#the majority of our universal knowledge is assumption-based

[cosmicsproutcake]

why do you hate "humans and earth are weird" posts and stuff?

Look, you can do whatever you want in fiction, I really don't care at the end of the day, it's just that like 70-80% of our problems stem from humans thinking we're uniquely special in some way, when we're really probably not, like at all, so I'm just not a fan of that trope.

[scentedpeachlandcreator]

Hi there!

I've been a fan of yours for a while (I discovered you through your "You want to manifest your dream life?" post a few weeks back) and I appreciate the way you approach loass. It is so uncomplicated but it just resonates with me. Just good vibes all around on this blog (and you're pink, always a plus!)

That being said, I've noticed that not a lot of bloggers address the topic of procrastination, or - if they do - it's something along the lines of "just do it/you already have your desires/other loass phrase" While I know there is merit in what they say, it is a little demotivating when these blanket statements don't connect with me (and likely others).

I'm aware of the many causes of it (fear of failure, perfectionism, anxiety, etc) and while I have made major strides on my own, I feel it'd be beneficial to get some outside advice.

Do you have any tips to manage procrastination?

(also, if you don't mind, can I be your 🪷 annon? I'd love to come back, even just to chat)

omg hello dear!

yes you can be my 🪷 anon!

it bring me joy when i see people loving my blog and actually find my posts interesting!

so my tips for the procrastination part, my advice is:

what do i do to manage procrastination?

First of all i noticed something, people tend to make manifesting seems like it's a job, and they complicate it so much, i know why, since we subconsciously believe that there's no way we can get whatever we want with just assuming that it ours and yes it's too good to be true, but you'll need to accept that manifesting your desires is really simple and easy.

Procrastination may make you feel like giving up, feeling slow, lazy and many more, but we need to fix that.

First step: keep it light and simple.

Go back remembering what you did when you Manifested something a month ago or a year ago, what did you think? What did you do?

Personally that helped me alot, since i Always seems to forget how to manifest like i used to.

Second step: go back to the basic.

What is the Law of assumption really?

It's a Universal Law that state whatever you assume to be true will be true.

Do i have to really use the terms 3d and 4d?

Coming from my opinion, no.

I don't use 3d and 4d terms anymore, i just decide it's mine and move on 🤷🏻‍♀️.

(if you want to explore more about the 3d and 4d go on, it's your choice).

Do i have to persist?

I mean if you already have it, why would you need Persisting anyway? You assumed it's yours? Then it's yours, period.

Is it gonna take too much time? What if it delays? What if-

Those all are limiting beliefs, time delay and things that would ruin your manifestation, signs, movements doesn't exist, you make them exist if you assumed so, you're the creator after all.

How do i manage my anxiety and doubt while manifesting?

You know that little voice that is telling you that you don't have your desires? That the ego, how to shut it up? Just tell it "no? I have it" Easy peasy, don't fight it, just tell it that not true and that you already have your desires.

When you find yourself getting stressful about time, just take a deep breath and say to yourself "no i have it right now, my desires are mine"

How do i deal with the 3d?

You don't have to ignore the 3d, you just knowledge it and remind yourself that you already have your desires and what happening in the 3d is gonna change, and move on.

Actually that all i have to say, manifestation is truly easy and simple.

Which methods are better?

Honestly, that based on your assumption, if you believe that would work then it will.

Assumption= reality.

I hope that cleared up everything for you, and made you understand that the Law of assumption is nothing and it's just a part of your lifestyle, speak it into existence because it is.

Read this, it would help a lot:

Xoxo, Eli

[0809sysblings]

Amane, indoctrination, and gaslighting

and why voting Amane innocent would be the best course of action

I've been wanting to write a big post on Amane talking about indoctrination and such. Because I see takes sometimes that make it clear the person doesn't really... Get It.

Most of what I'll be explaining comes from my personal experiences growing up.

Additionally, most of what I say when it comes to outcomes (i.e. "If x happens, Amane will do y") will be based on the assumption that realism, not entertainment, is prioritized in the writing and that there are no major holes in our knowledge of what's going on. Theoretically anything could happen since this is a fictional scenario and we don't know everything when it comes to the world, the cases, and the characters. Not to mention my situation was nowhere near as extreme as hers. So although I probably have a better understanding of it than most people, I definitely can't claim that I know what she's gone through.

Personal anecdotes I add to better support my points will be in the small font (this!) since I don't want them to distract from the main text and so that they can be easily skipped for those who may be worried about being triggered. But if anyone needs plain text descriptions, I'll happily provide them!

!! TW for child abuse, religious abuse, and cults !!

I recommend skipping my personal anecdotes if more detailed discussions about these topics are a trigger for you.

At the heart of "good" (read: successful) indoctrination is gaslighting.

Since gaslighting has been one of the many psychology terms completely watered down and distorted by the internet, I will define it just so we're all on the same page!

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation used to make the victim question their own sanity, sense of reality, or power of reasoning.

Basically, you can't trust yourself. You can't trust your thoughts, your feelings, your interpretations, etc. You become completely reliant on other people (usually specific people who are the ones doing the gaslighting) to figure out what's real/true or not.

Toxic/extremist religious groups like to take gaslighting a step further though. Not only do they make it so you cannot trust yourself to judge what is right or not, they may also teach you that what feels wrong is actually right. You can see where this can start to cause some issues lol.

Anything your gut may tell you that contradicts what the group/cult leaders tell you—"this is wrong!", "this is bad!", "I don't want to do this..."—must be ignored. Because those feelings and thoughts, according to the leaders, are actually the sinful part of you trying to lead the good and faithful part of you astray. They make you question yourself to make sure you never question them.

They will figuratively or literally beat this into you until your first instinct is no longer to listen to your gut and do what it says, but to dismiss it and do what it's telling you not to do. Existing becomes a chronic power struggle between your unconscious mind and your conscious mind. Unfortunately, the fact that you're struggling often then gets used against you as proof that you need to follow their teachings. Because if you're unhappy, then you must be doing something wrong. You just need to have a little more faith, dedicate a little more time to the religion/group, go a little harder into your duties... Only then will you feel better—feel more enlightened.

An integral part in making all this work is isolation. If you don't somehow isolate the members, they may figure out that they're being manipulated and abused.

Now, isolation doesn't always mean purely physical isolation (though Amane is being isolated physically to at least some capacity). Psychological isolation is almost just as powerful. An almost universal psychological isolation tactic used by extremist groups and cults is the "Us vs Them" mentality. We can see this being very prominent with Amane. A lot of things she talks about with regard to the cult involves an Us-vs-Them dynamic. There is "Us", the cult, and "Them", everyone else.

Personally, we were taught that those who weren't believers of our religion were out to get us or will, at the very least, get us hurt/killed somehow. We were told many people wanted us dead just for being believers. You had to be careful and watch out when interacting with non-believers; you couldn't trust them. God was constantly testing you via others, and you had to make sure you stayed faithful.

This in particular is why no matter if you vote guilty or innocent, that itself will not actually do anything to change her beliefs. Voting her guilty will not make her start to feel bad and then question her beliefs. Voting her innocent will not make her listen to us and then question her beliefs. If we make her have any doubt about the cult, that's just proof to her that what we're telling her is wrong and is just another "trial" from God for her to overcome. So, changing her beliefs should not be a factor considered when voting since it's completely irrelevant. Everything can be twisted to support the cult. That's just how it works.

I don't think any amount of punishment will make Amane "come to her senses". I mean... what could we possibly do to her that she hasn't already had to endure? Punishment will likely only escalate things even more. Not to mention that having a bit of a fascination with martyrdom isn't all that uncommon in those who have been religiously abused and indoctrinated. The threat of punishment may only serve to motivate her to double down on her beliefs and behavior. Not to say she wants and likes punishment. It's obvious she's both scared of punishment and wants it to stop. After all, that's most likely the motive behind the murder.

Even prior to Amane's age, I was already fantasizing about being a martyr. A part of me almost wanted to be killed for my religion and community. It was seen as something extremely admirable. The ultimate sacrifice, if you will. We were taught that if given the choice between saving yourself by denying your faith or letting yourself be hurt/killed by standing your ground, you should choose the latter. Of course, I also did not want that to happen at all. It scared me shitless. But we weren't allowed to be scared about that stuff. It was seen as questioning God and the religious authorities, which was completely taboo. So I had no choice but to "want" it.

Isolating Amane is the worst possible thing we could do to her. No one gets better from being isolated, and this goes double for people living in abusive environments. She's been isolated her whole life. The best thing for her would be spending time with the other prisoners without restrictions. The more time she spends around people who have no connection to the cult, the better. Trying to argue with those in cults about why they're wrong and why they are in a cult (because most don't even recognize they're in a cult due to the gaslighting, indoctrination, and stigma) will almost always backfire. The best thing to do is to just be there for them to have someone to interact with who is not a cult member.

