#myth of the rational actor

[phoenixyfriend]

The Myth of the Rational Actor

Ko-fi prompt from @vincentursus:

the myth of the rational actor please?

The myth as such: people will act in a perfectly rational manner, and the economy will respond in reaction to that.

So... the idea here is that emotions will never influence someone's actions in making economic choices.

Which is, as we can guess, bullshit.

To quote Medium,

Mainstream (neo-classical) economics idealizes human beings as perfectly rational actors when it comes to making decisions. This concept, known as rational choice theory, is based on three assumptions: 1. People have complete and consistent preferences (which can be assigned quantitative values called utilities) among a set of decision outcomes 2. People act independently based on full and relevant information 3. People always select the decision option that maximizes their utility.

So. That's absurd. Let's start from the bottom, utility.

One of the first things you learn in any marketing class is that half the industry is run on an appeal to emotion.

(The other half of it actually is an appeal to logic, like 'you can use this tool to compare your insurance costs,' which is the aforementioned rational action.)

The most obvious example of that utility element being wrong is: Food.

For a completely rational actor, the food purchased would be the most nutrition for the least cost. Taste is irrelevant. Ambience is irrelevant. Occasion is irrelevant. You fill out the food pyramid for whatever you can pay the least amount of cash. Buy a fifty pound bag of rice, wholesale canned tuna, and frozen veggie mixes that you only need five minutes to heat up and consume.

Chocolate? No. Salt or sugar? Only enough to fulfill your need for water absorption. Spices? Waste of money!

This sounds extreme, because a complete lack of emotional impact on your purchasing habits is extreme. You seek things that make you happy or pleased. You search for sweet tastes that cheer you up, for fatty tastes that satisfy you, for spicy flavors that you can eat in a competition with your friends to prove who's the manliest.

That's not rational! But we do it! Food is an inherently irrational thing to purchase, unless you are so strapped for cash that you cannot afford to be anything other than fully dedicated to the highest calorie:dollar ratio that you can find.

The other thing that the utility factor disregards is charity. On the standard 'rational' definition used in economics, charity is completely irrational for anyone who doesn't get a tax cut from it.

But people engage in charitable actions and donations anyway.

Full and relevant information: Uhhhhh no

I think we can all agree that full and relevant information is not actually a reality for most people.

Manufacturers bend the truth. Marketers omit things. Word of mouth is unreliable. Influencers lie. Online reviews are fake.

Some don't! But you don't know who is or isn't lying unless there is a law that controls what information they can put out. Researching takes time, and figuring out which lies are actually lies is difficult.

There are a lot of videos all over YouTube talking about scams, both the obvious, and the more subtle. There's a reason that misinformation is such a huge industry these days, and hey! A lot of misinformation relies on those aforementioned appeals to emotion that are both a marketing device and a rhetorical one.

Complete and consistent preferences: Sometimes?

I mean, some people have complete and consistent preferences. I have a favorite Starbucks drink that I get most times (technically I have four and it depends on the weather). I have stylistic preferences for my clothing. I have musical preferences.

But it still takes me time to make decisions when at a restaurant, you know? My little sister likes a lot of foods, sure, but if you ask her to pick a place to eat it can take literal hours. Hell, there are entire phenomenons named after the fact that people don't have preferences and have trouble making decisions!

And on top of all that, you have people whose 'preference' is spontaneity. They pick whatever they haven't tried before, because it's new, and exciting, and that's cool!

Which really harshes the mellow on that whole "clear and consistent preferences" thing.

Where does that leave us?

Well, the rational actor is clearly a majorly inaccurate standard to hold individual consumers and the market to. That said, I don't think more than a handful of very extreme people would ever claim that the rational actor is an absolutely perfect predictor for the market.

Rather, it's used as a starting point. If the market reacts to forces in a completely rational manner, here is what we would be expecting. Then, upon projecting the actions of the market under the most rational and perfect conditions, we can apply other possible factors. The possible success of a marketing campaign. The risks of weather or politics impacting supply lines. An unexpected trend rising up from a comedic social media moment among teens and young people.

Imagine you have a catapult. Imagine you know what the catapult will do under perfect conditions, with consistent rope length and artillery weight and weather conditions. The numbers you run your basic physics class formulas with are the rational actor.

The market trends that cause that rational prediction to have error margins is the equivalent of "the wind's been varying between 3mph and 9mph, and from NW to SWW."

I'm not sure how safely I can get away with embedding images that I don't personally have the rights to when they're actually relevant to the education portion of this, and not just a silly joke like the TGP inclusion up there, so I'll just tell you to go look at the first graph at this link, and you'll see what I mean about the 'best, most predictable case' line vs the 'actual possibilities' forecast.

Hope that helps!

(If you wanted me to go more into the history of this concept than its actual uses, uh... whoops?)

[mariacallous]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mykindalovr]

No Retreat (Ronald Speirs x Fem oc)

Summary: Ronald asks his girlfriend to marry him

Warnings: slight ptsd

And ofc no disrespect to the actual war veterans, this is just based on the actor portrayal

War had shaped Ronald Speirs into something few could truly understand. Ruthless when necessary, fearless under fire, and always the first to charge—he was respected, admired, and maybe even a little feared. But behind the stories, behind the silver bars and battlefield myths, was a man who never forgot how fragile life really was.

And somehow, she-Nancy-had found her way into that guarded place he kept locked away from the rest of the world.

She wasn’t the kind of woman you impressed with medals. She didn’t flinch when he went quiet, didn’t press when the war crept into his eyes. She simply waited. Listened. And when he was ready to speak, she let him.

He had never said “I love you” out loud. Not once. Not yet. But she knew.

So when he decided to propose, it wasn’t because he was “romantic.” It was because he was decisive. Speirs didn’t hope things would last. He committed to them.

The Setup

Speirs was stationed in Berlin post-war, working with the occupation forces. The city was still scarred and shattered, but there was a strange kind of beauty in its rebuilding. Speirs understood that. Destruction was easy. Rebuilding was the hard part. The part that took real guts.

He invited Nancy to visit, under the guise of wanting to show her the city “from his eyes.” She flew over in winter. Snow on the rooftops, cold that bit right through your coat. But she came anyway—because he asked.

What she didn’t know was that he’d spent weeks preparing something quietly, meticulously—just like a mission.

He had access to a rooftop garden in a once-bombed-out building now being converted into officer quarters. It overlooked the city skyline—domes, rubble, cranes, and hope all stitched together.

He cleared the space himself. Even brought up candles in old brass casings. A small table with two chairs, one bottle of wine he'd traded rations for, and a single vase holding a white lily. That was all. Speirs didn’t believe in clutter.

The Moment

She followed him up the stairwell, boots echoing on stone, scarf pulled tight around her neck.

"Ron, what are we doing up here? It’s freezing."

He didn’t answer at first. Just opened the rooftop door and stepped aside to let her through.

When she saw it—the makeshift dinner, the view, the simplicity—her breath caught.

Speirs, ever the soldier, stood behind her. Straight-backed. Silent.

But his voice, when he finally spoke, was softer than she’d ever heard it.

"I’ve never been afraid to jump out of a plane, or charge into a firefight."

She turned toward him, a half-smile on her lips.

"I know."

"But you…" He looked her directly in the eyes now. No mask. No commander. Just a man. “You scare the hell out of me. Because you make me want things that don’t come with orders.”

She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.

He stepped forward, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out a small, velvet-wrapped box.

He didn’t kneel. He didn’t have to. When Ronald Speirs looked at you like that, it felt like the whole world stopped anyway.

"I’m not promising peace, Nancy I can’t. I’m not built for easy things. But I can promise you loyalty. And a life where I never walk away. No matter how hard it gets."

