or even care

Fleebo and its offspring have annexed Madagascar and are threatening any retaliation with nuclear warfare and “making The Last of Us a reality.” Nobody knows if Fleebo actually has the capabilities to do this, but after the Lovecraft incident we’re all TOO goddam scared to fuck around and find out

Large snails have replaced cats and dogs as the most common household pet. Snail culture has largely taken over the world, especially Japan

The president of the United States is now decided with an oiled up twerking competition. Most people were hesitant at first but this has produced vastly more competent leaders so now everyone just kinda goes along with it

With the cost of living crisis only worsening with time, selling tattoo space on your body to advertisers has become common as people struggle to afford rent and pay their bills

North and South Korea have reunited into “Korea 2.0”

Germany has split up into East and West Germany again

Belgium and France have been annexed by West Germany and renamed “Wester Germany” and “Westest Germany” respectively

The entirety of Florida is now underwater. Most of Kansas is too for some reason that scientists refuse to explain because they’ve “sworn an oath to the eldritch gods” and that “much worse things would happen” if they did

The melting ice caps in Antarctica unveiled a lost civilization of intelligent creatures descended from a species of lungfish, predating human civilization by millions of years. They planned on hibernating for another 10-15 million years to observe the course of evolution on Earth and are very very angry at humans for waking them up prematurely and ruining all of that with global warming

The politically correct term for lungfish people is “Dipnoid” but most people refer to them by a variety of slurs, such as “finwalker” and “kelp muncher” (not that they even eat kelp)

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now increased to nearly half the size of what was formerly known as Canada and has been colonized entirely by pirates (the flag is actually pretty cool). The pirate nation has the 17th largest economy in the world and is projected to surpass the United States in GDP

Africa is about 2% smaller. Nobody knows why. Most people point to Fleebo, who denies having any involvement

All human-Dipnoid interaction was promptly banned by most world governments, except for the GPGPRP (Great Pacific Garbage Patch Republic of Pirates), whom the Dipnoids rely upon extensively for trade

Scientists have used DNA from fossils to recreate other species of humans. We now live alongside them like we did for thousands of years before everyone besides Homo sapiens went extinct. Racism is at an all time high

Class C and above robots are now legally recognized by most progressive countries as people

The United States government has been exposed for secretly funneling billions of dollars into the GPGPRP and using it to fund terrorist operations all over the world.

A new major religion revolving around Dave Grohl has skyrocketed in popularity. Grohilsm is now the world’s largest religion, second only to Fleeboism

Scientists discovered a new continent in the Pacific Ocean, and then promptly lost it again. Most people are convinced this was just an elaborate practical joke, but scientists “swear it definitely happened”

For a brief period of about 30 years, everything in George Orwell’s 1984 happened almost exactly as written in the book. Literally 1984

It was revealed that Jeff Epstein didn’t kill himself. He actually faked his death and spent the next few years in a drug-fueled episode of psychosis making sock puppets in a cave in Italy and then molesting said sock puppets until he died from a sock puppet related illness

Bigfoot was discovered off the coast of Georgia doing cocaine with a congregation of alligators. When questioned, he said he normally lives in Montana and was only there on vacation. He is now a celebrity, and has been featured in a number of tv shows and films, two of which he won an Oscar for. Last I checked, he was a washed up actor living in Hollywood with a reanimated Neanderthal woman

The GPGPRP raided most of England’s museums with the object of “doing exactly what they did for the last few centuries” England was understandably furious, but the rest of the world found it rather amusing

England declared war on the GPGPRP, which it promptly lost after hackers brought down the entire country’s military overnight. Much like in the 21st century, England is the world’s laughing stock

The entirety of Luxembourg relocated itself to the moon

Russia attempted to take over most of Eurasia. In retaliation to the full global effort to stop them, they launched nukes at the world’s 600 most populous cities outside of its current territory. Most of the warheads were stopped in time, but a few major metropolitan areas got hit pretty badly, including Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Mexico City, and Istanbul. Japan was understandably super pissed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki got nuked for a second time

In the wake of the nuclear holocaust, Canada assumed control over what was formerly Russia and assimilated many of its citizens and leaders into its own society and government. Under the new rule of formerly Russian leaders, Canada became a puppet state for the second coming of Russia. It annexed much of the United States, Mongolia, China, and a handful of other countries, becoming “the world’s first megacountry.” Crungolaska now controls a majority of the northern hemisphere

As part of a practical joke by Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks was actually marooned on a desert island like in Castaway. He lasted less than a week before he died. When I left this era of the future, Adam Sandler was serving a lifetime sentence in prison for murder

Fringe groups of crows with above-average intelligence have started popping up around the world. So far they have been observed forming small communities, crafting relatively complex tools, using rudimentary speech, performing rituals, and creating music

Aliens visited earth and had a formal meeting with many of our world leaders, but decided to leave us alone for a few thousand more years because humanity is “not yet mature enough to handle the responsibilities of interstellar travel.” They have incentivized us with a the blueprints for an Alcubierre Drive and a means to produce the exotic matter to fuel it once they deem us as being ready

The original colony of settlers on Mars has declared independence, officially becoming the first country not on Earth

We sent Tom Cruise back to space but this time we just left him there

The tether for the space elevator broke. The town known as Vatorville, famous for being the location of the takeoff point of the elevator shuttle on Earth, was completely decimated as tens of thousands of miles of steel cable came crashing back down. There were no survivors

Most people in first and second world countries have mandatory microchip implants that serve as a personal ID

Last Thursdayism has been largely denounced by quantum physicists. Current theories now revolve around “Next Thursdayism,” the belief that the entire universe was created in the future and that we all exist as a memory in the past

Synthetic organ farms for transplants and research have become a massive industry worth billions of dollars. However, there is still a huge black market for organically grown human organs, as they’re much cheaper to acquire and aren’t taxed at the exorbitant rates that lab-grown organs are

China dug a hole all the way to the center of the Earth. Turns out it’s hollow and there are people living inside. Who knew?

A university reconstructed the entire city of Rome as it was in its early days during the Roman Empire. It’s actually pretty historically accurate, except for the fact that there’s a lot less sex because it’s run by a bunch of sweaty history nerds

After Rome 2 resulted in the creation of a cult revolving around the Roman god of the dead that gained traction as a minor religion, Pluto was officially reinstated as a planet by NASA when cultists picketed their headquarters every day for nearly 3 years straight. “Fine, we’ll give these fucking virgins what they want so they’ll finally shut the hell up,” said NASA’s administrator in chief

In a display of the biotechnical prowess of Disney’s Imagineers, all the animatronics in Disney’s Hall of Presidents were replaced with clones of the originals, which went about exactly as well as you’d expect. After reports of the presidents hurling a series of racial slurs and other obscenities at the first black family to enter surfaced, the project was shut down almost immediately after it had opened. Minority admission to Magic Kingdom plummeted to 2.3% of its numbers from the previous year, making it the second whitest place on earth after a taylor swift concert

Plastic now makes up about 3% of every organism on earth by weight

Public officials are now required by law to take shrooms before running for office

Trees are considered a rare and highly sought after commodity, and are usually only owned by public institutions and the rich (the vast majority of oxygen farms use algae to produce oxygen)

FAQs:

FAQ: What time period(s) did you go to?