The only reason I left the extremist religious community I grew up in was because I made a friend who was not affiliated with it. I don't think I would've been able to see that the conditions I was living in were Not Very Good without that friend. He didn't even really do anything to actively help me. Just learning more about the real world through him was enough to make me start looking closer at my life.

To vote her guilty would be to continue isolating her. Not just physically as the guilty prisoners get restrictions put on them, but it's also an inescapable psychological isolation. Innocent vs Guilty is just another Us vs Them dynamic.

I fear that, if she ends up guilty this trial, she will likely be voted guilty again in trial 3. Her aggression will probably only escalate as she feels herself becoming more and more cornered. And since I know many people are voting her guilty solely to make sure she doesn't hurt Shidou or other prisoners, I can only imagine what the voting will look like for her in trial 3 once she's forced to become even more aggressive to protect herself.

And tbh... I can't imagine that having a prisoner with 3 guilty verdicts will make for all that interesting of a story for them. Not that it would be boring, per se. But having variety would, in my opinion, be the most interesting and entertaining! So, if nothing else I've said has been able to sway those who vote her guilty, then think about the entertainment factor!

Please vote this severely traumatized 12 y/o girl innocent. We can give her so many secret cakes to eat.

[sonic-wildfire]

hey there! i saw your post about british vs american people and as a working-class british person who is now based in the us, i wanted to add my two cents. i think something a lot of americans don't realise about brits is that our class system is so deep-rooted in our society that seemingly trivial things such as accents are in fact an integral part of it. accents in britain are not indicators of where you live or where you come from, but whether you are "rich" or "not rich". people with, say, east london or liverpudlian accents find it much harder to gain social status or high-paying jobs regardless of their education or financial situation because the assumption is always that they are poor and stupid. people who come from working-class backgrounds are mercilessly mocked and at worst actively discriminated against for their accents in traditionally middle-to-upper-class areas such as universities, and end up changing their accents to blend in, so it's really a self fulfilling cycle. slang such as "innit" or pronunciations such as "chewsday" are inherently working-class, and as such, people mocking them will be perceived as classism by most working-class brits. what you're seeing is not a country full of snobs unable to take criticism, but people who have been ridiculed for their accents their whole lives, and have the ability to strike back without major consequence. the problem here isn't either of you, it's the lack of knowledge surrounding each other's cultures, as a seemingly innocuous comment from you can be seen as a direct attack to someone else regardless of intent. this was very long and rambly but i hope it clears some things up! top of the mornin' to ya, guv'na, and maybe next time we can come together and roast the shit out of the english upper class :)

as a final note, id like to say that obviously none of this justifies the disproportionate response you describe in your post, and i hope that both of our fucked up systems improve soon and no-one innocent gets hurt in the process (<- this was very poorly articulated but i hope you understood what i was trying to say!)

I will admit, you have given me a new perspective on the matter of accents. I had figured there might be some form of class differences at play here, but I hadn’t realized just how deep those differences are rooted over in the UK.

In all honesty, taking a jab at accents was certainly not the best example to use, to put it lightly, and I apologize for that.

Thank you for taking the time to write this out; a friend of the working class is a friend of mine :)

[madseance]

Okay, so... the study actually is also not "testing how well people in the 21st century can understand the specific nuances of 19th century London". It was, as the article states, "designed to test how college students create meaning while they read," specifically English majors reading Bleak House. And the authors explain why these participants and why this text. The students at these universities enter college with ACT Reading scores that indicate they cannot read and understand a text like Bleak House. The authors of the study state:

As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.

They know they are testing students who did not arrive at university ready to read this book. They also recognize that, as professors, they have been assuming they're teaching these students the skills they need to do so. After all, these are English majors, and 41% of them were specifically majoring in English Education, meaning they are likely planning to become English teachers. The authors state that "Bleak House is a standard in college literature classes and, so, is important for English Education students, who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in high schools."

Additionally, preliminary to the main test, they administered a questionnaire to ascertain the students' knowledge of 19th century American and British literature, history, and culture. This is important because:

According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged”. With Bleak House, this knowledge is crucial.

Based on the results of this questionnaire, they determined that the students "could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous or current English classes."

So not only did these students arrive at university unable to read at the level needed to understand a text as complex as Bleak House, they also currently lack the contextual knowledge that would make that particular book more accessible to them.

The authors fully acknowledge these things. The point of this study is not to see if random modern people can rawdog Bleak House. It's to see how the typical English major at these universities—who started college unprepared to tackle a book this difficult, and who has not been successfully familiarized with 19th century literary contexts by their English classes so far—tries to understand Bleak House.

The OP in this thread says:

The study structure was 20 minutes to read aloud seven paragraphs. So, while one was allowed a quick Google or a peek at the dictionary, there isn't really time to do any sort of deep dive - this is a test of whether you are already familiar with this sort of work.

This is not accurate. Each subject was given the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House, and each session was 20 minutes. This was not a timed test: "Subjects were encouraged to go at their own pace and were not required to finish the entire passage," according to the article. They were not allowed just "a quick Google or a peek at the dictionary"; they could take all the time they wished. And again, it's not "a test of whether you are already familiar with this sort of work"; that was what the preliminary questionnaire was for, and it established that the students did not have such familiarity.

OP also states that "every few sentences, the facilitator would poke the subject to explain the last few sentences," which is also inaccurate: the article states that "subjects were asked to read out loud and then translate each sentence". And to the second poster's concern about reading aloud: "Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently." The authors also cite previous research to justify their use of the "think-aloud" method and the choice to have participants interpret each individual sentence.

OP, again:

Not summarize, no: they wanted a full dissection. "Dickens is setting the atmosphere by describing the fog" was considered a failure of comprehension.

The participant whose response OP seems to be referencing was evaluated as belonging to the "problematic readers" group, who "had no successful reading tactics to help them understand Bleak House, so they became quickly lost and floundered throughout the reading test." This response was considered by the authors to be an example of the unsuccessful tactic of "oversimplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic statement." In the passage, Dickens is doing more than just "setting the atmosphere by describing the fog". He is specific about where the fog is, what the fog is doing, how it's affecting the people in it; he's using this description to draw us down into the London streets and finally into Lincoln's Inn, where the fog becomes "a symbol for the confusion, disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery." So, yes—if all a student gets from that passage is "he's describing the fog," they're failing to meaningfully comprehend what Dickens is saying and how he's saying it.

Poster #2 in this thread objects to the observation made by the author of a different thread (linked by the OP) that "struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense." That person was relating a hypothesis they'd formed in the course of teaching: that if struggling readers are not helped to become better at reading and comprehending, they become used to not understanding what they read, and to drawing inaccurate conclusions about the meaning based on disparate familiar words or images. Poster #2 feels that the students' responses in this study do not suggest they read this way. But I'd argue they very much do suggest that. The examples from the study that the other thread's author cites illustrate this. One student reads the sentence describing the Chancellor being "addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers", fixates on the word whiskers, and guesses that there's a cat in the room. Another example is a student's interpretation of this sentence:

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The student's interpretation that illustrates a misunderstanding of this imagery is that "everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill." Dickens is not saying anything about finding bones, or that anything is waddling up the hill; he's saying the streets are so muddy it's as though we're at the dawn of creation with land having just emerged from the seas, and joking that you wouldn't be surprised to see a prehistoric beast (he specifically imagines this guy, depicted inaccurately but as was typical in Dickens' time) roaming Holborn Hill. (Note that the student could have looked up both these references.)

Poster #2 also seems to think that the study is failing to appreciate that a reader gains a better grasp on the text as they go. But the article says: "It is understandable that problematic readers skipped over 'In Chancery' and 'Lincoln’s Inn Hall' in the first two sentences because they could assume they would understand this language later in the reading." What concerned the authors is that the problematic readers' understanding of the text did not improve as they read, and they still didn't look up the unfamiliar terms.

Poster #2 says that they, personally, would expect to learn such things as what a Chancery is by reading the rest of Bleak House. But Dickens wrote this book with the expectation that the readers of his time already knew what it was. You may learn more things about it in the course of the book, but you're going in without any of the basic knowledge Dickens assumes you have; it's going to be harder for you to understand, and some critical aspects may elude you entirely. That's exactly the kind of thing this study was getting at—that the students made comprehension harder on themselves because they didn't use effective reading tactics. They didn't look things up when they could've, even when they seemed to recognize that they weren't fully grasping what they were reading.

This was not some malicious and cruel test to mock modern people's lack of familiarity with 19th century life and literature. It was an exploration of how English students tried to make sense of a book they could expect to encounter in their degree program and might have to teach some day. It was an attempt to answer the question, "Are we successfully teaching these students the things they need to know in order to grapple with the texts we assign them?" and the answer was no.

So no, I don't agree with the previous posters in this thread in their evaluation of this study, or of the post that tipped them off about it. I didn't get as much into that post here, but IMO it's an interesting take on students' struggles with reading comprehension by someone with experience in the field—and, frankly, someone who better understood the study than the people in this thread did. I don't want to be mean about it, but it is a bit ironic that a study about reading comprehension elicited such outrage, based apparently on people's incorrect comprehension of said study.

