#destructive mind of the radical left

[intermundia]

i'm curious, have you ever talked here about your opinions on star wars' politics and the jedi involvement with it? if not then i'm very curious about your thoughts on it. i understand star wars' politics are quite basic and non-radical (republic good dictatorship bad) and i don't necessarily disagree with it but i wonder if the jedi shouldn't have been more involved and possibly more radical (to the left) instead of just, idk, not giving their two cents on it. i know it's a hot take but it seems to me they would benefit more if they were more into politics. i would love to know your thoughts on it.

So, I think the answer depends on if you want a Watsonian or Doyalist explanation. If we’re looking though the lens of fictional in-universe reasons, we know that the Jedi HAVE tried being directly involved with running the government—it led to thousands of years of destructive civil war in the galaxy, with splinter groups of dark side users attempting to seize supreme executive power, and the Jedi militant about preventing it. They willingly surrendered power to the representatives of the people of the galaxy for a reason, not out of negligence or indifference to galactic suffering, and we should always remember the history.

The Jedi chose to work inside the guiding structure of a sovereign civic government, outside the Order and answerable to the people as a check on their power, as they are not democratically elected. It takes strong democratic civic institutions to fight against greedy corporate ownership of society. Would the Jedi’s direct, undemocratic lobbying or enforcement have been enough to change the minds of everyone and reinforce community bonds? I simply don't think it would, and the risks of them trying are unacceptably high. The Jedi are powerful Force users, and that’s always relevant to consider.

You have to be careful when what you Can do becomes what you Should do becomes what you Must do, despite any collateral damage, especially when the range of your potential is broad. The Jedi know intimately that the more powerful you are, the easier it is to feel entitled to interfere and impose your own judgement, which is dangerous, as it will always be based on partial information and informed by unconscious bias. If you do not stay impartial or only help in limited ways, you can begin to lose your sense of perspective. It is also a self-reinforcing behavior, and the consequences rise for getting pulled into a control loop that dives into the dark side out of greed can lead to considerable fallout for you and society.

You can easily begin with good intentions but be corrupted over time by even the smallest original selfish impulses snowballing on each other when the consequences don't stop you but instead encourage you to further exert control. There’s a children's story about not giving a mouse even one cookie, because it will always take more afterward. The wisdom of the Jedi is in their restraint. It may seem frustrating that they don't interfere whenever and wherever they see fit, accepting that they cannot stop some particular injustices, because their intentions are to prevent a worse evil from happening later.

It's hard to appreciate counterfactuals, like yeah the galaxy fell after a thousand years, but we have no way of knowing what suffering would exist in those same thousand years if the Jedi had not surrendered large parts of their political discretion to the Republic. When they did, there followed a golden age of peace that it flourished for a long time before undergoing a crisis where a Force user took over again, before returning to civic governance with a New Republic. If we look to the OT and beyond, that's what the division of Luke and Leia represent, in a way. Leia has a different perspective and priorities and channels of power. Luke should be a warrior monk who occasionally touches the divine in his quest for peace, not involved in politics.

If we’re looking at it through the lens of the author, I think you have to resist the urge to try to make the Jedi into some real-world equivalent religious paramilitary force, or leftist group despite caring a great deal for those values. You have to remember that it's space opera, it's myth. They're theatrical characters demonstrating the ideal of public service without recompense, an impossibly good group of people with legitimate and earned moral authority, who act in the best interest of peace and collaboration, as inspiration to children to model in their interior lives and moral understanding of the world. They're conceptual of pro-social hopeful generous spirit in our hearts, glorious moral knights with glowing swords, not politicians at desks yk.

They're an icon of something that every person can choose to do in their own lives, not just something we can demand from public servants. I know this may be a bit unsatisfying intellectually, but you have to keep the genre of Star Wars in mind, the space opera has mythic logic and operates in the realm of symbolism. When Lucas uses scientific sounding and political sounding language, he's still trying to communicate with the 10-year-olds who don't care about the complexities and nuances of the real world. It's about narrative shorthand and moral signaling that symbiosis, mutual thriving through selflessness, is better than greed, selfishness, and cruelty. That's the genre, you know? Making the Jedi into politicians wouldn't serve the narrative purposes of Lucas's epic story.

[darkmaga-retard]

By Patricia McCarthy

Given everything we know about Kamala Harris by now, it is astonishing that a single American would consider voting for her.  She is clearly way out of her depth, and until she suddenly became the designated candidate of the Democrat party, most people on both sides of the aisle considered her to be unqualified.  She did virtually nothing as Biden’s vice president these past three-and-a-half years beyond casting tie-breaking votes on numerous bills that have led to destructive inflation and trillions more in our national debt.  Most everyone agrees that she was the most radical of leftist senators while she held that office; she is to the left of Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist.  Harris is, and would govern as, a communist. The record of her political beliefs, going back to her terms first as San Francisco DA and then state AG, proves just how radical she is.  Now she claims she has “changed her mind” on all those annoying issues like defunding the police, ending all fracking, decriminalizing all drug offenses, no border wall, the decriminalization of all illegal entries into the U.S., mandated gun confiscation, etc., and she claims as well that “her values have not changed.”  She wants to have it both ways.

Now we have heard the one and only debate during which the two ABC moderators clearly sought to cover for Harris’s many, many lies. To those of us who follow the campaign closely, just about every word out of her mouth was a lie.  So, one has to assume that those people who support Kamala Harris are wholly ignorant of her plans to complete Obama’s transformation of America into a Marxist nation without any constitutional protections.  If they continue to support her after the debate, then they are so deeply indoctrinated they are unable to think critically.  David Muir and Lindsey Davis both ran interference for Harris. They did not challenge even one of her many prevarications.  For example, the left absolutely does support abortion up to and including birth.  Obama twice voted against Illinois’s infant born alive act.  It is the law in several states that infants who survive an abortion are denied medical care.  Davis was wrong to say late-term abortion is against the law in every state. There was a Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that passed in Congress and was signed by George W. Bush in 2002, but apparently another was needed.  H.R. 26 was passed in the House in January 2023; 210 Democrats voted against it. It has not been passed in the Senate.

Harris was never asked to explain her many flip-flops on important issues — her long-term opposition to fossil fuels, fracking, even LNG and gas stoves.  She was not asked if she still advocates for transgender surgeries for illegal migrants.  She was not asked if she still supports the defunding of police, giving felons the right to vote, and a fully open border.  She is on record over and over again opposing a border wall, but uses Trump’s border wall in her ads!  She does oppose private health care for all, despite her lies during the debate.  She supports censorship of discourse antithetical to the government agenda. Despite what she said, she does support the mandatory confiscation of all guns in the hands of citizens which would insure that only criminals have guns. 

[probablyasocialecologist]

I’m going to be honest straight away. I think “Gender Critical” people* are radicalised and I think there is a lot of danger for many cis people on the periphery to follow them down that rabbit hole. I’m writing this essay in an effort to prevent radicalisation of any feminists looking in on the situation who haven’t made their minds up yet. I’m speaking to people who consider themselves feminists and don’t consider themselves transphobic. I’m speaking to people who don’t spend time accusing trans people of having fetishes, who don’t think selfies with Proud Boys are excusable, and who don’t think soup is worse than Nazis. If that’s you, I hope you read on and consider what I have to say in good faith.

[...]

Here’s what else I know for sure. Trans people are real people. Their lives are not hypothetical. While we are discussing this topic on Twitter like it’s a theoretical game, they are truly scared for the future of their rights. So far in the UK there has not been significant legislative change, but we’ve seen hundreds of anti-trans laws proposed in the US, from threatening to perform genital testing on young women in high school sports to revoking the medical licenses of doctors who provide affirming care to threatening to take kids away from parents who even socially affirm their child’s gender. These are real children. They are not fodder for us to argue over. How many trans people, adults or children, do you know in person? And what aspects of their well-being are you willing to risk for a theoretical argument?

[...]

I don’t think I’ll have to work very hard to convince you that whatever so-called values Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson or ACTUAL NAZIS have do not align with the values of radical feminists. I would suggest that the reason they are interested in the issue are because they see something you don’t. Right-wingers recognise women’s liberation when they see it, because they hate it so much. They have never been on our side. They never will be on our side. They do not respect our right to our own lives, our own bodies, or our own minds, so if they are agreeing with you on an issue of women’s rights, THERE IS A PROBLEM. You might be thinking that you and Tucker don’t see eye to eye on the basics of the issue: he is pro-gender stereotypes and you are against them. But where does this all end up? It pains me to point out the right is very often several steps ahead of us; the devastating destruction of Roe v Wade shows us that. What is in it for them? They get to divide the left, something the gender debate has been extraordinarily effective at. They get to distract feminists from real issues (again Roe v Wade, the cornerstone of American feminist achievement, has fallen). On this very trip, Posie Parker has been spouting anti-abortion sentiment for the minors who need abortion and birth control the most, and since becoming radicalised, she’s claimed that lesbian mothers weren’t really mothers, and that trans men (whom she views as women) should be forcibly sterilised. They get to paint the left as the real agents of hatred, as the real homophobes, as the people really trying to shut down debate. They get to watch as lifelong feminists start criticising women’s appearance and behaviour for not being feminine enough. They get to watch as lifelong feminists start to argue that male violence is not a product of socialisation, of entitlement, of broken legal systems that do not view women’s bodies as their own, but as something inherent to men. Something they can’t help. Something we shouldn’t even try to change. And they get to recruit you. And they are doing that with remarkable success.

