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almostwisegalaxy · 3 months ago

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Silent Hostility

Part 2

Part 3

Part4

Spencer Reid x fem!reader

Reader has a shy character in this story

Age gaps : Spencer 37- 38 Reader : twenties

Post prison Reid. Season 13. But let's imagine that the team is Always the same as in the seasons marked, with : Derek Morgan, Aaron hotcher...

..................................................................................

The atmosphere in the BAU offices was the same as usual: agents moving back and forth, stacks of files piling up on desks, and the constant background noise of professional conversations. Spencer Reid usually kept his head down, absorbed in a scientific article or a pile of reports.

But today, something—someone—disrupted the ordinary flow of his day.

Y/N had just arrived.

A new recruit specializing in behavioral criminology. Young, far too young to be here in the eyes of some. And yet, her upright posture and sharp gaze spoke of a confidence far different from the polite smile she wore.

Spencer watched from the corner of his eye as she greeted Hotch and Prentiss with impeccable professionalism. She was elegant, composed, and he immediately noticed how some colleagues looked at her—with that mix of doubt and misplaced interest.

He, on the other hand, couldn’t look away for an entirely different reason.

Something was off.

Not with her directly, no. But in the way she carried herself, a subtlety almost imperceptible to an untrained eye. Her smile was perfectly controlled, her gestures measured, but there was tension in her fingers when she shook hands, a microsecond of hesitation before making eye contact.

A duality that captivated him.

He didn’t realize it at first, but he had stood up. He approached.

— Y/N, right?

She turned to him, and the moment their eyes met, Spencer felt a cold shiver creep into the air.

— Doctor Spencer Reid, he introduced himself, suddenly uncomfortable without knowing why.

She stared at him for a moment, her smile fading ever so slightly, as if something about him had just struck her straight in the heart. Then, she regained her composure and nodded.

— Nice to meet you, Doctor Reid.

A neutral response. Too neutral.

He felt a strange discomfort without being able to pinpoint its source. It was as if, in just a few seconds, she had erased him from her mind, like an annoying background noise.

— If you ever need help with—

— I can handle myself just fine, thanks.

The tone wasn’t overtly aggressive, but there was a sharp firmness, an invisible wall she had just put up between them.

Spencer froze. He didn’t understand.

The others had received smiles and polite exchanges. But with him, it was different.

It was cold.

And he had no idea why.

With time, Reid realized this wasn’t a passing awkwardness. It wasn’t just a misunderstanding.

Y/N hated him.

Oh, not openly. In front of the team, she was impeccable. Professional. But in the shadows, away from prying eyes, it was a different story.

Every time they were alone, the air grew heavier.

Once, as he was about to enter the break room, she walked out at the same moment. Their eyes met, and he immediately saw the change in her expression. A barely perceptible tension.

She walked past him without a word. As if he didn’t exist.

Another time, he tried to talk to her about a profile they were working on together.

— Y/N, I reviewed the latest data and—

— Look, Reid, she cut him off with a sigh, irritated. I know you love the sound of your own voice, but I’m not in the mood.

A knife to the chest would have hurt less.

He stood frozen, unable to respond.

She didn’t even look at him.

She despised him.

And he had no idea what he had done to deserve it.

Spencer Reid was a man of logic. He understood human behavior better than most. But this particular case eluded him.

Why?

Why her?

Why such visceral rejection?

He tried not to think about it. He tried to convince himself it didn’t matter. But the truth was, he had never been able to stand not understanding something.

So he watched her. Discreetly, of course. Just enough to catch those fleeting emotions she let slip when she thought no one was looking.

He saw the way her jaw tensed after a polite smile.

He noticed the stiffness in her shoulders when a man got too close.

He noted that, sometimes, she almost seemed… afraid.

But never around him.

No. She didn’t fear him.

She hated him.

And he would never know why.

---

Y/N knew Reid was watching her.

She could feel it before even seeing him. It wasn’t an intrusive gaze, nor was it ill-intentioned. But it was there. A persistent presence in her field of vision, an invisible weight on her skin.

She would have preferred if he despised her in return.

But no. He kept trying, clumsily, to break the barrier she had built between them.

And she kept reinforcing it.

That day, she was finalizing a report in an empty conference room when the door opened.

She didn’t need to look up to know it was him.

— Are you looking for someone? she asked bluntly, her tone sharp.

Reid hesitated for a second before stepping inside completely.

— No. I just wanted to… talk about the suspect’s profile.

She exhaled softly through her nose.

— We already discussed the profile with Hotch.

— Yes, but I noticed something that might be relevant.

She closed her laptop slowly and finally turned to him.

— Do you really want to do this now, Reid?

He blinked, visibly caught off guard.

— I… I don’t understand.

— Exactly. You don’t understand. So stop trying.

A heavy silence settled between them.

Spencer opened his mouth, closed it, then did what he always did when he was nervous—he started talking too fast.

— I’m sorry if I said or did something that offended you. That wasn’t my intention. Statistically speaking, first impressions can be biased by external factors—

— Reid.

She had just cut him off.

He stopped.

Her gaze was burning. Not with anger, but with something deeper. Something he couldn’t define.

She stood up slowly, took her file under her arm, and stepped closer to him.

— There’s nothing to understand, okay? Nothing to analyze, nothing to dissect.

She was so close now that he could see the faint tremble of her eyelashes, the barely perceptible tension in her fingers around the file.

— So stop.

She walked past him and left the room without another word.

Spencer remained still, his heart beating a little too fast, his thoughts in chaos.

He still didn’t understand.

But what he did know was that this woman was beginning to consume his mind.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

Days passed. Then weeks.

Reid tried to ignore the effect Y/N had on him. But it wasn’t just a matter of attraction. It wasn’t her smile he wanted to understand. It was that silent pain hiding beneath the surface.

But she wouldn’t let him get close.

Worse, she seemed to close herself off even more when he was around.

Until that night.

They were returning from a grueling case in Dallas, one of those cases that leaves a mark on the soul.

On the plane ride back, the team was half-asleep. Y/N, however, sat with her arms crossed, staring into nothing.

Reid hesitated, then sat across from her.

She didn’t react immediately, but he saw her shoulders tense ever so slightly.

— Can I? he asked softly.

She raised an eyebrow.

— Since when do you ask permission to sit?

— Since I realized you’d probably prefer me on the other side of the plane.

She said nothing.

Silence stretched between them.

Finally, she sighed, exhausted.

— Why do you keep pushing, Reid?

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

Because he didn’t know.

Because she fascinated him as much as she pushed him away.

Because he sensed, deep down, that beneath her disdain, there was something else.

— You’re a mystery, he finally admitted, honest.

She let out a bitter laugh.

— Do you think everyone is a puzzle to be solved?

— Not everyone.

Just her.

Y/N stared at him for a long moment. Then she stood up and went to sit elsewhere.

Spencer watched her empty seat, unable to understand why his chest felt so tight.

But he knew one thing.

He wouldn’t be able to ignore her.

And he wouldn’t be able to let her go.

---

Y/N knew how to adapt. It was a necessity, a survival instinct she had perfected over the years.

She knew when to smile. She knew how to joke, how to adjust her tone to seem warm without being too familiar, to keep her distance without appearing cold.

Within the team, she was well-liked.

Derek Morgan had immediately taken her under his wing. He liked ambitious young recruits, the ones with fire in their veins and iron willpower. With him, Y/N allowed herself to be a little lighter, to exchange playful banter and feigned arrogance.

— You really insist on running every morning before a field day? he asked one day, watching her tie her laces.

— I mostly insist on not running out of breath behind you, she replied, raising an eyebrow.

He laughed and patted her shoulder.

With Hotch, she was impeccable. Respectful, disciplined. She knew he was testing her, observing how she handled pressure, and she had no intention of giving him any reason to doubt her.

JJ, on the other hand, was gentle and maternal, which made Y/N uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. But she appreciated her, and they worked well together.

Emily Prentiss was perhaps the one she felt closest to. Not that they talked much, but there was a silent understanding between them, an unspoken recognition of wounds they never named.

And then there was Penelope Garcia.

Penelope was a whirlwind of bright colors and exuberant cheerfulness, everything Y/N was not. And yet, Garcia had immediately taken her under her wing, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

— My sweet star, you’re far too serious, she declared in the first week. We’re going to have to work on that.

Y/N rolled her eyes.

— I’m fine, Garcia.

— That’s what every little broken heart says before I save them with cookies and a personalized playlist.

Y/N had laughed despite herself.

Garcia had that gift, the ability to make the air feel lighter, to erase shadows without even realizing it.

So Y/N let her. She accepted the sudden hugs, the affectionate nicknames, the sincere gestures. Because, in some way, it was nice.

It was a friendship she had never known before.

But with Spencer, it was a completely different story.

Y/N always felt when he was there.

He didn’t talk much when they were in a group, but she felt his gaze.

It wasn’t oppressive. It wasn’t perverse or domineering like others had been before him.

No. His gaze was a suspended question.

And she refused to answer it.

One evening, as she was leaving the office late, she heard footsteps behind her in the hallway.

She tensed, breath short. But when she turned around, it was only Reid.

He stopped immediately when he saw her expression.

— Sorry, he murmured.

She looked away, jaw clenched.

— Don’t follow me.

— I’m not following you, he simply replied.

She laughed, a joyless laugh.

— Of course.

He remained still, and she felt her anger boil.

— Why do you do this, Reid? she whispered.

— Do what?

— Staring. Insisting.

He blinked, genuinely lost.

— Because you haunt me.

Silence fell like a heavy weight.

Y/N felt something tighten in her chest. A deep fear. A vertigo.

She took a step back.

— Stop this.

— Stop what?

— Trying to understand me.

He said nothing.

Because he couldn’t. Because he didn’t understand.

And she would never let him.

---

Months passed.

Y/N was integrating well into the team. She was no longer just the "new recruit"; she was a respected profiler whose intuition and keen observation made a difference in the field. Even Hotch, who was sparing with compliments, had implied that she belonged among them.

And yet, something in her remained on edge.

She laughed with Morgan, exchanged knowing looks with Prentiss, accepted Garcia’s suffocating hugs without flinching. But it was just a mask, a dance she had mastered to perfection.

There was only one person who refused to dance with her.

Spencer Reid.

He still watched her with that intensity, that silent obsession she hated as much as she feared. He didn’t understand her. He never would.

And yet, he remained.

Watching.

Searching.

Trying to uncover a secret she would never reveal.

But life at the BAU wasn’t just about the quiet tension between them. There were also moments of lightness, absurd instances that made their work bearable.

Like the day Rossi got locked in his own office.

