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diagonal-queen · 2 months

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The ADA as your roommates

♡ characters: Atsushi Nakajima, Dazai Osamu, Kunikida Doppo, Yosano Akiko, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Naomi Tanizaki, Ranpo Edogawa, Yukichi Fukuzawa

♡ synopsis: How good are the ADA at being roommates?

♡ cw: This is a post born out of medication-induced sleeplessness and months of pent up unfiltered fury directed at my shitty, shitty housemates. Some of that resentment may shine through in the headcanons. Also naughty words, NSFW themes with Dazai

note: hey y'all. i know it's not a request but it's the best i've got right now. law school and depression are kicking my ass. y'know that meme with the tiny man, and then the two buff dudes start beating the shit out of him? that's law school and depression with me. as always apologies for errors and i hope you enjoy x

Atsushi:

Help he's so sweet and awkward all the time?? Always gives you a little wave or a smile and nod when you pass each other in the halls

He buys candies and chocolates and things and leave them in a bowl on the table for people to take if they want :')

When his roommates feels sad he takes the time to hang out with them and help them through whatever problem they're having

In the morning when he comes into the kitchen to make breakfast he's all yawny and has a scruffy bedhead and it's SO cute

He doesn't do it consciously, but on occasion Atsushi will fall asleep on the couch, and even more occasionally he'll transform into Byakko in his sleep. You get used to it after a while, but you can't really invite friends over unless you know Atsushi is in his room or out of the house T-T

But he really is so sweet. If you bring someone over they develop a crush on him immediately, but of course he's oblivious. After they leave he turns to you and is like 'aw your friend is nice' (they were hardcore flirting with him)

If he ever has an issue with you or the house, he gets very nervous when bringing it up because he doesn't wanna cause any conflict (you could be smashing the plates on the ground every day and he'd be like 'hey so i'm super duper sorry to bother you like i really hate to nag but-')

My mans. Is doing. His BEST

Dazai:

Screw you.

Holy shit this guy is an absolute nightmare to live with. he'll drive you crazy within the week just because of how *little* he does around the house

He doesn't clean his dishes. He doesn't buy stuff for the house. He doesn't do a DAMN thing.

Preferably, if you're gonna be living with him, you'll also wanna bring Kunikida. He has his own issues but at least then there's a balance between a chore-driven man and the embodiment of sloth, the deadly sin

He will stumble through the front door at 3am with unkempt clothes and the stink of alcohol on him. and he won't bother trying to be subtle or quiet either. Just crashes around until he pukes on the floor and falls asleep on the couch

At least he flushes (more than I can say for my housemates /gen)

He drinks in the house, and leaves bottles everywhere. The entire place is damn near bordering a safety hazard because of all the glass

Tries to cook but absolutely can't do it- he sets fires, ruins the kitchen, etc etc. It wouldn't be unreasonable for you to assume that all takeout packaging and pizza boxes you find strewn around the house belongs to him

He's fully up for a secret hookup if you're into that, though. Just give his door a knock after 11pm and you're in

Kunikida:

This guy is both a saint and a total pain in the arse

On one hand, he does his chores and he does them literally perfectly. Is there even a perfect way to wash the dishes? There is now. Kunikida is here

On the other hand you can kiss your hopes of getting out of your own chores goodbye. This man makes a schedule. a chore chart. a system. he pulls out the whole nine yards

Thanks a lot DAZAI

Anyway, he has his merits. Kunikida brings it upon himself to bring up the slack (even if he doesn't want to) because he can't stand living in a messy space, so your home is always spick and span

He organises weekly or monthly meetings to discuss home affairs (he's a real Louis Moriarty, he will also make you omelettes)

Kunikida is also kind of a walking talking alarm clock- he wakes you up in the morning if you're not up by a certain time, and also gives you a lights out time at night when he deems it bedtime

He pretends that this is just a part of routine and etiquette and whatever- in reality, he just really cares about your health and wants you to get enough sleep and keep a consistent routine

He also encourages you to go out if you're an introvert because "staying inside all the time is bad for you". Damnit Kunikida

Yosano:

Oh she's so great to live with

Every time you run into her you two always end up bitching to each other about something. She's the ultimate bitch buddy

If you get sick she takes on the role of home doctor, quarantines you in your room, and tends to you until you're well again. Or, if she doesn't like you, she just chops you up and gets it over with lmao

Yosano drinks a lot though. You eventually get used to falling asleep to the sounds of crashing, whirring chainsaws and maniacal laughter from the next room over

She takes AGES in the bathroom, so you really ought to keep a bucket on hand or something just in case. Like this woman will be in there for hours on end (RIP your water bill)

She also always takes up the phone line because she's a lil social butterfly (RIP your phone bill) but she'll also take your phone calls for you if you don't like talking on the phone so there's that

Yosano is really sweet but she always leaves her stuff laying around. Like there'll just be patient portfolios and medical tools in the living room?? Girl

Some nights she comes home with a bigass pizza in her hand and a bottle of wine in the other, and you know you're in for a GOOD time

If you ever need some spare cash she'll give it to you but if you take too long to pay her back she WILL chop you up so beware

Tanizaki:

He's a perfectly adequate roommate.

In all honesty there's barely anything to say about Tanizaki. He does his chores, respects his roommates, helps them if they need help, etc etc. He's just a real stand up guy!

Though I HC that Tanizaki gets sick pretty easily, so he can sometimes be seen wandering the house with a pale face wrapped in a blanket making sad boy noises

He gives you lifts as long as you're able to provide gas money (or McDonalds, either works as payment)

He doesn't usually accept invitations to go out drinking, but he's more than happy to grab a coffee with you if time permits it. He's just a responsible guy 😌 (if you don't have time he'll also bring you a coffee because he's just that nice)

Tanizaki always has backup stuff in case you guys run out of anything. This man basically has a bunker's worth of extra supplies for literally no reason, but hey free stuff!

He likes to make dinner for you sometimes, and you guys eat together and chat (it's something he grew used to while living with Naomi)

He's always happy to lend you his stuff if you ever run out of things (because of Naomi he even keeps backup menstrual stuff on hand, so you vagina owners are all safe)

You guys definitely do face masks and manicures together too

Naomi:

Naomi might, literally, be the roommate ever

She does her chores, she keeps quiet at night, she lets you know if she's bringing people over. Her only flaw is that she's always talking about her brother. Naomi please

She's also very vocal whenever her brother's in the house. What are they doing ffs

She bakes cupcakes and cookies and stuff each week for her roommates

She also brings around her friends sometimes for movie nights, and if you come into the living room she invites you to watch movies with her and her friends

Naomi honestly invites you to everything. Parties, gatherings, hanging out with friends- she's a true extrovert and will adopt you if you're an introvert, you have no choice sry :/

She also decorates the place really well- in all honesty she really did miss her calling as an interior designer because miss girl makes your home look CLASS

Naomi is the roommate you go to when you're preparing for a date and you need help with your outfit or nerves. She's like the ultimate wingwoman fr

She also buys incense and air freshener so your house smells nice as FUCK

Ranpo:

He's almost as bad as Dazai, aside from the fact that he can respect rules, and so (although begrudgingly and with a lot of whining) he actually does his chores

If you all live together he steals all of the candy Atsushi left out for everyone :(

Basically lives in his pyjamas. He gets home from work and immediately gets changed into his jammies

He also hogs the TV and won't let you watch Netflix until his own shows are finished :( and he also judges you for your taste in TV regardless of what it is

Ranpo never cooks for himself or you, but he LOVES when you cook for him. It makes him feel so special

You guys also get takeout all the time. You make a tradition of it and get different stuff on different days. It becomes a part of the autism routine and now you're stuck wasting your money (haha)

You also have to take him places and accompany him everywhere because he knows fuck all about taking the train. You basically live life around Ranpo's (annoying spontaneous) schedule

He uses too much soap in the shower and gets bubbles all over the bathroom, but at least he smells nice?

He does all the house paperwork, so silver lining and all

Fukuzawa:

He's lowkey kind of scary 😔

Like, he's a really respectful roommate who does his chores and pays mind to his living companions, but he also just like barely comes out of his room or talks to anyone.

Plus, detective daddy kinda has a massive case of RBF which really isn't helping

That being said, he will make tea for you if you feel blue, and he'll sit in your room and silently listen to you complain about your issues for hours. The PATIENCE of this man

He randomly does really sweet stuff for you without saying a word about it. Replaces broken stuff, makes you pancakes in the morning etc.

Fukuzawa tends to work late hours so he's often awake late in the night. He enjoys when you keep him company on your sleepless nights, and will give you a blanket if you end up falling asleep in his bed or on the couch

He's also super neat and never touches your stuff without asking <3

He knocks on your bedroom door and the bathroom door every single time, just in case, and he never enters unless you give him the heads up

His own door is never locked in case you need him too. Or in case there's a break-in. Good luck to that person fr

taglist~ ♡ @gettinshiggywithit, @fyodorhatr, @flower-of-darkness, @bejeweledgirl, @kokoenjiandco, @pinkiipeachiikeen, @call-me-albie, @sayyestoheaven00

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hatsukeii · 29 days

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"WE ARE THE BLOOD IN OUR...WAS IT VEINS OR ARTERIES AGAIN?" / T. KUROO

PROLOGUE | M.LIST | NEXT. |

warning(s): a very offhanded, not serious mention of suicide, also ochem and bio!

wc: ~1.0k

When Kuroo Tetsuro sees another glaring "2" that bleeds into the white paper of his chemistry exam, he has to consciously restrain his fingers from curling up around the cover and crumpling it until it is unrecognisable to the naked eye.

"Great work, Kuroo, as expected. 84%, keep it up!"

He smiles at his teacher, only customarily, with a grin that presses tight against his lips to hide the grinding of his teeth.

"Yeah...thanks."

