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razieltwelve · 3 years

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Stabilise (Final Rose x Game of Thrones)

When Averia had been reborn as Lyara, she had immediately done her best to grasp her new situation. The North was vast, but the more she learned about it, the more her concerns grew. Despite its size, the North seemed to have little in the way of natural resources, and it had to import much of its food simply to survive. The former seemed to be at least partially due to how little her new world understood the ideas behind prospecting and geology whilst the latter was likely due to the relative primitiveness of the farming techniques available and the reliance on manual labour.

She had already dealt somewhat with the lack of mineral wealth in the North. Her theories regarding possible locations for mines had been proven mostly correct although her strike rate left much to be desired. However, without better maps and survey data, there was only so much she could do. She was fortunate too in that her father, Eddard Stark was a good ruler and father who actually listened to his children and subordinates, provided they could justify themselves. He wouldn’t have sent men to check for mines on a mere whim, but he had done so after reading her proposal and examining her reasoning for flaws.

With the North’s wealth set to improve, Averia turned her sights back to one of her more long-term projects: improving crop yields and increasing the area under plough. The two best methods for improving crop yields were to introduce better crop rotation and to identify or breed crops better suited to the harsh North. Given how devastating a mistake could be, she knew her father would never agree to any large-scale changes without ample data.

And that was were Maester Luwin came in. The man was highly intelligent, incredibly loyal, and quite open minded. He had listened carefully as she explained her ideas, and he had agreed that they would need proof before her father agreed to anything. With his help and with her father’s aid, she had been given several formerly unploughed areas to work with. If something went wrong, then it would be no great loss, but if she was successful, the whole North would reap the benefits.

Most importantly, she would be able to accumulate years of data with which to convince her father. The new fields would also give her a chance to test better farming equipment. She might not be Diana when it came to inventing things, but she was brilliant in her own right, and she had lived an entire life in Arendelle, a place whose wintry climate was a match for the North’s.

X X X

Maester Luwin looked over the numbers once again. The proof was incontrovertible. The crop rotation methods that Lyara had proposed had greatly increased the yield in the fields she had been given. Her theory regarding the ‘draining of soil’ by certain crops and its replenishment by others seemed to be correct.

With retrospect, it seemed obvious. The soil provided nourishment for plants. Just as food contained different things that people needed to live, so too did the soil contain different things for plants. Likewise, just as different animals required different feed, so too might different plants draw different things from the soil to survive. Plant the same crop in one place too often, and it was no surprise that it would drain that area of nourishment, leading to failure. But if the crops were moved such that each subsequent crop demanded different things of the soil, then the soil would never be exhausted and in fact might be replenished over time.

Simple but brilliant and insightful - like so many of Lyara’s other ideas.

With this latest season of proof, he was confident that they could now approach Lord Stark and suggest a change in farming practices. Of course, Lord Stark would not likely force the changes upon his vassals. He was not the sort of lord to do that. Instead, he would try it in his own lands first. Should it prove fruitful - and Luwin was certain it would - then his vassals would undoubtedly follow suit. In the harsh North, only a fool would ignore the chance to grow more food.

Yet it was Lyara’s development of mechanical devices to aid in farming that were likely to be adopt most quickly. The North - and Westeros - had used the same plough or something quite similar for countless years. Yet she had designed a better one that could be pulled far more easily using far less livestock. Likewise the seed drill she had invented was a marvel, vastly speeding up how quickly seeds could be planted while reducing how many were lost to vermin. She even had plans on a horse or ox-drawn reaping device and other more advanced devices too.

Of course, finding someone to build these things was not easy. To that end, she and Luwin had sought out the most skilled smiths in the North, and they had moved steadily from mere designs and ideas to real implementations that had proven their worth in the fields she had been given to test her ideas on.

“It is time,” Lyara said. She had been reading through the numbers as well. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

Luwin nodded solemnly. “I think so, my lady. Let us speak to your father.”

X X X

Ned Stark listened carefully as Luwin and Lyara explained what they had been doing and what their findings had been. Their words were accompanied by carefully kept records regarding crop yields and other information. Although Ned was no maester, he was still the Lord Paramount of the North. He was well educated in many things related to farming due to how important food was to the North. Every year, they spent much of their money to import food from the more fertile south, and every year, they struggled to equal the harvests of previous years only to find themselves coming up short.

For the first time, the reasons for their struggles were laid bare in words as simple as they were powerful. Likewise, an answer to their struggles was also presented. For a long time, he said nothing. Instead, he stared at the numbers on the page and at the designs on the parchment.

Finally, he spoke. “Who else knows of this?”

“Only Luwin and I know the full details,” Lyara said. “And the smiths involved in making the devices have all be sworn to secrecy. They are loyal men, father. They will say nothing until you give the order.”

