#devoid/separate from its obvious political meanings

[spilledreality]

Sporting vs Herding

i.

I wanna talk about two blogposts, Seph's "War Over Being Nice” and Alastair's "Of Triggering & the Triggered." Each lays out the same erisological idea: that there are two distinct modes or cultures of running discourse these days, and understanding the difference is crucial to understanding the content of conversation as much as its form. Let's go.

One style, Alastair writes, is indebted to the Greco-Roman rhetorical and 19th C British sporting traditions. A debate takes place in a "heterotopic" arena which is governed by an ethos of adversarial collaboration and sportsmanship. It is waged in a detached and impersonal manner, e.g. in American debate club, which inherits from these older traditions, you are assigned a side to argue; your position is not some "authentic" expression of self. Alastair:

This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.

All in all, it is a mark against one in these debates to take an argument personally, to allow arguments that happen "in the arena" to leave the arena. This mode of discourse I see exemplified in LessWrong culture, and is, I think, one of the primary attractors to the site.In the second mode of discourse, inoffensiveness, agreement, and inclusivity are emphasized, and positions are seen as closely associated with their proponents.  Alastair speculates it originates in an educational setting which values cooperation, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, affirmation, and subordination; this may be true, but I feel less confident in it than I am the larger claim about discursive modes. Provocatively, the two modes are dubbed "sporting" and "herding," with all the implications of, on the one hand, individual agents engaged in ritualized, healthy simulations of combat, and on the other, of quasi-non-agents shepherded in a coordinated, bounded, highly constrained and circumscribed epistemic landscape. Recall, if you are tempted to blame this all on the postmodernists, that this is exactly the opposite of their emphasis toward the "adult" realities of relativism, nebulosity, flux. Queer Theory has long advocated for the dissolution of gendered and racial identity, not the reification of identitarian handles we see now, which is QT's bastardization. We might believe these positions were taken too far, but they are ultimately about complicating the world and removing the structuralist comforts of certainty and dichotomy. (Structureless worlds are inherently hostile to rear children in, and also for most human life; see also the Kegan stages for a similar idea.)  

In the erisological vein, Alastair provides a portrait of the collision between the sporting and herding modes. Arguments that fly in one discursive style (taking offence, emotional injury, legitimation-by-feeling) absolutely do not fly in the other:

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge.

ii.

Seph stumbles upon a similar division, though it is less about discursive and argumentative modes, and more about social norms for emotional regulation and responsibility. He calls them Culture A and Culture B, mirroring sporting and herding styles, respectively.

In culture A, everyone is responsible for their own feelings. People say mean stuff all the time—teasing and jostling each other for fun and to get a rise. Occasionally someone gets upset. When that happens, there's usually no repercussions for the perpetrator. If someone gets consistently upset when the same topic is brought up, they will either eventually stop getting upset or the people around them will learn to avoid that topic. Verbally expressing anger at someone is tolerated. It is better to be honest than polite.

In such a culture, respect and status typically comes from performance; Seph quotes the maxim "If you can't sell shit, you are shit." We can see a commonality with sporting in that there is some shared goal which is attained specifically through adversarial play, such that some degree of interpersonal hostility is tolerated or even sought. Conflict is settled openly and explicitly.

In culture B, everyone is responsible for the feelings of others. At social gatherings everyone should feel safe and comfortable. After all, part of the point of having a community is to collectively care for the emotional wellbeing of the community's members. For this reason its seen as an act of violence against the community for your actions or speech to result in someone becoming upset, or if you make people feel uncomfortable or anxious. This comes with strong repercussions—the perpetrator is expected to make things right. An apology isn't necessarily good enough here—to heal the wound, the perpetrator needs to make group participants once again feel nurtured and safe in the group. If they don't do that, they are a toxic element to the group's cohesion and may no longer be welcome in the group. It is better to be polite than honest. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, it is better to say nothing at all.

In such a culture, status and respect come from your contribution to group cohesion and safety; Seph cites the maxim "Be someone your coworkers enjoy working with." But Seph's argument pushes back, fruitfully, on descriptions of Culture B as collaborative (which involve high self-assertion); rather, he writes, they are accommodating in the Thomas-Kilmann modes of conflict sense:

iii.

Seph and Alastair both gesture toward the way these modes feel gendered, with Culture A more "masculinized" and Culture B more "feminized."[1] While this seems important to note, given that a massive, historically unprecedented labor shift toward coed co-working has recently occured in the Western world, I don't see much point in hashing out a nature vs. nurture, gender essentialism debate here, so you can pick your side and project it. This is also perhaps interesting from the frame of American feminist history: early waves of feminism were very much about escaping the domestic sphere and entering the public sphere; there is an argument to be made that contemporary feminisms, now that they have successfully entered it, are dedicated to domesticating the public sphere into a more comfortable zone. Culture B, for instance, might well be wholly appropriate to the social setting of a living room, among acquaintances who don't know each other well; indeed, it feels much like the kind of aristocratic parlor culture of the same 19th C Britain that the sporting mode also thrived in, side-by-side. And to some extent, Culture A is often what gets called toxic masculinity; see Mad Men for a depiction.

(On the topic of domestication of the workplace: We've seen an increased blurring of the work-life separation; the mantra "lean-in" has been outcompeted by "decrease office hostility"; business attire has slid into informality, etiquette has been subsumed into ethics, dogs are allowed in the workplace. Obviously these changes are not driven by women's entrance into the workplace alone; the tech sector has had an enormous role in killing both business attire and the home-office divide, despite being almost entirely male in composition. And equally obvious, there is an enormous amount of inter- and intra-business competition in tech, which is both consistently cited by exiting employees as a hostile work environment, and has also managed to drive an outsized portion of global innovation the past few decades—thus cultural domestication is not at all perfectly correlated with a switch from Culture A to B. Draw from these speculations what you will.)

There are other origins for the kind of distinctions Seph and Alastair draw; one worthwhile comparison might be Nietzsche's master and slave moralities. The former mode emphasizes power and achievement, the other empathy, cooperation, and compassion. (Capitalism and communitarianism fall under some of the same, higher-level ideological patterns.) There are differences of course: the master moralist is "beyond" good and evil, or suffering and flourishing, whereas Culture A and B might both see themselves as dealing with questions of suffering but in very different ways. But the "slave revolt in morality" overwrote an aristocratic detachment or "aboveness" that we today might see as deeply immoral or inhuman; it is neither surprising nor damning that a revolting proletariat—the class which suffered most of the evils of the world—would speak from a place of one-to-one, attached self-advocacy. One can switch "sides" or "baskets" of the arena each half or quarter because they are impersonal targets in a public commons; one cannot so easily hold the same attitude toward defending one's home. This alone may indicate we should be more sympathetic to the communitarian mode than we might be inclined to be; certainly, those who advocate and embody this mode make plausible claims to being a similar, embattled and embittered class. A friend who I discussed these texts with argued that one failure mode of the rationalist community is an "unmooring" from the real concerns of human beings, slipping into an idealized, logical world modeled on self-similarity (i.e. highly Culture A, thinking over feeling in the Big 5 vocabulary), in a way that is blind to the realities of the larger population.

But there are also grave problems for such a discursive mode, especially when it becomes dominant. Because while on the surface, discursive battles in the sporting mode can appear to be battles between people, they are in reality battles between ideas.

iv.

As Mill argued in On Liberty, free discourse is crucial because it acts as a social steering mechanism: should we make a mistake in our course, freedom of discourse is the instrument for correcting it. But the mistake of losing free discourse is very hard to come back from; it must be fought for again, before other ideals can be pursued. 

Moreover, freedom of discourse is the means of rigorizing ideas before they are implemented, such as to avoid catastrophe. Anyone familiar with James Scott's Seeing Like A State, or Hayek's arguments for decentralized market intelligence, or a million other arguments against overhaulism, knows how difficult it is to engineer a social intervention that works as intended: the unforeseen, second-order effects; our inability to model complex systems and human psychology. Good intent is not remotely enough, and the herding approach cannot help but lower the standard of thinking and discourse emerging from such communities, which become more demographically powerful even as their ideas become worse (the two are tied up inextricably).

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

And on the strength of sporting approaches in rigorizing discourse:

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue

Thus those who wish us to accept their conceptual carvings or political advocacies without question or challenge are avoiding short-term emotional discomfort at the price of their own long-term flourishing, at the cost of finding working and stable social solutions to problems. Standpoint epistemology correctly holds that individuals possess privileged knowledge as to what it's like (in the Nagel sense) to hold their social identities. But it is often wrongly extended, in the popular game of informational corruption called "Telephone" or "Chinese Whispers," as arguing that such individuals also possess unassailable and unchallengeable insight into the proper societal solutions to their grievances. We can imagine a patient walking into the doctor's office; the doctor cannot plausibly tell him there is no pain in his leg, if he claims there is, but the same doctor can recommend treatment, or provide evidence as to whether the pain is physical or psychosomatic.A lack of discursive rigour would not be a problem, Alastair writes, "were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing."

v.

As for myself, it was not too long ago I graduated from a university in which a conflict between these modes is ongoing. We had a required course called

Contemporary Civilization

, founded in the wake of World War I, which focused on the last 2,000 years of philosophy, seminar-style: a little bit of introductory lecture, but most of the 2 x 2-hour sessions each week were filled by students arguing with one other. In other words, its founding ethos was of sporting and adversarial collaboration.We also had a number of breakdowns where several students simply could not handle this mode: they would begin crying, or say they couldn't deal with the [insert atmosphere adjective] in the room, and would either transfer out or speak to the professor. While they were not largely representative, they required catering to, and no one wished to upset these students. I have heard we were a fortunate class insofar as we had a small handful of students willing to engage sporting-style, or skeptical a priori of the dominant political ideology at the school. When, in one session, a socialist son of a Saudi billionaire, wearing a $10,000 watch and a camel-hair cashmere sweater, pontificated about "burning the money, reverting to a barter system, and killing the bosses," folks in class would mention that true barter systems were virtually unprecedented in post-agricultural societies, and basically unworkable at scale. In other classes, though, when arguments like these were made—which, taken literally, are logically irrational, but instead justify themselves through sentiment, a legitimation of driving emotion rather than explicit content, in the Culture B sense—other students apparently nodded sagely from the back of the room, "yes, and-ing" one another til their noses ran. Well, I wanted to lay out the styles with some neutrality, but I suppose it's clear now where my sympathies stand.

[1] It should go without saying, but to cover my bases, these modes feeling "feminized" or "masculinized" does not imply that all women, or women inherently, engage in one mode while all men inherently engage in another. Seph cites Camille Paglia as an archetypal example of a Culture A woman, and while she may fall to the extreme side of the Culture A mode, I'd argue most female intellectuals of the 20th C (at least those operated outside the sphere of feminist discourse) were strongly sporting-types: Sontag, for instance, was vociferous and unrelenting. 

[meloncubedradpops]

Repo! The Corona Opera: Final Countdown

This is the third and final installment of Repo: The Corona Opera. In the first piece, I made the argument that the surreal events we are experiencing in 2020 remind me of the world in the movie Repo! the Genetic Opera. My second essay compared the characteristics of fascism with the same movie. Here we will tie together ideas in both works to highlight a dark path that America is on, based on what we know about Repo!, in the hopes that we can reject the evils of those who are sacrificing our health and safety for their own selfish reasons. 

When I began thinking about this movie through the lenses of COVID-19, I saw uncanny patterns that just years ago seemed like an exaggerated storytelling. Millions of people dying from organ failure. Yeah, but how? 

Then 2020 happened. Oh, that's how. Sure the disease doesn't affect everyone in the same way, but its wrath and potential to harm are tremendous. The death toll in the United States alone is, as of today, is 231,000. At least, that is the death toll we are know so far. It will take time when the dust settles and we can analyze the excess death data to truly know how many of our fellow Americans have died. 

And while our world does not currently emulate those opening comic scenes in Repo, the impact from the sudden loss of life will be felt for a long time. There are a lot of really great themes in Repo: the concept of the family, drug addiction, the impact of corporate monopolies, and let's not forget it's a gothic coming-of-age story too. I am going to highlight three concepts that weave together our current reality with the world of Repo: the parallels of the Trump and Largo family, the Graverobber as the symbolic "other", and organ repossessions is genocide.

As mentioned in my previous entry, I highlighted the ways that Rotti Largo is a fascist. I went into detail supporting the argument that his company GeneCo holds tremendous and unyielding power in the city we see in the movie. And despite his efforts to save humanity from extinction, his assumed heirs and blood-related children are nothing short of entitled mediocrity. I will draw many parallels between President Donald Trump and Rotti Largo throughout the duration of this essay, but let's take a few minutes to talk about their children. Believe it or not, this meme was made by myself and my friend FOUR years ago, almost to the day! 

But unlike 2016, I had no idea that I'd find multiple comparisons to draw upon. And frankly, if we all knew how bad this presidency would be, for both America and the rest of the world, we might have made less jokes from our complacency. I ask the the real question though, which Trump and Rotti offspring are most alike?

Now, I've wanted to do this thought exercise since the inception of my essays. The surface level combinations would look something like, Amber and Ivanka (since they're both women, obvs), Donald Trump JR as Luigi (oldest child), and Eric Trump as Pavi ("you're just his useless brother!"). 

However my boyfriend raised a great point that had me rethink this: Donald Trump Jr is ACTUALLY Amber Sweet. When I took out the gender aspect out of the equation, it made so much more sense. In my next point, I will go into drug addiction in a much more dignified manner. But let's just take a moment here to consider the following. 

We know that Amber Sweet is addicted to two things in life: surgery and pain killing drugs to make surgery bearable. Amber Sweet's character provides an incredible insight to the daily life of the people in Repo. If you subtract the Zydrate Anatomy scene, you would hardly even know that zydrate is devastating lives of the people addicted to it. We hear about zydrate in the graveyard as a commercial and the media spends its first opportunity asking Rotti about zydrate's "use and abuses". After Sweet becomes a no-show in the presser, we quickly learn that she runs a support group for fellow addicts, or at least she is supposed to. 

How does this relate to Trump Jr? Quite simply, many are speculating that Trump Jr abuses cocaine. The most compelling evidence is his speech during the Republican National Convention. Now, obviously we don't have solid evidence that he is indeed consuming and abusing cocaine, and quite frankly if he is, that would not be incredibly surprising or even a huge deal. 

But the conversation doesn't end here. President Donald Trump did not hesitate to bring up former vice president Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden and his battle with addiction during the first Presidential Debate. It was a low jab, especially considering that the United States is going through a crippling opioid crisis, which he even admits is exacerbated by covid-19 and related lockdowns. Both Donald Trump and Rotti Largo exploit their own children in this manner. I mean, Donald Trump helped fucked up the Trump Foundation where his children were held prominent positions, which was caught stealing from a charity intended to help children with cancer! Every time we see Donald Trump Jr on our doom-screens, we get another glimpse into Jr's downward spiral. And with every additional crime that all of president Trump's children become implicated in, the more and more we can see that this family is rotten to the core. 

If Trump Jr is Amber Sweet, then Ivanka is Luigi. In Repo, Luigi can be described as nothing short of a homicidal maniac. I am not saying that Ivanka commits murder, at least not directly, but she does hold a lot of power in the White House. Spend any time learning about the machinations of the White House, particularly in the early days, and you will learn Ivanka competed with Melania for a voice in the administration, and still works for the White House today. Even if you exclude all of the shady business ties, such as the dozens of Chinese patents (including for voting machines!!!) Ivanka has filed, clearly the boundaries of nepotism do not exist for this family. Luigi somehow kills multiple people in the movie and faces no consequences for it. How can this be? Obviously corruption, but that is too simple. If there were multiple checks and balances at one point that would have forced Luigi to face justice for his crimes, they have obviously failed to come to roost in the movie. The obvious common denominator between today and the world of Repo is that those who want power will do anything to obtain and maintain it. Does the public know about every murder committed by Luigi? Does the public know about every crime committed by Ivanka (and also by proxy her husband Jared Kushner, who by the way, failed to pass mandatory security clearances but still has access to the intelligence of our government)? Jared intentionally made it difficult for many of the states hit hardest by covid-19 in the early weeks to acquire the necessary medical supplies because the electorate did not vote for Trump in 2016. That. IS. MURDER. Just as Luigi calls the common citizens in Repo "filthy mice", “Jrvanka” (and the Right at greater) frames the nation as two groups: us and THEM. Luigi is much less calculated, but the comparisons are there. If given the chance, the Trump and Largo family will kill because of their sociopathy, greed, and egos. 

Admittedly I don't have as compelling of a comparison for Eric Trump and Pavi. However I will say that both Pavi and Eric do the bidding for their father's empire, and I would also argue that both feel like they have to compete to get a modicum of attention and love from a paternal figure devoid of basic empathy. And at the end of the day, they do not reject their father's tyranny. And honestly that is enough of a comparison for me. 