So I decided to read the actual study (link) - it's totally free. TL;DR: the study is testing how well people in the 21st century can understand the specific nuances of 19th century London. This is not "reading comprehension", they are testing whether you know things like what a "Michaelmas Term" (Wikipedia) is. This is... to put it politely, not a normal part of reading comprehension in any sort of day to day task. This study is exclusively about your ability to read and be familiar with the nuances of 19th century English Literature as a specific body.

The study structure was 20 minutes to read aloud seven paragraphs. So, while one was allowed a quick Google or a peek at the dictionary, there isn't really time to do any sort of deep dive - this is a test of whether you are already familiar with this sort of work.

---

Oh, but it wasn't just 20 minutes to read it out loud: every few sentences, the facilitator would poke the subject to explain the last few sentences. Not summarize, no: they wanted a full dissection. "Dickens is setting the atmosphere by describing the fog" was considered a failure of comprehension. The only explanation they provide that counts as a "pass" is almost twice as long as the actual passage itself!

It's not even really clear if they made it clear to the subjects that they were looking for this sort of verbose summary - the facilitator just replies "O.K." regardless of how detailed their response is.

I cannot imagine I would do terribly better, given 20 minutes to read aloud 7 paragraphs, and being constantly prodded to regurgitate the material at random intervals!

---

I really do NOT consider it worth reading, but here's a link to the original post for posterity's sake: https://www.tumblr.com/prettyboysdontlookatexplosions/783379386552516608?source=share

[continuations]

The World After Capital in 64 Theses

Over the weekend I tweeted out a summary of my book The World After Capital in 64 theses. Here they are in one place:

The Industrial Age is 20+ years past its expiration date, following a long decline that started in the 1970s.

Mainstream politicians have propped up the Industrial Age through incremental reforms that are simply pushing out the inevitable collapse.

The lack of a positive vision for what comes after the Industrial Age has created a narrative vacuum exploited by nihilist forces such as Trump and ISIS.

The failure to enact radical changes is based on vastly underestimating the importance of digital technology, which is not simply another set of Industrial Age machines.

Digital technology has two unique characteristics not found in any prior human technology: zero marginal cost and universality of computation.

Our existing approaches to regulation of markets, dissemination of information, education and more are based on the no longer valid assumption of positive marginal cost.

Our beliefs about the role of labor in production and work as a source of purpose are incompatible with the ability of computers to carry out ever more sophisticated computations (and to do so ultimately at zero marginal cost).

Digital technology represents as profound a shift in human capabilities as the invention of agriculture and the discovery of science, each of which resulted in a new age for humanity.

The two prior transitions, from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age and from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age resulted in humanity changing almost everything about how individuals live and societies function, including changes in religion.

Inventing the next age, will require nothing short of changing everything yet again.

We can, if we make the right choices now, set ourselves on a path to the Knowledge Age which will allow humanity to overcome the climate crisis and to broadly enjoy the benefits of automation.

Choosing a path into the future requires understanding the nature of the transition we are facing and coming to terms with what it means to be human.

New technology enlarges the “space of the possible,” which then contains both good and bad outcomes. This has been true starting from the earliest human technology: fire can be used to cook and heat, but also to wage war.

Technological breakthroughs shift the binding constraint. For foraging tribes it was food. For agrarian societies it was arable land. Industrial countries were constrained by how much physical capital (machines, factories, railroads, etc.) they could produce.

Today humanity is no longer constrained by capital, but by attention.

We are facing a crisis of attention. We are not paying enough attention to profound challenges, such as “what is our purpose?” and “how do we overcome the climate crisis?”

Attention is to time as velocity is to speed: attention is what we direct our minds to during a time period. We cannot go back and change what we paid attention to. If we are poorly prepared for a crisis it is because of how we have allocated our attention in the past.

We have enough capital to meet our individual and collective needs, as long as we are clear about the difference between needs and wants.

Our needs can be met despite the population explosion because of the amazing technological progress we have made and because population growth is slowing down everywhere with peak population in sight.

Industrial Age society, however, has intentionally led us down a path of confusing our unlimited wants with our modest needs, as well as specific solutions (e.g. individually owned cars) with needs (e.g. transportation).

The confusion of wants with needs keeps much of our attention trapped in the “job loop”: we work so that we can buy goods and services, which are produced by other people also working.

The job loop was once beneficial, when combined with markets and entrepreneurship, it resulted in much of the innovation that we now take for granted.

Now, however, we can and should apply as much automation as we can muster to free human attention from the “job loop” so that it can participate in the “knowledge loop” instead: learn, create, and share.

Digital technology can be used to vastly accelerate the knowledge loop, as can be seen from early successes, such as Wikipedia and open access scientific publications.

Much of digital technology is being used to hog human attention into systems such as Facebook, Twitter and others that engage in the business of reselling attention,  commonly known as advertising. Most of what is advertised is  furthering wants and reinforces the job loop.

The success of market-based capitalism is that capital is no longer our binding constraint. But markets cannot be used for allocating attention due to missing prices.

Prices do not and cannot exist for what we most need to pay attention to. Price formation requires supply and demand, which don't exist for finding purpose in life, overcoming the climate crisis, conducting fundamental research, or engineering an asteroid defense.

We must use the capabilities of digital technology so that we can freely allocate human attention.

We can do so by enhancing economic, information, and psychological freedom.

Economic freedom means allowing people to opt out of the job loop by providing them with a universal basic income (UBI).

Informational freedom means empowering people to control computation and thus information access, creation and sharing.

Psychological freedom means developing mindfulness practices that allow people to direct their attention in the face of a myriad distractions.

UBI is affordable today exactly because we have digital technology that allows us to drive down the cost of producing goods and services through automation.

UBI is the cornerstone of a new social contract for the Knowledge Age, much as pensions and health insurance were for the Industrial Age.

Paid jobs are not a source of purpose for humans in and of themselves. Doing something meaningful is. We will never run out of meaningful things to do.

We need one global internet without artificial geographic boundaries or fast and slow lanes for different types of content.

Copyright and patent laws must be curtailed to facilitate easier creation and sharing of derivative works.

Large systems such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. must be mandated to be fully programmable to diminish their power and permit innovation to take place on top of the capabilities they have created.

In the longrun privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Providing strong privacy assurances can only be accomplished via controlled computation. Innovation will always grow our ability to destroy faster than our ability to build due to entropy.

We must put more effort into protecting individuals from what can happen to them if their data winds up leaked, rather than trying to protect the data at the expense of innovation and transparency.

Our brains evolved in an environment where seeing a cat meant there was a cat. Now the internet can show us an infinity of cats. We can thus be forever distracted.

It is easier for us to form snap judgments and have quick emotional reactions than to engage our critical thinking facilities.

Our attention is readily hijacked by systems designed to exploit these evolutionarily engrained features of our brains.

We can use mindfulness practices, such as conscious breathing or meditation to take back and maintain control of our attention.

As we increase economic, informational and psychological freedom, we also require values that guide our actions and the allocation of our attention.

We should embrace a renewed humanism as the source of our values.

There is an objective basis for humanism. Only humans have developed knowledge in the form of books and works of art that transcend both time and space.

Knowledge is the source of humanity’s great power. And with great power comes great responsibility.

Humans need to support each other in solidarity, irrespective of such differences as gender, race or nationality.

We are all unique, and we should celebrate these differences. They are beautiful and an integral part of our humanity.

Because only humans have the power of knowledge, we are responsible for other species. For example, we are responsible for whales, rather than the other way round.

When we see something that could be improved, we need to have the ability to express that. Individuals, companies and societies that do not allow criticism become stagnant and will ultimately fail.

Beyond criticism, the major mode for improvement is to create new ideas, products and art. Without ongoing innovation, systems become stagnant and start to decay.

We need to believe that problems can be solved, that progress can be achieved. Without optimism we will stop trying, and problems like the climate crisis will go unsolved threatening human extinction.

If we succeed with the transition to the Knowledge Age, we can tackle extraordinary opportunities ahead for humanity, such as restoring wildlife habitats here on earth and exploring space.

We can and should each contribute to leaving the Industrial Age behind and bringing about the Knowledge Age.

We start by developing our own mindfulness practice and helping others do so.

We tackle the climate crisis through activism demanding government regulation, through research into new solutions, and through entrepreneurship deploying working technologies.

We defend democracy from attempts to push towards authoritarian forms of government.

We foster decentralization through supporting localism, building up mutual aid, participating in decentralized systems (crypto and otherwise).

We promote humanism and live in accordance with humanist values.

We recognize that we are on the threshold of both transhumans (augmented humans) and neohumans (robots and artificial intelligences).

We continue on our epic human journey while marveling at (and worrying about) our aloneness in the universe.

We act boldly and with urgency, because humanity’s future depends on a successful transition to the Knowledge Age.