[nanabansama]

Knowing that Mitsuba’s yorishiro is likely up next, do you have any predictions on how that is going to go down?

I agree, anon! I can't imagine us ending on any yorishiro but Hanako's, especially since Hanako's is an actual main character who's integral to the story. And theres little doubt the story is leading up to all of them being destroyed...

Now... as some may be aware, we already know Mitsuba had the same yorishiro as the former Number 3 during the Hell of Mirrors arc.

That said, we have no way of knowing if this yorishiro being destroyed would have weakened Mitsuba. Maybe his actual yorishiro was located somewhere else.

Still, it's important to remember that consuming a supernatural allows humans to turn into them.

Eating part of the hand allowed the four human characters to travel to the boundary during the Severance. The affects were temporary, so it's not exactly the same scenario as Mitsuba, but he ate the heart of a Mystery which might explain the more radical side effects of his feast.

I think it's even possible that Mitsuba outright became the former Third itself, allowing him to harness his yorishiro.

But it is a bit underwhelming if Mitsuba's yorishiro is something he doesn't even care about, isn't it? And the rules of the yorishiro are not set in stone. It's possible that, over time, Mitsuba's yorishiro could've changed into something else. If his former yorishiro was the former Third's, anyway.

But I do want to point out that Tsukasa is wholly unconcerned about destroying it.

He lumps Mitsuba's yorishiro in with the destroyed ones. He says there are only three left. Mind you, this was BEFORE Number 6's was destroyed. So he's likely talking about the Sixth's, the First's, and the Seventh's here. (Remember, a yorishiro can't just destroy itself. He needs either Hanako or Nene's help with that.)

This makes me think Tsukasa knows what it is, and that whatever it is just isn't a problem.

Still, if it hasn't been made abundantly clear in the recent chapters, Tsukasa is a little more of an... act first, think later type of guy.

He very well could just be underestimating Mitsuba!

Unfortunately, I don't really have predictions for Mitsuba's yorishiro. But I think it would be fun if, leading up to its destruction, he receives an item he comes to care for very dearly? He just doesn't have anything that's really yorishiro material right now... hmm...

But there's really no doubt in my mind that, one way or another, Mitsuba's yorishiro is going to be destroyed. And then the story will have to deal with the fallout of whatever happens after every single one is destroyed, which could either turn into an extremely short or extremely long arc...

Anyway, thank you for the ask! Anyone can feel free to share their own Mitsuba yorishiro theories with me.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Solutions?

In a video interview with Critical Theory in Berlin[8] he proposes to set up a planned economy to reduce emissions yearly and instate sanctions forcing corporations to pursue technocratic solutions (e.g. drawing down Co2 from the atmosphere) in a bid to recuperate the power of the state for planetary salvation.

In a co-authored editorial Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: The Political Economy of Direct Air Capture,[9] he plays through different scenarios of carbon removal from the air and demands that the “the left” confront it. Natural carbon sinks cannot possibly do all the work, so what remains apparent is the inherent need for new technological advancements and centralized planning to make capture solutions viable.

Malm, however, believes if the “means of removal” were socialised, capital accumulation could be off the table and the process would help repair climate damage, never mind the ecological and energetic costs of those technologies.

To be clear, large-scale carbon capture and storage technology is merely a hype, not a viable technology at our disposal. It remains unproven at scale, with current test facilities shutting down due to repeated mechanical failures[10] and exorbitant operating costs.[11]

It requires vast industrial complexes and a further scarring of the environment, all the while releasing more Co2 to the atmosphere than sequestered (as seen in Norway’s Sleipner Facility,[12] currently the best facility on Earth).

From geoengineering [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg8] utopia, Malm continues during his interview, and I am paraphrasing: If we can lock up people inside their houses for a period of time, surely we can say you can’t eat beef from Brazil any longer. Even if a State is able to stop industrial beef production in the tropics for all groups and people, is this really the way to create lasting social change? Swedish authoritarianism, and the state naiveté fabricated by social democracy, shines through his political theory.

Malm’s authoritarian desires continue in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency. Here he plays with ideas such as “mandatory global veganism”[13] and invokes the “duty” of the “richest countries” to “lead and assist a global turn to plant-based protein” to oppose the consumption of “bushmeat”[14] in other parts of the world. “Bushmeat” here, refers to how Indigenous people, farmers and low-income households hunt and subsist on local animals (e.g. rabbits, snakes, iguanas, deer, gazelle, etc.), as they have for centuries. Malm exhibits colonial hubris, meanwhile demonstrating an uncritical belief in industrial food systems and the relationships they engender.

The careless, and ultimately Eurocentric and racist, assertions by Malm are even more dumbfounding considering his credentials as a human geographer, situated at one of among Sweden’s most prestigious universities. Human geography research is famous for revealing the ecological harms of colonial land management schemes and, later, “fortress” and “community” conservation programs.[15] These programs have been largely ineffective, failing to curtail “commercial poaching” and intensifying attacks on Indigenous people, militarizing forests and regimenting ecologically destructive practices.[16] Enforcing authoritarian relationships over land, especially against so-called “subsistence poachers” – or acquiring “bushmeat” in Malm’s words – has been a resolute disaster extending colonial practices of land control, degradation and warfare into nature.[17]

This insanity extends to silence regarding the Indigenous people under constant attack by mines and wind turbines in Sweden. As Kuhn points out, Malm “does not mention the Sámi with a single word”, although they see themselves as “radical environmentalists by the very nature of their traditional livelihood”. Kuhn explains this might be because “all Swedish leftists do” this, or because it is “easier to point to struggles far away”, or even that he has “political reasons” for ignoring them (e.g. them not talking about “fossil capital”?). At the same time, he goes into great length telling of his own involvement in an action group horribly named “Indians of the Concrete Jungle”. In essence, he likes Indigenous peoples when they resist in attention-grabbing news headlines, but demonstrates radical disinterest, if not contempt, for their lifeways, culture and autonomy with his political philosophy and proposals.

[goodqueenaly]

I feel like the succession of Viserys II might be an excellent opportunity for GRRM to explore his favorite theme - say it with me - the human heart in conflict with itself.

On the one hand, there was the then-Prince Viserys' loyalty to his elder brother Aegon III. That the two were very close is explicit: as Gyldayn notes in Fire and Blood Volume 1, "Viserys [had[ shared his [i.e. Aegon III's] bedchamber, his lessons, and his games" when the two were boys, the younger prince became his brother's "constant companion" after the former's return to Westeros,and as quoted from Munkun, "Aegon [III]’s affection for Gaemon Palehair was born of his desire to replace the little brother he had lost, but only when Viserys was restored to him did Aegon seem once more alive and whole". Nor did this closeness merely exist in the private, personal sphere: Viserys openly denounced and helped unravel Unwin Peake's conspiracy to seize power for himself and his faction during the Lysene Spring. As Hand for Aegon III, Viserys literally served as his brother's right-hand man, working to effect his royal policies.

So for Viserys, there may have been no question about continuing as Hand for his brother's sons, not simply as a reflection of his executive experience but as an expression of his loyalty to his brother's memory. The first and most powerful supporter of Aegon III's sons would be Aegon III's devoted younger brother; he, Viserys, would serve them as ably as he had their father, guarding against external threats to the dynasty much as he had during the Lysene Spring. Moreover, there may have been no doubt in Viserys' mind, at least at his brother's death, that Daeron and/or Baelor would have sons of their own someday, and that Aegon III's (male) line would remain the ruling line of Westeros for generations to come.

On the other hand, however, there was Prince Viserys' consideration for the welfare of the kingdom of the Iron Throne. Under the reign of Aegon III, this concern might have seemed part and parcel of Viserys' support for his brother: as Aegon III explicitly identified his policy, upon his majority, as "giv[ing] the smallfolk peace and food and justice", Viserys might have easily equated service to his brother with service to the realm. If Aegon III had proven withdrawn, cold, and unwilling to court his vassals and subjects, the king nevertheless worked with Viserys in "deal[ing] with the remaining turmoil in the realm", eliminating the false Daeron pretenders and trying to restore the draconic power of the dynasty. As a survivor (along with his brother) of the Dance of the Dragons, and an eyewitness to the devastation and destruction wrought between the warring factions, Viserys I think believed very strongly that the realm could not endure such a civil war again, and that it was his job, as the chief executive under the king, to ensure that it did not.