Last but not least, I can't ignore the fact that the official Republican Party platform for the 2020 election is loyalty to Trump in the absence of any other political or philosophical idea. A majority of the speakers at the Republican National Convention were members of his family. Their pitch to Americans is “Just Trust Us”. However, a quarter million Americans aren't here to agree or disagree with that statement. With each passing day, more and more Americans are getting sick, to the tune of tens of thousands of cases a day on average currently. The Largo family and GeneCo are not much different. Remember that scene in 21st Century Cure where Shilo and Graverobber are in a mass grave where we can see truck loads of humans being added to the pile of corpses? 

The only real thing separating the corpses from the rest of the city is a poorly constructed brick wall and the years of propaganda that normalizes what I imagine would be a terrible pungent smell of death. 

The entire Trump family came into the first presidential debate without masks. The president was literally sick with a virus that statistically speaking, could kill his opponent; and he was on stage shedding this incredibly contagious virus screaming and shouting, spreading his droplets everywhere. The Trump family failed to show up early enough to be tested for covid before the debate. 

This was not an accident. Jared Kushner bragged to journalist Bob Woodward back in April that Trump was going to take the country "back from scientists". As of this past weekend, we learned that Trump is floating around the idea of firing our nation's leading disease expert Anthony Fauci in a time where our cases, deaths, and hospitalizations from covid-19 are surging. It is almost grotesquely poetic how similar this is to GeneCo. GeneCo is a company in the healthcare industry, but they exploit the worst parts of society, which I will go into very soon. And in its effort to achieve maximum quarterly profits, the ends always justify the means, even if that results in fascism and excess death/suffering. Rotti's body guards kill the doctor who gives him his grim diagnosis. Trump didn't kill the doctors treating him during his recovery with covid, but information we got from the White House doctors were straight up WEIRD. We witnessed a Gentern being killed by Luigi in the Mark It Up Scene for no other reason besides existing in the proximity of him. Trump has spread misinformation about how there's more money to be made when a doctor declares a death as a covid death. I am finding it hard to see the difference. I think I've made my point regarding the parallels of the Trump and Largo family quite clearly, but you may see additional points I bring up as the rest of my essay unfolds. 

Society is complex with more nuance than we give it credit to. The different ways that various groups of people interact with are endlessly interesting, and one of the reasons I love Repo so much is because there's an incredible amount of unpacking that you can do, even in the absence of written dialogue about it. 

If you don't know, Repo started out as a story originally penned as "The Necromerchant's Debt", which gave the Graverobber character a more active role in the world crafted by Darren Smith and Terrace Zdunich. When watching the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, the Graverobber is certainly a character seen in multiple scenes, but in a lot of ways, his importance is left out. An entire scene was cut from the film, see Needle Through a Bug below if you're interested. 

Regardless the parts that we do see are still greatly impactful. Graverobber is essentially the symbolized "other" living in a world that is greatly stratified by social class, and he's doing what he can to survive. 

Now if you have been living on this planet we call Earth and have ever paid attention ever, you probably have noticed that there are a lot of power structures that influence the resources and opportunities that aid in our development and maintenance of our needs. The access to being able to elevate ourselves above basic survival are typically contingent upon a few things, one namely our ability to draw a paycheck. As I mentioned in my last essay, so many things went wrong to have what would equivalently be either a drug trafficking felony in today's terms or maybe theft, result in permissible extra-judicial murder. And I am not saying that Trump's bragging of the extra-judicial murder of an ANTIFA activist is at all related, but look at the way Trump compares his dissidents with the way GeneCo treats Graverobbers.

 We are experiencing the early stages of economic collapse, millions of people are hungry, soon-to-be evicted, jobless. And yet, the Republicans in power just HAD to rush through a Supreme Court justice. When arguing against lockdowns that would have saved lives, the Right spent countless hours arguing about increase suicide, drug use, poverty, domestic abuse, blah blah blah, you know all the things that were there and as equally as important pre-pandemic? And they did NOTHING to help mitigate this disaster beyond the bill that was passed this spring. The house passed the HEROES Act back in May, and senate majority leader Mitch McConnel declined to take a vote on it. 

Never mind the fact that landlords are still expected to pay the banks their mortgages on their investment properties. Never mind the fact that rent wasn't cancelled. Never mind that the Trump administration sought to prevent any oversight into the first bill passed previously to prosecute fraud. So you know, we can make sure the money went to small business owners, and not instead to the many, many crony ties to the administration who were approved for huge amounts of money. Honestly to think about this is kind of sickening, particularly when you relate it back to Repo and my essay I wrote on fascism.

I could probably talk all day about our failure with the "War on Drugs", but I feel like you can probably see based on the efficacy of its policies that drugs still exist and people are still abusing them. I bring this up because the Graverobber's occupation is essentially a drug dealer. However he sells a counterfeit of zydrate derived from the body of a bug who naturally borrow in a corpse's body, which is and also isn't stealing from the corpse / their estate, but is somehow still "bad" enough that you can legally be killed "on site" if a Gene Cop thinks you're harvesting the blue brain goo. I mean this entire concept makes my brain hurt. 

The Graverobber, as a concept, is a perfect example of the enemy who is simultaneously the biggest and the least threat, and the only way to stop them is to kill them before they can appeal before the jury of their peers or go to prison to pay for their crimes. And I am sure the propaganda that justifies this is beautifully orchestrated. It literally mimics Russian propaganda, AKA the biggest foreign intelligence threat since, I don’t know, the Cold War? I can picture authoritarian stump speeches now: 

"Here the Graverobber who comes in the night, tempting your children. They sell the promise of a good time, but did you know they are raping your daughters for this drug?? They can get your husband hooked on zydrate, and you won't know it's coming until he comes home unrecognizable. These thugs are stealing your grandmother's ring off her corpse, and you will find her half-rotted corpse thrown askew across her tombstone when you go to pay your respects."

And yet Graverobber defends himself:

"Industrialization has crippled the globe (Enjoy GeneCo's day and nighttime formula of Zydrate) Nature failed as technology spread (Ask a gentern if Zydrate is right for you) And from this wake a market erected (Buying Zydrate from an unlicensed source is illegal) An entire city built on top of the dead! And you can finance your bones And your kidneys For every market a submarket grows But best you be punctual With making your payments Lest it be you on the concrete below It's quick! It's clean! It's pure! It could change your life! Rest assured! It's the 21st century cure! And it's my job To steal and rob GRAVES!" 

He then goes into detail about how this is just the cost of doing business with his modern world. How many of our current and future stories by those who will not make a single sentence in our history books will be casted as enemies of the state who were ultimately just trying to make end's meet? You can deport the illegal immigrant but neglect to prosecute the American company who hired them to work here? How is that much different? If the people in Repo need this drug to cope with the deaths of their loved ones and their livelihoods, then what does that say about the soul of their nation? 

If you are still with me at this point, I want to thank you so much. I am going to conclude on a fairly heavy topic, but it is one worth having. Organ repossessions in Repo are genocide and in America, we are currently also committing genocide. 

The whole premise of the film is the justification that those who fail to make payments on their surgeries deserve to have their organs repossessed, because what other reality is there with unrelenting end-stage capitalism? People are losing their whole lives as I type this, through no fault of their own. Most Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense pre-covid-19. Millions are unable to pay for basic life expenses, such as rent, healthcare or food. Our president specifically shoved a Supreme Court justice because he wants the American Healthcare Act to be deemed too unconstitutional for public policy. Never mind the 100+ million Americans with pre-existing conditions. Never mind the millions who acquire their healthcare through the ACA marketplace. Never mind the fact that we are in a once-in-a-century PANDEMIC. Never mind that we spend more per capital on healthcare than anywhere else in the world. Never mind that the Right does not have ANY sort of plan to replace something in its place. How could MILLIONS die in an organ failure crises in Repo anyways? We already know that the Trump administration already stopped caring about covid deaths when we learned it was hurting people of color disproportionality than the general population. 1 out of 1000 black Americans have died from covid. Reread that sentence. If you don't believe me, go out and seek those facts for yourself. When we think of genocide we think of Hitler killing thousands of people via gas chambers. But there are SO many other steps that lead to the normalization of that. 

Undesirables, aka the "others", are easy to discard. Is it a surprise to anyone that ICE gynecologists are removing the uteruses of detainees? I almost made my whole essay about that one controversy alone. Genocide is insidious like that. 

"Oh but if she didn't want that hysterectomy, she shouldn't have tried to come to America for a better life, even if that's what my ancestors did." 

Of course not, she's the "other", and you're the law-abiding citizen. You were able to afford the extra $30 a month for the upgraded booby package that gave an otherwise unremarkable kidney transplant a fun twist by including breast implants. The orphan who works the streets because his parents died during the plague who needed a new pancreas because insulin became too expensive is threatening your suburbs. Bonus points if the orphan has a hint of melanin in his skin or if your daughter shows favor towards his antics, completely ignoring the fact that his mommy and daddy were killed by preventable disease. I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but look at the makeup of people who get their organs repossessed in Repo and try not to tell me there's a trend. Yes it could have been the coincidence of casting, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning. We don't see many people of color in this movie, but of the few we see, they get murdered by GeneCo/Wallace. And I don't care how stupid coincidences are because that is exactly what is happening with covid-19. The so-called essential, working class citizens (who are disproportionally POC) are putting their whole life on the line to serve everyone else who works at home. 

The ends justifies the means, kill enough elderly and the federal government won't have to pay out on social security. Force everyone to get back to work and fuck you if you think you deserve money for the hours you weren't allowed to work (oh and by the way we want to make it so you can't sue for covid-19 related liabilities). Oh you lost your job, "try something new", as told by Ivanka Trump earlier this summer. 

My main point is if you let fascism get control, they will normalize genocide and put you in jail for even making the connections of corruption. "Millions of people dead from organ failure, what's adding a few more to the pile in the name of law and order?" "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat". Once again, I am failing to see the difference. 

Okay I threw a lot at you just now, and the fact you made it to the end is a miracle. If you skip around because you have a squirrel brain like me, I thank you as well. The fact we get out of bed everyday and do anything right now is a miracle and I know attention can be finite. 

I am writing this on the eve of the United States General election after having wanting to write this since June of this year. I am tired. We are ALL Shiloh right now. Our lives have been on pause. "I must be brave", "I'll capture it", "Run back inside". Yeah girl, same! I haven't talked about her much throughout any of my essays, but I have to give credit where credit is due. 

Humans are a resilient creature. We have millions of years of experience on this Earth, and much of our survival has been based on pure dumb luck. But we have blown so many other species out of the water in one way alone, and that is our ability to communicate. 

We don't have to let people who exploit our weaknesses control us. The sociopaths who try and run our society did not historically aid in our survival. They didn't care if we ate the mushroom that killed us or would have protected us when threatened by wildlife, it was our tribe. The Right has successfully hijacked that bond between the self and the tribe so that it can fit the needs of sociopathy and greed. It is not normal for a president to tell a nation that "it is what it is" when over 100k citizens die from a preventable disease. Do not let the sociopaths throw us in that tiny pine box in a mighty small drop in a mighty dark plot, hastening the trip to our epilogue. Because every inch you give, they will take a mile and charge you by the hour. Never forget that.

[alri-xo]

Ship of Dreams (Titanic 1997 AU) | Prologue

Gif not mine

A/N: So this fic has been brewing since last month and I put it off because of the list of fics I had in mind. This is special to me because like... I mean I cry every time at this movie. So I would like to thank the people over at the best GC in the world for basically pushing me to do this, especially @witchymegg I love you all. I'm still gonna call the ship Titanic bc I want to. (This will contain actual Titanic references and a lot of revisions in the dialogues.)

Pairing: Original Character x Reader

Warnings: No page break (I always have to say this bc I am on the app)

"We're here..." Mikhail Petrovna says as the two submersibles lower deep into the depths of the Atlantic. Ruins of a once lively ship gracing the cameras that they controlled.

Jared McKinley took the camera they use for documentation, as other people in the submersibles looked out of the small windows. The ship was covered in sea garbarge as fish swam in and out of its crevices.

"It still gets me every time..." Jared says as he filmed through the window, filling the blurry frame.

Baron and Mikhail chuckled and made remarks on their venture to the sunken ship. Going in deeper and deeper as the clock ticked.

"It still gets me every time... to see the sad ruin of the great ship sitting here, where she landed at 2:30 in the morning, April 15, 1912, after her long fall from the world above." Jared narrated as the submersible navigated down, capturing also deep sea squids, floating gracefully in the murky water.

"You're so full of shit, boss..." Baron Martin remarks earning a chuckle from the two other men as they reached target depth.

"Here we are again on the deck of Titanic," Jared says as he documents the rugged deck, teeming with marine algae and sand, "Two and a half miles down. The pressure is three tons per square inch, enough to crush us like a freight train over an ant if our haul fails...

The video camera skimmed over Jared's face as he spilled information on his monologue, "These windows are nine inches thick and if they go," a short pause in his speech as he spoke, looking up to see how deep they've been going under the ocean, "It's sayonara in two microseconds."

One of the submersibles landed on the deck, and the other some place else to get ready to use another piece of technology they had in store.

After his little monologue, they went to work. Baron slipped on the 3D Electronic goggles and held on to the joysticks to control the ROV.

"Walking the dog," Baron says as he controlled the orange box, suspended with a thick wire connected to the database inside the submersible.

It skimmed through the various ruins inside the ship. Ornate wood carvings engraved the interior of the majestic ghost ship, a piano in pretty mint condition given that it has been underwater since the 1910's. The ivory keys and their desire to separate from the ebony ones but they do not move.

The device moves around the grand chandelier suspended in the once alive ship, it's crystals covered in sea dirt dulling it's shine but only for some parts of it.

It ventures further into the ghostly mansion-esque structure, a glass bottle of what it looks to be champagne and fine china, defining that the ship once carried people of high class.

The device then ventures in with its lights illuminating the eerie scene, a woman's shoe and a porcelain doll's head, devoid of its body, hair and eyes.

It then spots one of the grandest suites of the ship, entering room B-52. Jared scolded Baron a little, saying to go slow and not like the day past. He rogers it and slowly enters the room.

The once plush bed now in ruins, the material draping in the movement of the water, it's probably white color now a dark gray because of it's age. The device then moves in a cloud of grey, a mixture of sand and rust.

It then spots an old tub and broken chairs, however it's not of Jared's interest. As it skims further in the room, the camera spots a wardrobe. In a story like this, a thing like a wardrobe can carry the deepest of secrets, even a blessing in disguise.

Jared asks to see what is under the wardrobe. The ROV deploys its robotic arms as it clears the antiques in its way, "Be careful, Martin."

The man who controlled the orange ROV mumbled an 'I will' as the device lifted up debris and antiques off near the wardrobe. They recovered a dark object, not so dark anymore that the light of the Dog shown on its features.

"Ohh McKinley... Are you seeing what I think I'm seeing??" Baron hoots as they recovered the metal box...

Jared scoots closer to the monitor that shows what the device just saw. A rusty metal box covered in silt and sand.

"It's pay day, boys..."

💎

Inside a net, the locked safe ascended from the Atlantic ocean. Everybody cheering as it boarded the boat. Every person on board gathered around the safe as they celebrated.

Baron wrapped his arm around Jared, "Who's the beeest??" He asked excitedly as Jared rolled his eyes playfully at him.

"You... Baron..." he says with a small smile as Baron pops open a bottle of Champagne, its bubbles spurting all over the men on deck.

The safe was being opened by a sharp turning blade, the hot sparks emitted getting sputtered on the orange specks of light as it the metal cracked open. The noise went down as a warm brown sludge flowed out of the decade old safe, pried open by a chain and a tug.

Jared bent down on his knees, the camera man hot behind him as the lenses anticipated the greatest treasure yet. His hand pulled out books and pieces of paper covered in the mixture of silt, rust and water.

He took out a stack of paper, rather large in dimension and paused for a second. He put it down then dug deep in the safe, but found not diamonds, but sludge.

Everybody fell silent in disappointment. His career as a treasure hunter tainted with the failure of his mission. The money spent, the sweat perspired, to waste.

"No diamonds..." one man remarks at the obvious fact that there is no diamonds. The face of Jared as the realization washed over him like a tsunami.

"Shit."

"You know, Gary's career went down and never went up again because of something like this," Baron says lowly, his words toxic like that of poison ivy as it was bearable, as a man like Jared tried to not get such words get to his head.

The camera was at his face, embarrassment and shame gracing his features as the tention increased. He furrowed his brows, "Turn the camera off."

💎

He went down inside the boat, the technicians working to uncover parts of the Titanic long forgotten, and unknown to the other passengers. Just the riches they know, but not the contents it once held.

"The investors want a word with you, McKinley," Derrick Bay says as Jared barks at the camera men, covering the phone.