He opened the box. The ring was simple. Elegant. It looked like something chosen with the same focus he gave everything.

"Will you marry me?"

A long beat of silence stretched between them. Snow fell gently around their shoulders. The city below them breathed in smoke and the hope of tomorrow.

She stepped forward, eyes wet, but steady. She reached up, cupped his face in her gloved hands.

"You don’t have to promise peace, Ron. Just promise you won’t shut me out."

"I won’t," he whispered. "Not anymore."

Then she kissed him—slow, deliberate, just like everything he’d done to get to this moment.

"Yes," she said against his lips. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Later that night, as they sat together watching the city rebuild below, Speirs held her hand tightly in his. He didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. The war was over. But for once in his life, he wasn’t just surviving.

He was choosing something for himself.

No orders.

No fallback.

Just her.

No retreat.

[scotianostra]

January 17th 1883 saw the birth of Compton Mackenzie, in Hartlepool in North East England.

Compton Mackenzie is today best remembered for writing two comic novels set in Scotland – The Monarch of the Glen, which inspired the BBC drama series of the same name, and the much-loved Whisky Galore, which has twice been adapted for cinema. The story of a fictional Hebridean island taking advantage of a ship wreck full of spirits at the height of wartime rationing has entertained generations since it first appeared in 1947. The most recent cinematic version, starring Gregor Fisher, goes on general release in May. But Mackenzie was much more than a gentle chronicler of the Highlands and islands in the mid-20th century.

He was, at various times, an actor, soldier, Government spy, political activist, journalist, Jacobite supporter, cultural commentator, snooker enthusiast, raconteur and, in 1928, a co-founder of the National Party of Scotland – the forerunner to the modern SNP.

Andro Linklater, who wrote a biography of Mackenzie, commented: “(He) wasn’t born a Scot, and he didn’t sound like a Scot. But nevertheless his imagination was truly Scottish.” Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool in 1883 and raised in London. His was a theatrical family – many of whose members used Compton as their stage name. His grandfather Henry Compton was a well-known Shakespearean actor of the Victorian era. A history graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, the young Mackenzie published his first novel in 1912 but his writing career was stalled by the outbreak of war. He quickly signed up and saw action at Gallipoli. In 1915 he was recruited into the fledgling Secret Service and was posted across the eastern Mediterranean. Although he would later be awarded a knighthood, Mackenzie was no darling of the British establishment. In 1932 he was hauled before the courts and fined for breaching the Official Secrets Act for writing Greek Memories – a candid reflection of his time as a spy. At a time when the British public was scarcely aware of the security services, Mackenzie freely outlined its organisation. It was withdrawn from sale and was only published in full as recently as 2011.

In 1933 he took revenge on the Secret Service with Water on the Brain, an obvious swipe at the Service. Despite its satirical cover, he managed to include a few genuine morsels – such as the fact that the chief of the Service always wrote in green ink. At story’s end, the location of the Secret Service’s headquarters is revealed in a spy thriller and the spooks have to move out. The building becomes an asylum for “the servants of bureaucracy who have been driven mad in the service of the country”. By this point Mackenzie was already resident in Scotland and had become close friends with the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and the influential writer, thinker and adventurer Robert Cunninghame Graham. Together they helped establish the National Party of Scotland in 1928, which emerged in 1934 as the modern SNP.

Mackenzie settled on the Hebridean island of Barra and concentrated on his most ambitious project, The Four Winds of Love. Gavin Wallace, another of his biographers, later wrote: “The Four Winds of Love, published in six volumes between 1937 and 1945 and containing almost 1 million words, is one of the most ambitious Scottish novels of the twentieth century, an enormous historical odyssey which anatomizes the politics of peripheral nationalism both throughout Europe and in Britain, again through semi-autobiographical character development.” But it was Mackenzie’s comic novels that won him UK-wide fame and fortune. Whisky Galore, based on a real-life incident in Eriskay in 1941, was first adapted for the big screen by Ealing studios and released to popular acclaim in 1948. The enduring appeal of the novel was later summed up by one Scotsman literary critic: “So what if it perpetrates the old, cliched ‘Brigadoon’ myth? Scots, English, American or Martian, no-one can resist this tale of ill-gotten whisky gain on a Scottish island in wartime. It’s simply hilarious.” Such was Mackenzie’s status as an elder statesman of letters he was knighted in 1952 and remained a much-respected cultural commentator for the rest of his life. In later years he lived in Drummond Place, in Edinburgh’s New Town, where he died from cancer aged 89, in 1972. Lavish tributes followed. Dr Robert McIntyre, president of the SNP and the first Scottish nationalist elected to parliament, described Mackenzie as “the Grand Old Man of Scotland”. Novelist Eric Linklater said he was a “consummate stylist, who, unlike most writers, also lived with style.”

[littlesparklight]

I've never been the type to be the least fond of rationalized versions of Greek myth - not the ancient versions (of which there are several, and early, too; Herodotus is a case in point), and certainly not modern ones. What I didn't quite realize until recently was that, whenever I read some academic writing talking about the gods in an allegorized fashion (as natural phenomena or human passions) instead of being characters in their own right, that this wasn't just a development of the switch to Christianity. This strain of how to read/interpret/deal with, say, the Iliad (but also other epics or poems where the gods are characters in their own right) is just as ancient as the rationalized versions.

Which, that's Not My Thing either. I want the gods to be there in their own right, as actual characters and not just "humanized" allegory of natural phenomena and human passions.

It just wasn't until I was reading the first chapter of Denis Feeney's The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition, that I actually both got an understanding of that because he actually went through the development from the "beginning" so to speak. More to the point, it wasn't until that I understood why certain authors were talking of Helen and Aphrodite's confrontation in Book 3 of the Iliad as both Helen and the goddess having said confrontation but also Helen "simply" fighting against herself and with her own desires and in the end losing.

To be quick about it; on one end of the allegorizing spectrum there is the gods not as actual characters (but, because it's epic, being presented as actors), merely as their natural phenomena or human passions. Hence why some people say Athena isn't actually there, yanking of Achilles hair and arguing him into standing down in Book 1, but that this is only about Achilles himself and his reason winning out. Same, then, with those who say of Helen's confrontation that this is her fighting with herself only.

In the middle you have the stance that it is both the god as character and actor and as a (humanized) allegory of phenomena/passions. There you then get the tack I mentioned above, where Helen is both arguing with (and being maneuvered by) Aphrodite - and her own desires (and losing to both).

On the complete other end you of course have the stance that what we see is what there is; the god as character, acting in their own right and nothing more, implying nothing about the characters they're interacting with (or acting upon).

So when I read those articles I was always like "well if you say so but I don't see where this claim comes from /shrug". I didn't really dislike it since I certainly found the possibility of more proof of Helen's conflicted feelings/desires wrt Paris in my interest, lol. Not that reading Aphrodite as both goddess and allegory of Helen's own desires in that confrontation is the only proof; Helen's reaction to Aphrodite's attempted enticement/seduction when she describes Paris is proof enough (there is no "anger" in Helen's reaction, merely an ambiguous reaction that stirs her heart in her chest - one we're supposed to understand as erotic even before and ultimately because Aphrodite corners Helen into leaving, as G. S. Kirk in his commentary explains).

Understanding where that double way of reading the gods in epic came from helped with why these authors were talking that way about the Book 3 confrontation, of course. But it also got me willing to go along with such a double reading. I'm still never going to prefer something that tries to insist the gods aren't there in their own right, with their own actions and wants. It's just not interesting to me, at all.

But the double reading adds more than it takes away, to both the divine character and the human they might be interacting with in the moment.

I'll add two screencaps below to the cut.