A: I have no fucking clue. The world stopped using the Gregorian calendar in 2063 after a gamma ray burst hit the sun. The GRB led to stellar ablation, which changed the length of a year on Earth. The sun would continue to lose mass at an accelerated rate for several more years, with the length of the year changing slightly from year to year. The world adopted a variety of different calendars which kept being updated frequently and were often super confusing and contradictory. I traveled to about a dozen different points in time, which based on my best estimates spanned within a few millennia of the current date.

FAQ: How did you obtain a time machine?

A: I think it was the 17th or 18th of June, 2055? That night, a large sci-fi looking box thingy roughly the size of a VW Bus appeared a few hundred yards away in the open field in front of my house. I tried to take a picture of the box, but for some reason the closer I got, the more the image on my camera started to become fuzzy, and by the time I got close enough to take a decent picture, the camera had stopped working altogether. I pulled open a door to reveal a corpse inside that was charred beyond recognition, who appeared to have suffocated and/or burned to death during a fire that damaged most of the interior. I also noticed a number of strange tumors and growths on the body. I pressed a random button on the remains of what I believed to be a control panel, expecting nothing to happen, but the door closed automatically and I suddenly lost consciousness. When I came to, I exited the box, expecting to still be in the field in front of my house, but instead found myself a ways outside of a small snowy village that based on my best estimates, was somewhere in northern Asia around 2-3 thousand years ago. The villagers started coming after me with spears, so I quickly ran back to the box and pressed another button, hoping it would return me to from whence I came. This time, the people I found (who were thankfully much nicer and spoke a dialect of English that I could mostly understand) told me that it was the year 506 of the PGRB-Δ4 calendar (the calendar that the United Territories was using at the time). I repeated this maybe a dozen more times trying to get home until I landed in 2023, which as far as I could tell, was the closest I had gotten back to my original time so far. It was at this point that I decided to stay and seek medical attention, as I was rather concerned about some nasty new growths on my arms and legs similar to that which I had seen on the corpse.

FAQ: Where is the time machine now?

A: No idea. It disappeared a few days after I landed in 2023. My best guess is that some poor sap found it and ended up sometime else.

(I never ask for likes/reblogs but I literally spent fucking WEEKS on this one so if you liked it pls show me some love <3)

[mariacallous]

Maybe I'm being too charitable, but on some level I can get why people want Biden to step down, but I think it's not really about Biden's age or mental cognition.

It's fear.

People are so afraid right now, because everything is so uncertain. And they desperately want absolute assurance that things will work out without any risk.

Biden from their perspective seems too much of a risk, and that's driving people's fear into overdrive, trying to look for that one absolute solution and hope to quell their fear.

The problem as I see it is that they're tunnel-visioning so hard to the point that they don't realize that there is NO certain alternative candidate. Every other candidate brought forward has their own serious risks and flaws, at least from a superficial sense:

Harris is black and a woman, already a double whammy from a nation that had an absolute freakout over Obama, and is perceived as having done nothing notable as VP.

Newsom is heavily linked with California, which tarnishes him with the perception of being purely a coastal elite, and of being too polished and "politiciany".

And those are just the obvious ones. The others no doubt aren't that much better off, and on top of that have no real name recognition or significant accomplishments that really stand out. And that's not factoring in just how much things are heavily stacked to ensure that those other candidates will not succeed, whether from the media or from the GOP.

It's not a great thing, but it's at least understandable from a certain point of view. With that being said, it's also one of the things they have to face. They can't hope to help us win this election if they drown and marinate in their fears while dragging others down like this; they have to face that uncertainty and let others help them face that uncertainty.

They have to fight and focus on the goal, even if it means pushing down those fears, because right now their fear is a bigger detriment than anything Biden is or isn't doing.

.

[fatehbaz]

They’ve built a “Great Wheel” on the Seattle waterfront [...].

The small timber village became a military outpost in the Puget Sound War [...], [and] soon evolved into a trade gateway, with timber tailings and other industrial trash from Henry Yesler’s mill used to fill in the marshlands [...], atop which migrant laborers raised tents and shanties [...] now working to feed raw materials into the furnaces of the Second Industrial Revolution burning in the East. [...] The first nationwide strike ripped across the country’s railways in 1877, but in Seattle the unrest took on a grim character, as thousands of unemployed white workers rioted against their Chinese counterparts [...]. Meanwhile, [...] local elites rebuilt [...] downtown [...] from scratch, hosting the tallest building on the West Coast alongside other new constructs [fueled] with money gleaned from the supply chains linking eastern capital to Alaskan gold. [...] Today the city - again rebuilt [...] - is seen as one of the primary beneficiaries of the “Fifth” Industrial Revolution in information technology, outshone only by California’s Silicon Valley. [...] The digital was increasingly thought of as somehow "immaterial," sustained by intellectual labor more than physical toil [...].

Silicon Valley myths of [...] "immaterial" labor disguise a more gruesome dynamic in which growing segments of the global labor force are being deprived even of the basic brutality of the wage, instead forced out into growing rings of slums, prisons, and global wastelands. [...]

---

Perched alongside a downtown business corridor [...], Seattle's Great Wheel seems to peer out over [...] [the] prophesied “cooperative commons,” an infotech metropolis abutting the beauty of an evergreen arcadia. But travel below Seattle’s cluster of infotech industries and the image appears much the same as that of a hundred years prior - a trade gateway, squeezing value from supply chains by selling transport and logistical support. The southern stretch of the metropolis bears little resemblance to the revitalized urban core of the city proper. Instead of the “cognitive labor” of Microsoft, it is defined instead by the cold calculation of companies like UPS, founded in Seattle when the city was one link in a colonial supply chain built first for timber, then Alaskan gold, then World War. [...]

In south Seattle, this logistics empire takes the form of faceless warehouses, food processing facilities, container trucks, rail yards, and industrial parks concentrated between two seaports, an international airport, three major interstates, and railroads traveling in all directions. Meanwhile, the poor have been priced out of the old inner city, moving southward [...]. [T]hey can be found staffing the airport and the rail yards, hauling cargo in and out of two the major seaports, loading boxes in warehouses [...]. And, beyond them, the shadow stretches out to Washington’s rural hinterlands where migrant laborers staff a new boom in agriculture and raw materials [...] - and further still into America’s long-depressed interior, where the Great Wheel meets its opposite: Memphis, the FedEx logistics city, watched over by a great black pyramid [the infamous Bass Pro Shop pyramid]. [...]