Garcia had tampered with the lock to prove a security system could be bypassed, and she had accidentally trapped their veteran inside.

— Garcia, open this door immediately! Rossi thundered, furious.

— Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die! Garcia kept repeating, frantically tapping at her keyboard.

Y/N and Morgan were in tears from laughter.

Reid, on the other hand, leaned towards her, a smirk on his lips.

— Technically, he could survive for days with the snacks he hides in his bottom drawer.

She shot him a dark look, but deep down, she had to bite her cheek to keep from smiling.

Then there was the case of the kitten in the office.

Garcia had found a stray cat near the FBI building and had secretly brought it into her office.

— Just for one night! she pleaded.

Except the cat escaped and caused chaos throughout the floor.

Hotch caught Y/N and Garcia trying to lure the animal with a piece of turkey stolen from Reid’s sandwich.

— Don’t tell me there’s a cat in here…

— There’s a cat in here, Reid confirmed, turning a page in his book, unbothered.

— It has a white paw! Y/N added enthusiastically, earning an incredulous look from Hotch.

In the end, it was Prentiss who caught the creature with a dexterity that suggested past experience in animal rescue.

— I don’t even want to know, Hotch concluded before walking away.

Reid watched as Y/N gently stroked the cat’s head.

— You like it.

— Who wouldn’t?

— You don’t usually let yourself be swayed so easily.

She lifted her head towards him, her smile slowly fading.

— Maybe I’m more complicated than you think.

He said nothing.

Because he already knew.

That night, Reid couldn’t sleep.

He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his mind refusing to grant him rest.

Y/N.

She occupied his every thought.

He wanted to understand why. Why her, why this hostility that didn’t feel like simple dislike?

He could analyze a criminal in minutes, dissect a lie with clinical precision. But with her… he couldn’t.

She hated him. He felt it in her gaze, in the tension of her jaw when he spoke.

And yet, sometimes, there was something else. A crack.

One evening, as they were finishing a report late at a café near the FBI, she had slightly dozed off, resting her head on her hand.

Reid had wanted to wake her, but he stopped.

She looked… peaceful.

But also terribly fragile.

And something in him tightened.

He knew she was hiding something.

And he knew he would never find out what.

It was unbearable.

He ran a hand over his face and sat on the edge of his bed, his heart pounding too hard.

She haunted him.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

Y/N felt that obsession too.

She saw it in the way Reid looked at her, in how he kept trying to talk to her despite her cold responses.

But what she couldn’t understand… was why she didn’t push him away more violently.

She was used to keeping men at a distance. To shutting them down with a sharp smile or a biting remark.

But with him, it was different.

He was patient. Too patient.

And that scared her.

One night, after a grueling mission, she found herself in Garcia’s office.

— You want to talk about it, my sweet star?

Y/N tensed.

— Talk about what?

— About whatever’s eating at you.

She wanted to lie. To say she was fine.

But Garcia was a magician, able to see beyond masks.

— It’s Reid, isn’t it?

Y/N’s head snapped up, shocked.

— What?

— You’re mad at him. But not for what he’s done. For what he is.

Silence fell, heavy.

Garcia took her hands, her gaze soft but piercing.

— I don’t know what you’ve been through, Y/N. But I do know you’re stronger than whatever haunts you.

Y/N felt something crack inside her.

But she said nothing.

Because she couldn’t.

Because some wounds weren’t meant to be shared.

A few days later, Reid tried to talk to her again.

And she snapped.

They were alone in a conference room when he said something. She didn’t even remember what.

But it was too much.

— What do you want, Reid?!

He stepped back, startled by the violence in her voice.

— I just want to understand…

— There’s nothing to understand!

Her heart was pounding. She hated him. She despised him.

Because he reminded her too much of…

No.

She wasn’t allowed to think about that.

She shot him one last glare before storming out.

But Reid remained frozen, a cold shiver running down his spine.

Because for the first time, he had seen something other than anger in her eyes.

He had seen fear.

And that changed everything.

---

Spencer Reid didn’t know what to do anymore. Y/N hated him, that was obvious. But that night, as he returned home, he realized it wasn’t the contempt that haunted him. It wasn’t even her anger. It was her fear. Because he had seen it. Just for a fraction of a second, before she slammed the door. And it had turned his stomach upside down. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how to recognize the signs of trauma. He carried the scars himself. Y/N was hiding something. Something enormous. Something that, in one way or another, was connected to him. But he didn’t know what. And he never would. Because if one thing was clear, it was that she would rather see him disappear than talk to him. So why couldn’t he stop holding on to her? Why did he feel this irrational, senseless need to understand her, to fix her? He sat on his couch, head in his hands. He felt... lost. And that was a sensation he hated.

The next day, Y/N tried not to think about him. She buried herself in work, flipping through files, studying criminal profiles with an intensity bordering on obsession. But even there, in the relative calm of the BAU headquarters, she could feel him. Spencer Reid. Sitting at his desk, silent, but always present. Like a shadow behind her. Like a ghost she couldn’t exorcise. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Don’t think. Don’t feel. She could do it. She had to do it. She was going to make it. Until Garcia burst into the room like a colorful tornado.

"Okay, everyone, mandatory coffee break!"

Morgan looked up from his screen, amused.

"We’re in the middle of work, Garcia."

"Correction: you’re in the middle of work. I’m in the middle of an emotional disaster because my baby cat refused to eat his kibble this morning, and I need a pick-me-up."

Prentiss chuckled.

"Poor Garcia."

"You don’t understand, my children. This is an existential crisis."

Y/N smiled slightly, grabbing her coffee cup. But as she stood up to follow the others, her eyes met Reid’s. And there, just for a fraction of a second, she saw something in his eyes. Something sad. Something unbearable. She looked away, fists clenched. And left the room without a word.

The tension between them had become a problem. Y/N felt it. Reid knew it. And everyone could see it. It was Hotch who finally broke the silence. One evening, after a particularly exhausting day, he called Y/N into his office.

"Sit down."

She obeyed, sitting up straight. He studied her for a moment, fingers intertwined under his chin.

"I’ve noticed you have a problem with Reid."

Her heart skipped a beat.

"No, sir."

"Don’t lie."

She gritted her teeth. Hotch sighed, lowering his voice slightly.

"Listen, I’m not going to force you to talk about it. But let me be clear: we’re a team. And a team that doesn’t function well is a team that puts lives at risk."

Y/N lowered her gaze.

"I understand."

"Then find a way to fix it."

She nodded and left, her heart pounding.

She could have ignored Hotch’s warning. She could have kept pretending nothing was wrong. But that night, as she was leaving the office, she found Reid in the parking lot. Sitting on the hood of his car, staring into space. He looked... tired. Exhausted. As if this silent war between them had drained all his energy. She should have left. She should have pretended she didn’t see him. But her feet carried her toward him before she even realized it.

"Why are you still here?"

He lifted his head.

"I could ask you the same question."

She crossed her arms.

"Seriously, Reid. What do you want?"

He hesitated. Then sighed.

"I want you to stop hating me."

The shock was brutal. She took a step back, breath caught.

"I don’t..."

"Yes, you do. I know you do. But I don’t know why."

She closed her eyes, feeling panic rise. No. Not now. Not like this. She took a deep breath, trying to regain control. Then, slowly, she lifted her head.

"It’s better this way, Reid."

"Better for who?"

She didn’t answer. Because she couldn’t. She turned away, walking away quickly. But this time, Reid didn’t let her go.

"Wait."

She stopped.

"I don’t know what I did to deserve this."

His voice was shaky. Sincere.

"But if you think that will stop me from worrying about you... then you don’t know me as well as you think."

Y/N felt a burning in her throat. A dull pain in her chest. She said nothing. She didn’t turn around. She walked away into the night, knowing full well that this was a battle she wouldn’t be able to run from forever. Because Spencer Reid wouldn’t let go. And a part of her no longer knew if she wanted him to give up... or to keep fighting.

---

2:37 AM. Y/N’s phone vibrated insistently on her nightstand, pulling her from a deep sleep. She opened her eyes, still groggy, and reached for the device.

HOTCH: URGENT. EVERYONE TO HQ. IMMEDIATELY.

She groaned, sitting up, her vision still blurry.

“Shit…”

Without thinking, she threw on a large black coat over her silk pajamas and hastily tied her hair into a messy ponytail. She neither had the energy nor the patience to get properly dressed.

Arriving in front of the FBI building, she realized she wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Garcia was just stepping out of a taxi, her oversized orange coat poorly buttoned, revealing pink unicorn-patterned pajamas. Her glasses were askew, and she clutched a cup of coffee like her life depended on it.

When she spotted Y/N, she squinted behind her colorful lenses.

"You also decided fashion was overrated?"

Y/N raised an eyebrow, glancing at Garcia from head to toe.

"I think we just revolutionized the FBI’s dress code."

Garcia smirked and hooked her arm through Y/N’s as they entered the building.

"Remind me why we do this job again?"

"My memory fails me at this hour."

As they stepped into the briefing room, they found the rest of the team, all visibly exhausted. Morgan had his head resting on the table, Prentiss was yawning over her file, and even Rossi seemed to be battling sleep.

But it was Reid who caught Y/N’s attention.

Already awake. Already fully dressed. Already focused.

He sat upright, a coffee cup in hand, flipping through files as if he had never gone to bed. When he briefly looked up at her, she felt his gaze linger a second too long.

She frowned.

"What?" she snapped.

Reid blinked and immediately looked away, clearly caught in the act.

"Nothing."

She rolled her eyes and sat as far from him as possible.

That’s when Hotch entered the room.

The Ohio monster case was beginning.

Hotch turned on the main screen, and faces appeared. Women. Children. Broken families.

Y/N’s stomach twisted as she saw the photos of them before they vanished.

They were smiling. Laughing.

And now…

"Eight mothers. Eight children," Hotch began gravely. "All disappeared under similar circumstances."

He pointed to a series of images on the whiteboard.

"The MO is always the same. He takes the mother first. Leaves the children alone for two days, then comes back for them."

A heavy silence fell over the room.

Y/N already felt nausea rising.

"Then he forces them to make a choice."

Morgan leaned on the table, jaw clenched.

"What kind of choice?"

JJ briefly closed her eyes before answering.

"Either the mother kills her own children… or he rapes her in front of them."

The silence was deafening.

Garcia immediately looked away, gripping her coffee cup until her fingers turned white. Prentiss closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Rossi let out a long sigh, shaking his head.

But it was Y/N’s expression that caught Reid’s attention.

She didn’t react.

She remained still, eyes locked on the screen, her face eerily blank.

Too blank.