First, one from Feeney's bok:

The second, from W.R. Johnson's Darkness Visible:

[atomkinema-stars]

'The Third Man'

Since today, I will be making expansive copies of my Letterbox reviews (which I won't share here because of their low quality) together with some art I made for the movie. I've had an idea of watching this movie for a long time, inspired by its inclusion in most lists of 'The Best movies ever made.' However, when I first started watching it, I was, frankly, put off by strange music and a fairly mundane beginning. 'Wait, is it the same movie? It doesn't look or sound like what they described and doesn't even seem that noir-like?', I thought to myself. I didn't finish my first watch. But, as it always happens, reviews kind of miss the point. It IS a great movie. It's just very different from what they describe, and it's even greater than they think.

Why? Well, mostly, because it's one of the funniest film noirs, which doesn't sacrifice the seriousness of the topic at all. It's a damn dark comedy and a tragedy in one. Bizarre antics of a doomed cat-and-mouse game ensue, but the solution to the mystery is heavy and dark and not comical.

To what extent were those misadventures the plotting of the antagonist, or were they sometimes just twists of fate in a strange city? (At times, it really felt like that…) Unfortunately, nobody knows.

The movie would also benefit from not pushing the burden of emotional doubt on its main female character because the main "mystery" has enough weight and conflict to it to occupy our attention. It was kind of cowardly to make her the one who bore this burden of believing, even though the protagonist was just the same in the beginning.

But as an overall examination of beliefs of them both it works, so it's fine.

(I think the piece above is appropriately comical, but it's still kind of 'subpar' since I can't draw caricatures of famous actors that well. I guess I did capture a certain aura, but you have to forgive me for mistakes, I am drawing without references usually, trying to train my memory. I think I got Welles' eyes mostly right, though? They are extra full of irony. They're not as full of irony as they are in the movie, be warned. No one can capture that.)

P.S. (Read this at your own risk)

Being from Eastern Europe (Poland) made me like it a bit more, I admit, since it's easier to sympathize with the victims (yes, even the Austrians), which wouldn't be the case for Anglo-Saxon people who are 'the other' here, interestingly. The other side, even though the protagonist is also Anglo-Saxon. This part, in particular, is what makes it truly unusual - you rarely see Anglo-Saxon people being self-aware enough to recognize themselves as those who can be 'humanity's shadow', too, and not just complete saviors and heroes and 'the side of rational reason'. This movie tries to defeat this myth in a funny, kind-hearted, and palatable for English speakers way, tricking them, but also holding their hand gently. It also (correctly) shows how friendly some Anglo-Saxons can get with their rivals (The Soviets) when they've fallen far enough. It was a nice, correct (and morbid) detail. This movie has no alternatives in the modern world because of these reasons. Europeans, especially Austrians, germans, and Poles, but French people too, are firmly 'the other' in the modern world. This movie kind of subverts it, starting from the more modern alienation and then blasting the unexpected at full volume.

Another such case would be 'Witness for the prosecution', which I also recommend, but it's a vastly inferior movie and you have to accept it.

If you're curious about this movie, try to give it a watch.

Zither intensifies!!!

Don't believe me?

See (hear) for yourself...

[downwithpeople]

x-files roundup

young at heart: BAD. an episode that has a lot of good ideas but winds up being less than the sum of its parts. barnett should be a great creature feature antagonist, but he spends most of the episode literally hiding in shadows with his gross salamander arm kept out of view. he should have had his own delightful b-plot where he's going blind and killing people, but instead we get a lot of dull fbi procedural shit. it's just too boring to be worth watching.

E.B.E: GOOD. one of the strongest episodes of the season. it took us a little while to get there but besides the pilot, this is the first myth arc episode that felt like the writers really knew what they were doing. the atmosphere of paranoia is kicked up a notch and we get the most deep throat lines of any ep to date, though his answers raise just as many questions. scully's skepticism is nuanced, rational and grounded in a cautious pragmatism rather than a vapid contrarianism; once she finds the bug in her pen, she's more concerned about whether or not it's a good idea to kick the hornet's nest rather than questioning the existence of hornets. this is also the first lone gunmen appearance and they steal the scene right off the bat.

miracle man: BAD. an episode about faith that doesn't have anything interesting to say on the subject. samuel indisputably has real magic powers, but there's some half-hearted attempts to cast doubt on the idea. there's a corrupt southern sheriff and a corrupt southern preacher, but the real villain of the episode is a corrupt burn survivor with a walking aid in a reveal that is shockingly trite rather than shocking. mulder hallucinates his sister but as the series rolls on i expect i'm going to find all of the stuff surrounding samantha to be on the level of batman crying about his parents. the agents don't accomplish or learn anything and mulder just kind of throws his hands up at the end of the ep as if to say that's that. there's a great sequence during a sermon and we get some cool catholic scully dialogue.

shapes: BAD. this is the 90s so when native americans appear, we get the most magical ones. mulder is praised by a survivor of wounded knee for being an especially spiritual white man. this is an episode where he's also extremely unlikable, being all too eager to contravene tribal law to do autopsy on a wolfman. there's a bit of creature feature goodness but i just don't think werewolves are that cool; at least when werewolf the apocalypse was (is? i'm not gonna read the new books) extremely weird about native americans, it kind of went somewhere interesting. even without 2025 brain, this is another episode where the agents don't seem to really do anything and the whole mystery kind of self-destructs with little prompting. the good things about this episode: absolutely gorgeous shots of vancouver-as-montana, really great set design for the homes and businesses in the treygo reservation, great selection of first nations guest actors including my man michael horse. his sheriff character repeatedly shutting down mulder for trying to treat him like a tour guide is one of the few writing highlights of the ep.

darkness falls: GOOD. it's tense, it's scary, it's creepy. the horrible primeval fireflies are a toe dipped into more of a cosmic horror story, a force unleashed by accident through human greed that can't be comprehended. i mean, they do comprehend the little bastards, but it doesn't help them none. we get a strong supporting cast and some nasty scenes of people being entombed and eaten alive. we get another iteration of mulder and scully as the idealist/pragmatist, which is when they're always at their best. if i'm gonna deduct points for anything i think it's a real liberal ass episode. the logging companies are bad for destroying the environment, the ecoterrorists are bad for trying to save it and the only good and trustworthy people are the federal law enforcement in the middle of it.

tooms: GOOD. the guy so nice you see him twice! tooms kind of loses his impact for his second go around because the characters are just wise to his tricks; there's inherently less tension when the agents know what's up. what makes up for it is we get more time from tooms' POV and dough hitchinson does his damndest to make him so gross and scary that you can't fathom how anyone can be in the same room as him. we also get some great mulder/scully scenes, particularly the heartfelt conversation in the car. this is also an episode with big ramifications for the overarching plot despite being a MOTW ep. walter skinner makes his debut as the hard-headed assistant director. narratively, he's established as a threat, but he comes across as an eminently reasonable authority with genuine concern for the agents. we also get the cigarette smoking man talking, which i could frankly go without.

i really gotta pack

[youzicha]

It's late at night and I'm being paranoid, but guys, I'm starting to sense a vibe-shift away from the post-1950s consensus... Consider:

¶ Some recentish papers critical of split-brain patients, Libet experiment, which were approvingly cited by the usual free will/dualism mafia on rattumb. (I also think I saw someone quote this not-at-all recent deflationary account of blindsight?)

¶ This Tuesday someone called "a literal banana" posted a blogpost Against Automaticity which starts from the heuristics-and-biases field not replicating, says that we should instead think about "rational processes", and then jumps from there to saying that we should reject "the myth of the clockwork, the myth of mechanism ... the idea that you can explain every phenomenon causally", and instead turn to "Phenomenology" (which, banana assures us, "is not a woo model").