Every Seattle is capable of creating an eco-friendly, “cooperative commonwealth” tended by apps and algorithms only insofar as there is a Memphis that can provide human workers to sort the packages, a Shanghai to build the containers that carry them, and a Shenzhen to solder together the circuits of the machines that govern it all.

---

All text above by: Phil A. Neel. "The Great Wheel". Brooklyn Rail. April 2015. Published online at: brooklynrail.org/2015/04/field-notes/the-great-wheel. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, personal use, criticism purposes.]

[mightyflamethrower]

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

A perfect metaphor for what the progressives have done to America.

[wumblr]

isn't it a little disconcerting that leadership in the US abhors admitting failure to the point of incapability? has it always been like this? elite donors have been handwringing over biden's cognitive decline for months before daring to say it out loud, and the director of the nasa/boeing program (stich) has been out here placidly spewing doe-eyed optimism and dropping hints that have to be confirmed by anonymous sources while his whole department self-immolates

and like i get it. if you admit it was inefficient and unproductive to award two contracts to two companies to develop two ISS shuttles at the same time then you kind of have to also admit this is. like. theee fundamental tenet of capitalism, right? isn't it? competition drives innovation? clearly it does not. if you admit the candidate you rammed through the primaries was in fact unfit for the job then you're also kind of admitting the failure of another fundamental tenet about democracy, right? nobody wanted him. but i guess i shouldn't be so surprised given how quick the turnaround was from pulling out of afghanistan to redirect toward ukraine and palestine. the only fundamental tenet that matters is war profiteering

[collapsedsquid]

First, I mean my earlier observation literally: millionaires and billionaires are just like us in a very relevant and direct sense. Beyond a) possessing a lot of money and contacts and b) some very narrow and particular skills, it turns out that the very rich and very powerful are not astonishing super-beings but more or less the same people that most readers of this newsletter will recognize. Their chat dynamics appear recognizable because even elites are pretty much the same as us—except, of course, for those resources, which are considerable. Yet those resources don’t mean that they conduct conversations on a plane inaccessible to mortals; if anything, their discussions appear to have been less challenging and less interesting than the conversations my group chats entertain. This matters. Back in the day, WhatsApp chats were blamed for radicalizing the masses of Brazil into electing Jair Bolsanaro. This era of misinformation/disinformation research always had the whiff of believing that there was a cognitive/information elite that could escape such pollution, but the unwashed could not. Yet the more we learn about the Internet habits of the rich and famous the less likely this seems. If Sam Alito has a group chat, then I guarantee you its contents are indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of Fox News-pilled chats around the country. It’s not just the mass but the elites who can be radicalized and endumbened, in other words. And the effects of those information environments might not even be similar to the effects on less sophisticated observers—they might be more radicalizing or totalizing for people who are motivated to believe and act in certain ways. Back in the day, politicians more or less learned about the world from the same newspapers and networks any voter did. Now imagine the reinforcing doom loop of politicos sending the same misinformation to each other that you can see on any Facebook politics page (well, that you used to).

Bilderburg group meetings must be kept ultra secret so nobody can learn what fuckin morons they are.

[winxbutbetterimo-ovo]

Alfea Overview v2

i drew out a layout for Alfea i will use for specifications of my overview. did i make alfea a smidge taller? Yes but oh well, anyway lets begin.

The Alfea College for Fairies is a girls' boarding school in Magix for Fairies and the oldest (established 9000 years before the start of the story) and most prestigious educational institution for fairies. 

The education in Alfea lasts 3 years, one for each Fairy Form in the journey of an aspiring full-fledged fairy. Base form, Charmix, Enchantix.

The Alfea students are mostly in training ages 16-18 (unless they have been held back a grade like Stella, so in her case, 17). Fairies here learn how to control their power, fight evil, learn new spells as well as learn how to be their realms' queens and guardian fairies. In this way, Alfea is a little like a military boarding school for the elites.

In the Past

The Alfea Champions were an ancient trio of legendary fairies who were believed to be the most powerful fairies in all of Alfea History. Their feats have been known to be passed down through generations, immortalised in statues that stand in the Alfea Museum, and had been recorded in Legendarium. Ress of the Flame, Chevonne of the Water and Farcelia of the Wind. They were real fairies, but it has been so long that their legends outlived their actual story of their lives.

When Mavilla was headmistress of Alfea, owning and exhibiting the strengths of one's Fairy Animal was considered a vital part of a fairy education. Everything taught was a reflection of the contents of the Tome of Nature. Eventually, Mavilla changed this. 

Alfea used to have a crest which was a curved golden "A" on a purple and blue flower with a golden outline at the top of the school gates, just above Alfea's gate. The "A" of the crest is also seen on what used to be the school's uniform, consisting of a burgundy long-sleeved and knee-length dress and mary janes. The neck part of the dress has white lace and a dark burgundy loop.

At another point in time, Eldora was the keeper of the Alfea Greenhouse and taught floral magic.

School years

First Year

Freshmen fairies learn how to master their own source of power, as well as their base fairy form, and learn basic spells they can use in their daily life and in battle if necessary. Metamorphosymbiosis, Potionology and Survival Training are part of the first year curriculum. Fairies also learn how to explore diverse environments in the Simulation Room as part of their survival training. 

Second Year

Second Year fairies have the goal of earning Charmix. Their classes include, magic invocation, magic self-defence, applied convergence and cognitive analysis class, where fairies learn technical incantations, and spells requiring accurate pronunciation.

Third Year

Third Year Classes include, History of Magic, and those who achieve Enchantix will participate in Battle training to hone their skills. The fairies also have a final thesis, also earning Enchantix is more like an extra credit thing.

Graduation

After earning Enchantix, the basic fairy education is completed and they will graduate with Honours and receive the titles of Guardian Fairies of their respective homeworlds on the Day of the Gift. Without Enchantix, the girls still graduate, but they don't become guardian fairies. In this case, they return to their home world and can decide if they want to work towards being a guardian fairy by being an apprentice to one until they earn their Enchantix, or they can do something else. Alumni can also decide to extend their studies and do their masters here at Alfea in any Subject already offered, being mentored by any of the current staff

Winx After Graduation

They taught for a short period of time, before choosing to take their masters here in various subjects in addition to being substitute teachers from time to time.

Architecture and Layout

Outside

The Alfea Natural Park, which is a refuge for Fairy Animals, is found in the forest. It is unknown if parts of the forest close to the school belong to the school or not, but they are also used for classes and tests.

