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accursedkaleeshi · 2 years

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Depressing Grievous Headcanon: The Inhibitor Chips

TL:DR Grievous had inhibitor chips in his brain, 2 in particular made him The Worst™. One chip opened the flood gates of fury & the other chip slammed those gates shut & threw it in reverse. Let the rage flow until it reached “I will kill you or die trying” level, then click oh, shit I have to leave immediately.

How sure was Sidious that the inhibitor chips worked? Very. For every nefarious galaxy-rending plot he had you know there was untold fallout from prototype trials. Grievous was a prototype for a lot of things Sidious was trying to get off the ground. He got his money’s worth out of that bitch. The inhibitor chips used in Grievous ranged in complexity but were generally simpler as compared to those in the clones.

The pair of chips that did most of the work in the general literally just stimulated areas of his brain under certain conditions. Grievous knew that his behavior was altered at its core, but due in part to the other lovely things that were done to him, he didn’t really care. In fact, he found a horrible sense of freedom in this. He did not have to put in the work into making decisions. He could just be a monster with little to no accountability.

He was able to eventually recognize & pick out the triggers & circumstances under which these two particular chips activated. Towards the end of the Clone Wars he had far & away conditioned himself to act ahead of the resulting impulses. This did him zero favors, but maybe somewhere in his ruined mind he counted it as one of very few things he had control over. That was not, in fact, the case & he was just fast-passing the sith’s intentions.

What I’m calling Chip A for simplicity’s sake was the angry chip. Chip A basically ran this stupid cyborg. It was trigged by stress, which… yeah, he was always stressed. When it detected the chemicals it was looking for the chip would just unload electric signals into his brain’s more primitive functions & turn his fight or flight reaction to (Steve Harvey voice) KILL. As you might imagine, Kaleesh have a good chunk of brain dedicated to rage & violence. The Techno Union had to patch this a few times at the start b/c he would Kylo-Ren a perimeter around him for dumb shit. They added like. A dimmer switch.

Dooku used this in conjunction with his spooky sith mind games, having obscured most of his positive neural pathways & replacing them with an ominous void. Grievous did the rest himself. He was once a man that did a lot of thinking to back up his action, but they no longer needed him to think. If Grievous tried to think too deeply on something he couldn’t reach, like many of us, he would get very anxious. So, then Chip A would be like “yo we aren’t allowed to worry, it’s time to be mad. Pog.”

Needless to say Chip A was goddamn workhorse. Grievous was constantly seething with rage. The Separatists all congratulated themselves on a job well done, creating a rage machine. Until Dooku discovered The Plateau. Grievous was very easy to manipulate; he was largely an open book. Dooku expected there to be a peak to how mad Grievous could get versus how well he made tactical decisions. But instead he found The Plateau while training him. He wasn’t sure if it was a biological state or some remnants of his culture’s spiritualism & he didn’t care. Apparently Kaleesh did not peak in rage & then crash. They hit the top & stay there.

He tested it several times, y’know for science. Grievous hit the maximum amount of fury he could convey & instead of breaking down he just stayed there, especially no longer being susceptible to physical wear. Dooku had to incapacitate him each time. When questioned, Grievous had given him some native word that boiled down to “one death either way”. Kaleesh would fight until they dropped. Commendable in some savage way, he supposed, but that was problematic. Sidious needed this broken bone lizard for his plans. Plans that didn’t have an execution date just then.

The Plateau was the kind of state some cultures referred to as berserk. They couldn’t have their very expensive scapegoat kamikaze a frigate into Coruscant in a frenzied martyr-making rage 2 months into a galactic war. So they slapped another chip in this bitch. When Chip B activated it immediately cut signal to Chip A & zapped a slightly different area. It basically shut off the “fight” & reversed straight into “flight”, breaking off the lever in an area that Grievous had seldom even touched previously in his life.

Chip B was the nope chip. It was the disengage button. It forced him to stop & immediately question what he was doing & whether or not it was a good idea. You’d think, as an honor bound warrior, he would hate this. He actually didn’t mind it & oftentimes found it hilarious. He internalized it as choices he was making. Very convenient props to hold up his fort of denial. He had no personal stake in anything during the Clone Wars. If Dooku’s little errands didn’t go as planned, he actually did not give a fuck. He knew (or, he thought he knew) that Dooku could not kill him unless Sidious was done with him.

Again, that relinquishing of responsibility for his actions is what kept him running. He was Dooku’s problem. If he got punished, not usually physically but mentally, he would be irate yes, but he was already constantly furious. If he performed poorly it was the Count that took the flak from Sidious. Dooku hated his guts & if he could not die in battle there was at least a smug satisfaction in inflicting himself of the Count. He was there to kill Jedi & cause problems.

Kenobi, then, was the Republic’s perfect anti-arch clanker weapon. Obi-Wan Kenobi used his wholly defensive lightsaber stance to buy him time to be the sassiest, most obnoxious bitch ever from behind his blue blade. As Grievous is an easy read, Kenobi could just rocket him into the Plateau wherein he made worse & worse decisions the more pissed off he got until A switched to B.

The Jedi council figured after a while that Kenobi was essentially annoying General Grievous into retreating, but they had no idea how literally that was happening. Toward the end of the war it was rather pavlovian. The droids would report Kenobi and/or Kenobi-adjacent activity in the area they were operating & a lot of the time Grievous would just straight leave.

He’d be like, “I have shit to do. Either Kenobi will come stop all of you from whatever the fuck we are doing or he will chase me. He cannot do both. Bye, bitch.” He called it leading Kenobi away from Separatist operations but really he just didn’t want to deal with it half the time. “I don’t have time for this” was already conveniently embedded in his DNA. ROTS he could have just yolo merc’d Kenobi when he dropped his lightsaber like an idiot. But then the clone army showed up & he was just like, click “Ugh, I don’t want to deal with this right now.”

#accursed!grievous #it's funny but also horrible #sw headcanons #call him a coward to his face he will laugh but his ancestors will cry

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bestworstcase · 3 years

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on ‘villainy’ and varian’s and cassandra’s moral codes

for all that varian’s and cassandra’s villain arcs get compared to death they’re really more different than they are similar, and i think one of the more interesting distinctions is the characters’ moral perspectives on their own actions--namely that varian recognizes his own choices as villainous and consciously self-identifies as a ‘bad guy’ and cassandra not only…doesn’t do that but appears legitimately taken aback when varian says she’s ‘become the villain.’ from this we can infer that varian is transgressing his own personal sense of right and wrong while cassandra isn’t.

and… well with varian i think it’s pretty straightforward: he’s a kid who desperately wants to make the world a better place and make his father proud, but his impulsivity and recklessness and general disregard for lab safety foil his plans and get him into trouble. then one of his accidents puts his dad into what is essentially a magical coma and varian becomes singularly focused on reviving him--and, when he realizes that the king is more invested in covering up the problem than fixing it and his only hope lies with a zealously guarded relic belonging to the kingdom, he decides that the only way to achieve this goal is to start breaking the rules.

so he asks rapunzel--his friend who promised to help him--to retrieve some information the king is trying to steal from him, and then persuades her to help him access the sundrop vault; then when she balks at stealing it he makes it clear that he no longer trusts her and escapes with the flower. at this point he’s in the morally dubious zone; being strategic about what he tells rapunzel to make sure she helps him, spiking cookies with truth serum to sow chaos and get information he needs, and doing things that are crimes on paper but also largely victimless. i think these were things varian could probably rationalize as okay--not exactly good, but no one got hurt and he got what he needed.

except the flower’s magic is gone. he drugged the palace, manipulated rapunzel and broke her trust in him, and committed treason all for something useless because the actual magic of the sundrop is in rapunzel herself. now he’s in trouble, because he needs rapunzel’s help but his desperate measures guaranteed she won’t be willing to help him again. and this is when varian realizes that his only options are 1. give up on saving his dad and turn himself in and hope rapunzel takes pity on him, or 2. accept that no one is going to help him now and do whatever it takes to free quirin himself.

so--mutating ruddiger, attacking the city, kidnapping arianna and threatening her with encasement in amber, building an automaton army to defend him while he works--these are all things that varian feels are wrong, but chooses to do anyway because he doesn’t trust that anyone else will even try to save his father. despite his anger and his rationalizations, at the end of the day varian sees himself as doing bad things for good reasons. (“Believe me, I know/I’ve sunk pretty low” & “I’m the bad guy, that’s fine”)

and when his reasons fall through--when he fails to free his dad--he falls quickly into guilt and despair over having hurt people for nothing. he stews for a year in how unforgivable and ashamed he feels, and even when he teams up with the separatists, he’s doing it in, basically, pursuit of a reset button: he wants to take back what he did. and when rapunzel shows him that he can be forgiven, he can have a second chance, he does have people who are willing to help him and trust him again, he drops the memory-wiping idea and his alliance with the separatists without a second thought--because what rapunzel actually does is give him a way to pursue his goals without sacrificing his conscience, which is what he really needed the whole time.

now, cassandra, on the other hand…

cass is an interesting character in this regard because, while she does want to be a hero, she’s not at all altruistic. she’s consumed by her lack of autonomy and she craves not only control over her own life but also respect from the people around her--her desire to be a hero is very self-interested, at its core. and moreover she has a somewhat fatalistic view of the world wherein some people (not her) matter and some… just don’t.

moreover cassandra, despite her ambitions of becoming a guard, doesn’t so much as blink at eugene’s or the pub thugs’ criminal pasts--she is suspicious of lance at first, but on the grounds that he’s an unrepentant thief who showed up out of the blue under suspicious circumstances to ‘reconnect’ with his old partner in crime; eugene is also distrustful of lance, for the exact same reasons--and of course she doesn’t think twice about breaking the law herself. literally one of the very first things we see cassandra do is commit treason to make her friend happy. cass doesn’t care about the law, and she only wants to be a guard because she associates getting the job with having her dad’s approval and it’s also her ticket out of lifelong servitude.

on the other hand, cass does seem have a strong sense of right and wrong where people she cares about are concerned. she is constantly putting the desires and well-being of her friends ahead of not just her ambitions (e.g. in beginnings for rapunzel, or great expotations for varian) but also her own safety (e.g. risking her livelihood and home to sneak rapunzel out for the night in bea, or setting aside her misgivings about the sketchy bird people in freebird).

which is all to say--cass isn’t exactly amoral but the moral framework through which she sees the world is… more complicated than varian’s. she doesn’t seem particularly motivated to help strangers but she’ll move mountains to help people she cares about; she doesn’t care much about rules or laws except insofar as she doesn’t want to get caught breaking them, and she has this hierarchical mindset that some people matter--meaning, they get to make decisions for themselves and have people care about what they need and want--and some don’t, and that she herself is stuck in the latter category despite her best efforts to climb out of it.

which brings us to the subject of the moonstone, and cassandra’s villain arc, and why cass, unlike varian, doesn’t consider herself a bad person.