¶ But what is a rational process? I feel since Von Neumann and RAND the usual answer has been game theory, but that's also getting less popular? When Scott Alexander posted "Meditations on Moloch", Chris Hallquist wrote a reply saying that bad Nash equilibria is an excuse and the real problem is that the individual actors are bad people. And finally, both these strands join together neatly in this @raginrayguns post

 I think the appeal of the cog sci heuristics and biases stuff, as well as the game theory stuff and “moloch”, is substantially that they provide explanations in which bad things are nobody’s fault. 

I guess it's a bit risky to predict the course of intellectual history based on who I happen to follow on tumblr, but basically I foresee a return to Catholicism: an immaterial soul which can be good or bad and needs to individually cultivate virtue...

[smellyrottentrees]

Writerly Questionnaire

No one asked but my love language is infodumping so here we are.

About You

When did you start writing?

I do not recall. When I was very young, probably not long after I learned to write at all.

Are the genres/themes you enjoy reading different from the ones you write?

Somewhat. I don’t actually read much high fantasy, I’ve never even opened a Tolkien. I dwell more in horror and sometimes mystery (think Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown) and gothic literature. I do like fantasy on occasion, and absolutely eat up books about ancient myths.

Is there an author (or just a fellow writer!) you want to emulate, or one to whom you’re often compared?

I read Madeline Miller and fell in love with her writing style. I like Stephen King’s quite a bit for the way he can present a horrifying thing and it actually make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I try to emulate the gothic style, very calm and rational and descriptive while monsters casually run amok. I don’t think I’ve been compared to many authors out there.

Can you tell me a little about your writing space(s)? (Room, coffee shop, desk, etc.)

I either write on my bed (comfy, but no neck support) or on my parents’ living room rocking chair (can be distracting)

What’s your most effective way to muster up some muse?

Go out and live. Some of my best ideas are born of very mundane days for myself when I have time to think.

Did the place(s) you grew up in influence the people and places you write about?

Probably more than I would admit. My childhood home was very rural, an isolated neighborhood surrounded by farmland. There were open expanses of grass to run around in for what felt like forever, with mountains visible from the bedroom window. Where I live now is very wooded, less rural but somehow almost more isolated. I’ve always found a sense of comfort in spaces where no humans dwelled. I hope my stories show that.

Are there any recurring themes in your writing, and if so, do they surprise you at all?

I think the idea that morality is somewhat nuanced and situational comes up a lot. Like, when is killing someone okay? Is it ever okay? Is the punishment suitable for the crime? Are people always either all good or all bad? Is true evil and true good real? That kind of thing. It does sometimes creep up on me a little, I sometimes subconsciously write morals into a story and then read it back later and go, “what the hell??”

Your Characters

Would you please tell me about your current favorite character? (Current WIP, past WIP, never used, etc.)

Arroti. There is no question. He’s just so weird and never what people expect Him to be.

Which of your characters do you think you’d be friends with in real life?

Khet. I like kind people with good humor, and he’s very kind.

Which of your characters would you dislike the most if you met them?

Yetova. There is, again, no question.

Tell me about the process of coming up with of one, all, or any of your characters.

Usually the world comes before the characters. Most characters start solely as art, then their personality and lore comes next.

Do you notice any recurring themes/traits among your characters?

I don’t know. Anxiety and depression seem to afflict a good number of them, but that’s just the name of the game when it comes to the things they’ve experienced.

How do you picture them? (As real people you imagined, as models/actors who exist in real life, as imaginary artwork, as artwork you made or commissioned, anime style, etc.)

I know I draw them a certain way, but that’s because my aspirations are greater than my current skill. I see them in my head as real people, though not people who already exist like actors. They simply are.

Your Writing

What’s your reason for writing?

I am a creator at heart. Writing is just another outlet for my creations. And isn’t it fun to have a world to share with your own?

Is there a specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating coming from your readers?

I haven’t gotten too many comments to know. One time someone on here called my writing style romantic and I rode that high for a week, though. Writers do love feedback!

How do you want to be thought of by those who read your work? (For example: as a literary genius, or as a writer who “gets” the human condition; as a talented worldbuilder, as a role model, etc.)

Just a guy, I guess. A guy with a lot of stuff in my head.

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

My worldbuilding. It really fleshes out a story, in my opinion.

What have you been frequently told your greatest writing strength is by others?

I don’t share my writing much so I don’t get much feedback, but some people have told me they like my descriptions.

How do you feel about your own writing? (Answer in whatever way you interpret this question.)

Like anything, there is room for improvement.

If you were the last person on earth and knew your writing would never be read by another human, would you still write?

Yes. Before I had any social media, that’s basically what I was doing—art and writing for myself alone.

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, or do you write purely what you enjoy? If it’s a mix of the two, which holds the most influence?

The story itself is just what I enjoy. When it comes to formatting (e.g., when I decided to split my book into two arcs for easier marketability) I do sometimes make decisions based on what I feel others will enjoy. But the content itself is determined solely by my own whims and interests.

[msfbgraves]

I have been disturbed by the implications of AI for weeks now, deeply shaken, and I can't find a 'reasonable' argument why. I feel that denying people access to human stories is a violation of the deepest evil but I'm finding no 'logical', objective basis for this. After all, what's the harm if people only have access to bad stories? Film is a new medium, we've survived for millennia without it. And who cares if there are no books to read? Most people are fine not reading, instead watching utter crap -

But then I realised at least part of the reason why I can't find any reasonable argument for the value of good stories is that our culture disregards feelings to an alarming extent. Feelings aren't important, the consensus seems to be, and looking into them is, at best, a medical issue. It's simply not that important that people go through life vaguely miserable a lot, and if anything, that problem can potentially be solved by earning more money, so you can always tell people to focus on that.

Speaking of money, if we can save the 10% spent on creators in the sale of this good, that is a rational savings and a good idea. We don't need actors and writers, artists and directors and musicians anymore, or to a far, far lesser extent, and we can still give people their silly little pictures. Again 200, 500, a 1000 years ago we didn't even have silly little pictures and people survived, yeah? It's a luxury item and mass producing that is what we've done in every industrial revolution!

And... I'm a historian but this is a history I haven't been taught (it's not been presented to me as part of the general human experience somehow), but I have senses, and if it really weren't important, why is Ao3 so big? Why is there so much money in the entertainment industry? Why are many of the biggest successes in entertainment based on novels?

And the societal cost? Why are children who express themselves healthier? Find it easier to work together? Why do museums exist even if many people don't go? And well, did people who couldn't read not value stories?

But they've always made art, put on plays, valued gossip, valued stories. We've always had singers, dancers and musicians, comics. Children have always wanted to hear stories and we've always valued a good yarn. People travelling, or working, would tell them to each other. In winter, they tell them to each other at home. Every summer camp or school trip I went on, a group of people in a somewhat secluded location focusing on a specific activity you normally wouldn't have time for, be it practising music, sports, outdoor activities - it always concluded with: "and at the end of the week, we're putting on a show, so go make up a bit!" Even at orchestra camp, and you could argue that there would be quite enough culture to go around there, but no, we were told to make up bits and put on silly hats...We, humanity, made up 1001 Nights, the myths, the fairytales...

I just know that when you take that away from people, good stories, the human element, it is all kinds of Not Good, I can feel it in my soul.

If only because people who rarely engage with stories are often also terrible at relating to people. And that leads to a lot of misery. Giving people copies of stories based off of what has sold best in the past- it can't be good, it isn't good, but I wish I had some flowcharts to convince people who would otherwise dismiss me as being too emotional.

Because they're the ones in charge...!