For the second time in his life, somebody; some monster, or formidable foe, has pushed his head into the ground and risen from the dirt in this subject. From the front of the room, Kuroo slams his paper into the desk face down, a thud sounding from the slapping of paper on wood. His head snaps around his shoulder, eyes scanning his classmates behind him for a gleam in someone's eyes, or a face that tries to stay still, but trembles at the apples of its cheeks. Chatter about specific questions drones on, heads bury themselves into clammy hands, pens tick as impatient thumbs tap anxiously at the clicker shafts. An air of dread and nihilism paints the room grey, white lab lights buzzing and flickering more like that of a morgue as hopes and dreams are slowly, but surely, dissected with the flick of a pen that etches numbers into a test paper.

He should be glad, after all, he's in second place! Just barely grazing the top spot of the cohort! The education system is largely flawed anyways! Life is not a grade! He is still worthy of merit!

Kuroo's mind races for consolation, only to find sarcastic, half-hearted sentiments plucked from inspirational TED talks watched in his showers, and mandatory wellbeing assemblies enforced by the school to prevent students from finding the urge to launch themselves off bridges. He rips through the pages of his exam, picking at every calculation error, and missed argument, and misused theory that emerges from his work. He can almost hear their laughter, screechy and squeaky as they wiggle and twist on the paper, before shooting out of the page to laugh a little louder in his face.

"Guys, just take a look over here, since almost everyone messed up drawing this diagram. LDPE is supposed to be branched, but I still need to be able to read how many carbons and hydrogens are on each chain."

The projector ahead flicks on to reveal a perfect diagram, branches and webs of polyethylene connected neatly to one another, carbons and hydrogens labelled between each spot. Kuroo stares at his own diagram, a mess of lines and scribbled letters, all rendered futile beneath the ink red cross of judgement. He bets that whoever beat him wouldn't have gotten the words "illegible" stamped beside their polyethylene diagram. Wait, is that an S, or a 5?

From four rows behind, a pair of eyes train onto a sticky note stuck on a page of the exam. Just beneath the outline that houses the same polyethylene diagram on the projector screen, a labelled neuron is sprawled across the fluorescent yellow of the note. You rip the note off, clicking your tongue at the loss of a mark on the next question, before sticking the neuron diagram into a lined notebook. Peeling a new sticky note from your notepad, a pen spins between the joints of your fingers, rolling in steady backs and forths along your hand. You bite down on the hard plastic of the clicker shaft, flipping through the rest of the pages as you wiggle the pen up and down with your teeth to ease your bubbling annoyance. Seriously, who even cares about the difference between "suppose that" and "assume that" anyways?

A flick of the page with your hand flips the test back on its cover, and you slap the fresh sticky note onto the circled "1" that graces the top of the page, before scribbling the frontal lobe of a brain on the fluorescent green square in preparation for your lunchtime duty.

author's note:

to say that i haven't been either reader or kuroo would be a lie because you bet your ASS i am arguing for anything and everything i can get in an exam paper.... ANYWHO welcome to the new series!!! I've decided to make this into a series because of both the poll and personal planning preference LOL don't hate me pls but i hope u enjoy!!!

tags: @staraxiaa @iiwaijime @hiraethwa @akaakeis @wyrcan @chuuya-brainrot @catsoupki @bailey-reeds @fiannee @cupidsblonde @she-lovesmyheartshapedsunglasses @kuroppiii

ok love u guys see u soon bye bye

#kuroo x reader #kuroo tetsuro x reader #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu crack #haikyuu kuroo #kuroo tetsuro #kuroo tetsuro fluff #kuroo tetsuro imagine #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu scenarios #hq kuroo #kuroo testuro #kuroo tetsurou #kuroo fluff #haikyuu #haikyuu!!

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txttletale · 2 years

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socialism: elysian and scientific

[whispering to you in a movie theater in between mouthfuls of salted caramel popcorn--other moviegoers who just want to watch we bought a zoo (2011) are glaring at us but i don’t care]

so in 1880 friedrich engels wrote a snappy little number called ‘socialism: utopian & scientific’. it’s a foundational marxist text and one i’d recommend to everybody--and i think some of the ideas in it are incorporated and built on in disco elysium in really interesting ways.

socialism: utopian & scientific does a few things. first, it lays out the ideas of the 18th century utopian socialists and explains the societal context in which they developed their ideas--and the core idea of the dialectic development of ideas. engels harshly critiques the enlightenment's conception of the history of thought as a history of individual thinkers attempting to capture an eternal, immutable corpus of truth and justice--he describes this worldview thusly (emphasis mine):

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

and of course it jumped out to me playing disco elysium that this is exactly how human development works the world of elysium--innocences are singularly world-changing individuals who personally establish systems and ideologies within their lifetimes:

dolores dei in particular is a pretty clear synechdoche (both narratively and, because of how innocences work, diegetically) for the bourgeois revolutions of the enlightenment--her followers, the moralists, are clearly analogous to the real-world post-enlightenment liberal international system. the “kingdom of conscience”, is, i think, also a pretty heavy-handed reference to engels’ sardonic use of the “kingdom of reason” to describe the empty promises of the 18th century bourgeois revolutions:

Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

so--moralists are liberals, that’s not exactly groundbreaking. the innocentic system is a literalization of the metaphysical vision of the history of ideas--that’s interesting, but it doesn’t really say anything in and of itself. so let’s go a little deeper. if engels doesn’t think philosophers, are accessing a nebulous immaterial well of absolute truth, what does he think--well, he cites hegelian dialectics, a system he and marx develop into material dialectics and historical materialism. what the fuck are hegelian dialectics--well there’s a lot of really long fucking books that answer that, but let me just quote engels here:

In his system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and developmen

hegel posits the history of mankind as the history of ideas evolving in concert with one another--the ideas of, say, the enlightenment weren’t just waiting in the aether during the age of feudalism, fully formed until some singular genius could grasp them--instead they are the product of the ideas before them interacting through the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. this is dialectics--the idea that progress broadly takes the form of contradicting forces generating a novel force through their interaction.

now, engels identifies one key flaw in hegel, which is that he’s still idealist--he is putting the ideas first in this historical model, positing them as drivers of history rather than products of it. engels then goes on to lay out the fundamentals of historical materialism, which is the application of dialectics to a material view of history--when engels says “all past history [...] was the history of class struggles”, this is what he means, that historical development is the process of the creation and resolution of contradictions between modes of production and exchange (how stuff gets made and who gets it and why).

[i take someone elses double gulp soda out of their hand and slurp it loudly, ignoring their obvious outrage]

okay that’s all cool but what does this have to do with beloved crpg disco elysium (2019)? well, for a start it takes a very distinctively historical materialist worldview when it comes to its own history--the history of revachol is very much the history of class struggle, from the revolution to the strike--and the idea that the elements from which future society will arise are already present with current society is a recurring theme:

the future is change--society is in motion, contradictions must resolve, the world is dialectic--and the moralists are in opposition to this, desperate to maintain the status quo, to maintain contradictions perfectly suspended forever. from the dialectic point of view, moralism in disco elysium is the quest for no future at all:

as engels explains, a dialectic view of history means that you need to understand the past if you want to understand the present, because the present is born from elements of the past:

From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself.

for the moralists, the past is something to be forgotten, cast aside for an eternal unchanging present. which is interesting because in disco elysium there happens to be a global world-threatening force which is forgetting the past: the god damn pale. the pale is the accumulation of all human history into something flat and meaningless, the detachment of history from its context--the pale is the future, past, and present not as dialectical continuum of cause and effect but as meaningless incoherent chatter. the pale is the moralist’s view of history made real global force--

--and it has the potential to destroy everything--

and this is what moralism is. engels says of metaphysical philosophy:

In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.

by understanding the world in repose, as a dead thing, moralism is killing it. by discarding the past it is creating a debt that can’t be repaid. and what brings this all together is this bit of information from the game’s concept art:

innocences create the fucking pale. what they’re doing, their immanentized personificaton of the kingdom-of-reason model of history, is destroying the future. very literally, the non-dialectic view of the status quo--the quest for the right ideas to ensure endless stagnant stillness--is killing the world. the man who killed dolores dei was right:

we were supposed to come up with this ourselves. so--all that done--what’s the point of this post? what do i think any of this proves, other than that i and the DE writers are fancy communists who read books? well, my read on it at least: the pale is the destruction of history for a purpose--because if we do not understand history, we will think we cannot change it. we will wait for the great people to do it for us--we will wait for them to invent a future to live in and we will wait until we die. we are supposed to come up with this ourselves. as engels says:

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.

liberalism tells us that the future is unknowable, untouchable, that all we can do is wait for it to arrive. socialism--and disco elysium--tell us that the future is here, now, that everything we need to build it ourselves is already in the world. the second hardest part of that is realizing it--the hardest part is doing it.

[i am dragged bodily out of the theater by my ankles, frantically snatching snacks out of other people’s hands as i go. for the road]

#disco elysium #marxism #this is NOT comprehensive or well structured i just had to get these thoughts out in writing or id explode

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thelampisaflashlight · 4 months

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Cryptid Biology Season 2: Jersey Devil

[Previous entry: Here. Omega needs a break. Writing sex as a comedy of errors and nothing more. Cockblocked by an irrigation system.] Below the cut.

Omega would like to say that he's been living it up since his retirement, that he's been lazing about the abbey like an aged tomcat, coming and going as he pleases, but very rarely is that the case... especially not when the band is home from touring.

Injuries and illnesses seem to crop up like daisies in spring these days, and the quintessence ghoul finds his presence needed in the medical wing more often than not, due to both his seniority among the staff, and his talents as a healer.

He doesn't hate his job by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be quite draining, and he often finds himself in need of a little tender loving care...

Unfortunately, it has been kind of difficult to get laid given most of the people hitting on him are his patients.