“I see.” He smiled. “You have done well. This... I thought you finding those mines was a miracle beyond miracles, but it seems you’ve outdone yourself yet again. With these new techniques and devices...” He took a deep breath. “The money we could save on importing food alone...”

“I know, father.” Lyara’s gaze was calm as if she hadn’t just upended his world yet again. “As the words of our House say, Winter is coming, and I intend for us to be as prepared as possible.”

“Aye, you have the right of it.” Ned stood. “I fear I have neglected this project of yours.” He grinned and shook his head. “In truth, I wasn’t sure if you could create another miracle. I should stop underestimating you, daughter of mine. I wish to see these devices in person.”

The trip to the fields did not take long, and as Ned watched the strange devices his daughter had created get to work, he felt a pang of emotion that he couldn’t quite place. It was part awe, certainly, but there was also wistfulness too. How often he had heard his father mourn the lack of food in the North. Good men and women forced to all but starve when winter came. Had he seen these things, he would have wept at the possibilities.

“Keep all of this secret,” Ned said once they had finished their demonstration. “We must be careful with this information.” He knew of many in the south who would seek to sabotage them to keep the North reliant on their food. Robert, of course, would send him whatever aid he could, but Ned did not trust the Reach or the West any further than he could throw their rulers. “If we are to build these devices, then we must build them ourselves, using only solid, reliable people of the North.”

“Yes, father.”

“Luwin?”

“My loyalty is to you, Lord Stark,” the maester said. “I will write nothing to my order until you give me leave to do so.”

“Good.” Ned considered the fields thoughtfully. They were bustling with produce. “Still, it may not be easy to convince others to follow your new methods, daughter. We will try them on our lands first. When others see our success, then we will share with them our knowledge.”

“Will you ask a price for it?” Lyara asked.

Ned paused, deep in thought. It would be easy. Men in the North would kill for the knowledge and devices his daughter had developed. Yet, he was Lord of the North. His actions must always be for the good of the North. “Not exactly,” he said eventually. “We will share the knowledge of crops freely with loyal folk from the North, provided they swear not to share it with anyone else. As for the devices, we will keep secret how to make them, but we will sell them at a reasonable price to those from the North who wish to purchase them.”

“A wise decision, my lord,” Luwin praised.

“Aye.” Ned could see it now. He could hoard this knowledge and the devices all for himself and his family, but what then? The other lords would grow bitter and resentful. They would grow to hate him for withholding what they needed to aid their people. By sharing willingly, he won their gratitude, and there was still plenty of profit to be made by selling the devices. Moreover, if people did not have to spend so much importing food from the south, then that was more money they could spend on things from the North. “Make this your top priority,” he ordered Luwin. “And, my daughter, I’m afraid I must ask you to focus on this for the time being.”

“Of course.”

Ned’s lips twitched. “I know that expression on your face, daughter. What else are you thinking about?”

“Roads, father,” Lyara said. “And how to build better ones, ones suited for the North, ones that will work all year round and last long after we are but dust.”

X X X

Author’s Notes

Lyara (Averia) has identified weaknesses in the North, and she’s set about fixing them. With more money soon to be coming in from the mines, food is her next objective. Roads are after that since they’re expensive. But her intention is to have the North as self-sufficient as possible, to turn it from a net importer to a net exporter of goods and services. She’s also looking to expand trade, which may well bring her representatives into contact with merchants and sailors from Braavos...

If you’re interested in my thoughts on writing and other topics, you can find those here.

I also write original fiction, which you can find on Amazon here or on Audible here.

#final rose #game of thrones #fanfiction #averia yun farron #ned stark #luwin

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libertariantaoist · 4 years

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Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.

Either we believe that the State exists to serve the individual or the individual exists to serve the State. -from Letters of Ayn Rand

Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. ... A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort - is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud - to protect men from foreign invaders - to settle disputes among men according to objective laws - The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.

The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals. It does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government. It is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the government.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed".

It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

Since there is no such entity as "the public," since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that "the public interest" supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism -- by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.

#ayn rand #libertarian quotes

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theimpossiblerevolution · 8 years

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Hookup culture will start the Third World War. No, seriously.

Forget the ‘dating apocalypse’. We might be looking at the real thing.

Culture constrains not only [man’s] societal but also his biological existence.… Civilisation begins when the primary objective—namely, integral satisfaction of needs—is renounced.

—Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955)

The work of Freud, and Marcuse following him, have cast the sexual instinct as the enemy of civilised progress: ‘Eros’, they say, directs man’s energy towards aims which are counterproductive in civilised society; to redirect that energy to more useful and permanent purposes, laws and mores have been set out which repress our fundamental instincts so that more constructive principles may prevail. What Marcuse recognises in his critique of Freud, though, is that a civilisation which continually contradicts man’s basic instinct cannot expect to survive indefinitely; indeed, in the sixty or so years since Eros and Civilisation Western society has begun to reform itself quite significantly in this regard. The seminal event which allowed these reforms was the invention of modern birth control in the 1960s—for the first time, unlimited sex was available without the economic consequences of unlimited reproduction; though still not productive per se, the sexual instinct was no longer counterproductive, and was accordingly allowed an increased licence. This is likely not the ‘non-repressive society’ envisioned by Marcuse—it still largely lacks the component of economic liberation which he viewed as similarly essential. It nonetheless reconciles man’s individual desires, both the biological desire for sex and the philosophical desire for liberty, with the needs of civilisation at large—an undoubtedly beneficent and stabilising effect.

The dissociation of sex from reproduction can be even more destabilising, however, if it is achieved in ignorance of the nature and origins of the various human sexual instincts. In the state of nature, there are essentially two, essentially opposites: the male or paternal strategy, born out of the almost negligible (biological) cost which males pay to reproduce, is to spread one’s seed as widely as possible, with perhaps a predilection for the healthiest or most attractive females but nonetheless undercut by the idea that (almost) any sex is better than no sex. This strategy has no use for commitment—the ultimate evolutionary interest, reproducing as many times as possible, is far better served by moving on and impregnating yet another female. Men likewise have an instinctual desire for variety in sexual partners that most women do not. The female or maternal strategy, meanwhile, is a product of the immensity of the burden which reproduction places on females. While a male can reproduce a theoretically unlimited number of times, a female is harshly limited by time and resources; her sexual strategy must essentially be to choose the one mate whose child she will bear. This induces her to be far more selective, not trying to attract—or even trying actively to avoid—any but the absolute most desirable males she can. She adopts the opposite priority to his: for her, given the burden of reproduction, no sex is better than bad sex. The second part of the maternal strategy is to induce the father to share in the burden of parenting; this strategy is so effective, in the long run, that its success is seen as a hallmark of an advanced species, certainly a precursor to human civilisation. The institution of marriage, however usurped by patriarchy, is its ultimate triumph.

The base male instinct, unused to commitment or even consent, obviously seethes beneath this feminine restraint—but that is, of course, as it should be. A species which devotes itself solely to the base instincts which it acquired in the wild cannot, by definition, be civilised. Thus, the conflict which might undermine civilisation is not between the paternal and maternal strategies. The triumph of the latter is imperfect, but incontrovertible; in the course of long time, male instincts which offend it will be selected out of existence. The egregious threat will occur if and when the balance between the two often contradictory parts of the maternal strategy is disturbed, particularly in a specific direction. On the one hand, co-parenting demands monogamy, which enforces a stabilising symmetry on the sexual landscape of civilised society; on the other, female selectivity presents a profound asymmetry with male indiscriminance. Absent the former pressure, a population requires far fewer males than females. Since biology produces about the same number of both regardless, many species—including ‘civilised’ humanity up to a relatively recent point—have killed off enormous numbers of young, lower-status males by assigning to them such highly fatal activities as hunting and war. If the symmetry fails, this could once more be our fate.

Birth control alone will not produce such a dire situation. Even absent children to demand co-parenting, people long ago began to value romantic love and committed relationships for their own sake. Furthermore, most people must still reproduce at some point in their lives for the species to survive—all we’ve done is delay it, creating a sub-population of young adults where the normal rules of evolution do not apply. Symmetry can be maintained as long as most sexual relationships are fairly long-term and based on monogamy and commitment; unfortunately, this does not seem to be the trend. Casual sex—hookups, one-night stands, however you call it—has gone from taboo to accepted to common, and is now rapidly becoming the norm, at least among urban twenty-somethings. People have even begin to suffer from ‘a kind of psychosexual obesity’, according to a scientist quoted in an ‘apocalyptically’ titled 2015 Vanity Fair article on the subject. The trouble with a statement such as that is its narrow perspective. Some people, particularly men, might experience a glut of available sex partners so great that their capacity for intimacy suffers, as the article seems to argue. Yet as much as I’ve spoken of the breakdown of ‘symmetry’, there is a more inviolable kind of symmetry at play: ordinary heterosexual intercourse demands one man and one woman. As measured as most women’s desires tend to be, the inevitable consequence is that sexual obesity anywhere is sexual starvation elsewhere. Some guys can sleep with a hundred different girls in a year, as one quoted in the Vanity Fair article claims to have, while on average millennials have fewer sexual partners than their parents, because a vast group of young men is slowly and invisibly being reduced to celibacy.

The most unfortunate among them congregate in dark corners of the Internet, wallowing in self-pity and uniquely susceptible to misogynistic extremism, a combination which does not generally inspire the outside world to empathise with them. That makes this problem uniquely difficult to solve. In fact, the majority of the people involved—all the women and some subset of the men—wouldn’t even consider it a problem because it benefits them personally. It’s a problem, though—it should be a matter of common sense that a society which forces any significant number of its young men into celibacy will not be stable in the long run. For one, as I pointed out earlier, Nature finds a way to eliminate surplus population. Since most of this is taking place in the developed world, famine is unlikely; besides, the cataclysm will have to target young men specifically.