There is a bus stop where students, guests, and staff members can take buses from and to Magix City and to other places in Magix.

Protective barriers meant to keep non-magical creatures, non-fairies, and bad weather out are seen many times in the series.

The School Gates are the only access to the school compound. They consist of a large pink archway with two wing-like doors that move to open or close the gates.

Its campus is a large castle with pink walls and blue roofs built around a courtyard.

Ground / First Floor

Most of the Classrooms are found on the ground floor around the central courtyard. The side buildings have corridors through which the classrooms can be accessed and it has stairways from which the upper parts of the school can be accessed.

Namely: On the East Wing, Applied Convergence Classroom, Technical Incantations Classroom, Magic Invocation Classroom, Magic Defence Classroom, and on the West Wing, Potionology Classroom, Metamorphosymbiosis Classroom, and the Survival Training Classroom. Each classroom also acts as storage for whatever items the subject requires.

The School Kitchen, where Chef Sfoglia works, Students may also be assigned to do the cooking as chores or as punishment. Located in the West Wing

In the North Wing, The Entrance Hall is a large room found opposite the School Gates, and it is accessed by a set of grand stairs.

The Cafeteria / School Hall is a large room found on the ground floor. It has a large dome of glass as its outer wall and there are long tables where the students have their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It has a special tier for staff members. Parties and balls are often held there and during such occasions, the tables are removed to make a place for the festivities. It is found below the Headmistress' Office and behind the Entrance Hall, in the North Wing.

The West Wing also contains The School Infirmary where students are treated in case of health problems and injuries. It is composed of an office and a resting room with many beds. It is managed by Nurse Ofelia and her assistant.

The West Tower is where the Magic Archive of Alfea is found. Precious and rare books and scrolls about many things can be found there and the school's Codex used to be kept there. A Pixie, named Concorda, is the keeper of the Secret Archives.

The first floor of the east tower contains the Applied convergence Classroom which also acts as the School Amphitheater for formal gatherings required by the Headmistress or otherwise. the students sometimes attend the school assembly and it is also where general meetings are often held, especially in crisis times. There is a table with chairs around it where staff members sit. Exams may also be held there.

The Central Courtyard is a large open space at the centre of the school. It contains:

Benches where students can sit and spend their free time. The Well, with underground tunnels that connects Alfea to the other magical schools, and contains various rooms and obstacles to go through in order to obtain the Star of Teamwork. It functions as a gathering area for celebrations such as the beginning of the year and graduation ceremonies are done. It also serves as a landing space for Red Fountain ships.

Around the sides are the Gardens of Alfea. A place where students can relax and study and even practice their abilities with the accompaniment of nature.

And around the back is an open space mainly used for classes with a practical component.

Second Floor

The student Dormitories (enchanted to be bigger on the inside). Located in both the East and West Wings.

The North wing’s first floor’s ceiling is very high, taking up 2 floors, and therefore technically there is nothing here.

The Simulation Room is where virtual simulations take place. It can also be used to teleport people to other locations. Professor Palladium is the one who is in charge of the Simulation Chamber.

There is technically nothing here in the West Wing because the Archive Room Ceiling is the tallest in the entire school, taking up 4 floors. (Tho it can still be accessed from here as well but the platform is small so people usually dont.)

Third Floor

The student Dormitories (enchanted to be bigger on the inside). Located in both the East and West Wings.

The History of Magic Classroom in the East Wing Tower

And in the North Wing, the staff and Faragonda’s offices. Outside of which there is a small seating area.

There is technically nothing here in the West Wing because the Archive Room Ceiling is the tallest in the entire school, taking up 4 floors. (Tho it can still be accessed from here as well but the platform is small so people usually dont.)

Fourth Floor

The student Dormitories (enchanted to be bigger on the inside). Located in both the East and West Wings.

The Dance Studio/Gym in the East Wing Tower.

In the North wing, Faragonda and the Staff Quarters. Only accessible via the offices.

There is technically nothing here in the West Wing because the Archive Room Ceiling is the tallest in the entire school, taking up 4 floors. (Tho it can still be accessed from here as well but the platform is small so people usually dont.)

Fifth Floor

Only contains the Viewing Decks atop the two Towers of Alfea. Only accessible by Flight or Teleportation.

Basement

The basement of Alfea is sprawling. It contains what will become Musa’s Music Cafe, the Alfea Museum, the Hall of Memories (formerly: Fairy Animals), the magical Entrance to the Alfea Greenhouse, the Library (containing the Research Lectern with Miss Barbetea as its Librarian) with its Restricted Section, and finally the Hall of Enchantments (It contains the hall of infamy, where the portraits of all the enemies of the Magic Dimension can be found, the entire history of the magical universe and contains the Heart of Alfea), only accessible through the Headmistress’s Office.

The rest of the images here include a Key, a Compass and a small sketch i did to plan out how many floors Alfea actually has.

Finally staff:

Headmistress Faragonda (Applied Convergence)

Miss Grizelda (Magic Defence/Applied Convergence)

Professor Palladium (Potionology/Survival Training)

Professor WizzGizz (Metamorphosymbiosis/Technical Incantations)

Professor Avalon (s3 new) (Magic Invocation)

Professor Daphne (s6 new) (History of Magic)

Chef Sfoglia, In the Kitchen

Nurse Ofelia and her assistant. In the Infirmary

Pixie Concorda, the keeper of the Secret Archive

Miss Barbetea the Librarian

Knut the Janitor (s2 new)

Dorm Assignments

The students use all three levels of the student dorms. And where they go rotate every three years. So if you joined the school and are assigned to the second floor dorms, you stay there until u graduate then the freshmen after you will take over it.

Once again all dorms are enchanted to be bigger than they seem.

For the Staff, (All dorms are enchanted to be bigger than they seem from the outside)

Faragonda and Grizelda (daphne in future) Share a dorm, the North Wing, central Dorm.

Palladium, Wizzgizz, Avalon share a dorm, the North Wing, East (left) Dorm

When the winx become teachers, they will insist on sharing a dorm, the North Wing, West (right) dorm.

The non teaching staff usually have a built in dorm at wherever they are working, so Miss Barbetea has a room in the library, and Nurse Ofelia and her assistant share a room in the infirmary and so on. Their rooms are also enchanted so they are bigger on the inside.

Sketch Dump:

[findmeinthefallair]

Retraumatization vs. Self-Soothing (Part 1)

There will be a Part 2 that focuses on new material from Watching and Dreaming. Warnings: Heavy discussion surrounding how trauma works, mentions of self-harm, suicidal ideation, death, effects of abuse and discussions about therapy (from my perspective as a practicing therapist).