Reid furrowed his brows slightly.

He knew that kind of silence.

He knew that kind of look.

It was the look of someone trying to lock everything deep inside.

Hotch shattered the frozen atmosphere with a firm tone.

"He films everything and sends the videos to the fathers."

Y/N finally looked away, clenching her fists under the table.

This man…

This monster…

She wanted to destroy him.

"We leave for Ohio immediately," Hotch announced.

No one objected.

They all knew every minute counted.

And that the horror was only beginning.

They arrived in Ohio at dawn, greeted by a sheriff with exhausted eyes.

"Agent Hotchner."

Hotch shook his hand.

"Tell me what we know."

The sheriff gestured for them to follow him to his office, where an entire wall was covered with photos and reports.

Y/N felt an invisible weight pressing on her shoulders as she looked at the images of the missing mothers.

These women.

These children.

She crossed her arms, trying to ignore the cold rage building inside her.

Then she felt a gaze.

She turned slightly.

Reid.

Again.

He was watching her, brows slightly furrowed, as if trying to figure something out.

She clenched her jaw.

"Got a problem, Reid?" she murmured coldly.

He hesitated.

Then, softly:

"This is affecting you more than other cases."

A cold shiver ran down her spine.

She hated this.

She hated how observant he was.

"You think you know everything, huh?" she snapped. "Well, let me tell you something: you don’t know shit about me. So stop looking at me like you’ve cracked my damn secret."

She shot him one last dark look before walking away.

Reid remained still, troubled.

He didn’t understand why, but he knew one thing:

This case was awakening something in her.

Something she didn’t want to face.

And that, more than anything else, deeply worried him.

---

The team settled into the conference room of the local police station, their files scattered across the large wooden table. The sheriff had provided all available information, but the case was a nightmare. Eight mothers. Eight children. Eight broken families. And no trace of the killer.

Hotch stood up and studied the photos pinned to the whiteboard.

"We know he targets single mothers. All between 28 and 35 years old, all with one or two young children. He watches them for a while before attacking."

"How does he choose his victims?" Prentiss asked, arms crossed.

Rossi tapped on the report in front of him.

"They all have jobs that require a lot of public interaction. Teachers, waitresses, nurses, social workers…" He paused. "He wants women who seem approachable. Easy to engage with."

Y/N spoke for the first time.

"Which means he inserts himself into their lives long before taking them."

All eyes turned to her.

She pointed at the photos.

"Look at these women. They’re all smiling in these pictures. They look happy, social. This guy doesn’t go after isolated or vulnerable women. He wants the strong ones."

Morgan slowly nodded.

"Because he wants to break them."

Silence.

Reid was watching Y/N closely.

His gaze was cold, analytical, but filled with something else.

He knew that tone. He could tell when someone was speaking from their heart.

She wasn’t just profiling the killer.

She understood him.

And that unsettled him.

Hotch brought the discussion back on track.

"Garcia, check if any of the victims reported a suspicious individual in their surroundings before the abduction."

"Already digging, boss."

She typed furiously on her keyboard, her glasses slipping down her nose.

"But so far, nothing."

Y/N ran a hand over her face, frustrated.

"We’re missing something…"

Reid, who had remained silent until now, murmured,

"There has to be a connection."

He stood up, walked to the board, and stared at the victims' photos.

A detail. A clue.

And suddenly, something clicked.

"The schools."

Everyone turned to him.

"Look." He pointed at the children. "They all attended local public schools."

Prentiss frowned.

"You think he’s scouting them there?"

Reid nodded.

"It’s an easy way to observe them without drawing attention. He could be posing as a parent, a school employee, a delivery worker…"

Hotch processed the information quickly.

"We’ll start there. Garcia, get us a list of staff and frequent visitors at the schools these kids attended."

"Consider it done."

The investigation had taken a new turn.

And for the first time in hours…

They had a lead.

A few hours later, Garcia called them back.

"I might have something."

Her voice was tense.

"All these schools have one thing in common."

"What is it?" Hotch asked.

"A man."

She pulled up a photo on the screen.

A plain, forgettable face. A man in his forties, short brown hair, discreet glasses.

"His name is William Harrow," Garcia explained. "Maintenance worker. He does repairs in several schools in the area."

Y/N stared at the photo, a cold shiver running down her spine.

"Does he have a record?" Morgan asked.

"Nothing major. Just an old harassment complaint, dismissed."

Reid frowned.

"It’s too perfect. A job that gives him access to school buildings, an unremarkable appearance…"

Y/N murmured almost to herself,

"And the ability to disappear under the radar."

Hotch made an immediate decision.

"We’re paying him a visit."

The team arrived at Harrow’s listed address. A small house on the outskirts of town, with an unkempt yard and closed shutters.

Morgan and Prentiss positioned themselves at the back while Hotch, Y/N, and Reid knocked on the door.

Silence.

Then…

Footsteps.

The door opened slightly.

A man appeared in the doorway, eyes tired, wary.

"Yes?"

Hotch showed his badge.

"FBI. We’d like to ask you a few questions."

William Harrow didn’t flinch.

"About what?"

Y/N studied him carefully.

His posture. His gaze. Every micro-expression.

And something in his eyes unsettled her.

Reid, beside her, noticed her shift in demeanor.

"It’s about the schools where you work. The missing children."

Harrow raised an eyebrow.

"I don’t see how that concerns me."

His tone was calm. Too calm.

Y/N clenched her fists slightly.

"Can we come in?" Hotch asked.

A long silence.

Then Harrow opened the door wider.

"Be my guest."

Y/N’s instincts screamed.

Something was off.

And she knew this was just the beginning.

---

The inside of William Harrow’s house was clean. Too clean. Not a single personal photo. No children’s toys. Nothing that showed a trace of life. Y/N let her gaze sweep across the main room while Hotch and Reid asked the usual questions.

"You work at several schools, correct?" Hotch asked.

"Yes," Harrow replied, sitting calmly on his couch.

Reid observed his body language with an almost unsettling intensity.

"Have you ever had any contact with the children’s mothers?"

A slight smile appeared on Harrow’s face.

"I exchange polite words, like everyone does."

Y/N said nothing.

She studied.

Every blink. Every hand movement.

And her instincts screamed that he was lying.

But she couldn’t prove it.

Hotch continued, "Where were you during the last disappearances?"

"At home."

"Can anyone confirm that?"

"No one."

Harrow was still smiling.

Reid and Y/N exchanged a glance.

No alarm. No involuntary slip.

He wasn’t playing the outraged suspect.

He wasn’t trying to appear innocent either.

He was waiting.

As if he knew they wouldn’t find anything.

And he was right.

After an hour of questioning and a legal search of the house, the team had no choice but to leave.

Nothing.

No physical evidence. No misstep in his answers.

Just an intuition that wasn’t enough to arrest him.

Morgan, who had been waiting outside, whistled when he saw their expressions.

"So?"

Hotch shook his head.

"Nothing useful."

Morgan grumbled.

"This guy is guilty. I can feel it."

Y/N, arms crossed, was still staring at the house behind them.

"So can I."

But it wasn’t enough.

They needed proof.

In the car, silence stretched.

Then Reid murmured, almost pensively, "He wants to frustrate us."

Y/N turned to him.

"What do you mean?"

Reid tapped his fingers against his thigh, thinking out loud.

"He was perfectly calm. He didn’t try to deny anything outright. He let us do our job… Because he knew we had nothing on him."

Y/N clenched her fists.

"That means he’s going to do it again."

Hotch took a deep breath.

"Yes. And the next victim may already be chosen."

The silence that followed was heavier than ever.

They had to stop him.

Before it was too late.

---

The sun was beginning to set over the small town in Ohio as Morgan and Y/N made their way to a run-down garage on the outskirts. It was where William Harrow had applied for a second job a few months earlier before mysteriously disappearing off the radar.

"You think we’ll find anything here?" Y/N asked as she stepped out of the car.

Morgan shrugged, eyes fixed on the building’s entrance.

"Anything he doesn’t want us to find."

They ducked under the partially open metal shutter and stepped into the dusty workshop. Cars in various states of repair, scattered tools, the smell of oil and metal…

A man in his fifties, wearing grease-stained overalls, looked up at them.

"Need a hand?"

Morgan stepped forward and flashed his badge.

"FBI. We’re investigating a suspect who may have worked here. William Harrow."

The man frowned.

"Harrow? Yeah, he applied a few months back. But he never showed up for work."

Y/N exchanged a look with Morgan.

"Why not?"

"No idea," the man replied, wiping his hands on a rag. "Seemed serious at first, then he just… vanished. No call, no excuse. Never heard from him again."

Morgan nodded, but before he could ask another question…

A voice interrupted them.

"You’re looking for Harrow?"

A chill ran down Y/N’s spine.

She knew that voice.

Slowly, she turned.

And she saw William Harrow.

Standing near the exit, dressed in jeans and a light shirt, as if he had been expecting them.

"You and your team sure are persistent," he said with a polite smile.

Y/N immediately felt his gaze on her.

Too intense. Too deliberate.

Morgan crossed his arms, ready to step in at the first sign of trouble.

"What are you doing here, Harrow?"

The man shrugged.

"I applied for a job here. Wanted to see if it was still available. But it seems like you’re more interested in me than the position."

His tone was light, but Y/N sensed the darkness beneath his words.

Harrow turned his gaze to her.

And he stared.

For too long.

As if he recognized her.

As if he knew something she didn’t.

"You, on the other hand…" he murmured.

Y/N’s heart skipped a beat.

She forced herself not to look away.

"What about me?"

Harrow tilted his head slightly, studying her like she was a puzzle he was trying to solve.

Then, slowly, he smiled.

"We’ve met before, haven’t we?"

A shiver ran down her spine.

No.

That was impossible.

She had never seen this man before.

Never.

And yet…

Why did his words feel like they carried a hidden truth?

Morgan, sensing the tension, placed a hand on her shoulder.

"We should go."

Y/N didn’t respond immediately.

She stood there, facing Harrow, trying to read in his eyes what he was insinuating.

Then, slowly, she stepped back.

"Yeah. Let’s go."

But as she walked out of the garage, she still felt the weight of Harrow’s gaze on her.

And for the first time since this case began…

She felt afraid.

They had barely returned to the police station when the phone rang.

Hotch answered immediately.

"Hotchner."

Y/N and Morgan, still shaken from their encounter with Harrow, exchanged a glance.

But as they saw Hotch’s expression harden, Y/N knew before he even spoke.

Another woman had disappeared.

"He just took another mother," Hotch said as he hung up.

A cold silence fell over the room.

"When?" Rossi asked, already on his feet.