So, of course, it will be war—immense, total war, a slaughter the likes of which humanity has not seen in almost four generations.

Gaialogical processes of this sort tend to revel in gruesome irony, so it comes as no surprise that some of these young men are themselves helping to create the political conditions which could lead to their being sent off to die by the tens of millions. There is a movement on the far right, led largely by Steve Bannon, which believes that large-scale war once every four generations is a requirement for civilisational catharsis. They, like many other right-wing movements, have found in their recruiting attempts that sexual frustration is a quite potent antidote to reason. The first step is to promulgate the narrative that feminism is responsible for these young men’s situation. This has been widely successful, evidenced by the existence of the ‘Red Pill’ subreddit (trigger warning: rampant misogyny). From there, they use this as an example to convince the new recruits to fear for the ‘decline’ of ‘traditional’ culture, creating intense nostalgia for a fictitious, nebulously defined time period in the past which none of the recruits are old enough to remember anyway. Finally, they declare that all is not lost—but revolutionary, immediate, even violent action is necessary to reclaim that dying Golden Age.

Make America Great Again, right?

That’s how serious this is. Steve Bannon is now the senior advisor to the President of the United States. Let that sink in. They are not just at the gate—they are within the walls. The palace has fallen, they are storming the Bastille, and still we are saying ‘let them eat cake’.

This was not—still is not—inevitable. It’s not because of feminism. It’s not because of birth control. Committed relationships and sexual symmetry can survive both of those. Romantic love, though not as fundamental an instinct as the others, is not merely a social construction that will vanish instantly when no longer needed. What has happened, rather, is that a variety of forces have convinced many young people that dating, at the point where they are in life, is not desirable. This philosophy, in some places, has acquired an almost cultic devotion—among those who can be successful in the casual sexual market, single status is often a point of pride. They revel, unironically and uneuphemistically, in their ‘freedom’—a word which, in this context, was once understood to mean ‘loneliness’. They must be lonely, the way I measure loneliness, yet they do not seem to realise, never mind care. The women among them have taken to painting their cult of singledom with a vaguely feminist colour—no doubt resting on the ancient notion that marriage means confinement to a domestic role. This has not been true for many years, but somehow it still sustains the view among some women that voluntarily avoiding serious relationships is an act of revolution.

Nonetheless, I think the roots of the equation between loneliness and freedom are still economic, though they apply to both genders now. The view that relationships are burdensome to one who aspires to professional greatness is quite old, famously espoused by Nikola Tesla. Having children is immensely burdensome, yes, but marriage or a stable relationship, by itself, is far less burdensome than singledom. Simply being in a relationship meets many of one’s social and sexual needs almost automatically, needs which would otherwise require a huge amount of time, effort, and often money to fulfil. (It might be even more productive to neglect these needs altogether, but that’s far from healthy and quite unsustainable to do voluntarily.) The other economic factor which penalises relationships, especially long-term ones, is education and work. In the first few years of adulthood, a successful person might be subjected to two long-distance moves: from his childhood home to college, then from college to wherever he finds work. As unpredictable as such opportunities can be, anyone who hopes for them is hesitant to tie himself down to anyone or anything until much later in life. Partly, it’s merely a matter of priorities: personally, I think that there are a great many opportunities worth forgoing for love, but then again, I consider relationships a central and imperiled thread in the fabric of civilisation, and I doubt I’ll ever convince many people of that view. It’s mostly, however, a matter of economic conditions, including society’s overemphasis on income and wealth itself. Rectifying those conditions will be a complicated, lengthy process which will require at least some degree of sacrifice on all sides. I don’t know where to begin, nor would I have the power to begin if I did. I just know that however hard it may be, the alternative will be far worse.

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awesomenell65 · 8 years

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Starting a fresh post because it’s a fresh topic, really.

@hotarurea wrote: I don’t understand this glorifying of Grounders at all. I don’t particularly care for them as a group of people, I care about specific grounder characters and am looking forward to knowing them better/meeting new characters who seem interesting but I don’t see the need for Bellamy to gain any respect for their culture or leaders because they constantly deny him or his people that respect back.

And the topic is. I think I’m getting a new tumblr crush! Which allows me to spew on one of my obsessions. Behind the cut, for kindness.

That gif set that goes ‘round periodically, the one with Lincoln yelling at Clarke ‘you people are so soft!’..... you know that one?

Its popularity, that the scene even exists, is one of the elements that simultaneously confirms the line reading - that the Arkers are soft, and the Grounders are hardened survivors - and at the same time presents the Grounders as a monolithic, unquestioning, unobservant whole. I mean “You people!!!” ..... how many tragic stories start that way?