A demon he may be, but Omega is a consummate professional and takes his oath as a physician very seriously, and part of said oath is -albeit not in these exact words- not to fuck the people under your care.

Of course, one might debate the merits and morals of keeping such a vow outside of office hours...

After all, there are no rules in regards to what he gets up to outside of the infirmary, just that he maintain the decorum expected of his station within the church... But keeping up appearances be damned, Omega needs some fucking ass already.

It feels unnatural for him to have gone for so long without getting laid, he's so pent up he thinks he might go feral if this goes on any longer, and jacking off after work just isn't cutting it these days.

Back when he was in the band himself, it wasn't hard to find a willing body to get his rocks off with, but now everyone looks at him like he's some unobtainable hardass who only exists to tell them to eat right and to stop fucking fruit -Aeon- ...but he's not!

He's perfectly obtainable!

He's always ready to fuck, he's got a fucking PhD in fucking, he's a certified whore!

And people these days just don't respect that!

Where's Alpha to grab him by the throat and show him who's boss before he flips the script and fucks him raw?

When is Mist gonna pop out of the woodworks and peg him until he cries??

Honestly, even Special is looking like a snack now, but he knows better than to get anywhere near the odd ghoul when his even stranger partner, Cowbell, is lurking about.

What he needs someone he doesn't have history with, someone who's willing to let him go deep and-

"I'll bite." a slightly raspy voice offers from behind, making him jump.

A small woman in board shorts and a red tank top with "Jersey Devils" plastered across the chest peers up at him, gesturing with an open can of ginger ale she has clasped in her right hand, "Could be a little tit for tat; You want sex, I wanna see your dick."

Omega is stunned.

"You... What?"

The woman shrugs, sipping her drink.

"You're the one out here muttering about needing to get laid, and I've got nothing better to do." she says, "So unless your standards have jumped way up in the last ten seconds -which if they have, fuck you- you can either take it or leave it. The offer expires when I finish my soda, so you gotta act quickly."

"...I... Who are you?" he flusters, "I was saying that out loud??"

"I didn't ask for your name, so you don't need mine either." she hums, swirling her drink, "I think I have about two more sips-"

"Okay, okay- Fuck..." Omega pinches the bridge of his nose, fuck him and his desperation, "I... Yeah, yeah, let's... Let's do this."

"Fantastic."

"Where-" he starts to ask, and the woman simply grabs his hand.

"I know a place, come on."

...As it would turn out, the "place" the woman had in mind was the abbey's hedge maze.

"It takes most people an hour to get to the center, but I'll show you a secret." she says, moving along the far side of the maze's outer wall, "See that rock there?"

She gestures to a large, pillar of stone.

"Watch this."

With a startling ease, she picks up the rock and sets it off to the side.

"Before you act too amazed, heh, 'a-mazed'..." she shakes her head at her own joke, and then knocks on the stone, which makes a hollow thumping sound, "About two thirds of the rocks in this maze aren't real, otherwise the upkeep would be a real bitch..."

"How did you-"

She shushes him.

"I will not be taking questions at this time." she says, tugging him into the maze and sliding the rock back into position, "If we follow this trail, we'll be in the middle in five minutes."

Omega blinks, unsure of what to do with this new information, but follows her regardless.

Sure enough, they make it to the middle in roughly six minutes -the slight delay being the result of the woman pausing to pluck some leaves off of one of the hedges, because they were, "Uneven." and stuffing them into her pockets- and, honestly, Omega isn't sure what's in store for him now that they've arrived, because he certainly wasn't expecting this.

"Alright, looks like the coast is clear-" she announces, beginning to take off her shirt, which, although Omega knew this was coming, still makes him startle a bit, unprepared to see tits so soon.

...He gets over this initial shock quickly, and begins undressing himself when he sees how quickly the shorts come off, revealing light blue panties that seem ever so slightly too small...

"So why here?" he asks as she leads him over to the grass, "Not that I'm complaining, it's just... an interesting choice."

"It's private," she says, laying herself down on the lawn, she seems oddly relaxed, "but anyone could find us at any minute, and I've learned that's something I like."

Omega kicks off his pants.

"I see..." he hums, "What else do you like?"

"Men who don't ask so many questions." she teases as he kneels between her thighs, "Come on then, take what you want."

And he does.

He plays with her, all of her, from her mouth on down to her thighs, he runs his fingers over every sensitive part he can find, watching as the cotton grows a shade darker with every swipe of his skilled across the fabric.

He presses a kiss to the moles on her inner thigh and leaves bite marks in places he knows must elicit pain and pleasure in the same motion, and he keeps going until-

"...Let me see it."

Omega is just about to take himself out of his boxers when he hears a gasp-

"I'M SO SORRY!" a sister of sin squeals, reeling back in horror along with her friends, who all shriek and run off at the sight before them.

He wants to yell something back, but instead he looks back at the woman beneath him, who gives him a look that's less ashamed and more...

"Come on, big fella, I said I want to see it."

Fuck.

"You really want to continue-"

She hooks her legs around his waist, pulling him down, "I said what I said. Don't make me repeat myself."

Welp.

Decidedly unperturbed, Omega reaches down to slip her panties down to about mid thigh, pushing her legs back away from him to remove them the rest of the way, and proceeds to finish taking his dick out.

"For the record, I'm a grower, not a shower..."

The woman looks down, staring at his cock.

"Purple." she says with a giggle, "Nice."

Omega blushes, a bit embarrassed.

"It's cute."

He groans, ears flicking backwards.

"It doesn't have plates or scales, so that's a bonus... and it's not a tentacle..." she sighs, then slips her hand down to part her folds, "Let's see what surprises you have in store."

Plates... scales... tentacles...

Okay, so she's been with a ghoul before.

A couple ghouls from the sounds of it.

That makes her reaction a bit less...

It bothers him less knowing that somehow.

"No tentacles or fancy plates, but I do have a little trick up my sleeve I think you might like-"

Bea limps into her four o'clock staff meeting, soaking wet, and wobblier than a newborn deer, a sight which Mountain commits to memory as she drops down in the seat beside him.

She smells like sweat, freshly cut grass, and a subtler scent he recognizes as one of his fellow ghouls, but not one of his current bandmates.

"Did you fall in one of the fountains on your way here?" he whispers, nudging her with his elbow.

"Did you set the timer on the sprinklers this morning?" she asks, ignoring his question.

"I did, why?"

Bea inhales deeply.

"I got wet in two ways because of you, today, expect my revenge to be swift and completely disproportionate."

"Huh?"

#lamp writes #shitghosting #nameless ghouls #omega ghoul #ghost band #the band ghost #ghost bc #ghost band oc #sibling of sin oc #sibling of sin #mountain ghoul #Cryptid Biology 101 #that's what I'm tagging this now I guess

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theomnicode · 6 days

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Hello! What do you think about how the society in OPM accepts that King is the most powerful being in the world? While Saitama is hinted at what may become a danger to society if his strength were to become known? Considering that King has (accidentally and through his own fault) stolen Saitama's merits?

Sorry this one took a bit to answer, I had other business to attend to. This one is another long piece, but I dropped a tl;dr at the end lol.

Honestly though? I think it's perceptional bias.

Perception bias is a broad term used to describe different situations in which we perceive inaccuracies in our environment. It is a type of cognitive bias that occurs when we subconsciously form assumptions or draw conclusions based on our beliefs, expectations, or emotions.

There are several subtypes: Implicit bias: individuals hold attitudes towards people, or associate stereotypes with them, without being aware of this. Fundamental attribution error: individuals tend to blame their failings on circumstances around them, but consider that others are responsible for their shortcomings. Selective perception: expectations about people or situations affect perception.

King is revered as a strong hero and so people would accept and expect him to have strong abilities. Child Emperor pictures these abilities and describes them to King. (Cpt 152, Check) King is also tall, large and mysterious man who somehow exudes a strong aura of being strong willed, capable and a just person. But the public does not know him well enough to actually see through their bias: A physically weak and anxious man who just tries to live his life in peace, but who has heart of gold, wise beyond his years and incredible sense of justice.

Yet despite all this, I worry for King a lot, because the cognitive bias working against him is too strong, almost unnatural. It makes little sense about why this false image is so strong, considering he nor Saitama have THAT many actually proven feats on record or even publically observed. I mean, Saitama literally destroyed a meteor and got accused for it and killed Sea King and the public turned against him...and yet none of those actual, legitimate feats are being exaggerated to this degree like Charanko describes them as in Chapter 192: Level up.

Charanko's examples are so utterly ludicrous without a single shred of actual evidence that the utter shock being told they were lies of it was enough for him to at least start shaking off that cognitive bias and question his perception and seeking out the actual truth. The guy is completely overlooked as just being a weak nobody comic relief character archetype, but he is strong willed, like when he had the guts to attack Garou in direct confrontation.

But I mean, look at this thing, this is completely absurd. Where is the entirety of OPM people's critical thinking skills?

Who in their right mind would seriously believe rumours like solar system destroying level of bomb with a bonus black hole from some rando dude on the internet? Or King not having even been born yet, somehow being the second coming of christ itself?

Plus there is only one goddamn mythology piece in this entire manga that even closely fits the bill of a human(oid) character's birth being foreshadowed and that is OPM's God's mural in a place where literally nobody has seen it before.

Who the F would even be crazy enough to imagine up and spread such a rumour that King, of all people, is actually OPM God who legit nobody even knows exists? So absurd. :D

(Above image is from volume redraw)

It's such a malicious and cruel rumour too, capable of sowing distrust and discord in the entire Hero system when people stop believing in their heroes because they think the entire system is a lie. And they would blame King for it, thinking he's to blame for the lies because he broke their idea of an hero fantasy.

The only hero I can think who actually knows about OPM God is Blast, but he's not malicious. Zero motive whatsoever.