[mannlibrary]

Seed Saver

Wild Apples of Middle Asia, produced by J.S. Lawson from field drawings made by Nikolai Vavilov (1 of 6 plates donated to Cornell professor of horticulture  Richard Wellington by Nikolai Vavilov during the 6th International Genetics Conference held in Geneva, N.Y. in 1932; For an online look at the complete illustration set, please visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library at bit.ly/vavilov-apples). 

The rare and distinctive collections vault at Mann Library houses hand-colored  prints of wild apples and pears that tell an extraordinary story. The wild fruit specimens depicted were collected in Central Asia and the Caucasus by the Russian plant scientist Nikokai Vavilov (1887-1943) and his team of botanist colleagues over the course of extensive plant-finding expeditions during the early decades of the 1900s. These illustrations provide a full color glimpse of the intrepid work undertaken by a pioneering life scientist to advance food security in Russia and the world beyond. Sadly, Nikolai Vavilov’s was a brilliant career that was cut brutally short. January 26th marks the anniversary of Vavilov’s death at fifty-five in a Soviet prison in Saratov, Russia. We post this piece today in profound esteem for his inspiring legacy. 

During his all-too-brief life, Nikolai Vavilov advanced the knowledge of genetics and plant science in innumerable ways—in both lab and field.  His work on genetic homology led to the formulation of scientific law, while his expeditions to remote parts of the world both founded the largest seed bank of his time and traced the origins of numerous crop species.

Original Russian edition of N.I.Vavilov’s Studies on the Origin of Cultivated Plants, Leningrad, 1926, donated to Cornell University by the author. The work was widely acclaimed by the world’s plant scientists for establishing the geographical origins of major food crops. 

Born in 1887 just west of Moscow, Vavilov became an international star of Soviet science in the 1920s.  He traveled widely, not just to collect specimens but to collaborate and share ideas with fellow scientists around the world.  In 1932 Vavilov came to Ithaca to participate at the 6th International Congress on Genetics, hosted at Cornell University.  

The Sixth International Congress on Genetics, Cornell University, 1932; excerpt shows Nikolai Vavilov among his international colleagues.

He wasn't here simply to lecture, though; afterwards, writing for a Soviet audience, he made effort to bring what he learned in Ithaca to the USSR.  An excellent example is what Vavilov wrote about Dr. Barbara McClintock, who was researching maize genetics at Cornell:

"For our understanding of chromosomes, the star exhibit was the work of the young assistant to Cornell University, Miss McClintock. She displayed her remarkable preparations of corn chromosomes, allowing one to see the chromosomes' internal structure. This new technique made it possible to visually distinguish chromosomes, and to identify discrete chromosomal regions. Her astute understanding of the genetic background of corn could be seen by looking at the maps she created. These maps charted the distribution of genes over cytological scans, making it possible to connect the internal structure of the chromosome with the external phenomena of the genes. Miss McClintock was able to capture the conjugation of non-homologous chromosomes, and map the chromosomal sectioning of corn. This discovery is of huge significance, as all modern conceptions of genetics are based on the assumption that only homologous chromosomes conjugate."

(Written by N. I. Vavilov for the All-Soviet Academy of Agricultural and Rural Sciences in the name of Lenin: Institute of Applied Botany of USSR, available online in Russian at the All-Russian Research Institute of Plant Genetics. Translated to English by Anya Osatuke)

Unfortunately, the 1932 Genetics Congress in Geneva, N.Y. was the last the world outside of Russia would see of Nikolai Vavilov. By the 1930’s, Vavilov’s line of research in plant genetics had fallen deeply out of favor with the Stalin regime, which sought to purge Soviet institutes of science from any scholarship that argued with principles of Lysenkoism, a doctrine of the Soviet era—since de-bunked—that rejected Mendelian genetics and asserted an inexorable passing along of environmentally-influenced traits from all organisms to their offspring. Increasingly pressured by the Stalin government and hedged out by ideological pseudo-science, Vavilov was barred from travel until his arrest in 1940. Three years later, he perished imprisoned, likely from starvation. 

By the early 1950s, the political tides in the Soviet Union were turning. Soviet science under the regime of Nikita Kruschev slowly abandoned Lysenkoism. In 1987, a celebration marked the official rehabilitation of Vavilov and his scientific contributions in the eyes of the Soviet government. A postage stamp was issued in Vavilov’s honor and a collection of his papers on food crop origins was published, with an English translation produced five years later and reissued in 1997. Today, Russia’s premier institute for genetics research bears Vavilov’s name: the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow. And the institute that Vavilov founded over a century ago, the Institute for Plant Genetic Resources in St. Petersburg, which keeps a collection of seeds of thousands of food plant varieties and has an extraordinary story of its own to tell, continues to be a world renowned center for the preservation of agrobiodiversity. 

The important story of Nikolai Vavilov is discussed in more detail in the exhibit Cultivating Silence: Nikolai Vavilov and the Suppression of Science in the Modern Era, which opened in the Mann Library lobby in October 2021 and can now also be viewed at exhibits.library.cornell.edu/cultivating-silence.

[the-river-person]

Secrets of the Deltarune

Okay so I was taking a closer look at the Deltarune and I started to notice some really weird things. It’s a symbol for the Kingdom of Monsters, right? Wrong. Gerson tells us “That's the Delta Rune, the emblem of our kingdom.The Kingdom...Of Monsters.” Okay so its the same thing, right? Nope. I looked up emblem and its distinction from Symbol. A Symbol represents an idea, a process, or a physical entity. While an Emblem is often an abstract that represents a concept like a moral truth or an allegory. And when it is used for a person, it is usually a King, a saint, or even a deity. An emblem crystallizes in concrete, visual terms some abstraction: a deity, a tribe or nation, or a virtue or vice and can be worn as an identifier if worn as say a patch or on clothing or armor or carried on a flag or banner or shield. So what does it matter? Well Gerson even tells us why. “That emblem actually predates written history.The original meaning has been lost to time...“  Hold up. Predates written history? The beginning of written history is approximately 5500 years ago. Somewhere around 3400 B.C.E. Thats a long time. And the prophecy that goes with the symbol talks about the Underground going empty, so it can only really be as old as The War Between Humans and Monsters. But...when was that? The game doesn’t tell us the exact dates. Well we have a couple clues. At the beginning of the game we have a little cut-scene of the war and then a bit where we see a human going up the mountain only to fall down into the Underground. Most players assume that this is you, beginning your adventure. Except its not. Later in the game, when you SAVE Asriel in the True Pacifist Route, we’re shown another cutscene with the exact same human figure in EXACTLY the same position, being helped by a very  young Asriel and the silhouette of Toriel. It’s Chara, not Frisk. So our date of 201X (2010-2019) takes place long before Frisk even arrives. We don’t know how long before. That really doesn’t help with when they were first thrown down there though. So I took a look at the images before that, of the war. The first image shows a human who is very different from the later pictures. Both the make of the spear and the animal hide-like clothing suggest that it’s probably stone age. The text tells us a very general “Long Ago”when describing how both races ruled the earth together. In the next two images we’re shown the actual war. The crowd of humans have various things like torches and spears. Those diamond type spears are very similar to Roman Pilums. The Human figure with a sword was interesting though. He bore a mantle (cape or cloak) and is sporting a sword. Though there’s not much detail, we can still identify the general time period of the sword. The size isn’t big enough for a proper claymore or longsword, or even a hand and half sword. Since our figure appears to be moving forward, and we can guess that it’s not in a friendly manner given the context, yet still holding the sword in one hand instead of two, it’s probably a one handed broadsword. It also has a cruciform hilt (cross-shaped) that is slightly curved. The blade is quite wide with what appears to be straight edges (based on two images with limited detail). And it has a very narrow Ricasso, an unsharpened length of blade just above the guard or handle. Ricassos were used all throughout history, but they’re pretty notable for the Early Medieval Period in Europe. And the rest of the sword (blade type, length, crossguard, and method of use) is very reminiscent of a Medieval Knightly Arming Sword, the prominent type of sword in that period from the 10th to 13th centuries. So I had to take a closer look at my spears. Turns out, they actually more closely resemble a medieval cavalry lance or javelin. And many Javelins have their root in the style of the Roman Pilums, including the sometimes diamond shaped tips. The sword and mantle of the figure suggest heavily he’s a knight, and backed up by the spear carriers we can guess that its the Early Medieval Period, possibly the beginning of the Romanesque Period. So that would place us all roughly a thousand and at least ten years before Chara fell into the Underground in 201X. Asgore was certainly alive back then. In the Genocide Route Gerson says “Long ago, ASGORE and I agreed that escaping would be pointless...Since once we left, humans would just kill us.“ and in the Post-Pacifist when you go back to talk to everyone he’ll say this when talking about Undyne “I used to be a hero myself, back in the old days. Gerson, the Hammer of Justice.” He even talks about how Undyne would follow him around when he was beating up bad guys, and try to help, by enthusiastically attacking people at random such as the mailman. This tells us that Gerson and Asgore are as old as the original war and both had been part of the battle. And both lived long enough to survive till now. Gerson is quite old looking, while Asgore is not. He explains this by saying that Boss Monsters don’t age unless they have children and then they age as their children grow, otherwise they’ll be the same age forever. But Undyne doesn’t appear to be old. And I started to wonder how long normal monsters lived in comparison to Boss Monsters. A long time for sure. From the Undertale 5th Anniversary Alarm Clock Dialogue we can learn that Asgore once knew a character called Rudy (who also appears in the Deltarune Game), who he met at Hotland University and appeared to be generally the same age as Asgore. Since it takes place in Hotland we know that it was already when they were underground, Asgore was King and was already doing his Santa Clause thing, and that Asgore was trying to find ways to occupy his time aside from actually Ruling. In the dialogue he tells us that Rudy began to look older than him. “I was there for it all. His Youth, his Marriage, his Fatherhood. Then, suddenly, one day... he fell down. ... Rudy... I... was never able to show you the sun.” Monsters can live a long time. But Boss Monsters, as long as they don’t have a child, can live nearly forever as long as they aren’t killed. Based on that, Undyne is probably quite young and Gerson is incredibly old even for a Monster, and yet only recently he’s stopped charging around fighting bad guys. Since Undyne was with him, those bad guys were in the Underground, and his distinction of her attacking not so bad folk like the mailman, means that he was probably in an official capacity to fight crime, such as a guardsman, or maybe captain of the royal guard. So. Even though there’s plenty of time for a prophecy to spring up naturally. We have a number of Monsters who have actually lived that long that would be more than happy to correct mistakes and assumptions. Gerson is quite elderly and is a tad forgetful, but he still knows much. Characters such as Toriel and Asgore are still hale and hearty, and both had witnessed so much. Though we know very little about the character, Elder Puzzler is also implied to be quite aged and knows a great deal about the “Puzzling Roots” of Monster History. You’re probably wondering what all of this is leading to. Well with these characters in place to maintain knowledge of history in the populace, then we have an Underground which created a prophecy AFTER it was trapped there, which leads me to conclude that when the prophecy was created, it must have been referencing something older than the War of Monsters and Humans.