(Setting aside the general silliness of the line which is lifted from 1,000,000,001 stories from all media - professional and amatuer - about the moment when the civilized (white usually) lady meets the savage (man usually), and then she ‘proves’ her toughness with some suitably bloody act.... Okay. S1 had. Issues. Mmkay. Moving on.)

But S1 absolutely set up a dynamic where the Grounders assume that after one look at people who don’t wear scraps of leather quilted together with lots of buckles and raggedy bits of badly tanned fur - that they know all there is to know about them, and that they must be ‘soft.’ Lincoln’s line only made it text.

Lincoln does this despite having watched these kids nearly from the moment they stumbled blinking out into the sun. And then they lost Jasper - and then they WENT BACK TO GET HIM. Knowing full well by then that they were facing human enemies that they couldn’t see who wanted to kill them. Then they hauled Jasper’s ass back to their ship to save him. And then they tortured Lincoln (!!) for information about how to save their friend.

Meanwhile they also started hunting successfully, harvesting, building walls and shelters, stripped their ship for usuable parts, created weapons, tents, tools, water basins, cooking utensils, smoking huts, all of it from everything avilable to them using information and skills they already possessed (Charles Pike? Was a fucking GOOD teacher... maybe he really did win that election on his own merits, and not just because people were upset with Kane)...

But still our writers had Lincoln - and all the Grounders he was giving voice to in that instant - look at these disciplined, knowledgable, resilient, tough as nails kids and dismiss them as “soft.”

Because the narrative the show runners were contsructing required it, because they were - intentionally or not - falling back on Settlers v. Indians as their primary source of dramatic tension.

And the show runners have continued this in every season since. They have never allowed the Grounders to display the slightest curiosity about the Ark, or its survivors. They have never allowed them to ask a single question about their lives before (on screen). Vs. Kane or Octavia or Clarke or Jaha, to whom they have given an earnest desire to learn everything they can about their new neighbors.

A curioustiy the writers then had their Grounders disdain and dismiss as a weakness at every opporutnity (by beating the crap out of any questioner at every opportunity) -- because the writers have trapped the Grounders in stasis, in an unchanging bubble built a few years after the catasrophe and never once allowed to alter thereafter -- despite the decades and generations passing since that moment. Because -- in the end, they are still writing Settlers v. Indians, no matter how complex the polity they’ve now allowed the Grounders to have, it’s still an unchanging monolith built on stasis and rejection of any new information/conditions.

This narrative structure - Settlers v. Indians - isn’t the whole of the story, of course. It’s more like a ...... (flails for a phrase) an undertow, sometimes a riptide - but it’s not on the surface, it’s not “the PLOT” per se.

Because, of course, among other things, we already know - thanks to the same writers - from the split focus of S1, that it’s really fucking hard to live in space. The Arkers are - in fact - a preposterously scary bunch of very tough people.

But the narrative has had this really weird dualism thing going on from teh start. The Grounders are presented as scary, but not the Arkers. When it’s the Arkers, in terms of straight up onscreen body count, who are BY FAR the MOST HORRIFYING BUNCH OF INTENTIONAL KILLERS we’ve ever met in this story ‘verse.

And yet in dialogue, and in the way the people of the Ark are regarded and treated by the ‘savage’ ‘revenge is a dish best served hot and steamy’ ‘have a little crucifixion and torture with your lunch’ Grounders, or by the vampires at Mt. Weather who just want to eat them ..... almost no one inside the show who opposes the Ark has been allowed to be at all aware of just how often their clocks are cleaned by these people whom they hold in contempt as soft and weak.

Even though they actually gave Bellamy a line about this very thing! And very late in the game, Indra appears to be noticing the obvious. Roan too, I think, though he hasn’t had an explicit acknolwedgement in dialogue yet. (And there is an argument to be made that Nia understood, at least dimly, when she went after the resources the Arkers were still exploiting from the Mountain...)

And that expressed attitude (contempt for the Arkers) on the part of the Grounders and the Mt. Weather vampires - that attitude has often been adopted by many fans to explain that it is the Arkers who were/are at this really mammothly huge disadvangate with regard to the peoples they meet on earth. (Their small number is of course a problem, but it’s just about their only problem in terms of spec’ing out who will come out on top. All they really need is a few key ‘native’ allies, and they’re golden, basically. If you use European colonization of the New World as a guide...)

Which leaves me at a bit of a loss when it comes to deciding what the show runners are intending - am I supposed to believe my eyes or my ears?

Because both/and - the usual approach - doesn’t really make much sense in this case. The Arkers are weak and stupid and a supreme disadvantage - AND - in the last six months of universe time, they’ve killed more people - intentionally! - by themselves! - than the rest of them put together. My ears tell me they are weak and out of their depth. My eyes tell me the Arkers are truly righteous mother fuckers when it comes to dealing death and surviving on the run.

