#extremely late for this as I have been a slave of capitalism

[sky-ham]

How could I ever compare?

Week 1: Secret Crushes for the COP February event #ArcaneLoveLetters

made her a lil airship as a nod to mechanic!Vi from LoL lore

[Week 1] [Week 4]

[lets-talk-spirituality]

Hi!

I know I’ve been away. Why? Well I went abroad like I said. It was really eye opening in many ways and ultimately I learned that living in Hawaii has changed my traveling experience. When you live somewhere so beautiful it can feel like most things pale in comparison, especially since I love this place beyond just thinking it’s beautiful. A lot of my life has been like this. Experiencing the extremes and trying to appreciate the balance.

There’s been some shit with my job. I’m getting hair pulled away, like I know I can’t stay here any longer but where do I go. I’m on some precipice. I’m not sure what it is but they’re making my living situation here challenging and I’m not really sure what to do because every route ends up at the same place. I feel like a lot of this is probably my Saturn return.

It’s like I tried to pursue all they said to pursue and I did, I found the end of each road, reported on everything in the in between. And I keep looping. I learned that there is nothing. I got to the bottom of the human layer and it’s air. There’s nothing guys. No matter what job I pursue, ultimately I have to work and toil under capitalism. No matter how much I empower myself, I still live under patriarchy and that limits me. Even though I’ve ascended collective consciousness, that collective consciousness still prevents me from staying outside of it for too long. It’s a strong current.

I’m not sure how to hold both and it feels like I’m living in two planes at once. A higher dimension beyond this one but I have to keep dropping down to be a wage slave or to be somehow mistreated. I feel frustrated a lot. Like I’m seeing double at all times. What currently is and what it could be. It’s like layers on top of each other. I have this higher layer operating with magic and great friendships and this other layer of the crumbling economy and the genocide and it’s confusing.

I haven’t been active because I’ve been teeter tottering between extremes trying to rebalance myself somehow. I keep getting thrown off balance by life and I’m not really sure what to do. I’m being told part of what I’m learning is to bring things down from energy and materialize it. That is very challenging to do. Feeling sort of bored lately no matter what I try. Maybe that boredom is a desire for emotions. Anyway, going through it! I’ve been feeling a desire to come back and do some posting but I’m not sure what it looks like yet. So hello!

[bthump]

"guts seems to care more that he can’t hit griff than that casca’s been kidnapped" 👀 legit saw a couple of g/tsca shippers on twitter doubt if guts is really doing this mainly for casca since he mindlessly decided to attack griffith instead of trying to protect casca by staying at her side...

lmao nice. And also very true about how that fight went down. Guts’ single-minded attack didn’t do Casca any favours, but it’s extremely on brand.

Gonna answer a few more asks on this chapter in this post to spare your dashes lol.

anonymous  asked:

Wtf they are disappearing if griff united astral plane and real world? Like dragons and goblins are fine but elfs are not... what.

I am also immensely confused about this. Like, I haven’t double checked but I’m pretty sure someone mentioned that they were only even able to sail to the island because Griffith united the astral world and real world. I assume that they disappeared because Danann’s cherry tree was destroyed, but like... Griffith’s plan was to destroy all the witches and their spirit trees, so he wanted to destroy those magical fantasy areas and kick the creatures living there back into the astral plane, but then also wanted to flood the world with astral plane creatures which somehow doesn’t include the ones tied to those trees specifically? And why did the tree disappearing take the mermaids with it? Why Puck, presumably, who lived perfectly fine far away from it?

It’s possible that Danann just made the executive decision to peace out and take every magical creature in the area with her lol, which wouldn’t be a contradiction at all but would still be very sudden and weird

It’s also possible that it’s a whole nother genre shift and we’re back to low-fantasy now, and the dragons and unicorns and elves and stuff back on the mainland are gone too, but like, lol that was short-lived, and does that mean Falconia doesn’t actually need a world full of fantasy nightmares in order to thrive? Or is Griffith gonna be fucked when he gets back?

Guess we’ll eventually find out. Hopefully.

Anonymous asked:

I'm excited that the story is taking a darker turn, but I just want them to capitalize on it instead of making Casca torture porn, which is what I'm dreading is gonna happen :( Do you think that the team is going to avoid doing that? Because lately, I've got no hope.

I have hope that they’ll avoid it. Miura has mentioned regretting how far he went with some of the content, presumably things like the Eclipse rape, and he seemed to actively try to do better in depicting women afterwards with Farnese - like I recall him mentioning consulting with gender studies professors while writing. He still wasn’t perfect of course, but the sexual violence has been comparatively quite tame for years, and our last glimpse into the Eclipse rape in Casca’s dreamscape was downright tasteful, so I’m still feeling relatively sure that Casca’s not being kidnapped as like, a sex slave or whatever. Plus Miura also mentioned in one of his last interviews that Casca had to come to terms with what had happened to her, so that also seems to suggest that she’s not going to be like, thrown into a torture chamber to be traumatized even more.

I mean it never hurts to prepare for the worst lol but it doesn’t seem like something Miura would’ve gone for at this point in the story imho.

Anonymous asked:

What do you think about Berserk Team asking for a feedback about their performance after this arc seemingly finished with Guts in despair?

Huh, I didn’t really think to place any importance on it tbh. It kind of just looked like a version of the rote ‘contact us at this mailing address’ note you always used to see in comics and stuff. I’m not sure if they still do that now in the internet age lol, I haven’t noticed it since I was a kid but I also haven’t really read printed comics since then either so. I guess if it’s a new thing then it’s a little eyebrow raising? But it seems mainly like a courtesy thing, like Young Animal putting their ‘feedback goes here’ note on the Berserk chapter this issue because it’s new and people will probably have opinions about it.

[tren-fraszka]

Fall Anime 2022 summary

Since Fall 2022 anime was stacked I decided to make summary, because there’s so much good stuff. Am I slightly late? Yes. Does it really matter? No.

And to get it out of the way, I didn’t watch Chainswman anime, because I read the manga and found it not nearly as entertaining as most of the people do. Denji just really doesn’t work for me as protagonist.

I also dropped My Hero Academia, because I feel nothing, but pure disappointment for the direction its manga took.

Bocchi the Rock - best comedy and best exploration of social anxiety all at once. Those two elements shouldn’t work together so well and yet they do. If you want to see a girl with crippling social anxiety realizing her dreams to join a band and shred the guitar before actual live public then you won’t find anything better. No, scratch that, this is probably the best this fall anime season has to offer with extremely creative animation and well-crafted set characters that compliment each other perfectly

Gundam: Witch of Mercury - generational trauma the anime. The series is ongoing, but so far the setup had been excellent. The addition of school setting was actually a brilliant move, as it allowed to explore the twisted relationship between the wealthy corporation owners and their children. And have I mentioned the main plot centers around a lesbian engagement? This shows creates a beautiful intersection between a corporate profit, giant robots, personal vendettas, and teenagers entering adolescence.

Raven of the Inner Palace - a slowly burn romance between a young emperor and the girl with ability to summon ghosts, who’s confined inside the palace. With totally not Chinese palace as a backdrop to all the court intrigue and supernatural drama. If any of those elements sounds interesting then I would recommend it. The story isn’t finished and the second season is unlikely, but even then I enjoyed how different this story felt from everything else that aired this season.

Do It Yourself - fluffy story about DIY school club with some solid character interactions and nice jokes. It’s a pure feel good story, and it really excels in that aspect. It gets a bit ridiculous at the end with how far the characters go to not use their own money to resolve issues that could be really easily resolved that way. Still, it was a nice watch. I’d definitely recommend it if you want a series to cheer you up with unrelenting good vibes

I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss - a solid if a bit too rushed comedy. Even if the final episode was painfully rushed, I think it’s still worth experiencing this hilarious romance of a go-getter villainess and a sadistic demon lord. Consistently strong gags and endearing characters make up for the failings, resulting in a pleasant if ultimately forgettable experience

Urusei Yatsura - Rumiko Takahashi’s old manga had received a new adaptation to prove that it contains plenty of joke that can entertain even the modern audience. The show will continue into the second season, but given that the plot is mostly an excuse for new gags, there’s no reason not to start now. There’s just a certain charm to Rumiko Takahashi’s style of comedy that’s still worth experiencing 

Management of a Novice Alchemist - A really wholesome story of an orphan attempting to maintain her own alchemy business with some surprisingly solid economic beats in it. Who will be able to wield capitalism to their advantage? This anime is just a good comfort food and I want to shout out the animator who despite the show having mostly average animation, just went really hard during some action cuts. They were only a few seconds long cuts, but I’ve seen you and I respect you.

Reincarnated as a Sword - exactly what it says on the tin. Rather than being an overpowered character in it’s own right, the next victim of Truck-kun reincarnates as a powerful sword who ends up saving a slave catgirl and decides to become her weapon so she can find happiness and achieve her dreams. Pretty wholesome and fun overall with announced continuation.

Bibliophile Princess - A romace involving a bookworm and a prince. I’ve seen people consistently complain that it’s a subpar adaptation and while I don’t know the source material I feel like they might have a point. It felt like this anime was constantly underutilizing its own potential, not using it’s medium to properly communicate plot or character moments and relaying way too much on telling viewers things which could have been shown. Still, it was a pleasant romance which had something going for it.

Spy x Family Part 2 - If you’ve seen first part you know exactly what to expect, though focusing more on shorter unconnected gags makes this half feel weaker overall. It’s still good, but ends up feeling a bit too diluted when it comes to the proportions of main plot and just pure gags

Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun S3 - remains the tastiest comfort food. My son grew up and went to win school’s survival tournament. I’m proud of him and all his friends, who are proving just how skilled they are.

Mob Psycho 100 S3 - a great send off for the series, though it did drag a bit for me at times. But the final arc was such a great conclusion that it easily makes for the slower pace of this season.

[random-thought-depository]

Something I originally intended as part of my previous post but it was getting so long I decided to do it separately. It's pretty tangential to the Dorley thing but does connect to some of my ideas. Have a literal 25,000 year old vampire OC! Also some nuancing of Elle; she's such an obvious symbol of woke capitalism I initially gravitated toward writing her as super-evil and the sort of abuser who manipulates and uses marginalized people by pretending to be their friend, and I still kind of want that characterization for her, but lately I've been trying to nuance her somewhat.

Under read-more for length, and also content warnings for slavery, mind control, sexual/reproductive coercion, incest, child-killing, cannibalism, characters being approximately '60/'70s expected level of politically incorrect, and, uh, extremely long-term imprisonment is the best way I can think of to describe it. This was heavily inspired by me finding the idea of a 25,000 year old vampire fun and by the vague statements in Glow, Worm that vampires do age, just very slowly, but also by the rather awful thoughts "how do you make a 25,000 year old vampire relatable? You deprive them of the opportunity to have 25,000 years worth of experiences" and "What if: Dorley but instead of force-fem it's about patriarchy and kingship and what James C. Scott talks about and taking the vampire thrall thing to its ultimate logical nightmare fuel conclusions, and it's much worse because that's appropriate because it's more closely adjacent to the long terror in the gender as coercive political project room?"

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A little after she'd finished thrall-conditioning Annaliese, Elle found another vampire she thought might be useful in setting up her 'programme.' Her name was Jarna, and she was a thrall-brainwashed vampire slave like Annaliese, and she was being sold by her previous master, who said he didn't need her anymore. Jarna has a super-thrall "bullshit vampire power," similar to Annaliese's. Jarna's blood is actually much more potent than Annaliese's in terms of being able to thrall lots of people at once, but it keeps less well; Jarna's thrall factor doesn't survive her blood being frozen, and has a shorter shelf-life than Annaliese's under refrigeration. For a while Elle had an idea that she might be able to use Jarna for the 'programme' just like Annaliese, and/or that Jarna's super-thrall might be useful to her elsewhere.

Jarna was... strange. She looked like an old woman. She was very tall; more than six feet tall. She had brown skin and a combination of features that didn't really fit into any ethnic group Elle or Annaliese or anyone else could think of; she looked... different from anyone on Earth. Annaliese noticed she smelled different too. Jarna being a vampire was a big confounder there, of course, vampires and humans smell different, but... Jarna's scent was noticeably unique in a way that went beyond the way almost everyone's body odor is unique.

From Jarna's descriptions of her earlier life, as near as they could tell, she'd been born into some primitive tribe, and then she'd been abducted and taken to a place ruled by her previous master, who Jarna called Tatasi (that was not the name Elle knew him by). Tatasi had transitioned and thrall-brainwashed Jarna and during the thrall-brainwashing process he'd discovered her super-thrall ability. With appropriate control techniques Jarna could control thousands of people at once through blood thrall, and that was what Tatasi used her for; he used her blood to mentally enslave the people who worked for him. Her ability made her very useful to Tatasi, and it didn't seem to pass to childe vampires, so she'd been precious to him - not as a person, but as a tool. Frightened of the possibility that harm might come to her, he kept her confined to apartments in guarded compounds for a very long time. At first she'd spent a very long time mostly confined to three inner chambers in his house, and then later she'd been moved around more, but always she was kept inside and in seclusion. Elle thought Jarna's lifestyle during her thralldom to Tatasi sounded a lot like the life of a woman in purdah. And then one day Tatasi told Jarna that he didn't need her anymore, and Tatasi sold her to Elle.

Much as Jarna herself didn't seem to fit into any race Elle or Annaliese knew, Jarna's descriptions of her homeland didn't seem to quite fit any place on Earth. At first they'd thought it might be somewhere in Africa: it was a savannah, or something that sounded like one, and Jarna made vague references to animals that sounded like they might be elephants. But Jarna didn't look African, she looked more Indian than anything else, but that didn't seem quite right either... And her homeland had very cold winters, winters of deep snow, winters when rivers and ponds and lakes froze over - the descriptions reminded Annaliese of her miserable two months of freedom in a Russian winter, but maybe worse; Jarna talked about powerful winter winds, there were few trees to get in their way so they would blow unimpeded across the open plains and they were so forceful and so cold and they would blow things around; she seemed to remember it vividly. They thought maybe the high Arctic or the Eurasian steppe, but Jarna didn't look like an Inuit or a Mongolian or a Kazakh or a Turk. And Jarna's description of her abduction suggested relatively close proximity to a sea to the west, and it didn't sound like the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea, it was a cold and wild sea with crashing, pounding waves and icebergs, it sounded like the north Atlantic, and then they'd sailed through a straight that sounded like maybe Gibraltar but that couldn't possibly be right... None of it fit together, none of it made sense! It was like she was describing an alien planet! No, more confusing than that - it felt like she was describing Earth but the picture just didn't fit together right!

Elle had thralled Jarna almost as soon as she'd gotten her off the airplane, not even really for brainwashing at that point but simply so Jarna would obey Elle instead of being loyal to her old master. If Elle and Jarna had the sort of intimate thrall connection Annaliese tends to form while thralling people they would have been saved a lot of guessing; Elle getting access to a single memory-image of the 'elephants' of Jarna's homeland would have clarified everything. But thrall is idiosyncratic. It's a relationship. A relationship of domination, but still, a relationship; its shape depends on the people involved and the circumstances. Elle and Jarna didn't form the sort of mind-link through which they could easily share mental images. Their thrall connection mostly just made Jarna obedient. Elle could have looked directly into Jarna's memories, but that would have required pushing in a way she didn't want to do yet.

Jarna claimed that she'd been transitioned from human to vampire and put into seclusion by Tatasi as a young woman. And if that was true it was horrifying. Because Jarna looked like an old woman, and if she was transitioned young that could only mean that she became old as a vampire, and that was something theoretically possible, but it would require an immense span of time. Vampires do age, but it's very slow. The very old vampires, the ones who've lived thousands of years, have just barely perceptibly aged; if they had solid jet black hair when they transitioned they might have some barely noticeable grey hairs around their temples now, or something like that. You need to look at the very oldest vampires, the ones almost as old as civilization, to really see it, and even then, they haven't aged very much, assuming their recollections of their youth are reliable. If Jarna became old as a vampire, how old was Jarna?

The answer to that question came by accident. Elle had a large library in her mansion, and Jarna could not read English at this point (in fact, Jarna couldn't read any language at this point; Tatasi had never bothered to teach her to read and write), but sometimes she liked to look at books with pictures, and sometimes she'd ask Annaliese what the pictures were of. And one day Jarna came to Annaliese and Elle very excited, holding a children's illustrated book about the Ice Age.

Jarna showed Annaliese and Elle an illustration of a herd of woolly mammoths moving across the ice age tundra, with a single mammoth foregrounded. And Jarna pointed at the foregrounded mammoth and said, "I know this animal! We hunted them! My people hunted them!"

Jarna flipped excitedly through the picture book, and pointed to illustration after illustration of extinct animals that she knew, that she recognized. Oh, but she thought the artist hadn't gotten them quite right! And at some point in her long boring captivity Jarna had taught herself to draw quite well, and she started making drawings of what those animals really looked like. And her drawings did indeed look a little different, and somehow more real and alive. As if she had seen living woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions, cave bears, and so on, and the artist who made the illustrations in the book only had bones to work with.

Elle said in quiet awe and horror, "Jarna, those animals have all been extinct for ten thousand years."

Jarna smiled and said triumphantly, "I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!"

Elle started thinking about some things Jarna had said, about being marched to the shore of a cold and wild sea to the west and it not taking many days, about a cave, and about... And she started pulling books down from the shelf of her great library and showing Jarna pictures inside them, pictures of cave paintings and the entrances of some of the caves the paintings were found in, thinking just maybe...

Eventually Jarna pressed her finger against one picture, a picture of a cave painting in a cave in France that Elle and Annaliese guessed depicted an auroch, and Jarna said, "I think this is my home!" After a few moments Jarna said, "It is! I know this painting! My mother and grandmother made this! They let me watch - they were teaching me... I watched this being made!"

Elle said in awe and quiet horror, "Jarna, that painting is over twenty-five thousand years old."

Jarna had a big smile on her face and she tapped the photo again and said, "I watched this being made!" And then after a few moments she added, still cheerfully and still with a big smile on her face, "I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!"

There was a pregnant silence and Elle seemed to just sort of look at Jarna for a while, and then Elle reached out and caressed Jarna's face and said softly, "That's why I couldn't figure out what race you belong to. You belong to a race that doesn't exist anymore. You're a Cro-Magnon woman."

Of course! No wonder Jarna's descriptions of her homeland and her enslavement sounded like descriptions of an alien planet, yet tantalizingly familiar! They were descriptions of an alien yet familiar planet! The world of the Ice Age! Jarna's homeland was Europe! But not Europe as modern people knew it! The strange Serengeti-like but cold in winter homeland she described was the Europe of the Ice Age, a land of open grasslands full of Pleistocene megafauna! The cold and wild sea the slave-catchers had taken her across really was the Atlantic, specifically the Bay of Biscay! And the slave ship really had carried her through the Straight of Gibraltar!

Elle gathers around her... Lieutenants? Assistants? Thralls? Companions? The trans women she vampirized and then thrall-brainwashed as an experiment. She wasn't satisfied with the way they turned out. They'd been too independent, being the kind of person who transitions in the '60s or '70s selects pretty strongly for that, and of course she'd been able to use the thrall brainwashing to break that, but in the process she'd had to break too much. Thus her exploration of other options for solving her bloodline problem. But they're people she trusts. They have their uses.

Elle has Jarna tell her story again, and this time really go through it systematically and thoroughly while they pass bounce inferences off each other and her, and they all listen to it with new ears.

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Jarna's people were not nomads. There were nomads in Jarna's world, but Jarna's people looked down on them a little and pitied them a little, the way agricultural people later would. Jarna's people were fortunate to occupy a place that herds of animals funneled through on their spring and autumn migrations. Jarna's people were not farmers, but they'd invested in their land; built structures that funneled the herds further, diverted them like water, funneled them into killing places. They used fire to shape the landscape too, improving its value as a hunting ground and encouraging the growth of edible and otherwise useful plants.

The diet of Jarna's people was rich in meat and rather poor in just about everything else. When the herds migrated through their valley there were great hunts, slaughters, in which they killed many big animals. This was a time of feasting on fresh meat, but also a time of much work. The men - mostly the men - had the work of actually killing the animals, of course; it was almost like a military operation. And the women - mostly the women - had the work of smoking and otherwise preserving most of the meat of these animals. Jarna's people had become so good at killing animals in these hunts that a primary driver of their cultural evolution had been managing all the meat the hunts yielded, finding ways to preserve and store it. The great hunts provided the bulk of the food Jarna's tribe ate all year; they lived on preserved meat more than anything else.

Jarna's people were fortunate in another way; they occupied a cave, which's thermal mass insulated them in winter, and which provided them with perpetually cool, dry places where preserved meat stored well. The neighboring tribes to the south and southeast were similarly fortunate, and had their own caves. The neighboring tribes to the north, west, northwest, and northeast were not so fortunate; they had to winter in huts on open ground beneath open sky. And the nomads had to make do with tents that they could take apart and carry on their backs.

Jarna's people lived in and around their cave, and it was like a village; hundreds of people lived there, there were hundreds of people in Jarna's tribe. By the standards of Jarna's world, this was a large settlement and a mighty people; Jarna's tribe was the most numerous and therefore the strongest tribe in the area. Jarna had considered herself a fortunate person, to be born among such a tribe.

This was the rhythm of life for Jarna's people: in spring and autumn the great hunts, and all the work of preserving the meat. In summer, groups of mostly men would fan out across the country to hunt still-abundant big game and bring fresh meat back to the main body of the tribe at the cave, and groups of mostly women and children would fan out across the country to gather edible plants and shellfish and bird eggs and useful non-food materials and catch fish and birds and small animals, and some of that was brought back to the tribe too; the edible plants the women gathered were important for nutrients if not for calories, and some of them were preserved for the winter in various ways. In winter the whole tribe would retreat back into the cave, and live on stored food, and wait out the cold. Second to food, acquiring and processing fuel for fires in the winter was the great pre-occupation; the cave, fortunately, had some openings near the tops of the biggest chambers that allowed some smoke to escape, prevented excessive accumulation of smoke; Jarna's people had expanded them and even dug and carved out a few new ones over the generations.

Because Jarna was a girl, it had initially been expected that as an adult she'd preserve food, and she'd make and repair clothing and nets and carrier bags and baskets, and she'd go out with the gathering parties of mostly women and children to gather plants and catch small animals and gather wood and other things that could be fuel for fires, and she'd go into the deep part of the cave and paint things there. That was what most women in Jarna's tribe did. By the time Jarna was pubescent her older female relatives were already regularly taking her with them on gathering expeditions. And they sometimes took her with them into a big, deep chamber of the cave that had no natural light, and let Jarna watch while they painted by lights of flickering lamps, and started to teach her how to do what they were doing. The making of images in this deep chamber of the cave was a responsibility and a privilege of a few matrilineages of the women of Jarna's tribe, and Jarna understood that being taught how to do this was a responsibility and a privilege, was something special.

But Jarna was a... the best English translation of the word is tomboy. She seemed to relate better to boys than to girls, to prefer doing the things boys did, to more easily make friends with boys than with girls. And Jarna grew to be very tall and strong for a woman. So she joined the hunters, like a boy. At first she learned with the small boys from the old men who were too old and feeble to hunt themselves now but knew a lot about how to do it, and then as a teenager she started actually participating in big game hunts.

Many years after this conversation with Elle, Jarna sometimes visited the graduate school, the other institution, and that place being what it is, some of the girls there wondered if Jarna might be a trans man or at least kind of transmasculine. Jarna told them she doesn't think so. She never had a problem with her female body, never had any desire to change it. She just seemed to... relate better to boys and men, somehow. It's a bit hard to tell, though, because... would changing your body like that even be an idea that occurs to you if you live in a world where it's totally impossible? Testosterone shots would have been an outside context concept to the young Jarna, like a jet engine! And after that... well, her cognitive binding enslavement to Tatasi didn't leave much room for exploring her gender.

As a young woman Jarna fell in love with another woman. Her lover was a... regular woman? A woman who did women's work and had a more female-typical for their society social life. It was normative for women in Jarna's tribe to marry and have kids sooner or later, but lesbian relationships were accepted as long as they didn't interfere with that; lots of women were openly poly (though it wasn't called that) with a husband and a female lover; Jarna just openly had a romantic and sexual relationship with this woman and nobody had a problem with that. It felt like the relationship in Jarna's life that was best described as romantic. At this age Jarna also pretty frequently had sex with some of her similar-age male friends, but that was more of a friends-with-benefits thing. She didn't feel she was ready for marriage, and she didn't let them have the kind of sex with her that might have gotten her pregnant. She thinks her human self had a pretty good deal sexually, in a sort of "she was kind of like a straight boy but also androphilic but also she had a woman's body and was OK with that, it's super-easy to get sex from boys and enjoy it if you're like that" way. When she told the girls at the other institution heard this it sparked a discussion about how firmly this put her in the "yeah, definitely queer" category.

One of Elle's trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna's people had anything like a social institution of transgenderism. They did! They had one of those transfeminine castrati shaman classes! Her tribe had four people like that! And there was the tomboy thing, and... that's probably the best translation, but it distorts some of the nuances, it was understood as kind of... fourth gender-ish? Though it was pretty tangential to trans, people like that were understood as women, just... kind of masculine women?

One day, when Jarna was out hunting with a party of herself and four men, they were attacked. Two of the men were killed, and Jarna and two of the men, including her brother, were subdued and their arms bound and made to march.