“The original meaning has been lost to time... All we know is that the triangles symbolize us monsters below, and the winged circle above symbolizes... Somethin' else. Most people say it's the 'angel,' from the prophecy...” ‘Angel’. This is when we hear about the angel. We see the Deltarune on Toriel’s clothing and on the Ruins door. As well as behind Gerson himself. The thing he mentions clearly has wings of some kind. Surrounding a ball (note to self: Look into possible connection between mythical ball artifact from the piano room and the Deltarune Emblem). It looks a little like the fairy from the Zelda series. Those “triangles” are the greek letter Delta. That letter has a lot of connections and meanings to it. A river delta is shaped like the letter which is how it got its name. There are a number of maths and science connections. But the two connections you’d be interested in are that a Delta chord is another name for a Major Seventh Chord in music. The soundtrack of Undertale uses these chords to do fantastic things with the tone and aesthetic of its leitmotifs, changing them from a happy or hopeful tune, to a dark and despairing one without actually changing the melody. And in a subfield of Set Theory, a branch of mathematics and philosophical logic, it is used to calculate and examines the conditions under which one or the other player of a game has a winning strategy, and the consequences of the existence of such strategies. The games studied in set theory are usually Gale–Stewart games—two-player games of perfect information (each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.g. the starting hands of each player in a card game)) in which the players make an infinite sequence of moves and there are no draws. But why is one of them turned upside down? I started looking things up again. Turns out there is such a symbol. The Nabla symbol is the Greek Letter Delta only inverted so that it appears upside down. Its name comes from the Phoenician harp shape, though its also called the “Del”. A musical connection is exactly what Toby would do. But its main use is in mathematics, where it is a mathematical notation to represent three different operators which make equations infinitely easier to write. These equations are all concerned with what is called Physical Mathematics. That is... Mathematics that calculate and have to do with measuring the physical world. Why is that relevant? Well the difference between humans and monsters is that humans have physical bodies while monsters are made primarily of magic. Well I also discovered that the Delta symbol for the ancient Greeks was sometimes used to as an abbreviation for the word  δύση , which meant the West in the compass points. West, westerly, sunset, twilight, nightfall, dusk, darkness, decline, end of a day. All this symbolism for a couple of triangles. There’s entire books devoted to them. And he calls the whole symbol, deltas and angel alike, the Delta RUNE. Whats a rune? Well a rune is a letter, but specifically a letter from the writing of one of the Germanic Languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet. Interestingly... the Greek Letter Delta does NOT qualify as a Rune. In any stretch of the word. I searched for hours. What I DID find was the etymological origins of the word Rune. It comes from a Proto-Germanic word “rūnō“ which means something along the lines of “whisper, mystery, secret,  secret conversation, letter”. Interesting. So since its paired up with the Delta... it could be taken to mean “The Secret of the Delta” or “The Delta’s Secret”. If we make a few assumptions we might even get something like “The Secret of the West” or “The Mystery of the Twilight” or numerous other variations that have different connotations. It’s conjecture, certainly, and possibly a few stretches. But it is certainly there to think about. My thoughts centered around the positioning of the letters. The idea that the one facing up represented Humanity, and the two ordinary Deltas were Monsters. With the Angel above them all. Or rather, SOMETHING above them all. We have no proof that the idea of an Angel existed before the Underground’s prophecy. I like to think it did because usually that sort of thing draws on previously existing beliefs and ideas. For all we know the symbol could represent an abstract idea that governed both monsters and humans. Like “Kill or be killed” or “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” or other basic idiomatic ideologies of that sort. Other than the realization that the Deltarune is older than the prophecy and the Underground, I didn’t have a concrete idea of what the Emblem actually means. Just a lot of theories and connective ideas. But there’s certainly a lot to be found. I don’t really know how much thought Toby actually put into this, but he’s quite well known for secrets within secrets. So its possible he knew all this going in. If he’s anything like me, and I am notorious for writing this sort of twisting references within references within references into my stories, then he’s probably at least aware of an existing connection. Its quite probably that the Deltarune is exactly what Gerson tells us. An emblematic set of symbols that is used to represent the continuing Kingdom of Monsters and has been since before written history. But as he says... its so old that it might have had a different meaning originally, whatever idea the Monsters wanted to remember, wanted to uphold enough to use it for their royal family and their kingdom, a reminder. Of something, or someone.

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

…

Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

…

What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

…

Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

…

The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.

[gregorsarnsa]

ok so well it started from a chem lecture in class 11th i think? yeah so there's this thing called Heisenberg's principle it basically states that if your observing an electron and if u know it's velocity in space, then u cannot know it's position in space. and if you know the position, the exact x, y and z coordinate of the electron at a time, then u can never know the exact velocity of the electron.

anyway so just the fact that. science. a subject based on calculations and precisions and maths is so fucking vague that THEOREMS have to state that "no you cannot know this for sure" just got me thinking. like i considered 2-3 examples and like arts is vague? but so is science? because your version of truth in science is defined by what you observe, hear, feel and whether it is alike or not according to a person and majority of humans in general. but then again and who said that what humans observe is in fact the absolute truth? like humans as always tend to be overly selfish and they consider themselves and their own observations to be the truth? but that's just stupid bc inherently there are no facts and there are only assumptions any sentence and all theorems are based on assumptions. like even 1+1 = 2 is based on the assumption that the world works on a mathematical scale governed by humans and that just coincides with almost all of human knowledge over the years. like everything is an assumption that is believed by a group of people and that just makes it? the truth? not convinced here but ok and well there are groups that believe that humans have to be in such a mindset to progress?? but then that's ignoring the fact that humanity is random. the universe, for all we know, is a fluke and it has just one law, and that's randomness the universe pushes itself to randomness, not chaos or discipline and it's just wild. that there is a tremendous amount of randomness that has lead to everything being the way it is this moment in time [m considering time to be linear rn and us as matter based individuals who wake up everyday with no guide as to how they want to spend their day/knowledge of how they're going to spend their day] and that's just wild? bc one moment after this, we might just get sucked into a black hole and we'd never even k n o w like the principle of randomness is what amazes me sometimes and it's all due to randomness, you going "oooooooooooh" over a cluster of nebulae, hormones finding it pretty etc etc etc and also. life. 

i remember this one paragraph in class 10th bio that defined what protoplasm is and how we exist and think and all it just said that we are the same carbon, oxygen and nitrogen as the soil but we are in flux? and im just imagining the amount of randomness that had to be in use for this special mix of protoplasmic cell to be created years ago and then, more so, the amount of randomness that had to take place EXACTLY as it was for us to be us today. and this. is when i do not consider us as masters of time. we're still considering time to be a governing factor and not a governable factor from the viewpoint of humans imagine if. time was n o t linear. imagine if time was random speeding up and slowing down and still and still and a millenia in the blink of an eye we would, theoretically, be able to control randomness if we surpass time or light velocity but again. sigh. we are matter based organisms that unfortunately cannnot work think or observe if our matter gets annihilated by einstein’s theory and that's kind of the basis for god in almost all religions? like people could never explain randomness and why it is how it is and they just started calling this randomness as what people call the Creator or God.

love my brain bc i have an exam in 5 days and brain's just like. "ok. time to Discover The Secrets Of The Universe"

[anguyen06]

WGST Blog Post #6 (due 09/30)

What are the ways the presence of sex (female and male) creates problems in the gaming world?