In the end, I’ve settled on the idea that - as the writers have written the Grounders in this way, as savage, as violent, as uncompromising, as blood thirsty, as collectively stupidly unobservant - unique and lovely individual Grounders whom I desperately want to survive notwithstanding (!!!) - I can only follow their lead.

Therefore, for me, the Grounders are - as a whole - a hot mess and I don’t care that their manifestly horrible society is ending. It was rotten and fragile and of course it will/has broken in the face of incontrovertible new evidence that everything they have ever believed about their world was bullshit built on lies.

*I* didn’t do this to them. Their creators did.

I’m simply taking them as presented to me.

And as presented to me, Bellamy owes the Grounders - as a polity, as a whole - jack shit. They have set out to eliminate him and his people from the day the 100 fell to earth, fleeing their dying home. They are his enemies. Full Stop.

Now, in story, the Grounders have a very stark choice. Suck it up and work with the Ark and (maybe) survive, or don’t and die. I hope my individual favs choose to work with them. I hope most of the rest will get on board in time (though I suspect they won’t be written that way, the show runners appear to like using large numbers of off-screen death as a short hand for ‘really fucking serious problem’) because they don’t deserve to die merely for being closed minded and having had very bad leadership for generations. But in no way do I think Bellamy, or any of the rest of the surviving remant of the Ark, need to ‘learn to respect’ the Grounders. It’s the other way around, at this point.

And weridly? I suspect that this is the story my eyes will continue to indicate is being told, whatever my ears hear. Because... we all know the end of Settlers v. Indians, right? Settlers win. Indians, mostly die or are expelled, and a very very few choose to assimilate and adapt. And that riptide is ... very very strong.

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frederickwiddowson · 5 years

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Genesis 1:1 comments continued: How do you know that God exists?

The second question that begs itself is, “How do you know that God exists?”

There have been lots of arguments in history regarding God’s existence. There is everything from Pascal’s Wager. It goes like this in a shortened way. If I believe in God and He doesn’t exist I won’t know because I will cease to exist. If you don’t believe in God and He does exist, you’re fried.

There have been arguments from Aesthetics, Desire, Conscience, the Moral Argument, the Ontological Argument, and on and on for thousands of years. But, really, the argument for God’s existence breaks down to where we live. The most important proof of God’s existence is that there is something rather than nothing and since stuff doesn’t create itself it had to be created, and that’s where God comes in.

Of course, faith cannot be based on this idea. Faith is based on your experience with Him and on the truth of what He has said in His book. Not only have I encountered a risen Saviour in prayer, Bible reading, answered prayer, and in the creation and reality around me but I completely trust His book containing His ministry of reconciling mankind to Himself. I have no doubts. God speaks to my heart through His book changing me without me hearing words in my ear but working on me from the inside in His special way.

You may not find me a credible witness. Unbelievers become adamant, raving even, that as a person of faith you are a lunatic, or weak, or small-minded. They cannot accept that a perfectly rational scientist, businessman, or scholar of any type could believe in and love a God who has not revealed Himself to them.

These are things outside of our personal experience with God, a personal experience that no unbeliever can understand or accept unless God Himself touches their hearts, that suggest or even prove His existence.

Let’s take something as complex as life. The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle was born in Yorkshire, England on June 24, 1915. He was conferred a master's degree from Cambridge in 1939 and then was elected Fellow, St. John's College, Cambridge in the same year. He worked his way to become a Professor of Astrophysics and Natural Philosophy in 1958. He was a leading contributor in the discovery of how the elements from lithium to iron are synthesized inside stars.

Professor N. Chandra Wickramasinghe was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on January 20, 1939, studied astrophysics at Cambridge, and was a student of Hoyle's. He received a Ph.D. in 1963 taught at Cambridge. He later became a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at the University College, Cardiff, Wales. He is an expert in the use of infrared astronomy to study interstellar matter.

These are no lightweights although Wickramasinghe has gone a little bonkers in the last few years. But, they both came to the logical atheist conclusion that life came from outer space. Why? Because it was impossible for it to have happened by random chance on earth, not in 15 billion years or a hundred billion years. Let me read you a quote published recently by Dr. Wick…

“Improbability of Life

The blueprint for all life from bacteria to plants to animals was discovered in the 1950s by Watson and Crick to reside in DNA – in particular in the precise arrangements of the nucleotides A,G,T,C that effectively code for proteins that in turn control cell function. In a series of books and articles published in collaboration with the late Sir Fred Hoyle, I have argued that highly specific arrangements needed for the operation of living cells cannot be understood as arising from random processes. For the simplest bacterium (Mycoplasma genitalium) the probability that its few hundred genes will be discovered by random shuffling of their amino acid components gives a figure of 1 in 10 to the 1000th power or smaller. Hoyle and I have compared such horrendous improbabilities to the odds against a ‘tornado blowing through a junk yard leading to self-assembly of BOEING 707 airplane.’”[1]

1 in 10 to the 1000th? These types of scientists estimate there is only 10 to the 80th power number of atoms in the universe. Saying that life came about by random processes is like me saying that I’m getting handsomer, wealthier, and smarter as I get older. You would just look at me and go, what? I’m joking, right? But, scientists who believe in spontaneous generation, I mean abiogenesis, or life by accident are serious.