Some of the neighboring tribes in Jarna's region practiced something halfway between bride kidnapping and slavery. Jarna's tribe didn't do that, and were proud that they did not; they thought it an evil custom. If a captive woman escaped and made it to Jarna's tribe, Jarna's tribe would give her refuge, and some strong men to escort her back to her own tribe if she wished to return to them. This had provoked more than one war against a neighboring tribe (Jarna's people and their neighboring sedentary hunter tribes did fight wars against each other, mostly over disputed hunting grounds or blood feuds - the battles could get quite bloody). Jarna's tribe did not fear the wrath of their neighbors; Jarna's tribe was the most numerous and strongest tribe in the region. This was the only reference Jarna had at this time for slavery. She thought it strange that her captors had taken some of the men as well; if they were doing the sort of slave raid that she was familiar with, they would have killed all the men, and taken only her.

The captors were strange. They were very tall, taller than Jarna, and heavily built, they looked strong - they were strong, she knew because she'd fought them! But their faces were strangely fine and child-like, like the faces of young pubescent boys who had not yet fully entered into manhood.

They tied her and the other two hunters of her tribe together, and they made them walk forward in a line, tied to each other with ropes. They made them walk to the west for more than a few days. Sometimes they gave Jarna and the other captives a little of some strange, hard food; it was the first time Jarna had tasted something a little like bread. They carried packs of this food; they didn't give the captives much of it, mostly kept it for themselves, mostly Jarna and the other captives just got water, from waterskins refilled from whatever stream or river was convenient.

After some days of walking to the west, they came to the shore of what people in a much later age would call the Bay of Biscay.

Jarna had never seen the sea before, but she'd heard of it. She'd heard of the sea. And she'd heard of the mountains to the south of her homeland, and the lands of mild winters beyond them. And she'd heard of the steppe-tundra to the north and east of her homeland, where the winters were longer and colder than in her homeland, and where people lived in huts of mammoth skin and mammoth tusks and mammoth bones, because there was very little wood.

It was a frightening sea. This was the Ice Age, and it was a colder and wilder sea than the Bay of Biscay the humans of historic times knew; more like the North Atlantic. It was a sea of crashing, pounding waves, and a forceful icy wind blew from it, and Jarna suspected looking at it that she would not survive in it for long.

The captors set up a camp of sorts, in a place terribly exposed to the forceful cold wind from the sea. They tied Jarna and the others to the stump of an old dead tree, and tied their legs together, so they were quite helpless. Two of them remained with the captives while the others went away. Every once in a while they would untie one of the captives and let them walk a little way away and relieve themselves, and then they would tie them back up again. Only one at a time. And every once in a while they gave the captives some water, and less frequently a little of the strange, hard food.

A few days later, the others returned, bringing with them another marching line of captives; four captives on this one. And they untied Jarna and her brother and the other hunter from the tree stump, and untied their legs, and tied the two lines of captives together, and made them walk for a while, until they came to the ship.

Jarna at this time had no concept of a sailing ship, but she had some familiarity with small river boats, so she looked at the ship and correctly extrapolated its function. And now she looked at the sea with true fear. They were going to try to cross that in a boat? With her and her brother and her cousin stuck on it? That... that had to be dangerous!

Jarna wished she could hold her brother's hand, but that was impossible; their hands were bound behind their backs.

The other four captives were from the shoreline people of this area, who often entered the ocean in boats, for fishing and whaling and trading. One of them knew the language of Jarna's people, for the shoreline people sometimes sailed up the rivers to trade with the inland hunters, and that woman saw the fear on the faces of Jarna and the other hunters, and explained to them as best she could that her people often moved across the sea in boats, and... it wasn't exactly safe, but it was no worse than the hunting the men of Jarna's people did. Of course, the sea was rough today, her people would not put out to sea on a day like this, but that big boat was much bigger than anything her people built, and was probably more stable than anything her people built.

The captors walked Jarna and the other captives to near the ship, to where the icy waters were almost touching their shoes. There were more of the big but strangely child-faced men on the boat, and they lowered a long plank of wood to near where the captives were standing, and the captors made the captives walk up to the plank and onto the ship with them. The thing that had most struck Jarna about the sailing ship was the sail. She'd watched women weaving with fibers taken from wild plants as a child, even helped them and done a little herself, and she boggled at the work that must have gone in to making such a huge piece of cloth. By pantomime one of the captors indicated to the captives that they should relieve themselves over the side of the ship, which they did, knowing this probably meant they would be restrained for a long time now. And when that was done the captors gave the captives a little water and then marched the captives down into the hold of the ship and tied them down there.

The ship soon departed the shore and put out to sea. During the journey the captives were mostly kept tied down in the hold. Every few hours they were, one at a time, allowed up into the open air so they could relieve themselves over the side of the ship, so the waste went into the ocean. And twice a day food and water would be brought down into the hold and given to them, and when they had eaten the containers would be removed. A few of the big child-faced people would check on them frequently, to make sure they hadn't begun to work their bindings loose.

The hold had some little windows up near the ceiling to let in air and light, and the rope arrangement Jarna was restrained with gave her enough freedom of movement to stand and look out one of those little windows. The hardest part staying on her feet while the ship rolled about in the waves. So when the ship put out to sea Jarna was able to see the coast recede, and then she was able to track its journey somewhat, or at least to watch the coast pass by. The slave ship rarely moved out of sight of the coast ("That makes sense," Elle commented, "Ancient sailers usually stuck close to the coast, they were afraid of the open ocean"). Sometimes Jarna saw distant icebergs - she'd asked the shoreline people woman what they were, and the woman had known and explained it. The boat had gone south at first, then turned to the west ("Makes sense if they were going from France to Gibraltar by the Atlantic route and following the coast, they'd have to turn west to follow the Spanish coast!"). They stopped at a spot on what must have been the northern coast of Spain for some days, and then three more captives were loaded on and tied down in the hold - Jarna and the other hunters and shoreline folk couldn't talk to these new ones at all, they had no language in common. And then the boat set out again, and it sailed a little more west, and then turned south, and then southeast, following the coast ("My God, I can just follow it on the map! She must have had a great sense of direction too! Of course she did, she was a hunter!"). And then it passed a mountain Jarna remembered, and Elle ordered her to draw the mountain to the best of her memory ("That's the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar! That's goddamn Tariq's Mountain! It... looks a little different... It's probably eroded a little in the last twenty-five thousand years! And the shoreline looks different... Of course it looks different, the sea level was a lot lower then! My God, that she remembers it so well after all this time! She must have an absolutely photographic memory! God, that whole trip must have really been burned into her mind!").

Elle showed Jarna modern pictures of the Rock of Gibraltar, and yes, that is the mountain she saw, though it looks a little different now.

And having passed through what must have been the Straight of Gibraltar, the slave ship crossed what must have been the Mediterranean Sea, though it was a colder and wilder sea then. And it came to shore in a place where there was a...

An outpost! Jarna had no concept of such a thing at the time, but it's obvious in retrospect. A satellite settlement, from which ships were built and launched, where expeditions could be resupplied. More of the strange child-faced people there, and the vampiric lieutenant who controlled them (apparent as that in retrospect, but Jarna recognized him as a man with a strange authority over the other child-faced people). And from there the captives were made to walk overland, tied together with rope in a line (in a coffle, though Jarna had no word for such a concept at the time). They were walked to what must have been a place in the inland reaches of the Euphrates, and on its banks there was another outpost, and a river boat waiting to take them down the river. And the boat took them far down the river, to a place that's now somewhere under the waters of the Persian Gulf, to a place where...

To a place where there were fields.

Ten or fifteen thousand years before the known historic beginning of farming, there were cultivated fields of grain, and irrigation works, and thralls working the fields. Jarna had never seen cultivated fields before. Very few people in her world had.

And in the middle of the fields there was a town. A town! Not a big town. Maybe better described as a big village. It had maybe a thousand inhabitants, maybe not even that. But by the standards of Jarna's world, this was a mighty city. It might even have been the biggest permanent human settlement in the world at the time. There were three to five times as many people here as at the cave of Jarna's tribe when the whole tribe was gathered together, and Jarna thought of her tribe as a big tribe. And there were large buildings! Most of the people here lived in barracks of a sort. And there was something she in retrospect thinks of as Tatasi's palace, though even he didn't have that concept at the time; he called it his house. Jarna had never before seen or imagined such a thing as a settlement with large buildings constructed of bricks.

Most of the workers she saw toiling in the fields were the strange big child-faced people, but not all. Tatasi's slave-catching expeditions ranged widely. To the south, they reached South Africa. To the east, they regularly reached India, and sometimes went as far afield as Indonesia, Australia, and East Asia. To the west, they reached Spain and Morocco and... well, Jarna's journey gives a glimpse of how far they sometimes ranged. He even sent slave-catchers into inner Eurasia. Tatasi had reasons to be acquisitive of thralls from far-away lands who might have interesting new genes.

Jarna and the other new captives were offered water to drink and a kind of soup to eat. And they were hungry and thirsty, and the soup actually smelled kind of good. And when they ate it, it actually wasn't bad. And then it did something to them.

Tatasi has a super-thrall ability, like Annaliese and Jarna. The soup was laced with Tatasi's blood, and eating it put Jarna and the other captives under blood thrall to him, made them his slaves.

That day, Jarna and the other new captives met Tatasi. And Tatasi sent the rest of them to the barracks and the fields, to be new workers for him. But with Jarna, Tatasi decided to try a little experiment. Tatasi transitioned Jarna.

--------------

Jarna saw things in Tatasi's mind through her thrall connection to him. Tatasi is old. From the hints that can be gathered second-hand through Jarna, it seems likely that Tatasi was born and transitioned during the early warm phase of the Eemian interglacial, the interglacial period before the present one. Which would mean Tatasi is around 125,000 years old. Which suggests he ages much more slowly than Jarna. Maybe because, if Jarna's second-hand account of Tatasi's life is to be believed, Tatasi was the first vampire.

Certain clues suggest Tatasi was born somewhere in the area that's now Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, before the onset of the most recent Ice Age, before what he remembers as the great cooling and drying of the world. Embedded in Tatasi's mind were images of the homeland he was born into. And it was a land with cultivated fields and towns.

Conventional human histories put the first emergence of agriculture in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent around 10-15,000 years ago. Conventional vampire (mostly) oral histories roughly agree with and enrich this picture. According to ancient vampire legend, the first vampires started out as human witches and sorcerers who called something from the darkness between the spaces into them to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Embedded in this origin story is an actually pretty historically interesting description of the society of the sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural complex that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the global warming that preceded the Younger Dryas Cold Snap. According to the legend, it was from that society that the first vampires emerged. In that society agriculture was young enough that people remembered that it was women who'd begun to cultivate wheat, as an extension of their gathering activities, and that farming only gradually became the occupation of both genders as population increased and hunting became increasingly marginal as a food source.

If Jarna's impressions of Tatasi's memories were to be believed, 125,000 years ago Tatasi had been human, and something like a prince, and as he surveyed his father's domains he walked through cultivated fields of wheat.

Jarna said there was no contradiction. She'd also seen in Tatasi's memories that the civilization of his people had ultimately been a failure. It had endured for 25,000 years, but it hadn't progressed much. It never invented moon rockets or guns or even iron-working. It never expanded beyond the western flank of the Fertile Crescent. It never achieved any unity; from its origins to its end it was a constellation of hundreds of tiny city-states (dwindling at the end to dozens and then to a few and then to just one), if you could call its major settlements cities. It never even created a real city. Its greatest settlements were tiny by modern standards; not much more than twenty thousand people (and a few thousand people was a more typical population for one of its "cities"). In truth many of its "cities" might be more accurately described as big agricultural villages; most of their residents were agricultural laborers who walked out to the fields each day and returned to the central settlement each evening. And when the Ice Age set in and the world cooled and dried, its people had abandoned their cities and their cultivated fields, and dispersed into the wilderness, and gone back to being hunter-gatherers. Its cultivated fields of wheat had become choked with wild grass, and its cultivated gardens had become choked with weeds, and over the hundred thousand year winter of the Ice Age its cultivars had thoroughly reverted to wild type, and it was left for the women of the same region a hundred thousand years later to re-invent agriculture all over again from scratch.

It seems... maybe not unbelievable. It's the same region agriculture first emerged in immediately before the Holocene, so it probably has favorable conditions for it; if an agricultural society did arise in the Eemian, it would be a plausible place for it. And the Eemian had a nice climate, maybe nicer than the present interglacial, and agriculture got started multiple times independently during the present interglacial; if anything it seems weird if it never got started during any of the previous interglacials.

Tatasi wasn't a name. It was a title. It literally translated as Grandfather. Among Tatasi's people, it was the title of the ruler of a city-state, and thus the title of the most powerful people in the world Tatasi inhabited when he was a human. It was not a particularly grandiose title; the headman of a village or the leader of a minor clan or even just a literal grandfather was called the same thing. If Grandfather's people had invented titles equivalent in grandiosity to lord or king, he would have called himself that. But his people had never done that. Grandfather was the most important-sounding thing he could think of to call himself, so that was what he called himself, and that was what he made his thralls call him.

If Jarna was to be believed, Grandfather had no sire. Nor had he been born from a vampire mother. He was a younger son of his city-state's previous human Tatasi, and his older brothers were the ones being groomed for the title and the power, and he was jealous of his older brothers, so he sought and found a witch, and he persuaded her to teach him magic. And using the knowledge she taught him, he called something from the darkness between the spaces to live in him and give him power.

Elle was skeptical. That's just mythology! Vampirism isn't some spiritual possession! Vampirism is an infection! They're called Vand symbiotes. You can see them in a microscope! They invade your cells and take up residence in the cytoplasm. They function a little like a second set of mitochondria, but interacting with the host in much more complex ways. Your vampire bloodline is just the genetic profile of your Vand symbiotes; it's like your mitochondrial DNA lineage except you don't necessarily get all your Vand symbiotes from one sire. Sure, there's some weird thaumativory stuff going on in them, but it's basically a physical infection, no more mystical than the common cold! He probably fried his own brain with all that time he spent stroking his own ego! It happens sometimes to really old vampires! Memories can be notoriously unreliable even over just a human lifetime, now imagine what can happen to the brain of a narcissist who spends thousands of years surrounding himself with thralls and making them validate his grandiosity!

Using the powers the thing he'd called into him had given him, Grandfather defeated his father and his brothers and took control of his city-state. He killed his father and his brothers. And he put the people of his city-state under blood thrall to him and enslaved them that way. All of them. Grandfather has a powerful super-thrall ability; when he was a young vampire, with the right control techniques he could use it to control more than ten thousand people at once.

After that he... mostly didn't seem to do very much. He simply ruled his city-state, for the next 15,000 years, until the world began to dry and cool and the civilization that produced him began to die around him. If she were in his place, Elle would have tried to create a bigger empire, but Grandfather was apparently uninterested in that. Perhaps he simply lacked the imagination to conceive of such a thing. His civilization had never produced an empire, and Grandfather was... strangely unimaginative in some ways.

110,000 years ago, the great cooling and drying of the world began. The cold itself was not much of a problem for the civilization of Grandfather's time, even in the Ice Age their land stayed warm, but as the world cooled it was also mostly becoming drier, and that was a big problem for them. There was less rain to water the fields, so food production shrank, so the people became hungrier and the population of the towns shrank.

What usually finished off the process was not direct starvation but a one-two punch of malnutrition and infectious disease. Disease had always been a big problem for the civilization of Grandfather's age, the dense and sedentary populations of their villages and towns was an environment where infectious diseases could easily spread, and they were less well-adapted to living in dense populations than even the humans of the early Holocene (let alone of the humans of the modern age, who are mostly the products of thousands of years of brutal selection pressure for resistance to crowd diseases). It was probably one of the reasons they never got very far; epidemics and endemic infectious diseases greatly sapped the vitality of their society. Malnourished people are vulnerable to infectious diseases. As the food supply contracted and malnutrition increased, the death rate from infectious disease increased; people would die, and the proximate cause was some endemic disease, but the ultimate cause was the malnutrition that weakened them enough for the disease to finish them off. In a way worse, the increasingly malnourished populations of the towns and villages were increasingly vulnerable to epidemic diseases, to plagues. Terrible plagues swept through the land and, Grandfather's people being smart enough to recognize the correlation between plagues and crowding, people tended to react by fleeing the towns and villages and dispersing into the wilderness. As the subject populations under their control declined, both by death and by flight, the rulers of the city-states tried to compensate by squeezing their remaining subjects harder, increasing taxes and labor duties, which provoked more of their subjects to flee and created a failure cycle. Sometimes there were even revolutions in which a city-state's subjects would kill their rulers, demolish their own city, and disperse into the wilderness, into freedom (the technology of the civilization of Grandfather's time never got good enough to make being a typical subject of their society unambiguously better than being a hunter-gatherer). Sometimes a weakened and vulnerable city-state would be targeted by the rulers of neighboring city-states, who would raze it and march its population back to their own city-states to now be workers for their own city-states, in an inevitably negative-sum process that killed many and destroyed much and weakened the society as a whole. Sometimes tax collectors would come to a village and find it had simply been abandoned at some point, that its inhabitants had simply all fled into the wilderness, into freedom. Sometimes a town or a village would simply be slowly and quietly abandoned over time, its population shrinking and shrinking until there was nothing left but empty collapsing ruins being slowly reclaimed by nature.

As the fimbulwinter of the Ice Age deepened, the towns and villages of Grandfather's civilization were destroyed or abandoned one by one, like lights being turned off at night. At the beginning of the process there were hundreds of city-states. Then there were dozens. Then only a few. And then, finally, there was only one: Grandfather's city. Grandfather's blood protected his thralls from the diseases. And Grandfather's people alone did not abandon him; they could not; the blood thrall he kept them all under from childhood to death insured that.

Grandfather had to shrink the population of his little kingdom, to fit it within the tightening limits imposed by the drying climate. That was easy for him. He had almost total control over how many children his thralls made; abstinence-only birth control works fine if you're dealing with people who basically literally can't disobey you. And if he wanted to thin the numbers of his thralls in a hurry, he simply killed some pre-pubescent girls by drinking up their blood.

His more usual predilection was to drink to death pre-pubescent boys. For the same reason farmers often slaughter male animals young but keep the female ones. Women were necessary to replenish the stock, but now that he didn't need armies to defend his kingdom from rival lords all those boys were a bit surplus to requirements; reproductively, he only really needed a handful of males around to serve as studs. Oh, he kept a lot of them around for heavy labor on the farms and irrigation canals and construction and building repair projects and for genetic diversity (Grandfather didn't know about genes, but he knew inbreeding could kill small communities), but... he really didn't need all of them. Which left food for himself and his vampiric lieutenants as the obvious use for the surplus. When Jarna saw Grandfather's city, she noticed that she saw more women than men there. And no really old people. He drank to death all the thralls who were too old or too maimed or too disabled to work, too. Technically he didn't need to drink anyone to death, the ratio of human thralls to vampires he maintained was plenty to allow Grandfather and his lieutenants to live entirely by donations small enough to not permanently harm the donor and that was how they got most of the blood they drank, but the normal patterns of human life inevitably generated people who Grandfather saw as more-or-less useless to him, and drinking them up seemed to him the obvious efficient method of disposing of them.

One of the reasons the Eemian civilization never got very far might be that, compared to Holocene civilizations, it suffered from a cruel disadvantage: it had no domestic animals. When Grandfather was born, even the domestication of the dog was tens of thousands of years in the future. Maybe that was why: between the Eemian and the Holocene humans had made friends with the dog, and that might have served as a template to allow them to make friends or slaves (depending on how you looked at it) of the goat and the auroch. To Grandfather's people, an animal as a partner was an alien concept. Their agriculture was entirely about the production of plant-derived foods. All their meat had to come from hunting, fishing, whaling, and the gathering of shellfish, insects, and other small animals. And no domestic animals meant no milk (aside from the human breast milk drunk by babies and small children), no cheese, no reliable access to eggs. It may have greatly restrained the size of their population, with all the downstream effects of that (fewer people to come up with new ideas, fewer workers, less dense social networks...). At the very least, it no doubt made them less well-nourished, less healthy, less resilient against infectious diseases... Grandfather came up with his own ghastly solution for that. When he killed a human thrall who wasn't useful to him, after he or his vampiric lieutenants drank the blood, he ordered other human thralls to eat the flesh. He considered it efficient, and his blood protected them from prion diseases and other infectious diseases associated with cannibalism.

Grandfather's city was able to endure through the Ice Age because he could impose conditions of survival and community continuity on his thralls that free humans would never have accepted. He got his little kingdom through the Toba Catastrophe by making his thralls kill and cannibalize every one of their own under the age of seventeen, and every one of their own over the age of forty, and nine out of ten of the men of their own remaining after that. After the supervolcano winter ended, he got his kingdom back to something close to its pre-Catastrophe population within two generations.

A few centuries after Toba, Grandfather decided it was time for a big move. Grandfather was, for all his power, a fearful creature. Grandfather didn't understand the Ice Age, he only knew that the world was cooling and drying and the process was continuing, unevenly and with reverses but in the grand scale consistently, for thousands and thousands of years. He was worried that the world was dying, that eventually the oceans would freeze and all the land would become a desert. And that frightened him, because if the world died Grandfather would die. How old was the world? How long would the world last? Grandfather didn't know! And that scared him, because it meant that perhaps it was old in the way a seventy year old human is old, perhaps it was dying, and he did not know if it was possible to escape it before it died. And Toba shook him up, scared him. So Grandfather sent out scouts to survey the world a little. And then he abandoned the city he had ruled for so long, and moved his thralls in a great trek to the south, to a place on the banks of the great river that flowed through the valley that had become dry land as the Persian Gulf receded, and there his thralls built a new city, and they lived in the new city and he dwelled in it and ruled it. He hoped that if the cooling and drying of the world continued, this new city far to the south would remain viable for some time after his original homeland had become uninhabitable. And if the cooling and drying of the world in time threatened even this new city, from this new city it would be easy to move his people again, by boat this time, to somewhere on the coast of Africa, where it was warmer.

Then the other problem started. Not the decay of the world. The decay of Grandfather's own body. It seemed that he did age, very slowly, and specifically as he aged his super-thrall ability was losing its potency.

Grandfather had the ability to sire new vampires, and he had sired some; in the age when human kingdoms still existed they had been useful as superweapons against his rival human "Grandfathers," and he'd since killed most of those because he didn't need them anymore but he still kept a few vampire lieutenants around and even made a new one every once in a while when one of the old ones got killed by something or died of old age (he'd lived long enough that this was starting to happen to his oldest vampire lieutenants). But the new vampires he sired always turned out much weaker than him. And none of them inherited his super-thrall ability. He figured that was probably because he was the first, the original host, and that gave him a special relationship with the thing that lived inside vampires and made them vampires. So a hierarchy of thralldom (some of his humans thralled to his lieutenants who were thralled to him) wasn't going to fix this problem.

There was thrall-brainwashing, of course. He used it on his vampire lieutenants, and on humans who performed duties for them that made it impractical to supply them regularly with his blood. The slave-catchers Jarna encountered were thrall-brainwashed, and so were the personnel at the outposts she passed through, and so were the loggers he sent out to lands with an abundance of trees to bring wood back to his city by boat, and so were the traders he sent out on trading expeditions, and so were the foraging parties and fishermen he sent out to bring fish and meat back to his city to provide some supplementary meat and fish for his thralls and rich food for his own table. But thrall-brainwashing isn't perfectly reliable. See what seems to be happening to Harriet in Glow, Worm. Oh, done well it's mostly pretty reliable, but when a person lives as long as Grandfather they start to worry about even low-probability events. Grandfather didn't completely trust thrall-brainwashing. He preferred the certainty of the blood thrall, which bound his slaves directly to his will.

The most straightforward solution was to shrink the population of his kingdom to fit into the new limits of his thrall ability. And he did that. As Grandfather's thrall ability gradually weakened his city gradually shrank and shrank. By Jarna's time, Grandfather's city was a fraction of the size it had been when he first set up shop in the low valley that's now the Persian Gulf.

He pursued another mitigation strategy too. He started selectively breeding his thralls for susceptibility to blood thrall. Much of this was simply breeding them to be docile and submissive and weak-willed. Much of what he did with them was actually an artificial acceleration of trends that had already been playing themselves out in human evolution for millions of years. There was a lot of overlap between the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of a place like an ancient Sumerian royal cloth-manufacture workshop or a Medieval manorial estate or a modern public school and the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of Grandfather's city. A lot of Grandfather's breeding program was accelerating the self-domestication humans were doing to themselves. The strange big but child-faced people Jarna was captured by were humans with extreme domestication syndrome, more extreme than that of modern people. Grandfather also started to breed his thralls for increased size and strength and reduced sexual dimorphism; since the population limit of his city was the limit of his thrall ability rather than food production, the increased value big strong people had as workers for him was worth the increase in the amount of food they needed. The big child-faced people Jarna saw were the result of tens of thousands of years of Grandfather's breeding program; bred to have strong backs but weak minds. The slave-catching expeditions were partially about giving Grandfather interesting new genes to work with for his breeding program (Grandfather didn't know about genes, but he knew about heredity).

Still, Grandfather was not satisfied with these solutions. Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person, he worried about even small risks, perhaps because he lived so long; over tens of thousands of years even small risks added up. Grandfather knew the dangers associated with having a small and isolated community: Tasmania syndrome, genetic homogeneity creating vulnerability to disease, inbreeding, the fragility inherent to having all your eggs in one basket. The more his city shrank, the less safe Grandfather felt. A big community is a safe community, and a safe community would have meant a safe Grandfather. But the blood thrall was the only method of social control Grandfather really trusted. By Jarna's time Grandfather had stripped the social hierarchy of his city down to a dreadfully simplified form. Grandfather's city had no bureaucrats, no priests, no propagandists. Grandfather's city had only one form of social control: thrall. And that meant the size of Grandfather's city was strictly bounded by the limits of his thrall ability. Grandfather's city could not grow.