Military training and preparation in Hunter's old life as the Golden Guard did not make room for two aspects of mental health issues: getting retraumatized, and how to self-soothe (which is rooted in relationships, not to be confused with the cognitive clarity that I imagine Belos expects from the elite Emperor's Coven).

Having a clear purpose laid out for him by Belos as a result of enmeshment with his parental figure...is what he was so used to, as evidenced by this line:

He lost that sense of purpose, since Belos betrayed him. It will take much reassurance for him - from external inspiration, and having it be internalized over time - to believe deep down that he is allowed total freedom to decide who he'd like to be.

First off, retraumatization:

You can be triggered but not necessarily experience retraumatization, sometimes it may be a partial episode, sometimes a full-blown episode. It is almost always unavoidable in complex trauma and can happen in unexpected places at unexpected times, even in therapy sessions.

Hunter was clearly retraumatized during his 2nd and 3rd panic attack scenes. In For the Future, I think the two scenes where he rages also count. All those scenes except the 3rd panic attack were partial retraumatization, but the haircut scene seems like a full-blown event where it's pretty obvious he's at risk of seriously hurting himself. He was reliving the unspeakable.

Examples of him being triggered but not retraumatized are when he saved Gus towards the end of Labyrinth Runners, and at the end of Clouds on the Horizon when he failed to save Luz.

I know from my own C-PTSD experiences that the intensity of such episodes can vary: ranging from a small annoying mental prick that is far away enough that I'm not even irritable or noticeably scared, to feeling like my soul has been torn apart all over again.

I personally think the most insidious part of complex trauma is the first number of years of its aftermath, like aftershocks which can be more damaging than the original events. Once you are safe from the immediate danger, grief settles in for real, you begin to see in retrospect how screwed up the events were, and you're in a minefield of painful reminders. Casually taking a second to consciously remember a tiny fraction of the events can be enough to reel you into being retraumatized.

For the rest of Hunter's life, there will be so many bad memories he retains. Some days he might be fine, but there could be days where saying Flapjack's name out loud might be enough for the floodgates to open. He might feel that he'll be fine in opening up to a new group of people about what happened, but once he begins he might find it hard to breathe again. If he's anything like me, he'll also be stricken by a bunch of nightmares about being trapped in places, or about people hating him and acting like he doesn't exist.

Some memories will be more notable than others, one of which is the searing memory of Belos's ultimate display of rejection (wanting to discard him once he asked "What did you do to the other guards?") and of abandoning him:

And I suppose the darkest of all, the muscle memory of the helplessness he experienced during the possession scene:

And the blame he'll inevitably place on himself deep down, despite his efforts to rationalize and convince himself that it was all Belos's doing. He has been tainted with moral injuries that have marked him for life. During life-altering events like this, there is usually a most upsetting split-second that a client can single out when they process it in therapy. It's even used as a narrative device of sorts in shows: here it's when we see the shadow on the ground showing him hurting Flapjack, and off the top of my head I remember it being a significant point in another show I like, The Sinner, which the plot built up towards. In trauma-informed modalities like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), the therapist literally gets the client to find this most upsetting mental image as if its a frame to single out in a mental video file, and will then measure how disturbed the client is. This is only done after 1) trust (rapport) can be clearly felt in the relationship between therapist and client, and 2) they get the client to put in a solid amount of practice imagining themselves in a safe space of their own choosing (which is like the opposite of a traumatic flashback: positive and deliberately created, not negative and automatic).

It's easy to identify what sensation Hunter would find the most upsetting:

Anything that might remind him of this tactile experience could open that doorway to feeling retraumatized.

*horrible cracking sound of palistrom wood being damaged* And it's almost like the web of awful reminders (internal and external) he has, will branch out of this worst exact moment.

Therefore his treatment plan would require much tailoring and room for variation depending on what kind of day he is having. A concern that his loved ones would have is of retraumatization like below, that presents the risk of self-harm:

Another concern is the risk of the terrible voice of C-PTSD whispering things to him, the inner critic that might be fed by survivor's guilt:

(E.g. "Why did Flapjack have to be the one to die? It should have been me. I don't deserve my loved ones. Maybe I shouldn't even exist")

or fed by Belos's gaslighting which definitely happened several times offscreen:

And: Hunter wants to learn how to carve palisman, a craft that will bring new meaning and fulfilment as he heals, but which won't be as easy as he'd like it to be.

I was astounded like crazy when looking back at this:

"Palismen bond through emotion. I do not sense any conviction from you." "Emotion" and "conviction"...

both of which are essential components of recovering from trauma.

It couldn't be more poignant to have the character in the show who endured the most trauma (if you count how in his old life, he stole palismen and sent them to their doom, to literally keep his abuser alive), want to be the successor of this craft. I think he will have to embrace "emotion", like never before. And "conviction" about his life direction.

If he ultimately shuts himself down, isolates himself, letting the grief imprison and encase him,

that would be the antithesis of the big speech he gave in Thanks to Them. But I know he'll have the amazing resilience to want to love and connect deeply. And to make sure Flapjack's sacrifice wasn't in vain.

I'm already thinking that whoever his therapist might be (and my god, I 100% say he needs one. I'd rather he not refuse therapy, though maybe he'd need a bit of time before he starts such sessions, because his case desperately requires someone properly equipped to untangle all that trauma).......they ought to establish the following:

Increasing his self-awareness, acknowledgment and acceptance of his mind and body. The frayed feeling of being hypervigilant. The scars covering his body. The talking aspect of the therapy will play a role in attaining this.

Recognizing internal and external trauma-related triggers and cues that may show up in his routine, to actively take self-care measures, e.g. he is unpleasantly reminded of something during an outdoor picnic with the others.

Going through skills such as containment and distress tolerance. Sometimes a therapy session can get scary enough that a client cannot feel safe taking their pain home with them. They can practice containment by visualizing themselves leaving their pain with the therapist for safekeeping. Eventually, the client can hopefully contain the pain themselves and bring it with them wherever they go. Distress tolerance examples include naming all objects of the same colour around you, or doing something nice for another person.

Being familiar with the specific self-care methods that work for him, since this will vary a lot from individual to individual.

In the first number of months learning how to carve in the workshop/wherever he'll be taught, he definitely should not be left unsupervised, not just because of inexperience in carving: but also in case of retraumatization. The simple act of merely touching any palistrom wood on a bad day might be enough to viscerally bring up the upsetting image of Flapjack being harmed.

A guardian figure (current best guess: Camila?) must be briefed on how to be present for him and what to do if he needs help during bad episodes, relapses or other emergencies. Said adult should join in the therapy sessions at times to reinforce trust and safety in Hunter's new world of officially being in a family. An adult is a far better choice because the other kids should not shoulder such a responsibility (i.e. being parentified like what happened to Hunter) as they process their own trauma, though they of course can help in smaller ways.