"Hey, Ryan? Tyler? Yeah... It's not in the safe..." Jared says to the phone, explaining how it could be someplace else in the ship, to not let the investors down. During his explaining his eyes met the monitor in front of him, showing a view of the water cleaning up a painting of a woman, who is casually nude and young.

The water cleared the drawing's bosom refealing between the valley of the woman's breast holding a big diamond, a diamond in a darker color laced on her neck with smaller crystals, assumed to be diamonds in their infamous colorless crystal color.

"W-wait let me see this," he tuts as he asks for the picture of the treasure he's looking for and compared it to the necklace the young woman was wearing.

They further analyzed the drawing which was made with pencil, seeing the date at the bottom and the artist's initial's beside it, with an erasure at the first letter.

April 14, 1912, J BB

"I'll be God damned..."

💎

"Treasure Hunter Jared McKinley, mostly famed for finding Spanish Gold in the galleons of the Caribbean harnests the use of technology and submergence to find out what priceless valuables the sunken Titanic has in store after 84 years. He's with us via satellite in a Russian research center in the Atlantic. Hello, McKinley..." the anchor says in the news, the small television's sounds slightly audible to the ancient woman working on her pottery.

"Hey, Wendy... See, the Titanic is not just a shipwreck. It's the queen of shipwrecks... The elites stayed there..." he went on telling the story of the Titanic briefly, as questions fired at him from the new anchor.

The old woman stands up, her hair away from her face as her frail body hunches as she straightened herself. She wipes the red earth off of her fingers with a rag as her dog Diamond follows after her, nearing to the television.

"Meg, can you please turn up please, dear?" She asks of her grand daughter, Meg Treville.

She obliges as the sound of the television became clearer for her centennial ears, but she saw the drawing as clear as that in her teens...

"I'll be God damned."

💎

"McKinley, there's a call for you on satellite..." Derrick says as Jared ignores him as he instructs men to lower the submersibles for another expedition in the deep.

"Can't you see I'm working, Bay... Take a message..." he says not making eye contact with the man who holds the answers he's not expecting.

"I swear you don't want to turn down this call, Jared." He pleas, a reluctant look paints Jared's face, "You need to turn your voice up, she's kinda old..."

Jared held the phone in his hand, hesitant to speak to a possible poser, "This is Jared McKinley, Mrs..."

"Treville... Y/N Treville..." Derrick says, battling the whirring of the machines behind them...

"Mrs. Treville..." He says politely to the old woman on the other line...

"I was just wondering if you found the 'Heart of the Ocean' yet, Mr. McKinley?" She asks, her voice aged and wise as the two men shared looks of shock.

"I told you don't want to miss this call," Derrick beamed as Jared mustered up a small smile...

"Okay, Y/N... You got my attention... Now, tell me who is the woman in the picture?" Jared asks, as if taunting Y/N... But Y/N was taught at a young age not to lie.

"Oh yes... The woman in the picture is me."

<- Previous | Next ->

A/N: aaand SCENE. So this is the prologue to my very first Avengers series... I hope you enjoyed reading this... and yeah... I hope I did it justice... Stay Safe

-Alri

Taggies 💕

@witchymegg @theaussiedragon @amisutcliff @luna4501 @likeit-or-leaveit @underworldqueen13

[zigsexual]

sophia (drake/liam)

note: this is just absolute fluff brought on by the thought of liam being a dad (thanks to the royal heir for that one) and my headcanon family for future driam as per the deu (driam extended universe) which you can read more about here. its literally just fluff and also some riley and maxwell because lets be real i cant leave them out of anything.

summary: so. they have a baby now.

word count: 2100+

• • •

It’s only been a few days, and yet Drake is certain he’s seen a year’s worth of change in both himself and Liam since they brought Sophia home.

It’s not just the expected neuroticisms, although those are certainly obstacles of their own. Drake’s already found a fully armed guard standing watch at their daughter’s crib on two separate occasions, and he had to actually step in when Liam attempted to call the Minister of Health at four in the morning because he couldn’t get Sophia to stop crying.

He’d foreseen the anxieties, the shifts in routine. It’s the love — the overwhelming, all-consuming love — that takes him by surprise. He’d heard time and time again how much one could love a child, and now he knows now exactly how true those words can be, but what he hadn’t foreseen was how much more he could love Liam.

That first night, Sophia in her bassinet by their bed, the two of them standing over her and marveling at her tiny features, Drake had wrapped his arm around Liam’s back and said, “I love you,” and he’d never meant it more in his life.

He lingers in doorways now, taking a moment to watch Liam with her before he knows anyone’s there. The way he smiles, the way he sings to her, the way his whole expression softens when she’s in his arms — Drake can’t get enough of it.

“She looks like you,” he tells Liam while they’re getting her dressed in the morning. Liam smiles, first at him, then at her.

“It’s just the hair,” he says, brushing a finger gently through the dark tufts atop her head.

“No,” Drake steps closer, watching as Sophia’s big eyes move to his face, one hand in her mouth. “It’s all of her. She looks like you.” He rests a hand on Liam’s shoulder, Liam leaning into him as he does. “And the world could always use more of you.”

Liam cries, because that’s pretty much all he does now.

The first people who come to visit, outside of family (and Drake had to put his foot down on that when Savannah tried to sneak Bertrand in), are Riley and Maxwell. They come with gifts and laughter and the noise of much more than just two people, already a crescendo of delight when they spot the new princess for the first time.

“Hey baby girl!” Riley grins, sweeping Sophia into her arms as soon as she’s within reach and kissing her forehead. “Look at you.”

Liam still isn’t good at letting anyone else hold her, perpetually terrified of what might happen if she’s not with them, so Drake squeezes his hand in reassurance when he notices his anxious fidgeting. Liam offers him a grateful smile.

Maxwell is at Riley’s side, looking down at Sophia with the same kind of wonder, the two of them falling into soft, cooing voices as she opens and closes her tiny hand.

Riley is entranced, tracing the skin of one plump cheek, eyes a bit damp. Maxwell looks back over at Liam and Drake, beaming. “If you ever need babysitters…”

“Trust me, you’ll be the first to know,” Liam says, although Drake is certain Liam would sooner abdicate the throne than leave his daughter’s side for a day. “Are the two of you considering having kids at all?”

Riley’s smile falters for the briefest second, and she lets her gaze fall back to Sophia’s face. Maxwell slips his arm around her almost protectively, answering with a practiced, “Nah, we’re a two-person job. Any more and we compromise the intel.”

He and Liam ask them to be the godparents, and Riley promptly bursts into the tears she’d been trying to keep at bay. “It was the obvious choice,” Liam says, another lie; they’d had a few arguments on whether or not Leo deserved the honor (he didn’t) and if Savannah would be offended for being passed over (she was, and when Drake had politely reminded her he didn’t want his daughter growing up in a broken home, she’d seethed that her and Bertrand were working it out).

At night, he and Liam sit on the edge of their bed and watch Sophia sleep, her lips a perfect pink bow, one hand curled into a fist. Every time she so much as breathes, it’s somehow amazing, Liam grabbing his hand at the slightest movement, enthralled.

“We did that,” he says, looking at Drake in awe. “That’s our baby.”

“Well, we didn’t entirely —”

“Oh, hush,” Liam admonishes, eyes still sparkling. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Drake answers, leaning in against Liam just a touch more, folding their fingers together a bit tighter. “I know.”

“I wish she could always see the world like this,” Liam says softly, “New and exciting and welcoming. I wish she didn’t have to grow up.”

“She’s got us,” Drake says, “She’ll have it pretty good.”

Liam smiles at him, presses a kiss to his forehead. “That’s true. She does have us.”

Warmth blooms in Drake’s heart, and he wraps his other arm around Liam’s back, resting his head on his shoulder. “What do you think she’ll be like?”

“I don’t know.” Liam thinks. “Stubborn, maybe?”

“Hey,” Drake lifts his head to shoot Liam a look of mock reproach. “Are you talking about her, or me?”

“Her, obviously,” Liam can’t help but smile. Drake makes a face at him.

“Well, if she ends up crying all the time, we’ll at least know which parent is notto blame.”

“I don’t cry all the time!”

“Just every day for the past nine months.”

Liam frowns, but it’s more of a pout than anything. “That doesn’t count — there were extenuating circumstances.”

Drake smiles, reaching his hand up to cup Liam’s cheek, thumb running slowly across his skin. “I love you.”

Liam raises an eyebrow. “Don’t try to distract me. It won’t work.”

“Shut up,” Drake shifts closer, eyes locked on Liam’s. “I am absolutely crazy about you.”

“What are you trying to do?” Liam asks, head tilted curiously to the side now.

“Nothing, I just…” Drake drops his hand, still looking out at Liam fondly. “I was just thinking… I mean, that’s our baby. You and me.” He folds his fingers back in against Liam’s, squeezing his hand. “There’s no one else I’d rather do this with.”

Liam kisses him, deep and slow until Drake pulls back, laughing. “Not in front of her!”

“She’s asleep,” Liam whispers, leaning back in to press another kiss to his jaw. “She’ll never know.”

“You’ll scar her for life,” Drake says, even as he tilts his head back when Liam’s hand comes up to his hair. “This is what she’ll talk about in therapy for years to come.”

“What a lucky therapist.”

“Liam!”

Liam sits back, smiling. “I love you too.”

Drake elbows him. “Stupid prince.”

“That’s you now, actually.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.”

Liam brings their joined hands up to his lips, pressing a kiss to Drake’s fingers as he says, “But you’re my stupid prince,” which somehow makes Drake feel disgustingly happy.

Sophia wakes up at 3AM that night, crying so loudly that the both of them jolt up immediately, wide-eyed and frantic. Liam hurries to get her bottle while Drake takes her in his arms, rocking her gently to no avail. When Liam returns, she’s still screaming, and Drake passes her off to him so he can try to coax the bottle into her mouth.

She fights against it at first, but then seems to settle into routine, her big round eyes watching them both closely as she drinks.

“Oh, thank god,” Drake says, reaching one arm around Liam while the other hand comes up to stroke her tufts of hair. Liam settles in against him, warm from sleep, blinking blearily.

“Knock on wood,” he manages, gently tilting the bottle back towards her when she bats at it with one small fist. “I suppose we’ll have to get used to the baby alarm clock sooner or later.”

“There are worse alarm clocks to have.”

Liam smiles, but Drake isn’t sure if it’s at him or at her, and he finds that he doesn’t mind it either way. Sophia’s eyes flick between the two of them, curious and bright, and he wonders what kind of thoughts her fledgling mind has to offer.

“Hey sweetheart,” he says, voice lowered slightly, marveling at the way her head fits in the palm of his hand. “Were you just hungry? Are you feeling better now?”

Her mouth goes slack around the bottle as she watches him, and Liam says, “Oh, she’s listening!” with so much unfettered joy that Drake can’t even find it within himself to tease him for it. Instead, he turns to Liam and grins, and Liam beams back at him like they’ve just cracked the secret to eternal happiness.

Sophia, now devoid of the attention she had previously been the center of, starts crying again, knocking her bottle onto the floor with one flailing arm.

“Shit,” The smile falls off Drake’s face. “We broke her.”

“What do we do?” Liam says, looking at him frantically, doing his best to try and rock Sophia back into some sort of complacency. She denies his every attempt, only wailing louder each time Liam tries to cuddle her quiet.

“Does she need to be changed?” Drake asks, and Liam says, “Oh god, I don’t know. When was the last time we changed her?”

They both wait for the other to offer the answer, but neither does.

“Christ,” Drake runs a hand through his hair anxiously. “We haven’t even had her a month and we’ve fucked it up.”

Liam looks pale. “Should I call her doctor?”

“What is he supposed to do?”

“Give her medicine?”

“For what?” Drake stares at him. “Crying?”

Liam stares back, a stunted sort of insanity across his features. “Yes.”

Drake takes a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” He reaches towards Liam, arms outstretched. “Let me try.”

The second he gets close, Liam pulls away, leaning Sophia up against his shoulder with one hand on her back. “No. I can do this.”

“Come on, look at me,” Drake sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose as Sophia reaches a new decibel level. “She’s gonna wake up the whole palace, just let me —”

“I’m going to fix our baby,” Liam says firmly, eyes filled with a delirious determination. “We’re her parents, we’re supposed to know how to do this. I can do this.”

“Listen, babe, I’m sure you can, but what if I went and got her blanket, and we tried —”

Suddenly, Sophia lets out a profound burp before going quiet against Liam’s neck, sniffling into his shirt. They both stare at her for a moment, then at each other, blinking slowly.

“Well,” Liam says, “I think we fixed her.”

“She definitely threw up on you a little bit.”

“Did she?” Liam cranes his neck to the side, then frowns. “Oh, she did.”

“Casualties of war,” Drake laughs softly.

Liam passes Sophia over to him so he can head to the bathroom to clean up, and Sophia nestles against Drake’s chest as soon as he has her, one fat cheek pressed against him as she closes her eyes.

He rocks her gently, turning and watching as Liam shrugs off his shirt and turns on the sink faucet. “That’s your dad,” he whispers, not wanting to break her out of whatever spell sleep has cast on her. “He’s pretty great.”

He can feel her chest rise and fall against his, and he presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Actually, he’s the best. We’re lucky to have him, aren’t we?”

Liam emerges from the bathroom with tired eyes, yawning before he can stop himself. He runs a hand through his messed-up hair, his eyelids already heavy, and manages, “Do you want me to stay up with her…?”

“She’s asleep,” Drake says. “I think we’re out of the woods.”

“Perfect,” Liam answers, dropping a kiss against his temple as he passes. “Then let’s put her down and get back in bed.”

When Sophia is back in her bassinet, peaceful and still, Drake slips into the bed next to Liam and nestles against him, sighing softly when Liam drapes an arm over his shoulders.

“We’re good parents, right?” Drake asks Liam tentatively. “I mean, she’s going to grow up normal and everything?”

“Mhm,” Liam murmurs, too tired to assuage his fears. Drake rolls onto his back, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling for a long minute before he reaches across to hold Liam’s hand.

“We are,” Liam finally whispers, blinking his eyes open for just a second to meet Drake’s. “We’re great and she’s great and you’re the love of my life.”

Drake smiles, pulling Liam’s hand up and kissing his knuckles. “Goodnight, Liam.”

“Okay,” Liam says sleepily.

And, of course, not five minutes later, Sophia lets out a wail so loud one could swear it woke even the kitchen staff.

[gduncan969]

The Christian and Politics---Reflection on an Election

Psalm 2: 1 - 5 Why do the nations rage, And the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, “Let us break Their bonds in pieces And cast away Their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; The Lord shall hold them in derision. Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, And distress them in His deep displeasure.

The two things my father told me never to discuss in polite circles were politics and religion.  The reason is simple—they are too divisive and they stir up strong emotions that can destroy friendships.  Be that as it may, as Christians what are we supposed to make of the recent American election with its blatantly obvious list of nefarious activities and downright skullduggery by a Democrat Party willing to do anything, legal or illegal, to get rid of Trump—even to the extent of replacing him with a demented Joe Biden who tried to reassure us this week with a quote from the “Book of Palms” in the bible, not recognizing he had once again misread his tele-prompter!! If this is what a Biden presidency is going to look like, Lord help the free world!  It’s not his incompetence that troubles me as much as the pervasive corruption of the party that has put him there.  This election has plunged the USA into a time of great uncertainty which is adding to the anxiety already rampant as a result of COVID restrictions and the great global reset now underway.  What does this all mean for the Church of Jesus Christ and “how should we then live” as we go forward (to quote the title of Francis Schaeffer’s book of the 1970's)?  

Some might ask shouldn’t Christians stay out of politics because it’s a dirty business filled with hidden agendas and self-interests, something we should stay away from as worldly and unseemly?  What Christian in their right mind would want to get involved in such a messy business so surely we should stay away from it?  That’s the problem!  Christians staying away has in fact been a major contributor to the mess we are in because the Church has largely abandoned any attempt to influence those in authority over us, especially from within their ranks, so it should not surprise us that we are now facing a civic and national leadership almost entirely devoid of a biblical view of how God wants us to live.  The result has been that what was once called evil is now called good and what we used to call good is now considered evil.  For too long the Church has been silent and separate, the salt has lost its savor by refusing to get out of the package and the people that walk in darkness remain in darkness because they cannot see the light of God’s Presence (Isaiah 9:2) since it is well hidden under the bushel of some large, expensive building at some unknown address somewhere in the neighborhood but nobody knows who goes there or what they are there for.  

Did we get the Lord’s permission to close down his church?

