#prophetizing about the end of the world

[adarkrainbow]

Hello!

Turns out I was lecturing about my own history too ! I'm also French and I kind of studied the 19th century in depth years ago 😅. Though I've also studied litterature, but I'm more a history student and my brain went 'trump card activated'!

As for Castles, I agree, with all the big Castles in Ile de France (Fontainebleau, Versailles, Le Louvre etc, it's not surprising that in our minds Castle = BIG

I've discovered this blog a couple of months ago now? And it bring me great joy. Fairy tales were always an area of interest to me but I never studied them so I'm devouring all your posts on them.

Thank you so much for the blog!

Oh I didn't meant it as "it is vexing when I'm lectured by a foreigner about my own history". The thing is... in general when someone points out you don't know your own history, whoever they are, no matter the time, the condition, the intention, you'll always feel embarassed and vexed because that's how human body works X) Be it a British tourist who knows more than you as you chat by the sea-side about the big battle-ship nearby or your very French neighbor who points out the classic French book you praise wasn't written by the person you think wrote it... You know it is just one of those embarassing moments. Didn't meant to sound like the archetypal xenophobic French "Those damn foreigners putting their nose where it does not belong!"

Yeah - I studied literature myself, and while I do casually enjoy history (and am forced to know about it), I am not at all a history hack. I can tell you the full history of fairytales but do not ask me to list you the order of French kings.

Well this blog has been around for... a couple of years now? At least two years around - so while it is pretty "young", you managed to dig up one of those ancient posts nobody comments or reblogs anymore X) But at the same time that's literaly what I created my Masterpost list for - so newcomers can dig through the old archives they might have missed.

I have to say you're welcome! I admit with this blog I have my ups and downs - being literaly an over-stressed Master student trying to scratch some last-minute time to finalize a mémoire you one day believe is the greatest thing on earth, the following day reject as a stupid piece of overbloated uselessness... This blog is literaly an anti-stress system I put together originally to act as a side-way to my actual fairytale studies, so it can be quite moody X) And the periods of relaxation and calm usually coincide wth the "grandes vacances".

But anyway - all of that to say, that I do appreciate your compliments! It is just that you know, trying to bring forward French stuff to a side of Tumblr that is not big or keen on French culture (it comes to no surprise that when I work on a long, complex, full post about Perrault it gets reblogs I can count on a hand, but a throw-away hasty short post about the Grimm gets dozens and dozens of reblogs in a day), I always get tense when I make a mistake because my whole credibility is blown into little pieces by the overtly-critical and always-judgemental eye of the dreaded RANDOM AMERICAN GUY WHO COMES OUT AND SAYS HA TURNS OUT YOU ARE NOT AS FRENCH AS YOU SAY YOU ARE...

... I usually do not get as expressive and agitated in a post, especially an answer post, but I am tired and overwork so i'm just having a quiet little mania moment :)

[chokulit]

ive never seen anyone talk about this before so i will: i think the second opening of dungeon meshi symbolizes what would have happened if the winged lion won.

[daecaerys]

META , 𝑫𝑨𝑬𝑵𝑬𝑹𝒀𝑺' 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑨𝑵𝑻𝑰-𝑷𝑹𝑶𝑷𝑯𝑬𝑻, 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑨𝑵𝑻𝑰-𝑴𝑬𝑺𝑺𝑰𝑨𝑯, 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑯𝑼𝑴𝑨𝑵 𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑬𝑵: often talking with @ruingod and the tropes around characters, i realized how of an antithesis dany is to the common messianic trope ( unlike paul who absorbs himself in it to gain power ) and since recently there has been going on a discussion about it as if she's the same trope as his ( sigh ), i decided to come here and express my opinions ( which are just that, opinions and interpretations ). well, daenerys does not see herself as anything but a queen, a ruler, and she views it as a duty and not a priviledge. she sees ruling ad a responsability to protect those around her ( coming from the sense that she often wasn't protected ), and does not use their dependance on her and their views of her figure as means to create prophercies or even propaganda about her rule. she never sees herself as above her people, as their savior, but a member of their reality/society with the power of bringing change. daenerys did not conquer the free cities to gain numbers to battle, or to rule them with her iron first of ideals ( in fact, one of her issues is that she did not count with that part and is falling under creating her own ruling ). daenerys conquered the cities to free the slaved and their oppression. she had no need to do it either, with enough gold and ships to sail to westeros before doing so.

there's no questioning that daenerys is doing what she does because she believes in the good, not in vengeance, not out of need for power. she's there to serve the oppressed, and not the opposite. she's not their messiah. there's a reason why mhysa resonates with her: she's mother, she's freeing, amidst the fear of being the opposite due to her roots ( remember the valyrians were slavers themselves ). like dragons, there's no cruel inner nature. there's the singular thing: dany is good. intrisically. she struggles in understandig that good intentions do not make a good realm - it only, sometimes, makes it weak. and to be ruthless to protect those she swore to protect is what makes her shake in fear of becoming entirelly ruthless. losing herself. becoming what people believe dragons to be: monsters, and monsters only.

daenerys does not use speech to gain support. her actions did so, and she did not do them out of the selfish reason: yes, this will have me be their queen. i'll become their god. no, dany did it because she loathed to see such suffering. she acted out of her heart. when she freed the unsullied she did not do it knowing they would follow her afterwards, nor when she fred drogo's slaves. their freedom was theirs, just like hers was hers. they followed her because they saw it as just that, someone worth it, someone who did it because it was right, and not someone who used them.