If he's wanting to make his own new palisman (very high chance that this will be canon), I bet people like Eda might want to run through that with him. It may not appear onscreen but the therapist could also discuss this with him in sessions because it'd be good to think through whether to allow some time to grieve Flapjack first, even down to details like discussing the meaning and intention of creating the new one, does he want the size and feel of the new one to be different, etc. Perhaps he should even bring the work-in-progress carving to therapy where the therapist can check how he's doing in real-time with the tactile experience of touching and feeling the wood in his hands, processing the likely fear he'll have of harming anymore palisman (yes, even the new ones he creates), especially with how things went with Flapjack. The underlying theme would be his new opportunities to create life vs. the trail of destruction he has been a part of via his association with Belos. His own hands have created things, and have not just played a role in damaging and destroying lives.

Looking into the kind of relationship he has with the idea of physical touch, since his body has been violated, since his being was reduced to an object and tool. Forming new associations to exist alongside the old associations, e.g. when carving a new palisman, it'll be a very long time before he'd ever engage in that without Flapjack even crossing his mind, if that's even a possibility. I have a good feeling that a new palisman of his own would naturally help him along in terms of keeping him calm and grounded using physical contact, by filling an additional role as his trauma support animal (Flapjack himself was undeniably an emotional support animal, like a war veteran's therapy dog). Therapy plus his support network could help him hold both the newly forming memories together with the old haunting ones: they can coexist, and logically the general intensity of the traumatic memories will decrease over time.

Biggest of all in my opinion, keeping him from falling into black-or-white thinking and catastrophizing especially re: the grief about Flapjack. Seeing how he is coping with feelings of grief, guilt and shame. He would be feeling guilty, like he is leaving Flapjack behind or like he is choosing to forget him (this pattern is common in bereavement), if he chooses to have another palisman of his own. But he needs to believe he can still make space for Flapjack in a new way, in his life. ("Black-or-white thinking" and "catastrophizing" are from a list of what's called Cognitive Distortions, a handy aspect of the commonly used Cognitive Behavioral Therapy theory, or CBT. You can easily look up the various types with a Google search) Finding ways to honor Flapjack, honor the good memories and integrate the bad ones. In the early weeks it will be a lot for him to remember specific times like this:

without being able to separate them from the worst memories of harming Flapjack, and the potential to spiral into retraumatization will be high. This poor teen might run into the "What's the point?"/"There's no point" depression wall which is a frequent sign of black-and-white thinking in recovering from trauma and grief.

There would be more on the above list for sure, but this is a substantial portion of it.

Next, self-soothing:

Self-soothing has not come naturally to him (yet), but he has had exposure to being soothed by others. There are also great clues that he needs this, such as the plushie he owns and keeps under his pillow.

Gus introduces one form of this to him, the square breathing technique, in Labyrinth Runners. Further practice to improve at self-soothing would be an upgrade beyond the basic actions we do on autopilot. An example of basic body language is Hunter slightly hugging his lower legs and bringing his knees up in front of his chest to feel safe here:

I think the root of him lacking the skills to effectively self-soothe is...he has not experienced secure attachment with a parent/guardian. Attachment theory (devised by John Bowlby in the 1950s and expanded upon in the many years after that period) has to do with how kids develop a sense of security and whether they can bond with and depend on responsive and responsible caregivers or not. There are four attachment styles, three of which are insecure compared to the healthy secure type of attachment. 1.Anxious attachment: Children with this kind of attachment have very high distress when a parental figure leaves and is absent. The kid may show needy behavior and have a low sense of self-worth, and struggle with the tension between craving closeness with others yet feeling they're unworthy of that.

2. Avoidant attachment: This usually means the parent prioritizes the child learning hyper-independence, and may punish the child for naturally asking for help. It would reach the point where such children avoid the parent, and even show no preference between said parent and complete strangers. Later in life, they may stay away from being vulnerable, appear to have high self-esteem but dismiss others' emotions which would lead to relationship issues.

3. Disorganized attachment: This style is where the parent was inconsistent and unpredictable, perhaps being both a source of comfort and fear, so the child's attachment pattern is reflected in a confusing mix of behaviors and being quite on edge. The world and the people in it would feel scary and unsafe for the child.

4. Secure attachment: As you can imagine, such kids would have had their needs attended to by a parent who has a calm, soothing presence.

My hunch is Hunter leans towards the disorganized category, since Belos is terrible like below, sending mixed messages and getting Hunter to fluctuate between seeking attachment and recoiling from it:

This takes us to the most important part of this analysis:

The need for warmth in Hunter's relationships.

A concept not incorporated into a toxic culture like the Emperor's Coven. But which is vital to truly facilitate deep trust, and is essential in what Hunter is looking for most: a family.

And such warmth is something that extends beyond words, detached analysis or a theoretical understanding, all of which are processed by the prefrontal cortex of the brain. It goes deeper into the realm of experiential understanding (and, physical affection is something that definitely lends to formative experiences), feeling trust and security, which of course is more subconscious.

Examples of putting self-soothing into practice include mindful walks, playing with a pet and journaling. Making it a deliberate routine to promote a good ability to self-soothe - not just using it whenever he is retraumatized - would significantly increase its effectiveness e.g. I advocate for Camila giving him a good morning and good night hug every day, and/or giving such hugs before he leaves the house and after he returns home 😭😭😭😭 Something like that being predictable for a C-PTSD survivor can work wonders.

He won't be used to self-soothing immediately but as he grows yet closer to his new family, particularly becoming securely attached to whoever will replace Belos as his guardian, his wounded inner child will be exposed to the warmth needed for healing. Soothing words to calm him on bad days, wonderful heartfelt hugs, to save him over and over again, like Luz's repeated "You're gonna be okay" from this past scene:

This is what he can take with him when he needs to self-soothe without immediate help being available.

It's certainly not the case that just because he lacked these key foundational ingredients in his years being a young scout and the Golden Guard, it means he is too late. Our brains have neuroplasticity, he can learn and still build a foundation with incredible people in his support network.

Plus. Plus! Related to the earlier section in which I speculated on the challenges he's up against when learning how to carve palismen: I have a good feeling that despite the painful memories and uncomfortable associations, plenty of room will be made for much beauty in that environment and profession. I think the creatures he brings to life will love him a ton, and give back the doses of love that he puts out into the world, via his craftsmanship and him providing something so meaningful for countless witches out there. It'll poetically be the opposite of the fear of the palismen he sent away in his old life, and the fear that followed him around like an overhead raincloud because Belos exerted control over him...and I'm a believer in love and fear being opposites. *cue: a mental image I now have of a bunch of adorable squeaking live palismen flocking to him as their creator...like puppies being excited to see an approaching person*

To wrap up, both the concepts explored above tie in with a concept I researched a bit for this analysis: community mental health.