"About three hours ago," Hotch replied. "A neighbor noticed the front door was open, the lights were on, but no one was answering."

JJ rubbed her forehead.

"Which means we have…"

"Two days before he takes the children," Reid finished.

Y/N tensed.

Two days.

The countdown had begun.

They rushed to the scene immediately.

The victim’s home—Sarah Mitchell—was exactly as they had imagined.

A broken home in the dead of night.

The door slightly open.

No signs of struggle.

And a six-year-old boy curled up on his bed, too young to understand that his mother might never come back.

Y/N felt anger boil inside her.

She stared at the scattered toys on the floor, the school bag still sitting by the door.

A child waiting for his mother to wake him up in the morning.

But tomorrow morning, she wouldn’t be there.

Morgan clenched his jaw beside her.

"We have to find him."

"Yeah."

Reid, meanwhile, was staring at the floor.

Then he murmured, "He’s accelerating his cycle."

Y/N turned to him.

"What?"

Reid looked up, his mind racing.

"He’s been waiting weeks between abductions," he explained. "But now… he just took a woman while we were on his trail."

"He feels threatened," Hotch added.

"Or he wants to provoke us," Rossi said.

Y/N felt an invisible weight press down on her chest.

Two days.

They only had two days to stop the inevitable.

So she turned to Hotch.

"We don’t have time to wait. We need to take Harrow down now."

Hotch slowly nodded.

"Then let’s do it."

And they set off.

Towards the man who was already waiting for them.

---

The local precinct was heavy with tension that night. Fatigue and urgency made the air nearly unbreathable. Every officer on-site knew they were racing against time. With JJ absent, Y/N had been sent to speak with Matthew Mitchell, the ex-husband of the missing woman.

He sat in a small interrogation room, hands trembling, eyes bloodshot. The moment Y/N entered, he shot to his feet, desperate.

"Did you find her?!"

Y/N briefly closed her eyes before answering.

"Not yet."

He collapsed back onto the chair.

"Oh my God…" he murmured.

His entire body looked on the verge of breaking. He rubbed his face with shaking hands, as if trying to erase reality. Then, in a broken, desperate voice, he began to ramble.

"I’m nothing without her… Nothing."

Y/N remained still. She knew this pain. That abyss. That gaping void that swallowed everything.

He shook his head, eyes wet with tears.

"I heard what that psycho does to women… I don’t want her to go through that. I’d rather she be…"

He stopped, unable to finish the sentence.

Y/N swallowed.

He meant, I’d rather she be dead than suffer that.

She couldn’t blame him.

"She’s strong," she said softly.

"But not strong enough." He met her eyes. "No one is."

A shiver ran down Y/N’s spine.

He was right.

No one could ever be prepared to face what Harrow did to his victims.

And she had to stop him.

After the interview with Matthew, Y/N returned to the briefing room where the team was combing through every detail of the case.

Something nagged at her.

A feeling, a blurry thought lodged in the back of her mind.

Then, suddenly, it clicked.

"He has a daughter," she blurted out.

All eyes turned to her.

"What?" Rossi asked.

"Harrow. He has a daughter."

Spencer Reid frowned.

"But… we’ve investigated his family. He has no known children."

Y/N shook her head.

"Not officially. But look at the pattern." She scrolled through the case files on the computer. "He manages to lure children without a single direct witness. No signs of forced entry, no apparent threats."

Morgan caught on immediately.

"He doesn’t need to force them… He’s using someone they trust."

Y/N nodded.

"A teenage girl. She wouldn’t raise suspicion."

A heavy silence fell over the room.

Then Hotch said the words they were all dreading.

"Where is young Mitchell?"

A chill ran through Y/N.

He was under supervision. Here, at the station.

But…

Why did she suddenly have a terrible feeling?

Then, she heard it.

A barely audible sound.

A muffled "Mommy."

She didn’t think.

She ran.

She tore down the hallway, the others right behind her.

She slammed open the door to the room where the little boy was supposed to be.

But he was gone.

Only an open window let in the cold night air.

Y/N felt her world tilt.

"NO."

She looked everywhere, her heartbeat slamming against her ribs.

His small backpack was still there.

His stuffed animal lay on the floor.

But he… he was missing.

"Shit…" Morgan muttered as he reached her.

Y/N froze, her breath caught in her throat.

She was the one who had heard the cry.

She should have run faster.

Reid stepped inside, his horrified gaze fixed on the window.

He knew what this meant.

They had just lost their only hope of finding Sarah Mitchell alive.

Y/N pressed against the wall, fingers trembling.

She had failed.

She felt anger, frustration, and most of all…

Fear.

Reid slowly approached her.

He wasn’t good at comforting people.

But he understood what she was feeling.

Softly, he murmured,

"This isn’t your fault."

But Y/N didn’t look at him.

Because deep down…

She wasn’t sure he was right.

Next part...

..................................................................................

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mariacallous · 24 days ago

Text

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.

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catpriciousmarjara · 1 year ago

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Personal pet peeve: When a particular character has a lot of paperwork and such associated with their job and it has been established in universe that the work is extremely hard, complicated, and tedious but then in fanfic another character in another job position takes up this character's paperwork and does it perfectly. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

Paperwork is not some nebulous pile of papers so easy that anyone can just waltz in and fill it up just like that. Paperwork, especially for large organisations, requires specific training and knowledge. A particular situation might have at least ten forms associated with it depending on how it happened, when it happened, who were involved, who were affected, who filed the initial report etc. It could be form A.1, it could be form B8, it could be G3 or D-3.2e, and then it has to be filed away in a specific way under a specific designation. At times it could be completely nonsensical but still necessary and part of proper procedure....all of that requires training and experience. Someone from a totally unconnected role can't just take over this position and do an excellent job at it, unless it has been previously established that they too had prior training and guidance in this.

Example: Cale(KRS) and Basen Henituse in Trash of the Count's Family. Kim Rok Soo before trasmigration into Cale Henituse was a team leader who has experience with important official documentation and paperwork for the Company. Basen Henituse is established to have been send to territory heirship classes and doing well in them. These two people being able to take on the other's paperwork load is not at all farfetched. (Same with Cale and Alberu though the latter would still have to sign and seal his insignia separately in the end.)

So no someone who's untrained can't just take someone else's paperwork and just breeze through them unless they are like supernaturally intelligent to the point of figuratively downloading all the necessary data and information directly into their brain or something.

Let's not even talk about how the character might have a particular way and organisation of doing things and someone else taking over their workload without permission might just mess that order up and their well intended actions might end up doing more harm than good.

Look at MXTX's Shang Qinghua or Ling Wen. As I'm reading SVSSS right now let's take it as an example.

Someone who can conduct and lead an audit: Shang Qinghua, specifically trained as an auditor. Yue Qingyuan- can possibly fill in for a specific kind of audit.

Someone who cannot conduct an audit: Literally every other Peak Lord on Cang Qiong. Not trained for it. Should not be in charge of it.

Someone who can file in medical paperwork: Mu Qingfang, head of medical operations in the sect.

Someone who can't do that: his Peak Lord colleagues. At most they'll be able to file in incident reports and other such forms that guardians of patients will have to fill in at a hospital.

People involved with merchants and associated business transactions: Shang Qinghua(logistics expert-procurement logistics), and for large contracts, Yue Qingyuan(Sect Leader). Other Peak Lords depending on the goods. For example the Zui Xian Peak Lord when they are negotiating prices for the raw materials or equipment for alcohol brewing or Wei Qingwei when they are sourcing metal.

Someone who can handle annual budgeting: Shang Qinghua. Person who allocates the funds according to the final budget- Yue Qingyuan.

Persons who can't do that: His colleagues who are definitely not trained in finances and accounting.

And so on and so on.

Shang Qinghua was invited back to the sect after literal treason because nobody else could do his job. That should tell you that people without specific training can't just take over the paperwork of another person's job unless their own jobs are connected enough to be sufficiently similar that they can handle it.

So no someone like Shen Qingqiu who's a scholar and tactician primarily, can't take the entirety of Shang Qinghua's or Mu Qingfang's or Yue Qingyuan's paperwork and fill it in for them, no matter how intelligent he is. Though I'm sure Yue Qingyuan would let him sect be damned lmao.

You see things like this in many other fandoms as well. Innocuous forms that anyone can fill in are okay but complicated paperwork for auditing, budgeting, logistics, diplomacy, business transactions, internal affairs, etc? No way. That all takes time to familiarize with before even properly filing them let alone actually doing them.

This is of course a personal pet peeve as I mentioned from the beginning. People are free to write what they want, read what they want, like what they want. This is no way an accusation towards particular individuals. It's just that for me it breaks immersion pretty quickly.

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thetimesofindia · 3 days ago

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AI 171 crash probe widens: Ahmedabad airport ground staff quizzed, phones seized, sabotage angle not ruled out

A multi-agency investigation is underway at Ahmedabad's SVPI Airport following the Air India AI 171 crash, which killed 241. Ground handling agencies are under scrutiny, with staff questioned and phones seized. The probe, involving AAIB, Gujarat Police, AAI, DGCA, and the NTSB, seeks to determine the cause, including potential sabotage.

AHMEDABAD: Ground handling agencies at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International (SVPI) Airport are under scrutiny by multiple investigation agencies as part of the ongoing probe into the crash of Air India flight AI 171 last week.The investigation, led by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), is being conducted with support from Gujarat Police, Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). A parallel probe has been initiated by the United States' National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), bringing international aviation experts to the crash site in Ahmedabad."All personnel involved in ground handling operations for the ill-fated flight were questioned, and their statements recorded," said a source familiar with the investigation. "Phones of key staff members who cleared the aircraft for take-off were seized for further examination."A comprehensive, multi-agency probe is underway to determine the cause of the crash. Investigators reportedly obtained CCTV footage from airport premises and are not ruling out the possibility of sabotage. On June 12, Air India Flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, crashed moments after take-off from SVPI Airport, killing 241 of the 242 on board.Investigating teams have since recovered the digital flight data recorder (DFDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR). These are crucial pieces of evidence, which will help identify what led to the crash of AI 171. A CVR records cockpit sounds, including pilot conversations, alarms and sounds of engine and switches clicking.Read: Air India passengers stranded overnight at Delhi airport after flight encounters technical 'snag'The DFDR, on the other hand, logs hours of flight parameters such as speed, altitude, thrust, flap positions, autopilot inputs, acceleration, lift and landing gear movements. According to officials, the pilot issued a Mayday call shortly before the aircraft lost contact with Air Traffic Control (ATC) at SVPI airport.Officials from Boeing, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the NTSB, and UK-based aviation experts are now in Ahmedabad as part of the probe.The NTSB, in accordance with the international protocol, is investigating the crash independently due to the aircraft's American origin. This is the first time a Boeing 787 Dreamliner has crashed.The US agency, an independent federal body, is tasked with determining the causes of civil aviation accidents and recommending preventive measures. Union minister Murlidhar Mohol on Tuesday confirmed that a report from the central govt-appointed inquiry panel will be submitted within three months.(With inputs from agencies)

#animation #arcane #art #animals #artwork #artists on tumblr #andor #911 abc #baby animals #birds

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herald-divine-hell · 6 months ago

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How I Would Fix the Qun - a Muslim Perspective

Let us first begin with a general statement: I will not have any DA fans try to claim that since the Qun and the Qunari take other inspirations from different philosophical and social frameworks, that the racist conception and utilizing of Islamic history should be disqualified since it is not "really" Islamic history.