[theweeklydiscourse]

If the “fanboys” can use fanfiction published books to back up their claims and arguments for what they support, why can the opposite group (who supports the sequel films and the actors who play those characters) not use the books written about the sequel characters for their own evidence? Since Ben Solo is the character of the moment, his earliest moments were documented in detail in books that are essentially published fanfiction by contract. Those books talk about how Palpatine groomed him in the womb and Leia felt darkness that she couldn’t get rid of, and how as a toddler Ben wanted to a pilot like his father but both of them prioritized their own careers instead and he nearly died by the household droids. It’s not in the films or comic books so it’s not valid. Really? That’s the argument against creators invested in his character and backstory? There’s also the comic book writer Charles Soule who made an attempt to cover the backstory featured in the Last Jedi film, and claimed that Adam Driver was his ghost writer. Considering that comic storyline took a left turn into a dozen different galaxies and is still traveling, it’s impossible to rationalize that any film arc would be parallel to the equivalent dumpster fire that the comics turned out to be. Because at the time that was released, the episode 9 script was not available to anyone including actors.

It’s okay to have a head canon that fills in the gaps between what a film shows and what it doesn’t. But when the head canon goes completely off script to become the opposite of the film information, that’s when there is a problem. It doesn’t benefit anyone when fans (not the narcissist fanboys) are attacked, by the same people who say they share beliefs, for defending head canons and source material that runs parallel to the films and what we are given of specific characters and their dynamics, instead of an idea that is 3 million separate solar systems away. At the same time, alot of the struggles that Ben Solo went through are not unique because it follows all of the textbook definitions and levels of abuse. People who have never experienced any of them firsthand literally are unable to empathize with his character. Luke has zero use for Ben. His own parents don’t understand him because he is so different. Leia is Force Sensitive. Han is not. Even books that describe how the Force works say that every Force Sensitive has different abilities. That easily explains why Leia can’t help him, Luke refuses to unless it benefits him, and Han can’t. Don’t forget that Palpatine is PuppetMaster over everything.

Then you have the narcissist fanboys who were so angry that Ben Solo existed that they were the ones who rewrote every single facet of lore and science within that universe. To the point where a Force Sensitive is not even allowed to become a Force Ghost. If that ability is removed by the writers or anyone else, then that person cannot be revived later for another story. Same for the World Between Worlds. You can’t have two people in the same lineage in the same inter dimensional space have different rules, when the rest of who visits doesn’t have those same restrictions. Therefore a Ben Solo resurrection film is impossible for the future.

The rage that Ben Solo evokes from SW fanboys is something that needs to be studied. Their efforts to erase him and write him off into oblivion is a clear example of the petty spitefulness that broke the myth for good. He’s been hated by the fanboys since TFA (despite what people might try to have you believe) and it all comes down to them hating the idea of his character being taken in a sympathetic direction. They don’t care about the themes or coherence of the myth, all they really want is an empty and badass spectacle that’ll momentarily satisfy them, but isn’t what they need.

The foundation of people’s inability to empathize with Ben’s character was laid way back in the TFA era. Since then, the half-baked headcanons that circulated around the fandom have morphed into an unrecognizable mass of unexplained problems people have with him. TLJ shows us evidence of the abuse he experienced and actively characterizes Ben Solo as a victim in a way that no one had expected post-TFA. He’s overtly sympathetic and his character serves as a reminder that it was a fanciful idea to think that someone would just spontaneously become evil because of their heritage. TLJ makes it so that he can’t be written off as the kid with perfect parents who just went crazy one day, instead he’s more than that.

Also, on the topic of the “Jedi prerequisite” for becoming a force ghost makes me quake with rage. It’s a bullshit rule that only exists to exclude certain characters from coming back and is used arbitrarily. The rules are constantly being rewritten and revised to suit whatever narrative the person making those rules wants to enforce. For the time being, DLF is averse to anything Ben related (even though he was wildly popular and mostly well-received) and given that Adam Driver isn’t coming back, I’ve lost all hope for a potential resurrection.

[phoenixyfriend]

Masterlist: Business and Economics

Navigation Post

Fun fact, tumblr allows 250 links on the old editor and 100 in the new. So. Network of masterlists.

Economics and Theory:

How rent should work

Ko-Fi prompt: Macroeconomics

Ko-Fi prompt: Some Basic Econ/Finance Terms

Ko-Fi prompt: A few tracts, primarily about the minimum wage

Ko-Fi prompt: Progressive Taxes

Ko-Fi prompt: The Myth of the Rational Actor

Ko-Fi prompt: Raising the Minimum Wage and Its Effects

Ko-Fi prompt: Stock Market Basics

Ko-Fi prompt: Stock Market Rant

Ko-Fi prompt: Why don’t Landlords have price wars? (demand inelasticity)

Ko-Fi prompt: Trickle-down economics

Ko-Fi prompt: Tariffs/VAT/Customs

How do we define a Healthy Economy?

The overlap and intersect of rent and commute costs against wages - The effective demographic against which this argument works

When watching political ads, always ask: which taxes?

No income tax under [quantity]

Raising the Minimum Wage

Finance, and economics on the personal level:

Ko-Fi prompt: Anti-Inflation measures one can take with personal savings

Ko-Fi prompt: Green Stocks (are a marketing tactic and not a regulated term)

Being a business major who ended up a disillusioned leftist

Case Studies and Hypotheticals:

Ko-Fi prompt: Revenue and expenses for a sports stadium

Ko-Fi prompt: Going from shareholder-owned to employee-owned

Ko-Fi prompt: Thieves/Assassins Guilds

Ko-Fi prompt: Airline overbooking

Ko-Fi prompt: Car Dealerships

Ko-Fi prompt: Revenue and expenses for a concert venue

Raise Taxes on Golf - I may have a reputation

Employee Stock Options

Did you know women couldn’t have credit cards in the US until 1974?

[storytimewithnova]

Eerie Tale: 27 Club

In a small, remote village nestled deep within the heart of the Japanese countryside, an eerie legend cast a long shadow over the lives of its residents. They whispered about it in hushed tones, for fear that speaking its name would somehow invite the malevolent forces that lurked in the shadows. This legend was known as the "27 Club," a curse that seemed to target celebrities who met their untimely demise at the age of twenty-seven.

Osamu Miya, a humble farmer with a heart as heavy as the mountains that surrounded his village, had once scoffed at the idea of such a myth. His twin brother, Atsumu Miya, had been a multi-talented sensation—an actor, a model, a pro volleyball player, and a gifted singer who could capture the hearts of anyone who heard him. Atsumu was destined for greatness, and Osamu had watched with pride as his brother's star ascended.

But as fate would have it, the ominous whispers of the 27 Club would soon haunt Osamu's every waking moment. On a chilling autumn evening, a thick mist blanketed the village, and the wind carried an eerie, mournful tune that seemed to come from nowhere. Osamu received a phone call that would forever change his life.

His brother Atsumu had been found lifeless in his luxurious Tokyo apartment, mere days before his twenty-eighth birthday. Osamu couldn't comprehend the news. The police called it a sudden heart attack, but rumors of foul play swirled around like vengeful spirits. Atsumu's death was shrouded in darkness, a tragic enigma that gnawed at Osamu's soul.

As Osamu traveled to Tokyo to identify his brother's lifeless body, he couldn't escape the feeling that something sinister had taken place. The city, typically bustling with life, now seemed to exude an eerie, oppressive aura. Shadows danced menacingly in the corners of his vision, and strange, whispered voices echoed in his ears.

At the morgue, Osamu gazed upon Atsumu's peaceful yet lifeless face. His twin brother's eyes, once brimming with vitality, now held a haunting emptiness. The unnerving realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. Atsumu had joined the 27 Club, a club of those who met their end under mysterious circumstances.