When Aegon III died and Daeron I succeeded, I think Viserys may have felt little had changed in this mission. If Daeron committed himself to making war on Dorne, Viserys may have enjoyed the free hand (no pun intended) left to him to run the government while the king warred in the south; he, Viserys, could continue his policies of stability and justice for the kingdom's subjects (which of course did not yet include the people of Dorne, at least more than symbolically). However, when Daeron himself died and Baelor became king, Viserys I think found his assignment radically different. Instead of a brother who agreed with Viserys on the importance of peace and stability, or an imperial conquering nephew who let him, Viserys, take control of the government in his long absences, here was a nephew with both very defined opinions about his rights and responsibilities as king and policies which had little to no basis in reality or practical governance. Baelor's care for the realm's well-being came in the form of grand gestures which emptied the treasury, balanced with zealous assaults on those who did not, so the king believed, belong in his vision for the realm.

So by the end of Baelor's reign, Viserys, I think, faced a choice which, while once one and the same, had become mutually exclusive: what mattered more, his brother's legacy or the prosperity of the realm? To remain loyal to his brother's dynastic line, Viserys would need to support his brother's son as ably as he could as Hand - already a difficult proposition but made worse as that son called for a bloody crusade against "non-believers", not only attacking the very subjects Aegon III had wanted to give "peace and food and justice" but plunging the realm back into civil war. The alternative, of course, was for Viserys to take control of the government himself, to institute all the ideas for good governance that he might have exercised during the reigns of Aegon III and maybe even Daeron I - but to do that, Viserys would have needed to disinherit, and indeed perhaps murder (at least in the case of Baelor), his brother's own children. (Nor might Viserys have ignored the fact that, as both he and his brother were sons of a would-be Targaryen queen regnant, his brother's daughters might have stood a real chance of at least making a claim for themselves at the death of Baelor, even if he realized a potential advantage he might have had over them during Baelor's reign.)

(And all of this is separate from how Viserys might have personally felt about the crown during his life. Viserys might have genuinely, and not even necessarily irrationally, believed that he was the best man for the job of king, especially compared to Baelor. Viserys may also have genuinely wanted a more glorious future for himself and/or his grandson Daeron.)

I hope GRRM takes the opportunity to let Viserys have this moment of internal conflict, these aspects of his heart battling with each other as he decided what to do. Just as Bloodraven certainly killed (or at the very least ordered the killing of) Daemon Blackfyre and his sons while I think thinking of Daemon as the "brother I loved", so I could see Viserys poisoning Baelor (which I certainly believe he did) while struggling internally with the betrayal, as he might have seen it, of his much-loved brother's memory and legacy. This might have been no easy choice for Viserys, and if he eventually chose (what he saw as) the prosperity of the realm, there is plenty of room for conflict within himself as he made that choice. (Which is not to mention the irony of his own son setting in motion the future Blackfyre Rebellions, but that's probably a separate post to write.)

(Also yes this ties into The Accursed Kings but that also has to be a separate post because I have too many thoughts there.)

[beens-on-toast]

Practically 5% of Gaza's population is dead or injured. Most people have lost a limb or more. Some are in critical condition and will probably die from lack of fuel and medicine. Some sources say 800000 might die from hunger. Many Palestinians in the northern strip have gone without food for 3 days. And the world moves on.

The West hasn't won a single war it waged on the Middle East unless you think of kill count and complete destruction of infrastructure a win. All it has done is caused destruction, killed millions, created more radical groups, and left the countries it has invaded in economic ruin. Dear Zelensky had a wonderful taste of Western interference. He was convinced not to take a peace deal last year by Biden and Boris Johnson. 500000 Ukranians either dead or severely injured later, he requests Switzerland to write up a peace deal. All those promises of "we will stand with you till the end" to "we will stand with you for as long as we got the supply too" to "sorry your old news" cost half a million their lives. When a peace deal does come through the media will rave how Putin lost and was the one forced to make a deal. They won't mention the 500000 causalities of the war or that Zelensky drafted people as old as 70 since all their young men were either dead or so injured. They will never be able to work and live a normal life because a peace deal wasn't brokered earlier. An entire generation of men and women gone.

Anyone who thinks the West is still powerful is drinking some strong Kool Aid. Countries have surpassed the US in military strength. A million dollar missile is being used to take out 2000$ drones. Wrap your mind around that, what a trade off. For every 100 drones the Houthis send out to the Red Sea it'll cost around 100 million of missiles. And most countries are sick of being bullied. Sanctions only work for a certain length of time, it takes only a little bit of research that they only had a impact on Russia's economy for a short period, they just ended up trading with India. All tactics are ineffective and the world has realized that. And they have finally realized that it is better to be enemies with the West than to be its friend.

The only way I am able to stomach the horrors I have seen in Gaza is that they didn't die or suffer for nothing. Their deaths had an impact, it unmasked the West, showed the West has no interest in helping the "weak", that democracy and human rights is for some not all, and that the West, the boogeyman, is more afraid of the world than they are of them. Ceasefire, free Palestine, and stop the genocide.

[generation1point5]

After Echo: A Retrospective

It's been a little over a year since Echo and its related works compelled me to write a slew of thoughts and a whole fanfic. I had joined a community, left with some new friends, and am now back largely to the same place I was before. I've come full circle, as it were.

I've taken and contributed largely what I could, and now that I look back on this time it feels to me more like a chapter read and closed than anything ongoing. The thought does not make me as melancholic as I thought it might, perhaps for the fact that I feel like I have done all I could; that, and the anticipation of knowing that this day would one day come to pass has also crossed my mind a long time ago. It is not the first time I've passed through such phases in life, and it will certainly not be the last. It's a well-worn, familiar road by now.

Yet the impact it's left on me, however brief, has demonstrably proven that this particular cycle has been more compelling than most; the last time I had committed so much to a fandom was Mass Effect. Disco Elysium might have counted too, if not for the fact that my radicalization into Marxism had been a project that was already years in the making at that point, and my engagement of that sort is of a different dynamic entirely. That owes to the nature and social approach to politics as a whole when it comes to human relations, I think.

At the time of writing, After All has just over 1,650 views, and 70 kudos, far surpassing my earlier publicly published project for Mass Effect regarding my OCs. That is to be expected, considering that I was writing about actual (and very popular) characters from the work itself. To my own impression, it has made more of an impact among AO3 readers in general than it has with the community surrounding Echo Project as a whole. This is also within expectations, as I was writing a fic whose very premise is subject to much discourse within the fandom, and it didn't feature much of anything in the way of mature content beyond the banality of horror in late-stage capitalism in small town America.

I check back on my work less often than when I did shortly after I started uploading it, but each time I come back to it I still find lines that I'm happy that I had put to words; it was those few instants where I feel like I had touched on something fundamental, raw and true, and portrayed it with a clarity that stands the test of time. Ultimately, I am satisfied with the work I produced. I did not write After All to be a blockbuster. But part of me did write the fic with the intent for it to be read for an audience beyond myself; otherwise, it would have all remained in my head, never committed to paper. There is always a two-level game to the artistic process; it must be sincere and near enough to the heart to be worth the effort, but it is always published with the hope that others see it, that it would be recognized. I constantly remind myself never to find validation in my art. Recognition should always be kept distinct from self-worth. I am all-too familiar with the ways that tying one's identity to close to their creative sides can lead to self-destructive views on oneself.

Unlike the visual arts, the written word always contains a thesis, a velocity, a direction, an argument and intent to add or otherwise alter perspective. It is not satisfied with realizing a projected image onto a visual medium. Words can be made pretty by good organization, but if the content is empty the work will be rendered lifeless.

My intent with After All was not to correct what I perceived to be a wrong in the writing, nor was it a simple exercise of wish fulfillment (or so I tell myself). What Echo had captivated and inspired in me was, much like Disco Elysium, the banality of the horror of our everyday circumstances, the material dialectic and contradictions within our socioeconomic fabric that shape the lives of many. Despite the presence of the paranormal in Echo, the key theme it speaks to, and what I always return to, is that we make monsters of ourselves and other people. I am compelled by the tragedy inherent in the struggle to rid ourselves of these horrors while not losing ourselves in the process. It speaks to the human condition, and that was what I hoped to capture.

What I had concluded early on, and what I knew would cause me to detach myself from the community even as I got into it, was the tendency for fandoms to reduce stories to their "moral," as they are derived by all who interpret the work. In a way, it goes to show how we evaluate characters as a whole, to read them as ultimately good or bad, people worth defending or condemning, but to me these debates serve only to reinforce a broader point: that at best, the products of human emotion (art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, etc.) are interpretations of the world. They tell you more about the person who's talking than the world they're talking about. What I had wished to write was in response to these black and white assessments, to re-establish a thesis that we are complex, self-contradicting, self-divided. I wanted to broaden the focus on the character by illustrating the world, and see the grey out of the black and white. It was meant to be a sober look in the mirror, darkly revealed through the lens of Echo's characters and the world it shares with our own. I wanted to write a story without that clear sense of karma, as such a notion is neither present in Echo nor the real world. The question of what people deserved was never the point of Echo, and neither was it something that I wanted to assert in my fic, either. Far more compelling to me is the idea regarding one's capacity for change, distinct from whether it was warranted, deserved or even possible.