Case in point, if I see any attempt such as this:

I will slap you.

It is perfectly fine that the Qunari can take inspirations from other historical and philosophical ideas (though, importantly, different people have different claims of what inspiration the Qunari come from, despite the fact that it is very clear through Thedasian dating that the Qunari are meant to be the Thedasian representation of the Islam and its history with Europe), it is not fine to utilize a millennia-old racist stereotype that claims that the culturally, religiously, and physically distinct people is hell-bent at spreading their philosophy across the world by force. There is no hand-waving away the clear connections - BioWare took their inspirations but did not have any real interest to actively study or examine any historical book that reexamined the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam (ironically, Hugh Kennedy's the Great Arab Conquests was out prior to DAO's development, so they could have easily read that if they wanted some idea).

So, yes. The Qunari and the Qun are both inspired by Islamic history, while bearing little of the actual theology or belief system that made Islam a potent force of liberation and oppression. Simply because it takes from different philopshical approaches (which I have heard a variety of from fascism and communism to Plato's ideal system of governance), the fact that BioWare, as a primarily white gaming developer, especially in the late 2000s, should have taken more care and been more critical with the terrible extent of fetishizing and otherization of the Qunari as a group compared to the other Thedasian populations - going beyond simply Andrastian Thedasians, but also the dwarves and elves, and even then some can argue their handling of those depictions could have been better.

Of course, I will be fare to BioWare. It takes a lot of energy and time to research on the complex history of any society or religious group - excluding their own perspectives on the events. However, it is not difficult to ask for an attempt of fairness when utilizing marginalized groups of people's history to be accurate and careful with such representation, which I would argue that they failed to achieve with the Qunari especially.

Let us first begin.

The Prophet Muhammad and Islam's Misunderstood Origins (First Part)

The historical role in which Islamic history, or the history reported by the later 'Abbasid historians is much inspiration for the Qunari - there is nothing to deny there. I had discuss it in this post regarding the similiarties of dates between Islamic history and the history of the Qun in relations to Thedas. Yet much of the history that was are ensured accuracy to the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his early religious community is snared by religious, political, and social sectarianism. In short, much of what we know of Muhammad is not actually from Muhammad.

"Herald, what do you mean by this? The Islamic world has a vibrant and documented history on the Prophet Muhammad."

Yes, they attempted to do so. But let me try to make certain things cleared: Much of the traditional historical data on the Prophet Muhammad - founded in places such as the hadiths or sira were written well after Muhammad and his companions had died. Little is known during the Rashidun period (632-661), where Muhammad's companions were made leaders of the nascent Islamic community that would expand rapidly into a far-flung imperial state that included significant portions of Eastern Rome and nearly the entirety of Sasanian Iran, and much of what we know of the Umayyads, for written sources at least, date to the Umayyad-critical 'Abbasid period. The hadiths in particularly are points of contention - none of them truthfully dates back to the Prophet Muhammad, and some of the earliest hadith collections that have been discovered has only been found in the middle 700s CE, such as the famed Medinan Islamic scholar Malik b. Anas (711-795 CE) and his al-Muwatta (of whom, the transmissions by his students would see variations in text). And much of what is understood to be "Islamic" can be traced not to the Islamic holy text of the Qu'ran, but the hadiths themselves. It is the hadiths which decree the punishment of adultery would be stoning to death, which clearly goes against the literary tool of stoning in the Quran and the clear punishment of lashing for adultery found in it. In the Qu'ran, stoning is used as a means to display the oppression faced by Islam's prophets and other sincere monotheists by the accepted social customs of their time [Hud, 11:91; the Cave, 18:20; Mary, 19:46; the Poets, 26:116].

There is not much doubt that the man, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, existed and he was considered a prophet by the Arabs. There is much to doubt the historical transmissions founded in traditional Islamic histography. Most (western scholars that is) have a strange relationship with hadiths - some fully reject them, others are more critical but believe that you can find a kernel of truth in the hadiths themselves that connect back to the Prophet, and others accept them in relation to the Prophet Muhammad. The hadiths themselves, at least within contemporary Sunni Islam, have become near sacrosanct, and much of the varied developments of the Sha'ria comes from the hadith corpus (of which even the different sects and schools within those sects disagree on) rather than the Qur'an.

So what do we know? If we doubt the authenticity of the hadiths in relations to Prophet Muhammad, what do we have? How does this relate to the Qun?

In terms of primary sources in relation to early Islam and the Prophetic period of Islam (Muhammad's messengerhood), there is little of. The only real written source that most, if not a near consensus, historians agree that came more or less from Muhammad is the Qur'an itself. Beyond that, the earliest references of Islam on written sources comes not from the Arabs but from Christian writings, writing during the Arab conquests. For example, early Christian writer, known to modern day historians as Pseudo-Sebeos, wrote in 660CE:

At that time a certain man from along those same sons of Ismael, whose name was Mahmet [i.e., Muḥammad], a merchant, as if by God's command appeared to them as a preacher [and] the path of truth. He taught them to recognize the God of Abraham, especially because he was learnt and informed in the history of Moses. Now because the command was from on high, at a single order they all came together in unity of religion. Abandoning their vain cults, they turned to the living God who had appeared to their father Abraham. So, Mahmet legislated for them: not to eat carrion, not to drink wine, not to speak falsely, and not to engage in fornication. He said: 'With an oath God promised this land to Abraham and his seed after him for ever. And he brought about as he promised during that time while he loved Ismael. But now you are the sons of Abraham and God is accomplishing his promise to Abraham and his seed for you. Love sincerely only the God of Abraham, and go and seize the land which God gave to your father Abraham. No one will be able to resist you in battle, because God is with you.

Of course, there is much to be critical here. By the highlight portion is significant, for later Islamic historians would agree that Muhammad too was a merchant. So, we can generally make the safe assumption that Muhammad indeed was a merchant, though historians may or may not be critical with the assumed quote by Pseudo-Sebeos from the mouth of Muhammad.

Herald, you are rambling, why is this important?

For one, the oft-considered "real" Prophet Muhammad found within traditional Islamic sources only date a century or more after his death, a substantial period of time that saw Muhammad's religious community go from a quasi-polity in the western Hejaz to a wide-spread imperial caliphate, incorporating different cultural and social beliefs of those peoples as much as establishing a coherent Islamic identity. Perhaps a clear example of this can be found in the term Muslim as an identifier of Muhammad's followers, when the Quran utilizes the term as something different.

Now utilized as a term to identity those who follow the Prophet Muhammad's teachings - the usage of the term muslim in the Quran has a distinctiveness that relate to a general identifier of being someone who is a monotheist. In the Quran, it declares Jesus' Disciples as:

3:52: And when Jesus sense rebelliousness in them, he said, 'Who are my helpers from God?'' The apostles [the disciples] said, 'We are God's helpers. We believe in God; bear witness that we mus'limuna [are Submitters].

The Quran also refers to those who accept Muhammad's messages of truth as being "submitters even before it [the Quran]."

And indeed We have caused the Word to reach them, that haply they may reflect. Those unto whom We gave the Book before it, they are believers in it. And when it is recited unto them, they say, “We believe in it; verily it is the truth from our Lord. Truly we were submitters even before it.” It is they who will be given their reward twice over for their having been patient. And they repel evil with good, and spend from that which We have provided them." [28:52-54]

Alongside this, the chronologically late al-Ma'idah also refers to both the Gospels and the Torah as being "a guidance and a light":

"And how is it that they come to you for judgment, when they have the Torah, wherein is God's judgement? Yet even after that, they turn their backs, and they are not believers. Truly We sent down the Torah, wherein is a guidance and a light, by which the prophets who submitted judged those who are Jews, as did the sages and the rabbis, in accordance with such of God's Book as they were bidden to preserve and to which they were witnesses. So fear not mankind, but fear Me! And sell not My signs for a paltry price. Whosever judges not by that which God has sent down - it is they who are disbelievers. And therein We prescribed for them: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds, retribution. But whosever forgoes it out of charity, it shall be an expiation for him. Whosever judges not by that which God has sent down - it is they who are the wrongdoers.

And in their footsteps, We sent Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah that had come before him, and We gave him the Gospel, wherein is a guidance and a light, confirming the Torah that had come before him, as a guidance and an exhortation to the reverent. Let the people of the Gospel judge by what God has send down therein. Whosever judges by not that which God has sent down - it is they who are iniquitous. And We have send down unto you the Book in truth, confirming the Book that came before it, and as a protector over it. So judge them between in accordance with what God has sent down, and follow not their caprices away from the truth that has come unto you. For each among you We have appointed a law and a way. And had God willed, He would have made you one community, but [He willed otherwise], that He might try you in that which He has given you. So vie with one another in good deeds. Unto God shall be your return all together, and He will inform you of that wherein you differ." [The Table Spread, 5:43-48]

Why do I touch upon this? Well, if one asks any layman Muslim (and perhaps most modern day scholars), many would argue that the position of Jesus or Moses or Abraham as having "being" Muslim as a point in favor to Islam. That is not what the Quran is seeking to state, and any attempt to associate the thousand year accumulation of theological and scholarly interpretation of Islam as being the same message Muhammad argued for is historical anachronism. The Quran does argue that it is the pristine message from God to Muhammad that had been revealed to Jesus and Moses and Abraham, but no where in the Quran does that negate the Torah or the Gospel as being of divine origins. Indeed, often the Quran commands that those who doubt Muhammad's message to ask "the People of the Scripture" .