So, proof that God exists, step one. Life could not have happened on earth by chance. It’s not mathematically conceivable, not by any stretch of your Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dr. Who imagination. But, what about it coming from somewhere else? That’s called panspermia and that’s what Dr. Wick believes in.

Well, NASA scientists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, in their book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, explained that it is also highly unlikely that life came from someplace else as this planet, located where it is, is the best and most likely place for life to exist and, in fact, probably could not exist anywhere else.

So, proof that God exists, step two. Life could not have happened anywhere but on earth. But, it couldn’t happen here by chance. So, something else, or someone else rather, must be happening than mere material processes randomly achieved, or if you don’t like my use of the word random, then how about without purpose or intent, by accident.

Who could it be?

You know if they could have proven that life could have come together by random events on earth like Miller-Urey’s experiment tried to do and failed in the 1950s it would be astounding. But, you’d have to have nothing and then have something suddenly come into existence for it to simulate God without God. After all, Miller-Urey made something happen with the equipment and chemicals they introduced making themselves in the place of God. But, they did not create life and established conditions that evolutionists do not believe were present in their fantasy of early earth anyway. So, it worked as a publicity stunt but was not good science.

Then, there was Dr. Wimmer in the latter part of the twentieth century who supposedly made a virus out of synthetic DNA. Now he admitted in an interview that he did not create life as a virus isn’t alive, it can’t reproduce itself and needs a host, and he used synthetic DNA.

None of these experiments or any other created life or proved that it could be created by random processes without an intelligent mind involved.

So, now you have the gorilla in the living room. You have something as complex as life and you shouldn’t have it if there were no one to inject their intelligence into it. Life isn’t possible without God.

You have the atheist or the doubter demanding, “How do you know God exists?” and you have your own testimony, if you have one, and you have this incontrovertible fact, “Because without God life could not exist.”

You see, we are not just alive. We are aware that we are alive. Science has a huge problem with conscious self-awareness. Step three to proving that God exists. I am.

It has been said repeatedly that consciousness is the window through which we understand. Science has failed to pinpoint the actual brain processes that are behind our awareness. Some neuroscientists and philosophers of science express a deep pessimism that we will ever find an explanation for consciousness. But we know. Every car mechanic or customer service rep, a farmer or bank teller can know what a neuroscientist does not know. We know where consciousness comes from, that function of our spirit.

Zechariah 12:1 ¶ The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

Scientists say that a good theory, a theory that must supplant other theories, doesn’t have to answer every question. But it must answer more questions than its competitors. The belief in God answers far more questions than theoretical science can even come up with.

God is the greatest of all self-aware beings.

Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

He made us. He formed our bodies, our souls, and our spirits. In these verses are all three; body, spirit, and soul.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

1Thessalonians 5:23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He uses our spirit to see us from the inside.

Proverbs 20:27 The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly.

We are made self-aware and our soul is the seat of our self-identity and will and our spirit makes us aware of it, of God, and of all things. It is our understanding, our skills, our drives, our emotions, our yearnings.

It is sad that the atheist or doubter will question your testimony as to whether or not you are a credible witness for God’s existence. That was how I came to Christ, the mechanism He used, the testimony of others. I vacillated between atheism, happy to believe in any religion at all, and really, God just being irrelevant to my life or thinking. But, over time I saw the truth of Christianity in the lives of people around me.

No, it wasn’t because of someone screaming Bible verses at me on a street corner. It wasn’t from someone handing me a gospel tract. It was the testimony of Christians, filled with faith and goodness, relying completely on God for their very survival, trusting in Christ’s righteousness and not their own for eternal life. Their faith was real, and it took time but God impressed on me that reality until I accepted it myself and received Christ on March 19, 1986. It was a Wednesday evening I believe.

The question of whether or not God exists has been a subject of deep philosophical debate for thousands of years. But, even outside of our experience we know.

Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

The proof of God’s existence is all around us. Without God’s existence no reality makes sense for very long.

Ask yourself, if there was no God, then why is there something rather than nothing? Why is something as complex as life here in this space of earth? If God doesn’t exist why do I know that I am? Where did that come from, o’ wise one? How can we have this conversation?