At the same time, I wanted to tell a story that spoke to more than just self-improvement. The most compelling stories for me are not ones that are focused on individuals, or solitary heroes that beat the odds. Far more moving are stories that illustrate the broader world around them, as Echo did, to highlight the tension between changing the self and the self being changed by circumstances. That tension, I believe, is the reason why we feel the weight of our world so keenly. This struggle is neither noble nor beautiful, neither moral nor heinous. Like pain, it is simply there, and despite our best effort to flee from it, it lingers. That, to me, is the story of Echo. It is the story of many of our lives, and why we all try to make something of it, often into something that it is not. Who is to say whether it will be, ultimately, for the better?

After All is, by my own analysis and admission, a slanted excursion in self-expression. It was an attempt to show others how I see the world and the people in it, as expressed by the art of another, who saw and portrayed much the same world in their own way. I intended my own contributions as a gesture of respect, of recognition, of remembrance when I had finished my journey and began a new one. Since then, I have journeyed onto new pastures and old haunts, and look back on those prior days with a distant fondness and melancholy, having crossed into the pastures I had espied long over the horizon.

But the echoes of that time will always remain.

[outrunningthedark]

I had a nonnie in my inbox who asked me to expand my thoughts on the sperm donor arc and when I tried to post I got an error, so here is the answer without exact context, ugh:

I'm glad you brought this up because it's giving me a chance to express my thoughts more...calmly, as opposed to the *screaming into the void* moment I had yesterday. I, personally, am not a fan of what the show has done to Buck's character since season four. To me, it feels like the intention was to go one way with his story (the therapy arc, maybe revisit things with the parents in s5 to officially move on to the next phase), but then...problems? unforeseen circumstances? changed it up. I mean...think about it. We get this "huge" Buck backstory, he realizes he needs to start learning about his past/accepting it, and then...two episodes later...here comes his former hookup who causes nothing but drama and she's not just a blip on the radar again. They're bringing her back to be part of the cast in s5. If you want my opinion (and this is not a slight on any actors because it is what it is), once it was realized that Jennifer was pregnant and she would have to be written out, and then the question turned to what to do with Chimney... Buck in healing mode didn't mesh with how the audience would expect him to react to Madney "leaving", so...why not let him self-destruct even more! The show abandoned the therapy arc. That's the part people are ignoring. That's the part that makes their arguments about "healing not being linear" irrelevant. There was no hint at healing beyond those two conversations (the end of 4x05 and beginning of 4x06). Shit happened and the show changed course. Very quickly. Skipping ahead to the sperm donor storyline...Well. I would argue that it narratively doesn't make *total* sense when we left off 5x18 with Buck finally doing something for himself by breaking up with TayKay. Maybe if it was TayKay who cut ties, we could more easily accept him still not being willing to listen to that voice inside that knows he's doing the wrong thing(s). Also, now that we know "radical acceptance" isn't supposed to be explained the way Buck explained it (they should have just stuck with "saying yes to possibilities")...I'm annoyed that his behavior is the antithesis of radical acceptance and looking at the show like "you just threw fancy words out there hoping people would call you genius, huh?" (Sad to say it worked.) It makes the fandom look dumb af, too, "He's saying yes without thinking! He's bound to backslide!" He's...he's not performing radical acceptance until he STOPS falling into old habits, actually. It's now a conversation that could have been avoided if they didn't use THAT exact term. 🤦‍♀️ (It's like someone decided they should use a word other than 'open-minded' or even 'automatic' and chose radical without considering it's a real phrase with a completely different connotation.) I'm not a fan of the sperm donor arc, I've made no secret of that. The timing of it (to me) seems like a way to appease the people who want to think of him as a father (because Chris isn't biologically his and therefore it doesn't count 🙃) since it's probably gonna be awhile until he has a bio kid of his own, if ever. But. I was trying to stay optimistic. "Well, surely, this is not gonna work out and he's gonna have a moment where he realizes his purpose is to build/be a family with Eddie and Chris." And by "not work out" I mean he gets rejected or the attempts aren't successful. *That* would have been my preferred scenario - he makes a rash decision, but backs out before it's too late because he's finally like "Wtf am I doing? This isn't gonna make me happy." *That* would have fit with him putting himself first. *That* would have been a way to expand on the growth we saw a glimpse of in 5x18. Now...there might be a baby? (Still allowing a 1% chance that it ends up being Connor's baby after all...) And as long as there's a baby, people aren't going to let it go. "Is Buck gonna have to save his bio kid when they get sick???" "Will Connor and Kameron die to bring up a new trauma for Buck???" "Are we gonna get Big Man, Tiny Baby because he gets to be a friend to the family???" And the thing is...I can't blame people for going there with it. As long as there is a (hypothetical) child in the story, the show could bring them up at any time. To some in the fandom, Buck should be capable of walking away peacefully from this situation he's found himself in, but the fandom is not in the writers' room. If the show doesn't have any "better" ideas, if the show needs easy drama...Buck's attitude could change on a dime. The saving grace is that this storyline is happening now when (I highly doubt) we'll get to a season where the child is old enough to want to get to know their dad. Because you know that would happen.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

For more than 70 years, a slender volume written by a dockworker who died in 1983 has been handed around by presidents, would-be presidents, journalists, students, and more as a guide—decade after decade—to epochal and baffling events. 

Published in 1951 in the shadow of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements became one of President Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite books. As the former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces during World War II, Eisenhower saw firsthand the rise of mass movements and how they turn destructive. During one of the nation’s first televised presidential press conferences, he cited the book, turning it into a bestseller. 

Hoffer, often called “the longshoreman philosopher,” was admired across the political aisle. In 1967 he was an overnight guest of President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Years after Hoffer’s death, his book was rushed back into print and sold briskly when, in the new millennium, people turned to The True Believer to explain the attacks of 9/11. Decades before the terrorists commandeered the planes, Hoffer wrote: 

All the true believers of our time declaimed volubly. . . on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving, and too selfish to die for a nation, a God, or a holy cause. This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot—a moral and biological decay.

Since then, journalists have cited the book as a source to explain both the creation of the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left. 

In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to better understand her opponent Donald Trump and his followers, read what she later wrote was Hoffer’s “exploration of the psychology behind fanaticism and mass movements, and I shared it with my senior staff.”

For readers today, Hoffer’s descriptions of the nature of these movements and the people who join them are timelier and more trenchant than ever. The book—the paperback edition is fewer than 170 pages—is divided into 125 “chapters” ranging from a few sentences to several pages. These are mostly epigrammatic observations that build into a portrait of the personalities and forces that create mass movements.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote: “If you want concise insights into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement at their most primal level, may I suggest an evening with Eric Hoffer.”

I first learned of The True Believer in the summer of 2020. I was out of the U.S. getting my PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge. I had already begun publishing my own social observations, which led to an interview with a Dutch media outlet on cancel culture. The interview was posted and got a lot of views, which prompted the head of the outlet to take it down because he felt I was too sympathetic to the canceled.

I wrote a piece in Quillette on the irony of being canceled for expressing my thoughts on the canceled, and noted, “The U.S. used to export Coca-Cola, television shows, and music. Today, we export outrage, deplatforming, and social mobbing.”

A fellow student in my program saw the piece and told me I had to read The True Believer. I did, and like Eisenhower, it quickly became one of my favorite books. There were passages—published in 1951!—that seemed to describe how the rise of intellectual and social orthodoxy on campus, and across a growing number of institutions, stifles debate and free expression. More than that, Hoffer captured how in the age of smartphones and social media, people fear the consequences of uttering a single wrong word. He wrote:

[I]n a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion. There is prying and spying, tense watching, and a tense awareness of being watched. The surprising thing is that this pathological mistrust within the ranks leads not to dissension but to strict conformity. Knowing themselves continually watched, the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith. 

[...] Hoffer also described how language gets enlisted as a marker of who really is a true believer:

Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness.

I wonder what Hoffer would make of a world in which some words are so pregnant with meaning that the phrase “pregnant women” has become verboten. […]

One of the key and enduring insights of The True Believer is that frustration is the fuel of mass movements. Frustration, though, doesn’t arise solely from bleak material conditions. Hoffer argued, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some.”