However this election may pan out—Biden in, Trump out, or vice versa—the days of silence for the Church are over!  If governments can decree Churches to be non-essential and forbid them gathering then it is just a small step in this new wave of socialistic fervor to decree them as dangerous and close them down altogether.  That’s already a step some on the far left want to take.  A question that every church leader needs to ask is: “Did the Lord give me permission to close down his church when the government demanded it?” If we don’t have an answer, we need to get one and if the answer is “No”, we need to repent.  As believers in Jesus Christ, this election is forcing us to re-examine not just whose side we are on but what kind of action is required of us and there’s no avoiding the choice.  The days of wishing it would all go away are gone and the Lord is calling his children to waken up and do battle with the enemy right in his own backyard in the halls of power, in institutions, in committee rooms, in the media and in business!  We cannot stand idly by, for God has promised us we will overcome “through the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony” (Revelation 12:11) using weapons that “are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (2 Corinthians 10:4).  These weapons are given not just to be admired but to be used in battle.  Silence is no longer an option, we must speak the gospel of Jesus Christ into these halls of power but only after we first speak to the One who commands us to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.  Someone once said the bible is a gun that shoots dead people alive.  When fired at people who are dead in trespasses and sin they come to life.  Let’s take aim at those blinded by their hatred of Donald Trump and make them alive to the truth that is in Jesus Christ.  Though flawed in many ways, Trump has been used of the Lord to turn back the flood of political correctness, wokeness, corruption and deception that has made many afraid to speak truth to power.  We now whisper in corners lest anyone hear us rather than shout from the rooftops that God hates sin but loves the sinner.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, I agree with God’s prophets that Donald Trump will indeed remain as President of the United States and this will happen not because of man’s best efforts to overcome the corruption that has plagued the process but by a sovereign act of God Himself who put Trump there in the first place as an end-times “King Cyrus” (Ezra 1: 1, 2) to help restore godliness to America and its allies in readiness for the Lord’s return when he will receive the nations as his inheritance (Psalm 2:8).  In the meantime, much prayer is needed for the deliverance of the nations from the hands of evil men bent on completing their globalist plans for a one-world government controlled by the super-rich and using the COVID pandemic and corrupt politicians to succeed.  If this all sounds too far fetched, just look again at the evidence and consider the magnitude of the corruption that has brought us to this place and begin to understand the enormity of the battle we are engaged in whether we like it or not.  We have the sure promises of God as our mainstay and the power of his Holy Spirit within us to win the battle and gain the victory.  

[gascon-en-exil]

The Top Ten Women of Fire Emblem (As Written by a Gay Man)

#1 - Micaiah

When we were separated during the war, you changed, Sothe. And I changed too. I want to protect Daein more than anything. Our people must be saved, and if I can help in that effort, I will.

Let it not be said that this was an obvious pick simply because Micaiah happens to be a lord, and one from my favorite game in the series moreover. Although I thought it appropriate to end this ranking with a lord I’m well aware that all the women who’ve fulfilled that role in FE (excluding Avatars for obvious reasons) have had to work against writers determined to screw them over in one way or another. There’s not much point therefore in me rehashing the many criticisms, valid or not, that have been leveled against Micaiah over the years. I’m instead going to be breaking down just why I think she works for me as well as she does, and how thoroughly she earns the distinction of being the least narratively compromised female lord in the franchise...for whatever that’s worth.

Revenge of the Jugdral Waifs

Parts of Tellius’s worldbuilding borrow extensively from Jugdral, some in more subtle ways than others. Micaiah is one of its more obvious allusions, as both her look and class design owe much to a group of female light magic users from those games who also exist outside the framework of the traditional clerical classes (some - or all? - of them even share their starting class name with the Japanese name of Micaiah’s third tier class). Deirdre, Julia, Linoan, and Sara are all women of high standing, and three of them are linked by blood to the dark Loptyrian cult not unlike Micaiah’s association with the “dark” goddess Yune. In spite of circumstances that ought to grant them significant plot relevance however all four of these characters are diminished by the narratives of the two games, either kept on the political sidelines in preference to a man or turned into barely-characterized damsels in distress. To paraphrase Markoftheasphodel, Deirdre and Julia in particular encapsulate the whole of Jugdral’s particular brand of misogyny - some of the most important and powerful characters in the setting reduced to tormented plot devices devoid of personality.

It’s probably a stretch to suggest that Micaiah was intentionally written as a means of redeeming these characters after the fact merely because she owes so much of her design to them. Still, that reading is certainly there. Micaiah assumes Julia’s role during Part 4, becoming the human vessel for Yune as Julia is inhabited by the spirit of Naga during the last chapter of FE4. While there’s no arguing that Micaiah drew the short straw when it came to gameplay power-ups from her resident deity, in return she is allowed substantially more screentime and agency even when she’s sharing her body with someone else. Certain characterization threads relative to Micaiah and not Yune, like vengeance against Numida and Lekain and the back story of Micaiah’s relationship with Sothe, are followed through to their conclusions only during Part 4. Also, while it’s Yune calling the shots as the army ascends the Tower of Guidance Micaiah is still an active participant, taking responsibility for awakening Yune before Dheghinsea and saving Lehran among other things. 

It’s a common criticism that Ike takes over the plot of Radiant Dawn from Micaiah, but the truth is that he’s sharing the endgame spotlight with Micaiah and Yune together. Ike is still the saga hero of Tellius - the Seliph equivalent - but Micaiah displays none of Julia’s blankness and passivity at any point. She’s unquestionably closer to being the deuterotagonist of Tellius than any Leif equivalent (Elincia, perhaps?). What’s more, while Linoan must cede her political relevance to Leif and Julia’s epilogue has her being little more than a support to her emperor brother, Micaiah gets to rule the kingdom she’s spent the game trying to save - while not invalidating the rule of her recently-discovered younger sister over her own country, incidentally - whereas Ike leaves the continent to have adventures and gay sex. In Jugdral the best most women can hope to be is support for their ruling husbands; in Tellius all three beorc nations have women ruling them by the end. Indeed, even compared with the other non-Avatar female lords that’s a huge step forward.

Conquest Needs to Take Notes: FE10′s Villain Campaign

This should really be a more controversial statement than it actually is: the Dawn Brigade chapters of FE10, especially those in Part 3, make for a better villain campaign than the entirety of FE14′s Conquest route.

It’s sad how that it isn’t really an exaggeration at all, and even more sad that FE10 doesn’t rely on narrative shortcuts to convey the idea that you’re temporarily playing as the bad guys like Conquest does. Daein isn’t draped entirely in black, and its antagonistic history as a nation saddled with a legacy of racism and Ashnard’s goals of conquest isn’t swept under the rug or left to be inferred only from Path of Radiance. The Daein of Radiant Dawn still displays its anti-laguz prejudice from the previous game, and there’s no indication that that prejudice doesn’t extend to members of the playable cast or that it’s something that will be quickly and cleanly done away with after the credits roll. Micaiah herself plays to the wishes of her racist followers when she has to in Part 3, and though she’s not rabidly bigoted like Jill is in FE9 before her character development she does have a personal interest in not making waves.

I’m not only talking about her ambivalence toward laguz as a Branded, either. One of Micaiah’s most defining traits is her patriotism. It’s a curious element of her character, based in her feelings toward her adopted homeland and willfully unconcerned with Daein’s racism even as it forces her to hide her Brand. It’s rather amusing that probably the most common criticism leveled against Micaiah is that she’s a Mary Sue blindingly adored in-universe, not just because the same could be said for Ike but because that’s exactly what she’s built up to be. If anything the mounting conflict between Ike’s loyal followers - technically the Gallian army and later Crimea and Sanaki’s forces, but they all join together under him - and the cult-ish adherents of “the Maiden of Dawn” deconstructs this accusation. Everyone in Daein may adore her and may have rallied around the Dawn Brigade in a bid to remove the Begnion occupation, but by Part 3 that fervor is shown to be clearly unhealthy and something that Lekain is able to manipulate to his advantage. 

It’s not just the alliance with Begnion that places the Dawn Brigade chapters in villain campaign territory, as Micaiah is forced to resort to increasingly underhanded tactics to satisfy the demands of the senate, from ambushes in the dark to outright war crimes. All the while she’s being ironically proclaimed by her soldiers a symbol of light and divine will, a stark contrast to Nohr’s shadowy branding. It’s a matter of opinion whether Lekain’s blood pact is more or less contrived than the various plot devices that keep Conquest Corrin in line during the invasion of Hoshido, but Micaiah is actually allowed to be genuinely antagonistic toward the armies she’s opposing, in large part because of her pronounced nationalism and the atmosphere of blind worship she’s allowed to grow around her. One of the most important elements of a well-written villain story is that the characters involved shouldn’t think of themselves as the villains unless they’re fully evil and are committed as such (which usually isn’t that interesting anyway). Conquest focuses too much on Corrin’s angst over the ruin of Hoshido and leaves the motivations of the Nohrians vague, whereas Daein in Part 3 carries both its legacy of bigotry and militarism from FE9 and the memory of its glorious uprising against foreign oppression from Part 1. It’s not hard at all to imagine the members of the Dawn Brigade and even the Daein military thinking themselves heroes of their own story, bolstered by a leader determined to do whatever is necessary to save her people.  

The Token(-ish) Het of Tellius

I would be remiss though if I didn’t talk about queer content at some point, because Tellius pretty much runs off the stuff. In that regard Micaiah is admittedly lacking; she has her auto-A support with Sothe and almost nothing else, and while exposition on their early relationship reveals that their bond is a quasi-incestuous one riddled with age issues it’s not in the same league as Nailah/Rafiel totally inverting gender roles, Haar/Jill almost literally robbing the cradle, or Elincia’s complex feelings for her two closest retainers. One can appreciate though that Micaiah/Sothe displays a certain symmetry with Ike/Soren, from parallels in their first meetings to the experiences of one member of each pairing being Branded to their roles at the heads of their respective armies (from a gameplay perspective note that Soren and Sothe stand beside their partners when faced as enemies in 3-13 and 3-E respectively). I might go so far as to say that these symmetries provide additional legitimacy to Ike/Soren as a paired ending, especially since they get their own exposition-laden base conversation in endgame.

Ooh, Shiny!

And ok, my bias in favor of light magic users is on display here too. I was hyped for Micaiah as soon as she appeared in promotional materials as a caster lord, the first and so far only purely magical unit to hold that title. Even notwithstanding the fact that Radiant Dawn is arguably the worst game in the series in which to be a magic user Micaiah has some serious issues as a unit, but at least when she sucks in-game she does so in manner completely distinguishable from the likes of Leif and Roy. She can be a staffbot (she can use Physic as soon as she promotes), she can nuke stuff with Thani and/or Wrath crits thanks to her nonexistent defenses, she can riskily play around her late promotions with Resolve (Easy only, please), and even at the end of the game when she’s probably still frail and will never be fast enough to double everything she’s still the best candidate for Rexaura just because the saints are even worse. I appreciate too that light magic got some much-needed statistical buffs compared to Path of Radiance, and we most likely have Micaiah to thank for that. Even if the game hates her she can make for a fun if challenging unit to use to her greatest potential.

...Now I want to play FE10 again.

[spinach-productions]

Kale, chapter 2

Summary: a human child travels the complicated roads of monster existence (And lack thereof).

Wordcount: 3558

Thanks so much to spocksbedsidemanner, who is an all around lovely person.caught my many, many spelling and grammar mistakes, and

201x: A human child falls into the Underground via a poorly guarded hole in Mount Ebbot.

201x (+2 months): The same human child leads Monsterkind to the surface and acts as the first arbitrator between Monsters and Humans.  They are swiftly replaced by more experienced negotiators on both sides, but seeing a human child leading the 8-foot monarch of Monsterkind out of the darkness made quite the impression.

(This was a calculated performance on the 8-foot monarch’s part.  It works well.)

201x (+1 year and some change): Monsters are beginning to integrate with the human population.  Most live in one of two sister cities built on the east and south sides of Mount Ebbot.  Some strike out into the world, protected by the newly crafted Monster Protection and Human Relations Act.  The human child who made this possible lives with their monster guardian, former Queen Toriel, who now spends much of her time being called “Miss Toriel” by her students, “Tori” by her friends, and “mom” by her adopted human.

(A legally sanctioned human-monster family is met with prejudice in some places, but ultimately continues to pave the way towards peaceful interspecies relations when misguided humans who try to “rescue” the human child are met at the door with tea and cakes.  Toriel keeps a number of baked goods on hand for just such occasions.  This is a calculated move on her part.)

(It’s also a calculated choice on Frisk’s part.  After all, their new parents are the political leaders of an entire race.  Interest in public relations was bound to rub off at some point.)

Frisk insists on helping buy groceries, so on Saturdays they get up early to go to the local weekend market with Toriel.  The local human and monster farmers have come together to build a permanent structure for it that’s quickly becoming something of a shopping district.  Toriel uses her dinner budget on fresh vegetables, and her separate, slightly larger baking budget on supplies for unexpected guests.  After food shopping, they wander the new shops to see what kind of businesses have come to Mount Ebbot.

“It is nice to have a wider selection of goods,” Toriel says as they pass a stationary shop, “I have enjoyed living on the surface once more, but cultivating such a remote area has been difficult.  I miss the conveniences of living in a settled location.”

Frisk considers buying Toriel a new pen with their allowance (half a gold piece per week, which, according to the economic reports Frisk likes to read each morning, translates into $686.39USD, $975.85CAD, or €612.44).  They discard the idea as not to Toriel’s tastes, and follow her as she moves on.

Several shops down, Frisk feels a chill.  It feels like an empty space where something should be.  Monsters constantly broadcast their feelings through low-grade emotional magic that always fills up an area, but somewhere nearby, there was a complete absence of feeling Frisk hasn’t felt since they lived with humans over a year ago.

“Frisk?”  Toriel asks. “Are you alright?”

Frisk nods, taking her hand when she offers.  They continue walking.

Frisk feels the same chill as they pass a shop with turning book racks.  This time, the reason is obvious: a large section of space in front of the closest display is silent and grayscale.  It’s like all noise and color have been sucked out, and standing in the center of this anomaly is a monster child, not much younger than Frisk.  They appear to be some kind of armless reptile wearing a checkerboard shirt and a bow, and their eyes are wide and empty in their head.

“Oh,” Toriel says, “this looks nice!”

Frisk stares at the grey monster child. 

“I would like to step inside for a moment,” Toriel continues.  She doesn’t seem to notice the grey child at all.  “Would you care to join me?”

A quick check of the area shows that no one is reacting to the kid.  The grey monster child stares back with a smile.  It may be intended as a friendly gesture, but their blank eyes give it an unsettling effect.

Frisk decides to stay out here for now.  Toriel gives an assurance she won’t be long and disappears into the bookshop.

“Yo,” the monster kid says.

Frisk asks why no one else can see them.

“Are you a--” the monster kid makes a noise like static, “--too?”

A what?

The monster kid grins widely.  “Have you ever thought about a world where everything is the same, except you’re not there?”

Frisk says that they have, on occasion.

“Me too!”  The monster kid’s grin falters.  “I don’t like it.  It’s terrifying.”

Frisk asks if they’re alright.

They look around, watching people enter and exit the shop.  Watching people go about their daily lives.  “I… don’t know.  I don’t really remember.  Is it always this busy?”

Frisk says that it’s sometimes this busy.  They ask if there’s something they can do to help.

“I don’t think so.”  The monster kid smiles again but it’s lost the eerie edge from earlier.  They look resigned, but resigned to what?  “You know, just admitting that makes me feel better.  Thanks!”

Frisk is completely at a loss.

“Please forget about me,” they say. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

They ask what the monster kid means.

“Hello, my child,” says Toriel as she exits the shop.

Sound starts up again.  Frisks glances at her for a moment.  They look back to the monster kid, but they and the grey, silent space are gone.

“I have procured us a collection of crossword puzzles,” Toriel says, handing Frisk the book.

They take it and begin to flip through, still thinking about the monster kid’s last words.  What could happen?

“One more thing,” says the kid’s voice from nowhere, “Tell Sans and Papyrus that Doctor Gaster says ‘hi’.”

-

“Doctor Gaster?” Papyrus asks as he stretches his nonexistent calf muscles. “No, I don’t know one.”

Frisk readjusts their position on Papyrus’ shoulders.  After several failed attempts at running together due to mismatched leg length, Papyrus has started hoisting Frisk onto his shoulders for their morning jog.  He calls it strength-cardio.  Frisk suspects he likes the company.

They ask if Papyrus is sure.  The grey monster kid was pretty specific.

“No, it doesn’t ring any bells.”  Papyrus finishes his stretches and takes off down the road.  “Although I’ve met so many people since we moved to the surface.  Is he human?”

Frisk doesn’t think so.

“Well, I’m sure he’ll come up at some point.  Water bottle, please.”

Frisk hands him his water bottle.  They keep it in a small backpack they wear for jogging.

Papyrus raises the bottle to his mouth, only to be startled by a loud dinging noise just beside him.  The water sprays across his face and drips down his jaw; Papyrus sputters loudly and throws the sports bottle in surprise.  It sails through the air for a moment, then stops short in a burst of blue energy.