i think what it comes down to most is this: taking the moonstone is an act of defiance against not only rapunzel but also fate itself. waiting in the wings sets up cassandra’s resigned acceptance of this hierarchical order and her own cosmic insignificance, and then in crossing the line she REJECTS that same order. she’s raging against rapunzel but also against the cultural and legal and destined systems that put rapunzel on top and forced cass into subservience. she is very literally fighting for her freedom against the universe itself.

and when cass was not an altruistic or heavily morally motivated or even particularly law-abiding person before, and when her conscience has always been predominantly oriented around taking care of her friends first and herself second, and when the thing that drove her to this breaking point was her friends spitting that back in her face… well.

it’s easy to say “cass literally tried to murder rapunzel a bunch of times, how can she possibly believe she’s the good guy?”--but rapunzel maimed cass, blamed her for it, and consistently prioritized her destiny over cassandra’s wellbeing; and rapunzel represents the cosmic order that cass is fighting to liberate herself from. and while i know that the -popular- take on be very afraid is “cass is terrified of hurting rapunzel,” i submit it’s actually “cass is terrified of having to fight rapunzel, because she still believes that fate is literally tilted in rapunzel’s favor and she can’t win a direct fight with rapunzel.” that’s why she’s so scared; that’s why rapunzel seemingly deleting the red rocks hardens her resolve; that’s why she marches into corona with maximum drama and bluster and builds a fortress and tries so hard to mess with rapunzel’s head before the battle begins. she’s trying to even the odds. and that’s why, when rapunzel stomps her into the curb, cassandra’s immediate response is “i need an army.”

cassandra isn’t scared for rapunzel. she is scared OF rapunzel.

we do also see cass trying not to harm people she considers to be innocent bystanders; she uses the truth serum on varian bc she needs the incantation, but afterwards she doesn’t even bother to restrain him until after he starts pestering her, she says flat out that she doesn’t want him to get hurt when she fights rapunzel; similarly she is willing to hurt calliope to force rapunzel to comply, but--despite her deep personal dislike of calliope--uses a minimum amount of force and again verbally expresses that she doesn’t particularly want to hurt her, that it’s a means to an end and nothing more. attacking rapunzel? that’s fine, rapunzel is her enemy. attacking eugene? of course, he’s rapunzel’s closest ally. mind controlling the brotherhood? that kills two birds with one stone--eliminating powerful enemies with a vested interest in taking the moonstone away from her and turning them into allies who can level the playing field between her and rapunzel. and when she does finally snap and raze corona to the ground? the people of corona attacked her first. i think cass ABSOLUTELY sees herself as fighting a purely defensive war against people who have or will hurt her.

and this is, of course, ultimately why varian failed to get through to her during ‘nothing left to lose’--he appealed to her sense of morality and her sense of morality shrugged.

as for the thing that snaps her out of it? the moment that forces her to question whether she’s really as right as she thinks she is? it’s learning who her new friend really is. it’s the shock of finding out that she’s been allied with, confiding in, taking advice from a legendary villain, from a monster she likely grew up hearing stories about. cass takes it as a given that zhan tiri is evil--and if she’s friends with zhan tiri, what does that make her? and even then, cass is resistant to the idea that she might be a villain--“No, no, I’m nothing like you. Just because I’m pursuing my destiny doesn’t make me a bad person!”--which is, ultimately, very telling of her whole mindset. she’s not a bad guy, she’s fighting for her freedom. she’s not a bad guy, she’s protecting herself against people who want to exploit her. she’s not a bad guy, she’s just putting herself first for once.

and OAH generally, i’d argue, is not actually about cassandra trying to reconcile with rapunzel or redeem herself or be a better person, it’s… literally cass trying frantically to prove she’s NOT the bad guy. it’s “oh yeah? you think i’m a bad person? well could a bad guy do THIS? *lies and impersonates a former coworker and gets up on a stage to justify her own actions in front of a crowd*” it’s “a bad guy wouldn’t apologize, rapunzel never apologized for anything, and to prove i’m a better person I’M going to apologize! see? SEE!?”--and then everyone in corona attacks her and she goes “FINE, i’m the bad guy, fuck you all” and wrecks the place.

only then--only in plus est en vous--does cassandra get into a mindset similar to varian’s, of “i am the bad guy but if i can pull this off it will be worth it.” she’s not sorry. she still sees rapunzel as an enemy trying to get her under control again, and the only thing that’s really changed is cassandra acknowledging that she has in fact done bad things too.

and… i would argue that by the end of plus est cassandra… feels some guilt but isn’t sorry. “i’ve failed” and “i’ve done terrible things” and “i tried to prove i was more than everyone thought but they were right”--her anguish is not like varian’s anguish in RR, where he was consumed with despair because no one could possibly forgive him for the things he did. cassandra is upset because she did awful things and failed and she perceives that failure as proof of her own worthlessness. she’s right back to feeling how she felt in waiting in the wings but with a hefty new helping of self-disgust and shame for having been stupid enough to believe she could change anything for herself.

she’s not sorry. she’s not pleading for forgiveness. she just wants rapunzel to give up and leave her alone--& then, after rapunzel convinces her that she’s wrong, and she does have worth as a person, and she does have a destiny of her own, cass does what’s necessary to clean up the crisis she created and then… just bounces. she gets the freedom she wanted and leaves without a backward glance.

(which. good for her.)

tl;dr: varian’s villain arc explores his moral scruples and what it takes for him to be willing to ignore them, whereas cassandra’s villain arc explores her incendiary reaction to a lifetime of injustices; she isn’t amoral but her sense of right and wrong is, unlike varian’s, very contextual and personal. varian is a pragmatic idealist who wants to be lawful good but is capable of setting his own morals aside in pursuit of a goal he considers to be important enough, and cassandra is one radicalizing incident away from realizing that her grievances are not a unique personal failing but a systemic problem and then leading a class uprising.

#tts

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celticcrossanon · 3 years

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BRF Reading - 19th of August 2021

This is speculation only

Cards drawn 19th of August, 2021

Question: Is Meghan trying to kill Her Majesty the Queen?

Note: As I was drawing this spread and writing it up, the emotion I felt was anger - irritable, spiteful, impatient anger. The emotion was very strong. If that is what Meghan is feeling, she is furious at the Queen and wants to lash out at her.

Under a cut for length

Interpretation: I don't think Meghan is going as far as plotting to kill the Queen, but Meghan definitely wants to inflict pain on her.

Card One: The Three of Swords. This is a card of pain, heartbreak, and suffering. The card shows Queen Clytemnestra and her lover killing her husband, King Agamemnon, as he bathes.

Meghan may not want to kill the Queen literally, but she definitely wants to inflict the sort of pain that makes you wish you were dead. On the card, King Agamemnon, the ruler of the country, is attacked while he is in the bath, a place of relaxation and safety. HMTQ, the ruler of her country, is currently at Balmoral, a place of relaxation and safety for her. I expect Meghan to start pulling stunts designed to cause the Queen the maximum amount of pain while the Queen is at Balmoral, her safe place.

Card Two: The Page of Cups. Pages are messages, and this card is coming across as a message to the Queen from Meghan. It is a message based in emotion (Cups is the suit of emotion). Pages are the youngest of the court cards, so this emotion will be at the undeveloped end of the emotional spectrum - the emotional response will be that of a child and not an adult. The pain Meghan wants to inflict as per the Three of Swords is a message to the Queen, a message driven by immature emotions (these are coming across as spite, envy, and revenge - spite is the dominant emotion).

The card shows the youth Narcissus, gazing at his own reflection in a cup of water. Narcissus represents Meghan, who is obsessed with her image (her reflection) in the public eye (her mirror/cup of water). Narcissus thought his image was so beautiful and perfect that he fell in love with it, as no other person could compare to it. Similarly, Meghan thinks that she, herself, is so beautiful and perfect that no one can compare to her. She wants everyone to see and acknowledge and worship her perfection. Just as Narcissus pined away for love of his reflection, which never acknowledged him, we are all supposed to pine away and be desperate for Meghan to acknowledge us. When this doesn't happen, Meghan reacts with spite and anger, lashing out for revenge like a child throwing a temper tantrum and screaming "Look at me!"

Card Three: The Ten of Wands. This is a card of feeling burdened, of having all your dreams burn down around you. The card shows Jason sitting in a burning shelter made from the boards of his ship, while the treasure he won (the golden fleece) lies discarded next to him.

Here Meghan is represented by Jason. Wands can be PR, so Meghan is surrounded by PR that is burning to the ground, leaving only ashes in its wake. Nothing that she is going, PR wise, is working. Her prized treasure of 'freedom' is useless as she can not elevate her public image in any way. Meghan should blame herself for this, but as per the Page of Cups, she is incapable of doing this (as she sees herself as perfect), and so she projects her failure onto other people.

The Ten of Wands also shows Meghan's attitude to the Queen. For Meghan, the Queen feels like a burden upon her, and she wants to figuratively burn the Queen to the ground so she can be free of the restraints/burden that the Queen has placed upon her. She is going to try and achieve this using PR (Wands is the suit of PR).

Card Four: The Empress. This is the card of Venus, the ruler of Taurus, the sun sign of the Queen. It is also the card of a female ruler. This card stands for the Queen. Coming after the Ten of Wands, it confirms who Meghan is blaming for her failures and who feels like a burden to her - Her Majesty the Queen. Meghan is currently blaming the Queen for every PR failure she is experiencing, and experiencing the Queen and her restrictions as a heavy burden that Meghan has to carry.

Card Five: The Queen of Swords. Here this represents not a person, but an attitude. The Queen of Swords is an adult who is good at strategy - someone who uses their intellect and unbiased judgement to achieve their aims, someone who plans with rational thought and not emotion, i.e. they do not let the emotional responses of others interfere with their plans, someone who sees the truth of the matter and communicates that truth to others. This is how Meghan sees herself - a Queen fighting for her truth in the face of opposition from the Empress (the card before this). Meghan thinks that she is using her great intelligence and clear vision to show everyone the truth - her truth - of the matter, and she will not care if what she says or does hurts other people emotionally.

Underlying Energy: The Four of Wands. This is normally a card of home and of celebration. In this deck, the card shows Jason and his friends gathered together before they set out to find the golden fleece, so it is a card of celebration before undertaking a new quest/journey to achieve your goal. Wands is the suit of PR, so this card can be about PR.

Here Meghan is represented by Jason. She is about to set out on a journey, not over water but a PR journey, with the hopes of obtaining her prize - not a golden fleece, but inflicting the maximum amount of pain possible on HMTQ. To achieve this goal, she has gathered friends/associates/PR people who will help her. She may very well be celebrating/gloating about her future PR plans. Those plans could very well involve attacking the Queen through her family, her home, and things that are precious to her from her family life (like using the family nickname Lilibet for her child).

Underlying Energy 2: The Two of Wands. This is a card about deciding to set out on a journey, and then planning a journey. The card shows Jason standing outside the cave of Chiron, a place he knows as home. Chiron is shown on the card of the Hierophant, the card that represents the BRF, so in this image he stands for the BRF. Jason represents Meghan, once welcome in the home of Chiron/the BRF, now striking out on his/her own. Wands represent PR. This tells me that as per the Queen of Swords and the Four of Wands, Meghan is planning a PR campaign against the Queen. The image of Chiron in his home on the card reinforces the message of the Four of Wands, that Meghan will be attacking the Queen in her home, her safe haven, and/or Meghan will be taking things that are precious to the Queen from her family life and using them against her. It is a confirmation and repetition of other messages in the reading.