I heavily suspect Psykos for spreading it because this kind of rumour could only come up straight from the source itself. Because she's an alarmist (Cpt 175, Visitor) and OPM God has her in his backpocket to emotionally manipulate. Fubuki might uncover some more information to discover the truth, but I'd take it with grain of salt because Psykos appears to be under some kind of mental illness, possibly psychosis, as Fubuki has pointed out that she had never been a tough girl and something changed her. But I'm no detective and I'm not void of any bias, so here's a sherlock holmes quote:

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?"

Honestly, the magic man in the sky is prolly doing it, we just don't know how because there's not enough evidence, only context clues.

-*-

Bang on the other hand, cannot shake off his bias even if his heart is in the right place. But he was just directly told face to face by King himself that he is weak and he still refuses to believe it because he stubborny keeps believing in his own biases, thinking he's always correct.

Old people do oftentimes think they're always correct don't they? Because they're oh so old and wise and experienced. He does the same thing with Garou and Garou won't accept it.

-*-

Anyways, I worry for King's flailing mental health for reasons because he's thinking about self-harm and he wants to unalive himself by monster hand because he thinks it's already Game over for him.

The cognitive bias around people's minds is actually and ironically, shielding him from the cascading effects of the mass public outcry since he's not ready to face it yet. He lacks willpower, that mental fortitude, to withstand that kind of attack on his psyche. He might do it if people suddenly just snapped out of that cognitive bias.

Some might even say... that he's the cognitive bias itself. King can bullshit so effectively because he's can literally project bullshit out of his every orifice if he needs to. If say, he needs to protect himself or other people. And as long as people keep their cognitive biases, it would help him sustain the image that he's strong and not be hated by everyone if they suddenly snapped out of their cognitive bias. So you could say that...the cognitive bias is helping him survive and protecting him.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

Look, they're instantly second guessing themselves. Seems to be working very effectively. And Atomic Samurai did some incredible mental gymnastics to convince himself that just by sitting there, King just casually cut the apple even when he saw nothing and nothing literally happened in front his very eyes. (Chapter 189, Blade test.)

At least he has Saitama at his back, because Saitama has a bullshit radar a mile wide and Saitama believes he can change to be stronger. He respects King's opinion to do what is right despite knowing he lacks real power to be that force of change himself. He does not appear at a glance to show implicit bias towards King. He originally saved the guy just because he needed saving and then did it again, despite not knowing a thing about King, aside from the assumption that he must be a strong hero, even if he was asking for information to form an opinion. And then tries to dig deeper into that and questions the logic of King running away and showing lack of bias with his objectivity. (Chapter 38, King)

So as long as Saitama believes in King, he probably won't come to any real harm. But Saitama also has to believe in his own ability to actually help King if the need arises and act upon it, because otherwise it'll just be 166 chapter redux in the absolute worst case scenario.

-*-

So, about perceptive biases towards Saitama, they come out in negative light by default unless proven wrong by him directly.

I'll let the following panel demonstrate. (Chapter 55.7, Sense, vol 20 Extra)

The judge became immediately biased without any reason and attacked his integrity and pretended to know all about him when he actually knows nothing, despite this being ONLY a hero suit contest, not a character judgement and ignoring Saitama's explanation to why he likes to wear what he wears.

The judge won't acknowledge what he saw with his plain eyes as he refuses to believe what happened, Genos is showing different kind of bias because he too, is biased in favour of Saitama and thinks Saitama should win a hero suit contest just because he's strong, despite objectively having a really bland and cheap outfit even HE didn't like. Like a cosplay contest gone wrong if the judge just picks their favourite without any objectivity to their actual suit or performance and what is the point of the judging in the first place. Other people, despite cheering him on...show their true facets with their snide negative comments with their leaps of logic, attempting to tear him down for his good deed and nobody criticises them.

Now for a different kind of perception bias. (Chapter 16, Passed the exam)

Chewing gum might on a first glance, seem very disrespectful when towards authority figures who want your full attention because it inherently implies that the person is too busy chewing gum rather than paying attention, thus creating bias.

However the act of chewing gum in a situation where one wants to study and retain information has been seen as beneficial by studies.

Turns out, chewing gum may have more effects than simply making your breath smell good, or giving you something to do when bored. In fact, some studies show chewing gum can actually increase feelings of relaxation, increase attention, lower stress levels, and improve memory.

Saitama has shown even at the early stages of his teenager years that he DOES actually possess the attention span to study...as long as the subject actually interests him and he has selective interests. Despite all the chatter around him, he's able to tune them out and focus on his study. Give him something really dry and boring that just won't seem to stick and his attention span will waver, because attention is a resource to be managed.

Things like studying psychology can have their humble beginnings often in the interest in what affects human health, because personality types who are keen about bettering others like knowing what makes people tick in order to help them.

So it can be assumed that Saitama, knowing he has a poor attention span in boring seminars but has studied the subject before, anticipated this and simply brought chewing gum to help him focus just a bit more. Unfortunately, Snek became hostile to him and Saitama completely lost his focus and his attention wavered. This is how negative perception bias affects Saitama in his everyday life.

Another example of this selective attention span is where he watches the television because he's also interested in bettering the world as a whole, again because he likes helping other people and it brings him satisfaction. He often watches tv as an adult as well, to the point of doomscrolling. He even has Mob Psycho shirt on, a nod to ONE's other series to show that he's very empathic at his core. (Chapter 8.5, 200 yen, Vol 1 extra)

However, it is also shown that Saitama is incredibly sensitive to baseless judgement, hostility, bias and outside influence and he will get defensive and angry when faced with such and when challenged. (Meteor and Sea king fiasco) People like this who also have high moral integrity like Saitama has shown time to time again, also care great deal about their reputation in other's eyes, because it shows to them if they are doing a good job or not in their moralistic actions. Like a peer review.

Not getting any good feedback and instead met with various levels of hostility just conditions them to not try at all because they think it's their fault that everyone is against them. So Saitama early on has been faced with conditioning and now for instance, he thinks he just can't learn anything new even if he made an honest attempt. He has become insecure and self-critical and will think of himself in a negative light. (Stagnation and growth, chapter 76.) He has effectively build cognitive biases about himself and his true identity.

Here is Saitama attempting to unravel the cognitive bias around himself because he made a self-discovery. King, in his infinite wisdom, gives Saitama some objective perspective when Saitama immediately wants his second opinion about his perspective surrounding this new discovery. King, bless his heart, attempts to genuinely help Saitama but he misses the point of the discussion when Saitama was trying to see if he could bounce his ideas around, such as throwing a video game analogy to King that Saitama knows he SHOULD understand well. Saitama is just very poor at expressing his words due to his upbringing and loneliness and detatchment from emotions, especially without properly parsing it out first. He often thinks a lot louder than he seems to talk, which is why he's often misunderstood.

That is, unless he apparently connects on a deep level like with Genos and then the two of em could talk about anything and everything that comes to mind for days or until they run out of breath lmao. (Maji Drama CD vol 1, Saitama makeover)

King's perception bias towards Saitama is because he just does not know him well enough and his perspective is a bit skewed because of media influence that bring him comfort for his own emotional loneliness...because Saitama is always hung up about something or another because he has so much issues it hurts. King just does not see it or is not willing to believe "Super strong Saitama" could possibly have any issues since Saitama hides them well.

Saitama has far too much free time to think and ruminate, but his own cognitive biases stop him from seeing his true self without all the negativity surrounding him. The negativity of things such as his upbringing as a lonely boy who's sensitive to hostility. (Chapter 15.5, Brushing up, vol 2 extras)

-*-

Perception bias also serves another more...sinister purpose for Saitama. Psychological conditioning. There is potential evidence for deprivation of basic needs, conditioning for violence for protection and subliminal messages for suggestion, among other things. I won't go into details because I'm afraid of also potentially spoiling stuff, so I'll keep the suspense. :D

Here's maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid that explains about our intrinsical needs as human beings to have wellness in both body and mind.

Being deprived of all these needs is akin to mental torture. But so is facing all of the underlying issues at once via hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy if the patient is sufficiently dysfunctional in a societal setting like Saitama happens to be. Especially if the therapies are performed...poorly.

CBT has shown to be the most effective intervention for people exposed to adverse childhood experiences in the form of abuse or neglect Criticism of CBT sometimes focuses on implementations (such as the UK which may result initially in low quality therapy being offered by poorly trained practitioners. However, evidence supports the effectiveness of CBT for anxiety and depression. Evidence suggests that the addition of hypnotherapy as an adjunct to CBT improves treatment efficacy for a variety of clinical issues. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its symptoms have been shown to improve due to implementation of hypnotherapy, in both long and short term. As research continues, hypnotherapy is being more openly considered as an effective intervention for those with PTSD.

In short, in order to heal mentally, Saitama may need to face mental torture because he has such strong willpower and such strong mental barriers shielding his vulnerabilities on a basic primal need. He can essentially dip himself on lava and ignore the shock reaction from the extreme heat (Chapter 112, Sacrifice) and does not even need to breathe in space and does not notice the extreme cold or pressure of space nor the sun's harmful rays, that's how strongly he shields himself from outside influence. (Saitama vs Garou fight, cpt 167-168) But there only needs to be a sufficient trigger.

ONE sent Saitama home to restore his energy levels in Chapter 197, What only I can do...because he's going to sorely need them for the upcoming confrontation.

Empty Void's ability to genjutsu people casually and cause parallel shifts in the reality and using these to abuse emotional dependencies is like a loaded Chekov's gun on Saitama's forehead. Because Saitama has been roleplaying to re-learn his emphatic skillset after he had suffered too much mental trauma and he's done that a lot with Genos just via interaction. I heavily suspect that Saitama's emotional regulation and empathy suffered when he became too strong and he was emotionally blunting himself.