Determined to uncover the truth, Osamu delved into a labyrinth of secrets, uncovering a web of deceit and jealousy that surrounded Atsumu's life. Each step he took deeper into the darkness of Tokyo revealed more unsettling revelations—envious rivals, a shadowy cult, and a trail of inexplicable events that defied rational explanation.

As Osamu peered into the abyss of his brother's life and death, he couldn't help but wonder if the 27 Club was more than just a myth. It was a curse that had claimed Atsumu, a curse that now threatened to consume Osamu's sanity. The chilling realization that he might be the next victim of this sinister legend sent shivers down his spine, and he knew that he had embarked on a journey from which there might be no return.

And so, dear reader, as you follow Osamu's harrowing quest for answers, be prepared for a story of lost souls and tragic fates, a tale woven with mystery and darkness. For in the shadow of the 27 Club, even the bravest among us can find themselves ensnared by an inexplicable and terrifying destiny.

The further Osamu delved into the enigma of the 27 Club, the more chilling details he uncovered. It was as though a malevolent force had woven a sinister tapestry around the lives of those destined to join this macabre fraternity.

In his quest for answers, Osamu unearthed a series of disturbing coincidences. Each member of the 27 Club had exhibited peculiar behavior in the days leading up to their deaths—hallucinations, cryptic messages, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom. It was as though they were tormented by unseen entities, driven to the brink of madness.

Osamu's investigation led him to a shadowy underground society that referred to itself as "The Keepers of the 27." This cult-like group believed they could harness the power of the curse, granting them fame and fortune at the cost of their souls. Atsumu had unwittingly crossed paths with this nefarious organization, and his success had made him a target.

As Osamu delved deeper into the secrets of the cult, he discovered a series of eerie rituals performed on the 27th of each month. These rituals involved summoning dark entities, seeking forbidden knowledge, and offering sacrifices to maintain their grasp on fame and youth. It was a horrifying dance with the supernatural that had ensnared his brother and threatened to ensnare him as well.

Haunted by visions of Atsumu's lifeless gaze and the ominous chanting of the cult, Osamu ventured into the heart of the cult's lair, a hidden temple nestled in the heart of Tokyo's underbelly. There, he confronted the cult's leader, a charismatic figure who claimed to hold the key to unlocking the curse's power.

The final confrontation between Osamu and the cult leader was a chilling battle of wills. Dark forces swirled around them, and the very air seemed to crackle with malevolence. As Osamu struggled to break free from the cult's grasp, he realized that he had become a pawn in a game of life and death, where the stakes were higher than he could have ever imagined.

In a climactic and terrifying showdown, Osamu uncovered the truth about the curse of the 27 Club and the dark forces that fueled it. It was a horrifying revelation that left him teetering on the precipice of madness.

But Osamu was not alone in this harrowing journey. With the help of a few loyal allies, he managed to break the curse's hold on him and expose the cult's nefarious activities to the world. The 27 Club's power waned, and its grip on fame and fortune crumbled.

As the cult's dark influence dissipated, Osamu couldn't help but feel a bittersweet sense of closure. He had unraveled the mystery of the 27 Club, but at a grave personal cost. His twin brother, Atsumu, was gone forever, a tragic victim of a curse that would haunt Osamu's nightmares for the rest of his days.

And so, dear reader, beware as you ponder the eerie tale of the 27 Club—a story of fame, fortune, and the chilling depths of the human soul. For the curse that ensnared Osamu and his brother may still lurk in the shadows, waiting for its next unsuspecting victim.

In the aftermath of his chilling journey into the heart of the 27 Club's dark secrets, Osamu returned to his quiet village, forever changed. The weight of what he had witnessed and the horrors he had uncovered never left him. The memory of his brother, Atsumu, haunted his every step.

Osamu became a guardian of the 27 Club's history, dedicated to ensuring that the curse would never claim another life. He shared his story, revealing the cult's sinister practices and the tragic fates of those who had fallen victim to the curse. He hoped that by shedding light on the darkness, he could protect others from the same grim destiny.

Years passed, and the legend of the 27 Club began to fade. The cult's influence waned, and the curse lost its grip on the world of fame and fortune. Osamu's determination had broken the cycle, and the malevolent forces that had plagued his brother and so many others were no longer as potent.

As the years went by, Osamu found solace in preserving the memory of his twin brother, Atsumu, through the stories he told and the photographs he cherished. He had paid a high price for unraveling the 27 Club's mysteries, but in doing so, he had protected the lives of countless others who might have otherwise been ensnared by its sinister allure.

The village, once plagued by the fear of the 27 Club, gradually returned to a sense of normalcy, free from the eerie whispers and ominous shadows. Osamu had given his all to confront the darkness and had emerged as a beacon of hope, a reminder that even in the face of the most chilling legends, the power of courage and determination could prevail.

And so, dear reader, as you reflect on this tale of tragedy, mystery, and the relentless pursuit of truth, remember that the most haunting stories often hold within them the seeds of resilience and redemption. In the end, it is our strength of spirit that can conquer even the most chilling of myths, ensuring that the darkness of the past remains only a shadow in the annals of history.

[back-and-totheleft]

The Son Also Kneels

Oliver Stone was deplaning at LAX following a 16-hour trip from Indonesia when he turned on his phone and found it blowing up with texts from his office. Apparently the media—what he called the “paparazzi”—had been in touch. They wanted to ask him about his son, Sean.

In particular, they wanted to know what he thought of Sean’s decision to become a Muslim. Oliver instructed his office to decline comment.

“He never consulted me,” the elder Mr. Stone recalled in a phone call to The Observer from his production office in Los Angeles. “That is something you normally talk to your parents about.”

The director is a practicing Buddhist. “Obviously the Muslim religion believes in a singular god,” he added. “I don’t.”

Sean Stone, a 27-year-old filmmaker who was raised a Buddhist and spent his youth exploring his Christian and Jewish roots (not to mention any number of film sets), is like his old man, a determined—some would say obstinate—truth-seeker. He is also a man of firm opinions who is unafraid to express them in a highly public fashion.

But to peg him, as one Yahoo! News commenter did recently, as “another nut from a spoiled confused family,” is to miss the point entirely.

To hear him tell it, accepting Islam as his faith (and adopting a new Muslim middle name, Ali) is a demonstration that one man can embrace three Abrahamic religions as a gesture of peace.

“I don’t take a priest’s interpretation as sanctity,” he said. “I would not take an imam’s ruling on the Koran as being definitive. I would not take anyone’s word except my own interpretation of the books.”

Mr. Stone’s conversion was only part of his recent media coming-out party. In announcing his newfound faith, he eagerly stepped into perhaps the thorniest foreign policy question of the moment: whether Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, and whether its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a total nutjob.

“My main thing is I don’t want to see a war, an imperialistic war, because I know what it could do to the region,” he said. Mr. Stone also defended Mr. Ahmadinejad—the man who infamously referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” and declared that Israel should be “wiped off a map”—as a “rational actor.”

“The media is so biased in trying to paint him as a madman, because if he is a madman, you can’t talk to him,” he explained to The Observer.

Mr. Stone first met with Mr. Ahmadinejad in February, when he was a featured guest at the “Hollywoodism and Cinema” conference in Tehran. The president gave him a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.

When asked what they talked about, Mr. Stone didn’t really remember. The meeting might have seemed an opportunity to do some diplomatic work for his father, who had been eager to follow up his documentary portraits of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with one on Mr. Ahmadinejad, but had been rebuffed (many Iranians took issue with perceived historical inaccuracies in his Alexander the Great biopic). Still, the younger Stone didn’t push the issue.