Grandfather was tantalized by the idea of somehow siring a vampire who inherited his super-thrall ability. That was perhaps the central point of his slave-catching expeditions; he'd discovered the "bullshit vampire powers" effect and was hopeful that if he started with the right kind of human he might be able to sire a vampire with a super-thrall ability. He had diverse potential subjects to choose from. This was after the final out-of-Africa migration, but not that long after it, and before farmers spent ten thousand years displacing and assimilating everyone else; humans were considerably more physically diverse in this period than they are now. Many of the captives Grandfather's slave-catching expeditions brought back weren't Homo sapiens sapiens. Some of them weren't even Homo sapiens. Until Jarna, all those experiments were failures. He almost always killed the vampires produced in these failed experiments (while they were under blood thrall to him, so they didn't fight back). Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person; even with blood thrall and thrall-brainwashing to control them, Grandfather didn't like having too many other vampires around.

With Jarna, Grandfather finally hit the jackpot. When Jarna transitioned, she developed a super-thrall ability, similar to Grandfather's but three times stronger than the one he had at the time. Grandfather thrall-brainwashed Jarna, resculpted her into a person who would be completely obedient to him, and then used her to control the rest of his thralls, and Grandfather kept Jarna secluded inside his house and near him, partly to keep her safe, but also partly so he could monitor her intensely to make sure the thrall-brainwashing wasn't decaying and reinforce it if it was.

One of the first things Grandfather did when he felt secure in the new arrangement was to send many slave-takers out to bring captives to his city in much larger than usual numbers. With Jarna's super-thrall, Grandfather would be able to triple the size of his kingdom, and he wanted to make that happen faster than natural increase of his existing thralls would allow. To capture more thralls, Grandfather sent out men with weapons, but he also sent out boats full of cloth woven by the women thralls in his workshops, and parties carrying big packs full of cloth and jewelry: trade goods. There were places in Jarna's world where nature was rich enough that even without agriculture there could be societies with villages and chiefs and slaves, where slaves could simply be bought. Grandfather ordered the slave-takers to, as much as possible, bring back mostly fertile women. Fertile women were the new thralls he was particularly desirous of acquiring now: he planned to bind them with Jarna's blood thrall and then make her order them to make many children with the men of the big child-faced people, and by doing so rapidly increase the numbers of his thralls without diluting the results of all the hard work that went into his breeding program too much. And when the slave-takers returned, bringing back mostly young women captives, that was what he did.

It took a generation or two to triple the size of Grandfather's kingdom, bringing its size toward the limit of what Jarna could control with her super-thrall. Grandfather was pleased with the result. A big community was a safe community, and a safe community meant a safe Grandfather.

After that, Grandfather didn't do very much for the next ten thousand years or so. He simply dwelled in his city, and gave orders, and existed, and his city did not change much. For the next ten thousand years or so life for Jarna mostly continued in a long-running routine, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia.

In truth, Grandfather's "city" was really more of a big agricultural village. Most of his thralls worked the fields; walked out to them in the morning and walked back from them in the evening. Long before, there had been satellite villages, with arrangements for regular deliveries of Grandfather's blood to them, but they'd been abandoned as Grandfather's super-thrall ability waned and he shrunk his kingdom to conform to its tightening limits. After agriculture, the next biggest pre-occupations of Grandfather's city were textile manufacture and firewood acquisition. He had a huge workshop in his house where hundreds of thralled human women made cloth and clothing and rope; it was almost like a factory. It produced clothing for his thralls, and cloth for the sails of his ships, and so on, but it also produced cloth for trade. Cloth was the primary export of Grandfather's city; Grandfather used it to buy things from human communities. More than anything else, the resource Grandfather had in abundance was labor, and his trading practices reflected that.

Jarna's job was simple. Every morning and every evening most of Grandfather's thralls would eat together in a huge communal dining hall. And during the evening meal Jarna would be there. And Jarna would be bled by a few of Grandfather's thralls, using a technique similar to the one the Maasai use to bleed cattle. And there would be a huge pot of soup, and Jarna's blood would be added to the soup and mixed into it, and then the soup would be served out to the thralls, and the thralls would eat it. And Jarna's blood would put them in blood thrall to her until their next dose the next evening, which would be given to them the same way. It wasn't a very intimate kind of thrall; Jarna's brain wouldn't have been able to handle all the input if it was. It mostly manifested as the thralls simply being obedient. While most of the humans ate, Jarna was given a series of humans to drink from to restore the blood and strength she'd lost (her donors got a special dose of her blood beforehand). After the meal Jarna would give the thralls broad instructions for the rest of the night and the next day, and tell them to obey Grandfather and his lieutenants and the humans Grandfather had selected as supervisors. And while she did that she'd press into their minds certain attitudes and ideas; Grandfather was their god, they existed to be instruments of his will and to satisfy his desires, other authority figures were legitimate insofar as they were extensions of his will and sought to satisfy his desires, and so on.

A petty reason Grandfather was pleased to have Jarna was it meant he wouldn't have to be bled regularly. He disliked being bled regularly, and he was happy that now being bled regularly was outsourced to Jarna. Jarna understood why he disliked it. She disliked it too. She could feel that losing all that blood every day wasn't healthy for her, took a lot of out of her. It was survivable, it was sustainable, her resilient vampire body could heal the wound in a few hours and with appropriate feeding replace the blood before more was taken from her, she endured having it done to her almost every day for millennia after millennia, but she could feel that it wasn't good for her, that her body didn't like it. It felt bad.

At one point, one of Elle's trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna had seen anything in Grandfather's mind that might indicate whether there had been an accepted social role for crossgender people in the Eemian civilization. Jarna said she'd seen some things that suggested the Eemian civilization might have had a transfem castrati shaman class, like her own people did, but the memories were patchy and not very informative. It wasn't a subject Grandfather had ever been particularly interested in.

She supposes there probably were some people in Grandfather's city who had the internal experience of gender dysphoria and other crossgender impulses, but Grandfather's thralls were so controlled that there would have been very little room for crossgender behavior. Grandfather's thralls ate, slept, tended the other basic needs of their bodies, reproduced, tended to the basic needs of their children, taught their children what they needed to know to be useful workers for Grandfather, and did very little else. They weren't given time to do much else. They lived in barracks. Most of their meals were communal. They wore a sort of uniform, turned out by the thousands in the great textile workshop in Grandfather's house. Their lives were very regimented; the best modern analogies Jarna and the others could think of were a gulag, a prison, an army base, and a very strict boarding school. The thralls who'd been captured by the slave-takers retained more recognizable humanity. They'd sometimes sing in spare moments or while they worked, when they had a little spare time and energy they'd sometimes play games with each other, they had friendships with each other. But...

But the big child-faced thralls, the ones who'd been born in Grandfather's city, bred for Grandfather's city... They'd never known freedom even in their own heads since the age of two. In Grandfather's city, children were put under blood thrall as soon as they were weaned from their mother's milk, and they were weaned early by the standards of Jarna's people, within the first two years of life. They were kept under blood thrall from then until death, unless they were chosen for thrall-brainwashing. Their minds formed under blood thrall. To Jarna, the big child-faced thralls often hardly seemed human. They played no games. They sang no songs and made no music. They had no festivals, no celebrations. The only rituals they had were utilitarian ones, like the communal meal in which they were fed Jarna's blood. The only art they made was for Grandfather's pleasure, or was made to be traded away to humans Grandfather didn't control as part of Grandfather's designs. They weren't mindless or stupid, they could think, Jarna guessed they were about as clever as a normal person, but they were like... Jarna didn't have access to this concept at the time, but they seemed very much like robots.

But sometimes she'd see poignant glimpses of humanity in them. One time she saw one of them become briefly enraptured by the beauty of a butterfly that landed near him. Mothers would show affection to babies that were still nursing and not yet under blood thrall; would coo over them, rock them, try to entertain them by moving fingers around in funny ways, smile at them.

There had been an incident while the slave-catchers were leading her to the Bay of Biscay that she remembers vividly even now. While she was being force-marched, she'd started to sing, to take her mind off what was happening. And she'd noticed one of the slave-catchers watching her. He had a strange expression of wonder on his face, and his eyes were wet. And then a strange look of embarrassment came over him, and he slapped her hard across the face and made a gesture of using two fingers to press his lips together that she interpreted as a gesture for silence. She suspects in retrospect that her singing began to make him feel emotions he suspected Grandfather would not approve of, and the slap and demand for silence was the thrall-brainwashing asserting itself, protecting itself.

Grandfather confined Jarna to three rooms in the great building he called his house. One was the great communal dining hall, where she was bled and the thralls ate her blood with their soup. And then two other rooms, separated from the dining hall by a heavy barred door; Elle thought Jarna's description of them reminded her a little of a harem or a zenana. They were comfortable enough rooms, and in them she was attended by human servants. She was forbidden to ever leave the two rooms, except to go into the dining hall in the evenings, and sometimes Grandfather allowed her to walk around in a small inner courtyard or on the roof of his house. She wasn't exactly imprisoned in the conventional sense, the bars and locks were in her mind - Grandfather simply ordered her to stay within the boundaries of that space, and his orders made it almost as sure a prison as any physical cage could be. Grandfather frequently used blood thrall to look into Jarna's mind to make sure the thrall-brainwashing he'd done to her was holding firm, and re-enforce it if it showed signs of deterioration; she was very valuable to him, and he went to considerable effort to keep her both safe and firmly under his control.

Grandfather wanted to make more vampires like Jarna, to allow him to expand his kingdom further. He had her sire hundreds of vampires, transitioning every kind of exotic human the slave-catchers could bring back. It never worked. None of the vampires she sired inherited her super-thrall ability. When he realized they were failures, Grandfather killed the vampires Jarna had sired, while they were under blood thrall to her and she was under orders to keep them compliant, so they did not fight back. Grandfather did not have his thralls cannibalize their corpses; Grandfather didn't know if eating the cooked flesh of a vampire could transition a human, but if the answer was "yes," he didn't want to find out by having transitions happen outside his control within his city. Their corpses were taken to a place outside the city and burned until there was nothing left but ash and bone. Grandfather also didn't know what eating the flesh of a dead vampire might do to an animal, and he wasn't taking any chances on what the answer to that question was either.

When it became clear that Jarna couldn't sire a vampire with super-thrall, Grandfather experimented with getting Jarna pregnant.

Vampire reproduction is... complicated. There's the bloodline thing, but that's just a transmission chain of Vand symbiotes. In terms of conventional human reproduction, male vampires are sterile (yes, this implies Elanor in Glow, Worm is poly, or used a human sperm donor). Female vampires are almost sterile. They still have and release viable ova, but transition changes how the menstruation-ovulation cycle works, a lot. It gets subtler, there's no menstrual bleeding anymore, no noticeable periods, and it gets... not exactly straightforwardly slowed down, but something like that, a bit like their aging. Human women ovulate about once per month and are fertile about six days per month. Vampire women ovulate about once per year and are fertile about six days per year. But vampire women technically can get pregnant and give birth to vampire children, as Elanor did in Glow, Worm. They just usually choose not to. If they can't tell how close they are to ovulation by smell like Annaliese, a quick taste of a drop of their own blood will tell them approximately how close they are to ovulation, so it's easy for them to choose not to get pregnant (that trick is definitely a vampire sex ed 101 thing). And vampire children are hard to manage (imagine dealing with a toddler who has superstrength and a thirst for human blood!), and why bother with pregnancy and decades of child-rearing when transitioning an adult human is much quicker and easier? And lots of vampire women grew up before modern birth control and in much more sexist societies; lots of them have emotional baggage around pregnancy left over from experiences they had when they were human women.

But vampire women can get pregnant, and Grandfather made Jarna get pregnant, again and again, because he hoped he could get another prodigy vampire with a super-thrall ability that way. He used male human thralls to impregnate her. The first time he tried crossing her with one of the men of his strange big but child-faced thralls, and when that didn't give him the result he wanted he tried crossing her with every exotic male captive his slave-catchers could bring him.

It never worked. None of the children born from Jarna inherited her super-thrall ability. Elle suspects Jarna's super-thrall ability was the result of an interaction between Jarna's Vand symbiotes and her highly specific genetic profile; with cloning, Grandfather could have got himself another Jarna, but that was far beyond the crude technology available to him, or maybe he could have gotten what he wanted by crossing her own son back to her, to produce an inbred vampire with 75% of her DNA... Jarna clarified that he actually tried that a few times! He made her get pregnant by her own son, and then he made her get pregnant again by a son from that union, but it hadn't worked either. He'd tried that multiple times, starting off with a different thrall as the initial father each time, but none of these attempts worked, and eventually he'd concluded it was another dead end. Eventually Grandfather gave up on trying to use Jarna to create more super-thrall vampires.

Grandfather actually kept one of the vampire children he made Jarna produce this way. Grandfather made Jarna keep this son she'd produced under blood thrall until he grew up, so he'd stay docile and out of the way, and then Grandfather put her son under direct blood thrall to him and thrall-brainwashed him and made him one of his lieutenants. Jarna's other children weren't so lucky. When Grandfather realized that one of her children hadn't inherited her super-thrall ability, or when they ceased to be otherwise useful to him, he'd have Jarna put her own child under blood thrall to keep them compliant, and he'd kill them, and he'd have the corpse taken to a place outside his city and burned until there was nothing left of it but ash and bone. Grandfather killed all the vampires Jarna gave birth to, except for the one he kept as a lieutenant.

Elle has a habit of playing with pencils when she's angry and trying not to show it; it's a tell people who work for her often learn to recognize. Elle is usually good at controlling her emotions and good at controlling her vampire strength. While Jarna described Grandfather's attempts to use her to produce another vampire like her, Elle snapped several pencils in quiet rage.

Elle asked, gently, if Grandfather had ever made Jarna have sex with him.

He had, sometimes, when she was younger, but he didn't do it often, and he lost interest when she stopped looking like a young woman. He mostly used thralled human women for sex. As far as she could tell, he was straight (or, as she thought it at the time, only interested in women that way). He had a sort of harem in his big house where he kept thralled human women he used for sex. Some of them were women of the big child-faced people, but many were captives caught by his slave-catchers; one of the purposes of those expeditions was bringing back exotic women for his harem. He couldn't make children with them, of course; male vampires are sterile. Usually when they got too old for him he killed them by drinking up their blood, but he had a few favorites whose beauty he'd preserved through the ages by transitioning them.

Over the next ten thousand years or so, the deep winter of the Last Glacial Maximum passed, and then came the global spring of the pre-Holocene great warming. Jarna suspects that Grandfather would have been content to keep doing things the same way for a million years, but the great warming was the beginning of the world emphatically not letting him do that anymore. The sea level rose and rose, and soon the sea was threatening Grandfather's city, and he had to move it.

Grandfather didn't understand the Ice Ages. He remembered that the world had been warm before, but he was afraid of each great change, because he had no assurance that its end result would be survivable. For a while he was worried that the world might keep getting hotter and the sea level would keep rising until the ocean covered the tops of the highest mountains or the world became like the inside of an oven. Just like, during the great cooling, he'd worried that the world might keep getting colder and drier until all the seas froze and all the land became cold desert. He sent out scouts to find the highest places where something like his city could conceivably survive, so he would know a place he could move his city to if the ocean rose mountain-high above its present level.

For now, he chose a less drastic move; he abandoned his city and moved himself and his thralls to the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, to a place high and north enough that it might still be habitable if the southern lowlands became too hot and high enough that it would still be above water if the oceans rose considerably. And in that place he made his thralls build for him a new city and clear and plant new fields. And the rising waters of the Persian Gulf closed over the abandoned and decaying remains of his old city. And in his new city he spent more millennia doing not all that much. In his new city, as in his old one, Grandfather kept Jarna confined to the space of three rooms and an inner courtyard and a roof.

The world was changing in other ways that would ultimately have much more drastic consequences for Grandfather. If the Holocene summer had passed like the Eemian summer, he would have happily whiled it away, staying in and presiding over his little city and not doing all that much. But the Holocene summer would be different from the Eemian summer, though it was not so obvious at the time. Already the Fertile Crescent hilly flanks sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural society was emerging, and the agricultural societies and civilizations of the Holocene would not struggle and stagnate and ultimately wither and disappear (aside from one tiny strange remnant) like the agricultural societies and civilizations of the Eemian. The agricultural societies and civilizations of the Holocene would be strong, and thrive, and eventually swallow the world.

Elle and her thralls digress a little, discuss a little what might have made the difference, a little curious about that. It doesn't seem to have been a simple increase in intelligence, at least not if Jarna's testimony is to be believed. Grandfather was strangely unimaginative in some ways, but Jarna doesn't think he was stupid, and she knew him intimately for twenty-five millennia. Forget was, is - the bastard's still alive! - and seems to have adapted OK to modern society. Grandfather's people cultivated wheat, tended gardens, built towns, had government; from Jarna's impressions of Grandfather's memories, they were as clever as modern people, or at least they were not obviously less clever than modern people. Neanderthal brains were, if anything, a bit bigger than ours.

Domestic animals is one obvious big difference. And maybe it's disease/immunity related? There may have been a very broad slow uneven two-steps-forward-one-step-back long-term trend toward bigger human communities over the last few hundred millennia (greatly accelerated in the Holocene), which would have created a selection pressure for better immunity to crowd diseases - maybe Grandfather's people just weren't as far along in that process as early Holocene people? And population movements after the Eemian might have spread useful disease-resistance genes around. Jarna said disease was a big problem for Grandfather's people! That by itself might explain everything!

Or maybe it is some sort of cognitive and behavioral difference, not intelligence but something subtler, mindset.

One of the things that most outrages Elle about Grandfather's city is the waste of it. What a first mover advantage he had! He controlled the only agricultural society in a world of hunter-gatherers! And he spent a hundred thousand years doing nothing with it except inflicting misery and slavery on others!

She wouldn't have acted like that! She knows it! Even if she had only the knowledge he had then! She knows herself, and she knows that if you put her in Grandfather's place in Jarna's time, with his abilities and only the knowledge he had, the smallness and fragility of her little city and the vast empty raw potential of the world beyond it would have called to her, spoken to her, suggested things to her.

She'd have built a proper society, held together by more than thrall; a society that could grow. And then she'd have started expanding. She'd send out farmer-settlers, and construction workers to build roads. She'd expand to the limits of her logistics and institutions of social control, and then she'd start looking for ways to improve those things. She'd find smart people and recruit them to help her with that; she's sure she could find some, the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals had big brains. The really smart and useful ones she'd transition, so their intelligence and knowledge wouldn't be lost after a single human lifetime. With the unity that a functionally unaging thrall-brainwashed leadership class would create, and with a functionally unaging scholar class (imagine getting to have Newton and Einstein around for centuries and bouncing ideas off each other!), she thinks progress would be rapid. Even without her modern knowledge, a society like that would feel its way toward modern science like a plant growing toward the light without knowing what the sun is. Even without having the memory of our society as a goal, she thinks probably within a few millennia tops she would have...

... She would have given the big child-faced people and Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and all the rest a world with cities with running water and flush toilets and electricity. A world with modern hospitals with antibiotics and X-ray machines. A world with supermarkets filled with food. A world where mothers hold their newborn babies and think with assurance, "this baby will live long enough to become an old person with wrinkles and grey hair." A moon that has known the kiss of an astronaut's booted feet. A world where quirky young men look up at the stars at night and tell each other, "Just think, soon we'll be exploring the galaxy!" A world that has skipped twenty millennia of poverty and fear and pain!

Maybe a world where, a few decades or centuries after that, they find a way to artificially synthesize whatever it is vampires need from human blood. So everyone can transition. So everyone can live as long as Jarna has.

She wouldn't spend a hundred millennia masturbating to her mastery of a village of slaves! She knows it! She feels it!

Jarna's impression of Grandfather's physical appearance was that he was strangely ugly. That his features were strangely heavy and crude, as if indifferently sculpted from dense clay that resisted a sculptor's attempt at fine shaping. One of Grandfather's people would have said that this was because Grandfather looked like a real man, an adult man. Compared to Grandfather's people, modern humans or even most of the humans of Jarna's time were neotenous. One of Grandfather's people might have thought that modern humans looked strangely child-like, like people with adult bodies but faces like young teenage boys and young teenage girls. Jarna glimpsed some hints this in Grandfather's mind.

Neoteny is a symptom of domestication. In the case of humans, self-domestication (Grandfather's hyper-domesticated thralls aside). If Grandfather's people were less self-domesticated than modern humans, then plausibly they would have been less social, more aggressive, more fearful, less docile, less cooperative, not as good at playing well with others. All features that would have made them less well-suited to living in towns. All features that might have made their civilization less functional and more fragile in a thousand subtle ways. That might certainly explain why their civilization did not thrive. But let's pull on another angle too...

What do children do more of than adults? They play. They explore. They are curious about things. They daydream. They imagine. They fantasize. They construct elaborate imaginary worlds. A little like what Elle just did, when she imagined how she'd act if she was in Grandfather's place.

Jarna says Grandfather didn't daydream much. Grandfather didn't fantasize much. Grandfather's mind was very focused on relatively concrete, practical issues. Grandfather's thoughts and desires were very focused on the needs of his body and on "monkey brain" social desires like his desire to be important and respected. Grandfather wasn't stupid, but he did have a certain strange incuriosity. Grandfather wasn't stupid, he could come up with new ideas, but he was strangely unimaginative; he could extrapolate relatively straightforwardly from things he'd done before or things he'd been told or things he'd seen others do, but he wasn't good at making imaginative leaps.

Isn't it interesting that Grandfather's people had kings and palaces, but never invented special words for them? They used the same word for a palace and an ordinary house, and they used the same word for a king and a village headman and a literal grandfather. That does suggest a certain lack of imagination, maybe? Annaliese responded to that by suggesting that maybe that wasn't because of lack of imagination, maybe Grandfather's people didn't think in words as much as typical modern humans do, and words weren't very emotionally alive to them. It was the only time in the discussion that she said something on her own initiative, instead of as a response to somebody else directly addressing her. It might have been the only time in the discussion that she talked at all; she didn't talk much during it.

Grandfather was a strange person. Selfish. Fearful. Closed-off. Untrusting. Strangely conservative. Strangely unimaginative. Some of that might be idiosyncrasies of his individual personality. Some of that might be habits of mind that any extremely long-lived person tended to develop. Some of that might be the result of tens of millennia of what, in its own way, must have been profound emotional isolation. But Elle wonders if Grandfather's strange personality is to some extent a glimpse of what his people were like. Maybe that's why the Eemian civilizations stagnated and withered, while the Holocene civilizations were strong and thrived and grew and swallowed the world. And maybe that's why Homo sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals and the rest; because those extinct hominids had brains that worked like the brains of Grandfather's people.

Grandfather's selective breeding of this thralls may even have accelerated human self-domestication. Every once in a while a few of his human thralls would escape his control and escape into the wilderness, go feral. He sent hunting parties after them to bring them back to him so he could re-thrall them, but the hunting parties didn't always catch such escapees. It was a trickle, but over tens of millennia, and into the low population densities of the Pleistocene, it might have been significant. And Grandfather had been breeding his thralls for domestication, docility... Wouldn't it be something if that was part of what made the civilizations of the Holocene so dramatically more successful? It was maybe notable in this context that the location of Grandfather's original city had been close to the bottleneck point of the out-of-Africa migration and it had been inhabited while that migration was happening, and Grandfather's city had always stayed within the general region that the first agricultural societies and the first civilizations emerged in.

Jarna wondered sometimes what it was like for those escaped thralls when the blood thrall wore off and, for the first time since they were two years old, their minds were free.

Author's aside: remember that this is the '60s or '70s and Elle got a lot of her socialization in old vampire culture and in Victorian Britain. It'd be more surprising if she didn't have a strong tendency toward racialist thinking at this point!

It was during the pre-Holocene warming that Grandfather first learned of the emergence of other, rival vampires. In the hilly flanks sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural society other witches and sorcerers had independently invented the vampirization ritual, had called something from the darkness between the shapes to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. The ritual is latent in magic, as the atomic bomb is latent in physics. Once...

Jarna had seen an idea in Grandfather's mind that vampirism is somehow inherently magically connected to hierarchy, that the vampirization ritual only works if it's done in the context of a society that has rich and poor, privileged people and people who are treated as disposable. During the warming immediately before the Holocene the hilly flanks acorn-wheat sedentary proto-agricultural society crossed a threshold, just as Grandfather's civilization had crossed a threshold all those millennia before, and when it did it became possible and inevitable that ambitious magic-users would call something from the darkness between the spaces to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Elle is skeptical. Skeptical about the whole possession angle, but especially skeptical about that. If there is any truth to that, she thinks it's more likely that hierarchical high-surplus societies produce vampires in the same way they produce novelists; surplus allows specialization allows a large class of full-time magicians allows vampires.

It could also be... Over the tens of millennia, Grandfather had several bad experiences with thrall-brainwashed vampire lieutenants who developed a capacity for independent thought when away leading expeditions and tried to kill him when they returned to his city. That was a big part of the reason he didn't completely trust thrall-brainwashing. There had also been cases of vampire lieutenants who left his city leading expeditions and simply never returned to it. Grandfather suspected that in some of those cases their thrall-brainwashing had broken down too, but instead of returning and trying to kill him they had simply disappeared into the wilderness, into freedom. Some of those might have sired other vampires after escaping his control. Jarna said in this period Grandfather had a vampire thrall who had the "bullshit vampire power" of being able to look deeply into people's minds without a blood thrall connection to them, and that thrall had been present at some of Grandfather's meetings with his new rivals and had looked into their minds and confirmed that they had vampirized themselves in the same way Grandfather did.