“Careful,” says Sans, who has appeared next to them.  For some reason, he’s riding a tricycle.  “You sure you know water you’re doing?”

Papyrus plucks his water bottle out of the air with a scowl.  “Very funny, Sans.”

“Wet-ever are you talking about?”

Frisk snorts and wipes the splash damage off their face.

“Hey, good one kiddo,” Sans says as Papyrus stomps his foot in agitation.  “You really know how to go with the flow.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” Papyrus says, readjusting Frisk on his shoulders. “You’ve already corrupted them enough for one day.  Are you coming for a run with us or not?”

Sans joins them.  Papyrus, carrying Frisk, runs on the road’s shoulder, and Sans pedals alongside them.  Before long, he props his feet up on the handlebars.  The bike continues moving forward.

“What,” Papyrus puffs, “is the point if you’re not going to exercise?”

“I get to spend time with my cool bro and cool human friend,” Sans replies.

Frisk appreciates the comment.  Remembering the earlier conversation, they ask Sans if he knows anyone named Doctor Gaster.

Sans’ eyelights blink out.  He loses his already precarious balance and nearly falls backwards over the bike, tipping the bike onto its back wheels before he grabs the handlebars and slams it back down.

“Sans, are you alright?!”  Papyrus asks, helping him steady the tricycle.

“I’m okay,” Sans says.  His voice is completely devoid of inflection and he looks sweaty.  “Kiddo, where did you hear that name?”

Frisk, who managed to hold on to Papyrus’ shoulders when he dove to help Sans balance the bike, explains that someone asked them to relay a ‘hello’ from Doctor Gaster to both Sans and Papyrus.

“Do you know this person?” Papyrus asks.

Sans doesn’t answer immediately.  He slowly sits on the bike seat and places his hands on the handlebars, staring straight ahead as though he’s about to take a ride.  “Paps, mind if I pedal around with the kid a bit?  I think we got some stuff to discuss.”

Papyrus looks to Frisk.  Frisk says that’s alright, and requests to be let down.  They dismount Papyrus’ shoulders and climb onto the back of Sans’ tricycle, wrapping their arms around his middle to stay on.  Even through the jacket, he’s cool to the touch.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”  Papyrus asks again.

“Yeah bro, don’t worry about it.  I’ll drop Frisk off at Toriel’s when we’re done.”

Sans leaves without further explanation.  He pedals off down the road, takes a corner slightly too fast, uses blue magic to steady the bike, and keeps going.

“Papyrus will forget the conversation,” he says, still pedaling. “To facilitate that, he’ll also probably forget everything about you and me being there.  That’s what happens when you bring up Gaster’s name.”

Frisk asks why.

“Because he’s not around anymore.  He fell through a hole in time and space, and now any memory of him evaporates like water on a hot sidewalk.  I suspect it’s the timeline’s attempt to patch itself.  Hold on tight.”  Sans gives up on pretense and lifts the entire bike into the air.  They soar over the neighborhood rooftops, passing the convenience store and local school.

Frisk asks why Sans remembers him.

“That is a long story, kiddo.”

Frisk points out that they’re on a tricycle at least one-hundred feet in the air.  They have nowhere to go and nothing to do.

“Point.  Okay, let me make this story short: the Core originally generated energy through a combination of geothermal, emotional, and temporal components.  Something went wrong, it exploded, and it took out everyone in the room, including Gaster.  One of them was probably the one you saw.  I was partially shielded from the blast and managed to not get sucked out of reality, but since I was in the explosion radius, I remember how the timeline used to be.  You seem to remember because of all your time-alteration dealies.”

Frisk doesn’t apologize, but they do remind Sans that they promised not to SAVE or LOAD anymore.

“I know, kid,” Sans says, reaching back to ruffle Frisk’s hair. “It wasn’t an accusation, just a fact.  You’re special.”

Frisk says that probably means Sans is special, too.

“Oh yeah, real special.  I’m a special kind of guy.”

The tricycle begins to descend when they reach Frisk’s house.  Sans drops them off at the front door.  “Got someone waiting for you?”

Toriel is teaching this morning, but Frisk has a key.  They invite Sans inside for tea and some emergency baking.

“Nah, I’m good.  I need to think about some stuff.”

Frisk asks whether Sans thinks the monster kid and Gaster will be alright.

Sans’ face doesn’t change, but Frisk can tell he’s deciding between telling the truth and gently spackling over it with a lie.  They wait patiently, trusting him to make the right choice.  “I don’t know,” Sans finally says, “There are five all together.  I see them around sometimes, but never the G-man.  They’re not themselves anymore.”

Frisk marches down the stairs, across the lawn, and gives Sans an authoritative hug.

Sans gives a start, then sighs and wraps his arms around Frisk.  “I’m okay, kiddo.”

Frisk informs him that they know Sans is alright.

The hugs goes on for minute while Sans hovers on the edge of something emotional.  When he’s slightly more stable, Frisk tugs his jacket into place and takes a step back.

“Thanks,” Sans says. 

Frisk doesn’t comment as he wipes something off his face that’s probably water from Papyrus’ sports bottle.  They send him on his way, still dwelling on the monster kid and this mysterious Doctor Gaster.  Toriel won’t be home for a few hours, giving Frisk time to make some tea, grab a miniature pie, climb into Toriel’s favorite armchair (good for contemplation) and settle in for a long, hard think.

-

Now that Frisk knows what to look for, the grey monsters seem to be everywhere.  They begin carrying a notebook to help keep them all straight.

There’s the monster kid, who tends to turn up outside of bookshops and places that sell games.  They’ll seem relatively upbeat one moment, then trail off as they stare into the middle-distance, as though they’re listening to something Frisk can’t hear.

One grey monster seems particularly at odds with defining himself as a solid object.  He rises from the ground near libraries, and it takes a lot of self-control for Frisk to keep themselves from startling.  This grey monster has many arms and a hooked nose, and seems especially surprised when Frisk sits down to speak with him.

“It’s been so long since I spoke with anyone,” he explains, “I don’t know how long.”

They’re Frisk’s first lead on Doctor Gaster.  He was apparently the Royal Scientist before Alphys (who, when asks, can’t remember anyone by that and insists Sans held the position before her).  The grey monster with many arms waxes poetic about Gaster’s intelligence, but stops in the middle of explaining what happened, watching something Frisk can’t see the same way the monster kid does.

When the pause stretches out longer than a minute, Frisk asks him to continue.

“No, no,” he says, a good-natured smile growing across his blank face as they begin to fade. “It’s rude to talk about people who are listening.”

Another grey monster looks like a short gingerbread person.  Frisk finds them hanging around the local police station.  There’s something sad about the way they watch the officers work, as though they remember something long-gone that was once very dear to them.

This monster seems the least talkative.  They reiterate Doctor Gaster’s brilliance and how something happened to him that involved the Core, but like the many-armed man, they refuse to elaborate.

The final grey monster is terrifying.

He appears over Frisk’s shoulder.  Unlike the other grey monsters, this one seems unafraid to make direct contact, and falls into step with Frisk’s afternoon walk.  He’s medium height, neither particularly tall nor short, has two crests down the back of his head, and is grinning widely.  Frisk gets the impression the man is trying to intimidate them.  Unfortunately, it’s working.

“I hear you’re asking about Doctor Gaster,” he says.

Frisk replies that they are.  Does he know about him?

“I do.  He’s the reason we’re like this.”

This is the first time a grey monster has referenced one of the others.  Frisk asks what happened to everyone.

“We were caught in a brilliant man’s hubris.  He killed us, and was killed himself.”

If they’re dead, how are they still here?

“An excellent question.  I certainly don’t know.”

They walk in silence.  Frisk considers a few questions before asking if this man knows where Gaster can be found.

“I could tell you, but what about the rest of us?”

If Gaster is as brilliant as they say, then he’s their best chance at returning to normal life.

“You make an excellent point.”  The man stares straight ahead, still smiling.  “You know, I would like another stab at life.  You’ll find most of Gaster lurking around the new Core.”

Most of him?

“Why, certainly.  Not all of him is there.  In fact.”  The man makes a complicated gesture and his palm fills with sickly purple glow.  A small face appears on the blob of light. “I have a piece of him right here.”

The blob begins to wail.

Frisk sprints home and slams the door behind them.

-

The next day, Frisk packs a bag with sandwiches and water.  They say they want to explore the old monster civilization and Toriel understands the need to understand (if not the things Frisk wants to understand).  She gives them a few small tarts in a cooler and a picnic blanket to eat on, and hugs them goodbye.  Frisk promises to return by dinner, and sets off.

It’s less than an hour to the mouth of the Underground, and less than that to get to Hotland.  Frisk thinks about the two months after they fell through a hole in Mount Ebbot.  This place seemed much bigger at the time.

The doors to the Core lobby are stiff with disuse.  Leaving the Underground meant dismantling all available technology and structures for parts, and  the Core was no exception.  The front room is devoid of furniture, everything is coated with a thin layer of dust, and the overhead lights flicker weakly when Frisk turns them on.  Thankfully, the environmental controls seem to be intact, and after a few minutes of fiddling Frisk has a reprieve from the heat of Hotland’s lava flows.  They take the opportunity to spread out Toriel’s picnic blanket and eat lunch.

Food consumed, they repack their bag and venture further into the building.  Frisk consults a map behind where the reception desk used to be, and heads for the area marked “Security Clearance Required.” 

The halls are eerily quiet.  Frisk can hear their footsteps echoing back at them.  Old security cameras sleep in the corners, and every light seems to be experiencing some kind of power fluctuations.  It would be easy to miss a grey patch of space when Frisk’s nerves are so on edge.

They finally come to an imposing door with a sign that reads “LEVEL RED CLEARANCE ONLY.”  Luckily, the security locks were disabled when the building was shut down, and the door creaks open easily.  The other side is a long set of poorly lit stairs that disappear into darkness after the first flight.  Frisk adjusts their bag on their shoulders and presses on.

The stairs go on for a long time.  Frisk loses track of the number of flights long before they reach a door marked “Control Booth” in messy handwriting.  Behind it is a small, gloomy booth with a dead control panel.  Frisk pushes some of the many buttons, but nothing happens.  They continue on.

Finally, they reach the bottom.  There isn’t a sign on the last door, just a comically large wheel in place of an opening mechanism.  The door is cracked open.  Despite the weight, Frisk manages to pull it wide enough that they can squeeze through.

Even shut off, the Core is exactly as imposing as Frisk remembers.  It sits dormant on a platform over what’s supposed to be a bubbling pool of lava, but the room is silent.  Frisk has to glance down to see that, yes, the lava is still there and extremely hot.  It’s not making any noise because a black and white man is sitting in front of what used to be the Core.  He’s hunched over his own legs with his cracked face in both hands, staring into the depths of the Underground’s former energy source.

He seems to be melting?

Frisk walks the perimeter of the room so they don’t startle the man, but he doesn’t look away from the Core.  They approach slowly and sit several paces away.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the man says.  He sounds like he’s speaking from the opposite end of a very long hallway.

Frisk says it’s certainly something.

“I think I made this,” the man continues, “but I can’t quite remember.”

They sit in contemplative silence. 

“I think it was quite the undertaking.  I think there was a very good reason this needed to exist, and that important people were at risk if it didn’t come together properly.”  He tilts his head to one side in thought.  “There were specific people I wanted to protect, but I can’t remember their names, or their faces, or where they came from.”

Frisk studies the intricate machinery.  The man studies something that may be in front of him, or may be several years behind him.

Frisk asks if he would like a sandwich.

The man frowns at the unexpected question.  He slowly unfolds his back, like he’s not sure exactly how to sit up straight, and finally looks away from the Core with a puzzled look on his face.

Frisk sets out each sandwich option in turn: vegetable medley, ham and cheese, and gluten-free tomato pesto.  They also have some water, and a small butterscotch pie.

The man looks over the lunch choices.  He looks Frisk over.  He looks confused.

Frisk waits patiently.

Slowly, like every other movement he’s made so far, the man moves the tomato pesto to one side.  “I think,” he says, “That I hate tomato.”

[ladystylestores]

I used the Huawei Mate Xs and now I don’t want to go back to a normal smartphone

Does your phone turn into a tablet?

Some say all phones kind of look alike these days. Their features might be different, but overall, we’re stuck with the glass slab design. The push towards maximizing the feature set has more or less lead to standardizing the smartphone design robbing us of the variety we enjoyed in the past.

But these phones, all of them, have one huge downside that no one talks about – they don’t turn into tablets. I’m only half joking there – smartphones have now gotten to a place where their looks and general feature set are commoditized. That’s great if you enjoy slow iterative changes year to year, but can also be slightly boring.

Enter foldables. Because foldable handsets had been rumored to be just around the corner for many, many years I had practically given up on this ever actually becoming a thing, prior to that fateful February of 2019, when both Samsung and Huawei announced the first consumer-ready devices.

Huawei is now on its second-generation foldable with minor improvements compared to the first, and after using the Mate Xs for a few weeks I have to say – it’s incredibly hard to go back to any traditional smartphone. It feels like the Mate Xs is just straight up from another world – or from another more advanced time, if you will.

Of course it’s not the only foldable that turns into a tablet, the Galaxy Fold also does that, but, in my opinion, the Mate Xs has by far the better design. You can feel that a ton of small details have been carefully considered, whereas the Galaxy Fold seems like it was designed in a time when Samsung did not expect to have any real competition in this space and then was taken by surprise by Huawei’s announcement of the Mate X.

The Mate Xs has no awkward side-notch when opened, and it doesn’t need a laughably bezel-endowed small and cramped external screen, because the internal screen is also the external one. That’s a very smart design, which also means you’ll be taking selfies with the main camera array. The cameras fit very nicely the elongated slab of glass on top of the frame, this side of the phone makes it very easy to hold in one hand when in tablet mode, and the bottom fits the USB-C port for charging. The stereo speakers are as far away from each other as possible when the Mate Xs is opened up, and they’re ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ when you use it like a phone. See, it’s the little things – and they do add up.

The complaints about this device are obvious: people assume the Mate Xs is more fragile than the Galaxy Fold because of the exposed screen. However, while scratches might be an issue the fact that Mate Xs’ screen is plastic, not glass, means that even if you drop it, it won’t shatter – you know, like every traditional flagship device out there. I will confess to not having tried intentionally dropping it just to see what would happen, but I also don’t see that happening a lot.

When closed, it’s hefty but not unwieldy, and because of the 11mm thickness it’s actually one of the phones that are easiest to grip securely. The chunkiness was never an issue for me, but the weight… is a lot for the size, when it’s closed. I wish it was lighter, then again that problem goes away when you open it up because now the same weight is spread out over far larger surface area.

The Mate Xs is definitely not all rainbows and sunshine. Aside from the weight (which isn’t that bad), there’s also the fact that the screen is mounted sideways (the bottom of the display panel is in the side that houses the power and volume buttons), which means scrolling when you use the phone with the earpiece up is quite janky, because of the way the panel refreshes. You do get used to this eventually, but it did take me over a week.

The issue is gone if, when opened up, you rotate it such that the side with the buttons is the bottom one, and in ‘tablet mode’ the device works in all possible orientations so that’s easy to achieve if you leave auto-rotation on. I usually turn that off the second I set up a new phone, but in this case I left it on and thankfully it wasn’t too trigger happy when jumping from one orientation to the next.

The auto-brightness also needs constant tweaking, at least for my liking, which is weird because the P40 Pro I long-term reviewed here is one of a very small number of phones that required essentially no manual intervention when it comes to brightness. Then there’s the fact that, if you hold the Mate Xs closed as a phone, because of where the software is programmed to make the phone screen “end”, you get a small curve on the left side, but no such thing on the right side, where the side bezel is actually quite prominent.

On the flip side, as a tablet there are no notches, no hole-punches, just uninterrupted 8-inch goodness, which is great. The crease is there in the middle and you can feel it, but it’s rarely actually visible. As for the feeling it part, you get used to it in a few days.

You’re not touching glass, though, at any point when using the Mate Xs, but if you’ve ever used a phone with a pre-installed plastic screen protector you’ll know exactly what it feels like. It’s not in any way worse than that, and while bare naked glass just feels better to touch, it just doesn’t fold. At least not yet.

Battery life on the Mate Xs has been surprisingly good, but then again all Huawei and Honor phones have this in common – numbers greater than what the capacity would suggest, compared to the Android competition. I’m going to assume EMUI has something to do with that, as well as Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon’s Kirin 990 chipset, which has 5G on the chip and not in a separate modem like the Snapdragon 865.

And then there’s the software. First off, as this is (inherently, because of its price) a niche device, it seems to get less update love from Huawei than classic-looking flagships like the P40 series. The Mate Xs is still running EMUI 10, although the P40 handsets launched with EMUI 10.1. The improvements are minor, but this just goes to show that the Mate Xs is more of a hobby product than a main money maker for the Chinese company, and that may be reflected in how fast (or rather, slow) it gets subsequent updates. I hope I’m wrong about this one, because if you’re a techie who spends over 2,000 euros on this, you’re going to be quite disappointed if it is forgotten in the first wave of the Android 11 rollout.