Of course, there are also the famous verses of 2:62 and 5:69:

"The Believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believed in God and the Last Day and do good will have their rewards from their Lord, and there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." - 2:62

Now you'll notice - it mentions the Jews and Christians, but who are the Believers? Well, that is Muhammad's followers! In the Quran, whenever it is referring directly to Muhammad's followers, it uses the phrases "believing men and believing women" or "O you who believe". The term in Arabic would be the mu'minun, of which the caliphal title - amir al-mu'minun - takes its origins from. That is is good enough title for Muhammad's followers and goes more onto my point: the term for Muhammad's followers as being muslim or that Muhammad considered the term islam as the term for his own distinct religion simply isn't true. All Believers in Muhammad's revelations are muslim, yet not all Muslims, quranically speaking, are Muhammad's followers. The Quran does and encourages pluralism as a sign of God, and although Muhammad was given the "clear way", devoid of the sectarian influences that it considers the Christians and Jews had fallen into, Christians and Jews are still apart of the primeval conception of islam.

So, why mention this? It is to demonstrate that the early community founded by Muhammad was not the same community that grew out of the massive expansion born from the Arab conquests. The later imperial caliphates of the Umayyads (alongside its rivals the Kharijites and Zubayrids during the Second Muslim Civil War) began a slow process that began to remove the Christians and Jews from being a part of the primeval faith of islam. Importantly, the faith of Muhammad played little reason on why the Arabs expanded - so the idea that the Arabs came to the global scene to "spread Islam by the sword" is purely fictional. As Amira K. Bennison wrote in her the Great Caliphs (2011):

"These conquests [the Arab conquests] were often quite superficial, combing the capture of key settlements or the establishment of garrison towns which deals struck with local rulers - Visigothic nobles, Persian kings, and Turkic warlords - which gave them autonomy in return for recognition and tribute." (Bennison, pg. 20)

And:

"Contrary to popular myth that Islam was spread by the sword, many Muslim Arabs believed that it was their mission to conquer the world, not change the faith of its inhabitants, and saw Islam as theirs, the religion of the ruling elite, not of their subjects. Although they wanted to convert all Arabs, they showed little desire or compunction to convert the peoples of the other lands they had conquered..." (Bennison, pg. 21).

Hugh Kennedy wrote in his the Great Arab Conquests (2005):

"In general, however, conversion to Islam, or offering the opportunity to conversion to Islam, is not widely cited as a reason for fighting. More common is pride in Arabness and pride in tribe." (Kennedy, pg. 63)

Yet, what does the Quran states about fighting? According to the Quran, Muhammad's followers were permitted to fight against their polytheistic oppressors due to:

Permission is granted to those who are fought, because they have been wronged—and truly God is able to help them—who were expelled from their homes without right, only for saying, “Our Lord is God.” Were it not for God’s repelling people, some by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, wherein God’s Name is mentioned much, would have been destroyed. And God will surely help those who help Him—truly God is Strong, Mighty—who, were We to establish them upon the earth, would perform the prayer, give the alms, and enjoin right and forbid wrong. And unto God is the end of all affairs. [the Pilgrimage, 22:39-41]

So, this differs much of what is touched up - by both Muslims and non-Muslims. That the Arabs came at the direction of the Prophet to conquer and spread his religion (it is entirely unknown if Muhammad had any real hand in directing his followers to attack their northern neighbors, since all mentioned battles hint toward a more southern-focused direction), that they viewed other religious traditions false, and forcefully converted or slaughtered en masse many who refused this new religious is entirely fictitious. Later Muslims writing in the imperial caliphal period [Umayyad, onward] may have adopted such militant thinking to justify and explain their state expanded so rapidly. But that is just it! They were explaining why it happened rather than how it happened; and much of the historical documentation is filled with the narrative historicity born from the traditions of much of the Near East - the historians of the 'Abbasid period were ill-interested in army sizes, logistics, etc., but instead on individual leaders, valor, and moral lessons in which these stories can teach those living in the present. This is a tradition likely adopted from the pre-existing historical culture (what little documentation of the Sasanian sources bare similar results), and these sources themselves are not "primary" in their relation to Muhammad or his companions. They were written by their descendants, who often had a religious or political interest to paint certain areas a certain way (such on what Muhammad did or did not say or do at the time of his death to name a successor).

The relations with the other religious groups within Arabia (and possible Levant if Muhammad was a merchant who did preach northward to Roman Christians and Jews) is multifaceted and complex, with an underlying influence of political considerations tied with disagreements with religious doctrines of Islam's sister religions (such as Jesus as God or God's son). Much criticism toward these groups should always be read as these groups among the Christians and Jews, rather than a wholesale brush that condemns them to hell.

Now, onto the Qunari, in part 2.

#dragon age #da #qunari #the qun #islam #dragon age origins #dragon age inquisition #dragon age ii

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evidence-based-activism · 8 months ago

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What do you make of this? “The VAST majority of women are sexually submissive. I think it's around 3/4? I can dig up sources later if I feel like it

The attraction to power and dominance is way deeper than social conditioning and deeply engrained into all human social behavior. It's encoded into the social games we play to determine our standing with each other and which people we find fuckable.

Don't be graping folks, but also don't be denying women the means to sexually and socially satiate themselves by creating a deficit of men who will handle them as roughly as they quietly crave.”

I think it's ridiculous.

I've talked in the past about how men and women really do not feel sexual attraction in fundamentally different ways. The most important point from this post is that "sex differences in self‐reported sexual behavior were negligible ... [when] participants believed lying could be detected, moderate in an anonymous condition, and greatest [when not anonymous]" indicating "sex differences in self‐reported sexual behavior reflect responses influenced by normative expectations for men and women".

This is important, given the extent to which society is permeated by the expectation that women will be sexually submissive and men sexually dominate.

And even keeping this (i.e., that people tend to provide responses congruent with societal expectations of them, at least in sensitive topics) in mind, the percentage of women who report "preferring" sexual submission is far, far lower than 75%. The closest thing to a representative statistic we have comes from YouGov (a polling/data analytics company), which suggests that 21% of American women prefer being "submissive in bed" [1].

Some other research [emphasis mine]:

A review concludes "that traditional sexual scripts are harmful for both women's and men's ability to engage in authentic, rewarding sexual expression, although the female submissive role may be particularly debilitating" [2]

This article is particularly relevant: "Study 1 found that women implicitly associated sex with submission. Study 2 showed that women's implicit association of sex with submission predicted greater personal adoption of a submissive sexual role. Study 3 found that men did not implicitly associate sex with submission. Study 4 demonstrated that women's adoption of a submissive sexual role predicted lower reported arousal and greater reported difficulty becoming sexually aroused" [3]

Further, this article found "women’s submissive behavior had negative links to personal sexual satisfaction and their partner’s sexual satisfaction", and although they specified this was "only when their submission was inconsistent with their sexual preferences" they failed to indicate what percentage of the sample preferred sexual submission. They did, however, find that "women’s submissive behavior" was negatively correlated with "women’s interest in dominant partner" suggesting, at the very least, that women with no interest in dominant partners are engaging in submissive behavior as a result of the "high prevalence of traditional sexual scripts" [4]

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For the "dominance games" bit ... I expect they are referring to how, for some species, male animals will fight with each other for the "right" to mate with the female animals. He seems to be conveniently forgetting that the aggression in this analogy is being directed towards other males. So, even if we were going to concede the accuracy of the analogy (which I do not), it would be entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Further, the fact that humans may have demonstrated a behavior in the past and/or that other animals demonstrate it now, does not justify the behavior in humans in the present. Infanticide is common among both male [5] and female [6] mammals, as well as in human history [7], but I doubt anyone plans to defend that particular "reproductive strategy".

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Further, the belief that there are women who secretly "want" men to "handle them roughly" and are simply lying when they say otherwise, is straight from the standard list of rape myths [8]. And acceptance of these misogynistic myths is correlated with men's sexual violence against women [9].

This makes such assertions both incorrect and dangerous.

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In conclusion: this individual is both factually incorrect and logically inconsistent, and his apparent embrace of rape myths suggests he is – at the very least – an unapologetic misogynist.

References under the cut:

Moore, Peter. Most Americans Open to Sexual Dominance and Submission. YouGov, 13 Feb. 2015, https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/11593-most-americans-open-sexual-dominance.

Sanchez, D. T., Fetterolf, J. C., & Rudman, L. A. (2012). Eroticizing inequality in the United States: The consequences and determinants of traditional gender role adherence in intimate relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 49(2-3), 168-183.

Sanchez, D. T., Kiefer, A. K., & Ybarra, O. (2006). Sexual submissiveness in women: Costs for sexual autonomy and arousal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(4), 512-524.

Sanchez, D. T., Phelan, J. E., Moss-Racusin, C. A., & Good, J. J. (2012). The gender role motivation model of women’s sexually submissive behavior and satisfaction in heterosexual couples. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(4), 528-539.

Lukas, D., & Huchard, E. (2014). The evolution of infanticide by males in mammalian societies. Science, 346(6211), 841-844.

Lukas, D., & Huchard, E. (2019). The evolution of infanticide by females in mammals. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 374(1780), 20180075.

Levittan, M. (2012). The history of infanticide: exposure, sacrifice, and femicide. Violence and Abuse in Society. Understanding a Global Crisis. Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 83-130.

Payne, D. L., Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1999). Rape myth acceptance: Exploration of its structure and its measurement using theIllinois rape myth acceptance scale. Journal of research in Personality, 33(1), 27-68.

Yapp, E. J., & Quayle, E. (2018). A systematic review of the association between rape myth acceptance and male-on-female sexual violence. Aggression and violent behavior, 41, 1-19.

#feminism #patriarchal culture

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northstar-galactic-command · 24 days ago

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Shipkillers, Part One

Shady marketing materials will sometimes claim a weapon from a particularly license is “ship scale” or “naval grade”. Some pilots will also claim that the custom, overpowered monstrosity they’ve attached to their Mech is a “ship-class” gun. But what does that mean, anyway?

On a purely technical level, it means absolutely nothing. All of these terms are fluff and marketing buzzwords. There is no formal or official definition of what is and isn’t a naval weapon. At the most literal level, if someone bolted a GMS Type-I Pistol to the side of a freighter then any Frame equipped with a Type-I Pistol is technically armed with a “ship gun”.

A more realistic definition for so-called “naval weapons” is that they are dedicated ship-to-ship weapons that have been scaled down for use on a Mech, Mech weapons that have been scaled up into a ship-to-ship weapon, or Mech weapons that operate using the same principles as a popular ship-to-ship weapon.

In a hilarious twist the Pinaka missile launcher is a simultaneous example of both the first and second definitions*, while Harrison Armory’s Tachyon Lance is a pretty straightforward example of the third.