The hard centuries of the Younger Dryas Cold Snap came and went, and while they were a tremendous blow to the hilly flanks agricultural society, they did not destroy it. And within a millennia, the warmth returned, and the great warming resumed.

As potential military threats to his little kingdom proliferated, Grandfather started keeping more of the boys born to his thralls alive. He needed armies again.

Grandfather's little city survived into historic times. But in the end an enemy came along that could not be held off, and Grandfather's little city was destroyed. But Grandfather adapted. He developed alternate strategies for keeping himself alive and safe. He changed his organization into something like a more typical vampire clan.

Jarna was moved around a lot more now. But wherever Grandfather took her, he kept her in a secure, secluded, guarded place. He still had uses for her super-thrall ability, and she was still precious to him, as a possession, not as a person. And therefore she was heavily guarded, and she spent most of her time confined to the inner chambers of some palace or complex or other, mostly interacting only with servants and Grandfather and his lieutenants, almost never going outside except into an inner courtyard or sometimes onto a roof. It was rather like being a woman in purdah. She spent more millennia that way.

Until one day, Grandfather found and thralled and thrall-brainwashed another vampire who had a super-thrall ability more potent than Jarna's. And he went to Jarna, and he told her that he didn't need her anymore, and he'd found a vampire lady named Elle who offered him a good price for her, so he was selling Jarna to Elle. And so, after Jarna had served Grandfather for twenty-five thousand years, that was that, Grandfather put Jarna on an airplane and sent her to Elle. And almost as soon as Jarna got off the plane Elle put Jarna in blood thrall to her. And thus, after twenty-five thousand years of servitude, Grandfather's control of Jarna ended, though, of course, Jarna was not free, Jarna simply had a new mistress now.

-------------

Elle took Jarna to see the cave in France where she grew up. They went with Annaliese and one of Elle's trans women thralls. Maybe Elle did it out of curiosity. Maybe it was her idea of a kind of treat.

The four of them walked and drove around the area a little first, like tourists. Well, they were tourists, in a strange way... Elle wanted to see if Jarna would recognize familiar features in the landscape.

And she did! It had changed a lot, of course. Much of it was now full of cultivated fields and towns and roads with cars driving on them and all the things associated with modern human civilization, all that was new. And it was now full of people who were not her people; they didn't even look like her people (when they saw her, they often assumed she was a foreigner from a distant land, and they were right in a way; in a way she was a foreigner from a distant land - distant in time!). Even the nature had changed radically: there were a lot more trees now, the undeveloped areas were now covered by forest instead of the grasslands Jarna remembered, and the big animals were all gone, except for cattle in the fields, which... were recognizably relatives of the aurochs, but different. And during Jarna's youth the place probably wouldn't have been so warm at that time of year.

But the bones of the land were the same. The same valleys, the same hills. They'd changed a little, twenty-five thousand years of erosion has changed them, but they were recognizable, they were familiar. Jarna recognized many landmarks from the landscape she knew as a human, often they were a little distorted, but they were recognizable. She knew them so well, they were so familiar, they were associated with meaningful memories, she could not forget them, she recognized them when she saw them despite everything twenty-five thousand years has done to them. That hill! That's... And that's the valley where...!

In the landscape of Jarna's youth there were big boulders, and places where erosion had rubbed the hills down to bare rock, and she found many of them were still there. They were different now, twenty-five thousand years of wind and rain had eroded them, but she could recognize many of them.

It was a strange, bittersweet homecoming for Jarna. It made some deep part of her brain truly feel that she was truly old. While she'd languished in inner rooms the homeland she remembered had become this place. The landscape was familiar enough for her to really see how it had changed. She'd long ago accepted and processed that she would never truly return home, because the home she remembered didn't exist anymore, but this pulled at that old mental scar. She was home. She was home, and her home had turned into this place. The experience she was having now was the closest she could ever get to coming home.

But... She hadn't expected to ever get to go home. Not even in this limited sense. It was an unexpected gift to be taken home, to be allowed to see her home, to be allowed to see what her home had become. To get to wander through the landscape of her childhood and her young womanhood, and see things that had been so familiar to her then, and have the memories associated with those things evoked.

The four of them went to the cave, and on their way... That boulder! How well Jarna remembered that boulder! She'd been wondering if it was still there, and if so what it would look like after all this time! She often played around it with other children when she was a little girl. And she and her mother and the other women and girls often rested around it when they went gathering. Often when the women and girls rested there during gathering they would eat something together, and the women would talk to each other, and the girls would play with each other. It looked different now, twenty-five thousand years of wind and rain had changed its shape, whole meters of stone must have eroded away from it in places, but part of it are still recognizable, enough for it to be recognized, and Jarna also knows it by its place in the landscape.

It was a warm and pleasant spring day, eye-hurtingly sunny for vampires so they all took sunglasses but otherwise pleasant, and they'd taken a couple of picnic baskets, and Jarna suggested they eat near the boulder, as she had done so many times when she was human, and that sounded fine to the others, so they did that. Jarna took her sunglasses off; she wanted to experience the sunny day more like her human self would have, even if that meant putting up with sun-pain. The others took off their sunglasses too; it's not too bad if the eyes aren't exposed to it for too long.

The food was sandwiches and things, it did not taste of blood, it was human food, farmer food, very unlike the things Jarna had eaten near this boulder when she was human. Although they had taken some...

Some weeks prior, Jarna had tried to replicate a favorite dish of her human self, something her mother and aunts had often prepared for her when she was a little girl, a sort of mix of animal fat and fruit, one of Elle's trans women thralls said it was a little like something called "Eskimo ice cream." Annaliese had sampled some, and then Elle and her trans women thralls. One of the trans women thralls - the same one who was going to the cave with Jarna - thought it was really cool that they were getting to taste Cro-Magnon cuisine. Jarna had cautioned that what she'd produced was different from the original dish, it was all substitutions, she'd made it with stuff she'd dug out of Elle's refrigerator, the fat was from a different animal and the fruits were different, it tasted different from the dish in her memories, the authentic dish of twenty-five millennia ago would have tasted different. Besides, the vampire palette perceived tastes differently than the human palette, and she'd only tasted the original dish as a human, so...

Jarna had experimented with trying to recreate other dishes of her people, with the encouragement of the same thrall, who thought trying to recreate Cro-Magnon cuisine was a really cool project and who often helped Jarna in the kitchen with this. That woman seemed to have an interest in how people lived very long ago, and was full of questions for Jarna about how her people had done things. Elle allowed her thralls more independence than Grandfather did, Jarna liked that. The dishes Jarna had been able to cook were not particularly authentic, they were mostly substitutions, the meat was from different animals, the plants were different - in many cases an authentic recreation would be impossible because the original used meat from an animal that was now extinct. The thrall who kept encouraging her thought it was really cool anyway. She said it was a pity about the vampire thing, because publishing a Cro-Magnon cookbook would be really cool. Maybe some vampires would be interested in such a thing?

The day before they went to the cave Elle had paid the staff at the hotel they were staying at a hefty amount of money, and in exchange they'd given Jarna the right to use the hotel kitchen for a few hours during off-hours that day and raid the hotel fridge. Jarna had packed some of the results of that session into the picnic baskets. She'd anticipated the possibility of passing by that boulder on their way to the cave, and... And sitting near it, and eating something that tasted at least a little like the foods of her people, was an idea that had appealed to her profoundly.

Elle was astonished by how well and how vividly Jarna seemed to remember her life as a human. Of course, it made sense that she had an excellent eye and memory for terrain - she'd been a hunter! But this was more than that. Her human life couldn't have been much more than a thousandth of her lifetime, and it was so long ago, but she seemed to remember it as if it was only a human lifetime or so ago.

"I think it's cause that was the last time she was happy and felt really alive," Elle's trans woman thrall who'd come on the trip to the cave with them said, "Tatasi basically buried her alive. He basically kept her buried alive for twenty-five thousand years. How did she put it? He kept her shut up in rooms for a long time. He profoundly starved her of experiences. She hasn't had a long life, she's had maybe twenty-five years of life as a human followed by a whole lot of profound mental deprivation with some ghastly horrors thrown in. Of course most of her vivid memories and emotions are about her real life! Of course she remembers her real life like it was fifty years ago; your brain keeps the memories that are important to you!"

When Annaliese's first master explained to her that she would live a long life, in terms her wordless human self could understand, he'd shown her the slowness of the decay of stone. Elle too knew the slowness of the decay of stone; knew what it meant that whole meters of stone eroded off that boulder while Grandfather kept Jarna shut up in rooms.

After their picnic at the boulder, it was a not very long walk to the cave. Elle was rich enough to buy herself privileges like a private unsupervised self-guided tour of the cave for herself and three associates in which they would be allowed to descend into the chambers where the cave paintings were. They didn't have to share the cave with tourists or a guide or a minder. This was an intimate time.

There were electric lights in the cave now, bright enough to make the cave painting chambers well-lit even to human eyes. Elle's trans woman thrall guessed that without artificial light this chamber of the cave would be totally dark even to a vampire. Elle's trans woman thrall said it was amazing that the cave painters of Jarna's people had been able to do such work in a dark place, with only primitive open flame lamps for light and only human eyes. Jarna said the trick was to let your eyes adjust for a while before you started to work, her mother had told her that. And the paintings had been made to be seen with the dim, flickering light of animal tallow oil lamps. They'd been made for ceremonies where they served as a focus for symbolic magic to control the movement of the herds and insure the great seasonal hunts were a success. The pictures of herbivores were used to exert influence over the real animals, while the pictures of predators were used to invoke patron spirits of the hunters. The painters and the hunters each had their own roles in these ceremonies - as a child, Jarna had participated a few times as a learning painter, and then after she'd joined the hunters she'd participated as a hunter. It was in the context of one of those rituals, in the dim flickering light of animal tallow lamps, that you could have seen the paintings as they were made to be seen. The dim flickering light gave them a feeling of aliveness.

Elle's trans woman thrall said she wishes she could have seen one of those rituals. Jarna said she might remember enough that, with a few dozen cooperative people, she could recreate one.

Jarna looked for familiar paintings. The cave hadn't been anywhere near so well-lit when she'd been in it as a girl, and many of the paintings had been added after her abduction, and her memories of the cave were old...

Those horses! They'd been there when she was a little girl! They were older than her! Her mother had shown them to her!

That lion! Her grandmother painted that one!

And her mother and one of her aunts had painted that mammoth together! They'd pointed it out to her as their creation, while they were teaching her!

And there was the auroch in the book Elle showed her, the one her mother and grandmother made! Jarna watched it being made!

That woolly rhinoceros! Jarna had actually helped with that one! Her mother and aunt had done most of the work, but a few times her mother sat beneath it, and her aunt helped Jarna climb onto her mother's shoulders, and then her aunt held the lamp and her mother handed Jarna the tools and the materials and Jarna applied the paint.

Those hand prints! One of them was a print of Jarna's hand! Her mother had put Jarna on her shoulders, and lifted her high enough to put her hand on the wall in that place, and while Jarna's hand was pressed against the cave wall her mother had given Jarna pigment to take into her mouth and then spit onto and around her hand, so when she pulled her hand away there was an imprint of her hand outlined in red pigment. Every painter made at least one print like that; it was a little like a signature, a way to leave a little of their individuality on the cave wall.

Jarna wondered if she could find her old handprint, looked for it... There! That was it! That was the print of her hand! She was sure of it!

Jarna was tall enough now that she could simply raise her hand and hold it near the ancient handprint she'd made as a little girl. She did that, and compared the ancient handprint to the hand she had now. The hand she had now was bigger. And the hand she had now was an old woman's hand, wrinkled. In the time since the handprint was made she'd become an adult, and then she'd become old.

While this was happening Jarna had been talking, sharing her thoughts, and Elle had been listening. And Elle knew what it meant that Jarna's hand was now an old woman's hand, because Jarna had been transitioned young.

"I am going to kill him!" Elle almost shouted, "He took an intelligent being that lives longer than the redwoods, and he burned out her life in the space of three rooms! He kept her like a woman in purdah for twenty-five thousand years!" And Elle was crying, her eyes were wet and tears were running from them, and that was astonishing because it was the first time anyone present had ever seen her cry. And Elle said, "I am going to kill him! I am going to end the hundred and twenty-five thousand year waste he called a life! I'm going to inflict on him what he's spent a hundred and twenty-five millennia being afraid of! I am going to kill him!"

Elle rushed up to Jarna and grabbed her hand, held it between her own two hands, put pressure on it so she could really feel the contact, and said, "And Jarna, I'm going to do it while you're still alive! I promise you! Tatasi will not outlive you! You will see him die! Maybe not directly, but someday I'm going to come to you and I'm going to - I'm going to show you his severed head or something, you will have the experience of being alive and knowing that he's dead! I'm going to give you the experience of living in a world that doesn't contain him anymore, of knowing you've outlived him! I'm going to give you that gift! I promise it to you! That's my promise to you!"

"Do you want me to swear by the old gods of our people? By the gods of my clan, the gods of my sire's sire?" Elle asked, and she let go of Jarna's hand and began making motions across her chest while she spoke, sketching out invisible symbols in the air, like a Christian making the sign of the cross across their chest, "I feel stupid doing it, cause I don't believe in that stuff, but if you want me to, I will! I swear by Ilkar-Na, the war god worshipped at Gobekli Tepe, I swear by Orodros, who marched across Europe with the Yamnaya under the sign of the crushing wagon wheel..."

"Grandfather is older than those gods," Jarna said, "Much older."

Elle smiled, a smile that had a little self-deprecating humor in it, but also a smile that was fierce, a smile that showed teeth, a smile that showed fangs, and Elle said, "Then I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness, which I take much more seriously anyway. I swear to you this: I am going to kill Tatasi, and I am going to do it while you are still alive, and I'm going to give you proof that I've killed him, and I am going to do it soon, you won't have to wait long! This is my gift to you, my promise to you, my vow to you, my oath to you, and a Sister's oath to a Sister is binding, on it I stake my self-respect and my honor among my Sisters and my Brothers."

And then Elle said, "And I'm going to make another oath. All of you witness this oath! I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness that I will never do to a Sister or a Brother what Tatasi did to you! Any Sister or Brother who is my thrall and who does not die to violence or accident will have freedom eventually, will have freedom long before their lifespan is burned out! Even if I live to be as old as Jarna is now, even if I live to be as old as Tatasi is now, even if I live a million years, no matter how long I live, no-one will spend twenty millennia as my thrall!"

And then Elle said, "And I'm going to make a third oath! And I want all of you to witness this oath too! I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness that I will never be a waste like Tatasi! I will never be a selfish, negative-sum weight on the world like him! I will never grab a little power and then content myself with masturbating to my mastery of some tiny corner of creation while I accomplish nothing but making the world a little bit worse for everyone else!"

And then Elle grasped Jarna's hands firmly and told her "And I have another gift for you. I'm going to set you free. And I don't mean eventually. I'm going to start the process right now." Elle explained that while Annaliese's super-thrall is much less potent than Jarna's in terms of controlling or influencing many people at once, Annaliese's super-thrall would better fit the needs of the 'programme,' so Elle didn't really need Jarna. Certainly Jarna could be very useful to Elle elsewhere, but Elle had decided that, for the first time in a long time, she was going to do something both costly and altruistic. She was going to use blood thrall to undo the thrall-brainwashing Grandfather had done to Jarna, and then she was going to set Jarna free. And present Jarna to the Directorate. The Directorate would probably give Jarna some sort of position of privilege and influence, or at the very least would make sure she was more than comfortable for the foreseeable future. The old vampires in the Directorate have an aristocratic and gerontocratic mindset, they respect other old vampires, and Jarna is very, very old indeed, there are very few people older than Jarna. And Elle gave Jarna this encouragement: Jarna may be nearing the end of her lifespan by vampire standards, but in absolute terms, she probably still has long to live. She looks like maybe a woman in her sixties, or maybe like a healthy, fit, vigorous seventy-something. If it works anything at all like a vastly stretched out version of human aging, that suggests she could easily still be alive thousands of years from now. She likely still has enough time left to become truly old, experience old.

------------

Vampire manumission of the sort Elle gave Jarna is tricky. It contains an inherent contradiction. It involves using blood thrall to undo thrall-brainwashing. It involves the same basic process as thrall-brainwashing, but directed toward creating a free-thinking mind. It involves using the tools of cognitive binding to set someone's mind free. It involves commanding someone to become free. It's as awkward as it sounds.

Annaliese was better at it than Elle. At least with Jarna. Elle's thrall power over Jarna was very verbal. Elle could say "You are your own person. You do what you want or what you think is right, and you decide for yourself what is right. You do not have to obey Tatasi. You have no loyalty to Tatasi," but that would fall into Jarna's mind as a series of commands. It was hard to make someone truly free that way.

A person who mostly thought without words, Annaliese experienced thrall connection very differently, much more intimately. She could reach into Jarna's mind and feel the blocks and channels Grandfather had put inside her. He'd been lazy! That would be very helpful! He'd mostly just put a series of blocks and compulsions into Jarna's mind, he'd left huge swathes of her brain relatively untouched. She had a lot of anger toward him! And a lot of thoughts and emotions that neither he nor Elle had put in her!

Elle and Annaliese did thrall-sharing with Jarna. The way Annaliese explained it years later to the graduate school girls was that it was "kind of like kinky poly with a domme, a sub, and a switch who was domming the sub and subbing for the domme." Elle ordered Annaliese to drink from Elle and ordered Jarna to drink from both Elle and Annaliese, so a triangular network of thrall connections was established. And Elle and Annaliese worked on Jarna together.

Annaliese found the parts of Jarna that were basically already free and encouraged them to grow. She found the blocks Grandfather put in Jarna's mind and weakened them. She encouraged connections to form and strengthen, dissolved the partitions Grandfather put in Jarna's brain. She found the channels Grandfather had carved in Jarna's brain and encouraged other parts of Jarna to grow into those channels and recruit parts of those networks, cannibalize them, tear those networks apart by appropriating parts of them.

Annaliese would find emotions in Jarna and enflame them, and then Annaliese and Jarna would feel Jarna's emotions together while Annaliese encouraged them, and by doing this Annaliese strengthened the neural pathways in Jarna that created those emotions. These emotion-sharing sessions were mostly wordless; when Jarna and Annaliese did them they would...

Sometimes they would cry together, bawl together, often hugging each other tightly.

Sometimes they would go to a training/exercise room and take out Jarna's anger on a boxer's punching bag, punching and kicking it and screaming together. Elle found it a little funny to watch; Annaliese and Jarna were not physically strong for vampires, for a strong vampire like Elle it was a little like watching the furious anger of small children. If Elle had been that angry she'd have vented her rage on cinderblocks and bricks and reduced them to debris and dust! But Jarna and Annaliese were comparatively feeble vampires, which was to say they were about as strong as very strong human men, so they just punched and kicked the stuffing out of a boxer's punching bag. Often literally beat the stuffing out of it; they did go through a lot of punching bags!

Sometimes Jarna would pace and talk to herself angrily in the ancient, dead language of her tribe. Usually while Jarna did that Annaliese would play energetically with some object, using hand movements to distract herself from the emotions and give herself an outlet for the desire to do something the emotions created. Every once in a while, when Jarna's emotions during these sessions got particularly hard for Annaliese to deal with, Annaliese would self-regulate by banging her head repetitively against a wall.

One time, while Jarna was pacing and talking angrily in the ancient, dead language of her tribe, Elle asked Annaliese what Jarna was saying. Annaliese said gently, "Mistress, she's talking in that language because she doesn't want the rest of us to understand what she's saying."

Elle's first reaction was annoyance, but then she realized: in this context this was actually seemed like a very good sign! She said to Annaliese, "Please don't call me that."

Annaliese said, "Sorry, Sister! Sometimes I forget!"

"Better," Elle said. And then she gestured vaguely at Jarna and said, "But... She's expressing anger at Tatasi, isn't she?"

Annaliese nodded slightly, more of a single slow bowing and unbowing of the head (she did that often), and said, "Yes, she is."

A very good sign! She was expressing anger at Tatasi, and even while under blood thrall to Elle she was developing a desire to keep secrets from Elle, to have privacy from her! A very good sign in this context!

A day came when Jarna developed enough independence of mind to make a request of Elle, an important request, to ask her something, to ask her for another promise, to swear another oath.

Jarna said, "I ask that you save my son."

Her son. The one Grandfather made her to bear, all those millennia ago. He was still alive. Or, at least, he had been when Grandfather sold her and sent her off to Elle. He was still one of Grandfather's thralls. He was almost as old as Jarna now; she'd been less than two centuries old when she'd given birth to him. He looked like an old man now. He had never known freedom.

Elle swore an oath to save Jarna's son, and set him free, just like she'd set Jarna free. She swore that she'd do it when she fulfilled her first oath to Jarna and killed Grandfather.

A day came, sooner than Elle had expected, when she and Annaliese judged that Jarna was ready for the blood thrall to be withdrawn. And that day Jarna took no blood into her, and the thrall connections between her and Elle and Annaliese thinned and broke. And a little while after they broke, Jarna smiled and said she was experiencing her first hours of true freedom in twenty-five thousand years, and she liked being free, and she thanked Elle and Annaliese for freeing her.

Elle and Annaliese kept Jarna around for a little while, to make sure Grandfather's thrall-brainwashing was truly gone from her, and to make sure her mind was free in the way they intended. A few times they put her back under blood thrall for just an hour or so, just to look into her thoughts and see what was happening in her mind. And eventually Elle presented Jarna to the Directorate, and Jarna left Elle's estate, and went to make her own life.

Jarna is... almost free now. There was one bit of control Elle installed in her. Jarna will not betray Elle. Jarna will not do anything that would radically ruin Elle's plans, endanger Elle's life. Elle and Annaliese carved those mental pathways into Jarna deep. They may erode in a century or so; by then it won't matter, by then Elle will have succeeded or failed, and if she's succeeded she'll be too powerful for the Directorate to harm her, she'll be giving orders to the Directorate. Elle comforts herself with the notion that a century or so is trivial compared to the amount of lifespan Jarna probably has left. Elle felt putting this in was necessary, because Jarna does have some pretty serious kompromat on Elle, just knowing about her plans related to the 'programme.' It was either that or erase a good chunk of Jarna's memories of her time with Elle, and to Elle that seemed a worse violation.

Jarna visits the graduate school sometimes. Elle can trust her with that.

Jarna is... mostly free now. And seems to be happy, and living her best life. Elle is happy about that.

-----------

Author's note: I couldn't resist the Grandmother/Grandfather parallel.

[oliviermiraarmstrongs]

mid-year book freak out tag

thank you @bloody-wonder for giving me an excuse to share my book thoughts!

1. Best Book You’ve Read So Far in 2021?

It’s gotta be The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; I hear “feminist period novel about mentally ill woman unable to cope in upper-class society” and I am THERE! It’s like [Stefon voice] This book has EVERYTHING: repressed women, a decaying old house, a complex relationship of two sisters, a pulpy sci-fi story-within-a-story-within-a-story, criticism of capitalism and reactionary attitudes and politics, commentary on how conservative society shuns those it perceives to be “other” and a threat to the social order (poor people, socialists, “unconventional” women). It is EXTREMELY my shit.

2. Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far in 2021?

The only one I've read is Siege and Storm, so Siege and Storm! Shadow and Bone was captivating, if a little simplistic, but the sequel really fleshes out the characters, setting, and themes. It’s great to see Alina take a more active role, and I love the exploration of sainthood. 

3. New Release You Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To?

I’m really curious about Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart. Same with Axiom’s End, which I haven’t really been seeking out, but it’s been resting on my list since I like a lot of Lindsay Ellis’ stuff.

4. Most Anticipated Release For Second Half of 2021?

5. Biggest Disappointment?

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. I’ve been getting into Atwood, and I have a soft spot for female-centric retellings of myths, so this was on my list for a long time. It’s not bad; it’s decent as a character study and offers some good perspective on the hanged slave women from The Odyssey, but overall it came off as...bitter? And not in a good way. It’s reasonable to include commentary on how bad things were for women in ancient times, but after a while I’m just like “But there had to be a time when Penelope was happy, right?” But the biggest failing has to be the treatment of Helen. Why a story focused on bringing literary justice to silenced women also characterizes Helen of Troy as a manipulative, arrogant bitch who single-handedly ignited the Trojan War because she enjoys fucking people over, I’ll never know. Ironic that in the opening chapter, Penelope bemoans being used as a yardstick with which to judge other women, and then the book proceeds to do exactly that with her and Helen. Can’t let Penelope have a positive relationship with another woman! There could be some form of unreliable narrator at play, but there’s not much indication that that’s the case here. Even Homer had a more nuanced portrayal of Helen than this!

6. Biggest Surprise?

I suppose The Red Tent. I picked it up at a Goodwill because of my aforementioned interest in female-centric retellings. It’s not amazing, but I wasn’t really expecting it to emotionally affect me like it did. You spend so much time setting up Dinah’s family and this supportive community of woman within a patriarchal society, only to have Dinah abandon it all after getting betrayed by her father and (most of) her brothers. Hearing about how her family fell apart after she left and she never got to see her mothers again really gets to me. The book has flaws for sure - neither of Dinah’s romances are developed very well, and some of its themes can come off as gender essentialist - but I think it’s a nice exploration of female labor and traditions that too often get ignored.