So, if they so happened to use Genos against him and trigger his PTSD, there's no telling how Saitama will react.

Saitama more than likely has some mental illnesses like disorders and at the very minimum PTSD, not just depression, which can be used maliciously against him and the entire OPM world. There is one more thing about psychological conditioning, but I'm not gonna say it out loud here on this meta, I'm afraid to spoil it. :p *rubs hands gleefully*

There is also a high chance that if he's stressed enough and sleep deprivated enough, he could honestly go into psychosis if the entire world suddenly turned on him because he's sensitive to criticism and hostility.

Psychosis is a condition of the mind or psyche that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for a given situation. There may also be sleep problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulties carrying out daily activities. Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes.

That's where he would truly become a danger to both himself and the entire Earth he's living on if he starts to have delusions, hallucinations and becomes out of touch with reality and also paranoid. So unless Saitama's mental health is adressed in a proper environment, he's a ticking time bomb till someone pulls the trigger on that PTSD and other issues he has. Empty Void can easily do exactly that by abusing his attachment to Genos in a cruel way, just like he tried to do with Flash and Sonic, starting from Chapter 200, Void.

Even seemingly normal, kind and well-adjusted people at the core can become very unpredictable when under high amount of duress and psychosis.

As underlined above, everyone always seems to default to the negative viewpoint of Saitama due to their perception biases and if Saitama's true strenght became more know...public would outright fear him simply because they cannot understand the scale of how powerful Saitama actually is, abnormally strong. Like they'd suddenly become prey to some unknown entity. Add in Saitama becoming more and more loose with his inhibitions from things like sleep depression and they'd have a huge mess in their hands.

Even Garou who fought against Saitama with everything he has, is completely shocked about how insane Saitama's abilities are, because they defy physic laws like it's nothing, so Garou goes "This is insane! What the hell IS this monster!?" when Saitama sneezed jupiter apart. (Awakening of the gods, chp 168)

Saitama has also shown dubious morality by attempting to punch and kill Garou to avenge Genos, but not really thinking or caring that the entire Earth would become collateral damage like Blast mentions as he portals and contains the explosion in Earth atmosphere. Chapter 166, Squared & Cpt 167, I.o) Saitama's mental state, when normally calm and seemingly well-adjusted, was thrown out of the window when he saw Genos died on him and has now become a PTSD trigger. He literally vented out all that anger in his fist in a massive clash of divine power, as told by the Blastice league.

So if perception bias surrounding Saitama was to turn sideways and he'd get dumped the pressure of the world against him, the consequences might become...bad. Saitama needs to be able to regulate his emotions far better in order to withstand mass scale attack from public opinion. Otherwise ONE is playing with fire with Saitama's mental health state, because he does NOT react well to criticism an such and will lash out like he did during the meteor incident, but far worse.

Thus, a danger to society.

-*-

Tl;dr: King has always been viewed in positive light so people perceive his powers as good thing and non-threat because they believe King is a great hero, whereas Saitama has always been surrounded by negative preconceptions about whatever he seems to be doing and public opinion about his hero status is not good, so Saitama busting out his massive, unknown power would instead cause uproar and mass scale panic that someone is even capable of such.

Thanks all for reading and thank you itsmaferart for this question. :)

#opm #one punch man #saitama #opm king #opm meta #perceptional bias #conditioning #mental health #charanko #opm Bang #Psykos #cognitive bias #my own work #psychology #maslow hierarchy of needs #long post

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togglessymposium · 10 months

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I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

#Not saying that free will itself isn't real in some sense #but I am saying that if the God Of Abraham is real #or even ontologically possible #then free will is not a form of indeterminacy #there is only one future #and it is singular #the counterfactual futures are as irrelevant to morality as they are to physics #because there is no such thing as 'might have been'#only the necessary and inevitable attributes of a known cosmos

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kny111 · 1 year

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Do World Powers Engage in Subtle Systemic Slavery or Overt Systemic Slavery? It doesn’t Matter. Slavery is Slavery & It Will Never Be Needed Especially Not As A System.

The United States along with other world powers and those that serve them have created this ‘using us, yet against us’ system. We need to change this. The fire James Baldwin spoke of, the very merited rage those enslaved have against this system, is well overdue.

Those who serve a government that knowingly allow for enslavement still and lie to people about it being abolished when their own amendment backs daily institutional and systemic enslavement when it allows “slavery is abolished except in punishment or crime“. This does nothing to remove slavery as a systemic feature from this governing system and you are implicit.

by - K, Blog Admin

What happens when we as a community repurpose the instruments of science and evidence gathering and focus on the 13th amendment? This piece of document literally allows for enslavement. What has been created in its wake? Here’s the thing, when colonial imperial powers in Europe said okay when issues occur we’re gonna call them ‘crime’ they meant it as a word to account for social norms being breached and a sort of “holler if you hear me“ approach to solving those issues was laid out institutionally which included neighborhood watch people that could process this. They later became police. Between that time and the present 2023, legislature and policy reshaped crime and policing, as well as the defending of issues through military, crime became systemically synonymous with prisons/cages/slavery to solve those issues. From the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its bolstering of these pro enslavement laws to this past historical investment in this strange notion of punishing others so physically, violently to the benefit of a system, a legalized market of slavery was formed and continues to persist with similar legislative and political play on words as they did with the 13th amendment’s clause: The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

When you specifically write into law and action that amendments create and actualize the means to the system we use, what are you enacting when you pronounce through this same mechanism that “no slavery shall exist within the united states or any place subject to its jurisdiction - EXCEPT as punishment for crime“? We need to, as a people really inspect this slowly and carefully because science has yet to produce any evidence that says punishment at that level and method is required to solve these issues so where is this evidence that says that type of punishment is even needed for the people to “fall in line”?

Secondly, isn’t it evident that processing issues as merely ‘crime’ is factually bringing us more structural issues than not because not every issue can be generalized to crime and often times the word crime itself just doesn’t do nearly enough to account for the disabled community and many other far reaching issues.

These aren’t assumptions, these are educated deductions based on statistical data provided by the errors of the running system. Again, it has yet to produce reputable convincing evidence that establishes prisons, crime, and cops/ slave patrol systems they synergized with as effective means to solve the issues we as a society constantly face. And with this same lack of adhering to scientific facts are we supposed to feel comforted by these slave industry agents, legislators and policy makers that allow for that amendment to exist as is because they know it buys them that much time to not worry of their implicitness in enslavement of others? I implore everyone watch the documentary by Ava DuVernay 13th available for free on youtube from NetFlix due to its educational merit. This documentary is like a course 101 on understanding just how much of an issue enslavement systems are and how synonymous prisons and cops are to slave markets and patrols. It gets right to the problem of slavery, what scriptures did they use to embed it into our social mainframe? did it exist back then? Yes, Is it gone? No, it let’s us know it’s still active and strategies by white supremacists and slavers then benefit their lineages and communities now.

They have a lot of control over the systems that try to govern us. Reconfiguring, inspecting and enacting amendments at this level will be required for us to do something meaningful against this oppressive system and its unsustainable, inefficient amalgamation with slavery markets as a resource system.

Reparations for those harmed by these systems as well as systemic decolonization strategies will be commonly needed. We need documentaries like this and similar subject media to help the public understand the necessary steps to abolish prisons and repurposing the military that serve them away from the rich’s interest and focus on the people. Since all defending this slavery system are implicit. 13th by Ava DuVernay is available now on YouTube for free via NetFlix along with other educational documentaries

#documentary #trans atlantic slave trade #history #scripture #policy #legislature #amendment #ava duvernay #13 the musical #13th amendment #politics #slavery #slave market #prison industrial complex #science #slave patrol #abolishment #abolish police #abolish slavery

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mariacallous · 3 months

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so what's next in American Judicial Antics? 5th circuit issuing a nationwide injunction requiring everyone to vote for trump? SCOTUS ruling that corporations have a constitutional right to poison the water?

Here's the cases SCOTUS agreed to hear (so far) and will issue rulings on by next June:

Williams v. Washington, No. 23-191

Issue(s): Whether exhaustion of state administrative remedies is required to bring claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in state court.

Glossip v. Oklahoma, No. 22-7466

Issue(s): (1) Whether the state’s suppression of the key prosecution witness’ admission that he was under the care of a psychiatrist and failure to correct that witness’ false testimony about that care and related diagnosis violate the due process of law under Brady v. Maryland and Napue v. Illinois; (2) whether the entirety of the suppressed evidence must be considered when assessing the materiality of Brady and Napue claims; (3) whether due process of law requires reversal where a capital conviction is so infected with errors that the state no longer seeks to defend it; and (4) whether the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals' holding that the Oklahoma Post-Conviction Procedure Act precluded post-conviction relief is an adequate and independent state-law ground for the judgment.

Garland v. VanDerStok, No. 23-852

Issue(s): (1) Whether “a weapon parts kit that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” under 27 C.F.R. § 478.11 is a “firearm” regulated by the Gun Control Act of 1968; and (2) whether “a partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver” that is “designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function as a frame or receiver” under 27 C.F.R. § 478.12(c) is a “frame or receiver” regulated by the act.

Lackey v. Stinnie, No. 23-621

Issue(s): (1) Whether a party must obtain a ruling that conclusively decides the merits in its favor, as opposed to merely predicting a likelihood of later success, to prevail on the merits under 42 U.S.C. § 1988; and (2) whether a party must obtain an enduring change in the parties’ legal relationship from a judicial act, as opposed to a non-judicial event that moots the case, to prevail under Section 1988.

Bufkin v. McDonough, No. 23-713

Issue(s): Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims must ensure that the benefit-of-the-doubt rule in 38 U.S.C. § 5107(b) was properly applied during the claims process in order to satisfy 38 U.S.C. § 7261(b)(1), which directs the court to “take due account” of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ application of that rule.