All that being said, claiming a chassis weapon is a “naval gun” because it has a loose naval counterpart is like claiming something is an artillery mech because it’s equipped with an IPS-N. hand cannon. The hand cannon uses explosive propellant to launch a high-caliber projectile just like the GMS Type-III howitzer and HA siege cannon, and even has “cannon” in its name! That still doesn’t make it an artillery cannon.

There is one major exception to this, and it’s the main reason we even have to have this discussion. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the Apocalypse Rail.

First, we need to clear up some misconceptions. The Apocalypse Rail does not use the same technology as the long and short-spool guns found on warships. It was never put on a ship, and it was never meant to be put on a ship. Not in its current form, at least.

The Apocalypse Rail was originally a scale test of an entirely new type of spool weapon that Harrison Armory hoped would eventually replace existing spinal spoon guns. It was released to the general public as a form of crowd-sourced field testing, to give HA engineers live data they could use to help work out the kinks before attempting to put it on a ship.

Getting it to the point it could actually be deployed to a real battlefield was the tricky part. It was too big, too volatile, and required too much power to include as a standalone weapon. So instead they built the Apocalypse Rail around the only Chassis big enough to handle it: the new (at the time) Barbossa frame. Or the Barbossa was built around the Apocalypse Rail, depending on who you ask.

Unfortunately for those desiring taxonomic precision, this came with a PR problem. The Barbossa was built under the explicit orders of John Creighton Harrison II. It was supposed to, and this is a direct quote, “stand as the unstoppable image of Harrison I”. There was no way HA was going to let words “miniature”, “small”, or “light” be affiliated with the signature superweapon of the biggest frame they’d ever released, a frame that was supposed to be an idol to their beloved founder. So instead of an accurate classification like “small-scale gravitational spool gun” or “miniature exponential gravitic catapult”, the weapon was marketed as a “ship-class spool weapon”.

…which is where the problems start.

There’s no shortage of people who like to perform statistical analyses of Mechs and their equipment, and there’s no end of data for them to comb through: official specs, field tests, action reports, simulations accurate down to the last spec of dust, videos of weird stunts someone pulled in the Long Rim, and so much more. The official reports done by corporations or nationstates almost never see the light of day, but plenty of others are willing to take a more public stab at it. Some of these are extremely methodical and well researched, some are hot garbage, and virtually all of them have at least some bias (intentional or otherwise).

The Omninet is flooded with articles, videos, and think pieces on each and every major Frame, most arguing why the Frame is either the best thing ever or utter trash. While it has its supporters, the Barbarossa rarely comes out well in these sorts of amateur reviews. A common complaint (aside from its ridiculous size) is that the terrifying Apocalypse Rail is overhyped. It's easy to find a weapon that can be modified to hit just hard as the Apocalypse Rail does against an unarmored or lightly armored target, without the Rail's many drawbacks. For example, according to most reports a full burst from a stock Leviathan Heavy Assault Cannon has higher average damage than an Apocalypse Rail, and a mech with a Leviathan doesn't need to sit still while their gun charges.

This causes some misunderstandings. Pilots look at the numbers for their over-caliber artillery cannon or super-charged turbolaser and see that it's averaging as much or more damage as the legendary "ship-class spool weapon". If the Apocalypse Rail is a ship-scale weapon and their gun hits just as hard, they must be carrying naval ordinance too!

What most people forget is that the Apocalypse Rail wasn't designed to shoot at Frames, or aircraft, or tanks. It's honestly wasted against them, like trying to kill ants with a sledgehammer. The Rail was designed to be used against hundred-meter long slabs of armor that can't dodge or take cover. It's an anti-ship, anti-fortification weapon, and that's where it shows its true power.

An IPS-N portable bunker can shrug off hits from siege cannons, Pinaka missile barrages, and fully-charged solidcore lasers. It’s four times as thick as the GMS Pattern-A Jericho deployable cover, designed to tank sustained barrages from super-heavy ordinance.

An Apocalypse Rail can destroy a portable bunker in a single shot.

Even if you somehow doubled the bunker's thickness and put it under two overlapping Aegis shield generators, a fully-charged Apocalypse Rail will still vaporize the bunker in a single hit. It’s that powerful. So why does it suck?

To put it bluntly, the Apocalypse Rail can barely hit the broadside of a barn. It has a deviation measured in meters. This shouldn't come as a surprise: it's a highly volatile weapon system built directly into an infamously clumsy Frame that must be totally stationary while charging and firing. Everything from gravity to humidity to atmospheric pressure to density of air particulates can impact the weapon's accuracy, and that's not even getting into the fact that enemies usually won't sit perfectly still so they can be shot. Unless the Rail is shooting at a large building, a direct hit is almost impossible. So instead of aiming at their target, most pilots will aim at something near their target.

Infantry, Frames, vehicles, and similar units don’t take damage from an Apocalypse Rail’s projectile: they get damaged by the shockwave from the projectile impacting nearby. This keeps misses from unintentionally rearranging landmarks several dozen kilometers away, and a fully charged Rail is so powerful that even a near miss can severely damage most units. It doesn't always work, however, which is how you get those amusing images of people standing in the molten crater of an Apocalypse Rail impact, totally unharmed despite everything around them having been vaporized.

Against large orbital targets, which move in predictable ways and don’t have as much terrestrial nonsense to complicate the shot, the Apocalypse Rail is devastating. In an orbital defense role, its range and damage exceed almost any other chassis-based weapon system on the market. Thus, while it isn't purpose-built for the job, the Apocalypse Rail is still the closest thing most pilots ever get to putting “true” naval ordinance on a Mech.

But dedicated Frame-mounted anti-ship weapons do exist. They’re known as “Shipkillers”.

To be continued…

*: The Pinaka was based on a ship-to-ship missile system, which was sized down for use on a mechanized Chassis. The original naval weapon was phased out, but the Pinaka performed so well as part of the Monarch license that SSC scaled it back up and rereleased it as part of their LIMITD line of naval weapons.

#the Apocalypse Rail exists to compensate for John Creighton's dick #and like his dick it's overhyped #it requires external support #and it doesn't work most of the time #lancer rp #lancer rpg #lancer battlegroup #lancer Harrison Armory

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cuckolding-books-library · 6 days ago

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Husbands who do 'her' chores have less sex, study finds

Hey, fellas, put down those vacuum cleaners and pull out the lawn mowers.Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according Kornrich and his research team from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute

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Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and sex.

"Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher sexual frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor," says Sabino Kornrich, lead author of a study that appears in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. "Housework is something that people use as a very important way to express gender, masculinity and femininity. We weren't surprised to think that sex might be more tied to this type of gender expression."

Other studies have found that men who make the bed also get to romp around in it more often. But Kornrich and his research team from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid wanted to test claims that women might “exchange” sex for men’s participation in housework.

As it turned out, they found a statistically significant difference between men who did no "core housework" -- that is, chores that are typically identified with women -- and men who regularly handled the cooking, cleaning and laundry. Their findings came from data collected from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, or NSFH, a 1996 national survey conducted by James Sweet and Larry Bumpass. Although the comprehensive study is almost 20 years old, Kornrich believes the household division of labor hasn't changed much and the data still apply.

"For couples in which men did no 'core' housework, sexual frequency was 4.8 times per month," says Kornrich. "For couples in which men did all of the 'core' housework, sexual frequency was 3.2 times per month."

Kornrich says he actually used the same data source as previous research which found that both men and women who did more chores enjoyed more sex, but this time broke down the type of housework participants were doing.

"You end up with a more nuanced pattern," he says. "Men who do a greater share of male-typed housework and women who do a greater share of female-typed housework report more frequent sex."

Allison Ellis, a 42-year-old Seattle writer, says she and her husband divvy up the household chores, but not along gender lines.

"He wants to clean and doesn't want to cook ever," she says. "Our deal is I cook and he cleans. I'm not allowed to touch the dishwasher."

Ellis doesn’t quite agree with the findings from the new study, admitting that she "swoons" every time she sees her husband get out the vacuum cleaner.

"It's more of a turn-on when he's doing the vacuuming than when he's doing the traditional stereotypical tasks," she says. "I wouldn't say there's a direct correlation but it's definitely something that keeps us in sync."

Julie Brines, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington and coauthor of the study, says the deep-seated views that some behaviors are more masculine or feminine affect “whether or not we find them sexy or whether we define a situation as a sexual situation."

Jeff Friedrich, the 38-year-old plastic surgeon who makes his wife's heart go pitter-pat when he takes out the vacuum cleaner, says he doesn't see any kind of correlation between their sex life and any kind of household chores.

"In my mind, that seems to be a little overly simplistic, that doing some chores around the house will earn you a trip to the bedroom," he says. "I've always done the kitchen and done the vacuuming and we've always had what I think is a good sex life. But I haven't tested it. I haven't stopped vacuuming and cleaning the kitchen to see what happens."

Which is perhaps a good thing, says Kornrich.

"Men who refuse to do housework, including both traditionally male and female tasks, could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives' marital satisfaction, he says. "Earlier research has found that women's marital satisfaction is linked to men's participation in the household."

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Comment:

Female led hubbies get less sex –probably just wife initiated sex– but it doesn't imply that wives who lead get less sex. Women who lead may be more likely to get more and more varied sex … on the side. The more opportunities are always for the most powerful ... and roles have changed; house-hubbies know.

#female led marriage #cuckoldry #all ladies do it #cosi fan tutte

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zorilleerrant · 1 month ago

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Live To Fight Another Day

@flashfictionfridayofficial

“Aw,” Moe says, as the robots explode, “I guess they had it handled after all.” Then, with a shrug, she packs up her binoculars and starts walking away, apparently no longer caring if anyone can see us.

I hurry to catch up. I don’t want to. I want to go back and figure out whatever the hell was powering those machines beyond what I caught a glimpse of in the flames. I want to know why they felt so familiar. I want to ask her what any of it means, that she thought it was important enough to break protocol.

“So, uh,” David says, offering her an awkward smile. I can see his hands still shaking even from here. “Are you staying…?”

“Oh, that’s sweet, babycakes, but I’ve got to skedaddle,” Moe says, checking her watch like it’s subtle how she turns away from me to hide what it’s showing. She’s not even managing to keep her face blank; she’s clearly scowling at the thing. “Now that we’ve averted the robot uprising, I’m probably going to get in trouble if I don’t get back.” She even tucks her hand behind her back when she smiles at me.

“So there’s going to be a robot uprising,” I repeat, trying not to be fazed by whatever the hell she’s doing. David’s eyes widen when he hears that, and I have to yank him by the arm to get him to come with us.

“No, on account of we just averted it, are you listening?” Moe says, but she rolls her eyes in a way that’s a lot more familiar and relaxed, her pace slowing to a more casual speed. “I figured if I hadn’t heard of one, there shouldn’t be one, so I might as well 86 it. Is it my fault those guys had it copacetic?”