7. Favorite New Author?

The only relatively new author I’ve been reading is Leigh Bardugo, soooooo... honestly I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been said, I got into the series pretty late. Great world-building, witty dialogue, a familiar type of story with enough interesting ideas to make it feel fresh. Check out Shadow and Bone if you get the chance. Sound of the summer.

8. Newest Fictional Crush?

You would think it would be Nikolai Lantsov since I just finished reading Siege and Storm and he seems to be the fan favorite... but nah, not yet. He’s fun, but he doesn’t hit me in that way (Though very sexy of him to just casually proposition Alina and Mal for a royal polycule, a la Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot; would love an AU where they accept his offer). However, I would let Zoya murder me. Every time Zoya is not in a scene I am asking “Where’s Zoya?” Also shout out to Alina, just because I would treat her better than all the men in her life! 

9. Newest Favorite Character?

Gonna try to do this without spoiling too much, but Laura Chase in The Blind Assassin really resonated with me. Her personality reminds me a lot of myself, especially as an an autistic person, like the way she has her own way of thinking that makes perfect sense to her, but makes other people see her as odd and naive. I love how she’s set up in-universe as this Sylvia Plath-esque tragic heroine, with Iris spending the rest of the book interrogating and deconstructing, and in a way, reconstructing this image of her. Atwood you’re insane for this. I forgive you for the Helen thing now.

10. Book That Made You Cry?

I never got as far as crying, but the part in The Goldfinch where [spoilers incoming] the art heist goes wrong and Theo is alone in the hotel room and he’s spiraling and considering suicide and finally dreams of his mom… all that was too much for me and I had to put the book down for the night. This guy just can’t catch a fucking break.

11. Book That Made You Happy?

fucidjdjdj I didn’t read any happy books this year. Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm because I read them really fast unlike my usual months-long reading schedule.

12. Favorite Book Adaptation You Saw?

Predictably, Shadow and Bone. I basically bought and read the book less than a week before the show came out because I thought it looked interesting and wanted in on the hype (mostly because Jessie is cute 🥰). Honestly, the show improves a lot on the first book; the multiple storylines make it more dynamic and complex, the actors really help to make the characters feel more fleshed out, and Alina and Inej interacted for like three scenes, introducing an unexpected but thematically rich ship.

13. Favorite Review You’ve Written This Year?

14. Most Beautiful Book You’ve Bought So Far This Year?

I impulse-bought this book of Romantic poetry at Barnes and Noble just because it was pretty and I had a gift card

15. What Books Do You Need To Read By The End Of The Year?

Besides finishing The Grisha Trilogy/Six of Crows duology/Zoya’s duology that I forgot the name of….I don’t know. I’m not a reader that plans in advance. I acquire books, finish whatever I’m currently reading, look through my stacks deciding what to read next, spend an hour doing so because I can’t decide if I’m in the mood for any of them, and either force myself to read one or buy/borrow a new one.

I’m tagging @betweenironyandsilver, @illuminaticns, @borispavlikovskys, @chdarling, @sctine, @mightyaubs, @excuseforadrink, and @trckstergods, if you wanna! Or anyone who wants to yell about books.

[mjvnivsbrvtvs]

hi! so we have established at this point that you have A Lot Of thoughts about antony and brutus. but how does caesar (julius, not the little bitch octavian) play into that? bc like. my knowledge and impression of them is very limited and mainly constructed from watching hbo rome and idk. i think it'd be fun to throw caesar in the mix. love all the art and writing on your blog btw! have a nice day.

Hey, okay! So this used to be over 30 pages long (Machiavelli and Caligula got involved and that's when things got out of hand), but through the power of friendship and two late night writing dates fueled by coffee, I’ve cut it way down to under 10. Many thanks to the people who listened to me ramble about it at length, and also to a dear friend for helping me cut this down to under ten pages!

Also, thank you! I'm glad you enjoy the stuff I make! It makes me very happy to hear that!

And quickly, a Disclaimer: I’m not an academic, I’m not a classicist, I’m not a historian, and I spend a lot of time very stressed out that I’ve tricked people into thinking I’m someone who has any kind of merit in this area. It's probably best to treat this as an abstract character analysis!

On the other hand, I love talking about dead men, so, with enthusiasm, here we go!

For this, I’m going to cut Shakespeare and HBO Rome out of the framework and focus more on a historical spin.

Caesar is a combination of a manipulator and a catalyst. A Bad Omen. The remaining wound that’s poisoning Rome.

Cassius gets a lot of the blame for Brutus’ turn to assassination, but it overlooks that Brutus was already inclined towards political ambition, as were most men involved in the political landscape of the time.

Furthermore, although Sulla had actually raised the number of praetorships available from six to eight, there were still only two consulships available. There was always the chance that death or disgrace might remove some of the competition and hence ease the bottleneck. But, otherwise, it was at the top of the ladder that the competition was particularly fierce: whereas in previous years one in three praetors would have gone on to become consul, from the 80s BC onwards the chances were one in four. For the senators who had made it this far, it mattered that they should try to achieve their consulship in the earliest year allowed to them by law. To fail in this goal once was humiliating; to fail at the polls twice would be deemed a signal disgrace for a man like Brutus.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

The way Caesar offered Brutus political power the way that he did, and Brutus accepting it, locked them into the assassination outcome.

Here is a man who’s built his entire image around honor and liberty and virtu, around being a staunch defender of morals and the republic

In these heated circumstances, Brutus composed a bitter tract On the Dictatorship of Pompey (De Dictatura Pompei), in which he staunchly opposed the idea of giving Pompey such a position of power. ‘It is better to rule no one than to be another man’s slave’, runs one of the only snippets of this composition to survive today: ‘for one can live honourably without power’, Brutus explained, ‘but to live as a slave is impossible’. In other words, Brutus believed it would be better for the Senate to have no imperial power at all than to have imperium and be subject to Pompey’s whim.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

and you give him political advancement, but without the honor needed for this advancement to mean anything?

At the same time, however, Brutus had gained his position via extremely un-republican means: appointment by a dictator rather than election by the people. As the name of the famous career path, the cursus honorum, suggests, political office was perceived as an honour at Rome. But it was one which had to be bestowed by the populus Romanus in recognition of a man’s dignitas.69 In other words, a man’s ‘worth’ or ‘standing’ was only really demonstrated by his prior services to the state and his moral qualities, and that was what was needed to gain public recognition. Brutus had got it wrong. As Cicero not too subtly reminded him in the treatise he dedicated to Brutus: ‘Honour is the reward for virtue in the considered opinion of the citizenry.’ But the man who gains power (imperium) by some other circumstance, or even against the will of the people, he continues, ‘has laid his hands only on the title of honour, but it is not real honour’.70

Brutus may have secured political office, then, but he had not done so honourably; nor had he acted in a manner that would earn him a reputation for virtue or everlasting fame.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

Brutus in the image that he fashioned for himself was not compatible with the way Caesar was setting him up to be a political successor, and there was really never going to be any other outcome than the one that happened.

The Brutus of Shakespeare and Plutarch’s greatest tragedy was that he was pushed into something he wouldn’t have done otherwise. The Brutus of history’s greatest tragedy was accepting Caesar’s forgiveness after the Caesar-Pompey conflict, and then selling out for political ambition, because Caesar's forgiveness is not benevolent.

Rather than have his enemies killed, he offered them mercy or clemency -- clementia in Latin. As Caesar wrote to his advisors, “Let this be our new method of conquering -- to fortify ourselves by mercy and generosity.” Caesar pardoned most of his enemies and forbore confiscating their property. He even promoted some of them to high public office.

This policy won him praise from no less a figure than Marcus Tullius Cicero, who described him in a letter to Aulus Caecina as “mild and merciful by nature.” But Caecina knew a thing or two about dictators, since he’d had to publish a flattering book about Caesar in order to win his pardon after having opposed him in the civil war. Caecina and other beneficiaries of Caesar’s unusual clemency took it in a far more ambivalent way. To begin with, most of them were, like Caesar, Roman nobles. Theirs was a culture of honor and status; asking a peer for a pardon was a serious humiliation. So Caesar’s “very power of granting favors weighed heavily on free people,” as Florus, a historian and panegyrist of Rome, wrote about two centuries after the dictator’s death. One prominent noble, in fact, ostentatiously refused Caesar’s clemency. Marcius Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger, was a determined opponent of populist politics and Caesar’s most bitter foe. They had clashed years earlier over Caesar’s desire to show mercy to the Catiline conspirators; Cato argued vigorously for capital punishment and convinced the Senate to execute them. Now he preferred death to Caesar’s pardon. “I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts,” Cato said; he told his son, "I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.

-Barry Strauss, Caesar and the Dangers of Forgiveness

something else that's a fun adjacent to the topic that's fun to think about:

The link between ‘sparing’ and ‘handing over’ is common in the ancient world.763 Paul also uses παραδίδωμι again, denoting ‘hand over, give up a person’ (Bauer et al. 2000:762).764 The verb παραδίδωμι especially occurs in connection with war (Eschner 2010b:197; Gaventa 2011:272).765 However, in Romans 8:32, Paul uses παραδίδωμι to focus on a court image (Eschner 2010b:201).766 Christina Eschner (2010b:197) convincingly argues that Paul’s use of παραδίδωμι refers to the ‘Hingabeformulierungen’ as the combination of the personal object of the handing over of a person in the violence of another person, especially the handing over of a person to an enemy.767 Moreover, Eschner (2009:676) convincingly argues that Isaiah 53 is not the pre-tradition for Romans 8:32.

Annette Potgieter, Contested Body: Metaphors of dominion in Romans 5-8

Along with the internal conflict of Pompey, the murderer of Brutus’ father, and Caesar, the figurehead for everything that goes against what Brutus stands for, Brutus accepting Caesar’s forgiveness isn’t an act of benevolence, regardless of Caesar’s intentions.

On wards, Caesar owns Brutus. Caesar benefits from having Brutus as his own, he inherits Brutus’ reputation, he inherits a better PR image in the eyes of the Roman people. On wards, nothing Brutus does is without the ugly stain of Caesar. His career is no longer his own, his life is no longer fully his own, his legacy is no longer entirely his. Brutus becomes a man divided.

And it’s not like it was an internal struggle, it was an entire spectacle. Hypocrisy is theatrical. Call yourself a man of honor and then you sell out? The people of Rome will remember that, and they’re going to make sure you know it.

After this certain men at the elections proposed for consuls the tribunes previously mentioned, and they not only privately approached Marcus Brutus and such other persons as were proud-spirited and attempted to persuade them, but also tried to incite them to action publicly. 12 1 Making the most of his having the same name as the great Brutus who overthrew the Tarquins, they scattered broadcast many pamphlets, declaring that he was not truly that man's descendant; for the older Brutus had put to death both his sons, the only ones he had, when they were mere lads, and left no offspring whatever. 2 Nevertheless, the majority pretended to accept such a relationship, in order that Brutus, as a kinsman of that famous man, might be induced to perform deeds as great. They kept continually calling upon him, shouting out "Brutus, Brutus!" and adding further "We need a Brutus." 3 Finally on the statue of the early Brutus they wrote "Would that thou wert living!" and upon the tribunal of the living Brutus (for he was praetor at the time and this is the name given to the seat on which the praetor sits in judgment) "Brutus, thou sleepest," and "Thou art not Brutus."

Cassius Dio

Brutus knew. Cassius knew. Caesar knew. You can’t escape your legacy when you’re the one who stamped it on coins.

Caesar turned Brutus into the dagger that would cut, and Brutus himself isn’t free from this injury. It’s a mutual betrayal, a mutual dooming.

By this time Caesar found himself being attacked from every side, and as he glanced around to see if he could force a way through his attackers, he saw Brutus closing in upon him with his dagger drawn. At this he let go of Casca’s hand which he had seized, muffled up his head in his robe, and yielded up his body to his murderers’ blows. Then the conspirators flung themselves upon him with such a frenzy of violence, as they hacked away with their daggers, that they even wounded one another. Brutus received a stab in the hand as he tried to play his part in the slaughter, and every one of them was drenched in blood.

Plutarch

For Antony, Caesar is a bad sign.

Brutus and Antony are fucked over by the generation they were born in, etc etc the cannibalization of Rome on itself, the Third Servile War was the match to the gasoline already on the streets of Rome, the last generation of Romans etc etc etc. They are counterparts to each other, displaced representatives of a time already gone by the time they were alive.

Rome spends its years in a state of civil war after civil war, political upheaval, and death. Neither Brutus or Antony will ever really know stability, as instability is hallmark of the times. Both of them are at something of a disadvantage, although Brutus has what Antony does not, and what Brutus has is what let’s him create his own career. Until Caesar, Brutus is owned by no one.

This is not the case for Antony.

You can track Antony’s life by who he’s attached to. Very rarely is he ever truly a man unto himself, there is always someone nearby.

In his youth, it is said, Antony gave promise of a brilliant future, but then he became a close friend of Curio and this association seems to have fallen like a blight upon his career. Curio was a man who had become wholly enslaved to the demands of pleasure, and in order to make Antony more pliable to his will, he plunged him into a life of drinking bouts, love-affairs, and reckless spending. The consequence was that Antony quickly ran up debts of an enormous size for so young a man, the sum involved being two hundred and fifty talents. Curio provided security for the whole of this amount, but his father heard of it and forbade Antony his house. Antony then attached himself for a short while to Clodius, the most notorious of all the demagogues of his time for his lawlessness and loose-living, and took part in the campaigns of violence which at that time were throwing political affairs at Rome into chaos.

Plutarch

(although, in contrast to Brutus, we rarely lose sight of Antony. As a person, we can see him with a kind of clarity, if one looks a little bit past the Augustan propaganda. He is, at all times, human.)

Antony being figuratively or literally attached to a person starts early, and continues politically. While Brutus has enough privilege to brute force his way into politics despite Cicero’s lamentation of a promising life being thrown off course, Antony will instead follow a different career path that echoes in his personal life and defines his relationships.

Whereas some young men often attached or indebted themselves to a patron or a military leader at the beginning of their political lives,

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

+

3. During his stay in Greece he was invited by Gabinius, a man of consular rank, to accompany the Roman force which was about to sail for Syria. Antony declined to join him in a private capacity, but when he was offered the command of the cavalry he agreed to serve in the campaign.

Plutarch

To take it a step further, it even defines how he’s perceived today looking back: it’s never just Antony, it’s always Antony and---

It can be read as someone being taken advantage of, in places, survival in others, especially in Antony's early life. Other times, it appears like Antony himself is the one who manipulates things to his favor, casting aside people and realigning himself back to an advantage.

or when he saw an opportunity for faster advancement, he was willing to place the blame on a convenient scapegoat or to disregard previous loyalties, however important they had been. His desertion of Fulvia's memory in 40, and, much later, of Lepidus, Sextus Pompey, and Octavia, produced significant political gains. This characteristic, which Caesar discovered to his cost in 47, gives the sharp edge to Antony's personality which Syme's portrait lacks, especially when he attributes Antony's actions to a 'sentiment of loyalty' or describes him as a 'frank and chivalrous soldier'. In this context, one wonders what became of Fadia.19

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 47 B.C.

Caesar inherits Antony, and like Brutus, locks him in for a doomed ending.

The way Caesar writes about Antony smacks of someone viewing another person as something more akin to a dog, and it carries over until it’s bitter conclusion.

Caesar benefits from Antony immensely. The people love Antony, the military loves Antony. He’s charming, he’s self aware, he’s good at what he does. Above all of that, he has political ambitions of a similar passion as Brutus.

Antony drew some political benefit from his genial personality. Even Cicero, who from at least 49 did not like him,15 was prepared to regard some of his earlier misdemeanours as harmless.16 Bluff good humour, moderate intelligence, at least a passing interest in literature, and an ability to be the life and soul of a social gathering all contributed to make him a charming companion and to bind many important people to him. He had a lieutenant's ability to follow orders and a willingness to listen to advice, even (one might say especially) from intelligent women.17 These attributes made Antony able to handle some situations very well."1

There was a more important side to his personality, however, which contributed to his political survival. Antony was ruthless in his quest for pre-eminence

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

None of this matters, because after all Antony does for Caesar

Plutarch's comment that Curio brought Antony into Caesar's camp is surely mistaken.59 Anthony had been serving as Caesar's officer from perhaps as early as 53, after his return from Syria.60 He is described as legatus in late 52,61 and was later well known as Caesar's quaestor.62 It is more likely that the reverse of the statement is true, that Antony assisted in bringing Curio over to Caesar. If this were so, then he performed a signal service for Caesar, for gaining Curio meant attaching Fulvia, who provided direct access to the Clodian clientela in the city. Such valuable political connections served to increase Antony's standing with Caesar, and to set him apart from other officers in his army.63

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

Caesar still, for whatever reasons, fucks over Antony spectacularly with the will. Loyalty is repaid with dismissal, and it will bury the Republic for good.

It’s not enough for Caesar to screw him over just once, it becomes generational and ugly. Caesar lives on through Octavian: it becomes Octavian’s brand, his motif, propaganda wielded like a knife. Octavian, thanks to Caesar, will bring Antony to his bitter conclusion

And for my "bitter" conclusion, I’ll sign off by saying that there are actual scholars on Antony who are more well versed than I am who can go into depth about the Caesar-Octavian-Antony dynamic (and how it played out with Caligula) better than I can, and scholarship on Brutus consists mostly of looking at an outline of a man and trying to guess what the inside was like.

At the end of the day, Caesar was the instigator, active manipulator, and catalyst for the final act of the Republic.

I hope that this was at least entertaining to read!

[clairebeauchampfan]

Abandoning the women of Afghanistan to a ‘fate worse than death’

(I’ll grant that this is a kick-Joe Biden article by a well known right wing commentator writing for a particularly right-wing rag, but there’s a lot of truth in it.Sadly) 

SARAH VINE: Joe Biden's decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan is the single most anti-women act a leader can commit

By SARAH VINE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY (this article appeared on 14th August) 

As the successor to Donald ‘grab-them-by-the-pussy’ Trump, President Joe Biden has always been keen to emphasise his support of women’s rights.

He has, of course, a female Vice- President in Kamala Harris and is, we are told, committed to ‘an aggressive and comprehensive plan to further women’s economic and physical security and ensure that women can fully exercise their civil rights’.

His team is working hard ‘to end violence against women’, continuing his ‘leadership on this issue since he authored the Violence Against Women Act in 1994’ and, last but not least, passionate about the need to ‘protect and empower women around the world’.

Fine words indeed. There’s just one small problem. It’s all a pack of lies.

Because when it comes to all of the above, Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan is the single most anti-women act he could have conceived.

Also, far worse and on a far greater scale than anything Trump ever did.

By withdrawing America’s peace-keeping forces and abandoning the country to the Taliban’s oppression and extremism, Mr Biden has condemned the women and girls of Afghanistan to a living nightmare that will strip them of their human rights, subject them to acts of unspeakable violence – and deprive them of the right to work, study or live as equals.

Afghan women and girls now face the same horrors perpetrated against the Yazidi women in Syria – raped and tortured and held as sex slaves for Islamist ‘warriors’ – or like Malala Yousafzai (who won a Nobel Prize after being shot in the head by the Pakistan Taliban for daring to go to school). What stood between women and the brutality of extreme Islam is fleeing the country – and the misogynistic violence is rising like foetid flood water.

As the self-styled soldiers of this medieval cult seize control of ever more towns and villages – they now hold half of the country’s 24 provincial capitals – women are already being forced to submit to their draconian laws or face the consequences.

Early last month, for example, Taliban fighters walked into the offices of Aziz Bank in Kandahar and ordered nine female employees to leave.

They were escorted home at gunpoint, and told that male relatives could take their roles. Elsewhere, there have been reports of a mother having her eyes gouged out in front of her family, and of girls as young as 12 being carted off as ‘wives’.

As a former MP for Kabul, Shukria Barakzai, who was targeted by the Taliban in 2014 and almost died in a suicide bomb attack, put it, the country faces a return to the dark days of the late 1990s, when ‘one by one, our rights – to education, to a job, to a social presence – were all but eliminated’.

So much for Mr Biden and his commitment to women.

As for Boris Johnson, he justifies our withdrawal by saying there ‘isn’t a military solution’ in Afghanistan. But there never was. The Allied forces being in Afghanistan was never about Western occupation; it was about holding back the tide of extremism – a worthwhile and, until recently, broadly effective task – so that the people of Afghanistan weren’t forced to live under extreme religious laws.

Laws that, as Barakzai put it so succinctly, reduce women and girls to ‘little more than chattels’.

As the mother of a vibrant 18-year-old with her whole life ahead of her, I cannot imagine how it must feel to see your daughter deprived of an education, prevented from working and forced to bow to the misogynist will of a group of religious fanatics. I dare say I’d lay down my life to prevent it, and so, I suspect, would many other women of my generation.........

etcetera etcetera

[tishinada]

100 Days of Writing – Day 12

I'll be continuing with the topic of Imperial slavery for several posts. Please read the entire post before you assume I'm downplaying slavery in the Empire (and wait for the future posts as well as I explain some of the historical basis for the differences I draw and explain why reality and theory in my version of the Empire are also two different things.) This is a complicated topic (and no, that isn't a way of soft-pedaling it, I just mean that slavery wasn't a monolithic institution and took different forms in different times and places for different reasons), and it isn't helped that the writers for SWtOR had their heads up their you-know-whats in their understanding of a complicated historical subject (colonization is another example they clearly knew virtually nothing about, and still don’t).

First, in my version of the Empire, the official line about slavery is very different from the way slavery actually works. I’ll explain the distinction in two or three of the other posts about this. But this form of slavery is distinctly different from the one in Hutt space. In this post, I’m going to start talking about two (theoretically) different systems of slavery that the game seemed to start with and which historical systems they resembled.

There was some canon support originally in the game for the idea that slavery in the Empire was limited to criminals and enemies captured in combat and that ownership mostly rests with the state and a few individuals with a high rank in the government. This was the common ancient form of slavery which was not usually inheritable or otherwise based on ancestry. But it's clear in game that in Hutt Space, it's a much broader institution: being enslaved by slave raid or pirates or for debts appears common. The writers blur that line for no apparent reason constantly (probably because they seem to have done virtually zero reading on modern research into slavery.)

But this is a difference that modern scholars draw in the real world between most ancient forms of slavery and the more modern plantation forms of racial slavery that started when the Portuguese began producing sugar on the Cape Verde islands with enslaved Africans in the 1400s (sugar was an extremely expensive commodity at the time). That evolved into racially inheritable slavery during the mid-to-late 1600s in the Caribbean and British North American colonies. “Modern” chattel slavery was almost unknown globally until 300 – 350 years ago in the real world and evolved specifically in order to produce certain high value crops (sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, cacoa, and most recently, cotton) as cheaply as possible, a form of extreme agricultural capitalism. (This economic motive driving the rise of chattel slavery seems to have completely gone over the writers’ heads, btw, because there’s virtually no connection between economics and slavery in the game.)

For instance, Major Anri's backstory appears similar to the version of traditional slavery that existed in West Africa before the Atlantic slave trade. She was a slave soldier before being emancipated and given her current rank (and that's a fairly high rank out the gate, btw.) A West African slave could actually achieve significant status through military service (but they were always a slave.) Arming a slave under racially inheritable plantation slavery, on the other hand, would have been almost unthinkable in most situations (there were brief exceptions to this, as there usually are to most generalities – but they were not soldiers.)

Again, this is not intended to soft pedal Imperial slavery. Slavery is horrifying in any form, and the institutional structures of the Empire make it much worse than it is on paper. But the theoretical basis of Imperial slavery (in my universe,) which is what 95% of Imperials know and believe about it, is a lot more limited than in Hutt Space. Among other things, I’m exploring why Imperials with an otherwise strong moral sense, like Elara Dorne, could live with slavery and be able to not recognize how horrible it was until she left the Empire. That doesn’t excuse their ignorance, especially since a lot of people have to be trying hard not to see too much.

(Day 11 here) (Day 13 here)

[kapitaali]

The New Hippies

THE NEW HIPPIES: The work abolition movement, anarcho-primitivism and biodynamism as ways to combat climate change

Essay for the course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business by Teppo Saari

Introduction

The course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business had the students think about and discuss the various ethical dimensions in business, moral dilemmas and choices to be made that a decision maker in business world come across every day.

This essay is motivated by our case study with a headline ’Investors urge European companies to include climate risks in accounts’ (Financial Times 2020). In this essay I will explore values and ethical principles that I see as the solutions to our case study and climate change in general. This is not to say that I could stand up for them in business world. Ironically, my main thread and leitmotif here is the untransformational nature of capitalism and business world. Thus, standing up to the values I will discuss here means doing less business, not more.

This essay is divided in three parts: problem – reaction – solution. These three parts will talk about the chosen values and ethical principles. They are by no means new: pragmatism – The Golden Rule – parsimony & naturality. They just seem to be in conflict with our modern way of living.

Thinking pragmatically about the problem

As part of our course assignment, we got to read about a group of investors managing trillions of dollars worth of assets who urged European companies to include climate risks in their accounts (Financial Times 2020). Scientists have warned us for decades, that pumping extreme amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere will result in melting of the polar ice caps (Mitchell 1989; Jones & Henderson-Sellers 1990), which will raise the sea level and drown some of the coastal cities (Peters & Darling 1985). Finally, capitalists are acting responsibly!

It would seem that capitalists actually cared for the planet and not just their profits. Or would it? Maybe they are scared of losing their future profits, and this kind of media escapade would bring back public trust and confidence in the system. It would be a sign that capitalists can act transparently, openly, accountably, respecting others (O’Leary 1993). But is changing the allocation in your investment portfolio really a sign of empathy? Would there be other ways to better express empathy in business?