Speaking of Android, the Mate Xs is devoid of any Google apps and services, which creates a ton of issues, most of which are fixable, but require some patience. Some apps will just not work at all because they depend on the missing Google Mobile Services, and for most apps you’ll need to do some hunting in at least two different app stores. The situation is detailed in full in this page of my P40 Pro long-term review, if you’re interested.

In the meantime, Huawei has released a new app called Petal Search in its App Gallery, which you can use as a meta search engine for apps – it will point you to the specific app store you can grab an app from, or to the app maker’s website if you can download it straight from there. It’s a kludge, this, but a very necessary one, given the political situation. If you’ve ever used Huawei’s MoreApps for the same purpose, think of Petal Search as a more refined version of that – since it also handles updates, as in, you can see which of your installed apps have new versions available across different app stores and websites.

Clearly then, the Huawei Mate Xs is not perfect. But it is a showcase of where the future of smartphones is headed, and it also doesn’t feel like a beta product at all. You are paying a lot of money for it, but the experience is very polished and it feels like Huawei gave some real thought to a lot of things here, including various ways of interacting with the device. It’s a mature smartphone (if crippled somewhat by the lack of Google services, although this isn’t Huawei’s fault), it’s a joy to use in day to day life. Oh, and did I mention it also turns into a tablet.

The amazingness of that can’t be overstated. Sure, you can buy another flagship smartphone plus an iPad Pro for around the same money, or even less. I’ve heard that argument before, except it misses the point entirely, because then you end up carrying two different devices with you. And how often are you really going to do that? Yes, an iPad Mini is around the same size as the opened up Mate Xs, and yes, it’s cheap. But the convenience of having one product that is both a phone and a tablet is just impossible to replicate.

I’ve been doing the mobile thing for a while now, and I was there when phone cameras were starting to first get adequate for casual shooting, and I’ve heard a similar argument then. Something along the lines of “but this can’t match my DSLR for quality, why would I need a camera in a phone?”. In response to that, the phrase “the best camera is the one you have in your pocket” was coined, and I think this can be easily repurposed as “the best tablet is the one you have in your pocket, as your smartphone”, or something similar.

Overall my time with the Mate Xs has proven that after years of incremental advances in the smartphone world, we’re now standing at the precipice of a huge shift in usability, triggered by the advent of foldable screens. These will only get better with time, as foldable smartphones will become more and more affordable for more and more people. It’s a very exciting future that the Mate Xs has revealed for me, and I can’t wait for the time when everyone can afford a foldable – be that of the ‘phone turns into tablet’ variety like the Mate Xs or Galaxy Fold, or the ‘phone becomes easily pocketable’ option pioneered by the Motorola Razr and the Galaxy Z Flip.

I’m ready for even more craziness to come, as LG is now rumored to bring to market a rollable smartphone early next year. The flexible display panels will hopefully enable a lot of experimentation with form factors, which will be very interesting to see. It’s not that we haven’t had any experimentation lately, we have – but it was still confined to the glass sandwich slab footprint. From now on, though, the sky seems to be the limit.

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[entergamingxp]

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst still offers an open-world city like no other • Eurogamer.net

Years ago, EA’s building in the UK was a Foster and Partners number in Chertsey. And it had a handful of interesting features. There was a moat. There were ducks involved, or maybe swans. The front of the structure came off (on purpose) and leaked (not on purpose). From the air the whole thing looked a bit like the letter E. Electronic!

Inside it was pure Bond lair, of course, this being the era which also gave us the doomy concrete spinal excavation of Westminster Tube Station, my favourite building in London because I am a massive child, loose in the world with nothing in my skull but feathers. (Westminster Tube is definitely Bond, but definitely also Brosnan Bond.) Anyway, EA’s place: with oddly angled windows ensuring you never knew which direction the automatic blinds were going to descend from, skeletal staircases and lots of dark surfaces. You can see it for yourself in films like Inception and TV shows like Jekyll. Anything with a touch of horror or unease. The Bond people never actually used it, I gather. The heights were not quite right for it to be truly deathly, but it did a good job of being Deathly Junior. A mausoleum built to the specs of a condominium. EA doesn’t live there any more.

I’ve spent the last few days in another collision of EA and architecture, though. And again, although Foster and Partners were not involved, it’s also disquieting and abstractly villainous and filled with odd features. A lot of people might argue that it leaks, too, or at least that it is not quite fit for purpose. No matter. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is finally on Steam and I have been running and jumping, diving and swooping across its squeaky world. I’m in love.

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Emad has already made the case that this game is politically and socially a lot more interesting and progressive than most video game sequels. If you only read one piece on Mirror’s Edge today, re-read his! Meanwhile, I’m going to look purely at the game’s landscape – how it affects the game’s atmosphere and how it shapes the feeling of play.

Remember when they announced a sequel to Mirror’s Edge, the pristine parkour-heavy action game from Dice, all shot through with wiry energy and surprising heft, and they said it was going to be open-world this time? I remember thinking: that’s going to have to be a very different kind of open world. The first game was emphatically not open-world, and it’s hard to see how it would have worked in that way. Instead, each level was a sort of white-box Rubik’s Snake of urban design, gloriously sunny and bleached outside, the surfaces somehow chalky, and chalk is just the remains of the dead isn’t it? And then, muddly and fussy and a bit of a migraine indoors.

These places were great, if you ask me. I even liked getting lost in office buildings with the hint button pointing me mindlessly at my own feet when I really needed an exit. But it wasn’t for everyone, which is a phrase that must not delight an outfit like EA. And the idea of exploding these spaces outwards, retaining their intricacy while allowing them to become open-world areas fit for exploration and repeated journeys and multiple purposes – I can imagine the kind of headaches this design would cause. The first Mirror’s Edge bristled with places that gave the careful impression that they connected to other places. But that’s very different to places that actually do connect.

Anyway, the genius of Catalyst – and it is genius; despite the understandably chilly reception the game got, I find it intermittently more than thrilling – is that its open spaces do connect, but also still give the impression that there are yet deeper connections that cannot be accessed. Rooftops, alleyways and ladders! Ducts and open-air business suites, that indoor-outdoor lifestyle everyone’s after in the Valley. All of this. Drainpipes, server boxes, cooling fans that you learn to pause so you can move through them. This is the City of Glass, all but devoid of life and with a skyline that looks like it’ s made from guesswork renders of next-gen consoles. This is a city of paths and routes, but as the name suggests, it’s also a city of surfaces.

What I mean is that I’m dazzled by the sheer number of times I find myself looking through a surface that’s in front of me. There are windows, obviously, giving me views of sterile workspaces or endless iterations of corporate artwork. But then there are vents with slatted surfaces giving a glimmer of what’s beyond. And the floors! You never saw such floors. There are times when you look down and see through the floor, through grills or thin metal rattle-punched with holes, through squeaky clear stuff that is neither glass nor plastic but seems to have been imported from J.J. Abram’s Enterprise. Look down into rooms you maybe can or cannot access. Additional crawlspaces that may or may not be meant for your use.

Then look up. Again, oppressively bleached surfaces and clear light rule in this city. The city is the story here – so cold and unkind and heavy-handed. But the further you go, the more you find missions in which you leave the city itself behind and below with little warning and find yourself climbing through the innards of giant computers. Perhaps the point is that the city itself is a computer, with electrons moving about with more agency than the humans. Certainly more at home with these straight lines and sharp turns than the rare people you sometimes glimpse, looking down through a glass ceiling somewhere, all of them trapped in rooms that don’t seem to have any obvious entrances or exits.

What does this place allow for? It’s surprisingly entertaining really. It looks like an afternoon at the dentist but it encourages zip and flow. The best mission has you going up a skyscraper to remove something rather crucial to its design at the top. It’s the point in the game where you learn the fast-turn move that you may have neglected to buy up until now because it looked like a faff. Suddenly all the things you can do with your move-set link together because of that fast-turn. It reminds me in full pelt of Burnout Paradise, actually, that sense of carving a perfect channel through a world that rushes around you but magically never connects when you most fear it’s going to. Pipes, used for climbing, are suddenly there to allow you to do quick quarter circle moves. The red items of runner vision line up so beautifully that you can forget that this is another game about rebellion delivered by means of following a line from the start to the finish. A rush.

And when you do hit the ground, it’s worth something. I love the moment of impact when you’re left jarred and shaking and looking at your hands on the beautifully rendered floor, and glimpsing all those possible places beneath it. They’re necessary, these heavy stops. They are the weighted price you pay that makes all that gliding and dashing feel fair, feel real. They’re the bill being settled. And they too are built into the city.

Images like this are a bit of a reminder that EA didn’t know how to market this one in a world where they clearly feared everyone else was playing Assassin’s Creed.

Meanwhile, when the flow breaks, this game is the closest thing I have ever encountered to those dreams where you have to do something simple but can’t. For me it’s always dialling a phone number, prodding in the wrong buttons, deleting, starting over, unable to stumble through the area code. It seems like a cold place, even an annoying place. But in between missions I’m finding the City of Glass is surprisingly fun to sweep around and collect doodads in and do the side-stuff. It’s fun to get lost, to get stuck in those nightmare loops. It’s fun just to race about this jumble, always moving up and down, a city defined by a control scheme which really only wants you to think about whether to move up or down in the first place.

And weirdly it keeps reminding me of real locations, much more than a lot of other video game cities ever do. Maybe it’s a narrowing of specifics, but a scattering of specifics. San Andreas is Los Angeles and only Los Angeles. Crackdown 3 is pure cold-filtered Croydon with no added sugar. The emptiness of the City of Glass makes me remember ancient weekends exploring the deserted City in London, or one night, long ago, when a girlfriend and I followed a single dancing trail of white house paint that had been dribbled along miles of the South Bank. But it doesn’t stay in London. It’s fun to wander through the City of Glass and ponder the possible influences, in fact. I wonder about the things that the invisible designers (who seem to lurk, as open-world designers always do, high overhead, peering down, not entirely benevolent) have read that I may have read too, like an old Lloyd Wright Jr plan to turn Bunker Hill in Los Angeles into a kind of book-end necropolis, a giant walled space where different modes of transport were separated out on tracks of different heights and different widths. To be surrounded by traffic menageries that you sensed but would never fully see. That’s very Mirror’s Edge.

What this city has that is all its own, though, and I think that this will be my lingering memory of this game, is those layers upon layers: not-glass, not-grill, not-plastic, all of them slides giving glimpses of the worlds trapped beneath them. And over it all this singular texture that I now realise unites everything while leaving everything subtly unreadable. This gloss. Slick and squeaky – visual and aural noise.

Everything in the city has been coated in this stuff, this gloss, so you will never really know what it is. Plastic, concrete, foam? The rudiments of materials are always beautifully done. But then there is always a sense of a micro-layer on top, a kandy-ing. And like so much else here, I kind of love it.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/mirrors-edge-catalyst-still-offers-an-open-world-city-like-no-other-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mirrors-edge-catalyst-still-offers-an-open-world-city-like-no-other-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[gravitascivics]

MECHANICAL OR ORGANIC; WHO CARES?

[Note:  If the reader has taken up reading this blog with this posting, he/she is helped by knowing that this posting is the next one in a series of postings.  The series begins with the posting, “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-natural-rights-view-of-morality.html). Overall, the series addresses how the study of political science has affected the civics curriculum of the nation’s secondary schools.]

 This posting continues this series’ account on the effects the natural rights view has had on civics education.  Prominently, among those effects civics has portrayed a more objectified view of government and politics.  Previous postings reveal that political science, under the influence of the political systems construct, imposes a mechanical or an organic view on how the political system is described and explained in the nation’s classrooms.  

Has the way political science, the discipline, defined or observed its subject matter affected how civics education treats its subject matter? After all, political science is the main source of information for that secondary subject.  As it turns out, political science has experienced meaningful changes since 1950.

The practitioners of that discipline, in effect, shifted from one image of politics to another; the first reflects the behavioral revolt and the second, the post-behavioral revolt (both reviewed in previous postings). That discipline went through more than one basic shift during the twentieth century and one those shifts, the second, had to do with this concern of how one could analogize governance and politics.

As for calls emanating from the post-behavioral shift, to update the way one views political systems – not as machines but as organisms – one can observe that the treatment most teachers use is machines.  They do not consciously do this but in effect that is the way they tend to view their subject matter.  But for the sake of discussion, one can concede that the better way of perceiving this subject is to look at a political system as an organism.  

If teachers were to take this organic view seriously, what does that mean in their attempts to teach students about the realities of governance? David Easton's political systems model does address such organic elements as community, regime, and authority as integral parts of the political system.  But these elements are presented in a typical civics classroom by way of explaining how a system provides expected services.  

The political system makes authoritative allocation decisions about sought-after benefits.  The context in which these allocations take place are within the social makeup of particular groups, e.g., laws concerning gun control, or of the society as a whole, e.g., national defense policies.  Those collective settings, when viewed more organically, encourage a study or merely an observation toward a more humane perspective than what one can garner from a mechanical view.  

But within this organic view, a sense emerges; that is, that the “organism” is mostly governed by external forces which are bombarding the system with a plethora of inputs.  Therefore, this “organic” view does not alter the operative assumption that, to a meaningful degree, the system has a passive character – one of agency.  As such, the system is incapable or highly limited in its ability to voluntarily initiate action.  

To be a bit more concrete:  Imagine a single cell organism floating in a fluid.  It is attracted to positive sustenance and avoids discomforting elements. That is how the political system is viewed “organically.”  It is not viewed as having even self-motivating capabilities of a flea or an ant.  One can observe, such a view does provide one an explanation for the apparent hypocrisy of which too many politicians can be accused.  

They simply seem to seek the immediate reward or avoid the immediate punishment.  After all, politics is defined by some as the “art of the possible.”  And the possible is determined by what the accumulated political forces in the environment contain at a given time.  As Easton indicates, as one might be drawn to behaviorism in psychology, one would perceive government as issuing chosen outputs with the expectation of being rewarded by those who operate within the system and have the requisite levels of power.[1]  

This leans toward a highly deterministic view of politics in which the political system, like the organism just described, is merely responding to stimuli in its environment.  While political behaviorists were not so crude as to be purely deterministic, the influence of such views are more than just inconsequential.  They have lent themselves toward encouraging the presentation of political and governmental realities in detached and almost inhuman fashion.  

It also presents a system incapable of truly leading the populace. It merely responds to political pressure.  At a minimum, this approach can not be judged (at least by this writer) as one that encourages a populous to seek to establish and/or maintain a federated relationship among its members – its partners – and with the government.

Secondary textbooks, assuming one buys into this organic image, capture an essential aspect of this view.  In their pages, a vision of government emerges as something out there and while it responds to the electorate, it is not part of the electorate, much as pointed out in a previous posting, a department store and its customers are two separate elements.  

For example, in terms of feedback, as those in authority hear and see how people are reacting to past policies and actions, those in government can adjust or correct perceived “mistakes.”  Does one want an example?  Consider how the various state governments are currentlyreacting to the covid 19 crisis.

Not only does the image presented in textbooks relate to a system devoid of any leadership potential by those in government, but the picture it presents is also misleading.  They do not sufficiently take into account the factor of power among the populous.  Not all stimuli have the same effect.  That is, as described earlier in this blog, not all participants in the system are equally capable of exerting influence, i.e., not all of them have the same power.

Government is thereby a service-rendering entity for some more than others, not an extension of the people as a whole.  This is not portrayed as a reality, but the lack of equality is not alluded to as an ideal.  Textbooks present an image where all seem to be equal in this process.  This blog in short order will provide the evidence to back up that claim.  

Let this writer remind the reader that the role of textbooks cannot be overstated.  Again, most teachers depend on textbooks to basically make their curricular choices.[2] This following quote captures the effects that textbooks and other supportive materials have on what is taught not only in civics, but across the whole curriculum:

Instructional materials represent the resources that teachers use to develop student understanding of subject-specific concepts and skills in the enactment of the curriculum.  Such materials include textbooks, workbooks, laboratory manuals, manipulatives such as three-dimensional solids, laboratory supplies and equipment, videos, laser discs, CDs, software, and websites.  Developed by many different entities, instructional materials often become critical, defining components of instructional programs … In particular, commercial publishing firms with K-12 divisions dedicated to producing and selling school textbooks are central players in shaping what most teachers teach … Educational material production is “big business” … Thus, although publishers can and do produce materials in response to particular educational changes, decisions to invest in such developments are always tempered by estimates of the potential demand for materials supporting those changes. Accordingly, curricular content specified as important by textbook adoption policies in large states has great influence on the content of commercially available texts.[3]

Research into this concern has been consistent.