It is defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as activities that promote mental health that are performed in the community instead of institutional settings. I've experienced this as a peer support volunteer in a mental health charity's cooking and baking group in the past: it's a cool experience that has a distinctly different feel from sitting in therapy sessions, yet it's a good way to boost mental health. Having both in parallel is a powerful combo.

I'd put emphasis on the last bit of that definition, "instead of institutional settings", because early on I already thought to myself that Hunter, a cult survivor, should not be made in any way to feel as though his recovery progress is a test, evaluation or something performative. That might reinforce the sense of long-time isolation in the castle which he believed was normal before he met his friends.

Additionally it might be over-familiar territory for him to attach the notion of success vs. failure (applying that to his recovery process), to his worth. There's a hint of this in his reaction in Thanks to Them to not doing as well during Camila's brief pop quiz. The Emperor's Coven and everything it normalizes is the height of "institution". Lilith is obviously the other character who has been affected enough by Belos and how her mother treated her for so long, to be prone to the same issue. We see it in how she begs Luz for approval when learning how to use glyphs.

Usually therapy feels prescriptive and staged, unless the therapeutic alliance between therapist and client is strong. But sessions are filled with technical wording such as "skills", "management" and the like on a normal basis. Which is why if Hunter attends individual therapy, solely relying on that in isolation will not be beneficial. It must be paired with a healthy dose of community mental health care e.g. events in markets, schools and notable public places that will have a more organic feel to it.

He needs variety in his treatment plan to dismantle the effects of the Emperor's Coven's fearmongering and rigidity. Variety can intuitively and wordlessly convey to him that life is meant to be lived, not survived. An in-between blend that involves a professional setting like individual therapy but also the community element would be group therapy, which I imagine is a given for so many people on the Isles after the great danger passes in the finale.

Belos's tyrannical reign has left everyone on the Boiling Isles with grief and confusion. It has left the worst scars on not just Luz but also Hunter, since the latter previously operated on the same side as Belos, and unknowingly advocated for a cause that he realized was the opposite of what he felt is right.

Community counteracts isolation and reminds Hunter that he is part of something bigger. There will always be spaces in which he can create something new, enjoy laughter as great medicine, and be heard and accepted.

The second and final part of this topic will be uploaded after Watching and Dreaming. I hope this first part was informative to read.

[simply-ivanka]

Biden Gets the Chicago Treatment

Barack Obama, an old-fashioned ward boss, orchestrates the president’s removal.

By Rod R. Blagojevich

Wall Street Journal

Democracy took a devastating hit on Sunday when President Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Along the way, he got it wrong. It isn’t Donald Trump who is an existential threat to our democracy. It’s Barack Obama.

In the old-school way of Chicago backroom politics, Mr. Obama was the conductor of the band that successfully orchestrated the removal of the presidential candidate chosen by more than 14 million Democratic primary voters—to be replaced by someone he and the party bosses choose instead. It’s classic ward-boss tactics.

I’ve known Mr. Obama since 1995. We both grew up in Chicago politics. We understand how it works—with the bosses over the people. Mr. Obama learned the lessons well. And what he just did to Mr. Biden is what political bosses have been doing in Chicago since the 1871 fire—selections masquerading as elections.

Mr. Obama and I know this kind of Chicago politics better than anyone. We both rose up in it, and I was brought to ruin by it when the Illinois Legislature impeached and removed me from the governor’s office in 2009 for conversations initiated by Mr. Obama himself. A common element in my case and now Mr. Biden’s is Mr. Obama’s involvement. He’s the central figure who played a behind-the-scenes role in both stories.

While today’s Democratic bosses may look different from the old-time cigar-chomping guy with a pinky ring, they operate the same way: in the shadows of the backroom. Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the rich donors—the Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites—are the new bosses of today’s Democratic Party. They call the shots. The voters, most of them working people, are there to be lied to, manipulated and controlled.

All along, Mr. Biden and the Democratic politicians have been claiming that this year’s presidential race is about “saving democracy.” They are the biggest hypocrites in American political history.

The party that says it is running to save democracy has already deployed the criminal-justice system against the leading candidate of the opposition party. And now they have successfully maneuvered to dump their duly elected candidate for president.

Mr. Biden’s withdrawal proves something even more sinister. They’ve been lying to us the whole time. The president’s unfitness to run for re-election today didn’t just happen. The Democrats have been covering it up for a long time.

They hid him in the basement when he ran for president in 2020, and they got away with it because of the pandemic. But when Mr. Biden’s cognitive issues were exposed during June’s presidential debate, Mr. Obama and the Democratic bosses could no longer hide his condition. The jig was up, and Joe had to go.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month will provide the perfect backdrop and place for Mr. Obama to finish the job and choose his candidate, not the voters’ candidate. Democracy, no. Chicago ward-boss politics, yes.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat, served as governor of Illinois, 2003-09.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

I do not like how the American left-of-centre is seemingly incapable of complaining about IQ elitism except under the guise of covert racism. “We should create a multi-tier system of citizenship where you get access to better rights and public goods depending on the outcome of cognitive tests” is already some revolting shit fully independent of racial differences! So why the bizarre aversion to attacking the cognitive elitism as such?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Charlotte Alter at Time Magazine:

The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert. The light-up bracelets evoked the Eras Tour. And the exuberant crowd—more than 14,000 strong, lining up in the rain—resembled the early days of Barack Obama. Inside a Philadelphia arena on Aug. 6, Vice President Kamala Harris was greeted with a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.

If you’d predicted this scene a month ago to anyone following the race, they would never have believed you. But Harris has pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history. A contest that revolved around the cognitive decline of a geriatric President has been transformed: Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable. Democrats resigned to a “grim death march” toward certain defeat, as one national organizer put it, felt their gloom replaced by a jolt of hope. Harris smashed fundraising records, raking in $310 million in July. She packed stadiums and dominated TikTok, offering a fresh message focused on the future over the past. Volunteers signed up in droves. Trump’s widening leads across the battleground states evaporated. Over the span of a few weeks in late July and early August, Harris became a political phenomenon. “Our campaign is not just a fight against Donald Trump,” she told the cheering crowd in Philadelphia. “Our campaign is a fight for the future.”