Shareholders are interested in the risk their assets are facing, not necessarily in the welfare of the people. Investors acting virtuously can be just virtue-signaling or pleasing other elements in the society to take off media pressure and negative PR from them in a conformist way (Collinson 2003). Maybe they are just greenwashing their own conscience. Why is George Soros’ climate buzz astroturfing industrial complex (Morningstar 2019a) financing Greta Thunberg to do public PR campaigns targeting the youth? Maybe there is money in it. It is unlikely that it would have been dubbed ”A 100 trillion dollar storytelling campaign” without some particularly good reasons (Morningstar 2019b).

But there is something else in it too than just money: power and control. The person who gets to limit choices gets to dictate what kind of choices remain. And if a person has that kind of foreknowledge, then that person can be two steps ahead of us. And being two steps ahead of us means securing future profits. Including climate risks in accounts will imply controls. Controls are imposed on accounts, but ultimately it will mean controls imposed on people and their daily activities. Workers are the ones who will naturally suffer the consequences of management decisions. In this case management decisions are ’urged’ externally, from the owners’ part. After all, it is the corporations that are producing most of the climate change effects, in terms of pollution and greenhouse gases (Griffin 2017). People doing their jobs, working everyday, producing things but also at the same time producing climate effects. I would still love to hear politicians use more terms such as ”pollution” when talking about these issues. For it is unclear how reducing carbon emissions will reduce overall pollution that is also a contributor in the destruction of our environment (see eg. Bodo & Gimah 2020; Oelofse et al. 2007). Issues like microplastics, holes in the ozone layer, biodiversity loss, acid rains and soil degradation need to be talked about just as much, if not more so.

The problem is simple: too much economic activity producing too much climate impact, mostly pollution and greenhouse gases. Solving the Grand Challenge (Konstantinou & Muller 2020) of our time is harder if we wish to keep the fabric of our society intact. There’s a clear need for dialogue among stakeholders (Gardiner 1996), but how is it a dialogue if people are not actually listened to and don’t get to say how things will progress in society? What I am proposing is a meme-like solution that has the greater impact the more people adopt it. My solution is: stop working. Produce less. Stop supporting systems and mechanisms that produce climate effects. Stop supporting the mechanisms that don’t listen to your voice. Disconnect from the Matrix. Working a dayjob is one of these mechanisms. Although many people have realized the benefits of working from home (Kost 2020), a lot more needs to be done. Remote work is not available to everyone. Not all jobs are remote work.

Bob Black (2021) in his texts has advocated for the total and complete abolition of work. Stopping working naturally does not mean stopping doing things, it will merely mean stopping working a job, a concept which itself is a social construct. Black’s theses are simple but powerful. Working is the source of all ills, it is not compatible with ludic life (allthemore so in 2021), it is forced labour and compulsory production, it is replete with indignities called ”discipline”: ”surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc”. Black does not only describe the negative ontological aspects of working, he goes deeper and invokes many familiar names of Greek philosophers:

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150–200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

Black notes that only ”a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages”. In similar vein, the late but great David Graeber saw the futility of most work. Calling this phenomenon ’bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018), Graeber sets out to describe what many of us are familiar with: we do useless things to make ourselves feel useful. Because modern society legitimizes itself with having people ’do’ stuff and not ’be’ a certain person. How can you (objectively) measure being? You can’t. But doing, that you can measure. This measurement then qualifies you as a member of society: productive, doing your part (an idiom that is a perfect example how you can’t escape the doing paradigm on a societal level). Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is: if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world. In many cases these types of jobs are found to be supporting some kind of buraucracy, reporting, assisting decision makers, etc. Our current Matrix has its ways of creating more of these with the clever marketing concept called ’value’ (Petrescu 2019). They don’t make a difference, they create value.

Why would you want to overload the world by doing things that you nor most everyone else see no point in? Why would you waste your time doing pointless things? The easy answer to these questions is ’subsistence’. But there are many other ways to live on this planet. If you keep doing what the society tells you is acceptable or convenient, you will shut your eyes from the problem at hand: climate change.

Legitimizing anarcho-naturism as a solution with The Golden Rule

Our responsibility is to ourselves. We can not properly be held responsible for anything else. Yet the system of representational democracy does just this, holds us collectively responsible for many things, borrows money from creditors with our names on the loan collectively and then makes us pay for the loans. The way this Matrix works is yet another reason to disconnect from it. Or at least stop supporting it as much as possible.

The Golden Rule states: ”Treat others as you want to be treated” (Gensler 2013). From the perspective of climate change, it can first seem curious why you would quit your job and head for the hills. After all, we are facing a global issue here. There are people in need for help and I am running away? But I would see it as a way to get around our predicament. The Golden Rule can be also interpreted in Kantian way as the categorical imperative, particularly its first formulation: ”Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This formulation is somewhat more proactive in nature. It talks about acting, doing things, and doing things is what is appreciated in our society, even when your goal is to exit the society.

Why exit the society? Is it enough to just quit your job and find something else to do, something that is more fulfilling and not bullshit? What an excellent question. Long before the advent of smart phones and 5G and DNA-vaccines, this question had been brought up to the table. In the 1800s, people were realizing the negative impact industrialization was having on society at large. People were rooted out from their family homes in the countryside, forced to move to a large city to look for a job, crammed into small apartments with dozens of other workers, coerced into working long and hard days at factories to make a living. The lowly misery of these people attracted the attention of a certain Friedrich Engels, who felt their situation was not adequate to make up for the suffering they had gone through. He meticulously described the working conditions of the English working class in his ”The Condition of the Working Class in England” (2003 [1845]), originally published in German. Sociology as a science was established by Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to study these changes. Slowly but surely, the influx of people into cities started to cause issues, something that mayors and other municipal representatives had to start taking care of. Planning and zoning were given a lot more attention, since the earlier modus operandi of old European cities had been rather laissez faire (Sutcliffe 1980).

Against this backdrop of massive societal change, people started to question the changes and their direction. Are we really nothing more than slaves, just working in a different environment? Slavery might not be the right word or context here. Many people believe to be free, govern themselves and their property, and yet their daily actions and options to choose from seem to be eerily limited. They have only so many choices, most of which seem somehow related to running their errands. A more appropriate term, with all its connotations, here would be the Greek word ananke, ”force, constraint, necessity”. Like a force of nature, progress towards modernity necessitates that people leave their family homes and go work in large factories, compulsively manufacturing endless amounts of products, some of which are necessary, others merely decorations, and some just pointless.

Many names in 19th century New England worked upon a vision for the future society at a time when unprecedented changes were taking place and the standard of living was rising faster than ever before. The Transcendental Club was a group of New England authors, philosophers, socialists, politicians and intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century which gave rise to Transcendentalism, the first notable American intellectual movement. Transcendentalist believe in the inherent goodness of people and nature, but that society and its institutions — particularly organized religion and political parties — corrupt the purity of the individual. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003; Sacks 2003.) Transcendentalism is a unique mix of European Romanticism, German (particularly Kantian) philosophy, and American Christianity. The impact of this movement can still be seen in the many flavours of American anarchist and radical Christian movements.

Out of the ranks of Transcendentalists rose a couple of names that can be viewed as the progenitors of modern anarcho-primitivism and natur(al)ist anarchy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the central figure of the Transcendental Club, who together with Henry David Thoreau critiqued the contemporary society for its ”unthinking conformity” and advocated for “an original relation to the universe” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003). Emerson’s Nature (2009 [1836]) poetically embellishes our view of the natural world, while Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1995 [1854]) is a call for civil disobedience and revolt against the modern world. Another influential natur(al)ist writer has been Leo Tolstoi whose name is frequently mentioned by anarchists. Tolstoi himself was a Christian and pacifist, and his writings have inspired Christian anarcho-pacifism that views the state as ”immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2017).

Before the Transcendentalist movement, Europe experienced similar trend in philosophy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural philosophy. Rousseau touched upon many subjects: freedom, free will, authority, nature, morality, societal inequality, representation and government. Like Transcendentalists, Rousseau held a belief that human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society. ”Rousseau clearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life, so in whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it is not the moral sense that the casual reader would ordinarily assume” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010). Rousseau’s work is relevant to many of the social movements that currently fight against COVID restrictions, vaccination agenda, building of 5G antenna towers next to where people live, polluting the environment, systemic poverty and general disconnection from the natural world. Rousseau, although regarded as a philosopher, saw philosophy itself negatively, and to him philosophers were ”the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010).

Rousseau’s days did not see capitalism as we see it now. It was later Marx (influenced by Hegel, who in turn was influenced by Rousseau) that put together a treatise that considers the societal change we have seen ever since from industrialism and circulation of capital. But Rousseau’s thoughts about the social contract (1968 [1762]), “child-centered” education (Rousseau 2010), and inequality (Graeber & Wengrow 2018; Rousseau 2008) are still relevant today. Especially when we are faced with many societal forces that are contradictory in nature, each of them pushing us into certain direction, demanding our attention, wanting us to change our beliefs about that one particular aspect that connects with other aspects and forms the Matrix of our reality.

We are once again facing a similar situation as the people did back in the days of the first industrial revolution. Now the industrial revolution has reached its fourth cycle, unimaginatively called ”Industry 4.0” (Marr 2018; WEF 2021), where machines are starting to become autonomous and talk to each other. I used to think technology was cool, and went to work for Google. But at Google I learned that technology is not cool, after all. Not until technology becomes completely open source, it will be used by massive conglomerates to build autonomous weapons systems (Cassella 2018; Johnson 2018) and the industry will keep paying ethics researchers to keep writing arguments for them (Charters 2020). Even though I could work for an industry that, given the current trajectory, will be among the biggest producers of CO 2 in the future Vidal 2017), the idea that I would work for an industry that sees weaponizing their products as the grandest idea of mankind’s future is still gnawing.

Because, it is all just business (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

One of the functions of critical science is to create awareness of the underlying values, and the political and financial interests which are currently determining the course of science and technology in industrialized society. This exposure of the value-laden character of science and technology is done with the goal of emancipating both people and the environment from domination and exploitation by powerful interests. The ultimate objective is to redirect science and technology to support both ordinary people and the environment, instead of causing suffering through oppression and exploitation by dominant elites. Furthermore, by exposing the myth of the value-neutrality of science and technology, critical science attempts to awaken working scientists and engineers to the social, political, and ethical implications of their work, making it impossible or, at the very least, uncomfortable for them to ignore the wider context and corresponding responsibilities of their professional activities.

It all seems to be connected with state imperialism and the military-industrial(-intelligence) complex. Lenin’s statement (2008 [1916]) equating capitalism with imperialism still prevails this day: ”imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists”. The conditions change, but the war machine keeps on churning (soon with autonomous weapons!), with wealthy but crooky investors financing projects that are even more dystopian (Byrne 2013). We may remember what president Dwight D. Eisenhower said about the military- industrial complex (NPR 2011):

”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

It is exactly these kinds of doomsday scenarios that inspire people like Theodore John ”The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Kaczynski, famous for sending mail bombs to various university professors around the US, holds a doctoral degree in mathematics. (Wikipedia 2021.) Kaczynski was bullied as a child, and it has been suggested that he was part of an MKULTRA experiment in college (The Week 2017). Kaczynski did not send his bombs haphazardly. He wrote long theoretical pieces to justify his actions, most of them being thematically anarcho-primitivist. In 1995, after sending several bombs to university personnel and business executives in 1978-1995, he said to ”desist from terrorism” if he got his text published in media outlets.

In his Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski 1995), a 35 thousand word essay published in The Washington Post, which the FBI gave the name ”Unabomber manifesto”, Kaczynski attributes many our societal ills to ”leftism”. In the manifesto Kaczynski details how two psychological tendencies, “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”, form the basis of ”the psychology of modern leftism”. Feelings of inferiority are taken to mean the whole spectrum of negative feelings about self: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred etc. Oversocialization is the process of socialization taken to extreme levels:

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.

25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

Kaczynski goes on to describe how this oversocialization causes a person to feel guilt and shame for their actions, especially in the context of performing as society expects them to perform. He writes how this concept of oversocialization is used to determine ”the direction of modern leftism”. Further on, Kaczynski describes how modern man needs goals to strive for, to not run the risk of developing serious psychological problems. This goalsetting activity he denotes ”power process”. But these goals can be real or artificial. Setting a goal is “surrogate activity” if the person devotes much time and energy to attaining it, does not attain it, and still feels seriously deprived. It is just a goal for goalsetting’s sake, the unfulfilled other side of the coin of power process. Kaczynski then connects these concepts to the many societal ills (excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe) by describing how modern society, with all its marketing and advertising creating artificial needs, disrupts the power process, mankind’s search for itself and meaning-making in life. He sees social hierarchies and the need to climb up them, the ”keeping up with the Joneses”, as surrogate activity.

”Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds”. This gradual increase, then, the system tries to ’solve’ by using propaganda, ”to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them”. In regards to technology, the ”bad” parts cannot be separated from the ”good”, and thus we are constantly facing the dilemma between technology and freedom, new technology being introduced all the time, and new regulations being introduced to curb the negative effects of the technology and at the same time stripping us of our freedoms. Kaczynski concludes, that revolution is easier than reforming the system.

Later, Kaczynski released another of his anti-technological theses. In Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015) Kaczynski presents a ”comprehensive historical analysis explaining the futility of social control and the catastrophic influence of technological growth on human social and planetary ecological systems.” This time Kaczynski talks more about how to start an anti-tech movement and how to keep it going. The text reads like a mathemathical proof of sorts, it presents ”rules”, ”propositions” and ”postulates” why the technological system will destroy itself (eg. Russell’s Paradox resulting in chaos in a highly complex, tightly coupled system) and why a successful anti-tech movement needs clear goals to avoid some of the errors revolutionary movements have made, which are elaborated in the book. Violence is not offered as a solution in the book, it is seen more like a mishap of sorts, a suboptimal outcome of a revolutionary movement. But it talks about power. Kaczynski got to learn the hard way how the feeling of powerlessness breeds desperate actions that would have been otherwise unnecessary. The book also talks about climate change and related issues, from a mathematic systems theoretical point of view.

Institutions that are in the business of social engineering and behavioral modification, such as the Tavistock Institute in the UK or the CIA in the US, would have us believe that Kaczynski’s actions were ”defences against anxiety” that can be seen as ”withdrawal, informal organization, reactive individualism and scapegoating” (Hills et al. 2020), and to some extent this is true. But Kaczynski interprets the actions of these institutions stemming from technological progress in our society Kaczynski 1995):

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people.

This uniformity of a large hierarchical modern society then forces its will on people (Kaczynski 1995):

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

We have once again encountered ananke, necessity. Now, if we consider ourselves as the lonely decision makers in this society, what could we do? We can try and fight fire with fire, but such fights end up producing only pain and casualties (Taylor 2013). Anarcho-naturists and anarcho-pacifists understand that (unnecessary) fighting in most cases does not work. Sometimes fighting is warranted, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine those cases. Sending bombs to people’s offices may get you some attention and even make somebody quote your manifesto in an essay, but it is not solving the issue, something which the Unabomber addressed in his later texts. If working a job indirectly supports the military-industrial complex NewScientist 2011), what good does it do? The military-industrial complex is the biggest source of pollution in the world (The Conversation 2019; Acedo 2015), detaching yourself from this complex is imperative. Even if they would manage to convince us with their psyops that they are willing to change and that climate change is an important issue (Ahmed 2014), it would still be the biggest polluter that is controlling the conversation. It has even been suggested that they are behind this climate buzz (Light 2014). Is your job doing that much good in society that it outweighs the cons? If I need to act responsibly, but cannot fight the system nor conform, while at the same time keeping in mind our looming climate disaster, the only reasonable and peaceful response is to exit the system altogether.

Biodynamism’s naturality and parsimony

Owning responsibility and transforming the world implies taking some kind of action. We have already seen how feelings of powerlessness and lack of self-worth can lead to destructive actions. But there are an unlimited amount of actions that can be taken, that are not based in feelings of powerlessness but empowerment.

Exiting society might sound like a lonely project, and some people might rightfully feel lonely when all their peers still want to live in the illusion. But it does not have to be so. A lot of soul-searching needs to be done, and that is usually done in privacy, focusing upon oneself, but beyond that there are ways how to go off-grid and drastically reduce your carbon emissions.

One of the key concepts that will be our guiding principle here is degrowth (Paulson 2017), which ties into values such as organicity, naturality and parsimony. We will want to have less production of artificial things, and more organic and natural things. By artificial we mean long supply chains and many phases of production with modern high technology that produce a large amount of climate effects. By natural we mean using primitive technology, mostly all-natural or recycled materials and something that can be produced even alone, given enough time. Primitive technology does not exclude electricity, it just means producing it differently.

Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and theosophist, the founder of Anthroposophy and a great reformer of science in matters of spirit, started the first intentional form of organic farming, known as biodynamic agriculture, after he had given a series of lectures on the topic in the last year of his life. (Paull 2011.) Steiner had many spiritual experiences during his life, which lead him to start the Anthroposophy movement. He wanted to apply the scientific process into spiritual realm, inquiring it as it would be as real as our material world. Inquiring this spiritual world helped him access knowledge he claims to not have been access otherwise (Steiner 2011 [1918]). Anthroposophist self-inquiry can be seen as Foucauldian ”technology of the self” that ”provide an intervention mechanism on the part of active subjects, injecting an element of contingency to everyday encounters and alleviating the determinist effect that technologies of power would have otherwise” (Skinner 2012).

Steiner’s thoughts about agriculture are still relevant (Paull 2011):

In 1924 Steiner commented that, “Nowadays people simply think that a certain amount of nitrogen is needed for plant growth, and they imagine it makes no difference how it’s prepared or where it comes from” Steiner, 1924b, pp.9-10). He made the point that, “In the course of this materialistic age of ours, we’ve lost the knowledge of what it takes to continue to care for the natural world” (Steiner, 1924b, p.10).

Our current system seems to think exactly in this way, that if we just compensate our wreaked havoc by investing in ’green’ technology (Elegant 2019), it will all be ok and rainbows in the sky. But it will not. No one is even double checking if the companies that say that they are now carbon neutral actually proactively try to make our world greener. They can just buy a renewable energy company and say now we are green and do nothing else. Some would argue that going ’carbon neutral’ like these massive corporations are doing it is not the way to do it: “’green’ infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe” (Dunlap 2020).

Steinerian biodynamism ”encompasses practices of composting, mixed farming systems with use of animal manures, crop rotations, care for animal welfare, looking at the farm as an organism/entity and local distribution systems, all of which contribute toward the protection of the environment, safeguard biodiversity and improve livelihoods of farmers” (Turinek et al. 2009). While modern biodynamic studies focus on agroecological factors such as nutrient cycles, soil characteristics, and nutritional quality (Reganold 1995; Droogers & Bouma 1996), Steiner himself was quite metaphysical in his lectures and paid attention to details such as kingdoms of nature, planetary influences, biorhythms, incarnated and environmental ethers, and the Zodiac (Steiner 2004 [1958]; Nastati 2009).

By shifting to more natural ways of living, we may help Gaia (Lovelock 1991; Singh 2007) heal in many other ways than just reduce our climate emissions. By realizing that we are actually living on the skin of a fairly large and complex organism, we will stop treating it as a plain source of material resources, and start bonding with it, tune into its consciousness and establish two-way communication, just like the natives have done in America.

The way of the natives ought to be our current way, since there is no reason why the natives could not guard the lands they have before. One of the greatest fears of people speaking for private property rights is that managing resources collectively would mean exhausting them. There is no Tragedy of Commons. Just because you are materially poor does not mean that you are any less competent steward of land and wealth, as proposed by Elinor Oström (2009). Acting for climate is not an investment allocation problem. The natives need their land back so that they could do their best to fight the destruction of our ecosystem. The Outokumpu supply chain in Brazilian rainforests, Elon Musk and Bolivian lithium mines, Papua New Guinea indigenous conflict, mining in Lapland in traditional Sami herding areas, Australian uranium mining in indigenous lands… these are all pointless conflicts.

There are also many other ways of staying grounded and in touch with nature, while at the same time cultivating sovereignty. Many of these things revolve around feeding the most immediate community next to you. They reflect ideas such as mutuality, solidarity, organicity, and naturality. Permaculture is a term coined by David Holmgren to describe ”an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience” (Wikipedia: Permaculture 2021). Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems (Holmgren Desing Services 2007).

Earthships are 100% sustainable homes that are both energy efficient and modern. Earthsips are built with natural and repurposed (recycled) materials, they heat and cool themselves without electric heat, they use solar energy to power electric appliances, they collect all of their water from rain and snowmelt, they re-use their sewage water to fertilize plants, and there’s an indoor garden that grows food in vertical growing spaces (Reynolds 2021). Ecovillages are a ”human-scale, full-featured settlement, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future” (Gilman & Gilman 1991).

Clifford Harper had a set of drawings imagining an alternative in his book Radical Technology (Harper & Boyle 1976). In them, he shows many of the ideas that were themes in the German garden city movement in the beginning of 20th century (Bollerey & Hartmann 1980), such as collectivised gardens, autonomous housing estates, and community workshops. The book introduces us ’radical technology’, which spans basically all of the concepts we have discussed up to this point: organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, vegetarianism, hydroponics, soft energy, insulation, low-cost housing, tree houses, shanty houses, ’folk-built’ houses using traditional methods, houses built from subsoil, self-built houses, housing associations, solar dwellings, domestic paper-making, carpentry, scrap reclamation, printing, community & pirate radio, collectivised gardens, collective workshops for clothesmaking, shoe repair, pottery, household decoration and repairs, autonomous housing estates, autonomous rural villages, etc.

These concepts, while they seem simple, are still empowering, they are meant to let people enjoy they fruits of their labour. Last but certainly not least is the concept that all of these things fall under, alternative (or, appropriate) technology. Alternative technologies are those ”which offer genuine alternatives to the large-scale, complex, centralized, high-energy life forms which dominate the modern age” (Winner 1979). Alternative technologies seek to solve the problems technocentric thinking has caused in society: technical scale and economic concentration, level of complexity or simplicity best suited to technical operations of various kinds, division of labor and its alleged necessity, social and technical hierarchy as it relates to the design of technological systems, and self-sufficiency and interdependence regarding the lives of individuals and communities. Many of these solutions have been developed in Africa, where problems have had to be solved, but resources have been scarce in actuality.

Appropriate technology holds great promise in ways that are currently underappreciated in our society (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

As has been mentioned repeatedly throughout this book, the primary goal of technology in our current economic system is to increase material affluence and to generate profits for the wealthy by controlling and exploiting both people and the environment. In view of the reality of interconnectedness, this is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially desirable. In this chapter we discuss how to design technologies which reflect the values of environmental sustainability and social appropriateness. We also emphasize the importance of heeding the precautionary principle in order to prevent unintended consequences, as well as the need for participatory design in order to ensure greater democratic control of technology. Finally, as a specific example of an environmentally sustainable and socially appropriate technology, we discuss the positive contribution of local, organic, small-scale agriculture.

Conclusion

This essay has presented the reader with ramblings of a person who is familiar with Critical Theory, who would like to build a stronger connection to nature, and who is having a major identity crisis in life. I have expressed, albeit feebly, my will to emancipate myself, to exit the Matrix. In Finnish they would say ”Sota ei yhtä miestä kaipaa”, and in George S. Patton’s words this expression would be ”Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.”

In this essay I seem to have extensively quoted the Unabomber manifesto. This is not to say that Kaczynski had exceptionally good motives or justifications for his actions. He killed many people and is in prison now. Kaczynski’s ideas are not unique. Quoting his manifesto serves merely to prove one point: he is the product of his environment. Mental illness is no longer a taboo and things have progressed somewhat since Kaczynski’s days. It could be argued that Kaczynski’s writings were just projection of his own feelings of shame and guilt he had gone through. But his mental condition, should he be diagnosed with one (Amador & Reshmi 2000), does not invalidate the things he’s written. In many ways his writings are now more relevant than ever. When we have tech billionaires talking about inserting neuralinks into your brain and downloading thoughts straight from the headquarters, we can really see the manifesto dots connecting.

I wish it would have been just the mental load caused by a ’surrogate activity’ of keeping up with the Joneses that was the cause of all this, but no, it’s the real deal now. When we have corporate executives and federal commissions defending autonomous weapons systems and saying building such systems is a ’moral imperative’ (Gershgorn 2021), you know we have reached peak civilization. It’s all downhill from now on. All participation in society will support this moral imperative, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. While many would get back to nature for reasons of convenience, such as better health, Rousseau himself would have gotten back to nature ”to feel God in nature” (LaFreniere 1990). It is this kind of humanist transcendentalism (not transhumanism) that we will need again, to realize what we have done to our planet, to realize what needs to be done to abolish the war machine consuming it, and to make ourselves whole again.

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https://kapitaali.com/the-new-hippies/

[fishoutofcamelot]

Zombie symbolism in media? Body snatchers? That sounds extremely interesting 👀👀👀

OOOOOOOOOOH ARE YOU READY FOR ME TO RANT? CUZ I’M GONNA RANT BABY. YALL WANNA SEE HOW HARD I CAN HYPERFIXATE???

I’ll leave my ramblings under the cut.

The Bodysnatchers thing is a bit quicker to explain so I’ll start with that. Basically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1956, about a small town where the people are slowly but surely replaced and replicated by emotionless hivemind pod aliens. It was a pretty obvious metaphor for the red scare and America’s fear of the ‘growing threat of communism’ invading their society. A communist could look like anyone and be anyone, after all.

Naturally, the bodysnatcher concept got rebooted a few times - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007), just off the top of my head. You’re all probably very familiar with the core concept: people are slowly being replaced by foreign duplicates. 