He points out in the years leading up to both the French and Russian Revolutions, life had in fact been gradually improving for the masses. He concludes, “The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.” […]

In a passage in The True Believer that is reminiscent of today’s idea of the “horseshoe theory”—that is, political extremes have more in common with one another than with moderates—Hoffer wrote, “When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any movement. . . . In pre–Hitlerian Germany, it was often a toss-up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.” One of his most famous aphorisms is this:

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. . . . Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.”

[desultory-novice]

I have a headcanon/theory I wanna run past you. It revolves around Marx, but there's A LOT of lead-up to it, so buckle up: Given what we know about alternate dimensions, rifts between them, and the nature of Elfilis' abilities, it's probable that the setting of Forgotten Land is not merely an Earth a long distance away from Pop Star. Rather, the fact that Shiver Star fills that niche already could imply that it and the New World are alternate universe versions of the same planet.

(Which means there's a fair chance there's an alternate Pop Star equivilent out there too, but more on that later.)

Elfilin & co. crossing over from a different universe would also explain why Kirby's home dimension doesn't have much history with a being like Fecto Elfilis. You'd think a hostile multiversal conqueror would be more of a Big Fucking Deal back in the day, but once the Ancients developed warp tech they just ditched it along with their planet and moved on to greener pastures.

Perhaps one reason the Ancients were split into two distinct camps was because the science-users from another dimension joined up with the magic-users from this one? This is just spitballing — but the point I'm trying to lead up to is that alternate universe counterparts may be similar in some respects but radically different in others: from mere pallette swaps to differences on a conceptual level (like science vs. magic).

Given that the full scope of Fecto Elfilis' abilities is different to most anything we've seen, it's safe to say that they run on a different power source than, say, Dark Matter does. Out of the four components of Void the progenitor — Dream, Dark, Soul, and Heart — if Dark Matter embodied, well, Dark, and whatever Morpho Knight's schtick is toys with Soul, then perhaps there are those such as Fecto Elfilis who hold dominion over Dream. Or over nightmare. Who can say?

Also Ripple Star is literally a giant fucking heart. Whether it's in the same dimension as Pop Star or not (since the Crystal makes star-shaped rifts as you pointed out) is up for debate, but Ripple Star's environment is a lot like Popstar's, having many of the same enemies and similar design. Maybe different worlds have different balances of the four humours i dunno.

Actually, yeah! Maybe different parallel dimensions come with a different balance/power dynamic! If Ripple Star is indeed a Heart-coded iteration of Pop Star instead of a Dream-coded one, then maybe the clade Fecto Elfilis belongs to is an antagonistic threat on par with Dark Matter within their reality of origin. Similar in concept, yet radically different.

With all of this context in mind, let's get to to the point I was originally trying to make. Take a look at the geometric style of wings posessed by 0² and especially Void Termina. Now take a look at Marx's wings.

Similar, yet radically different.

This is straying into pure headcanon territory, but I don't think Marx comes from our Pop Star at all.

Suddenly, a lot of things start clicking into place. His desire for control. The desire to remake Pop Star the way he wants it. His out-of-context nature compared with most other antagonists who are Dark Matter-affiliated or Dark Matter-adjacent (i mean, even Dark Crafter implies some link with those arts n' crafts witches). Marx is most certainly not tied to Dark Matter, but he could very well be tied to Something Matter, right? (Plus that one spin-off manga where I think he insists that he and Kirby were childhood friends??)

Basically Fanfic At This Point, But Picture This: Perhaps the New World wasn't the first planet Fecto Elfilis had invaded and rained destruction upon. Perhaps, before moving on to the New World, it first invaded the Pop Star equivilent that Marx once belonged to. Perhaps unlucky Marx was one of the few creatures left alive when the ashes finally settled. Perhaps he went hunting for a desperate hope. Maybe he made a deal with the devil; maybe he got those wings another way. Maybe he even went a little mad.

Perhaps this is when Magolor first meets him; invites him aboard. Tells a tale to Marx about clockwork stars from another era, in another universe.

Perhaps its best that Marx never gets to know Elfilin.

Cool Marx asks for Christmas! Hooray! Thank you...!

-"Alternate universes of the same planet..." Someone else who loves the alternate planets/same planet, different dimension theory to explain the New World and Shiver Star discrepancies! Yes, yes! I agree completely!

-"Distinct camps..." Ooh! That is a FASCINATING reason for two such divergent groups as scientists and magic users coming together! It reminds me that I've got a Parallel Halcandra theory of my own! (Although in my case, I've toyed with the parallel theory to explain what happened to it, rather than how it was formed.) But I really like your take on it too!

-Fecto Elfilis and Dream Matter being in the same sphere sounds pretty darn sensible to me! And yes, Ripple Star and Pop Star both being... for lack of a better phrase "children's cereal marshmallow shapes" almost has to lead to some kind of connection! (Love the idea that Eflilis is SOME universe's Dark Matter!)

-"Marx isn't from our Pop Star" Oh gosh! This is such a cool idea! It plays into all the fun of the various Mirror Marxs people have created, but leaves room for so many different and interesting angles!

-

Tangent, but one of my favorite retro RPGs is Tales of Phantasia. The bad guy is this fairly generic seeming pretty boy "Demon King" who just goes around wrecking the world and leading an army of monsters, yadda yadda. But the more of the story you uncover, the more you realize he's only attacking technologically advanced cities. And those cities only got to be advanced by syphoning power from the world's Mana Tree. By this point, the protagonists are pretty much locked into having to destroy him (time travel is involved) but toward the very end, you realize he isn't a "demon" he's an interstellar traveler from another planet. He's, in fact, the last survivor of his planet. An environmental scientist-type who campaigned to get his people to stop killing their Mana Tree, only to fail. His planet was utterly destroyed afterwards, and only he escaped. He just wanted to keep the protagonist's people from destroying their planet (and maybe find a way to save what was left of his) but miscommunication led to a war and him being demonized by the people...!

N-not saying Marx had such pure intentions, but I love that the possibility exists that his conflicts with the people of Pop Star come from those came kinds of misunderstandings! That he would wish on a star to get HIS Pop Star back!

I've been thinking of parallels to make the friend trio of Marx, Magolor, and Taranza make more sense, since while I adore the idea of the three of them interacting, both Magolor and Taranza have such history and pathos to them. I sort of liked the idea of Marx being the "Kagero Mansion" magician to balance things out, but this would maybe be an even better start for them to have more in common!

Thank you so much for this! I really enjoyed it! (The lead up was awesome too! So many great ideas!)

[planetofsnarfs]

Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become.

The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X — a bad habit that was apparent when his interview with Don Lemon was released Monday morning.

In the contentious interview, Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to “censorship,” bashed the press for legitimate reporting, assailed DEI programs without supporting evidence, skewered advertisers who fled the X platform last year and yet again gave credence to the racist Great Replacement theory, among other things.

To those not fluent in the intricacies of right-wing media, some of what Musk said may have sounded bizarre or even foreign. But in the right-wing fever swamps, where Musk is now deeply entrenched, these are the issues that animate the masses.

Musk’s comments on the premiere episode of Lemon’s new online show added to an unhinged 72-hour posting spree on X, in which the erratic businessman raged against the “woke mind virus” and said its “goal” is “the destruction of America,” agreed with a user who wrote “Fake News is the Enemy of the People,” said the press is “basically the [Joe] Biden cheering squad,” accused the news media of “lying” about Donald Trump’s “blood bath” comments, called NPR a “nice version of Pravda,” alleged Google “manipulate[s] their search results with left wing bias,” said the January 6 insurrection was “not a ‘bloodbath’ by any definition,” and argued that if there is not a “red wave” in November, “America is doomed.”

At this juncture, calling Musk a right-wing shitposter is no longer provocative. It’s simply accurate. And his ugly behavior is even more troubling because of the fact that Musk is enormously influential, casting a large shadow across multiple industries and doing billions of dollars’ worth of national security business with the US government.

In his ownership of X alone, Musk controls one of the world’s most important communications platforms, spitting corrosive venom into the public discourse at a faster speed than his SpaceX rockets hurtle into orbit.

In fact, as users of the platform once called Twitter know all too well, Musk’s posts often find themselves to the very top of the home feed. That is because, according to reporting from Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, engineers were forced to build “a system designed to ensure” his posts do well on the platform he owns.

To make matters worse, Musk appears to be growing more intolerant of other viewpoints. While elevating right-wing extremists, he simultaneously seeks to destroy trust in credible news sources.

Once upon a time, Musk welcomed having a media personality like Lemon on the X platform. Not so much anymore.

On Monday, after his interview with Lemon was posted online, Musk trashed the former CNN anchor, calling him in various posts a “stupid asshole” and saying he is “just a bad guy, plain and simple.”

“He’s not used to having to answer to anyone,” Lemon said in a Q&A with People’s Jason Sheeler, “especially someone like me who doesn’t share his worldview, who doesn’t look like him.”

In effect, Musk has become self-radicalized on the very website that he was forced to purchase for $44 billion, sliding deeper into the darkest and most unsavory corners of the platform that has served to only reinforce his own worldview with an echo chamber of conspiracy theorists and ego-stoking sycophants that regularly fawn at his every move no matter how outrageous or preposterously false.