Most of the time, in games, there is an objective and winning satisfaction. Skill and knowledge of how the game operates are normally how players are able to find the objective or win the game. It did not matter whether you were female or male. However, in some games, whenever the presence of sex is introduced, it explains why a certain player is skilled or unskilled. For instance, when a player loses the round or plays out a bad strategy, it differs when the player is male or female. When the player is male, these types of plays are brushed off. When the player is female, the player receives backlash and harsh assessment for their action. It is similar to the situation of Pokemon Go, discussed in the Fickle reading. It started off as an adventure game that any person could participate in. As players went to more extreme lengths to catch pokemons, what race one was started to become a problem (Fickle, 2019). In both scenarios, females and people of color had more difficulties playing the game or to advance in the game without belittlement or verbal abuse. It goes to show the difference between when one group plays and how another group plays.

Why is it harmful to categorize people by physical appearance/traits?

A few ways people are able to distinguish individuals is through similar physical traits within the community. In some cases, it could be proven to be useful, such as when trying to apprehend a burglar. However, in some cases, categorizing people by physical appearance can be harmful when placing people in a narrow box of how people of different races or ethnicities should look. In the “Race in Cyberspace” reading, Kolko brought up the point that “...the systems of racial categorization that permeate our world are derived from culture, not nature” (Kolko, 2000). What makes up a person’s ethnicity is not just the physical appearance but the history and heritage. It is harmful to categorize people based on physical appearance because if one does not have some of the physical characteristics, does it mean that the individual is not that ethnicity? This could lead to the concerns of identity crisis, insecurities of oneself, etc. The opposite is the same: if someone meets all the criteria, should people automatically assume and distinguish that person as that ethnicity? With assumptions made, people may criticize someone else for cultural appropriation, unaware of the fact that that person is that ethnicity. For example, if an individual, who may not necessarily look Asian or have the physical features of Eastern appearances, posts a picture with chopsticks in their hair may receive hate online for cultural appropriation. That is why it is important to not categorize people into certain race/ethnicity groups based on appearances in order to avoid generalization and confusion.

What are the consequences of letting people get away with racist comments/(borderline) discriminatory actions?

In the gaming community, there are many ways that people use to express anger and frustration; one of the ways is by yelling or typing out racial slurs. Even if it was not directed towards one person or meant to harm another individual, it still has major effects. When it becomes intentional, the effect that it has is that the game loses its appeal to certain gamers. People may stop playing the game due to the major toll on their mental health. Some people may not appreciate the overuse of generalization and generic stereotyping, and may have to end their gaming time early. These are short term effects of allowing people to say these types of comments. The long term effects are from ignoring the severity of these actions. In the “The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg Terminator” reading, it mentions how the yellow-faced cyborg” was a mixture of Asian cultures. When criticized for being cultural appropriation, it was played off as a fun concept of mixing Asian cultures (Ow, 2003). Downplaying the problem is what allows racism to continue to exist. By not speaking out on this or by ignoring the issue, it allows people to believe that it is okay to say racial slurs, because there are no consequences.

Are there ways to combat online racism?

Other than speaking up against racism, whether it is through posts or commenting under the racist posts, there are common ways people are penalized for saying engaging in racist activity. One way is to report an individual's post or account. Reporting a social media account has the ability to ban and/or suspend the user from accessing that account. Reporting a gamer’s account, specifically on Valorant, puts an extended timer on their account that prevents them queuing in a game, or completely bans the user from accessing that account. One other way racism has been combated against was through community efforts. Skai Jackson, an American actress, took upon herself to take actions against racism by personally notifying the schools of the people who have said or engaged in racist activity. Her big following also took action and received responses from each of these schools. Combatting racism is difficult, especially when dealing with users that believe they can hide behind their aliases and screens. However, it is extremely important to take actions and to not be complicit with these actions.

Fickle, T. (2019). The race card : from gaming technologies to model minorities . New York University Press.

Kolko, B., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. (2000). Race in Cyberspace. Taylor & Francis Group.

Ow, J. A. (2003). The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg Terminator: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of Cyber-Coolies in 3D Realms’ Shadow Warrior. In Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (pp. 256–257). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203957349

[bashhowardproductions]

Is Din in a Cult? An Exploration

After Season 2 of the Mandalorian, there has been a lot of debate regarding whether or not Din’s sect of Mandalorianism(?) is a cult, especially after the comment in The Heiress, which Bo-Katan says “Children of The Watch are a cult of religious zealots that broke away from Mandalorian society.” 

Enough people on this site seem to be familiar with Bo-Katan, and her actions, and take this comment as baseless, even going far enough to claim it’s a parallel to religious intolerance. Luckily, that doesn’t matter!! We have enough information about his religious beliefs to make our own assessment, without taking the word of another character who has varying amounts of trustworthiness(again, I didn’t watch the animated series. but also again, that shouldn’t matter).

I’m going to be working off of cultresearch.org ‘s page, “ Characteristics Associated With Cults”. Mind you, not all of these will apply, since they are for real life, practical application, and not for a fictional universe. I will only reference things that have happened in The Mandalorian, and in The Original Trilogy.

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished?

-Yes, in “The Sin”, when the fight breaks out.

The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel.

-Yes. However, one could make the case that it’s for safety.

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members.

-Yes. Obviously religion plays a different role in the Star Wars universe than it does in real life, but the Tribe has a certain level of elitism, mostly against other factions of Mandalorians. 

The group has a polarized, us-versus-them mentality.

-This is a big one. They feel this way against everyone. Not just empire, but New Republic, and literally any other organization.

The leader is not accountable to any authorities.

-I’m throwing this one out, due to political turmoil

The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

-Yes, especially seen in “The Sin”. Paz Vizsla shames Din for accepting an Imperial job, and attempts to remove him from the covert for doing so. 

The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

-This one’s a little awkward. No, the Tribe isn’t handing out pamphlets on the road, but they certainly are very okay with adopting children and indoctrinating them.

Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

-This is another awkward one. Star Wars itself is a very goal oriented series, so we’re not incredibly familiar what down time looks like for anyone, besides Mr. Toche Station, but when he has down time in the series, when he still HAS the covert, he spends his time there. And of course, he’s only hunting in order to provide for the covert. 

Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

-Yes. It’s only until his covert is destroyed that Din begins to associate with non-Mandalorians. Even then, once he begins his task, his first priority is to find other Mandalorians to help him, rather than exhaust his current social circles.

The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave— or even consider leaving—the group.

-This is how Din feels for the majority of the series, until “The Rescue”. His identity is so tied to his Tribe that he can’t fathom what would happen if he left.

How are people who left the group treated? What is said about them? Will the group give you names of people who left? Both those who were satisfied and those who were not?

-This is the big one. Din is adopted and takes the Creed as a child, as he explains to Omera in “The Sanctuary”. The implication being, if he didn’t, he would have lost the people that took him in after his parents died. That’s manipulative as hell. Why not wait until they’re 18? A case could be made for the fact that they went into hiding, and needed to make sure they could trust the Foundlings wouldn’t leave and give away their positions etc, but it’s still heinous to adopt children and force them into a restrictive religion under the threat of abandonment. 

Are former members willing to speak about their experiences? How do they evaluate their time with the group or person?

-Throwing this one out

What is the process for filing complaints? Is there a feedback mechanism that is real and honored? Are complaints made public? Is there a money-back guarantee?

-Throwing this one out

Are your questions answered directly? Are you told time and again to listen to your heart and not your head? Are you told that you are too new, too uninformed, too nosy, and so on, and shouldn’t be asking such questions?

-Now this ones tricky. We don’t see anyone ask a question that isn’t answered, but an assumption could be made based on how clueless Din seems to be about certain things, like other Mandalorian factions, Jedi, etc. 

Is there a leader who appears to be the ultimate authority, spokesperson? Are his or her views challenged by others? Must the leader’s opinion be accepted without question?

-Using the Armorer as the spokesperson, no. Although, we never see someone challenge her besides Paz, and it seems like he was in the wrong. 

Is more than one point of view presented? Are other points of view recognized? Are other points of view seen as valid but different?

-Absolutely not, and that’s a big thing that people forget. It’s not like Din says “I keep my face covered because that is how I follow the Creed, but your form is acceptable too,” to Bo-Katan or Boba. He is fully under the assumption that they are Wrong and he is Right. He comes to terms with them, but he still doesn’t respect their beliefs. 

What kind of commitment is expected? In time, money, lifestyle changes?

-All three. Until the covert is destroyed, Din’s entire existence hinges on providing for the Covert. That’s why he’s a hunter, that’s where all of his extra money goes, and his lifestyle is entirely dictated by the Creed. 