While this quote mentions other sources than the textbooks, one should remember supplemental materials are part of the textbook product.  That is, the textbook companies provide to schools these supportive materials of what their textbooks describe and explain.

         To point out the obvious, these “big businesses” have an interest in assuring that the content of their books, especially those that relate to civics do not pose challenging messaging to the system in which they operate.  The natural rights view is well ensconced in how the system operates at the school site.

[1] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.

[2] Stephen J. Thornton, “Teacher as Curricular-Instructional Gatekeeper in Social Studies, in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, edited by James P. Shaver (New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 237-248.  While this citation is dated, there is no reason to believe the point made is not as true today as it was in 1991.

[3] “Chapter 4, Curriculum As a Channel of Influence:  What Shapes What Is Taught to Whom,” in Investigating the Influence of Standards:  A Framework for Research in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education, edited by Iris R. Weiss, Michael S. Knapp, Karen S. Hollweg, and Gail Burrill (Washington, DC:  National Academy Press, 2002), emphasis added.  This report is a product of the National Research Council’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: Resurrecting the fountainhead of removal doctrine

Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, where Trevor Burrus is a research fellow and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. They filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been controversial since its creation. First proposed by then-Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, the CFPB administers 19 federal consumer-protection statutes and is overseen by a single director nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. That director serves a five-year term, removable only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Even in a town where so much power is wielded, it isn’t going too far to say that the CFPB director is one of the most powerful and unaccountable people in Washington. The agency isn’t even beholden to the normal appropriations process because its funding comes from the Federal Reserve. The director simply requests an amount “reasonably necessary to carry out” the agency’s duties, and the Fed provides it (so long as it doesn’t go above a set percentage of the Fed’s operating expenses).

A dedicated CFPB director could rework a large part of America’s financial system and there’s almost nothing any elected official could do about it. A dedicated president could promise his constituents that he would fix certain broken aspects of consumer lending, but he would be nearly powerless against the awesome and unaccountable power of the CFPB director.

There’s something wrong with that. Although independent agencies may sometimes be good for governance, they fit uneasily into our constitutional structure. Seila Law is a California-based law firm that assists clients with consumer debt. When the CFPB opened an investigation into whether the firm violated consumer-finance law, it probably didn’t expect to end up at the Supreme Court litigating the constitutionality of its own structure. Or maybe it did, because the structure of the CFPB has hung like a sword of Damocles over the agency since its creation.

This is a good time to have this fight. Independent agencies have been criticized for decades, and the judicial decisions that authorized them have long been questioned. This fourth branch of government skirts the usual system of checks and balances by exercising powers reserved for each of the three branches, frequently without any oversight or control by anyone, let alone the branch to which the power was originally entrusted. Yet the Constitution says, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President.” A fair reading of those words would look to the meaning of “executive power” and to anyone wielding that power. Those officials should be, at minimum, accountable to the president.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) is the foundational case upon which independent agencies were created. The Supreme Court looked to the meaning of “executive power” and ruled that limits on the president’s removal powers were constitutional with respect to the recently created Federal Trade Commission. The court described the FTC’s statutory duties as “neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative,” emphasizing the “non-partisan” and “expert” aspects of the commission. When conducting investigations and reporting its findings to Congress, the FTC “acts as a legislative agency.” When acting “as a master in chancery under rules prescribed by the court, it acts as an agency of the judiciary.” The court viewed FTC commissioners as “occup[ying] no place in the executive department” and “exercis[ing] no part of the executive power vested by the Constitution in the President.” Any exercise of “executive function,” which the court described as distinguishable from “executive power in the constitutional sense,” is in the service “of its quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial branches of government.”

While the court concluded that the FTC is quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial, and nonexecutive, the core of Humphrey’s Executor is a respect for the separation of powers. If an agency is “wholly disconnected from the executive department,” then it follows that the president would not have the inherent, unlimitable authority to control it. Congress may restrict the president’s removal power to protect the nonexecutive agency from the executive branch’s control. Think, for an obvious example, of a congressional committee. The president has no inherent authority to appoint or remove members of such a committee because it exercises legislative authority. The president could only feasibly gain such authority if Congress gave it to him (and then there would be a significant nondelegation problem).

In the decades after Humphrey’s Executor, the court continued to examine whether independent agencies wield “executive power.” In Wiener v. United States (1958), the court looked to the “intrinsic judicial character” of the War Claims Commission in ruling that the president could not remove members of the commission at will. In Morrison v. Olson (1988), however, the court changed course, upholding limits on a president’s ability to remove an independent counsel after considering whether “the removal restrictions are of such a nature that they impede the President’s ability to perform his constitutional duty.”

It is an odd decision. Because the independent counsel was essentially a prosecutor, and prosecution is traditionally a core executive function, the court was obliged to move away from distinctions between the “executive power” and “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers in order to uphold the restrictions on presidential removal. Instead, it turned to the much vaguer question of whether it is “essential to the President’s proper execution of his Article II powers that these agencies be headed up by individuals who were removable at will.”

Seven justices (with Anthony Kennedy recused and Justice Antonin Scalia vigorously dissenting), none of whom had ever been president or a governor, opined on what was “essential to the President’s proper execution of his Article II powers.” But there had earlier been a justice who had been president—and who wrote eloquently and knowingly about the nature of effective executive power. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, in Myers v. United States (1926), wrote that “when the grant of the executive power is enforced by the express mandate to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, it emphasizes the necessity for including within the executive power as conferred the exclusive power of removal.”

Taft’s lengthy opinion in Myers concluded that constitutional structure and separation of powers principles made the president’s removal power regarding officers exercising executive power “illimitable.” “From [the] division” of powers into three branches, Taft wrote, “the reasonable construction of the Constitution must be that the branches should be kept separate in all cases in which they were not expressly blended, and the Constitution should be expounded to blend them no more than it affirmatively requires.” Taft understood that when an agency exercises executive power, such as by filing suit to enforce a federal consumer-protection law, the officers of that agency are exercising the power vested by the Constitution in the president alone. For that exercise of the president’s power to be constitutionally valid, the president must retain ultimate control over its use.

If the CEO of a company were limited in her ability to remove a lesser officer, that would severely curtail her prerogative as executive. Similarly, the president’s ability to remove agency heads at will means that he can remove them if he disapproves of their use of the executive power—leaving ultimate responsibility for the exercise of executive power with the president. The public can in turn hold the president accountable for his decision to remove, or not remove, an agency head. If the president is limited in his ability to remove an agency head, then the executive power exists at least partially outside his control. Instead, it rests with the agencies and their chief officers—bureaucrats, unaccountable to the people. Such a system has no place in our constitutional structure, which rigidly defines where each power of government is vested.

Yet only a decade after Myers was decided, Humphrey’s Executor, in the words of Scalia’s dissent in Morrison, “gutt[ed], in six quick pages devoid of textual or historical precedent for the novel principle it set forth, [Myers’s] carefully researched and reasoned 70-page opinion.” While on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh described in his concurrence in In re Aiken County (2011) how Humphrey’s Executor has led to a situation in which the president “lacks day-to-day control over large swaths of regulatory policy and enforcement in the Executive Branch” due to independent agencies with “huge policymaking and enforcement authority” that can “greatly affect the lives and liberties of the American people.”

The test should be whether an officer exercises executive power. Because the executive power is vested by the Constitution exclusively in the president, any officer who exercises that power is removable by the president at his discretion. In Seila Law, this is not a close call: The CFPB director obviously exercises executive power. This case, which presents such a clear violation of the separation of powers, will allow the Supreme Court to set down a ground rule that will guide the lower courts in how to expound on the doctrine within the proper constitutional framework.

As Scalia noted in Morrison—one of those solo dissents that has come to be viewed as the true reading of the law all along—determining which kind of governmental power an officer exercises is not always easy, and there will always be close cases. Dealing with those close cases of quasi-powers under a clear and definitive test is, however, preferable to the status quo, in which lower courts are faced with the daunting task of simultaneously following Humphrey’s Executor, Morrison and the Constitution.

In Seila Law, the Supreme Court should clarify the extent to which Humphrey’s Executor remains good law and announce a clear test for removal-doctrine cases, thus relieving the lower courts of the task of navigating a jumbled set of precedents and allowing them to return to what Scalia referred to as the “fountainhead” of removal doctrine: the separation of powers.

The post Symposium: Resurrecting the fountainhead of removal doctrine appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/02/symposium-resurrecting-the-fountainhead-of-removal-doctrine/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[96thdayofrage]

Harris has spent her career locking up Black and brown people. She should not be allowed to shake hands, kiss babies or walk into black churches without being taken to task.

“Kamala Harris is no friend of black people.”

California Senator Kamala Harris shows all the signs of announcing her candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. She is giving speeches in the right states, interviewing with the right talking heads, and recently published the obligatory memoir. She has been on the Democratic funder’scasting couch for nearly two years. Only the official announcement is missing.

But Harris is highly problematic for black voters, perhaps more so than any other candidate. She served as the district attorney of San Francisco and later as attorney general of California. In both roles she did everything in her power to support the mass incarceration system and all of its foundations. That is what prosecutors do after all, but most of them don’t try to run for president and ask for black people’s votes.

Barack Obama was smart enough to choose a career path free of such red flags. As a community organizer,state legislator and United States senator he took a route that black people were able to support. Unlike Harris he was not actively involved in building the prison system, the institution that has done more damage to black people than any other.

“She did everything in her power to support the mass incarceration system and all of its foundations.”

The movement against mass incarceration and police killings is the human rights movement of our time.No one should be permitted to run for president with an expectation of black support if like Harris they played a role in worsening this ongoing humanitarian crisis.

As attorney general Harrisopposed legislation that would have required her office to investigate police shootings.When California was ordered to reduce prison overcrowding she argued against it. She said, accurately, that a low wage work force would go free. But that is the reason to diminish the carceral state, not an argument to continue it. She always sided with law enforcement, which means she acted against the interests of black people. She still does this in her memoir, These Truths We Hold: An American Journey. She says of mass incarceration, “I wanted to tear it down,” but the facts say otherwise.

“Harrisopposed legislation that would have required her office to investigate police shootings.”

One of her more disgraceful policies was to victim shame black mothers for their children’s school truancy. They were fined and when most of them could not pay, were put in jail and separated from their children.This action is the epitome of modern day chattel slavery and Harris cannot be given a pass.

She constantly hedges on issues of crime and punishment that have been so devastating. In one breath she states the obvious and says that police brutality exists. She then feels obliged to add that police, “deserve to be proud of their public service and commended for the way they do their jobs.” She now says, “We need to legalize marijuana and regulate it. And we need to expunge nonviolent marijuana-related offenses from the records of the millions of people who have been arrested and incarcerated so they can get on with their lives.” But as attorney general she actively opposed marijuana legalization.

“She always sided with law enforcement, which means she acted against the interests of black people.”

Harris shows her true colors before she even begins her campaign. She is either a cold hearted cynic who went along with the ever popular cult of being “tough on crime” or she harbors true animus towards black people. In either case she presents a great danger.

The 2020 election is already presenting dangers to black voters. The understandable desire to defeat Trump is complicated by the role of the ever duplicitous Democratic Party. The racist divide keeps black people trapped in the party that is only slightly less racist. Hillary Clinton spoke openly of “super predator” youth who must “be brought to heal.” Bill Clinton made Republican fantasies come true by ending a 60 year long right to public assistance. Obama negated the very idea of a black polity when he wasn’t telling jokes about an imaginary cousin Pookie. The only thing worse than accepting this long history of Democratic treachery would be electing someone who openly destroyed the lives of black men, women and children.

“As attorney general she actively opposed marijuana legalization.”

Kamala Harris is no friend of black people and she should be treated as such. She should not be allowed to shake hands, kiss babies or walk into black churches without being taken to task. We have seen this movie and we know how it ends. A black candidate with all the right credentials makes the case for race pride but the people end up with nothing to show for their adoration.

It can be argued that Obama’s presidency left black Americans worse off than before he took office. The already weakened black radical tradition was jettisoned in favor of representational politics that was devoid of any tangible political benefit. The only thing worse would be to elect another corporate backed Democrat ready to fool us with false notions of race pride. We must say no to Kamala Harris.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.” This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire. This then begs the questions of who really needs the protection and who protects the peoples of the world from the United States and its allies? The only logical, principled and strategic response to this question is citizens of the empire must reject their imperial privileges and join in opposing ruling elites exploiting labor and plundering the Earth. To do that, however, requires breaking with the intoxicating allure of cross-class, bi-partisan “white identity politics.” Neocons like William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl were the driving forces in pushing for the war in Iraq. They understood if they wanted to sell war, “Americans” needed to believe the conflict was about values, not interests. The neocons dusted off and put a new face on that old rationalization for colonialism—the white man’s burden. Interventions were to bring democracy and freedom to those people who were struggling to be just like their more advanced models in the white West. Liberal interventionists further developed those ideas into “humanitarian interventionism” and the “responsibility to protect.” The fact that the United States and Europe can wrap themselves in the flag of morality, practice savior politics and get away with it is a testament to the enduring psychopathology of white supremacist ideology. The most extreme expressions of this cognitive dissonance occurred during the Obama administration, when the notion of U.S. exceptionalism was used to justify continuing the barbarism of the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror. With this justification and the outrageous assertion that it was defending democracy, the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination committed crimes against humanity and war crimes that resulted in the deaths of millions, while millions more were displaced and ancient cities, nations and peoples were destroyed. The result? International Gallup and Pew research polls have consistently shown the peoples of the world consider the United States the greatest threat to world peace on the planet. National Security Strategy Under Trump: More of the Same When the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, Liberal pundits suggested it was significantly different than any previous U.S. strategy.. But beyond some specific references to putting “America” and its citizens first in relationship to the economy, and the reactionary stances of tightening border security and enforcing strict immigration policies, Trump’s strategy did not stray much from the post-Cold War strategy of the preceding years. The difference that did exist was more in style than substance. The Trump administration completely dispensed with all pretexts used by previous administrations. Even domestic law, like the War Powers Act that was ignored by the Obama administration, continues to be of no concern for the new Trump administration. Now it is Trump’s “America first” with no concern for international law or accepted standards of behavior. Unchecked by the countervailing power of the Soviet Union, the bi-partisan National Security Strategy produced in the 1990s that committed the U.S. state to pursue policies that would ensure continued U.S. economic, political and military hegemony through the 21st century—the “new American century”—is still the overall strategic objective of this administration. Even explicitly naming China and Russia as “competition” that threatens to harm the country’s security was not that much of a departure since the centerpiece of U.S policy has been checking any state that challenged U.S. power in any region. The Trump administration named threats to U.S. interests—North Korea in Asia, Russia in Eurasia, Iran in West Asia, with jihadist groups included in case the United States needed a War on Terror (WOT) justification for U.S. interventions anywhere in the world. While Neocons and liberal interventionists in previous administrations sugarcoated U.S. geo-strategic objectives to mask hegemony, the Trump rhetoric is crude, direct and unambiguously aggressive. Protecting U.S. interests in the 21st century means relying on military aggression, war and subversion. Building the U.S. anti-war movement as the responsibility to protect from Empire Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He also said the public allowing this violence would lead to a kind of national spiritual death that would continue to make the U.S. state a danger to the world. That spiritual death has not quite happened completely. Yet accepting the “inevitability” of violence and the necessity for waging war is now more deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of individuals in the United States than it was 50 years ago when King warned of the deep malady of U.S. society. For most of the 21st century, the United States has been at war. Culturally, mass shootings, the wars on drugs and terror, violence and war as entertainment, livestreamed videos of horrendous police-executed murders as well as of a head of state being sodomized with a knife have resulted in what Henry Giroux refers to as a “culture of cruelty”. But the very fact that the authorities need to lie to the people with fairy tales of the responsibility to protect in order to give moral coverage for the waging of war is an acknowledgement that they understand that there is enough humanity left with the public that it would reject U.S. warmongering if it was only seen as advancing narrow national interests. It is this remaining moral core—and the objective interests of the clear majority of the people to be in opposition to war—that provides the foundation for reviving the modern anti-war movement. Baltimore was the site of the rebellion in response to Freddie Gray’s murder by the domestic military we refer to as “the police.” There, a couple of hundred activists will convene January 12 to kick off a new campaign to close all U.S. foreign bases. This gathering is the result of a new coalition of forces—both old and new—to revive the U.S. anti-war movement. This conference comes on the heels of another meeting that took place just a few months ago in Washington, D.C., where some of the same forces came together to kick-off a campaign to “divest from the war machine.” Strategically these efforts are designed to be the first steps toward building the confidence, institutional strength and programmatic focus of a new, reinvigorated, broad-based, anti-war, pro-peace and anti-imperialist movement in the United States. We are opposing the warmongering both corporate political parties have normalized. The difficulties and challenges of this endeavor are not lost on the various organizations, networks and coalitions that are part of these efforts. We all recognize that there are no shortcuts to the delicate reconstructing of our existing forces and the challenge of expanding those forces by bringing in new formations. The ideological and political differences that have surfaced among left and progressive forces around issues of war and imperialism make it more challenging. But the imperative of expressing solidarity with the victims of U.S. warmongering must take precedence over our differences and should serve as a basis for building political unity. Solidarity, however, is not enough for those of us in the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). We recognize its importance as a baseline principle for (re)-building a broad anti-war movement. Our common interests with other oppressed peoples, nations and states that find themselves in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism demands we offer more than solidarity—we must stand as allies. Those of us building the Black Alliance for Peace understand we cannot afford the comforting myths of U.S. benevolence that attempts to conceal the naked deployment of U.S. state power in service of Western capitalist/colonialist interests. And so, we view with suspicion, if not treat with disdain, our comrades who support U.S. interventions, even when they frame that support with “leftist” justifications. For oppressed nations and peoples of the world, the U.S. white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy is and remains the principle contradiction. There must not be any nationalist sentimentality or equivocation on that position. We saw how the anti-war opposition that emerged during the Bush years in opposition to lawless state-sanctioned violence, dissolved during the Obama administration. Liberals and major elements of the “left” objectively aligned themselves with the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination through their silence or outright support in the name of opposing authoritarian regimes. The consequence of that class collaboration is the spectrum of war has today become a permanent feature of policy discourse. The obscene $80 billion increase in military spending that was supported by both parties and the corporate media reflects that collaboration and the corrosive impact of almost two decades of militarism on the politics and consciousness of the public. So, for BAP, the historic task is clear. The people must be separated from the capitalist oligarchy and the nature of the state must be exposed. Our politics must be clear and our rhetoric devoid of liberal ambiguities. We must expose the underlying capitalist-class interests that are masked by appeals to national interests and patriotism. The anti-war movement must advance a clear understanding of the economic and class interests that are at root of imperialist strategies and great power conflicts. We must assert without equivocation the position that we can’t get rid of the scourge of war without getting rid of racism and capitalism and that the people should reject all calls to protect the national interests promoted by the ruling elites. We must say if the rulers want war, let them fight it themselves! The anti-war and anti-imperialist position must be seen as the highest expression of internationalism and global solidarity. Activists in the United States must reject all efforts to pink-wash militarism and recognize their moral obligation—as citizens of empire—to oppose all U.S. military interventions. We must take the position that we will no longer allow chicken hawk politicians to send our sons and daughters off to other lands, where they become war criminals fighting other working-class and poor people who only want social justice, national sovereignty and self-determination for themselves. The permanent war agenda of the capitalist dictatorship must be met with permanent opposition from the working class and all oppressed people. The people must understand the link between the racialized justifications for making war abroad with the intensification of the war being waged against Black and Brown communities in the United States We say to progressives that you can’t pretend that you believe “Black Lives Matter” in the United States and not be opposed to the assault on the humanity of Palestinians, of Yemenis, of the millions lost in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, of the destruction of Libya and of coups in Honduras and destabilization in Venezuela. Reject the racist 21st century version of the white man’s burden with its absurd notion of humanitarian war and the responsibility to protect and understand that the real threat to world peace is the empire that we are all a part of. Our task is clear: the anti-war position is not an add-on. It is a fundamental moral and political obligation for the citizens of empire. The world can no longer wait. http://clubof.info/