It soon became clear that Mr. Stone’s views on Iran are not all that radical. For instance, shortly after he defended his opinions to network news blowhards Bill O’Reilly and Piers Morgan, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, appeared on 60 Minutes to declare that bombing Iran right now was “the stupidest idea [he] ever heard.”

Still, his comments were controversial, even within his own family. “When you’re younger, you can make mistakes by saying what people don’t want to hear,” the elder Mr. Stone noted. “Sometimes he says stuff that I think is downright fucking stupid.”

The Observer met the Son of Oliver at a rear table at Think Coffee by Union Square one March morning.

Tall, strapping and square-jawed, Sean Christopher Ali Stone appeared more Winklevii than Wahabi. He did not have his father’s self-described “Mongol eyes” or the gap between his teeth.

What he did have, however, was the family curiosity, and that knack for taking controversial positions.

“I think it’s important to have that spirit of inquiry, that spirit of investigation,” Mr. Stone said as he periodically sipped from a cup of chai tea. “If you keep slandering people, calling them ‘conspiracy theorists,’ you’re killing the desire to investigate, the desire to actually know.”

Mr. Stone, who is single and divides his time between Los Angeles and New York’s Alphabet City, wanted to make it clear that his highly publicized spiritual transformation was not intended as a publicity gambit.

It all began on Valentine’s Day 2010, when he and his filmmaking partner, Alexander Wraith, were at Letchworth Village, an abandoned institution for the mentally and physically disabled in Rockland County. They were there to film Graystone, Mr. Stone’s feature debut, about two men (named Sean and Alexander) who visit supposedly haunted sites to explore their belief in the supernatural.

He and Mr. Wraith had brought along candles from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which they lit and placed on the ground as they prayed aloud. They heard screams and howls and a child’s laughter, which scared them both shitless.

“That’s why there’s an expression ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’” he said. “Either you find your faith and you believe that there is a higher power guiding you and protecting you, or else you basically surrender it and say there is no God.”

Two years later to the day, Mr. Stone found himself in Isfahan, Iran, sitting inside a mosque across from a Shiite cleric, explaining his reasons for wanting to be a Muslim. He was accompanied by a man named Bahram Heidari, an Iranian living in Canada who was helping him develop a feature film about the Sufi poet Rumi (Mr. Stone is also prepping a documentary on djinn, or genies). With an Iranian TV news crew on hand to document the occasion, Mr. Stone said the shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief.

“I didn’t ‘convert,’” he pointed out, “because I don’t believe you can convert from the same God. It’s an acceptance of Islam as an extension of what I call the Judeo-Christian tradition going back to Abraham.”

He said he was surprised the event generated so much attention. “We had not arranged for any press,” he said. “We don’t know how they found out about it.”

But when everyone from CNN to Agence France-Presse jumped on the story, he went with it. He later defended Iran on cable news. “It seems that every time we sanction this country and turn the bolts tighter around it … it’s just going to make them potentially more radical and dangerous,” he said. “You can’t just bomb your way to an accord.” While defending Mr. Ahmadinejad, he also was emphatic that “there is no room for Holocaust denial.” (Not long ago, his father also was quoted minimizing the Holocaust.)

It’s not hard to understand how Mr. Stone developed a certain sympathy for men of strong convictions who are unafraid to offend.

“He says things that rile people, I’m not going to deny that,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Ahmadinejad. He says the same about his dad. “I think he likes controversy,” Mr. Stone said. “I think as much as anything, he likes that people get riled.”

Sean Stone was born in Santa Monica in 1984, the eldest child of Oliver and Elizabeth Burkit Fox, a production assistant and Oliver’s second wife.

He made his screen debut at 6 months, with a cameo in Salvador. At age 2, he was playing Gordon Gekko’s kid, “a fat little capitalist son,” as he put it.

His earliest and clearest film memory was being on the set of Born on the Fourth of July, in which he was among a group of kids shooting at each other with fake guns in the woods.

“That’s pretty intense when you’re, like, 4,” he said.

Mr. Stone’s early film career was more a matter of convenience than raw talent. “He was available and I thought he was photogenic,” his dad admitted.

Sean’s parents separated in 1993 (“It was not an easy divorce,” Oliver said), and Sean and his brother Michael lived with Elizabeth. When he could, Oliver took Sean on weekend trips “where he could be outside the normal Los Angeles ‘shop, drive, and die’ routine,” said Oliver.

They also traveled the world, from East Africa to Tibet, where Oliver, an Episcopalian who had converted to Buddhism, introduced the then 9-year-old Sean to the Dalai Lama.

“It’s a different kind of Buddhism, it’s an atomistic form,” Oliver said. “It must have been amazing for him.” The experience was eye-opening, Sean said. It inspired him to take up the practice of meditation and fostered a curiosity about all forms of spirituality. It was also around that time that Sean began to discover his father’s films, each one violent and provocative and dubious about the powers that be.

Mr. Stone was 7 when his father released JFK, a film that brought a mix of reviews both approving and vitriolic. The knocks on his father bothered him at the time, and still do. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “To me it’s a disgrace that so many people get away with calling him a conspiracy theorist, when the truth is he’s always based his work on evidence. He does his homework.”

After graduating from Brentwood School, just around the same time the second Iraq war was getting underway, Mr. Stone considered joining the Army, “more out of a desire to have a life experience,” he said. (Oliver, who dropped out of Yale and eventually enlisted in the Army in 1967, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, recognized the impulse.) Rather than enlist, Mr. Stone wound up at Princeton, where he enrolled in the ROTC, bailing after a semester to focus on academics.

In 2009, after apprenticing with his father, Sean began to focus on his own filmmaking, starting with Graystone, which will be released on video-on-demand in the fall.

Mr. Stone’s long-term goal is to be a filmmaker, though his father is quick to tamp down expectations. “It’s very hard to assume the mantle, so to speak,” Oliver said. “It’s true about anybody in any profession, whether you’re the stockbroker’s son or a garbage man’s son.”

Mr. Stone agrees that it will be hard to step out from his father’s shadow and make a name for himself, though that new middle name of his is certainly a start.

Even so, his embrace of Islam goes only so far. For instance, Mr. Stone isn’t quite ready to forswear alcohol altogether.

“I know plenty of Christians and Jews who violate the Testaments all the time,” he pointed out. “It all depends on how you practice.”

-Daniel Edward Rosen, "The Son Also Kneels," The Observer, Mar 28 2012

[atithsinaiamonkar]

The Symbiotic Union: Can Science and Faith Coexist?

The iconic Bollywood film "PK" made a unique exploration of the realities of faith and the human condition at large. Through its satirical lens, the film challenged conventional notions of faith and encouraged viewers to question the impaired acceptance of some religious beliefs. As the protagonist, PK, brilliantly portrayed by supremely talented and acclaimed actor Aamir Khan navigates a world filled with diverse beliefs and practices, he unwittingly exposes the absurdity of many blind rituals and superstitions. The cinematic provocation of this movie exhibits the complex interplay between science and faith, exhibiting the fragile boundary separating these two opposing forces and examining how these seemingly disparate domains can coexist and even complement each other.

Today, advancements in science and technology coexist with deeply entrenched faith-based practices. Even in critical moments, when medical science reaches its limits, many resort to prayer and divine intervention. This dichotomy is evident in the practices of institutions like ISRO, where scientists, while at the forefront of technological innovation, still seek divine blessings before major satellite launches and operations. This global phenomenon has polarised society into two factions, one that champions science as the ultimate arbiter of truth and the other that prioritises faith over empirical evidence. These two forces have captivated human thought for centuries and continue mesmerising the world with their perplexing embrace while failing to find synchrony in their association.