her iron throne goal becomes secondary in her mind as she decides to stay in mereen to keep things under control. to not let those people back in chains and in even more pain before she met them. if she wanted just to control them, dany would become the tyrant that season 8 wants you to see her as. she'd burn her enemies, and make others follow her with the disguise of being their savior. make them cross the sea and fight in her name only. she'd be flawless before their eyes, she'd see herself as flawless, she'd see herself as righteous. daenerys does not do it, in any moment. she constantly does what sacrifice is needed to help others and not herself. staying in mereen is proof of that, still, we constantly read she's a selfish person who only does what she does out of greed. when speaking of paul, for example, and the parallels, it is just a mirror of different perspectives of similar situations. one leaning towards the opressed for power, and the other leaning towards power to help the opressed.

[thedeafprophet]

i understand and respect other folk who find power in stories with inhuman body modification/transformation and find it empowering, but oof can it be a major squick for me

[clownsnake]

dokja doing his best time and time again to help junghyeok with regressor depression…. I see the sauce being cooked here

[troublewithvampires]

//like clockwork, any time my life gets a lil stressful i wanna bring back a muse i've had on hiatus for a while

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

.

[zoya-nazyalenskys]

wait people think that ithlinne's prophecy at the end of blood origin refers to jaskier? besties its litchrally about ciri

[icharchivist]

You're so normal about DA, Queen

It's genuinely such a nice collection though! Doggies,,,

thank you thank you 😎 it's a hard work but hey,

And thank youuuu i love it very much <333 the doggies are so precious to me, i love the Mabari in DA so it makes me so happy (long story short Mabari are a specific breed of dog that bonds for life with their owner- they choose their owner, you have to be worthy of them, and they will stick to your side until the very end, always loyal. you get one in dao and in da2 and a companion gets one in DAI's final dlc and it's just so precious i love them so much.)

so yeah it's. yeah. i lvoe them so much.

[enigma-absolute]

This is part of the ask game of “tell someone something you assume about them and see if it is true or not.”

For you, the “Left Behind” book series you gobbled in one go and loved every bit of it.

Half-true!

I didn’t get into the full adult series, I’d gotten into the kids spin-off side story version of it (though I never did read EVERY book in the series) and I especially ate up the books in the latter days of the seven years.

However, looking back on it with a more of a critique-ful eye just. Makes me glad I didn’t make those books my personality as a kid. There’s healthier eschatology out there than that. Cool story, but the vibes can’t hit any longer. I might have a nostalgia soft spot for them, but I’m in no rush to re-read them again.

[veunho]

If I knew how to draw it'd be so over for u bitches

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[thecherrygod]

... thinking about my oc Elías and how ive never continued his story ever since at least 2017, so hes been in the equivalent of a stuck elevator ever since, but once the elevator opens the floor hes dropping at is literally his death, and how he knows hes about to die and cant do anything about it, but how he doesnt know the afterlife is real and he still has a mission

[thedeafprophet]

I was reminded of that weird anon ask again today and im just like,

Yeah actually, "Bisexuality is not transphobic and includes nonbinary people" and "Pansexual and other multi-spec identities are not transphobic or biphobic, and can co-exist independently of bisexuality and the assumptions of gender and sexuality" are, in fact, two facts that can coexist and I can agree with both, believe it or not.

Shockingly, the sexuality and labels belong to those who choose to identify with them, and how they feel what terms best fit their experiences. And im gonna support folks for whatever identity they have so long as its chosen in good faith.

[ramshacklefey]

It's amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.

Here's one of the ones you hear less often:

See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the "real" church could be established by Jesus.

And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a "divine revelation" about which of the Tribes of Israel they're a member of (don't worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to "adopt" people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).

Let's sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham's house.

But it doesn't stop there!

The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people's history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain "white and delightsome") will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.

So, you've got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the "good" ones are white, and the "bad" ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that's part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it's not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.

But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn't the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.

So what's the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn't enough in this case.

Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a "Lamanite Adoption Program," where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.

The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.

I'm pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn't take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA....

So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they're an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.

[vasquez-rocks]

i do get why people critique star trek for having not very 'alien' aliens but i also think it's based on a kinda narrow understanding of what makes an interesting alien character. two lil thoughts. a) trek, as a tv show reliant on mostly practical effects, is not going to be able to do what, say, animation can do with character design. every medium has strengths and weaknesses and it seems a lil silly to not take that into account b) more importantly, i'm less interested in characters that LOOK alien than characters who FEEL alien, that is, who have points of view and experiences that are fundamentally different from humans. odo and jadzia, for example, look a lot less alien than, say, hemmer from snw, and i do like hemmer, but except for his rarely-mentioned psychic abilities, what makes his experience of the world different from any of the human characters? meanwhile, odo and jadzia come from species with different understandings of individuality and consciousness, who can experience things their human counterparts can't (and vice versa in odo's case), and this constantly influences their storylines, choices, and perspectives on the world. even in tos, you have one-off aliens like the horta and medusans that are about as far from humans as you can get on a '60s tv budget. the prophets, even as they sometimes appear as humans, are never really 'humanized' (except maybe a tiny bit at the very end) tl;dr i don't really care if trek aliens are visually alien so much as if they're conceptually alien, and I think you can do that even when your alien is just a human with funky ears or whatever!