Where has this Kamala Harris been all along? For years, Democratic officials questioned her political chops, pundits mocked her word salads, and her polling suggested limited appeal. Her performance in the 2020 presidential primary was wooden, and her turn as Biden’s No. 2 did little to inspire confidence. Even this summer, as party insiders chattered about possible replacements if Biden stepped aside, “it was explicit from some of the major donors that she can’t win,” says Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that trains young Democrats to run for office. “They didn’t think people were ready to elect someone like her.” Harris may still be the underdog. Trump has arguably the clearer path to 270 electoral votes and an edge on the issues that voters say are most important to them. Harris will have to answer for the Biden Administration’s record, including on inflation and border security. Republicans are casting her as a coastal elite, pointing to positions she took in the 2020 primary—arguing for gun buybacks, a ban on fracking, and an overhaul of the health-insurance system—that may indeed be too liberal to win over many of the swing voters who decide elections. Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts. (Her campaign denied a request for an interview for this story.) She has to repair ruptures in the party coalition, galvanizing the Black, Hispanic, Arab American, and young voters who migrated away from Biden. Though her early polling numbers are far better than Biden’s were, she lags his 2020 support with some key demographic groups she needs to win.

Harris has less than 90 days to prove that she can convert the momentum of her successful launch into a tough, smart operation capable of beating a former President with a dedicated base of support and a knack for commanding the stage. She inherited a campaign infrastructure and policy record from her predecessor, but the energy is all hers. Picking Walz as a running mate over more conventional choices signals a belief that this race is as much about feelings as it is about fundamentals. Harris’ brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican “weirdos”—has already done what no Trump opponent has ever been able to do: snatch the spotlight away from him.

She may seem like an overnight sensation, but Harris’ moment was years in the making. Quietly, her small team of top aides had been laying the groundwork for a future presidential run. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the Vice President added reproductive rights to her portfolio. Abortion was never a comfortable issue for Biden, a devout Catholic, but it was a natural fit for his No. 2. Harris believed that with Roe gone, Republicans would turn their sights to restricting both birth control and IVF. In the months after Dobbs, she traveled the U.S., talking about abortion rights as a matter of “reproductive freedom.” As far back as the 2022 midterms, aides say, she argued for making this the core of the party’s national message, even as the White House focused on jobs and the economy.

[...] The list was intended for 2028. But when Biden dropped out on July 21 and quickly endorsed Harris, it was instantly pressed into service. The Vice President—clad in a Howard University sweatshirt, munching pizza with anchovies—spent the next 10 hours on the phone, dialing delegates and wrangling endorsements. A day later, the nomination was all but hers. Even though other presidential hopefuls had ties to swing states or big donors, “the list was the thing that we had that they didn’t,” says a top aide. “It wasn’t a fairy godmother waving a magic wand.”

Harris’ ability to sew up the nomination so quickly was a triumph of work ethic and political dexterity that foreshadowed what was to come. “To consolidate the Democratic Party in a matter of hours, to do as many visible events and establish that presence without putting a foot wrong, is a feat,” says Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary who ran against Harris for the 2020 nomination and was a finalist to become her running mate. “I don’t think anybody expected her to be so flawless.” With Biden no longer atop the ticket, the moribund Democratic grassroots came to life. Harris was capable of delivering a message that never felt quite right under Clinton or Biden: that theirs was the party of the future, and Trump was of the past. Her campaign raised $200 million in the first week, in what it said was the best 24 hours of any candidate in presidential-campaign history. More than 38,000 people registered on Vote.org in the 48 hours after she became the presumptive nominee, eclipsing the voter-registration surge encouraged by Taylor Swift last year. Within a week, Harris erased Trump’s polling dominance in key states, turning a burgeoning landslide into a dead heat.

[...] The shift is perhaps most visible in the digital sphere. While millions of hardcore Democrats would crawl over broken glass to keep Trump from re-election, less reliable voters in Gen Z are especially attuned to online trends. For months, President Biden’s online supporters have been on the defensive about his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. Comments about Gaza flooded pro-Biden content posted to social platforms, making it difficult to create what digital strategists call a “permission structure” to support him. To many, it evoked the online mobs who would mock Clinton supporters in 2016, preventing her from building traction on social media. “In 2016, if you wanted to be an online supporter of Hillary Clinton, you did it in a private Facebook group,” says Litman. “In 2024, you blast it on TikTok, and you’re part of the K-Hive and you make your username the coconut tree.” Even if Washington was taken by surprise, the energetic fighter of the past two weeks matches the Harris whom allies say they have known for years. Louise Renne, a former San Francisco city attorney, recalls that when Harris took over the city’s interest in adoption cases in the DA’s office, she brought an armful of teddy bears to court on her first day. Andrea Dew Steele, a donor-adviser who snacked on wine and cheese with Harris as they typed up her first political bio sheet for her 2003 campaign for San Francisco DA, remembers Harris sitting outside grocery stores with an ironing board stacked with campaign literature. Those who made it through her 2020 primary recall that after she dropped out, she joined the last of her staff in a dance party in the campaign headquarters. Harris’ early allies in California may have seen glimpses of Barack Obama, but her turn on the national stage has seemed more Selina Meyer. After a splashy kickoff in 2019, the Harris 2020 campaign stalled, then sputtered out. Aides say she took advice from too many different advisers offering conflicting guidance. Her record as a prosecutor was unwieldy baggage for a Democratic primary shadowed by a movement for racial justice. In a contest defined by Bernie Sanders on one side and Biden on the other, she never found her lane. Her operation was plagued with mismanagement and infighting. Harris seemed tentative and insecure, terrified of putting a foot wrong. “We did a disservice to her in 2020,” admits Bakari Sellers, a state co-chair on that campaign. “We Bubble-Wrapped her.” Enthusiasm waned; the money dried up. She dropped out long before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses.

[...] Republicans admit Harris will be harder to beat than a diminished Biden. But they believe the candidate riding high the past few weeks will soon, under sustained attack, come down to earth. “If she runs the same kind of campaign she ran in 2019 and 2020, her campaign will collapse and Donald Trump will waltz into the White House,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres says. “On the other hand, if she has learned as much as her allies and friends say she has in the last four years, she will give Trump a real run for his money.” Harris campaign officials say they remain focused on the seven key battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. With Harris atop the ticket, those states “are even more in play for us, stronger for us than they might have been otherwise,” says Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground director. Harris is more popular with younger, Black, and Latino voters than Biden was when he dropped out of the race, according to polling, which puts her in a stronger position to win the Sun Belt states. At the same time, she may be losing ground with older white voters, which makes her more vulnerable in the trio of “Blue Wall” states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form that core of the Democrats’ Electoral College strategy. To shore up those states, Harris is leaning on her major labor endorsements and making multiple visits to the upper Midwest.

Harris inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure, including more than 260 outposts across the battleground states. In Nevada, the Harris campaign has 13 field offices to Trump’s one; in Pennsylvania, it has 36 coordinated offices to Trump’s three, according to a campaign memo.

Time Magazine has an insightful column on the resurrection of Kamala Harris and her rising political fortunes.

Read the full story at Time Magazine.