Royal Canin U.S.A. v. Wullschleger, No. 23-677

Issue(s): (1) Whether a post-removal amendment of a complaint to omit federal questions defeats federal-question subject matter jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331; and (2) whether such a post-removal amendment of a complaint precludes a district court from exercising supplemental jurisdiction over the plaintiff’s remaining state-law claims pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1367.

Medical Marijuana v. Horn, No. 23-365

Issue(s): Whether economic harms resulting from personal injuries are injuries to “business or property by reason of” the defendant’s acts for purposes of a civil treble-damages action under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Bouarfa v. Mayorkas, No. 23-583

Issue(s): Whether a visa petitioner may obtain judicial review when an approved petition is revoked on the basis of nondiscretionary criteria.

City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 23-753

Issue(s): Whether the Clean Water Act allows the Environmental Protection Agency (or an authorized state) to impose generic prohibitions in National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits that subject permit-holders to enforcement for violating water quality standards without identifying specific limits to which their discharges must conform.

Delligatti v. U.S., No. 23-825

Issue(s): Whether a crime that requires proof of bodily injury or death, but can be committed by failing to take action, has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.

Advocate Christ Medical Center v. Becerra, No. 23-715

Issue(s): Whether the phrase “entitled ... to benefits,” used twice in the same sentence of the Medicare Act, means the same thing for Medicare part A and Supplemental Social Security benefits, such that it includes all who meet basic program eligibility criteria, whether or not benefits are actually received.

Facebook v. Amalgamated Bank, No. 23-980

Issue(s): Whether risk disclosures are false or misleading when they do not disclose that a risk has materialized in the past, even if that past event presents no known risk of ongoing or future business harm.

E.M.D. Sales v. Carrera, No. 23-217

Issue(s): Whether the burden of proof that employers must satisfy to demonstrate the applicability of a Fair Labor Standards Act exemption is a mere preponderance of the evidence or clear and convincing evidence.

Kousisis v. U.S., No. 23-909

Issue(s): (1) Whether deception to induce a commercial exchange can constitute mail or wire fraud, even if inflicting economic harm on the alleged victim was not the object of the scheme; (2) whether a sovereign’s statutory, regulatory, or policy interest is a property interest when compliance is a material term of payment for goods or services; and (3) whether all contract rights are “property.”

NVIDIA Corp. v. E. Ohman J:or Fonder AB, No. 23-970

Issue(s): (1) Whether plaintiffs seeking to allege scienter under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act based on allegations about internal company documents must plead with particularity the contents of those documents; and (2) whether plaintiffs can satisfy the Act's falsity requirement by relying on an expert opinion to substitute for particularized allegations of fact.

Wisconsin Bell v. U.S., ex rel. Todd Heath, No. 23-1127

Issue(s): Whether reimbursement requests submitted to the Federal Communications Commission's E-rate program are “claims” under the False Claims Act.

Feliciano v. Department of Transportation, No. 23-861

Issue(s): Whether a federal civilian employee called or ordered to active duty under a provision of law during a national emergency is entitled to differential pay even if the duty is not directly connected to the national emergency.

Republic of Hungary v. Simon, No. 23-867

Issue(s): (1) Whether historical commingling of assets suffices to establish that proceeds of seized property have a commercial nexus with the United States under the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act; (2) whether a plaintiff must make out a valid claim that an exception to the FSIA applies at the pleading stage, rather than merely raising a plausible inference; and (3) whether a sovereign defendant bears the burden of producing evidence to affirmatively disprove that the proceeds of property taken in violation of international law have a commercial nexus with the United States under the expropriation exception to the FSIA.

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, No. 23-975

Issue(s): Whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.

Dewberry Group v. Dewberry Engineers, No. 23-900

Issue(s): Whether an award of the “defendant’s profits” under the Lanham Act can include an order for the defendant to disgorge the distinct profits of legally separate non-party corporate affiliates.

Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida, No. 23-997

Issue(s): Whether, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a former employee — who was qualified to perform her job and who earned post-employment benefits while employed — loses her right to sue over discrimination with respect to those benefits solely because she no longer holds her job.

U.S. v. Miller, No. 23-824

Issue(s): Whether a bankruptcy trustee may avoid a debtor’s tax payment to the United States under 11 U.S.C. § 544(b) when no actual creditor could have obtained relief under the applicable state fraudulent-transfer law outside of bankruptcy.

U.S. v. Skrmetti, No. 23-477

Issue(s): Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

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acceptccnow · 11 months

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Discussing Customer Experience, GRUBBRR Self-Service Kiosks, and The Covid Effect

In today's ever-changing food service industry, keeping up with the times is essential for success. Self-service kiosks have gained traction as a means to enhance the dining experience. With the challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of cutting-edge technologies such as GRUBBRR's self-service kiosks, which seamlessly accept credit cards and streamline payment processing, became vital for both businesses and customers.

The Transformation of the Customer Experience At the heart of any thriving business, particularly in the food service sector, is the customer experience. GRUBBRR, a prominent provider of self-service kiosks, has been a pioneer in reshaping this experience. Their kiosks are thoughtfully designed to boost efficiency, precision, and overall satisfaction.

Before the pandemic, self-service kiosks were seen as a convenient addition to the dining experience. They empowered customers to leisurely browse menus, customize their orders, and make payments using these user-friendly kiosks, creating a more personalized experience. However, with the arrival of Covid-19, the role of these kiosks transcended mere convenience.

The Pandemic's Influence on Dining The Covid-19 pandemic caused a seismic shift in how we approach dining out. Restaurants had to pivot their operations to ensure safety and compliance with social distancing guidelines. The demand for contactless solutions, including self-service kiosks that accept credit cards and streamline payment processing, surged.

Customer preferences underwent a significant shift during this period. Customers sought minimal physical contact with surfaces and staff. Businesses had to adapt to these evolving expectations. Self-service kiosks, like those offered by GRUBBRR, provided customers with a way to place orders without physically handling menus or engaging closely with waitstaff.

Enhancing Safety and Efficiency with Self-Service Kiosks For restaurants striving to provide a safe and efficient dining experience, GRUBBRR's self-service kiosks emerged as a savior. Customers gained access to full menus, the ability to customize orders, and an option to pay through these kiosks. This eliminated the need for physical menus and reduced direct interaction with staff. By accepting credit cards and optimizing payment processing, these kiosks ensured swift, secure, and contactless transactions.

The merits of self-service kiosks stretched beyond safety considerations. They elevated operational efficiency by minimizing order errors and wait times. With self-service kiosks, customers could carefully peruse menu options, ultimately leading to heightened satisfaction and improved order accuracy.

youtube

Merchant Account Processing: A Streamlined Solution An indispensable component of the self-service kiosk ecosystem is merchant account processing. GRUBBRR's kiosks are intricately linked with payment processing systems to guarantee secure, reliable, and swift transactions. This integration empowers businesses to seamlessly accept credit cards, delivering a hassle-free payment experience to customers.

By facilitating seamless payment processing, self-service kiosks ensure that customers can wrap up transactions without any glitches. This heightened level of convenience not only enriches the customer experience but also aids businesses in streamlined operations and the maintenance of a consistent cash flow.

#high risk merchant account #high risk payment gateway #high risk payment processing #merchant processing #payment processing #credit card payment #credit card processing #accept credit cards #payment #youtube #self ordering kiosk #ordering kiosk #Youtube

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sketchdeath22 · 11 months

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So... here's the story on the only finished thing on here

The board is one of the main ways Hunters can get jobs, people post what they need and the radio frequency to contact them on and Hunters call in to tell them they'll do it. Another way of contact is just knowing a Hunters radio frequency but if not this is one way to get jobs.

Does any of this make sense?

#s.d. spirals #oc art #oc artwork #art #artists on tumblr #art practice #artwork #original character #original comic #comic art #web comic #comic books #comics #system error salias #system error xeirio #system error merit #system error comic

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20dollarlolita · 2 years

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Quick tip:

Sometimes you're sewing on a fancy-ass sewing machine, and it will stop and give you a broken thread error. You'll get a pop-up on your screen that says, "check needle thread," or "thread broken," or something. Sometimes, this pops up even when the needle thread isn't broken.

You, having determined that the thread is not broken, close the pop-up and keep sewing. The error comes up again, and again, every time you start sewing.

You now have two options: You can stop sewing, pack your machine up, take it to your local or semi-local sewing machine store that offers service, pay money to have it serviced, wait 3-5 weeks for repair, bring it home, and find that the problem has been solved and that the technicians were not able to replicate the problem in store.

Or you can stop sewing, take the thread all the way out of the machine, thread the machine from the beginning, and see if that solves the problem. It usually does.

It would be dishonest of me to present these two options like they are equal problem solving tasks.

Yes, I know that the thread isn't broken. You know that the thread isn't broken. But your fancypants machine, which has the mental processing power of an infant yet which is absolutely unyielding to anything but its own logic, does not know that the thread isn't broken. Just do what it wants, because it will never decide to see merit in your ideas and attempt to compromise.

I've started seeing this a lot at work, where someone brings the machine in to be troubleshot instead of just fucking taking the thread out and putting it back in. Fun fact, that's the first thing we can do, and also fun fact, gas is $6 a gallon, so not driving the machine 95 minutes to the sewing machine store just so that someone can take the thread out and put it back in is actually pretty damn prudent, fun fact. I don't know why this happens (and I see it most with Tacony machines and Bernina) but the machine literally told you how to solve the problem, so please just do it.