“Explains why it’s not in the history books, at least,” I agree. She can’t possibly just be here for this. This has to have something to do with the murder. Or else it has something to do with me, assuming those aren’t the same thing.

Or else it was an excuse for her to test out her new scope, I guess.

“That’s not in the history books?” David squeaks. He’s trailing a fair ways behind us just because he won’t stop craning his neck to look back at all the destruction. You’d think he’d never seen robot mockups of celebrities possessed by semi-sentient curses before. Even after that movie, which was – alright, admittedly I’m not sure if that one’s happened yet, because it was bad anyway. “Like, it won’t be in the news?”

Moe stares at him blankly for a minute. Then she turns slowly to me with a skeptical look, like she’s trying to figure out if he’s joking, and, sadly, I have to shake my head. In all likelihood he’s completely serious. She brightens considerably. “Primary documentation is always a good way to look into things, but especially as information about an era becomes denser, you need data sifting mechanisms that work faster than that. It’s not my area of specialty, so I would’ve been months looking for the handful of articles I’m sure will be written about this.”

“That’s what you get for hinging everything on gossip,” I tell her, shaking my head ruefully. “Follow up on a rumor instead of doing your due diligence, and for what. You could’ve had a full report researched and written up within the year.”

Moe snorts at me. “Alright, next time I’ll leave you to your demise while I make sure I get all my sources in order. You’d’ve thanked me if I did stop Tricky Robo-Dick from mind controlling everyone.” She pouts again. I think she’s remembered how she didn’t get to shoot her weird freeze cannon.

“I was more worried about the lasers,” I tell her, holding out the singed patch on my sleeve while David makes a small eep noise in the background. Not that I wanted a mechanical Nixon running around town doing much of anything.

“Lasers,” she scoffs, shaking her head at me. “They always had lasers. Everything’s got – why do you guys always add lasers to everything? What’s the point? Nothing would’ve ended the world just with lasers.”

“I don’t think people are looking to end the world, mostly,” I deadpan, with a small gesture at the people who blew up their own robots. Moe smacks her shoulder into mine and laughs. “If nothing else, the shareholders might complain.”

“Whose robots were those?” David says, frantically – he keeps getting worked up whenever anyone says apocalypse near him. “Why were they mind controlling people? Why were they glowing like that? What apocalypse?”

“Relax, they’re probably just Orenthal’s,” I say, with a moue of distaste that Moe happily reflects back at me, shaking her head so hard at the thought she sneezes. The dainty way she wipes her face with the tissue is in direct contrast to the pointedly grotesque way she mimes gagging.

“What, the guy who keeps donating to the robotics program? The philanthropist inventor guy? What does he have to do with anything?” David asks, with growing frustration, while Moe and I exchange looks.

“The timeline,” she says, warningly, eyes comically wide.

I sigh at her, and then offer my arm. “At least stay for dinner, come on.”

#look I said something #my writing #original fiction #original character #zorille's board certified necromancer

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gwydionmisha · 2 months ago

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I think we found the Government Waste.

Here's more of it:

So they likely have been giving Russian Hackers and who knows who else sensitive data.]:

#US DOGE Service #Department of Labor #DOGE #News #Government Waste #sensitive data #whistleblower report #NLRB #Elon Musk #The Government Accountability Office #Dan Bongino

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is auditing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The probe, which has been ongoing since March, covers DOGE’s handling of data at several cabinet-level agencies, including the Departments of Labor, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the Treasury, and the Social Security Administration, as well as the US DOGE Service (USDS) itself, according to sources and records reviewed by WIRED.

Records show that the GAO—an independent auditing, research, and investigative agency for Congress—appears to be requesting comprehensive information from the agencies in question, including incident reports on “potential or actual misuse of agency systems or data” and documentation of policies and procedures relating to systems DOGE operatives have accessed, as well as documentation of policies for the agency's risk assessments, audit logs, insider threat programs, and more.

Over the last few months, DOGE operatives, many of them with connections to Musk’s companies but little to no government experience, have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies as part of Musk’s plan to push out tens of thousands of government employees. They have also gained initial access to untold amounts of sensitive data, from Treasury payment systems to tax records, and appear to be attempting to connect purposefully disparate data systems.

While a number of Democratic officials have sounded the alarm on DOGE’s activities, this audit is one of the first real signs of possible accountability and oversight.

The GAO’s review is expected to be completed by the end of spring, according to records reviewed by WIRED. Congressional sources say it will yield a report that will be made public.

“GAO has received requests to review actions taken by DOGE across multiple agencies,” Sarah Kaczmarek, a spokesperson for the GAO, tells WIRED. “The first thing GAO does as any work begins is to determine the full scope of what we will cover and the methodology to be used. Until that is done, we cannot provide any additional details or estimates on when the work will be completed.”

The audit, according to records reviewed by WIRED, is broadly centered on DOGE’s adherence to privacy and data protection laws and regulations. More specifically, according to records detailing GAO’s interactions with the Department of Labor (DOL), the agency will conduct a granular review of every system to which DOGE—defined in these records as USDS workers and members of the DOGE teams which an executive order directs every federal agency to establish—has been given access at the agencies it is examining. DOL did not respond to requests for comment.

Notes obtained by WIRED detail a proposed meeting between GAO examiners and DOL representatives to request that DOL officials share records of the system privileges provided to DOGE affiliates, including “any modifications to the accounts,” as well as audit logs showing their activity.

In addition, DOL officials were asked to prepare for an in-person meeting at which GAO officials could observe the security settings on laptops the agency had provided to DOGE operatives and review all the systems that track DOGE’s work at DOL, including a data loss prevention tool and systems used to track cybersecurity and privacy incidents.

Notes from a March 18 meeting, marked “Internal/Confidential,” show that a DOL lawyer presented colleagues with an overview of DOL’s interactions with DOGE. “So far,” the notes read, “they do not have write access. They have asked; we’ve held them at bay. We’ve tried to get them to tell us what they want & then we do it. They only have read access.” DOGE seems primarily interested, according to the notes, in pay systems and grants, and has signed an agreement detailing a “long list of things they won’t do.”

The notes also detail interactions between the GAO and DOL related to DOGE’s work. Included are a specific set of requests GAO gave to DOL representatives:

“Please identify any systems and information for which USDS and/or agency DOGE team staff were provided access. In doing so, please identify all accounts created, including those for any applications, servers, databases, mainframes, and/or network equipment.

“Please describe the type of access that USDS and/or agency DOGE team staff have to agency systems and information (e.g., read, write, execute).

“Please describe how USDS and/or agency DOGE team staff access agency systems and information (e.g., on-premise or remote, agency furnished equipment or other equipment).

“Please describe the safeguards that are in place to determine that USDS and/or agency DOGE team staff protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of agency systems and information consistent with relevant laws and guidance.

“Please describe the processes that the agency has in place to ensure that USDS and DOGE teams are appropriately protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the agency systems and information as required by applicable laws and guidance.”

Concerns about DOGE access to agency systems are not unfounded. In February, WIRED reported that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former X engineer, was granted the ability not only to read the code in the Treasury systems but also to write—or change—it. With that level of access, there were concerns that he could have potentially cut off congressionally authorized payments or caused the systems to simply stop working. “It’s like knowing you have hackers on your network, but nobody lets you do anything about it,” a Treasury employee told WIRED at the time.

Elez, according to the March 18 meeting notes and previous WIRED reporting, also has access to the DOL and has been linked to the Social Security Administration. His and other DOGE affiliates’ access to SSA data is currently restricted due to a court order. Elez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reporting from WIRED and other outlets since then has continued to expose DOGE’s sweeping attempts to access sensitive data—and the potential consequences. President Donald Trump’s executive order from March 20 directs agencies to begin “eliminating information silos,” purportedly to fight fraud and waste. These actions could also threaten privacy by consolidating personal data housed on different systems into a central repository, WIRED previously reported.

A record detailing an initial request from GAO for DOL documents, due at the end of March, shows that the agency was asked to show how it protected its systems, with the requested documentation covering, among other things, its policies on management of access to system accounts, training, the principles of separation of duties and least privilege, the use of portable storage devices, audit logging, and its insider threat program. These requests reference the National Institute of Standards and Technology publication Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations, which serves as a set of information security guidelines for federal systems not related to national security.

The DOL was also asked to provide records documenting risk assessments and memorandums of understanding pertaining to DOGE; documentation for each system account created for DOGE that shows approval for requests to access the accounts, what access authorization they have, and any subsequent modifications to the accounts; all communications from October 2024 to March 2025 related to DOGE being granted access to agency systems and/or information; and detailed information on the job status of each DOGE affiliate, their relationship to the USDS, and the supervisory structure they’re working under and the security training they’ve undergone. (DOGE’s management structure has been quite opaque, with even DOGE workers not knowing who was technically in charge a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration.)

GAO examiners also sought information including instances of and incident reports related to “potential or actual misuse of agency systems or data,” detailed information on who oversees specific systems and data dictionaries, data architecture records, and interface control documents for specific systems, as well as documentation of the audit logs for each system.

The GAO audit is being carried out in response to requests from congressional leaders.

In a February 6 letter, representative Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and the ranking member of the House of Representatives’ Education and Workforce committee, cited reporting from WIRED and other outlets about DOGE intrusions into federal systems in the course of asking the agency to investigate what he called “a constitutional emergency” related to DOGE access.

On February 24, in a letter obtained by WIRED, representative Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts and the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, requested a review of what DOGE is doing in agencies including the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.

“Americans expect that when they share personal information with the government, whether for paying taxes or accessing health or Social Security benefits, it will be safeguarded,” Neal tells WIRED. “That is not what’s happened with DOGE, and why, at my request, the Government Accountability Office is working to shed much-needed light on their access to and use of personal and confidential information. It shouldn’t have to come to this—if there’s nothing to hide, DOGE should want the public to understand its work—but this is exactly why accountability measures across the government are so important.”

According to a Congressional aide, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to be quoted in the media, the requests followed media reports on DOGE’s incursions into federal systems.

“The federal government, and actually most private companies as well, operate on the principle that data should be protected,” they say. “It should be protected from theft, protected from access by people who do not have a legitimate purpose or reason to be in and to be accessing that data. And so the reports of untrained people rummaging around databases changing code, scraping data—who knows what they’re doing?—were pretty alarming.”

“Has this data been exported outside of the agencies?” they add. “Is it being accessed or used by hackers or private citizens, or maybe it’s being used to train AI models? I don’t know.”

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