All of it dished up by an algorithm designed to regurgitate it right back to him. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, Musk is hell bent on taking everyone else down there with him.

[mariacallous]

I have found myself thinking about Michael Gove more and more recently. Not just because of his profile this week over the new definition of extremism, but because I think he - in his own way - is the author of a lot of what has become the extremism of the Tory Party.

That sentence won’t go down well in many quarters. Gove does not come across as a radical at all. By all accounts (I have never met him and the only thing we have in common is our ability to perform all the words of 80s banger Wham Rap) he is incredibly charming. Some say smarmy, but most say charming - and by most I mean people across the political and media spectrum. His reputation for politeness is pretty legendary.

He is also a fantastic media performer. Partly that is to do with the above charm. He’s self-deprecating and also seems thoughtful. When asked a question, his body language makes you think he’s considering the answer, and the right thing to do, very carefully. His head cocks slightly, his lips purse (more) and his shoulders open up as if to indicate he has nothing to hide or defend. Whatever answer he gives, that impression is at the core of his presentation.

He also has a reputation for competence in government that is rare among still-active Conservatives. When he was at Defra, many environmentalists found him more open and easier to work with than pretty much anyone else who has had that brief. He hasn’t got a lot through that housing campaigners would like, but it isn’t for the lack of visibly trying.

He also instituted a revolution in education that is underestimated by most in the impact it will continue to have on this country long after he has left office. For example, I still hear a great deal of wrangling about the National Curriculum. Many Labour education pledges reference it. But, here’s the thing: Gove’s reforms have quietly and without telling anyone basically abolished the National Curriculum in all but name. Because Academies don’t have to follow the National Curriculum and at present around three-quarters of schools are academies. Even though the plan to force all schools to academies by 2030 has been dropped, this trajectory is likely to continue (and unlikely to be reversed at least in the first term of a Labour government). Anything that does not affect over 70 per cent of schools does not deserve the title “national” anything.

Two notable things happened during Gove’s time as Education Secretary beyond the policy that, I think, illustrate the point I am trying to make here. Firstly, he hired Dominic Cummings as his special advisor and secondly, he was described by David Cameron (somewhat fondly at the time, though I would be fascinated to know if post-2016 thought it quite so amusing) as a “Maoist” who like Cummings “believes that the world makes progress through the process of creative destruction”.

Now look again at the record of this mild-mannered, Wham-rapping, Aberdeen-dancing politician.

Gove publicly and loudly backed Brexit breaking a long friendship with Cameron to do so. He then agreed to head up Johnson’s campaign team for the leadership in 2016 only to run himself at the last minute torpedoing Boris’s chances. He was in May’s cabinet at the end, but also on telly calling her planned Brexit vote offering a temporary Customs Union and a vote on a referendum unworkable (to be fair, it was). He again served in Johnson’s cabinet - having apparently changed his mind about his unsuitability for the post (and to be fair, Johnson certainly delivered his fair share of creative destruction) - and as all around him were resigning, Gove was, hilariously, sacked by Johnson. Then who can forget the Laura Kuenssberg interview with Liz Truss and Gove responding where he - just feet away from the then PM called her plans profoundly concerning and unconservative. She didn’t last much longer.

Gove does serve in government now, but whenever plotting is mentioned - evil or otherwise - his name is never very far from the frame. Of course, plotting in politics is as natural as breathing. But plotting for the sake of it is a different matter. I think Gove enjoys the chaos of the game more than the outcomes.

Michael Gove gives off all the vibes of the Cameron-era type of Tory politician. And let’s be fair, that was when he made his most destructive changes to the education system as he abolished things that might have come in handy, such as a massive school repairs programme.

And maybe that’s fair. Because that government was slick and went on a media charm offensive that vastly belied its destructive instincts. The behaviour of Johnson and the insanity of Truss may lead us to forget that the underlying reasons why the country is in the mess we are is down to the economic policies of the Cameron and Osborne government.

Michael Gove has been the great survivor of the Tory years. At the heart of so many plots one loses count, yet endlessly returning to serve semi-loyally at the heart of government. He may charm the press. He may come across as a decent bloke. But his record of destruction and chaos is one we all suffer from. We may enjoy it when his dagger is turned towards his colleagues, but don’t forget for one minute that his destructive instinct is one that could take us all down if we let ourselves be charmed into thinking of him as the acceptable and moderate face of the Tory party. He is anything but.

[elinora-froach]

New DnD character teehee :) backstory up ahead: (death, cult, and violence warning)

in this world, it is cursed to be eternal night because a long time ago the moon god and sun god fought, the mood god won and took over the world. This guy's family had been worshipping the moon god for years in an attempt to be spared in case the god would do something destructive.. One day, people who took radical attempts to free people from the moon god's power (killing people who worshipped him) raided his family's home. Quickly trying to protect his loved ones he rushed to save them, and actually managed to fend the attackers off. However, as soon as he saves them his father, seemingly 'possessed by their god' and reciting some religious scripts literally stabbed him in the back. noone else in his family were in the place to challenge their 'god's' actions, so they left him to die. thankfully an old man found him and healed him with magic, once he was healed he learned about life outside the cult, and how evil the moon god was. He quickly learned to resent his family and the moon god after leaving the old man he became obbsessed with helping the innocent and weak, to the point of not letting his mind focus on anything else. He's quite quick to agree with or join anything that seems good or helpful

[delicatefade]

For #talktometuesday I'm v curious to hear more about corrupt Eilan is that in a world where she follows Solas and helps him bring the Veil down or something else? I love hearing about Inquisitors who turn to the dark side 😈

Aha! The turn to the dark side is full of thrashing and self delusion. Quick world state catch up. It's close to canon-ish. Solas broke up with Eilan and left to pursue his goal of tearing down the Veil to restore the world to its rightful order. Eilan stayed on as Inquisitor. The Inquisition is now a direct military and ops vehicle of the Chantry lead by Leliana with Cassandra as her hand. The Inquisition's main target is Solas. tl;dr: If you're wondering what radicalizes her.... nothing? She never agrees with Solas philosophically about the Veil or why it needs to come down. But she is so singularly focused on staying in a relationship with him, so self-absorbed in her love, that she makes a series of small, compromised decisions. Each decision feels, in that moment, absolutely human and excusable. But ultimately those decisions culminate in her corruption because they make her his accomplice. And once the deed is done, she engages in a series of mental gymnastics to live with herself and with him and her transformation from a do-gooder to a villain is complete. The slightly longer explanation below: 👇

Eilan corruption arc. The story starts six months after Trespasser. Eilan and Solas were a couple and very much in love. She is convinced that if she could just find him and reason with him, he can be persuaded from his destructive path. She dreams about him, finds him that way (dream magic!) He's actually thrilled by this turn of events. For him, it represents the possibility that she might change her mind and join him. He also wants this to end with his lover Eilan at his side. What a dream! They both ignore the elephant in the room for a while, just enjoy being together and pretend they aren't at odds. But as he gets closer to his goal, she starts getting desperate and leaks some of his secrets to Dorian so that power players of Thedas can perhaps oppose Solas a little longer. But she never actually gives up any critical information that would help Solas' enemies stop Solas once and for all. That would be a step too far. Her heart isn't there. Dorian, and others, doubt Eilan's loyalties. She had said she is Team Modern Thedas, but her actions speak otherwise. Dorian in particular feels betrayed by her. 😟 Meanwhile she's arguing with Solas all the time, their relationship is frayed very badly, she acts out, but he will not be dissuaded. He is convinced she will prefer life as an elf without the Veil and their lives will be better. He is also hoping that removing the Veil will make all elves immortal again. Fingers crossed, vhenan!!! You and me forever!!! Finally, when Solas does take down the Veil, Eilan against all odds shows the fuck up and does have a way to stop his ritual. Bruh, it won't even kill or wound him. It is like, the perfect Solavellan gotcha: stop the ritual without hurting Solas? Wow, the dream. SHE STILL BACKS OFF!!!!! She's too in love to disappoint and hurt him (emotionally) this way, and will absolutely choose him over the world (as her friends had accurately accused!!!) Sure, she gives herself a little mental band-aid about it, she reasons her decision not to stop Solas from *checks notes* destroying civilization as millions of people know it is about, uh, "having faith in him." Nah, dawg, it's toxic, obsessive love. That story is completed and published. Comes in at just under 30k. Read it here -> https://archiveofourown.org/works/38774526/chapters/96954213 I am working on the sequel which covers the first 3 years after the Veil falls. The draft is currently at 65k words. In that fic, the consequences of the apocalypse are dire!! A little worse than Solas expected. You know. For consistency. Eilan, at first, is not coping well and says ugly things to Solas. But in order to cope, she has to compartmentalize. Also, she's essentially in the most privileged position in all of Thedas at that point, and shielded from most horrors.