The HV Topaz line sometimes likes to do this thing where it has an error that pops up, where it generates an error report file and tells you to email that to an automated system. This is because the machine is not wifi-enabled, and cannot send that message for you. When someone comes in and says they got that error, I very innocently ask, "and what did they say when you emailed that error file to them?" knowing damn well that they didn't try that, and getting massive enjoyment from watching them admit that they didn't try that. That error file is personalized to the exact fault that made the machine fail, so your sewing machine store can't solve that problem for you apart from just taking the file off your machine and emailing it for you. Your sewing machine store also cannot do anything if, instead of bringing your machine in to be troubleshot, you just took a picture of the screen and asked us what the error means. The error, which says "a error file has been generated. Pleas email this file to <email>," means you should take the error file that has been generated and email it to the email.

Frankly, if your machine was over $1500, it probably really wants to help you solve the problem on your own. It will give you steps to attempt to resolve this problem. If you take it to a service place, the first thing they're going to do is attempt to follow the instructions given by the sewing machine. These very, very frequently solve the problem. No one knows what's going on better than your expensive problem child robot, so listen to it. We have people all the time who say, "I don't get why it didn't work at home, but I bring it here and it stops having the problem!!" I understand that watching that happen is very frustrating. However, you can often save this frustration by rethreading, changing thread, changing needle, looking in your bobbin area for lint or needle strikes, looking at your thread cutter for lint and thread in there, turning the machine off, turning it back on, flossing the thread into the tension discs, and other really basic things that cost you a max of $2 to do at home. A really good portion of the time, the reason it happened all the time and home but doesn't happen during service or pre-service check-in is just because you didn't try hard enough, or didn't try the right steps, to resolve your problem at home. I'm not allowed to say that at work, but I do believe it's the truth.

The other reason why you might take a broken machine to the shop and it works there is because sometimes your broken machine just needs to be put in the car and driven somewhere. I'm not bullshitting you on this; I genuinely believe this to be the truth. So, if your local sewing machine store is 95 minutes away, you can probably save some time by just taking your machine to your local McDonald's drive thru instead.

#today at work #i'm not lying about the car trip thing

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dailyanarchistposts · 5 months

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Chapter V. Third Period. — Competition.

3. — Remedies against competition.

Can competition in labor be abolished?

It would be as well worth while to ask if personality, liberty, individual responsibility can be suppressed.

Competition, in fact, is the expression of collective activity; just as wages, considered in its highest acceptation, is the expression of the merit and demerit, in a word, the responsibility, of the laborer. It is vain to declaim and revolt against these two essential forms of liberty and discipline in labor. Without a theory of wages there is no distribution, no justice; without an organization of competition there is no social guarantee, consequently no solidarity.

The socialists have confounded two essentially distinct things when, contrasting the union of the domestic hearth with industrial competition, they have asked themselves if society could not be constituted precisely like a great family all of whose members would be bound by ties of blood, and not as a sort of coalition in which each is held back by the law of his own interests.

The family is not, if I may venture to so speak, the type, the organic molecule, of society. In the family, as M. de Bonald has very well observed, there exists but one moral being, one mind, one soul, I had almost said, with the Bible, one flesh. The family is the type and the cradle of monarchy and the patriciate: in it resides and is preserved the idea of authority and sovereignty, which is being obliterated more and more in the State. It was on the model of the family that all the ancient and feudal societies were organized, and it is precisely against this old patriarchal constitution that modern democracy protests and revolts.

The constitutive unit of society is the workshop.

Now, the workshop necessarily implies an interest as a body and private interests, a collective person and individuals. Hence a system of relations unknown in the family, among which the opposition of the collective will, represented by the employer, and individual wills, represented by the wage-receivers, figures in the front rank. Then come the relations from shop to shop, from capital to capital, — in other words, competition and association. For competition and association are supported by each other; they do not exist independently; very far from excluding each other, they are not even divergent. Whoever says competition already supposes a common object; competition, then, is not egoism, and the most deplorable error of socialism consists in having regarded it as the subversion of society.

Therefore there can be no question here of destroying competition, as impossible as to destroy liberty; the problem is to find its equilibrium, I would willingly say its police. For every force, every form of spontaneity, whether individual or collective, must receive its determination: in this respect it is the same with competition as with intelligence and liberty. How, then, will competition be harmoniously determined in society?

We have heard the reply of M. Dunoyer, speaking for political economy: Competition must be determined by itself. In other words, according to M. Dunoyer and all the economists, the remedy for the inconveniences of competition is more competition; and, since political economy is the theory of property, of the absolute right of use and abuse, it is clear that political economy has no other answer to make. Now, this is as if it should be pretended that the education of liberty is effected by liberty, the instruction of the mind by the mind, the determination of value by value, all of which propositions are evidently tautological and absurd.

And, in fact, to confine ourselves to the subject under discussion, it is obvious that competition, practised for itself and with no other object than to maintain a vague and discordant independence, can end in nothing, and that its oscillations are eternal. In competition the struggling elements are capital, machinery, processes, talent, and experience, — that is, capital again; victory is assured to the heaviest battalions. If, then, competition is practised only to the advantage of private interests, and if its social effects have been neither determined by science nor reserved by the State, there will be in competition, as in democracy, a continual tendency from civil war to oligarchy, from oligarchy to despotism, and then dissolution and return to civil war, without end and without rest. That is why competition, abandoned to itself, can never arrive at its own constitution: like value, it needs a superior principle to socialize and define it. These facts are henceforth well enough established to warrant us in considering them above criticism, and to excuse us from returning to them. Political economy, so far as the police of competition is concerned, having no means but competition itself, and unable to have any other, is shown to be powerless.

It remains now to inquire what solution socialism contem-plates. A single example will give the measure of its means, and will permit us to come to general conclusions regarding it.

Of all modern socialists M. Louis Blanc, perhaps, by his remarkable talent, has been most successful in calling public attention to his writings. In his “Organization of Labor,” after having traced back the problem of association to a single point, competition, he unhesitatingly pronounces in favor of its abolition. From this we may judge to what an extent this writer, generally so cautious, is deceived as to the value of political economy and the range of socialism. On the one hand, M. Blanc, receiving his ideas ready made from I know not what source, giving everything to his century and nothing to history, rejects absolutely, in substance and in form, political economy, and deprives himself of the very materials of organization; on the other, he attributes to tendencies revived from all past epochs, which he takes for new, a reality which they do not possess, and misconceives the nature of socialism, which is exclusively critical. M. Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one’s name Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J. J. Rousseau, provided there is nothing in experience, there is nothing in the mind.

M. Blanc begins with this declaration:

We cannot understand those who have imagined I know not what mysterious coupling of two opposite principles. To graft association upon competition is a poor idea: it is to substitute hermaphrodites for eunuchs.

These three lines M. Blanc will always have reason to regret. They prove that, when he published the fourth edition of his book, he was as little advanced in logic as in political economy, and that he reasoned about both as a blind man would reason about colors. Hermaphrodism, in politics, consists precisely in exclusion, because exclusion always restores, in some form or other and in the same degree, the idea excluded; and M. Blanc would be greatly surprised were he to be shown, by his continual mixture in his book of the most contrary principles, — authority and right, property and communism, aristocracy and equality, labor and capital, reward and sacrifice, liberty and dictatorship, free inquiry and religious faith, — that the real hermaphrodite, the double-sexed publicist, is himself. M. Blanc, placed on the borders of democracy and socialism, one degree lower than the Republic, two degrees beneath M. Barrot, three beneath M. Thiers, is also, whatever he may say and whatever he may do, a descendant through four generations from M. Guizot, a doctrinaire.

“Certainly,” cries M. Blanc, “we are not of those who anathematize the principle of authority. This principle we have a thousand times had occasion to defend against attacks as dangerous as absurd. We know that, when organized force exists nowhere in a society, despotism exists everywhere.”

Thus, according to M. Blanc, the remedy for competition, or rather, the means of abolishing it, consists in the intervention of authority, in the substitution of the State for individual liberty: it is the inverse of the system of the economists.

I should dislike to have M. Blanc, whose social tendencies are well known, accuse me of making impolitic war upon him in refuting him. I do justice to M. Blanc’s generous intentions; I love and I read his works, and I am especially thankful to him for the service he has rendered in revealing, in his “History of Ten Years,” the hopeless poverty of his party. But no one can consent to seem a dupe or an imbecile: now, putting personality entirely aside, what can there be in common between socialism, that universal protest, and the hotch-potch of old prejudices which make up M. Blanc’s republic? M. Blanc is never tired of appealing to authority, and socialism loudly declares itself anarchistic; M. Blanc places power above society, and socialism tends to subordinate it to society; M. Blanc makes social life descend from above, and socialism maintains that it springs up and grows from below; M. Blanc runs after politics, and socialism is in quest of science. No more hypocrisy, let me say to M. Blanc: you desire neither Catholicism nor monarchy nor nobility, but you must have a God, a religion, a dictatorship, a censorship, a hierarchy, distinctions, and ranks. For my part, I deny your God, your authority, your sovereignty, your judicial State, and all your representative mystifications; I want neither Robespierre’s censer nor Marat’s rod; and, rather than submit to your androgynous democracy, I would support the status quo. For sixteen years your party has resisted progress and blocked opinion; for sixteen years it has shown its despotic origin by following in the wake of power at the extremity of the left centre: it is time for it to abdicate or undergo a metamorphosis. Implacable theorists of authority, what then do you propose which the government upon which you make war cannot accomplish in a fashion more tolerable than yours?

M. Blanc’s SYSTEM may be summarized in three points:

1. To give power a great force of initiative, — that is, in plain English, to make absolutism omnipotent in order to realize a utopia.

2. To establish public workshops, and supply them with capital, at the State’s expense.

3. To extinguish private industry by the competition of national industry.

And that is all.