The universe is finely tuned, so finely tuned that something as rare and fragile as life can live in it. Things like the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons, nuclear efficiency of fusion from hydrogen to helium, the density parameter, the cosmological constant, and a bunch of other intelligent sounding stuff make many scientists insist that the universe is just so and because of that you, me, and that little chipmunk you saw on your deck this morning can exist.

Other scientists invent all sorts of nonsensical things to counteract this belief. They will resurrect the multidimensions of the occult of the late 1800s which impacted theoretical physics then and say there is a multiverse, many universes where things are different and anything is possible. I might even be handsomer, wealthier, and smarter on one of them, in their imagination only of course.

But, the universe is fine-tuned. Now, how does something get tuned? Have you ever seen a radio tune itself? Never mind. In today’s world I suppose that is possible. But, at some point a person was involved; an engineer or someone to tune that radio. How do you think the universe was tuned so close and exact? Who did it? Who maintains it? We all know that if you leave your car in the driveway without maintaining it for thirty years the tires will rot and it will become undriveable. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all things fall apart. Oh, and there is this;

Colossians 1:17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Scientific papers have expressed alarm at the harmful mutations produced in each generation of people. One of them was entitled, “Contamination of the Genome by Very Slightly Deleterious Mutations: Why Have We Not Died 100 Times Over?” But, we’re here, our biology is preserved, life goes on and the planet is not yet cold and dead.

Again, I say ask yourself, if there was no God, then why is there something rather than nothing? Why is something as complex as life here in this space of earth? If God doesn’t exist why do I know that I am? Why is the universe so finely tuned as to permit us to exist?

You know, our government has spent millions of dollars searching for extraterrestrials, life on other planets, even microbial. They will continue to do so but will probably never find it. The scientific community has a hunger, a lust, to overthrow God. They are searching for microbes and water on Mars.

In the Rosetta Mission they recently learned that water in space can be vastly different than water on earth so they feel confident in at least admitting that our water didn’t come from comets. But, they will keep searching, hoping to be able to drive the nail in the coffin for belief in the God of the Bible.

There are two other things that scream the truth of the existence of God. One is the very desperate desire to prove beyond all doubt that He does not. Let me read you part of the short religious history of man that God has provided in Romans.

Romans 1:19 ¶ Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And in another context an ancient warning;

Isaiah 66:4 I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.

Remember what King David thought of atheists in about 1000 BC.

Psalm 14:1 « To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. » The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

Finally, evolutionary biologists admit an astounding thing. Belief in God, according to some of them, is hard-wired into the human brain. A neuroscientist and the author of several books, Andrew Newberg, wrote a book entitled Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. He is called a neurotheologist, studying how religious belief and prayer affect the brain.

On page 129 he wrote, “…evolution has adopted this machinery, and has favored the religious capabilities of the religious brain because religious belief and behaviors turn out to be good for us in profound and pragmatic ways.”

As evolutionists often do he refers to evolution as he does in other places with natural selection almost as a god in itself rather than just a process or a mechanism by which new species of dog, cat, or deer are produced by environmental stresses or opportunities or human cross-breeding efforts (There are more than two dozen scientific definitions of species.) The fact is that all of the genetic information necessary for a creature to adapt to its environment are present within the creature’s DNA and no dog ever became a cat and no alligator ever became a trout. But, Newberg, like other of his ilk, refer to evolution as a sort of inert god who unfeelingly adopts and favors in the passage I quoted. In a preceding page he refers to natural selection as not tolerating something. So, it is almost humorous to see how these kinds of scientists use language, at the least, in a very interesting way.

Susan Mazur, a science writer and journalist who doesn’t appear to be a fundamental Baptist (said in a tongue-in-cheek manner), wrote in her book The Altenberg 16: An Expose’ of the Evolution Industry that, “Evolutionary science is as much about posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying as it is about actual scientific theory.” (v)

So, to summarize, if you want to look outside of your own experience for proof that God exists I suggest starting with life. There are many other topics we could talk about that prove or at least suggest His existence but for brevity sake let’s review the points I’ve made.

One, there is something rather than nothing and since space dust did not create itself then something or someone did. Two, life could not have begun here on earth and probably not on some distant planet by chance. Some intelligent being had to create it. Three, self-awareness and consciousness imply a reality greater than the physical universe. Four, we are apparently “hard-wired” to believe in God. It is part of our make-up.

We believe in God because He has communed with our spirit so that we can. We experience Him in our prayer and in the answers to it, the way the Bible speaks to us, in the truth found in it, the way He molds and changes us by our reading and hearing it read, by the reality arounds us that is confirmed in the Bible, and by His miraculous intervention in our lives.

[1] Chandra Wickramasinghe & Robert Bauval, Cosmic Womb: The Seeding of Planet Earth (Rochester, Vermont:Bear & Co., 2017), Kindle ed., chap. 1.

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libertariantaoist · 5 years