Does it appear that there are secrets? Is information restricted in any way? Is there some information that you are told must not be shared with outsiders? Is there information that you’re told you can’t get until you’re a member of the group or reached a certain level?

-Yes, information is restricted. To be fair, Luke didn’t know at the beginning of ANH what the Jedi were or what the force is, but presumably in 9 ABY, at least SOMETHING is going around about the Jedi that destroyed the Death Star. Hell, the New Republic’s greeting is “May the Force be With You”, meaning some semblance of Force-knowledge is circulating. Additionally, based on his reaction to Bo-Katan and Co, we can guess the Armorer never tells him about other Mandalorian sects.

This is not a checklist by any means, and it’s not definitive, but based on these guidelines, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a cult. Of course, now that he’s broken the Creed, this might all be proven wrong if he finds another member of his covert, but from what we’ve seen in the Mandalorian, it’s not looking good. 

[serpentstole]

Luciferian Challenge: Day 12+13 (And 22)

A few of these prompts ended up being very similar in theme, so I’ve combined them into a bit of a long reply.

Dogma is something we throw about…that we reject it. Where do you think we may fall short as Luciferians/Satanists when it comes to dogma? Do you think dogma has a certain value?

I don’t think dogma has any value really, no, as I don’t like the idea of rules or ideas that cannot be questioned on principle. Even as a child, I took issue with blind obedience. My mother once called me downstairs, and I asked why, and my father got angry and said that I shouldn’t bother to ask why and just do it, and that even if one of them told me to jump out of a window they probably had a good reason for it.

That memory is seared into my brain and still irks me.

I do think rules themselves can be important, but when we speak of rejecting dogma it’s typically in the sense of it being some authoritative status quo that cannot be discussed or challenged. I think my example above is a good example of that, as petty as it may seem: that parents should be obeyed without question and with the assumption they have our best interests at heart.

I do not believe there’s room for that sort of attitude in an empathetic and respectful society, even towards children. Respecting their natural curiosity and teaching them about bodily autonomy is something I think can only be a net good. The only thing growing up in a strict household taught me, where there was little room for negotiation or challenging of the way things were, was how to be a decent liar.

It harmed me in far more ways than it helped instill any positive values, and while I would not want to belittle the experiences of anyone in a similar boat, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. There are some families where a dogmatic stance, whether based in politics or religion, can lead to the alienation or outright abandonment of LGBT youth, of young women who wish control over their own bodies, of those with views that differ from their parents’, or any other black sheep.

I feel like this question and my thoughts on it really go hand in hand with the next one, so I’m going to actually combine them into one post and make up the difference later.

Do you think it’s dogma or silly to say what Luciferianism/Satanism is not?

I do not think it’s dogmatic to say what Luciferianism or Satanism is or isn’t. The reason I’ve kept both labels in these two prompts, when I’ve removed them in every other post, is because I spent a lot of time in a mixed Luciferian and Satanist community during the beginning of my religious journey. Despite our differences, especially in the case of Atheist Satanism versus Theistic Luciferianism, I saw a great deal of overlap in a lot of the values/ideals, inspirations, and talking points. 

I think outlining those ideals and values is important to just… having a label. Words mean things. Religious affiliations and ideas mean things. Even saying you belong to or adhere to a school of thought typically has some manner of definition or parameters. While Luciferianism and Satanism can be incredibly diverse when it comes to the details of one’s ethics and morals, practices, views of the divinity or lack there of, and other suck points, there’s a good deal that does unite us that’s reflected in the archetypal figures our religions are named after. I also believe that certain aspects of what is seen as the Standard Luciferian should be weighed more or less heavily. For example, I don’t see my irritation with hostility towards Christianity as something that makes me less of a Luciferian.

However, I want to combine these two prompts with one more to round out my view of this topic. 

What do you disagree with Luciferians/Satanists most?

In the goddamn dogma they cling to and perpetuate while claiming to be adversarial to or enlightened above such ideas. It’s become almost a meaningless buzzword. It barely still looks like a real word to me anymore. This is honestly where my post goes completely off the rails into a mini essay, so it’s under the cut.

The idea that all “Abrahamic” religions should be treated as inherently harmful and oppressive is a bad take. 

That Christianity, Judaism, and Islam should even be lumped together when discussing such issues betrays a shallow understanding of these religions that’s been regurgitated from one person to another, typically through a culturally Christian lens.

The idea that “only LaVeyan Satanism should be called Satanism because nothing else that calls itself Satanism is actually Satanism” is exhausting, and I will fist fight Anton myself in hell.

The principles of Might Makes Right and Social Darwanism that some Satanists perpetuate is dumb and bad and wrong, sorry, that’s the only rebuttal I’m dignifying that school of thought with. Once again, I will be fist fighting Anton in hell.

And that’s to say nothing of the Satanists and Luciferians out there that regurgitate the same racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other assorted bigotries that they’ll condemn religions like Christanity for while perpetuating it with a coat of black paint. Because I have absolutely seen this first hand, both as an observer and as the target of it.

Like... I can’t speak on Islam at all, because I have very very limited experience with it from both a research and real life experience point of view, and thus I’m not comfortable making any claims. On the other hand, I do know that to list all the ways that Judaism is not a dogmatic religion would deserve its own post written by someone far more knowledgeable than me, and it somehow still gets lumped into the Problematic n’ Dogmatic category of AbRaHaMiC ReLiGiOnS. For that reason, in the case of Islam, I can’t help but wonder if the assumption that it’s also dogmatic comes from the harmful assumption that it’s a religion that’s strict to the point of harshness that a lot of people have.

Even in the case of Christianity, which I would argue (as someone who I’d say was raised within the church) is hands down the most seemingly dogmatic of the three (particularly in North America), this is just not universally true. If it was, there probably wouldn’t be so many branches and denominations, many of which cannot stand each other and think the rest are misguided at best and heretical at worst. This is something that’s even brought up in the Satanic Bible; I’ve read the miserable thing. Have you ever seen someone say “Christians and Catholics”? That’s a pretty loaded example of how much disagreement exists within the religion when an entire core branch of it is considered tangentially related.

Not to mention, I was raised Lutheran. That came about because a German Catholic got incredibly steamed at his own religion so he made a more boring different version of it. While the existence of dogma has led to these schisms, historically speaking, the end result has been a religion so varied that it’s hard to say what is and isn’t treated as inarguable law. If you don’t believe me, try talking to a Protestant pastor about the Seven Deadly Sins and see how far you get. I tried during confirmation class and got shut down immediately... but on the flip side, my church was pretty accepting of LGBT folks, which I think some people would claim Christianity is dogmatically against by default.

Is there dogmatic thinking within specific churches or branches or communities? Absolutely, I wouldn’t argue that. I think it can arise in any community, religious or not, but that some religious communities seem to be particularly vulnerable to it. But the harm those specific cases could do should be where our focus goes, not the condemnation of these religions or the concept of religion as a whole, which I touched on in a previous prompt. 

I’m not some glorious enlightened mind. I would not want to give the impression that I think I hold in my hands the One True Way to do Luciferianism, or that I think the majority of this religious community are uncritical edgelords. This is, after all, my answer to the thing I take issue with the most, not my thoughts on Luciferianism or Satanism as a whole. I just don’t think it should be a particularly hot take that Religious Discrimination Is Bad Actually, or that maybe you can be rebellious and adversarial and hedonistic and enlightened while still genuinely giving a shit about people. Because otherwise what’s the point?

If we are hostile and rebellious with no actual end goal, no greater cause or purpose, we are simply being contrarian for the sake of it. If we blame the idea of organized religion instead of those who manipulate and abuse faith and scripture for selfish and malicious ends, we’ve missed the point, as I said in the aforementioned previous post. Not all of us have the ability to become an activist, obviously, and I would not ask you to. But I think as those who would claim to reject dogmatic thinking and strive to embody either the ideals of enlightenment or the adversary would do well to be ever questioning their preconceptions of the world around them, of other religions, and of less obvious unjust structures of power.

I don’t know why a community that believes in illumination and free thinking sees the world in such black and white ways.

While I will always strive for a greater understanding of the world, and I hold the concept of enlightenment very dear to my heart, I think it’s something that one spends a lifetime working towards. Alongside my favourite quotes from Paradise Lost, I hold the Socratic Paradox of “I know that I know nothing” as a personal motto, and I wish more people who I share this label with would do the same.

[al-sabur]

THE ISLANDERS - A Sufi Legend told by Idries Shah

“The ordinary man repents his sins: the elect repent of their heedlessness.” -(Dhu’l-Nun Misri)

Once upon a time there lived an ideal community in a far-off land. Its members had no fears as we now know them. Instead of uncertainty and vacillation, they had purposefulness and a fuller means of expressing themselves. Although there were none of the stresses and tensions which mankind now considers essential to its progress, their lives were richer, because other, better elements replaced these things. Theirs, therefore, was a slightly different mode of existence. We could almost say that our present perceptions are a crude, makeshift version of the real ones which this community possessed.