Has M. Blanc touched the problem of value, which involves in itself alone all others? He does not even suspect its existence. Has he given a theory of distribution? No. Has he solved the antinomy of the division of labor, perpetual cause of the workingman’s ignorance, immorality, and poverty? No. Has he caused the contradiction of machinery and wages to disappear, and reconciled the rights of association with those of liberty? On the contrary, M. Blanc consecrates this contradiction. Under the despotic protection of the State, he admits in principle the inequality of ranks and wages, adding thereto, as compensation, the ballot. Are not workingmen who vote their regulations and elect their leaders free? It may very likely happen that these voting workingmen will admit no command or difference of pay among them: then, as nothing will have been provided for the satisfaction of industrial capacities, while maintaining political equality, dissolution will penetrate into the workshop, and, in the absence of police intervention, each will return to his own affairs. These fears seem to M. Blanc neither serious nor well-founded: he awaits the test calmly, very sure that society will not go out of his way to contradict him.

And such complex and intricate questions as those of taxation, credit, international trade, property, heredity, — has M. Blanc fathomed them? Has he solved the problem of population? No, no, no, a thousand times no: when M. Blanc cannot solve a difficulty, he eliminates it. Regarding population, he says:

As only poverty is prolific, and as the social workshop will cause poverty to disappear, there is no reason for giving it any thought.

In vain does M. de Sismondi, supported by universal ex-perience, cry out to him:

We have no confidence in those who exercise delegated powers. We believe that any corporation will do its business worse than those who are animated by individual interest; that on the part of the directors there will be negligence, display, waste, favoritism, fear of compromise, all the faults, in short, to be noticed in the administration of the public wealth as contrasted with private wealth. We believe, further, that in an assembly of stockholders will be found only carelessness, caprice, negligence, and that a mercantile enterprise would be constantly compromised and soon ruined, if it were dependent upon a deliberative commercial assembly.

M. Blanc hears nothing; he drowns all other sounds with his own sonorous phrases; private interest he replaces by devotion to the public welfare; for competition he substitutes emulation and rewards. After having posited industrial hierarchy as a principle, it being a necessary consequence of his faith in God, authority, and genius, he abandons himself to mystic powers, idols of his heart and his imagination.

Thus M. Blanc begins by a coup d’État, or rather, according to his original expression, by an application of the force of initiative which he gives to power; and he levies an extraordinary tax upon the rich in order to supply the proletariat with capital. M. Blanc’s logic is very simple, — it is that of the Republic: power can accomplish what the people want, and what the people want is right. A singular fashion of reforming society, this of repressing its most spontaneous tendencies, denying its most authentic manifestations, and, instead of generalizing comfort by the regular development of traditions, displacing labor and income! But, in truth, what is the good of these disguises? Why so much beating about the bush? Was it not simpler to adopt the agrarian law straightway? Could not power, by virtue of its force of initiative, at once declare all capital and tools the property of the State, save an indemnity to be granted to the present holders as a transitional measure? By means of this peremptory, but frank and sincere, policy, the economic field would have been cleared away; it would not have cost utopia more, and M. Blanc could then have proceeded at his ease, and without any hindrance, to the organization of society.

But what do I say? organize! The whole organic work of M. Blanc consists in this great act of expropriation, or substitution, if you prefer: industry once displaced and republicanized and the great monopoly established, M. Blanc does not doubt that production will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his system. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These critics had not seen that, in discussing M. Blanc’s system, they were arguing about the dimensions, weight, and form of a mathematical point. Now, as it has happened, the controversy maintained by M. Blanc has taught him more than his own meditations had done; and one can see that, if the objections had continued, he would have ended by discovering what he thought he had invented, — the organization of labor.

But, in fine, has the aim, however narrow, which M. Blanc pursued, — namely, the abolition of competition and the guarantee of success to an enterprise patronized and backed by the State, — been attained? On this subject I will quote the reflections of a talented economist, M. Joseph Garnier, to whose words I will permit myself to add a few comments.

The government, according to M. Blanc, would choose moral workmen, and would give them good wages.

So M. Blanc must have men made expressly for him: he does not flatter himself that he can act on any sort of temperaments. As for wages, M. Blanc promises that they shall be good; that is easier than to define their measure.

M. Blanc admits by his hypothesis that these workshops would yield a net product, and, further, would compete so successfully with private industry that the latter would change into national workshops.

How could that be, if the cost of the national workshops is higher than that of the free workshops? I have shown in the third chapter that three hundred workmen in a mill do not produce for their employer, among them all, a regular net income of twenty thousand francs, and that these twenty thousand francs, distributed among the three hundred laborers, would add but eighteen centimes a day to their income. Now, this is true of all industries. How will the national workshop, which owes its workmen good wages, make up this deficit? By emulation, says M. Blanc.

M. Blanc points with extreme complacency to the Leclaire establishment, a society of house-painters doing a very successful business, which he regards as a living demonstration of his system. M. Blanc might have added to this example a multitude of similar societies, which would prove quite as much as the Leclaire establishment, — that is, no more. The Leclaire establishment is a collective monopoly, supported by the great society which envelops it. Now, the question is whether entire society can become a monopoly, in M. Blanc’s sense and patterned after the Leclaire establishment: I deny it positively. But a fact touching more closely the question before us, and which M. Blanc has not taken into consideration, is that it follows from the distribution accounts furnished by the Leclaire establishment that, the wages paid being much above the general average, the first thing to do in a reorganization of society would be to start up competition with the Leclaire establishment, either among its own workmen or outside.

Wages would be regulated by the government. The members of the social workshop would dispose of them as they liked, and the indisputable excellence of life in common would not be long in causing association in labor to give birth to voluntary association in pleasure.

Is M. Blanc a communist, yes or no? Let him declare himself once for all, instead of holding off; and if communism does not make him more intelligible, we shall at least know what he wants.

In reading the supplement in which M. Blanc has seen fit to combat the objections which some journals have raised, we see more clearly the incompleteness of his conception, daughter of at least three fathers, — Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, and communism, — with the aid of politics and a little, a very little, political economy.

According to his explanations, the State would be only the regulator, legislator, protector of industry, not the universal manufacturer or producer. But as he exclusively protects the social workshops to destroy private industry, he necessarily brings up in monopoly and falls back into the Saint-Simonian theory in spite of himself, at least so far as production is concerned.

M. Blanc cannot deny it: his system is directed against private industry; and with him power, by its force of initiative, tends to extinguish all individual initiative, to proscribe free labor. The coupling of contraries is odious to M. Blanc: accordingly we see that, after having sacrificed competition to association, he sacrifices to it liberty also. I am waiting for him to abolish the family.

Nevertheless hierarchy would result from the elective principle, as in Fourierism, as in constitutional politics. But these social workshops again, regulated by law, — will they be anything but corporations? What is the bond of corporations? The law. Who will make the law? The government. You suppose that it will be good? Well, experience has shown that it has never been a success in regulating the innumerable accidents of industry. You tell us that it will fix the rate of profits, the rate of wages; you hope that it will do it in such a way that laborers and capital will take refuge in the social workshop. But you do not tell us how equilibrium will be established between these workshops which will have a tendency to life in common, to the phalanstery; you do not tell us how these workshops will avoid competition within and without; how they will provide for the excess of population in relation to capital; how the manufacturing social workshops will differ from those of the fields; and many other things besides. I know well that you will answer: By the specific virtue of the law! And if your government, your State, knows not how to make it? Do you not see that you are sliding down a declivity, and that you are obliged to grasp at something similar to the existing law? It is easy to see by reading you that you are especially devoted to the invention of a power susceptible of application to your system; but I declare, after reading you carefully, that in my opinion you have as yet no clear and precise idea of what you need. What you lack, as well as all of us, is the true conception of liberty and equality, which you would not like to disown, and which you are obliged to sacrifice, whatever precautions you may take.

Unacquainted with the nature and functions of power, you have not dared to stop for a single explanation; you have not given the slightest example.

Suppose we admit that the workshops succeed as producers; there will also be commercial workshops to put products in circulation and effect exchanges. And who then will regulate the price? Again the law? In truth, I tell you, you will need a new appearance on Mount Sinai; otherwise you will never get out of your difficulties, you, your Council of State, your chamber of representatives, or your areopagus of senators.

The correctness of these reflections cannot be questioned. M. Blanc, with his organization by the State, is obliged always to end where he should have begun (so beginning, he would have been saved the trouble of writing his book), — that is, in the study of economic science. As his critic very well says: “M. Blanc has made the grave mistake of using political strategy in dealing with questions which are not amenable to such treatment”; he has tried to summon the government to a fulfillment of its obligations, and he has succeeded only in demonstrating more clearly than ever the incompatibility of socialism with haranguing and parliamentary democracy. His pamphlet, all enamelled with eloquent pages, does honor to his literary capacity: as for the philosophical value of the book, it would be absolutely the same if the author had confined himself to writing on each page, in large letters, this single phrase: I PROTEST.

To sum up:

Competition, as an economic position or phase, considered in its origin, is the necessary result of the intervention of machinery, of the establishment of the workshop, and of the theory of reduction of general costs; considered in its own significance and in its tendency, it is the mode by which collective activity manifests and exercises itself, the expression of social spontaneity, the emblem of democracy and equality, the most energetic instrument for the constitution of value, the support of association. As the essay of individual forces, it is the guarantee of their liberty, the first moment of their harmony, the form of responsibility which unites them all and makes them solidary.

But competition abandoned to itself and deprived of the direction of a superior and efficacious principle is only a vague movement, an endless oscillation of industrial power, eternally tossed about between those two equally disastrous extremes, — on the one hand, corporations and patronage, to which we have seen the workshop give birth, and, on the other, monopoly, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

Socialism, while protesting, and with reason, against this anarchical competition, has as yet proposed nothing satisfactory for its regulation, as is proved by the fact that we meet everywhere, in the utopias which have seen the light, the determination or socialization of value abandoned to arbitrary control, and all reforms ending, now in hierarchical corporation, now in State monopoly, or the tyranny of communism.

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