But while the monster has remained roughly the same, the theme has not. In earlier renditions, Bodysnatchers symbolized communism. But in later renditions, the narratives shifted to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism - that is, people’s ability to express and think for themselves being taken away. That’s because freedom of thought/individuality is a much more pressing threat on our minds in the current climate. Most people aren’t scared of communists anymore, but we are scared of having our free will taken away from us. 

The best indicator of the era in which a story is created is its villain. Stories written circa 9/11 have villains that are foreign, because foreign terrorism was a big fear in the early 2000s. In the past, villains were black people, because white people were racist (and still are, but more blatantly so in the past). 

Alright, now for the fun part.

ZOMBIES

Although the concept has existed in Haitian voodooism for ages, the first instance of zombies in western fiction was a book called The Magic Island written by William Seabrook in 1929. Basically ol Seabrook took a trip to Haiti and saw all the slaves acting tired and ‘brutish’ and, having learned about the voodoo ‘zombi’, believed the slaves were zombies, and thus put them in his book.

The first zombie story in film was actually an adaptation of Seabrook’s accounts, called White Zombie (1932). It was about a couple who takes a trip to Haiti, only for the woman to be turned into a zombie and enchanted into being a Haitian’s romantic slave. SUPER racist, if you couldn’t tell, but not only does it reflect the state of entertainment of the era - Dracula and Frankenstein had both been released around the same time - but it also reflects American cultural fears. That is, the fear of white people losing their authoritative control over the world. White fright.

Naturally, the box office success of White Zombie inspired a whole bunch of other remakes and spinoffs in the newly minted zombie genre, most of them taking a similar Haitian voodoo approach. Within a decade, zombies had grown from an obscure bit of Haitian lore to a fully integrated part of American pop culture. Movies, songs, books, cocktails, etc. 

But this was also a time for WWII to roll around and, much like the Bodysnatchers, zombie symbolism evolved to fit the times. Now zombies experienced a shift from white fright and ethnic spirituality to something a bit more secular. Now they were a product of foreign science created to perpetuate warmongering schemes. In King of Zombies (1941), a spy uses zombies to try and force a US Admiral to share his secrets. And Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) became the first instance of Nazi zombies. 

Then came the atom bomb, and once more zombie symbolism shifted to fears of radiation and communism. The most on-the-nose example of this is Creature With the Atom Brain (1955).

Then came the Vietnam War, and people started fearing an uncontrollable, unconscionable military. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombies were caused by radiation from a space probe, combining both nuclear and space-race motifs, as well as a harsh government that would cause you just as much problems as the zombies. One could argue that the zombies in the Living Dead series represent military soldiers, or more likely the military-industrial complex as a whole, which is presented as mindless in its pursuit of violence.

The Living Dead series also introduced a new mainstay to the genre: guns. Military stuff. Fighting. Battle. And that became a major milestone in the evolution of zombie representation in media. This was only exacerbated by the political climate of the time. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a lot of wars. Vietnam, Korea, Arab Spring, Bay of Pigs, America’s various invasions and attacks on Middle Eastern nations, etc. Naturally the public were concerned by all this fighting, and the nature of zombie fiction very much evolved to match this.

But the late 1900s weren’t just a place of war. They were also a place of increasing economic disparity and inequal wealth distribution. In the 70s and 80s, the wage gap widened astronomically, while consumerism remained steadily on the rise. And so, zombies symbolized something else: late-stage capitalism. Specifically, capitalist consumption - mindless consumption. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies attack a mall, and with it the hedonistic lifestyles of the people taking refuge there. This iteration props up zombies as the consumers, and it is their mindless consumption that causes the fall of the very system they were overindulging in.

Then there was the AIDS scare, and the zombie threat evolved to match something that we can all vibe with here in the time of COVID: contagion. Now the zombie condition was something you could get infected with and turn into. In a video game called Resident Evil (1996), the main antagonist was a pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation that’s been experimenting with viruses and bio-warfare. In 28 Days Later (2002), viral apes escape a research lab and infect an unsuspecting public.

Nowadays, zombies are a means of expressing our contemporary fears of apocalypse. It’s no secret that the world has been on the brink for a while now, and everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Post-apocalypse zombie movies act as simultaneous male power fantasy, expression of contemporary cynicism, an expression of war sentiments, and a product of the zombie’s storied symbolic history. People are no longer able to trust the government, and in many ways people have a hard time trusting each other, and this manifests as an every-man-for-himself survivalist narrative. 

So why have zombies endured for so long, despite changing so much? Why are we so fascinated by them? Well, many say that it’s because zombies are a way for us to express our fears of apocalypse. Communism, radiation, contagion - these are all threats to the country’s wellbeing. Some might even say that zombies represent a threat to conversative America/white nationalism, what with the inclusion of voodooism, foreign entities, and late-stage capitalism being viewed as enemies.

Personally, I might partly agree with the conservative America thing, but I don’t think zombies exist to project our fears onto. That’s just how villains and monsters work in general. In fiction, the conflict’s stakes don’t hit home unless the villain is intimidating. The hero has to fight something scary for us to be invested in their struggles. But the definition of what makes something scary is different for every different generation and social group. Maybe that scary thing is foreign invaders, or illness, or losing a loved one, or a government takeover. As such, the stories of that era mold to fit the fears of that era. It’s why we see so many government conspiracy thrillers right now; it’s because we’re all afraid of the government and what it can do to us.

So if projecting societal fears onto the story’s villain is a commonplace practice, then what makes zombies so special? Why have they lasted so long and so prevalently? I would argue it’s because the concept of a zombie, at its core, plays at a long-standing American ideal: freedom.

Why did people migrate to the New World? Religious freedom. Why did we start the Revolutionary War and become our own country? Freedom from England’s authority. Why was the Civil War a thing? The south wanted freedom from the north - and in a remarkable display of irony, they wanted to use that freedom to oppress black people. Why are we so obsessed with capitalism? Economic freedom.

Look back at each symbolic iteration of the zombie. What’s the common thread? In the 20s/30s, it was about white fright. The fear that black people could rise up against them and take away their perceived ‘freedom’ (which was really just tyrannical authority, but whatever). During WWII, it was about foreign threats coming in and taking over our country. During Vietnam, it became about our military spinning out of control and hecking things up for the rest of us. In the 80s/90s, it was about capitalism turning us into mindless consumers. Then it was about plagues and hiveminds and the collapse of society as a whole, destroying everything we thought we knew and throwing our whole lives into disarray. In just about every symbolic iteration, freedom and power have been major elements under threat.

And even deeper than that, what is a zombie? It’s someone who, for whatever reason, is a mindlessly violent creature that cannot think beyond base animal impulses and a desire to consume flesh. You can no longer think for yourself. Everything that made you who you are is gone.

Becoming a zombie is the ultimate violation of someone’s personal freedom. And that terrifies Americans.

Although an interesting - and concerning - phenomenon is this new wave of wish fulfillment zombie-ism. You know, the gun-toting action movie hero who has the personality of soggy toast and a jaw so chiseled it could decapitate the undead. That violent survivalist notion of living off the grid and being a total badass all the while. It speaks to men who, for whatever reason, feel their masculinity and dominance is under threat. So they project their desires to compensate for their lack of masculine control onto zombie fiction, granting them personal freedom from obligations and expectations (and feminism) to live out their solo macho fantasies by engaging in low- to no-consequence combat. And in doing so, completely disregarding the fact that those same zombies were once people who cruelly had their freedom of self ripped away from them. Gaining their own freedom through the persecution of others (zombies). And if that doesn’t sum up the white conservative experience, I don’t know what does.

So yeah. That’s zombies, y’all.

Thanks for the ask!

[skies-diary]

The more I think about it, the more I think we should stop sending our children to school past grade 5.

More under the cut. TW for suicide mention, mental illness, gun violence mention, and assault mention.

Of course education is important, but schools dont really educate; not anymore. At least, "higher learning" like middle / high school and college don't. I can think of only two classes in grades 6-12 that I've ever used in my day to day life, and those were sex ed (which was comprehensive for me, but which many schools in the US arent even allowed to have on the syllabus) and home economics. The rest were really just full of meaningless facts that I was forced to memorize and that I likely won't remember by ten years after graduation.

It's not that I think people should be uneducated. It's that as early as 100 years ago, people wouldn't send children to school before they were six years old, and now preschools start enrollment at six weeks old. Its that I learned very little in my teenage years that I would ever use in my adult life. Its that school contributed to my depression and anxiety that started at age 11 when I was in sixth grade, and that I'm still struggling with today.

More than anything else, though, while elementary school taught to read and write and made learning a part of life, sixth grade and up made me hate learning. It taught me that learning is a chore to finish and be done with so you can do "fun things". It taught me that if you can't get something right on the first try, you're bad at it and theres no point trying. More than trying to get me ready to choose my own path in life, school was focused on three things; fidelity to country, unconditional respect and obedience to authority, and capitalism training.

Fidelity to country: Every single day started with the pledge of allegiance. Some kids didnt stand for it, and I wish I'd been one of them. On veterans day my senior year, our first hour teacher told the class that any students that didnt stand for the pledge that day would be sent to the office for "disciplinary action". After the pledge, the whole class was escorted down the hall to the room of a teacher who was also a veteran, and we all had to stand in a line to shake his hand and thank him for his service. At age 17, I didn't think that was too strange. At age 23, having lived through Trump's presidency and seen what nationalism and extremism looks like more clearly, I find it much more off-putting than before.

Unconditional respect for authority: For me, this really started in second grade. After first grade, I was transferred to a new school which was poorly managed. The school was understaffed and overcrowded, classrooms were wildly out of ratio and teachers were overwhelmed. My brother, in kindergarten, hardly knew how to spell his name by the end of the year, and that's only because he had extra-curricular support.

The school avoided any and all accountability by having a policy of "the teacher is always right", therefore placing all responsibility on the students for any learning difficulties they encountered. The school board thankfully let my siblings and I transfer to a more competent and less crowded school after I was physically assulted by another student (a boy from another class who tried to suffocate me), and my parents threatened a lawsuit against the district.

The expectation for unfailing respect was amplified in high and middle school, from the constant police presence in schools to the draconian dress code regulations to teachers who treated their profession like a power trip. I did have a lot of good teachers, but others acted like being a teacher gave them license to act like a drill sergeant.

Capitalism training: this is very different than career training. Career training would have taught us marketable, useful skills. Rather, my school district got us ready for the workforce by having us sit at a desk for eight hours a day, delegating us tasks to be completed in a set amount of time, or we'd have life-altering repercussions. We were young adults who had little to no say in how we spent our day to day lives. I feel like these things contributed a lot to spending my teenaged years feeling like I had no direction in life; a feeling that persists in adulthood and has caused me untold distress, from difficulty in career choice to suicidal ideation.

As a teen, I didn't really understand the point of it all. However, it seems fairly obvious as an adult. School was training for corporate life. Modern American schools are turning out kids who have very few life skills, who are primed to sit at a desk for 8 hours, completing largely meaningless tasks and putting up with bullshit from authority figures whom they know better than to question.

In my personal experience, everything past grade 5 had nothing to do with education; rather, it was a nearly decade-long indoctrination ritual to prepare children to take their place as an employee and "contribute to society" under Late Stage Capitalism. It's framed as a necessary part of life, but the truth is that historically, parents, extended family and community were the forces that educated children. They taught them the life skills useful to their time and culture. Today, for example, technological literacy is needed, but a Native American child in 1500 would have learned how to hunt, how to mend, and how to build shelter. A child in 4000 BC Egypt would have likely learned to grown plants in the Nile Delta and care for farm animals.

Learning is a part of life. Human brains are supercomputers that can recognize patterns like nothing else in the world. No teacher has to sit down a typically developing child and teach them to speak; they learn through daily life. Humans didn't learn to make fire in lecture hall. We're naturally curious and eager to learn as children, but after going through school, very few adults retain this enthusiasm.

I used to be able to read three novels in an afternoon. Now I struggle to finish a chapter. This shift did not come about until age 11, the same year I entered middle school.

Children go to school now because there is rarely any other choice. In most American families, both parents work, and if a child is in a single-parent household, it's even less likely they have a stay-at-home parent. This symptom of Late Stage Capitalism (parental absense) causes children to grow into adults indoctrinated into the system, which is causatious of Late Stage Capitalism. It's a cycle that can be hard to break.

But we have to do something. Education reform, finding a way to homeschool / educate through community, or even just stop having kids. I haven't had any children yet because I dont want to raise my babies to be corporate slaves for the Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk of their generation.

Because as it stands right now, America's schoolchildren that aren't gunned down by angry white men are coming out the other side of graduation depressed, directionless, and with one of the highest suicide rates (second leading cause of death for Gen Z) in human history.

What American schools are doing isn't just not working, it's purposefully malicious. We need to change.

[seymour-butz-stuff]

What does it mean when people say that all cops are bastards (ACAB)?

If it were an individual thing, you'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't; it's an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. Police do not exist to protect and serve, according to the US supreme court itself, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital.

Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job.

While the following list focuses on the US as a model police state, ALL cops in ALL countries are derivative from very similar violent traditions of modern policing, rooted in old totalitarian regimes, genocides, and slavery, if not the mere maintenance of authoritarian power structures through terrorism.

police shoot people twice as often as previously thought. Keep in mind that this was self-reported, so we have no way of knowing if these numbers speak to the actual number of shootings in the US. Many of these people are completely unarmed. Police kill far, far more people than terrorists in the US and have killed over a hundred people more than mass shooters did in 2019 that we are aware of. Mass shooters are easily tracked. Police killings are not. 1 2

Oh, and cops also killed more people in 2019 than school shooters did in all of US history.

And if they don't shoot you, they might just airstrike your block and burn your children alive.

They also shoot one dog every hour, every day. At the absolute least.

Once you're in jail, be prepared to sit there for weeks -or months or years. It's so bad that people constantly plead guilty just so they can get out. It's so bad and so common, in fact, that over a third of all exonerations come after an individual has pleaded guilty. So much for the right to a speedy trial, huh?- And getting arrested is easy - tens of thousands of people yearly, in fact, thanks to lowest bidder garbage that police departments use in order to test for illicit substances. Field drug tests are about as reliable as lie detector tests or horoscopes. They just don't work. They just don't.

Think you're safe if you just follow directions? Yeah, no. And if they don't just outright kill you, they could make their instructions so arcane and hard to follow that they'll kill you for not following them, and they'll usually get away with it. He got away with it, by the way. Surprise!

They'll prosecute you for even knowing about crimes cops have committed.

Think you're safe in your home? lmao nah. Not even your 7 year old is safe from getting her brains blown out. check out this horrifying megapost on no-knock raids

Being a taxi driver is literally more dangerous than being a cop.

cops are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else is to them

they've admitted to stealing as much -or recently more- than burglars through "asset forfeiture," and the rate of their thefts has been climbing yearly. Keep in mind, these numbers only articulate what's been reported. It's probable that they've stolen far more than just this.

police are literally allowed to rape people on the job in 35 states, as they have the power to determine whether or not you consented to sex with them while in their custody.

up to 50% of the people police murder are disabled

the police are being trained to kill as if they're an occupying army and we're an insurgency. this is an inevitability, as the military-industrial complex needs to keep expanding into new markets.

Eugenics was still alive and well in the prison-industrial complex up until very recently, and could very well be continuing for all we know, as it was forcibly sterilizing inmates as late as 2010. I honestly don't see a reason to believe it's stopped.

The US surveillance state is massive (and while this post primarily focuses on the US, other countries are just as bad), though much of our surveillance is privatized. This doesn't stop the police from partnering with private companies, however. This will only get worse as time goes on. Also, we can't forget about the Patriot Act and Snowden's PRISM leaks.

the police, as an institution, are so completely steeped in violence, that up to 40% of them commit acts of domestic violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Most citizens are not even allowed to own firearms if found guilty of domestic violence, and these guys are expected to handle military-grade equipment.

Police exist to control and terrorize us, not serve and protect us. That's only their function if you happen to be rich and powerful.

also this: lol

the police as they are now haven't even existed for 200 years as an institution, and the modern police force was founded to control crowds and catch slaves, not to "serve and protect" -- unless you mean serving and protecting what people call "the 1%." They have a long history of controlling the working class by intimidating, harassing, assaulting, and even murdering strikers during labor disputes. This isn't a bug; it's a feature.

The justice system also loves to intimidate and outright assassinate civil rights leaders.

The police do not serve justice. The police serve the ruling classes, whether or not they themselves are aware of it. They make our communities far more dangerous places to live, but there are alternatives to the modern police state. There is a better way.

Further Reading: (all links are to free versions of the texts found online - many curated from this source)

white nationalists court and infiltrate a significant number of Sheriff's departments nationwide

Kropotkin and a quick history of policing

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. (2013). Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense.

Rose City Copwatch. (2008). Alternatives to Police.

Williams, Kristian. (2011). “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing.” Interface 3(1).

Williams, Kristian. (2004). Our Enemies in Blue: Police and power in America. New York: Soft Skull Press.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Understanding Unequal Exchange: How does trade imperialism affect the global working class?

This article originally appeared on Anticonquista, an Anti-Imperialist Media outlet for the Latin American and Caribbean Diaspora. This is my attempt to write an accessible explainer on the issue of Unequal Exchange, using some examples from the Pacific and New Zealand to illustrate the sometimes equation-heavy theory.

I was initially inspired to write this explainer by Abdul Nasir’s reexamination of Dependency Theory. It is wonderful to see the fruitful and diverse theories of Imperialism of the late 20th century being revived and discussed on Anticonquista. We must do all we can to resume the important debates that were muted by the collapse of global workers’ institutions at the close of the last century, and overcome the grey orthodoxy that has reasserted itself in radical critiques of imperialism.

Unequal exchange was once considered one of the most important new developments in imperialism studies of the 20th century. The theory, first proposed by French-Greek theorist and resistance fighter Arghiri Emmanuel in the 1960s, was quickly taken up by many of the underdevelopment and imperialism theorists of the day, from Walter Rodney to Samir Amin. Dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank had proven that the imperialism had developed to a point where empire was best understood not in terms of capital exports from the core (as in Hobson, Bukharin, Hilferding and Lenin’s models), but in terms of the wealth extracted from the periphery. However, they were not always clear on how this wealth was generated. Emmanuel was the first to propose an original theory of where exactly that extracted wealth came from. This was the theory of unequal exchange, the idea that the bulk of imperialist superprofits stemmed not from monopolies, noncompetition or securing captive markets, but rather from the difference in wages between nations.

To Emmanuel, Marx’s factors of production were not only fixed quantities of labour and material inputs, they also represented the stake each class holds in the total surplus value produced by a society (whether this stake is recognised is another matter). A given quantity of labour hours invested in production represents a stake workers hold over an end product, while a given quantity of raw materials or fixed capital represents the stake a capitalist holds.

In pre-capitalist artisanal production, the labourer is the only one who holds a stake over the end product of their labour. The labourer controls both the tools and the resources required for production, and can work whenever they choose. The labourer can move freely between industries, and will move to whichever one yields the best prices. Many artisans will move into an industry if the prices are very high, and begin producing greater quantities of that commodity, forcing prices down. In pre-capitalist production, the market will reward labourers for fulfilling particular needs, and that reward falls in relation to the degree that need is met, and so wages and profitability both equalise freely.

All that changes in a society with two classes involved in production. Under capitalist production, both the labourer and capitalist have stakes in the final product, and thus the degree to which wages and prices equalise depends on different factors. When capital moves freely between industries, this tends to equalise the rate of profit. When labour moves freely between industries, this tends to equalise wages. Both wages and profitability must be considered when setting prices.

This is all well and good in the context of individual countries. In most countries, labour and capital moves freely between industries, and so wages, profitability, and prices are all relatively consistent between towns and cities in one country.

On an international level however, wages, profitability and prices are often completely inconsistent, especially between richer and poorer countries. This is because capital often moves freely between the core and the periphery, shifting to wherever has the highest rate of profit, while labour is constrained. Workers cannot move between countries due to militarised borders, repressive governments, and migration quotas. In the end, the rate of profit slowly equalises between countries, while wages only become more and more dissimilar between countries due to different levels of unionisation, and other “historical and moral determinants” like the degree of reactionary violence, market suppression and underdevelopment.

At the end of the day, a situation is produced wherein, as Charles Bettleheim explains, “on the world market the poor nations are obliged to sell the product of a relatively large number of hours in order to obtain in exchange from the rich nations the product of a small number of hours of labour.”

This inequality in trade can be further explored in a number of ways. In the past, unequal exchange has been explained through equations and figures, but this topic is too important to be bound up in academic language and convention. What follows is my attempt to explore the consequences of unequal exchange through the eyes of two fictional workers in countries separated by a small stretch of South Pacific ocean.

An example: Natia and Tim

Unequal Exchange can be hard to understand in human terms. By its nature it deals with abstract transfers of wealth in the spaces between nations, never really connecting with our human experience of work and life. But it does have a human dimension, and it extends outwards from a web of interconnected human experiences and struggles. Compare Natia and Tim. Natia works at a copra plantation in Savai’i, in Samoa. She spends her day collecting coconuts, halving them, and leaving them out to dry in the sun in large batches. Sometimes she helps at the kilns, where the sun-dried coconuts are fully dried, and the desiccated meat is crushed into oil and meal. It is a hard process, and sometimes whole batches develop mold and have to be thrown out. The market for the meal is shrinking, as the New Zealand farmers who used to buy it as animal feed have now shifted to Palm Kernel Expeller, much of it grown by debt slaves in Malaysia.

In the end, Natia gets about $350 USD per month for her full-time labour. It’s considered a decent wage in Samoa. Her employer has few ongoing costs aside from her low wages. However, considering the need to compete with PKE and other copra producers, the employer can only sell the copra meal for a very low price: just above the amount needed to pay for Natia and the other workers’ labour.

3,000 kilometres away from Natia, Tim is just starting his shift. He works at a plastics factory in Auckland, New Zealand. The factory is designed to turn mineral oil into a range of commodity plastics and tupperware, and while Tim works hard, his productivity is mostly due to the wide variety of factory machines at his disposal. Tim is able to produce a large amount of plastic products in just one hour, and the market for the products is always high, since the factory is generally able to out-produce and out-compete its smaller competitors.

Tim has been working at the company for a while, and has always participated in his union. The most recent strike was 2 years ago, when the union representatives were able to secure a new collective bargaining agreement that raised Tim’s wages to $3,150 USD per month. It’s nowhere near as much as his many managers get, but Tim is pretty thankful, since it’s considered a living wage by New Zealand standards. The company fought tooth and nail against the pay increase, but in the end it didn’t hurt business too much, and they were able to compensate by raising prices, thanks to their healthy market share.

The products of Natia and Tim’s labour are often exported around the Pacific. A handful of New Zealand farmers still import Pacific copra meal, while stores in Savai’i often stock the tupperware containers and commercial plastics Tim produces. The problem is that the products of their equivalent labour hours are sold at wildly different prices. The amount of tupperware that Time produces in one labour hour gets sold for enough to pay for nine hours of Natia’s work.

Is Tim’s labour itself worth nine times more than Natia’s? Not really; if Natia went to New Zealand and performed similar agricultural work, she would be paid at a rate much more comparable to Tim, if only due to labour laws and the higher cost of living in New Zealand. The product of her labour would also be exchanged at a vastly higher rate, even without additional machinery to help her. The real problem is that Natia could only access those wages if she won a visa through the ballot system, and only a few were given out each year, even before it was shut down entirely due to Covid.

The disparity between the two only becomes more extreme as time goes on. Thousands of other workers produce commodities that are traded between New Zealand and Samoa, and all of them have very similar wages to Natia and Tim. Samoa is limited in how many New Zealand imports it can buy, since its products are worth nine times less than New Zealand’s by default. Meanwhile, New Zealand exporters are making a killing: their products could buy nine times their own value in Samoan commodities! Over time, Samoan industry becomes more and more specialised and export-oriented, and less able to supply domestic consumers with cheaper local goods, processes covered by Samir Amin in Unequal Development. Instead, imported western goods become the norm, and Natia is forced to spend much more on necessities. Competition in the animal feed market threatens to force Natia’s wages down further, or even put the plantation out of business entirely.

Meanwhile, Tim’s wages are enough to buy plenty of consumer goods. He can’t always afford the boutique local brands, but he can afford as much imported produce as he could ever need. Over time, his wages are supplemented by these cheaper goods, and he can afford to save. In addition, the state mandates access to a superannuation fund for workers, and Tim’s contributions are invested in all sorts of foreign industry and international trade futures. Tim doesn’t ever have enough to stop working for a living, but he has enough to perhaps retire comfortably, or even to ensure that his kids don’t have to work as hard as he did. He is secure in the knowledge that in the long run, things seem to be getting better.

Workers like Natia represent the bulk of the global working class, labouring in low-paid labour producing much of the world’s most basic commodities. Their conditions are deteriorating due to the increased dependency, specialisation, and export-orientation of industry in the global periphery, as this means there is less local industry devoted to local needs. They are unable to save, or move to countries with better conditions. Their main hope is an increase in the total global mobility of labour, which might equalise wages and prices between countries. For them, freedom of migration is liberation, as even if they don’t migrate themselves, the resulting wage equalisation benefits everyone.

Workers like Tim represent a minority in the global working class: he is at the bottom end of a labour aristocracy. As we have seen, Tim’s conditions aren’t wonderful, or somehow post-scarcity, but he has the ability to save, to move between industries freely, to invest his surplus wages, and to send his kids to be educated. These are all rights Tim ought to enjoy, ones which he fought hard to keep, but the institutions which enable those rights are also unwittingly contributing to global inequality.