Meanwhile we see Solas start to have doubts about his choices re: the Veil (both putting it up and taking it down). His self-doubts start to eat at him and it is Eilan who builds up his confidence again. She's a playwright and writes literal propaganda to retell history where Solas is the singular greatest Byronic hero of all time. She tells him that what he did was right and good. Does she actually believe that? Doesn't matter! And not really? Look, they need to live. Here's what she does start to believe: Some people just matter more to world history, you know? 😉 And her turn to villainy is complete without ever, even once, having a god damn point. She just wants her love. I might write a part 3 where we see Eilan at her happiest. She and Solas are married, have kids, and the ugly past feels distant. In that story they learn that actions have consequences and the misdeeds of the past catch up to them both.

[dailyanarchistposts]

G.3.1 Is “anarcho”-capitalism American anarchism?

Unlike Rothbard, some “anarcho”-capitalists are more than happy to proclaim themselves “individualist anarchists” and so suggest that their notions are identical, or nearly so, with the likes of Tucker, Ingalls and Labadie. As part of this, they tend to stress that individualist anarchism is uniquely American, an indigenous form of anarchism unlike social anarchism. To do so, however, means ignoring not only the many European influences on individualist anarchism itself (most notably, Proudhon) but also downplaying the realities of American capitalism which quickly made social anarchism the dominant form of Anarchism in America. Ironically, such a position is deeply contradictory as “anarcho”-capitalism itself is most heavily influenced by a European ideology, namely “Austrian” economics, which has lead its proponents to reject key aspects of the indigenous American anarchist tradition.

For example, “anarcho”-capitalist Wendy McElroy does this in a short essay provoked by the Seattle protests in 1999. While Canadian, her rampant American nationalism is at odds with the internationalism of the individualist anarchists, stating that after property destruction in Seattle which placed American anarchists back in the media social anarchism “is not American anarchism. Individualist anarchism, the indigenous form of the political philosophy, stands in rigorous opposition to attacking the person or property of individuals.” Like an ideological protectionist, she argued that “Left [sic!] anarchism (socialist and communist) are foreign imports that flooded the country like cheap goods during the 19th century.” [Anarchism: Two Kinds] Apparently Albert and Lucy Parsons were un-Americans, as was Voltairine de Cleyre who turned from individualist to communist anarchism. And best not mention the social conditions in America which quickly made communist-anarchism predominant in the movement or that individualist anarchists like Tucker proudly proclaimed their ideas socialist!

She argued that ”[m]any of these anarchists (especially those escaping Russia) introduced lamentable traits into American radicalism” such as “propaganda by deed” as well as a class analysis which “divided society into economic classes that were at war with each other.” Taking the issue of “propaganda by the deed” first, it should be noted that use of violence against person or property was hardly alien to American traditions. The Boston Tea Party was just as “lamentable” an attack on “property of individuals” as the window breaking at Seattle while the revolution and revolutionary war were hardly fought using pacifist methods or respecting the “person or property of individuals” who supported imperialist Britain. Similarly, the struggle against slavery was not conducted purely by means Quakers would have supported (John Brown springs to mind), nor was (to use just one example) Shay’s rebellion. So “attacking the person or property of individuals” was hardly alien to American radicalism and so was definitely not imported by “foreign” anarchists.

Of course, anarchism in American became associated with terrorism (or “propaganda by the deed”) due to the Haymarket events of 1886 and Berkman’s assassination attempt against Frick during the Homestead strike. Significantly, McElroy makes no mention of the substantial state and employer violence which provoked many anarchists to advocate violence in self-defence. For example, the great strike of 1877 saw the police opened fire on strikers on July 25th, killing five and injuring many more. “For several days, meetings of workmen were broken up by the police, who again and again interfered with the rights of free speech and assembly.” The Chicago Times called for the use of hand grenades against strikers and state troops were called in, killing a dozen strikers. “In two days of fighting, between 25 and 50 civilians had been killed, some 200 seriously injured, and between 300 and 400 arrested. Not a single policeman or soldier had lost his life.” This context explains why many workers, including those in reformist trade unions as well as anarchist groups like the IWPA, turned to armed self-defence (“violence”). The Haymarket meeting itself was organised in response to the police firing on strikers and killing at least two. The Haymarket bomb was thrown after the police tried to break-up a peaceful meeting by force: “It is clear then that … it was the police and not the anarchists who were the perpetrators of the violence at the Haymarket.” All but one of the deaths and most of the injuries were caused by the police firing indiscriminately in the panic after the explosion. [Paul Avrich, The Maymarket Tragedy, pp. 32–4, p. 189, p. 210, and pp. 208–9] As for Berkman’s assassination attempt, this was provoked by the employer’s Pinkerton police opening fire on strikers, killing and wounding many. [Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 86]

In other words, it was not foreign anarchists or alien ideas which associated anarchism with violence but, rather, the reality of American capitalism. As historian Eugenia C. Delamotte puts it, “the view that anarchism stood for violence … spread rapidly in the mainstream press from the 1870s” because of “the use of violence against strikers and demonstrators in the labour agitation that marked these decades — struggles for the eight-hour day, better wages, and the right to unionise, for example. Police, militia, and private security guards harassed, intimidated, bludgeoned, and shot workers routinely in conflicts that were just as routinely portrayed in the media as worker violence rather than state violence; labour activists were also subject to brutal attacks, threats of lynching, and many other forms of physical assault and intimidation … the question of how to respond to such violence became a critical issue in the 1870s, with the upswelling of labour agitation and attempts to suppress it violently.” [Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, pp. 51–2]

Joseph Labadie, it should be noted, thought the “Beastly police” got what they deserved at Haymarket as they had attempted to break up a peaceful public meeting and such people should “go at the peril of their lives. If it is necessary to use dynamite to protect the rights of free meeting, free press and free speech, then the sooner we learn its manufacture and use … the better it will be for the toilers of the world.” The radical paper he was involved in, the Labor Leaf, had previously argued that “should trouble come, the capitalists will use the regular army and militia to shoot down those who are not satisfied. It won’t be so if the people are equally ready.” Even reformist unions were arming themselves to protect themselves, with many workers applauding their attempts to organise union militias. As worker put it, ”[w]ith union men well armed and accustomed to military tactics, we could keep Pinkerton’s men at a distance … Employers would think twice, too, before they attempted to use troops against us … Every union ought to have its company of sharpshooters.” [quoted by Richard Jules Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, p. 200 and p. 135]

While the violent rhetoric of the Chicago anarchists was used at their trial and is remembered (in part because enemies of anarchism take great glee in repeating it), the state and employer violence which provoked it has been forgotten or ignored. Unless this is mentioned, a seriously distorted picture of both communist-anarchism and capitalism are created. It is significant, of course, that while the words of the Martyrs are taken as evidence of anarchism’s violent nature, the actual violence (up to and including murder) against strikers by state and private police apparently tells us nothing about the nature of the state or capitalist system (Ward Churchill presents an excellent summary such activities in his article “From the Pinkertons to the PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policing in the United States, 1870 to the Present” [CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1–72]).

So, as can be seen, McElroy distorts the context of anarchist violence by utterly ignoring the far worse capitalist violence which provoked it. Like more obvious statists, she demonises the resistance to the oppressed while ignoring that of the oppressor. Equally, it should also be noted Tucker rejected violent methods to end class oppression not out of principle, but rather strategy as there “was no doubt in his mind as to the righteousness of resistance to oppression by recourse to violence, but his concern now was with its expedience … he was absolutely convinced that the desired social revolution would be possible only through the utility of peaceful propaganda and passive resistance.” [James J. Martin, Men Against the State, p. 225] For Tucker “as long as freedom of speech and of the press is not struck down, there should be no resort to physical force in the struggle against oppression.” [quoted by Morgan Edwards, “Neither Bombs Nor Ballots: Liberty & the Strategy of Anarchism”, pp. 65–91, Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty, Coughlin, Hamilton and Sullivan (eds.), p. 67] Nor should we forget that Spooner’s rhetoric could be as blood-thirsty as Johann Most’s at times and that American individualist anarchist Dyer Lum was an advocate of insurrection.