Conclusion: Meghan wants to hurt the Queen. She wants to cause the Queen as much agonising pain as possible. She sees herself as the perfect woman, whose PR plans have been brought down by both the restrictions placed on her by the Queen, and the responses of the Queen to her PR. She sees the Queen as a burden on her. In response to this, she is lashing out in an spiteful and immature manner to send a message to the Queen, a message of pain. She is planning and strategising a new PR journey that will attack the Queen in her safe haven of Balmoral and/or through things that are precious to the Queen from her family life. Meghan does not care how much pain this will cause the Queen, as causing pain is her motivating force for doing this PR.

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skeptomai-krino · 3 years

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what does justice look like?

(TW for terrorism, gun violence against children, death, brief discussion of christianity, discussion of prisons and prison statistics, including a brief mention of an opiate use rate. this is a heavy one y’all, highly encourage you to read + reblog if you can.)

bolds have been added for readability

__________________________

On July 22, a young man in a police uniform took a boat to Utøya, a small island about 38 kilometers away from Oslo’s city centre. He claimed he was there to give a speech about security to the Youth Camp that was taking place there at the time.

He was allowed onto the island with minimal questioning. After all, everything seemed to be in order. His ID looked fine at a first glance, and perhaps most importantly, he moved with the confidence of someone who had done this a million times before. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Someone who felt no guilt, or fear, or even excitement.

Why would he? This was just routine.

Wasn’t it?

What happened that day has gone down in Norwegian history. Everyone knows about it. Everyone feels the ripples. The man in the police uniform has become a household name, and almost everyone in Oslo knows someone who was there that fateful day. It’s almost impossible to talk about Norwegian crime and justice without at least mentioning him.

Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 children on Utøya that day, most between the ages of 14 to 20.

It was his second terror attack of the day.

The first was a car bomb, set off in Oslo’s governmental sector, that killed eight people and injured over 109.

All in all, 77 people were murdered on 22 July.

What sentence would you say such a man deserves? A man who could do such terrible things, and show no remorse? A self-declared anti-immigration fascist, who calls himself a murderer like it’s a badge of pride?

What he got was 21 years, the longest preventative detention sentence in Norway, though it can be extended in five year segments if it is determined that someone is still a threat to society, as Breivik does seem to be, in a prison system that is known among foreigners, especially US Americans, for being, well, cushy.

Prisoners in newer prisons are given ample living space, a flat-screen television, and access to things that are generally found in a normal apartment. Yes, this includes metal cutlery.

According to a statement by the office of the attorney general, Breivik in particular had three rooms in his cells, one for living, one for studying, and one for working out. He also had a television, a gaming console, a computer (without internet access), and was able to make his own food and prepare his own laundry.

Norwegian prisons are designed to stimulate external life as best as is possible, in order to help facilitate recovery and reintegration, since most prisoners are returned to life outside at some point. And even when they aren’t, there’s no need for inhumane torture.

Let’s take Halden Prison as an example.

Halden is a maximum security prison that was established in 2010, and has a capacity of 252. It has been often called the world’s most humane prison and is Norway’s second largest prison.

Even its very design is pioneering; greenery surrounds the prison, with ample trees and shrubbery strategically placed to conceal the fence surrounding the prison. It is built campus style, to encourage prisoners to walk around and interact with each other and their environment. Areas look unique, and the prison is built from materials like wood, glass, and cork, in order to reduce echo and allow light.

Additionally, guard rooms are intentionally designed too small, which encourages guards to step outside and mingle with the prisoners. That may not seem impressive, but a US study from the late 90s found that prisons with direct contact and direct observation between staff and prisoners reduces the rates of violent outbreaks by 246 percent- 36 to 13.

The entire design of the prison stimulates normalcy and reduces stress, which as you can imagine is relatively important.

While Halden prison itself is relatively new, and most prisons even in Norway do not reach its standards, the ideology and concern for human life that went into it is present in all aspects of the Norwegian justice system, and Norwegian culture as a whole.

The Norwegian Correctional Service, or kriminalomsorgen (which literally translates to something like ‘crime care’ or ‘prison care’) in Norwegian, is based around the concept of turning criminals into good neighbors. It’s an impressive system, and officers say the most important thing in rehabilitative justice is that taking away freedom and autonomy is enough.

Bad people are still people, and just as good people become bad, bad people can change and become good. To use an over-simplified moral standard.

Initially though, the ‘justice’ system was not at all like what we see today. It was very religious and solitary, even to the extent of priests acting as social workers and prisoners being tested on their bible knowledge before release and after initially being confined. Where religion didn’t work, which was pretty much everywhere, prisoners were overmedicated in an attempt to change and control their behaviour.

As one can imagine, this did not go wonderfully.

To take one statistic, you may have heard of recidivism rates before. They’re the frequency that a criminal will return to prison after being released, though some areas count by reconviction and others by reinprisonment, which can make things a little complicated.

Recidivism in Norway while the penal model was in effect went up to 91%. 91% of prisoners were reimprisoned within two years of their release. This is astronomical.

To put that in perspective, the United States, which is often internationally mocked for its terrible justice system and high recidivism, has a rate of up to 55%. Norway now has it at 20%.

So what changed?

What changed was civil outcry, mostly. The Norwegian Association for Criminal Reform, or KROM, was formed in 1968 to deal with these issues, as well as to abolish forced labour camps and juvenile delinquency centres- which they were successful at.

Due to concentrated efforts from almost every Norwegian, the effect on the population has been massive.

Not only has the recidivism rate fallen to 20%, the lowest in the world, other statistics have followed suit. The opiate usage rate is at 0.4% (take that Reagan), a murder rate of 0.6, and a prison population of 0.642 out of every 1,000 people.

Comparing this to the US, with school shootings essentially a normal part of life and a murder rate of 5, it seems pretty obvious that rehabilitative justice works. At worst it works better than punitive justice.

While foreigners may joke about traveling to Norway to steal a banana in order to get themselves a nice place to stay, that’s more a problem with the countries they come from, and Norwegians overwhelmingly would rather not end up jailed anywhere. Partly because they also have welfare programs that prevent people needing basic things like food, shelter, and healthcare, and because the people who built the system were right.

Loss of freedom, loss of autonomy, it’s enough. That’s enough of a punishment.

Remember Breivik? He filled a suit claiming that he was being mistreated in prison, and that it was abusive and was making his condition worse. And the court agreed with him.

They agreed that imprisonment can make problems worse if it’s not given care. Isolation and solitary confinement are especially dangerous. No matter who a person is or what they’ve done, punishment doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring change, and it will never bring back what they took from the world.

No amount of torture and punishment, as deserved as it would be, will ever bring those 77 people home to their families.

But maybe some kindness can prevent more from being lost.

Norway undeniably has advantages. It’s incredibly small and rather homogenous. But there is more than enough evidence to indicate that a rehabilitative system works, and works a lot better than a punitive one. It’s cheaper too, since while they have to spend more per prisoner, the reduction in prisoners more than makes up for it. Why hasn’t the US followed suit? And why don’t we do that now?

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titaniumelemental · 4 years

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[Thoughts on literalism and being expected to only care about one issue at a time. Making a new post because of length and to not potentially start an object-level argument on @funereal-disease‘s post.]

In the last 2.5 months of discourse on lockdowns and reopenings and not reopenings, there was an abundance of absolutist rhetoric in favor of suppression of the virus by any means necessary. How we shouldn’t talk about the economy at all (how can you put a price on human life?!), or worry about anyone’s mental health, or about whether the government should have the power to infringe on people’s rights and if so for how long (don’t worry, it was all about wanting haircuts, you can dismiss it without tackling the difficult issue.) Not everyone did this, but many did, and I was broadly on their side despite it because of the credible evidence of how many people would die if we didn’t do it. But I was unsettled with the refusal to discuss balancing different needs or the idea of where to draw the line.

In reality the local lockdown measures hurt me an amount, I was more fortunate than a lot of people, and I’m feeling able to emotionally handle the near future. But what scared the shit out of me was the feeling that it could have been much much worse and my crowd would still insist I submit to it. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts you, people could die. That there was no line, there was no “too much to ask.”

I don’t think many people truly thought that, but it was like no one would talk about where the line was until the hypothetical crosses their personal line, then act like it was obvious. People who’d say how we all have to do “whatever it takes” to slow the spread as much as possible would a week later be talking about the timeline of a potential vaccine and say offhand “clearly a years-long lockdown isn’t feasible.”

Is it clear? This is almost the talk of compromise I was looking for, but it comes with no acknowledgment that it clashes with the rest of their absolutism. As if we were all just supposed to know that all the strong words about “whatever it takes” and “anything and everything” didn’t really include anything really out of line! Clearly!

There’s an epidemiologist on Twitter whose opinion I generally trust and respect. He engaged in all the above behavior, but I’ve kept checking back because he seems to know what he’s talking about. This week he’s posting about unreservedly supports the protests, first making the point that risk of transmission should be low (outdoors, most people wearing masks) but then switching gears and acting like it doesn’t matter because racism is a public health issue, etc. When people point out that we should be realistic and not assume maximum possible effectiveness of the protests, he falls back on saying that utilitarianism isn’t the only framework and we should try looking at this from a deontological or virtue ethics standpoint.

And, I don’t even know what to do with that because I look at all the absolutist support for suppression of the virus by any means necessary, and what was all of that if not a ruthless, painful utilitarian decision?? (It doesn’t matter how much we hurt you because it will stop other people from dying.) And I went along with it because of the credible evidence of how many people would die. Because no argument I could come up with based on my own hurt and fear seemed to outweigh how many people would die. It was a utilitarian decision.

Only now, apparently trying to save lives based on the numbers isn’t the right way to look at things anymore. He reminds us that “peaceful protest is a fundamental right.” Never mind the rights of freedom of movement and freedom of association that we were supposed to trade away (on an indefinite timeline) and act like it wasn’t a hard choice. But now, “no cause is more pressing than the racial disparities we face in America today.”

No cause is more pressing. I’m guessing we’re probably not supposed to take that one literally either. But I’m having trouble keeping up.

#scrupulosity #covid19 cw #vagueblogging

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fallen-stars-au · 3 years

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Any Kind of Freedom (Chapter 1)

Steven's been missing for over a month now.

Well, okay, he's not missing if they know he's on Homeworld, but he wasn't the sort to just go zero-contact for this long.

And it's officially been long enough.

They would find him and bring him home or get shattered trying.

(Here is also an Ao3 Version.)

Prev | First | Next

It was stupid.

It was absolutely, absurdly, ridiculously stupid how easy it was to piss off the Diamonds sometimes.

Sure, sure, they’d gotten better about it. Kind of. Apparently not as much as he’d thought—at least not when it came to White.