Science, an unrelenting explorer of the unknown, has peeled back the layers of cosmic mystery, from the minute particles that constitute matter to the vast expanse of the universe. Armed with empirical evidence and logical reasoning, science has empowered humanity to harness the resources of nature, elevate our quality of life and confront some pressing global challenges. Scientific breakthroughs have revolutionised medicine, technology, agriculture etc. reshaping the very fabric of human existence. From developing life-saving vaccines to creating sustainable energy solutions, science holds the key to a brighter future. Its ability to unravel the secrets of the natural world and apply them to practical solutions has made it an indispensable tool for human progress and prosperity.

The scientific understanding of human reproduction has long debunked the enchanting fairytales of angelic beings delivering infants wrapped in flower petals. Science offers a more grounded explanation, revealing the intricate biological processes involved in conception and birth. Similarly, the Big Bang theory provides a compelling explanation for the origins of the universe, challenging creation myths and religious tenets. The theory of evolution, through the process of natural selection, accounts for the diversity of life on Earth, including the evolution of humans from our primate ancestors. Science always relies on the existence of empirical evidence and logical reasoning to offer rational explanations for phenomena that are otherwise shrouded in misconception and superstition.

Faith extends beyond the realm of scientific inquiry, providing answers to the existential dilemmas that science cannot fully explain. Faith instils a moral compass and a belief in a higher power. By fostering hope and compassion it enriches lives and inspires individuals to strive for the better. Just as an orphan yearns for parental guidance, a person without faith may lack a moral anchor. The absence of a higher authority can lead individuals astray, as evidenced by the experiences of many orphans who struggled without any parental guidance. The fear of divine retribution and the hope of heavenly rewards can motivate people to lead virtuous lives. Conversely, atheists, lacking such accountability, may be less inclined and more fearless to consider the moral repercussions of their actions.

However, unchecked faith can degenerate into dogma and superstition, hindering progress and stifling critical thinking. It becomes necessary to approach any belief system with a critical mind, questioning its assumptions and seeking evidence to support its claims. By doing so, we can avoid the pitfalls of blind faith and embrace the wisdom that faith can offer. Blind faith can lead to irrational and harmful behaviour, as evidenced by countless examples. Moreover, pseudoscientific and cult practices often exploit the vulnerable, promising heavenly salvation and enlightenment while demanding obedience and sacrifice. A balanced approach that combines faith with scientific thinking becomes imperative to harness the positive aspects of faith while avoiding its negative excesses.

When faced with adversity, the human mind often succumbs to a state of learned helplessness. This feeling accompanied by anxiety and despair, paralyses rational thinking and creates a suspension of disbelief. In such moments of vulnerability, individuals may turn to seeking solace in the unknown. This leads to a dangerous disconnect between reason and reality, where individuals become more prone to superstition and unfounded beliefs. Instead of seeking solutions through scientific inquiry and critical reasoning, they resort to desperate measures, adding layers of complexity and confusion to an already challenging situation. This erosion of trust in both science and faith hinders progress and leaves individuals feeling lost and adrift in an ocean of uncertainty without shores.

A harmonious integration of science and religion can lead to a more profound understanding of both the natural and spiritual worlds. By embracing science for uncovering truth, while acknowledging its inherent limitations and the existence of questions beyond its scope, we can approach faith with a critical vision. This encourages a dialogue where scientific discoveries can inform and enrich the contemporary interpretations of faith, while the values of faith can guide the ethical application of scientific knowledge. This symbiotic relationship fosters a sense of responsibility and accountability within the scientific and spiritual community, ensuring that both faith and science serve the common good and align with the principles of compassion and justice across the globe.

Religious scriptures across all faiths offer profound insights into their practices, often aligning with scientific principles. They define faith not as any blind belief, but as a deep-seated trust in and an unconditional devotion to the higher power and a commitment to virtuous living. Many rituals, often dismissed as mere superstition, have underlying scientific benefits and have been proven to enhance our physical and mental well-being. These texts consistently prioritise virtuous conduct, emphasising integrity, compassion and altruism over superficial rituals or attempts to manipulate and appease the divine. Adherence to such authentic teachings is mandatory if we are to cultivate a holistic approach to life, integrating spiritual growth with justified understanding and ethical living.

A quarrel between two always benefits the third. The artificial divide between science and faith has created an opportune landscape for people with nefarious intentions to exploit the resulting chaos. By sowing discord and deepening the rift between these two forces, they capitalise on the confusion that ensues. While conflicts are inevitable, the welfare of human civilisation demands a concerted effort to maintain a harmonious union between science and faith. The multifaceted challenges facing humanity, necessitate a holistic approach that draws upon both the power of scientific innovation and the ethical guidance offered by faith. Ultimately, we are all products of this intricate interplay, and nurturing this communion is paramount for the continued growth and flourishing of humankind.

Science and religion are not adversaries but complementary disciplines with distinct strengths and limitations. Recognising the value of both perspectives allows us to cultivate a more balanced and enlightened worldview. As Albert Einstein eloquently mentioned, "Science without faith is lame, faith without science is blind." A tolerant coexistence between these two disciplines can illuminate the path towards a more fulfilling and meaningful human existence. As products of the procreation of science and faith, we must step in to foster a dialogue of ceasefire between science and faith. For securing the welfare of the human populace, we must take decisive action to preserve this association, if we are to forge a brighter future that is both intellectually enriching and spiritually fulfilling.

[nurmalaevi]

Denny Ja's Latest Essay Poetry: Dismantling Myth and Shaping Opinion Through Political Consultation

In a complex and often controversial, theoretory and mythical world political world that develops can affect the way we view a political event. However, with the latest essay poetry from Denny JA entitled "Disassembles Myths and Forming Opinion Through Political Consultation", we can have a more objective and informed view. In his essay poetry, Denny JA explores various myths that develop in the world of Indonesian politics, and by using the method of political consultation, he helps readers to form more critical and directed opinions. This essay poem is not only a summary of political theory, but also a practical guide that provides concrete steps to deal with complex political issues. One myth that is often a debate among the community is the myth that politics is a thing that is far from everyday life. In his essay poetry, Denny JA described that politics actually permeated in every aspect of our lives, be it in the family environment, workplace, or even in everyday social interaction. By dismantling this myth, Denny Ja invites us to recognize the importance of actively participating in politics and understanding how political decision making can affect our lives. In addition to dismantling myths, Denny Ja also offers a new approach through political consultation. In his essay poetry, he explained that political consultation is a method that involves a structured dialogue process between leaders and the community to discuss relevant political issues. Through this process, the community can actively participate in making political decisions and feel they have votes in the direction of state policy. In conducting political consultations, Denny Ja stressed the importance of building open, honest and inclusive dialogue. He invited political leaders to listen to the aspirations and input from the community, and consider the common interests in making political decisions. In his essay poetry, Denny Ja gave a real example of how political consultations could succeed in realizing positive changes at various political levels. Not only that, this essay poem also provides insight into the importance of a deep understanding of the developing political issues. Denny Ja invites the reader to not only rely on news received from the mass media, but also conducts research and obtain more complete information. With a deeper understanding, we will be more able to shape opinions based on facts and not only the myths that develop. Essay poetry "Dismantling myth and forming opinions through political consultation" is a valuable source of inspiration for those who want to understand and be involved in politics in a wiser way. Denny Ja through his essay poetry motivates us to not only be a passive spectator in political events, but become an actor who plays an active role in contributing ideas for the progress of the country. In the political world full of wrong myths and perceptions, this essay poem provides a strong foundation to dismantle myths and form rational opinions. Denny Ja has offered a useful and relevant work to those who want to understand politics better, and play an active role in shaping the direction of state policy.