As far as class analysis does, which “divided society into economic classes that were at war with each other”, it can be seen that the “left” anarchists were simply acknowledging the reality of the situation — as did, it must be stressed, the individualist anarchists. As we noted in section G.1, the individualist anarchists were well aware that there was a class war going on, one in which the capitalist class used the state to ensure its position (the individualist anarchist “knows very well that the present State is an historical development, that it is simply the tool of the property-owning class; he knows that primitive accumulation began through robbery bold and daring, and that the freebooters then organised the State in its present form for their own self-preservation.” [A.H. Simpson, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 92]). Thus workers had a right to a genuinely free market for ”[i]f the man with labour to sell has not this free market, then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken from him. Now, such a market has constantly been denied … to labourers of the entire civilised world. And the men who have denied it are … Capitalists … [who] have placed and kept on the statue-books all sorts of prohibitions and taxes designed to limit and effective in limiting the number of bidders for the labour of those who have labour to sell.” [Instead of a Book, p. 454] For Joshua King Ingalls, ”[i]n any question as between the worker and the holder of privilege, [the state] is certain to throw itself into the scale with the latter, for it is itself the source of privilege, the creator of class rule.” [quoted by Bowman N. Hall, “Joshua K. Ingalls, American Individualist: Land Reformer, Opponent of Henry George and Advocate of Land Leasing, Now an Established Mode,” pp. 383–96, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 4, p. 292] Ultimately, the state was “a police force to regulate the people in the interests of the plutocracy.” [Ingalls, quoted by Martin, Op. Cit., p. 152]

Discussing Henry Frick, manager of the Homestead steelworkers who was shot by Berkman for using violence against striking workers, Tucker noted that Frick did not “aspire, as I do, to live in a society of mutually helpful equals” but rather it was “his determination to live in luxury produced by the toil and suffering of men whose necks are under his heel. He has deliberately chosen to live on terms of hostility with the greater part of the human race.” While opposing Berkman’s act, Tucker believed that he was “a man with whom I have much in common, — much more at any rate than with such a man as Frick.” Berkman “would like to live on terms of equality with his fellows, doing his share of work for not more than his share of pay.” [The Individualist Anarchists, pp. 307–8] Clearly, Tucker was well aware of the class struggle and why, while not supporting such actions, violence occurred when fighting it.

As Victor Yarros summarised, for the individualist anarchists the “State is the servant of the robbers, and it exists chiefly to prevent the expropriation of the robbers and the restoration of a free and fair field for legitimate competition and wholesome, effective voluntary cooperation.” [“Philosophical Anarchism: Its Rise, Decline, and Eclipse”, pp. 470–483, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 41, no. 4, p. 475] For “anarcho”-capitalists, the state exploits all classes subject to it (perhaps the rich most, by means of taxation to fund welfare programmes and legal support for union rights and strikes).

So when McElroy states that, “Individualist anarchism rejects the State because it is the institutionalisation of force against peaceful individuals”, she is only partly correct. While it may be true for “anarcho”-capitalism, it fails to note that for the individualist anarchists the modern state was the institutionalisation of force by the capitalist class to deny the working class a free market. The individualist anarchists, in other words, like social anarchists also rejected the state because it imposed certain class monopolies and class legislation which ensured the exploitation of labour by capital — a significant omission on McElroy’s part. “Can it be soberly pretended for a moment that the State … is purely a defensive institution?” asked Tucker. “Surely not … you will find that a good nine-tenths of existing legislation serves … either to prescribe the individual’s personal habits, or, worse still, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial, and proprietary monopolies which deprive labour of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a perfectly free market.” [Tucker, Instead of a Book, pp. 25–6] In fact:

“As long as a portion of the products of labour are appropriated for the payment of fat salaries to useless officials and big dividends to idle stockholders, labour is entitled to consider itself defrauded, and all just men will sympathise with its protest.” [Tucker, Liberty, no. 19, p. 1]

It goes without saying that almost all “anarcho”-capitalists follow Rothbard in being totally opposed to labour unions, strikes and other forms of working class protest. As such, the individualist anarchists, just as much as the “left” anarchists McElroy is so keen to disassociate them from, argued that ”[t]hose who made a profit from buying or selling were class criminals and their customers or employees were class victims. It did not matter if the exchanges were voluntary ones. Thus, left anarchists hated the free market as deeply as they hated the State.” [McElroy, Op. Cit.] Yet, as any individualist anarchist of the time would have told her, the “free market” did not exist because the capitalist class used the state to oppress the working class and reduce the options available to choose from so allowing the exploitation of labour to occur. Class analysis, in other words, was not limited to “foreign” anarchism, nor was the notion that making a profit was a form of exploitation (usury). As Tucker continually stressed: “Liberty will abolish interest; it will abolish profit; it will abolish monopolistic rent; it will abolish taxation; it will abolish the exploitation of labour.” [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 157]

It should also be noted that the “left” anarchist opposition to the individualist anarchist “free market” is due to an analysis which argues that it will not, in fact, result in the anarchist aim of ending exploitation nor will it maximise individual freedom (see section G.4). We do not “hate” the free market, rather we love individual liberty and seek the best kind of society to ensure free people. By concentrating on markets being free, “anarcho”-capitalism ensures that it is wilfully blind to the freedom-destroying similarities between capitalist property and the state (as we discussed in section F.1). An analysis which many individualist anarchists recognised, with the likes of Dyer Lum seeing that replacing the authority of the state with that of the boss was no great improvement in terms of freedom and so advocating co-operative workplaces to abolish wage slavery. Equally, in terms of land ownership the individualist anarchists opposed any voluntary exchanges which violated “occupancy and use” and so they, so, “hated the free market as deeply as they hated the State.” Or, more correctly, they recognised that voluntary exchanges can result in concentrations of wealth and so power which made a mockery of individual freedom. In other words, that while the market may be free the individuals within it would not be.

McElroy partly admits this, saying that “the two schools of anarchism had enough in common to shake hands when they first met. To some degree, they spoke a mutual language. For example, they both reviled the State and denounced capitalism. But, by the latter, individualist anarchists meant ‘state-capitalism’ the alliance of government and business.” Yet this “alliance of government and business” has been the only kind of capitalism that has ever existed. They were well aware that such an alliance made the capitalist system what it was, i.e., a system based on the exploitation of labour. William Bailie, in an article entitled “The Rule of the Monopolists” simply repeated the standard socialist analysis of the state when he talked about the “gigantic monopolies, which control not only our industry, but all the machinery of the State, — legislative, judicial, executive, — together with school, college, press, and pulpit.” Thus the “preponderance in the number of injunctions against striking, boycotting, and agitating, compared with the number against locking-out, blacklisting, and the employment of armed mercenaries.” The courts could not ensure justice because of the “subserviency of the judiciary to the capitalist class … and the nature of the reward in store for the accommodating judge.” Government “is the instrument by means of which the monopolist maintains his supremacy” as the law-makers “enact what he desires; the judiciary interprets his will; the executive is his submissive agent; the military arm exists in reality to defend his country, protect his property, and suppress his enemies, the workers on strike.” Ultimately, “when the producer no longer obeys the State, his economic master will have lost his power.” [Liberty, no. 368, p. 4 and p. 5] Little wonder, then, that the individualist anarchists thought that the end of the state and the class monopolies it enforces would produce a radically different society rather than one essentially similar to the current one but without taxes. Their support for the “free market” implied the end of capitalism and its replacement with a new social system, one which would end the exploitation of labour.

She herself admits, in a roundabout way, that “anarcho”-capitalism is significantly different that individualist anarchism. “The schism between the two forms of anarchism has deepened with time,” she asserts. This was ”[l]argely due to the path breaking work of Murray Rothbard” and so, unlike genuine individualist anarchism, the new “individualist anarchism” (i.e., “anarcho”-capitalism) “is no longer inherently suspicious of profit-making practices, such as charging interest. Indeed, it embraces the free market as the voluntary vehicle of economic exchange” (does this mean that the old version of it did not, in fact, embrace “the free market” after all?) This is because it “draws increasingly upon the work of Austrian economists such as Mises and Hayek” and so “it draws increasingly farther away from left anarchism” and, she fails to note, the likes of Warren and Tucker. As such, it would be churlish to note that “Austrian” economics was even more of a “foreign import” much at odds with American anarchist traditions as communist anarchism, but we will! After all, Rothbard’s support of usury (interest, rent and profit) would be unlikely to find much support from someone who looked forward to the development of “an attitude of hostility to usury, in any form, which will ultimately cause any person who charges more than cost for any product to be regarded very much as we now regard a pickpocket.” [Tucker, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 155] Nor, as noted above, would Rothbard’s support for an “Archist” (capitalist) land ownership system have won him anything but dismissal nor would his judge, jurist and lawyer driven political system have been seen as anything other than rule by the few rather than rule by none.

Ultimately, it is a case of influences and the kind of socio-political analysis and aims it inspires. Unsurprisingly, the main influences in individualist anarchism came from social movements and protests. Thus poverty-stricken farmers and labour unions seeking monetary and land reform to ease their position and subservience to capital all plainly played their part in shaping the theory, as did the Single-Tax ideas of Henry George and the radical critiques of capitalism provided by Proudhon and Marx. In contrast, “anarcho”-capitalism’s major (indeed, predominant) influence is “Austrian” economists, an ideology developed (in part) to provide intellectual support against such movements and their proposals for reform. As we will discuss in the next section, this explains the quite fundamental differences between the two systems for all the attempts of “anarcho”-capitalists to appropriate the legacy of the likes of Tucker.