All he had to do was make one suggestion at what had apparently been the wrong time-

In the near-three years since he’d met the Diamonds formally and first travelled to Homeworld, Steven had been locked in the tower a total of five times. Three of them had been for just a couple days but hardly less unpleasant than the longer spells. But the other two times… His first prison sentence (there was nothing else he could call it) had been literal torture. He’d discovered things about how his half-gem biology differed (how the ways he could survive differed) from that of a full-human in ways he never wanted to experience again—in pain he never wanted to experience again. At the very least, Blue had recognized then that he wasn’t lying about having human needs, so the tower and “his” own chambers had been outfitted appropriately. It meant none of his other times in the tower had been as bad as the first, but it was hardly fun or even easy to handle. But what had to be the worst part about every single time he’d been put in that tower is that he never knew how long it would be until he could get back out of it. And with only six tiny windows, it was near impossible to tell a time since Homeworld lack Earth’s same sort of day and night cycle he vastly preferred.

The Diamonds even needed and actively used his help all the time now! Even with their own duties! But apparently, once again suggesting they let gems choose their occupations (despite the fact they knew how deeply he believed this and had successfully set it in motion within his own Court) had been just enough for White at that moment for her to not care about any of that right now. Instead, he got a disgusted and disappointed look, and Yellow got an order to put him away.

It was a small comfort, at least, that Yellow and Blue both looked regretful and as though they wanted to refuse the order.

By Day Three, he didn’t care so much anymore about that because he was still back in this damn tower anyways.

By Day Five, Steven properly started wondering just how long until he could get out. He missed… Well hell, he missed everything. And everyone. His daily delivery of food and fresh water from the crops at the Zoo being shoved through the slot in the door built for that sole purpose was the most contact he’d had with anyone, and the gem on the other side was hardly allowed to speak back to him. It was times like this he desperately wished he could keep things in his gem to even just have a guitar. Or even paperwork. Just anything to stop the maddening, looping thoughts in his head. The only thing that helped was singing, and even then, he couldn’t write any of it down. But he sang it over and over again so much, he sort of doubted he’d be able to forget it anyways. If that was a plus.

By Day Nineteen (maybe), he’d stopped singing. He wasn’t even sure he’d thanked the door every day for his supply like he liked to. He didn’t care anymore—he just wanted out.

“-ridot. Peridot. Peridot!” Splash. Peridot sat bolt upright, awake now, half-drenched, and rapidly checking that her tablet was safe. It was in Lapis’s hand, being extended towards her to reclaim when there wouldn’t be any water damage done to it. “Come on, we’re leaving for Homeworld as soon as we’re done checking on Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, and Greg.” There was a tense note in her voice that had been consistent throughout the past few weeks—not that Peridot could blame her.

“Right. That’s today. Let’s get to it, then!” Peridot hauled herself up off the now-wet couch and accepted her tablet back after shaking the water off her hands before she motioned for Lapis to lead the way.

Thirty-seven days. It had been thirty-seven days since any of them had seen or heard from Steven. Oh sure, they could always contact Zircon and did every day to ask if he could speak to them, but she kept saying he was unavailable. By the look on her face, all they could tell is that she was no more thrilled about the reason he was unavailable as she was about their constant calls. It was ten days after he’d left for Homeworld last (longer than he’d been gone in years) that they’d first called Zircon and a couple more days after that when Peridot had stopped Lapis from going to Homeworld herself. Steven’s work with the Diamonds was delicate, and anything they did would lead to his punishment as much as their own. So rather than rushing off, Peridot had reasoned out an agreement with Lapis when they would go. Twenty-five days seemed like… a lot, really. It was a lot. Definitely more than Peridot liked either, but Zircon was still willing to answer their calls and insisted she knew where Steven was and insisted even harder that they not come.

“Right. We have approximately eighty-two minutes until Steven’s daily wake-up call should arrive to him on Homeworld, so that gives us a maximum of nineteen-point-five minutes with each of them to have time to warp to Homeworld and catch him before he leaves his room.” It would be silly to assume Steven was actually functioning on his normal schedule, but it was all they could go off of.

Lapis nodded, cold determination emanating from her as she wordlessly led the way out of the house to check on Greg first. Peridot followed, trying to soothe her own worries when they would hopefully have an answer to their concerns in just a few hours.

Thankfully, Greg was easier to check on than he used to be. Now that “Andy” (she still tended to call him The Other Greg to herself and to Lapis) was helping out more often, it was rare that either of them had to really do anything, but it helped Steven when they asked to make sure. They chatted for a few moments to let him know their plans for the day, and then they were gone again with a solid “good luck” and a plea to bring his son home.

Garnet and Amethyst were also easy to check on as they were at the house, attempting to play a human board game with no help or instructions, but they were at least having fun. A little over a month wasn’t very long for them, after all. It just was for Steven and anyone who functioned on a human schedule.

It proved a bit more difficult to find Pearl, however. She avoided the Temple—even her own room because it “was so awfully dangerous” by the amount of weapons stored there—and tended to stick around the house cleaning where nothing needed to be cleaned, but no one had seen her since the previous afternoon.

Time ticked on by, and the spare minutes they’d saved up in making the other check-ins quick were rapidly dispensed. Peridot scrunched her nose in mild irritation as the alarm she’d set on her tablet started to go off at her hip, and she wiggled out from under the back rafters where she’d been searching.

They were out of time or they’d miss their chance to catch him.

“Lapis! Hey, Lapis, come on, we gotta go! We can’t find her right now,” she called up towards the lighthouse even as another layer of anxiety piled itself on top of her stack. Where in the stars was Pearl? She wouldn’t leave the planet—that was the only thing Steven had ever ordered of her for her own safety. So where had she gone?

Lapis dropped to the ground beside her and was already walking back up the path to the house. She’d stopped wanting to search at least half an hour before; Peridot knew she was just as concerned about Pearl, but their worries for Steven won out in this instance. “She’ll be fine; let’s go.”

Peri quickly followed, grabbing her metal hovering device from just inside the front door and without stopping on the way to the warp pad; with a rush of light and a musical chime, they were at the Galaxy Warp. She gasped as the light dissipated and recognized someone there other than two of the four Rose Quartz guards (Rosie and Quinn as they liked to be called) in charge of keeping non-Earth gems off planet. “Pearl!!” Relief washed through Peridot as she hurried over to their “friend” (even after almost a year, it was still so bizarre and just… wrong not having Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl as their normal selves) who was resting on her knees in front of the Galaxy Warp. “We looked everywhere… for.. you.” As soon as she saw Pearl’s face, she knew she’d been crying—enough for wise tear tracks to be dried down her cheeks.

Pearl pulled herself up from the ground, lacking her usual grace and semi-forced cheer as she saluted them both. “I apologize for not informing you of my whereabouts, Lapis Lazuli and Peridot. I wished to await my It’s Steven here so I might know the moment he returns to Earth…” It clicked.

Peridot knew something had been wrong lately, but of course she hadn’t been able to get a word out of Pearl about what it was. She still followed the classic rules of a Pearl, and that meant hiding and ignoring any of her own feelings. For her to have even cried like she clearly had been… well, it was almost relieving to see albeit kind of sad.

Before Peridot could point any of this out, Lapis’s patience was gone. “Well then, stop with the salute thing and come with us. We’re going to find him.”

Pearl started. “Find… him…? But- but he’s on Homeworld! I would be disobeying a direct order from my Diamond, I could hardly-“

“Who cares? If you’re coming, get moving. We need to leave.” Apparently Lapis had even less patience at the moment than Peridot had thought, but it was apparently just as well. When Lapis walked past to the massive warp pad in front of them, Pearl hesitated for a very long moment before she followed—seeming to struggle to take each step. But she still made them.

Peridot stayed by Pearl’s side for each slow step, and even Lapis calmed down some with wide eyes as they walked up and onto the Galaxy Warp. Once they were within the boundaries, Peridot warped the three of them away before Pearl could turn back and change her mind.

#fallen stars au #steven universe #steven universe future #su au #suf au #su #suf #steven universe au #steven universe future au #fs fics #peridot #su peridot #lapis #su lapis #lapis lazuli #pearl #su pearl

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moondustaeil · 3 years

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𝐫𝐞:𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞.

↳ Ambrosia's not-so-happy life update.

trigger warning, this post includes: weight loss, food, calorie counting, disordered eating habits, suicide, insecurities, fears.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏: 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭, 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭?

As I contemplate whether I should make an earnest post look as aesthetic as possible, my eyes are tearing up to Lee Chansub's "Gone". Therefore, this chapter gets named after his lyrics.

Since when was it? It's a question that crosses my mind after deciding on the chapter name, even though I'm well aware of the number of days that have passed. Each day I write that significant number in my journal, but there must be more than the pen can write. Beyond my awareness: there must have been a certain amount of time spent on a prologue to pen down the event that ultimately led to this chapter.

Since where was it? There could be multiple meanings behind the question, but I can only formulate a limited answer despite the openness. As far as I'm in charge of this story, there is no why or where. Yes, I quite literally woke up one day and decided to go on a diet, simple as that. Before that day, dieting never crossed my mind: I never saw my body as too much or myself as too little compared to others. Can you understand now why I think a prologue was written for me and not by me?

Anyhow, let's have a look at how I think I experienced my life before the diet. Sometimes I think I don't even remember how I experienced the last moments of it, but that doesn't mean I don't know how it went. My life before the diet was pretty plain: I didn't engage in any social or physical activities and spent most of my time behind my laptop to write or lurk around on YouTube. Eating-habit-wise, I never ate much: three meals a day with occasional snacks, those snacks probably covering more calories than my meals did. Despite eating calorie-covering snacks, I would have given my all for fruit and vegetables, especially frozen fruit. Back then, I already had significant eating habits: I'd eat nuts when I was stressed, drink smoothies while studying for exams, eat sour sweets when I was bored. My body before the diet wasn't that noteworthy: I maintained the same weight for around three years and only ditched my tight jeans because covid had me feeling too lazy to wear them. A youth like this might sound boring to you, but I gladly lived my life like this and, I don't regret the way I spent it.

I can still recall up to two days before it began: I can tell the contents of those days like I was the supporting cast instead of the main character, simply because I can't remember the emotions. The two last days were spent behind my laptop, waiting for the exam results while eating spicy nuts (to keep the stress level low). When the exam results came, and I realised I passed them all, I must have felt relieved. But in my memory, I didn't and don't feel anything at all concerning my exams. And that's where it stops. I don't even know where it starts again.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟐: 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐧𝐨 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲

It quite literally feels like I woke up with no memories of the first days of the diet: I can recall what I ate, but not what I did or felt.

On the first day, I drank a strawberry oat smoothie for breakfast. It was my first self-made smoothie which was convincingly delicious compared to the bought smoothies I used to have. That same day, I stopped eating snacks: unknowingly, I restricted them and wouldn't allow them for the months after.

That paragraph is all I remember from the first day, and if I were to write one about every day of that week, it would be less each day. Maybe those days just weren't memory-worthy enough as I don't want to search for a reason behind every single thing.

For approximately twenty-eight days after the first one, I have no recollections. The only way I can reflect on those days is by checking my calorie intake and physical activity. Though, it doesn't feel like I was the one who tracked it.