[racingtoaredlight]

RTARL tries to explain a holistic view of economics

This is going to be mostly devoid of specific sourcing and functions more as a placeholder for some far off future deep dive into these ideas so adjust your expectations thusly. Also, the images from the original film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers don’t explicitly relate to the content other than the idea of pods. If I’m wrong about that tell me.

The main thing I really want to put forward is this idea circling my brain that our economy is best described as a series of pods. Each of those pods (on a segment basis such as “military”, “food”, “manufacturing” and so on; on a specialized industry basis, on down to the company basis) is organized as a top down ideal where the ideas and capital come from a leader/group of leaders, the work goes through the employees, and the profits cycle back to the leader(s). You can add profit-sharing to some degree but the basic model remains the same and if you think about it long enough the distance between American-style capitalism and high middle ages feudalism become less and less apparent. More a change in venue and messaging than in practical division of resources and spoils.

What made me want to put these words on this podunk website for this mostly disinterested audience on this day? I was made aware of tomdispatch.com and this outstanding piece by William Hartung to delve into the full military budget of the United States government. (Thanks, Jeremy Scahill!) The backbone of American economic planning is generically termed “defense.” Defense can mean almost anything and necessarily affects everything if that is the base of all principles. It can and will be argued that the U.S. overspends from a defense mindset but this isn’t necessarily the case as it’s based on what other nations spend relative to their own economic power (viewing said nations as singular actors.) Is the U.S. the Earth’s largest empire because of its own prioritization or because of other nation’s lack of prioritization? I shouldn’t bring that up because it leads down its own unending rabbit hole in regards to nation building and entanglements and deep state/covert activities. That isn’t the discussion going on in my mind here right now.

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What’s interesting to me about the expanded scope of Hartung’s (and before him Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer) is the better view of what can be classified as defense spending. There is dimensionality to that view far beyond merely the budgeting at hand. This is a window into how all budgeting and economic organization works in our system and, as a result, how the spoils flow back to the top of the pyramid. Is this efficient in an overall sense? No, I don’t think it is.

It acts, in a simplified sense, as mind control for the masses as a means to continue on in this way where the haves have more and more comforts precisely because there are have-nots. If you take the money in a closed system (in this example the defense budget) and you spread it around to enough pods (armed forces, administrators, intelligence agencies, contractors) it becomes easy for those who are charged with allocating resources to put those resources into the hands of their cronies and allies.

The expansion of the contracted segment of defense spending over the past several decades acts as a wash on those resources so that a handful of “well-paid” contractors cover up for the exorbitant over-paying of their employer and disguises the spoils being given to Blackwater, Dyncorp, et al. In a full profit share model the employees of those corporations would be much more richly compensated, giving a clearer picture to military enlistees how much money they are not getting and, perhaps, pressuring the Pentagon to stop using so many contractors in the first place. This is separate but not unrelated to the actions of those contractors, which are often employed as a way of getting around more strict engagement rules for direct military personnel.

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The lack of transparency between employer and employee in regards to profits of the company are, as the concept goes, a feature and not a bug. A somewhat desperate but not quite destitute general populace is more likely to go along with whatever they are given rather than drop out of the system in despair or, more problematically for “the ruling class,” attempt to develop strategies for leveling the playing field or decimating it altogether.

The pod structure of our economy is also a feature that helps to divorce workers from their neighbors and a larger idea of who is on what side in a given economic conflict. A microcosm of how this works is the political focus on immigrants and foreigners “stealing jobs” from Americans. Were these jobs available to Americans in the first place if a factory is closed in South Carolina while another one is opened in Shenzen? Are the Chinese employees who take these jobs that are suddenly available the violent actor in this scenario? No and no. The workers in America that lost their jobs are in service to the same forces as the workers in China that found them. The enemy, if you choose to view things in those terms, are the organizers of that system - the CEO, CFO, Board of Directors, company president - that made the decision to divest from one geographic area and locate the factory in another. This seems obvious but is still not grasped easily in a landscape that is as much beholden to media coverage as it is to daily practical realities.

This pod setup becomes more problematic as an organizing principle in a world where there are vastly more human beings than there are reasons to employ them. How does our post-feudalist system continue in a nouveau feudalist manner if the populace has tipped from dependent to desperate? There is opportunity on all sides here but the ability to aggregate information and organize physical actors is weighted more towards the top of the pyramid.

Inefficiency within this system as it stands stems from the idea that those on the top of the pyramid are acting in good faith for all of those below them. There is no evidence to support this theory. If anything, the history of labor strife supports quite the opposite. Post-strife companies tend to be more productive, innovative (in a real-world sense, not in Silicon Valley parlance), and remunerative. This is a larger topic that I’ve been meaning to study for years through the prism of MLB vs. MLBPA but it is consistent in other industries.

This is a stream of consciousness ramble in search of a financial backer to become something more. I’ll be back to mindless sports pablum and dick jokes in no time. Sorry for the abrupt ending this is as far as I can make it without adding footnotes and writing a million words.

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[therightnewsnetwork]

Thomas Sowell’s Legacy

After more than a quarter century of sharing his thoughts and opinions through his Creators Syndicate newspaper column, Thomas Sowell recently decided to retire from column writing. It is a loss to public discourse and especially a loss to the African-American community, for reasons I shall explore below. Luckily, the reading public still has access to Sowell’s trenchant political and social observations and analyses through his many books, including his latest, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, a revised and enlarged edition of a 2015 volume of the same title.

His overall aim is to clarify the facts and causes of income and social inequalities. In pursuing this aim, he challenges the thinking of “luck egalitarians,” the moral philosophy of John Rawls, and the redistributionists, all of whom advocate various concepts of equal opportunity and disparate political schemes to summon desired outcomes through social engineering. Often these conceptions of equal opportunity assume that most of the differences in achievement between individuals and groups should either be even or random. In the case of luck egalitarians, advocates of an extreme version of equal opportunity, life chances should depend only on an individual’s responsible choices, not on brute luck. Luck egalitarians deem morally illegitimate such things as one’s genetic endowment, abilities, and the circumstances of birth; however, they also deem morally legitimate things that are acquired, both tangible and intangible, through deliberate and calculated choices.   

Sowell capitalizes on this dichotomy and argues against the assumption made by equal opportunity warriors about achievement “disparities” or “gaps” among individuals and groups. The assumption, according to Sowell, is that many economic and social outcomes would tend to be either even or random, if left to the natural course of events, so that the strikingly uneven and non-random outcomes so often observed in the real world imply either adverse human intervention or else some genetic differences in the people whose outcomes are so different. Due to the decline of genetic determinism, it becomes intellectually attractive to surmise that disparities in outcomes that are not even or random can be explained by discrimination or some other form of malicious intent.

Sowell offers an alternative view that does not assume evenness or randomness among individual and group achievement. His view posits causal factors such as geography, demography, culture, and political factors that are far from even or random. Sowell acknowledges that other causal factors that are motivated by human malice or discrimination, like conquest and slavery, can play a role in accounting for unequal outcomes, but conquest and slavery should not have more causal weight than other factors merely because they are morally offensive. When he discusses geography and the continent of Africa, for example, Sowell points out that geographic conditions have been an important factor in Africa’s development. The Sahara desert is the largest desert in the world, separating North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa. Although the sheer size of the desert has adversely affected the development of North Africa, it has had far more devastating consequences for sub-Saharan Africa.

The separation between the North and the South has for centuries been the main factor in limiting contact between the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world, and the lack of adequate harbors in tropical Africa also limited contact with overseas cultures. By contrast, navigable waterways such as the Mississippi and Hudson rivers and many natural harbors on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts were instrumental in the development of the United States. Navigable waterways fostered contact both within U.S. borders and externally. Sowell provides ample illustrations of geography playing an important role in the development of countries and peoples. And it is not egalitarian, says Sowell, adding that “the disparities in geographic settings, and in the phenomena which arise from those settings, are at least as striking as the economic disparities that many people find so surprising.”

Unlike luck egalitarians, Sowell understands that it is foolish to assume that equal opportunity requires that a country’s path to development or an individual’s path to achievement be completely devoid of obstacles that are not of their own choosing. Brute luck and its effects are not episodic; they are factors throughout one’s life. Geography may limit or expand a country’s development, but in either case it constrains its choices.

Sowell also discusses cultural traits that are far from even or random in accounting for differences among ethnic groups. Culture is intangible and portable, according to Sowell, and includes not only customs, values, and attitudes but also skills and talents—what economics calls human capital—that more directly affect economic outcomes.

The topic of cultural capital and its diffusion has figured prominently in several of Sowell’s books. In Wealth, Poverty and Politics he elaborates on the concept as it applies to various ethnic groups. He points out, for example, that in places as distinct as Australia, Russia, France, and England, Germans have excelled at building pianos. They were the first to pioneer advances in optical instruments and cameras. They also excelled in military skills in countries around the world. The Chinese, Jews, and Lebanese, despite having been discriminated against, thrived economically wherever they migrated due to their cultural capital. Sowell’s discussion of the Germans and other ethnic groups underscores his argument that more than skills are involved in differentiating these various ethnic groups. Behind the skills are cultural values that make the acquisition of new skills a priority, and values that make the shedding of obsolete skills imperative. The argument is insightful insofar as it shows that cultural differences are not random or even:

Germans are just one of the groups who have taken their own particular culture with them when they immigrated to other societies, so that the general environments of those various other societies were not the controlling factor in these groups’ economic or other outcomes in those societies. … To account for radical differences in income and wealth among groups living in the same society, environment can be defined as what is going on around a group, while culture means what is going on within each group.                                                                                       

The other assumption of equal-opportunity advocates is that justice must precede efficiency. John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice goes to great lengths to defend this view. Rawl’s position is that unequal economic and social awards may be accepted only insofar as they benefit the less fortunate in society. Sowell argues that such a view can limit progress within society on behalf of those who engage in counterproductive lifestyles. The less fortunate or those who make poor decisions are not predestined to their fate. Although their choices may be affected by “past social conditions,” they are still influenced by current incentives—penalties and rewards—for their future conduct, especially when non-judgmentalism amounts to a subsidy for counterproductive behavior.

The differences in income and wealth among various cultures can be accounted for by the differences in productivity. The Rawlsian position ignores the obvious fact that income inequalities seem to match inequalities in economic productivity among individuals and groups. According to Sowell, ignoring the role of productivity in income inequalities is typical of redistributionists, who try to correct for what they consider unearned advantages (“the accident of birth”) received by individuals and groups. Thus they are more interested in judging merit than productivity, and social justice becomes their rallying cry. In order to illustrate his point, Sowell asks us to imagine a man who is born into a poor, abusive, and alcohol-ridden family. The man, through sheer determination, rises above his circumstances to become a carpenter, a supportive husband, and a loving father to his children. The man’s achievements are certainly meritorious. On the other hand, imagine a man who is born into a loving and well connected affluent family who goes on to become a brain surgeon. Although it is commendable that the second man becomes a brain surgeon, it is not necessarily more of a meritorious achievement than becoming a carpenter. Sowell elaborates:

In a world where rewards were based solely on merit, there would be no obvious reason to pay the brain surgeon any more than the carpenter was paid. But, in a world where productivity matters, this is no longer a question of the relative merits of individuals. What is far 192 Wealth, Poverty and Politics more important than merit-based “social justice” to particular income recipients is the well-being of all the people who stand to benefit from what they produce. Introducing production into the discussion makes a big difference. It is now a question of the relative urgency of brain surgery and carpentry….

Instead of construing the relative economic fates of individuals and groups as “income recipients,” we should look at the “services produced” by certain individuals and groups in relation to those who benefit from the income redistributionists. Ultimately, Sowell argues, the luck egalitarians, Rawlsians, and redistributionists seek a type of social justice that goes beyond what any society actually controls. If the past is irrevocable, and choices are necessarily constrained by circumstances that long predate our arrival on the scene, the only possible way to achieve social justice is to create our own world. However, with such a creation we are no longer seeking social justice; rather we are seeking “cosmic justice.” And if the past is any indication, the quest for cosmic justice can lead to much suffering.

Sowell also brings to bear on the topic of black American culture many of the insights he has put forth through his Creators Syndicate columns. These insights are grounded in the belief that black Americans are no different from other ethnic groups in America who strive to rise above their humble beginnings. He does not deny that the majority of blacks were introduced to America through slavery, but he denies that black Americans were permanently scarred by the experience of slavery and, thus, in need of perpetual government handouts.

Sowell’s approach is to marshal facts in order to analyze a claim or social policy. One claim that he has very little tolerance for is the belief that slavery and post-slavery discrimination left a legacy of broken families among black Americans. He convincingly shows that the data on the black family say otherwise. For example, the proportion of black children living with one parent was not as significant “during the first hundred years after slavery as it became in the first thirty-five years after the great expansion of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.” Sowell argues that the causal connection between the breakdown of the black family and the welfare state is empirically verifiable for those willing to look at the historical record.

Thomas Sowell’s matter-of-fact, empirical approach to topical issues that affect the black community will be sorely missed. His trenchant analytical approach to these issues will continue to be on display, though, in the pages of Wealth, Poverty and Politics and his other books. Of course Sowell’s ideas also can be seen now in the work of many other African-American political commentators, many of them influenced by his scholarly excellence born of rigorous, data-driven economics.

Andre Archie, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, is the author of Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades. He is currently working on a book titled Socratic Conservatism, Socratic Questions: The Right Turn in Plato’s Political Dialogues for The Catholic University of America Press.

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from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/thomas-sowells-legacy/