In rich countries, prices and wages are caught in an upward death spiral. Since prices are determined by the interrelationship between wages and profitability, and wages tend to gravitate around the ability to purchase a fixed number of commodities, we can see how wages might push prices higher and vice versa. Other factors push wages and prices higher, including the efforts by unions to stay ahead of the cost of living, and increases in the overall standard of living enabled by external debt.

To break out of that spiral means acting internationally, securing better wages for all workers up and down the supply chain. An alternative approach would involve pressuring western governments to impose price ceilings: a hard limit on the cost of living set in a fixed number of commodities. Theorists like Emmanuel singled out western unions as a major cause of unequal exchange, and it is certainly true that many cannot be relied upon, but it is not necessarily unions themselves so much as the underlying upward spiral of prices and wages. A world with fewer unions, even the most compromised ones, is nonetheless one in which workers wield less power, and have less potential energy to turn towards international organisation.

The global consequences of Unequal Exchange

The relationship between Natia and Tim is just one tiny part of the global problem of unequal exchange. The true scale of unequal exchange has only been explored relatively recently thanks to the work of Zak Cope, in his book The Wealth of (Some) Nations, as well as recent studies that have built upon his findings.

Much of Cope’s recent work is devoted to quantifying and exploring various forms of imperialist superprofits (or the Imperial Transfer of Value). In Cope’s analysis, unequal exchange is not the sole form of imperialist superprofits, but it does constitute a majority. By measuring wage differentials between core and peripheral countries, and comparing those wages to a midpoint (the global median wage), Cope was able to find the total value gained each year through unequal exchange: roughly 2.8 trillion dollars per year.

To put this in perspective, the value gained through unequal exchange is 53.8% of all superprofits flowing from the periphery to the core. It is also 31.5% of the core’s profits available for reinvestment (calculated as the core’s GDP multiplied by rate of savings), in other words, nearly a third of all profits in the core are purely the result of being able to sustain higher wages.

Decades ago, Samir Amin predicted that as the rate of profit fell in core industries, unequal exchange would slowly come to be the dominant source of profits for western capitalists, locking the periphery into a permanent state of dependency in order to prop-up the decayed husk of domestic industry in the core. In many of the world’s richest nations, that prediction is being borne out today.

Shifting the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery means that the core relies less and less on the unprofitable exploitation of its own workers. Instead, many core workers are increasingly being placed in menial office and managerial jobs which produce little to no real value. Such workers are ostensibly there to increase the value of other labourers’ work – so-called “reflexive” labourers – but in practice this is economically impossible, and many of these managers, administrators, and functionaries are simply paid consumers, shifting and manipulating various forms of debt, sitting at the heights of increasingly top-heavy finance and tech juggernauts.

As the core systematically underdevelops itself, taking away its own ability to autogenously produce value, the periphery stands at a crossroads. Many nations are now choosing to promote trade between peripheral partners, effectively disengaging from the predatory trade imperialism of the core. This too has dangers, in that it risks imperialist intervention, and some peripheral nations still side with the core out of fear of repercussions, out of a bribed ruling class, or out of a lack of alternatives.

Workers in the core are still able to organise against trade imperialism directy, even if such activism will always be opposed by sections of the labour aristocracy. Pushing for increased migrant quotas and rights is one proven way to mitigate global wage inequality, as remittances and competition tend to raise peripheral average wages. To return to our Pacific example, compare Samoa with the Cook Islands: both nations were colonised and dominated by New Zealand imperialism, but the Cooks have at least gained an average wage more comparable to the core, entirely thanks to the ability to migrate to a core nation.

Another step would be to encourage labour organisation across national boundaries. As we have seen, a narrow-minded focus on only improving the wages of core workers can actively harm peripheral workers by encouraging greater differences in wages. If the entire supply chain of an industry can be organised, not only would workers exercise greater control over their workplaces by influencing the factors of production, they would also be able to raise the lowest-paid workers up to a greater standard.

One of the greatest lessons we can draw from recent advances in unequal exchange theory is that business-as-usual activism can have unintended consequences. Do we fight to perpetuate labour aristocracy, wealth extraction, and the further stratification of our class? Or do we fight to bring about unity between workers of all nationalities, no matter their position in the hierarchies of industry and empire?

Further Reading

Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, 1972 Emmanuel’s most rigorous examination of Unequal Exchange is still highly relevant reading today, even if sections on Organic Composition of Capital have been questioned by later writers. It also includes an interesting debate between Emmanuel and his mentor Charles Bettleheim.

Zak Cope, The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer, 2019 Cope’s most recent book builds on his ideas from 2013’s Divided World, Divided Class into one of the most rigorous analyses of imperialist value transfer yet attempted. Cope’s analysis of Unequal Exchange is limited to two small chapters, but the rest of the book is well worth a read and covers an enormous swathe of leftist and colonial history.

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 1980 Brewer’s book is a great overview of theories of imperialism, from Marx to Emmanuel and Amin. He takes particular interest in charting the development of Unequal Exchange discourse, and makes a few of his own additions to the theory.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1974 Rodney was one of the first writers in the colonised world to pick up the idea of Unequal Exchange, and wove it into his masterful history of European colonisation in Africa, which also serves to discredit the “whiggish history” of perpetual progress in the colonised world.

Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, 1976 Amin was one of the first writers able to explore the various international implications of Unequal Exchange rather than having to develop his own economic framework from scratch. As such his work is often more holistic than the narrow economic focus of Emmanuel. His theory of development is excellent, even if his autarkic conclusions are sometimes flawed.

Esteban Ezequiel Maito, The historical transience of capital: the downward trend in the rate of profit since the 19th century, 2014 Maito’s study represents a rigorous effort to analyse the declining rate of profit. Crucially, Maito accounts for the rate of turnover, something similar studies sometimes fail to do. Maito identifies three separate rates of profit, the core, peripheral, and China, and demonstrates that these are all equalising as they decline. This confirms many of the assumptions of the Unequal Exchange theorists.

[thegeminisage]

the south is like another country

i have an entire essay on how the current radicalism and steep political divide in this country can be traced directly back to the civil war - rural white southerners here playing the part pre-ww2 germany, the part of a resentful, conquered nation assimilated into the nation that conquered them, because if you think about it the south/the confederacy WAS its own nation for a time, that lost a very bloody war, and paid very steeply for it (not that slavers didn’t deserve every bit of misery the “carpetbaggers” threw at them), and the bitterness from that loss/the lost capital from having their slaves freed has been handed down through the generations, to people who now live in abject poverty while their livelihoods are destroyed by late stage capitalism, and their schools are so broke a lot of people here don’t even know how to read, and their towns are eaten alive with meth, and they’re still looked down upon by most of the country for being racist uneducated backwater hicks (to be clear, we should always look down on racism and racists, but it’s not making them any less bitter/ripe for being drawn into the cult of tr*mp’s america and f*cism).

but anyway this post isn’t about that! this post is about how when i go up north and i say “y’all it really is like i’m living in a different country” NOBODY BELIEVES ME. we speak the same language, we’re all americans, right? PFFFFFT. this amazon van thing just drives it home (pun intended). here’s a list of differences from the deep south* to the rest of the country*:

*the deep south here meaning the RURAL deep south. sorry to everyone who lives in cities/the suburbs and/or in border states like maryland and virginia. i’ve been to maryland and virginia and they are technically southern and some of this applies to them but it is not quite as extreme as it is here. the rest of the country includes the other states i’ve been to (california, washington state, new york, etc), which are in mostly every area except the midwest. i cannot personally vouch for the midwest. sorry, midwesterners! rural midwest probably has a lot of things in common with the deep south because rural life is different and also how easily people move around this country, but whatever

this is a long-ass post get ready

difference #1: DRIVING. driving & pedestrians are entirely different un rural areas vs urban areas. for starters, southern towns often do not even have sidewalks. this is because of 1. budget and 2. racism.

budget: rural towns are very spread out, and it costs major $$$ to put sidewalks in. it’s just not worth the trouble, financially, to put a sidewalk where only 12 people are ever going to use it, AND spend the money to maintain it. never gonna happen. racism: initially, suburbs especially in the south were seen as safe havens where people could get away from the stress of living in “urban” (re: integrated) areas. that the neighborhoods were only accessible by car and NOT by people who were too poor (black) to afford automobiles were just an added bonus. 

as such, the first time i left the southeast, i was SHOCKED to see people walking and biking WITH (or indifferent to) the flow of traffic. down here we are taught that if you are walking along the road (or biking, because bikers get lumped in with pedestrians down here), it is very very very crucial that you walk against the flow of traffic, because you cannot expect drivers to see you and not mow you down. the onus is on YOU to get out of THEIR way. additionally, walking in knee-high grass along the side of the road sucks, and because there aren’t many people here, the roads are usually totally empty. so oftentimes pedestrians just straight up walk ON the road. and if you do that you absolutely have to be able to see a car coming from a long way away, because rural drivers on completely empty roads tend to take them at extremely high speeds just for fun. the people who live diagonally across from me have had to replace their mailbox four times because folks take that blind curve at 90mph. i had a cat get hit by a car on that road. (they all live indoors now.) i even witnessed a car accident happen there when i was just outside minding my own business. ever see a tire fly 12 feet into the air and come down into someone’s windshield? that’s what happens when you hit power line pole driving like that.

the first time i ever encountered one of those pedestrian crossing buttons was in california in the early 2010s. i had literally never seen one before because we simply don’t have them here. they’re not very self-explanatory if you have been jaywalking your whole entire life because all you’re taught to do is look both ways and make sure the street is empty before you cross. northern/urban roadways are made so that pedestrians and drivers can both get to where they’re going. in rural/southern areas pedestrians might as well not bother.

interestingly, while not an entirely southern problem, there’s a loose correlation between rural areas and more problems with drunk drivers.

on the driving side, driving in a city is batshit insane. it’s both faster and slower. there is NO space and you’re expected to go whenever you have so much as an inch to worm your way in. there’s more traffic, and the traffic totally dictates your speed. in the south you can change lanes if you want to drive faster or slower and weave around traffic or let it weave around you, but in a city there’s no other lane to change to and if you don’t drive at the speed of the people ahead of and behind you you will die. you turn fast, you brake fast, etc. whenever i come back from driving in a city the people who ride with me think i’m insane. you don’t PULL ONTO A ROAD if you can SEE ANOTHER CAR THERE, what the fuck? meanwhile i’m like “lol that is six miles of space i have plenty of time” and give everyone in my vicinity heart palpitations until i readjust. 

tailgating in a rural area is something only assholes do (done by people on a two-lane road to encourage the person in front of them to go faster because the only other lane is for oncoming traffic), and if someone gets within one car length of me on a two-lane road i can very passively aggressively slow my vehicle to a crawl until they back the fuck off. in a city you’re lucky if you have a twelve inches between your bumper and the next car’s hood ornament.

difference #2: LANGUAGE. this is a small one, but the southern dialect combined with the lack of literacy means i am learning certain things late in life. phrases i have heard verbally with my ears but had never seen written out include: “chest of drawers” which i thought was “chester drawers” - “seven year itch” which i thought was “seven year each” - “albeit” which i thought was “i’ll be it.” i’ve made a deliberate effort to unlearn mine own accent/dialect but i run into weird shit all the time. remotes are mashers, shopping carts are buggies, you put stuff up instead of putting it away, i fix you a drink instead of pouring you one, we shoot the game instead of play it. my mom LITERALLY can’t understand me if i speak too quickly - she has to remind me all the time to slow down and put on my southern.

difference #3: TECHNOLOGY. issue of whether or not you personally have the creepy amazon vans aside, the rural south is behind the rest of the country on technology. things in cities are AUTOMATED. things like the little button you press to cross the street, tickets you take at parking garages, even the parking meters you find in cities, that’s just the beginning of it. one time i came across a little computer touch screen in a MCDONALDS where you put your order in. you didn’t even go up to the counter. you just put your order on the screen and swiped your card and then they got it ready for you and you never had to speak to a human person. self-checkouts, gas pumps where you can swipe your card and not go in and pay at first...the south got those YEARS behind everybody else. in the mid-2010s i went to DC and visited a target for maybe the 5th time ever and i was BAFFLED by the self-checkout. i had no idea how to use it! it was like less than ten years ago and i was IN MY TWENTIES and i had never seen one before! when we send a package we have to talk to a human person. when we order food we usually have to talk to a human person. apps for places like dominos and subway have not been in use here for very long. my county just got doordash LAST YEAR. 

because i am 31, and because the south is so technologically behind, i am actually old enough to remember how when you used to go to a gas station an attendant would not only pump your gas but wash your windshield for you while you just SAT IN THE CAR. that seems like something from the 50s but it actually was a thing here in my childhood IN the 90s. i wish i was making this up.

difference #4: INFRASTRUCTURE. this sort of goes hand-in-hand w/ the last point because so much of our infrastructure is made of technology, and it’s also more of a rural/urban thing than a south/north thing. but just for fun here’s a non-exhaustive list of things i don’t have in my town:

starbucks* - the first time i went to a starbucks i was in my 20s

a public pool - we used to, but now the only pool here requires a YMCA membership. the only baseball diamond in this county is also at the Y.

walmart

in fact, ANYWHERE to buy clothes that is not a goodwill or other secondhand store. i cannot buy clothing unless i order it online or LEAVE MY TOWN. almost all of the clothing i own is from walmart because it’s one of the only places in my entire county where you can actually PURCHASE clothing.

grocery store chains? pffft. my town has two entire stores and both are small southern chains. i didn’t go into a publix for the first time until two years ago when i went to florida. i’ve NEVER entered a whole foods.

food delivery? yeah, no. like i said, we got doordash last year, but before that the only place you could get delivery from was a pizza chain. we only have two pizza places in my town that deliver, and one is a local place, not attached to any chain, so i can’t spend my loyalty points there. (it’s very expensive there too.) last year it was CLOSED for six months because the manager got caught dealing meth. every last one of the delivery drivers was trafficking it for him. they all got fired and had to restart from the ground up. for that short time, it was not possible to get any food delivered to your house whatsoever.

a hospital/ambulance services - if someone is sick, we have to take them to the hospital in laurens, the town next door (about 15-20 minutes by car). the town i live in lucky - we have our own police and fire departments. (acab but you know what i mean.) joanna is a smaller town next to mine that isn’t a real town - it’s been demoted to a census designated area because only 2000 people live there. if they have an emergency, they have to use OUR fire and police departments, and LAURENS’s ambulance/hospital system

after-school places kids can go to keep from getting into trouble. we have the Y, if you have money (no one here has money), and we have churches, but mostly schools can’t afford to run too many extracurriculars. there’s nothing to do here but church and meth.

food banks: zero. we have food DRIVES sometimes where people will come from further away and bring free food, but if you’re hungry, there’s nowhere you can go for help - you have to wait for help to come to you.

libraries: we don’t have our own library. we have a branch of the county library that’s physically located in our town. but we share books with the rest of the entire county, so everything is always checked out or at the other branch. 

*we technically have a starbucks that’s in the local college campus, but only college students are allowed to be there. they’ll still serve people without a college ID because no one gives a fuck, but you can’t linger and loiter and hang out like you do in a normal starbucks. we also have one in the barnes and noble in greenville, which is about an hour away by car, but again, it’s a mini starbucks that serves a limited menu and none of that weird Starbucks Culture™

here’s a few things i don’t have in my ENTIRE COUNTY:

movie theaters - technically. we have a Historial™ one-screen theater in laurens that shows one movie for two weeks a month after it hits regular theaters and then switches to another, and if you miss it, too bad. this is a VERY recent addition - it wasn’t restores until i was in my 20s as a kid and a teenager i had to ride in a car an hour or more to go to the movies.

target. only commies and yankees have target. down here we do walmart.

malls

arcades

skate parks/skating rinks

bowling

museums

zoos/aquariums

campgrounds

fairs. our county fairground got razed a decade ago because there just werent enough people showing up to justify the expense. so no more fairs. you have to have people to fund things and down here there just aren’t enough people anywhere.

you get the idea. we don’t have entertainment. like i said, nothing to do but church and meth.

CLASSES FOR STUFF: knitting classes, dancing classes, driving classes? nope. gymnastics, karate dojos, golf, knitting groups, books clubs, cooking classes? [GAMESHOW BUZZER]. you can’t even hire a clown for a birthday party out here. we do have a shooting range. ONE. in the entire county. and a race track. and a rather infamous former kkk memorabilia store. they made a movie about that (serious tw for this trailer - they’ve got white hoods, burning crosses, pepper spray, the whole nine), which, yes, takes place in laurens, aka right next door to me. i used to walk by that place all the time when i was playing pokemon go. haven’t seen the movie but the shooting locations in the trailer make laurens look a lot bigger and prettier than it really is in real life - especially the racetrack, which, in the trailer, is actually PAVED. (this is inaccurate to real life.)

EDUCATION: lots of people can’t read. we have two schools for illiterate adults, one religious college, and one branch of one of the state colleges that has a skeleton staff and a fuck ton of computers (you basically just go there to distance learn/e-learn - if you want to take real classes from this college, you have to drive at least an hour.)

support groups/group therapy: almost none. we have al-anon and weight watchers, but that’s about it. there’s only half a dozen therapists in my entire county, and none that operate from my town. mental healthcare down here is bullshit.

on food: we don’t have many sit-down restaurants, where servers bring you your menu and your food. if you don’t count waffle houses, my town has 4. my county has 9. in and out, 5 guys, applebees, ruby tuesday, red lobster, olive garden, panda epxress? forget it. those places were and still are rare treats. i’ve only been to an olive garden twice. red lobster once. whenever i leave my county i BEG for chinese because there’s only two chinese restaurants in our entire county and one of them is crazy expensive and the other one sucks. 

we also don’t have the more important stores you need to like, live. if we need to exchange our router at a charter store? yeah, we don’t have one. need to visit the sprint store to get your phone repaired? nuh-uh, we don’t have any phone stores either. my family recently switched to at&t because it was the only company that had a physical location in our county. before that, we had to drive an hour for even the smallest repair.

on a grimer note: we don’t have homeless shelters! homeless in laurens county? too bad for you. we do have homeless PEOPLE. they just have nowhere to go except the churches

hospitals? only kind of. like i said, our county has one, but it’s not equipped to take seriously sick people. when my mom had a heart attack she had to be driven straight to greenwood, which is 45 minutes away if you’re not in an ambulance. they obviously made it faster than that, but still. that was scary. it took them a long time to get here. i had a distant relative of mine die before the ambulance made it because they were SO far out in the sticks, even further than me.

we also don’t have any specialty stores. sporting goods, gamestops, shoe stores, florists, craft stores, bookstores, best buys...forget it. if you can’t buy it at walmart, you just can’t buy it. the exceptions: my TOWN has one jewelry store, two hardware stores, and two auto repair stores. my COUNTY has three clothing stores, none of which are in my town, one place that sells used TVs, and one movie rental place. thrilling, right? i can rent a movie if i drive out of town. (i know streaming killed the rental business, but we also only had two places when i was a kid, if you counted the rental section in the grocery store.)

so, yeah. i know the term “shithole” is really loaded these days, but rural areas are just plain less developed, and often in seriously poor repair because nobody fucking uses them. there USED to be more stuff here - my mom was on a bowling league, and as a kid i had a birthday party at a skating rink - but late stage capitalism and drugs destroyed it all. people ran out of money to do things like skate and bowl and so those places closed. the south is full of empty store fronts and deserted strip malls slowly being eaten by kudzu. my brother got out of this town and whenever he winds up back here (not often) he remarks on how completely and utterly dead everything feels. “my friends who live in greenwood now think they’re all rural,” he said once. “they complain constantly about how remote it is. but they have no idea. they wouldn’t make it five minutes out here.” greenwood has its own movie theater, mall, starbucks, homeless shelter, food bank, and hospital.

so, yeah! if you were wondering what rural white southerners are so fucking mad about, that’s part of it. propaganda and xenophobia and racism has their anger directed ENTIRELY at the wrong people, but it’s hard to argue that the anger itself isn’t just a little bit justified.

difference #5: CULTURE. specifically culture around food, and the culture around the civil war. i could write an entire other essay about the culture of the church being everything because the church IS the only semblance of infrastructure we have and this is why the south is so homophobic, but we’ll skip that for now.

food: this is a quickie, because i sort of touched on it already, but there are like, almost NO vegetarian options here. there’s very limited choices of cuisine. it’s ALL waffle house and soul food. we have a lot of mexican places because we’re physically close to the mexican border, but aside from that, forget finding like indian or thai or japanese or anything like that. no sushi. forget finding a menu that has meals that are halal or kosher. there’s just. no culture here. no variety. you know? like i said, our entire county doesn’t even hit double-digits for proper sit-down restaurants.

civil war: i’m not going to go into the big stuff since i sort of covered it at the top and also this post is getting way too long, but to other white rural southerners there is legitimate baggage around the fact that my mom married a yankee and that i am half-yankee. and he’s not even a real yankee! he was born up north but raised in southern florida. (florida is weird. the further south you go geographically, the less southern you are culturally.) yet: my family makes jokes that are sometimes not jokes about this. when i drop this information in casual conversation people get that look on their faces like: ah, that explains it. it being that i am not religious and don’t laugh at racist jokes and maybe i am queer?? (strangers tend to be unsure about this last part, even when i’m wearing rainbows.) it’s because i’m half-yank! that explains everything! the xenophobia is SO strong here that white people are even xenophobic at OTHER WHITE PEOPLE. 

so in conclusion when i say the north is like another country, it’s because the people who raised me think of it like another country. and culturally! it is buck wild! the differences that there are! when i leave this town i feel like i step into fucking star trek! if you are not from the rural south, and you have never been to the rural south, please do not come here! i’ve been to a few different places now and this is definitely my least favorite one. 

[arcticdementor]

On June 24, amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about the current moment. An edited version of their conversation follows.

…

You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.

Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with you. Suppose he thinks that affirmative action is undignified because he thinks that positions should be earned, not given, but he allows that he doesn’t expect someone like you to understand that argument because you’re black. That would be terribly unreasonable— even “racist.” Yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.

…

People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.

This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons.

…

And just so I don’t sound like a right-winger, observe that if I were a Marxist, I’d be furious at these people going around talking about “structural racism.” Structure, yes. Racism, no. Because if I were a Marxist, which I’m not, I’d understand the driving force of history to be the interaction between class relations and the means of production, the struggle between workers and capital in the quest for profit given the logic of capitalism. Though I don’t subscribe to it, that’s at least an intellectually serious theory. I know what people are talking about when they say we need more unions, when they say we need to break up big companies, when they say that the accumulation of wealth has gotten too great. When someone says that the logic of profit-seeking leads to war, at least I know what they’re talking about. I don’t necessarily have to agree with Das Kapital to understand that it’s a serious engagement with history.

Structural racism, by contrast, is a bluff. It’s not an engagement with history. It’s a bullying tactic. In effect, it’s telling you to shut up.

…

Yu: I’ve had conversations in the past few weeks that have ended very poorly; conversations that have spiraled out of control, where I’m suddenly a racist, so I’m on damage control. I just don’t know how to reach people in a meaningful way, and that’s very disturbing to me.

Loury: It is disturbing. I’m not a seer. My mouth is not a prayer book. I only say what I say based on my subjective assessment of it all. But it may be that, for a while anyway, there’s not going to be a whole lot of effective talking. It may well be that we have to imagine a world where effective deliberation and consensus is not within reach for us, and we’re going to have to manage that situation. It could get very bad. It could go to violence. This is what Sam Harris always says, and he’s got a point. He says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.

I don’t know if you saw my piece in Quillette about the looting and the rioting, but I pick up these pieces published in the New York Times, respectable left-wing journals. I’m reading them, and the writer is saying, “America was founded on looting. What did you think the Boston Tea Party was?” Or, “You’re talking about looting when George Floyd lies dead? Oh, I see, black lives don’t matter as much as property.” These are, to my mind, incomprehensibly idiotic. I don’t mean that to cast aspersions. The civilization that we all enjoy rests upon a very fragile foundation. Look. I’m in my backyard. It’s very nice. I’ve got a lot of space. There’s a fence. The birds come. I have a lawn. It’s mine!

Now, if a homeless person comes and squats in my backyard, I call the police. I have him removed, forcibly. There should be no lack of clarity about whether George Floyd’s death somehow excuses or justifies burning a bodega to the ground that a Muslim immigrant spends his whole life building. Being confused about that, equivocating about that, splitting the difference about that—I don’t understand how we’re going to have a reasoned discussion. My thoughts go back to, protect civilization. Again, I know how that sounds. It’s hyperbolic. It’s exaggerated—but only a little! My gut response is that this is not the time for argument. This is the time to protect civilization and protect institutions. When people start toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and spray-painting on statues of George Washington, “a slave owner,” things fall apart. The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe.

…

Yu: If there’s no available policy intervention, and there’s also no way we can change people’s minds, then is it hopeless? Is disparity always going to be the case?

Loury: Yes. My answer is it’s hopeless. But let me rephrase the question, and I’m channeling Thomas Sowell now. You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism. Again, hyperbolic, I know. No, I’m not talking about Eastern Europe circa 1960, but look at it this way: there can’t be a disparity without somebody being on top. People don’t recognize this.

What groups are on top? What about the Jews? You could say, “There are too many Jews in positions of influence.” If there are too few black lawyers who are partners in big law firms, doesn’t it follow that are too many Jews who are partners at these big firms? If there are too few blacks who are professors of mechanical engineering at places like Carnegie Mellon, why aren’t there too many Korean professors at these places?

…

What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.