The first proper recollection I have is of a day I ate 180 calories for the first time: a number I can only wonder about now. Though it was my first time having such a low intake, it wasn't the last or lowest. The number 180 seemed to attract me as in the days that followed, 180 would be the maximum amount of calories I'd consume. Back then, I had no idea what TDEE or BMR (of any of the other terms) were, so I can't tell you what my deficit was. But I would burn around 1200 calories a day by exercising, and that should be enough to raise red flags.

From that point on, even though I was probably slowly killing myself, I felt alive. A growing obsession with food, weight loss and exercise was fueling my mind. While my body was left behind, trying to catch up with the pace. If I didn't lose more than 1 gram overnight, I'd starve myself the next day. If I felt too lazy to exercise, I'd punish myself for being lazy by doing more. My weight dropped a lot, up to the point where the scale sometimes seemed to skip numbers.

Then a parent swap came: I would be staying with my dad for two weeks. In advance, I had already figured out everything I thought I needed to know: how I would skip meals without him finding out, at what times I could exercise without him knowing, where I could throw away the food he thought I would eat. The day I packed my bag and left for his house, my plans turned into action.

The two weeks there went as smooth as I planned them to go. Even with bonuses: he worked up to three days a week and did not question it when I didn't eat. In those two weeks, I would replace kpop videos with programs I used to despise: supersize versus superskinny and mukbangs. The videos would satisfy my hunger in some way, even though they caused me to start nailbiting. I wouldn't eat: I would only watch as others fed themselves.

Since I lost the initial subject I wanted to discuss in this chapter (I'm so sorry), I shall be moving on to the next chapter.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟑: 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨? 𝐃𝐢𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐚𝐭?

It was at this point that people were starting to notice things that I hadn't. Sometimes those things were appearance-related and, other times it was personality-related or even habit-related.

It started with a compliment from my aunt, and I felt like I was glowing when she mentioned my visible jawline and thin face. Maybe I was slightly disappointed that she noticed the facial changes before my body but, at the same time, she noticed a difference!

After her, people started commenting on my body, and I worked more to achieve those comments. I saw them as comments rather than compliments: I didn't tire myself out starting from 5:20 am every day just to receive a meaningless compliment. I wanted people to take notice.

And, they did. People that directly surrounded me were starting to notice things that I failed to see. Mostly stuff that changed about my personality while my body was changing. My mother told me that I became the opposite of easy-going and friendly when others were around. My sister told me that my facial expressions had gone even further than my usual resting bitch face. My nephew said that all I would do was try to end up in arguments with others and that he didn't like being around me anymore. It hurt to have all of those things said, but at the same time, I was too in denial to care. The only thing I cared about was food, exercise and losing weight.

On rare occasions, I became aware of the person I became. Mostly when others would try to reach me by calling or coming over but I was too busy to talk to them, and if I did, I would talk about food-related things only. So, I shut everyone out.

I no longer talked to my friends daily, wouldn't reply to my parents sending me messages, didn't go on social media unless it was to look at food or triggering images.

The world consisted of me and was ruled by my obsession.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟒: 𝐈 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞

There is an unknown amount of time that settles itself between the previous chapter and this chapter. During this time, I once again feel like I'm just a supporting character: my habits develop and my obsession rules over everything I do.

Many of the things I did (which already wasn't a lot, to begin with), were based on stuff I said already. Though even more refined and obsessive.

When I closed my eyes, sleep would take me to dreams about food and weight loss. Approximately three times a night, I would open my eyes, assume it was morning and get ready for another day of exhaustion and starvation. Those nightly hours are still engraved in my mind and current habits: 12:00 am, 3:20 am, 5:28 am.

It is in this chapter that a slow awareness creeps up on me. The side effects are what wakens me when everything else consumes me: constant thoughts about food, the inability to sleep, not being able to think or focus, drifting from reality, always feeling cold, tingling headaches, not leaving the house for days unless it's for shopping (because I would look at food I couldn't eat).

"I need to stop," I told myself while I wrote in my journal how much better I would be if I lost some more weight because the scale is tempting me.

I didn't want to stop. I just wanted it to stop.

Though in reality, I had no control to stop myself or it. I had lost control long ago, and to this day, I still have no idea at which chapter I left it behind. Some days I thought of how to stop, but the exit sign was more like a full-stop as it led me to think of killing myself: it would make my family stop commenting on my condition and could give me a sense of freedom even though I would be dead.

It surely wasn't the first time I passed that exit sign in life, but it was the first time I felt determined to pass it by. All I wanted was to be able to sleep peacefully without thinking of food. *Snort*, such high standards.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟓: 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬

Unexpectedly, a good dream did cloud over my bedroom. Even though it was simple, it's one of the dreams that I hope to keep in my memory forever. And for laughs, I'll share it.

TO1-member Donggeon was standing near my garage but, my mother's car wasn't in the driveway because she wasn't home. I was standing outside with him while he talked with Wei's Donghan (who was invisible to me). They were having a casual conversation in Korean. Then, he wanted to lean against the car that wasn't in the driveway, causing him to fall on all fours. He laughed at his stupidity and, at the same time, his ears were getting red from embarrassment.

That pretty much sums up the first not-food-related dream I had during my entire journey. And I still remember waking up at 3:20 am, laughing: it was stupid and silly but left such a big impression on me. And that's when I told myself: "I need to recover".

It sounds silly but I still, to this day, think that this dream set me off into recovery mode. Even though I felt like I had no control, I tried to take control: calculated a number of calories that I surely had to eat each day, planned Thursday to be my active rest-day, found less intense workouts to do in the morning, tried to replace the mukbangs in my watch later list by relaxing videos or recovery videos, scheduled to journal every day. Though I told myself I would do those things, it wasn't easy to put my words into action.

Yet, I fucking did it.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟔: 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐲 𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐧

Not going to lie: I spent all night wondering how I was going to write this and all morning putting it into proper words. Hence, the reason why I'm feeling exhausted: too exhausted to continue writing it even though the blooming period is so close. So instead of giving a lecture on recovery: I will try to give my opinion on recovering and how I'm doing these days.

Each day, I still question whether I'm truly in a recovery of something. I never went to see a professional or verbally admitted to my problems, so I never learned whether I'm recovering from something or just making progress after a downfall. I might be familiar with the use of DSM-4 and DSM-5 but, that doesn't mean I'm qualified to judge on whether I had/have a disorder or not. Yet, I opt to use the terms disordered eating and recovery until I'm sure of what it was that I went through.

Some days it feels like I was faking all of it, but then I realise, how was I faking it while I was going through it and experiencing it? Perhaps some of you reading even think I am faking all of the above, but that's your opinion. I don't need to defend myself for feeling things.

Now, I'll update you on where I'm standing today because I guess I wrote six chapters in order to get to this point. We all know I like to write more than necessary.

⋅ My disordered eating habits and calorie intake: I have made quite some progress (even if I say so myself). Each week, I challenge myself to increase my calorie intake by 100 until I reach my maintenance calories. It isn't as easy as it sounds because by the time I actually dared to increase by ten calories, the week is over, and I have to adjust my goal because I wasn't even able to reach close to where I planned to be. This week my goal is to eat 800 calories a day: a number that unexpectedly is paired with a lot of guilt and fear, so I haven't been able to eat that amount yet. The maximum I've eaten is 641 calories a day. Together with that, I also promised myself to eat one fear food or not-eaten food a week: that way, I hope to stop restricting myself and learn to enjoy them again. Some lasting habits I developed: I fear eating too early and will try to push back eating as late as I can because it gives me the feeling that I can enjoy it for longer but I do have strict hours, I cut everything into mini pieces because it gives me the feeling that I have more to nibble on and more to enjoy, I read every single nutrition label multiple times (in the store and at home) because I fear that it might include too many calories or fat, I don't eat anything that I didn't plan and nothing that I can't track calorie-wise, I eat the same thing for breakfast every day because I feel like it's the only food I can trust. The urge to skip meals or lie about them is getting smaller, but the thought always remains in the back of my mind.

⋅ My weight: I'm at a weight that is still considered healthy according to whoever feels qualified to judge. However, I fear gaining weight every single day, which stops me from eating my weekly allowance. Despite eating more than at the start of this: I still lose weight. The weight loss fuels the bad habits once more, but I try to tell myself that my weight is only to indicate whether I'm close to my maintenance calories or not.

⋅ My body: my body kept most of its side effects inside until I started to recover aside from the ones that I've stated before. Yesterday was the first day that I didn't feel cold despite wearing a shirt only, so that was a win for my body. However, I do have constant headaches, get blackouts often and, I easily feel my energy draining whenever I do a little bit too much (which I didn't always feel when I was actively doing it). That being said, my abilities have definitely decreased: you can read what kind of exercise I do in the next paragraph, but it has decreased a lot because I will feel weak sooner than before.

⋅ Exercise: I am between struggling and not struggling with it. The reason why I started to exercise was to burn more calories than I ate. But back then, I had no knowledge of BMR and whatnot. These days I do a lot less impactful exercise than I did before, but I still exercise each day: I do 96 minutes of stationary cycling a day, go on daily walks and have the obsession to take steps whenever I'm standing still. As you might be able to tell, I feel like I'm on the line of having control here.

⋅ My personality/social life/hobbies: even though I was in denial about my changing personality for a long while, I eventually realised that people were right when they said I changed. The realisation came during recovery, mostly because I noticed how I was in a better mood than when I was at my lowest point. My social life is building up slowly and doesn't always include me having to talk about my weight loss or food, though people always mention it so, I do always end up having to talk about it without wanting to. As for hobbies, I found my interest in kpop and writing again but, it's still at a somewhat moderate level. I still find myself lurking at food-related posts or triggering things, but I can control myself better and watch some positive videos instead. Aside from that, I journal every day: I write down what I ate, my physical activity, what I saw as memorable in my day, and more.

𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞

That's pretty much all for the life update. I still left out a lot that I failed to remember while writing or felt too tired to write about, and I bet not a lot of you are interested in any of this anyway. I just felt like I owed everyone an explanation of where I've been and why I haven't been reblogging much or writing.

As I've stated a few times before, I don't know yet when I will get back into writing or posting content. And the past months made me realise that it might be good for myself if I take some time away from Tumblr: I won't be able to look for triggering content, won't be able to trigger anyone else on accident and can focus on working towards my goals.

I hate the word hiatus but I think this means that I will be going on semi-hiatus. On good days, I might still come here to talk to my mutuals or reblog some kpop content that I enjoy. But other times, I probably won't respond or interact much as I'm logged out.

For now, my semi-hiatus will continue until mid to end September. This might be shortened or extended depending on my progress and my personal needs.

Have a lovely day, moonflowers! 💌

#ambrosia's life #was this the tag i used to use for stuff like this?

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tinyshe · 3 years

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Story at-a-glance

There are 10 steps that every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10. Once the 10th step locks into place, there will be no going back

The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties

With the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, we entered step 10, where emergency powers and laws are used to strip remaining freedoms from the people, censorship is enacted and certain kinds of speech is criminalized

We must get involved and fight to enact state legislation that protects against continued erosion of freedom and reestablishes rights and liberties

The Daily Clout platform was created for this purpose. It allows citizens to lobby already drafted, turnkey bills to their legislators

This is the article in full:

Naomi Wolf, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, is a prolific author and Yale University graduate. She also received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship that allowed her to complete her Ph.D. in English and literature at Oxford University in 2015. Eight years before that, she wrote a book called “The End of America,” which is the topic of this interview. “The End of America” was published in 2007. At the end of this article, you will find a playlist of three videos in which she reads select chapters of the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.1A Prescient Warning Already in 2007, Wolf warned us of where we were headed. In her book, she points out that would-be tyrants are found on both sides of the political spectrum. We must not get locked into generalizations about political affiliations, because they simply do not give us a truthful picture of who the enemy is. While Wolf and I could be said to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Wolf being a long-time progressive while many would view me as a conservative, our views are in perfect alignment when it comes to the issues of protecting American freedom and liberty.We are [now] at Step 10. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back. ~ Naomi WolfIn “The End of America,” Wolf lays out the 10 steps toward tyranny. These steps have been followed by virtually all would-be tyrants, be they on the political left or right. They were followed in Italy in the '20s, Germany in '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Chile in the '70s and China in the '80s. “They all took the same 10 steps, and they always work,” Wolf says. “I warned people that when you start to see these 10 steps, you have to take action, because there is no way to recover once things go too far without a bloody revolution or a civil war. We are [now] at Step 10. People have said, since I wrote that book in 2007, ‘Tell us when we're at Step 10.’ I've always said, ‘Things are bad, they're getting worse, but there's still hope.’ We're literally at Step 10 now. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back.”We’re in the Final Step of the Implementation of Tyranny.The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. It may be a real threat or an imagined one, but in all cases, it’s a hyped-up threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties. Ultimately, that wasn’t effective enough.“There was still freedom in the world. People were not saying, ‘ISIS exists; therefore, I'm going to give up my First Amendment liberties, my Fourth Amendment liberties, my Second Amendment liberties and so on.’ Sadly, this medical crisis — which is now not a pandemic in many states and countries, it's an endemic; it doesn't meet the formal definition of a pandemic — was the perfect excuse for leaders to usher in Step 10,” Wolf says. The last and final step in the implementation of tyranny, Step 10, involves the creation of a surveillance state where citizens are spied upon, and critique of the government is reclassified as dissent and subversive activity. Step 10 The surveillance state is now being rolled out in the form of vaccine passports, while certain kinds of speech are said to be dangerous and freedom of speech is being criminalized. Needless to say, the mainstream press is an important part of this scheme. “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have essentially bought up the western press and coerce them, bribe them, into following the party line, brought up by the CDC and so on,” Wolf says.“Toward the end of the steps, which is Step 10, is emergency law, [which is a] subversion of the rule of law, also called martial law. We're here. I'm [in] New York State. We're under emergency law. Every 30 days, I get an email saying that tyrannical Governor Cuomo has extended emergency powers, even though in Columbia County where I live, there are only eight deaths a month with COVID, average age 85, which is older than the average American life span. It's not a pandemic where I live, but I'm living under emergency law, which means the legislature has no power. The governor can do whatever he wants. It’s the same in Massachusetts, same in California — 49 states, all states except Alaska, are technically under emergency law. This is terrifying. You get what you're seeing, which is governors deciding, or the federal government deciding, that you can't assemble, you can't worship, you have no medical choice, the coercion of vaccine passports, your child can't go to school, your young adult can't get a college education if they don't agree to an experimental vaccination. You get suspension of the right to property. You can't run your business — 110,000 restaurants have closed. You get a suspension of freedoms of speech. People are being deplatformed left and right and there are movements in Congress to criminalize what had been First Amendment protected speech. You get the invocation of martial powers and there's no end to it. Literally, with Massachusetts emergency law, I have no rights. I have no ability to lobby the governor. With New York’s emergency law, I have no representative with the power to end emergency measures. The governor has to end emergency measures, [and] he's the one who benefits from them. It's catastrophic. We're seeing a complete takeover of American rights, freedoms and bodies by Big Tech, which is up double digits to triple-digit billions since the pandemic began. China has moved in to … establish its role as the global superpower under the guise of this pandemic, buying up community groups, elected officials and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are flooding K through 12 education … community groups [and] universities with money to engage in COVID education — which means a strict party line [narrative] that is aimed at destroying what's human about us and what's free. That's it in a nutshell. It's unbelievably terrifying.”What the COVID-19 Passports Are Really AboutWolf was recently interviewed by Fox News’ Steve Hilton (above), in which she warned that mandatory COVID-19 passports will spell the “end of human liberty in the West”:2,3 In essence, they’re a precursor to the social credit system that has already been implemented in China. The vaccine passes have already been rolled out in New York, where Wolf lives. Surveillance is nothing new, of course. We’ve been digitally surveilled for years, through social media platforms, Google and all manner of “smart” technology. Since the early 2000s, Google and Facebook in particular have been data mining online users. These data, then, have been applied to deep learning computers, giving them unprecedented ability to predict the type of messaging triggers that will create the maximum amount of fear — and thus compliance. There’s also every reason to assume that this information has also been shared with people like Bill Gates, who largely controls the World Health Organization. If it wasn’t for the WHO, we would not be in this situation, because it was the central organization with the authority to declare a global pandemic, and keep it in place long past its natural expiration date. They actually changed the definition of “pandemic,” removing the requirement of mass casualties, and if it wasn’t for that, COVID-19 simply would not qualify as a pandemic. The Pandemic Is Hypothetical at BestWolf points out that COVID-19 dashboards, such as Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracking project that mainstream media keep citing, cannot tell us anything about who’s actually getting infected, or who’s dying. We don’t even know if they are showing real or made up data.Wolf, being the CEO of a tech company, builds digital dashboards based on government data, so she knows what she’s talking about. You have to have the raw datasets. Since none of the dashboards provide the raw data, nothing can be verified. “Basically, they can dial up cases, which are positive PCR tests, or dial them down,” she says. So, the entire pandemic narrative is unverified.We do know, however, that the CDC has shifted influenza and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 deaths, and tens of thousands of Americans die from these conditions every year. When lawmakers in Minnesota audited death records, for example, they found a 40% over-attribution of deaths to COVID-19. Then there’s the PCR test scandal. Not only have laboratories everywhere been using excessively high amplification cycles resulting in staggeringly high false positive rates, but they also do not account for duplicate tests. If you get a positive test, and test once a week until you test negative, each positive test result you obtain is counted as a separate “case.”“We literally can't know if there's been a pandemic, there's so much faulty attribution, inflation of numbers, and so on,” Wolf says. “Those numbers, I can't stress enough, have never been audited ... We have to do a freedom of information request in Britain to take a look at the raw data sets that are being fed into the Office for National Statistics, COVID dashboard. We looked at where the data were flowing from for the Johns Hopkins dashboard, which again, was used by every major university, every major news outlet. One of the data providers was a hedge fund! … I know something else about APIs. It is virtually impossible to, in real time, get hundreds of thousands of reports from hundreds of thousands of doctors, hospitals, CVS and Rite Aid, feeding into a live digital dashboard. I keep asking the developers to show me, ‘How did you do this? It's virtually impossible.’ There's no answer, there's crickets. Literally, we don't know if the dashboards are just dialing up and dialing down infection rates. Everyone's taking for granted that these must be real numbers, but there's no evidence that they are real numbers. I'm willing to stand corrected if there's a FOIA and we see the raw data sets. But right now, it is a hypothetical pandemic.”Collusion by Tech CompaniesTech companies have also engaged in what Wolf likens to criminal collusion. She explains:“In March of last year, for the COVID-19 response project, Zoom, NASDAQ, Nintendo, Microsoft, Amazon — all the people who benefited from the lockdown — coordinated so that wherever you go on the internet, across platform to platform, you see these alerts about COVID-19, warnings about COVID, instructions about COVID, and of course, censorship … if you run afoul of the narrative about COVID. I run a tech company. The question, when you run a tech company, is how do you get people to not do things in the real world, and do things on your platform? That's the business model. If people are gathering in churches, gathering in real school rooms, if they're going for walks together, go on picnics, having dinner parties, going to clubs, that's an opportunity lost to Microsoft and Google and so on. But if they can drive you indoors, terrify you from being around other people, or make it unlawful to be around other people through these emergency powers that restrict assembly [then they can profit] … Digital learning curriculum were turnkey, ready to go. Suddenly, it was like, ‘Oh, kids have to be at home and do distance learning.’ That's a $300 million industry for just one company that creates digital curriculums. They're not going to let go of that. I think we are in a small loop of six tech companies [and] the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, having bought legislators in China, who's up 32% while the economies of the West have crashed, and that's the fight that we have to fight.”The Legalization of Tyranny. Few people realize that dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler came to power in legal working democracies. They became subverted and rules of law were rewritten in such a way as to allow these leaders to legally take over. That's one of the primary dangers we now face in the U.S., because at the end of step 10, the leader obtains the legal authority to become a tyrant.“This is especially true of the National Socialists,” Wolf says. “They kept passing a set of laws called the Enabling Acts that are very much like the laws that are being passed now. They criminalized certain speech, created a surveillance apparatus for citizens … and they did this lawfully. They were elected, and they passed restrictive law after restrictive law. Then, once democracy was fragile enough, it really only took six months for thugs to beat up opposition leaders, union leaders, the outspoken and clergy. After that, everyone was too scared to speak. We're seeing the same thing happen now, but faster. It's very scary that China has created a white paper — the World Economic Forum has it on its website — that maps how biofascism, as I call it — vaccinations, the managing of people's bodies, biometrics and health — is being launched as a way to control civic engagement, governance, private life, assembly and every other aspect of human life, to bring about super-fast totalitarianism. That's why focusing on legislation is something I've been doing with my company DailyClout, very seriously, because if we don't pass laws immediately to make unlawful some of the things we're seeing, there will be no more hope for us.”Using the Legal System to Save the Law. One strategy of totalitarianism that must be fought through legislation is the requirement of vaccine passports. “Once these are launched … people like you and I, Dr. Mercola, will be switched off of society. ‘Oops, my vaccine passport is positive. I guess I can't go food shopping for my family.’ ‘I said something critical of biofascism on Dr. Mercola's show, so now my child can't get into school.’ Just as in Israel, people who are critics are being surveilled [and] marginalized from society. It has turned into a two-tier society. If you choose not to get vaccinated, then you're really in a marginalized minority in an apartheid state. The more we know about these vaccines, the scarier it is to have coercion that is social. It's also illegal. In America, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. It means it's illegal to even ask me anything about my medical status. You can't ask me if I'm pregnant. You can't ask me if I'm disabled. You can't ask me if I have diabetes or HIV. You cannot ask me anything. By definition, these intrusive measures are unlawful. We have to use the law to save the law, basically. In Michigan, there's an edict from the governor that 2- to 4-year-old children have to be masked. This is child abuse. Science doesn't support it. Unlawful, tyrannical laws are being passed across the country under the guise of emergency measures, and stupid people going along with it, like in Congress, I'm embarrassed to say, because I voted for Biden. We have to fight before we are living in fascist regime where every move is tracked and we're marginalized from society.”The Courts Are Our Last Hope, And They’re Now Under AttackOne area in which “The End of America” excels is helping you understand is that the United States was founded by people who had repressive societies. Their goal was to prevent such a repressive society from emerging again. The founders had to personally reckon with criminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, state sanctioned torture and even murder.So, at great personal sacrifice, they signed the Constitution. Had they lost the Revolutionary War, they would all have been executed, so the stakes could not have been higher. As a result, our founding fathers constructed a carefully balanced system to make sure no tyrant could ever come to power. We’re now facing a scenario that could obliterate that delicate balance, namely the Biden administration’s call to “pack the court,” i.e., add, in this case four, additional Justices to the Supreme Court. We’re now facing a shift in our legal structure that will allow for the legalization of tyrannical reign and “legally” override the carefully constructed governmental balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branched that has previously served to prevent tyranny in the U.S.This three-tier branch, constructed to safeguard our freedoms, is under direct attack, and this is NOT a partisan issue. Not by a longshot, and everyone needs to wake up to this fact. It’s an issue of freedom versus tyranny.“Absolutely,” Wolf says. “Sadly, this is clear. That's why I'm saying progressives have to wake up … I worry very much about the role of China in this, because I think we've seen that some people connected to the Democratic Party have close ties with members of the Chinese Communist Party. That is just established fact. I'm not saying that the tyrants are on the left. In Britain, it's Tories cracking down on liberty, holding the country under house arrest. In Australia it's conservatives, in Canada it's Trudeau, a liberal. This isn't partisan. But in America, we do have to face the fact that this administration is drunk on power and has some bad actors aligned with it, including Silicon Valley. They are crushing conservative voices, kicking them off of public platforms in addition to voices critical of the COVID narrative. They're also moving at warp speed to use their own phrasing about something else to lock in power in a way that is against everything our founders set in place — the most beautiful, delicate system of checks and balances any human beings have ever created; an ideal of people all over the world who want freedom and balanced accountable government. Yeah, packing the Supreme Court is a horrific tampering with some of the last checks and balances that we have … I can't believe I keep saying thank God for the conservatives on the bench. But these days, I have to say it, and I'm ashamed. But thank God, because they were the ones who in California said ‘No, you cannot keep people from assembling to worship. That is a violation of the Constitution.’ They're our last hope. The courts are our last hope. It is catastrophic, and I see other scary movements against accountable democracy that are being put forward by this administration. Among them, President Biden is not saying to the blue states: ‘You have to give up your emergency powers. You have to open up. You can't control people in their homes, you can't force people to have vaccinations and you can't keep people from assembling and worshipping.’ These are all violations of their constitutional liberties. He's not saying that. That's a complete failure of leadership, if not worse. My people have to rise up and face it. Conservatives have to face cleaning up their own houses … What's at stake is everything, and we all have to unite across party lines and save our Constitution and make these people accountable, whatever their party [affiliation].”Urgent Call to Action The good news is, the would-be tyrants have not won yet. That said, we have no time to spare. We have no time to remain idle, hoping it will all just go back to normal on its own. The answer is peaceful mass civil disobedience.“There's hope in mass peaceful civil disobedience … when things are really dire,” Wolf says. “My favorite story is about the singing revolution of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, in which they were under the grip of the Soviet Union, a massive tyrannical monolith. They all decided to just peacefully gather on a highway that extended the length of their three countries and sing. They kept peacefully disrupting business as usual in their cities, making it impossible for work to continue, for traffic to go on. They sat down, they linked arms and they sang. Over time, they just wore down the Soviet Union. That's a beautiful model. Same thing with Dr. Martin Luther King. His was a peaceful revolution of civil disobedience.”This strategy is time-consuming, however, so be prepared to stand your ground for as long as it takes. It can take months, years even, when you have nothing else in your arsenal. Peaceful disobedience is the primary strategy in armed countries as well. As mentioned, we must also rally behind legislation that prevents the alteration of laws that safeguard our freedoms.Join the Five Freedoms Campaign!To that end, Wolf has started the Five Freedoms Campaign, which you can find on her Daily Clout website. The campaign focuses on creating legislation to preserve key freedoms and prevent emergency laws from infringing on our freedom to assembly, worship, protest and engage in business. Legislation is also being crafted to open schools, remove mask mandates and eliminate requirements for vaccine passports.“We've had overwhelmingly high levels of support,” Wolf says. “I hope your followers will also join us. We hired a really distinguished lawyer who is drafting model legislation. She has finished the new vaccine passport bill and we've gotten state legislators in Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan to sponsor to pass that legislation. I'm sending out the request for 47 other state legislatures to adopt this model legislation. Contact me, I'll come out, I'll speak to your legislature. We'll do a rally, we'll do a press conference, as we're doing in Maine on April 27. We've got to pass these bills. Then she's going to work on an omnibus bill to make all five freedoms inviolable so that no one can pass mask mandates as they did in Michigan today. No one can force vaccine passports as they're doing in New York, so that we can get our freedoms back.”Wolf and her team are making this interactive process as easy as possible by posting good model bills on dailyclout.io, and proactively drafting much-needed bills. Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don't have lawyers at their beck and call. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that:“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we've been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’ It's a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It's why we founded Daily Clout, but it's beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It's not just for this issue. Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”Limiting Emergency PowersAnother facet that needs to be addressed is governors’ emergency powers. Some states have been locked down under emergency power for more than a year, which is insane, considering we’re not in an emergency and haven’t been for many months. These emergency powers need to be limited in some way, as they are at the heart of all this unlawful behavior. As explained by Wolf: “Emergency law basically suspends the Constitution of the United States. As I've said elsewhere, the Constitution doesn't say all this can be suspended if there's disease. We've been through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, Spanish flu, polio, tuberculosis — disease after disease, without ever having emergency law extended without review month after month. We've had world wars fought without emergency laws. We were attacked on our soil without emergency law being declared in New York state after 9/11. There's no justification for it. It's against everything we believe in. It's unconstitutional.” So, one of the five freedoms Wolf’s campaign focuses on is the restriction of emergency laws. New Hampshire has become the first state to pass a bill that accomplishes this. It reforms emergency law such that the Governor’s emergency powers cannot be indefinitely extended without review by the legislature. They also passed a bill that guarantees freedom of worship, and another bill that ensures emergency law cannot be invoked indefinitely in any future crisis.4“We've now passed along our model ‘No vaccine passport’ bill to the New Hampshire legislators,” Wolf says. “If they can do it in New Hampshire, with our help, with your help, they can do it across the country. But we need to get that model legislation out to every legislature and mobilize that grassroots movement to pass the end of emergency law. I mean, look what's happening in New York State. It's insane. Fourteen state legislators are trying to get Governor Cuomo to end emergency law. But as our laws are written, Governor Cuomo has to be the one to end his own emergency law. There're a huge amount of lobbying that has to happen for these legislators to understand that there are eyes on them, that they're accountable. I'm going to be reporting and … hopefully millions of people will be following and helping to pass these laws to get back our rights.”Daily Clout Empowers Citizens to Lobby for Freedom. To be clear, the Daily Clout is not a lobbying group. YOU are the ones lobbying your legislators. Daily Clout simply provides the needed assistance so that you can do that easily and effectively. “It's such a beautiful effort, because you'd have to come out and say, ‘The people of New Hampshire have no right to pass their own legislation’ in order to oppose an effort like this,” Wolf says. “We're not a special interest. It's just the people. It's the people of New Hampshire, people of Maine, passing their own legislation. I do hear, consistently, that Democrats won't help, that in many states with their democratic majorities, it's going to be difficult if Democrats don't reach across the aisle and add their names. I'm sending out the call to Democrats to support this legislation. I'm going to warn everyone, speaking as a former political consultant, that the party that embraces the restoration of freedom is going to be the party that wins in 2022 and 2024. There's no question about that. This is going to be a winning issue. People know something is terribly wrong, but they don't know what to do. This is a completely unprecedented assault on liberty. With my many years in national politics, I know what to do. This is why we developed Daily Clout. If you show up with a turnkey piece of legislation and some turnkey supporters, that's a very quick fix for a really catastrophic crisis that has a legislative solution. As long as there's still legislatures, we can pass good legislation at the state level. At the federal level, it's going to be harder, because there isn't any balance right now. I'm very inspired there's so many people serving at the state legislature level who are really decent citizens, who are not partisan hacks. People who really ran to help their neighbors and help their communities and who are not wholly owned by China, Big Tech or whatever, and who want to do the right thing. I could be wrong, but in two weeks [since we launched the Daily Clout site] we've already been invited to address state legislators and draft legislation for three, and that's without any marketing budget or anything but platforms like this, where I say it's available. We started Daily Clout because citizens didn't have a platform to be effective at lobbying for their own issues. This is a turnkey platform that does that for them. I designed it that way. I designed it, as a former political consultant, knowing that the way things are set up, ordinary citizens don't have a seat at the table. There is no easy way to engage in civic action.

This makes it easy, makes it digital and people are using it.”How to Use the Daily Clout Site.So, how do you get involved? First, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign.

Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.There’s also a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Daily Clout will also email you links and explain how to find your state legislator. If you provide your name and zip code, which will remain confidential, your state legislator’s contact information will be included in the email.“We're creating a widget right now to attach your name and zip code to the model bills so it goes right to your state legislator, showing that the bill already has support,” Wolf explains. “But in the meantime, you can look up any bill on BillCam. Those are bills that have already been introduced or passed. There are ‘No vaccine passport’ bills, for instance. We're showcasing them on BillCam. It's already set up, so you can just tweet it to the sponsor, tweet it to representative. You can Facebook it to your community. It already goes through social media and you can show support by ‘voting on it’ in the widget on BillCam as you share legislation with your community.”Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events. They’re also installing a widget that will allow you to meet with like-minded people in your state who want this legislation passed. Lastly, you can write to Daily Clout and ask them to draft a bill. A lawyer will then be assigned to draft it for you.“Right now, we're focused on the Five Freedoms Campaign, but there is that functionality. You can write a blog and explain the bill that you want. You can send us a video and explain what your issue is, and all of this goes to shining a light on the legislators. They're not used to having a light shone on them. That really does drive outcomes. Those are the steps that you can take,” Wolf says. We’ve already seen how effective this strategy can be, with New Hampshire passing three bills to protect citizens’ freedoms. “I never want to take credit away from legislators working hard to pass bills, but I know that we helped,” Wolf says. “I know that our lawyer has been in close touch with some of those state legislators in New Hampshire and provided language that we pay for, so that those legislators would have a turnkey bill to act on.”Hundreds of people also wrote to New Hampshire’s Governor Christopher Sununu, urging him to lift the mask mandate, which he recently did. Knowing that the Daily Clout would report on the outcome of that campaign, he not only felt the political pressure, but he also knew he had support from his constituents. So, please, use this unprecedented opportunity to get involved, in any capacity that you can. Your freedom, and that of future generations, hinge on our getting involved and fighting for it. Last but not least, to understand where we are and how we got here, I strongly recommend reading “The End of America.” In the video below, Wolf reads select chapters from the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.5

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shadow-dancing · 3 years

Text

Guitar Man (Taeil)

Listen: Guitar Man ; Every time I’m With You ; New Kid in Town

Genre: white collar worker!Taeil, guitarist!Taeil, some angst, moonlighting Words: 2, 217

It was another crowded night at Pandora's Box, the pub in town that your uncle owned. Lately there has been a guitar playing man who was drawing in hoards of people to visit, & your uncle couldn't be happier by the boom in business. You weren't into pubs or bars—the stale air & smell of booze was a big turn off for your sensitive sense of smell, & the songs that usually blared at a billion decibels were not your cup of tea. Your uncle was singing this guitar man praises every night when he came home from work, & it was driving you slightly mad.

Your friend, Taeyong, was absolutely floored that you have never heard this person live when your uncle literally ran the place. "Come on, Y/N, the guy's great! Just go listen once, trust me."

You gave in after 3 weeks, & visited the establishment on a Monday night where you hoped the crowds would be less compared to the weekends. The pub air hit your nostrils like a sucker punch & you silently gagged as you made your way to the bar. You recognized the bartender, it was Johnny, the gentle giant whom you've known since your uncle opened the place about 3 years ago.

"Hey Y/N! What're you doing here?" Johnny asked with a wave. He was aware you were not a big fan of pubs.

"Came to see the newest sensation, of course," you smiled wryly, sitting gingerly on the bar stool.

"Ah, Taeil. He's great, the bars been busier than Times Square on New Year's Eve these past weeks. I think boss is considering hiring him permanently," Johnny nodded. "Have you eaten?"

"Not yet."

"I'll get Kun to make some fish & chips for you."

Soon you were tucking into your fish & chips with some iced Ribena. It was starting to get really crowded, & Johnny eventually got busy enough that he was making 3 drinks at the same time. You were tempted to leave; the amount of people in the relatively large space was probably over the maximum capacity at this point, & people had to jostle their ways around trying to find seats. At 7:45 the band that was playing stopped, said their thanks, & got off the stage. A relatively short young man, clad in a striped shirt under an oversized denim jacket & his dark hair side swept, took their place, a black guitar case slung over his shoulder & a bottle of water in hand. The crowd started murmuring excitedly, which gave you all you needed to know—this young man was Taeil. You were startled by his appearance when he turned around—he was wearing a white half mask to cover the upper half of his face.

Taeil adjusted the mic to fit his smaller stature, & perched on the stool that had been brought out for him. You watched as he produced an acoustic guitar from the case, & tuned it. He cleared his throat, took a quick sip of water, cleared his throat once more, & leaned into the mic a little.

"Good evening everyone—"

The crowd interrupted him with hoots & cheers. You rolled your eyes. Let the man speak, dammit.

Taeil smiled politely as the cheers died down. "I hope you all enjoy yourselves tonight."

You pushed aside your empty plate, sipping your drink. A hush fell over the crowd as Taeil started playing.

"Are we going insane? Do we need to explain? I feel like we know it."

Your heart leaped. Taeyong & Johnny were wrong—he wasn't just good, he was damn good. The crowd slowed their activities, their eyes trained on him as he sang. The kitchen grew quieter as Johnny & Kun paused a moment to listen.

"I could lose it all it won't be daunting Somehow I don't think I'd even care Cuz every time I'm with you I feel wanted We could make believers if we dared"

As he finished the song, the people sighed; some wiped their tears & kissed their significant others, while others wallowed in loneliness. Taeil realized the mixed reaction & wanted to stammer an apology, but the crowd burst into applause & screamed for another song. He took a swig of water & started on the next song.

"Baby I don't know why, but somehow I always seem to get tangled up in my pride"

Taeil's set ended at 9.30, much to the dismay of the crowd. He waved shyly as he hopped off the stage & disappeared through a back door. Johnny & Kun resumed their work. & you gulped down the rest of your drink. Taeil's set was over, there no longer was a reason to hang around. As you lay in bed later that night, your heart was still pounding, the sweet vocals resonating in you ears.

You found yourself at the pub after work the next day. Johnny looked up as you approached, & you knew he could tell you couldn't get enough of Taeil. At the same time as yesterday, Taeil took the stage at 7:45, & today he asked the band to accompany him as he played a rendition of Got My Mind Set On You, Oh Pretty Woman, & Part Time Lover.

"Okay break time everyone! I need to hydrate!" Taeil laughed, leaving the mic.

He squeezed past his adoring fans & made it to the bar, where he asked for some lemon tea. Johnny handed it to him, & he downed it pretty fast, almost choking on the ice.

"You okay?" You asked, offering some serviettes.

"Yeah, fine. Forgot my bottle," Taeil reassured. He flashed you a smile, before heading off to the stage again.

--------------------------------------------------------

Taeil scrubbed a hand over his eyes as the sun started to hang low. Work was exhausting as always, & he was more than ready to just up & leave the place. He glanced at his watch—4:55PM. 5 more minutes & he could clock out. He looked around to see what his colleagues were up to; Jungwoo was yawning widely as he typed away at his laptop, Yuta was scrawling away busily on some paper, probably doodling, & Jaehyun had his earphones plugged in—Taeil could make out some TV drama playing on Jaehyun's Netflix account. Taeil exhaled, glancing at his watch again.

Another 2 minutes to freedom.

He pushed his papers aside, pulling out a binder full of guitar chords from his bag. He flipped through the sheets to find a song to play at the pub. Are You Lonesome Tonight seemed good for a first song, maybe for the second song he could play—

"Aw yes! Finally time to leave this place!" Yuta announced loudly, standing up to stretch his arms.

"Not so loud! Do you want the boss to hear?" Taeil hissed, putting a finger to his lips.

"He left like 45 minutes ago," Jungwoo pointed out, shutting off his laptop.

"What? Really?" Jaehyun asked, taking his earphones out.

"Seriously? I thought you were watching that stupid TV drama because you knew he was gone!" Jungwoo exclaimed.

"No, I watched it because I don't want to do work. Tomorrow's a holiday for heaven's sakes why are we even here when we could've taken the day off."

"Oh whatever let's just get out of here," Yuta grumbled, packing up. "The pool table at Daydream is calling my name."

"Taeil, you joining us for pool?" Jungwoo asked. "Yuta is gonna go up against Doyoung later."

"No it's fine, I have something to do tonight. I'll see you all tomorrow, bye," Taeil said as he walked out the door.

He quickly got into his car, & drove home for a quick rinse. He found a clean shirt & threw on a black jacket & was out the door again with his guitar in hand. He was glad the owner of Pandora's Box let him play; he was tired of the tedious routine of his work days, & playing for the crowd for 1.5 hours was the one thing he looked forward to everyday, even if it meant he had to take a 2 hour drive to the pub. He had chanced upon the pub after the previous place he used to frequent got shut down due to poor business. He didn't even realize the crowds got less, as he was so focused on his playing.

Traffic was lighter than usual today, to which Taeil chalked up to being related to tomorrow being a public holiday, & most probably took the day off to make it a long weekend. He parked in his usual spot, & entered the front discreetly. It was pretty early, so there were only a handful of people inside. Johnny, the bartender, looked up as Taeil approached.

"Hey man, you're early today," he noted.

"Yeah, traffic was good. Can I get some water?"

Johnny slid him a glass of water.

"Is that musician gonna play tonight?"

Taeil almost choked on his water as he accidentally eavesdropped on the conversation of the fellas at the table behind him.

"I should think so."

"Tsk. What's so great about him? He just sings songs & strums his guitar. Anyone can do it!"

"Uh, I mean, not everyone has the—"

"Pass me a guitar & I could sing as good as him."

"Can you even play guitar."

"Does it matter?"

"Yes it does, you nitwit."

Taeil was mildly amused by the exchange, but also by the fact they thought they might like to take his place. In no way did he believe he was superior over them, but being a musician wasn't as easy as prancing on the stage with a guitar.

He wowed the crowd as always that night, and at 9.25 he looked at his binder stuffed with sheet music. What shall his final song be?

You watched intently form your seat, Taeyong cheering next to you; Taeil was absolutely glowing tonight, & everyone was all ears. He sang Elvis, & even played Piano Man by Billy Joel. You noticed the crowd seemed to be a little thin today, yet it didn't faze Taeil. He adjusted his mask, & picked up his guitar. A familiar set of chords filled your ears, & you inhale deeply.

"There's talk on the street it sounds so familiar. Great expectations, everybody's watching you."

You bit your lip slightly. What could Taeil possibly mean by playing this song? Was it just a song for tonight or did he have some intention to sing it?

"Johnny come lately The new kid in town Everybody loves you So don't let them down"

The rest of the crowd did not seem to be worried by the song. After all, why should they? The guitar man was simply here to serenade them with his angelic vocals to help them forget about life for a while. You take a swig of your Ribena. You were probably just overthinking things. After all, this song was about fleeting romance. You glanced at Taeyong briefly, & he catches your eye. He smiles, & you feel your heart skip a beat.

"There's talk on the street, it's there to remind you Doesn't really matter which side you're on You're walking away, and they're talking behind you They will never forget you 'til somebody new comes along"

As the pub emptied for closing, Taeil sat at the bar with a glass of water. Johnny was mopping up the beer some patron had spilled all over the floor, grumbling about how uncouth some people can get. Kun was singing softly in the kitchen as he washed up the dirty dishes in the sink, while his kitchen assistants cleaned the stoves & countertops. Taeil thumbed the rim of his glass, suddenly tired. Boy was he glad tomorrow was a holiday cuz he intended to sleep in late.

"You did well today, Taeil," the bar owner said as he rearranged the tables & chairs.

"Thank you, sir."

"Is something wrong?"

"Not at all, sir, just tired," Taeil admitted.

"Not surprised, you did go all out tonight," the owner nodded. "If you're too tired to make the drive home I think Johnny can let you stay in his place, can you Johnny?"

Johnny gave a thumbs up.

"Nah, I think I'll be fine."

The lightbulb above Taeil flickered. The bar owner frowned at it, muttering he should get a replacement bulb for that. Taeil stayed until the owner had to escort his employees out. Sitting in the driver seat of his car, Taeil watched as the lights went out before starting his car.

It was time to leave.

--------------------------------------------------------

"Is the Guitar Man coming back?"

"I don't know, maybe."

"I hope he does. He was fantastic."

Johnny looked up. The crowds were less now that Taeil hasn't returned to play for the past 5 days. The boss had called Taeil out of concern 3 days ago, lord knows what could've happened that night that he insisted on driving back despite his tiredness, & Taeil answered that he’s gone elsewhere to play. The boss was disappointed, but understood that sensations tend to fade out after their 15 minutes of fame.

Johnny returned to his chores; he too had been disappointed to hear Taeil left to go elsewhere to sing. Maybe one day the guitar man would return.

#nct taeil #nct taeil imagines #nct taeil scenarios #nct taeil fanfiction #nct scenarios #nct imagines #nct 127 imagines #nct 127 scenarios #nct 127 taeil #au:guitar man

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