They had real lives, not semi-lives.

We can call them the El Ar people.

They had a leader, who discovered that their country was to become uninhabitable for a period of, shall we say, twenty thousand years. He planned their escape, realising that their descendants would be able to return home successfully, only after many trials.

He found for them a place of refuge, an island whose features were only roughly similar to those of the original homeland. Because of the difference in climate and situation, the immigrants had to undergo a transformation. This made them more physically and mentally adapted to the new circumstances; coarse perceptions, for instance, were substituted for finer ones, as when the hand of the manual labourer becomes toughened in response to the needs of his calling.

In order to reduce the pain which a comparison between the old and new states would bring, they were made to forget the past almost entirely. Only the most shadowy recollection of it remained, yet it was sufficient to be awakened when the time came.

The system was very complicated, but well arranged. The organs by means of which the people survived on the island were also made the organs of enjoyment, physical and mental. The organs which were really constructive in the old homeland were placed in a special form of abeyance, and linked with the shadowy memory, in preparation for its eventual activation.

Slowly and painfully the immigrants settled down, adjusting themselves to the local conditions. The resources of the island were such that, coupled with effort and a certain form of guidance, people would be able to escape to a further island, on the way back to their original home. This was the first of a succession of islands upon which gradual acclimatisation took place.

The responsibility of this ‘evolution’ was vested in those individuals who could sustain it. These were necessarily only a few, because for the mass of the people the effort of keeping both sets of knowledge in their consciousness was virtually impossible. One of them seemed to conflict with the other one. Certain specialists guarded the ‘special science’.

This ‘secret’, the method of effecting the transition, was nothing more or less than the knowledge of maritime skills and their application. The escape needed an instructor, raw materials, people, effort and understanding. Given these, people could learn to swim, and also to build ships.

The people who were originally in charge of the escape operations made it clear to everyone that a certain preparation was necessary before anyone could learn to swim or even take part in building a ship. For a time the process continued satisfactorily.

Then a man who had been found, for the time being, lacking in the necessary qualities rebelled against this order and managed to develop a masterly idea. He had observed that the effort to escape placed a heavy and often seemingly unwelcome burden upon the people. At the same time they were disposed to believe things which they were told about the escape operation. He realised that he could acquire power, and also revenge himself upon those who had undervalued him, as he thought, by a simple exploitation of these two sets of facts.

He would merely offer to take away the burden, by affirming that there was no burden.

He made this announcement:

“There is no need for man to integrate his mind and train it in the way which has been described to you. The human mind is already a stable and continuous, consistent thing. You have been told that you have to become a craftsman in order to build a ship. I say, not only do you not need to be a craftsman — you do not need a ship at all! An islander needs only to observe a few simple rules to survive and remain integrated into society. By the exercise of common sense, born into everyone, he can attain anything upon this island, our home, the common property and heritage of all!”

The tonguester, having gained a great deal of interest among the people, now ‘proved’ his message by saying:

“If there is any reality in ships and swimming, show us ships which have made the journey, and swimmers who have come back!”

This was a challenge to the instructors which they could not meet. It was based upon an assumption of which the bemused herd could not now see the fallacy. You see, ships never returned from the other land. Swimmers, when they did come back, had undergone a fresh adaptation which made them invisible to the crowd.

The mob pressed for demonstrative proof.

“Shipbuilding,” said the escapers, in an attempt to reason with the revolt, “is an art and a craft. The learning and the exercise of this lore depends upon special techniques. These together make up a total activity, which cannot be examined piecemeal, as you demand. This activity has an impalpable element, called baraka, from which the word ‘barque’ — a ship — is derived. This word means ‘the Subtlety’, and it cannot be shown to you.”

“Art, craft, total, baraka, nonsense!” shouted the revolutionaries.

And so they hanged as many shipbuilding craftsmen as they could find.

The new gospel was welcomed on all sides as one of liberation. Man had discovered that he was already mature! He felt, for the time at least, as if he had been released from responsibility.

Most other ways of thinking were soon swamped by the simplicity and comfort of the revolutionary concept. Soon it was considered to be a basic fact which had never been challenged by any rational person. Rational, of course, meant anyone who harmonised with the general theory itself, upon which society was now based.

Ideas which opposed the new one were easily called irrational. Anything irrational was bad. Thereafter, even if he had doubts, the individual had to suppress them or divert them, because he must at all costs be thought rational.

It was not very difficult to be rational. One had only to adhere to the values of society. Further, evidence of the truth of rationality abounded — providing that one did not think beyond the life of the island.

Society had now temporarily equilibrated itself within the island, and seemed to provide a plausible completeness, if viewed by means of itself. It was based upon reason plus emotion, making both seem plausible. Cannibalism, for instance, was permitted on rational grounds. The human body was found to be edible. Edibility was a characteristic of food. Therefore the human body was food. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of this reasoning, a makeshift was arranged. Cannibalism was controlled, in the interests of society. Compromise was the trademark of temporary balance. Every now and again someone pointed out a new compromise, and the struggle between reason, ambition and community produced some fresh social norm.

Since the skills of boatbuilding had no obvious application within this society, the effort could easily be considered absurd. Boats were not needed — there was nowhere to go. The consequences of certain assumptions can be made to ‘prove’ those assumptions. This is what is called pseudocertainty, the substitute for real certainty. It is what we deal in every day, when we assume that we will live another day. But our islanders applied it to everything.

Two entries in the great Island Universal Encyclopaedia show us how the process worked. Distilling their wisdom from the only mental nutrition available to them, the island’s savants produced, in all honesty, this kind of truth:

“SHIP: Displeasing. An imaginary vehicle in which impostors and deceivers have claimed it possible to ‘cross the water’, now scientifically established as an absurdity. No materials impermeable to water are known on the Island, from which such a ‘ship’ might be constructed, quite apart from the question of there being a destination beyond the Island. Preaching ‘shipbuilding’ is a major crime under Law XVII of the Penal Code, subsection J, The Protection of the Credulous. SHIPBUILDING MANIA is an extreme form of mental escapism, a symptom of maladjustment. All citizens are under a constitutional obligation to notify the health authorities if they suspect the existence of this tragic condition in any individual. 

See: Swimming; Mental aberrations; Crime (Major). Readings: Smith, J., Why ‘Ships’ Cannot be Built, Island University Monograph No. 1151.”

“SWIMMING: Unpleasant. Supposedly a method of propelling the body through water without drowning, generally for the purpose of ‘reaching a place outside the Island’. The ‘student’ of this unpleasant art had to submit himself to a grotesque ritual. In the first lesson, he had to prostrate himself on the ground, and move his arms and legs in response to the commands of an ‘instructor’. The entire concept is based upon the desire of the self-styled ‘instructors’ to dominate the credulous in barbaric times. More recently the cult has taken the form of epidemic mania. See: Ship; Heresies; Pseudoarts. Readings: Brown, W., The Great ‘Swimming’ Madness, 7 vols, Institute of Social Lucidity.”

The words ‘displeasing’ and ‘unpleasant’ were used on the island to indicate anything which conflicted with the new gospel, which was itself known as ‘Please’. The idea behind this was that people would now please themselves, within the general need to please the State. The State was taken to mean all the people.

It is hardly surprising that from quite early times the very thought of leaving the island filled most people with terror. Similarly, very real fear is to be seen in long-term prisoners who are about to be released. ‘Outside’ the place of captivity is a vague, unknown, threatening world.

The island was not a prison. But it was a cage with invisible bars, more effective than obvious ones ever could be.

The insular society became more and more complex, and we can look at only a few of its outstanding features. Its literature was a rich one. In addition to cultural compositions there were numerous books which explained the values and achievements of the nation. There was also a system of allegorical fiction which portrayed how terrible life might have been, had society not arranged itself in the present reassuring pattern.

From time to time instructors tried to help the whole community to escape. Captains sacrificed themselves for the re-establishment of a climate in which the now concealed shipbuilders could continue their work. All these efforts were interpreted by historians and sociologists with reference to conditions on the island, without thought for any contact outside this closed society. Plausible explanations of almost anything were comparatively easy to produce. No principle of ethics was involved, because scholars continued to study with genuine dedication what seemed to be true. ‘What more can we do?’ they asked, implying by the word ‘more’ that the alternative might be an effort of quantity. Or they asked each other, ‘What else can we do?’ assuming that the answer might be in ‘else’ — something different. Their real problem was that they assumed themselves able to formulate the questions, and ignored the fact that the questions were every bit as important as the answers.

Of course the islanders had plenty of scope for thought and action within their own small domain. The variations of ideas and differences of opinion gave the impression of freedom of thought. Thought was encouraged, providing that it was not ‘absurd’.

Freedom of speech was allowed. It was of little use without the development of understanding, which was not pursued.

The work and the emphasis of the navigators had to take on different aspects in accordance with the changes in the community. This made their reality even more baffling to the students who tried to follow them from the island point of view.

Amid all the confusion, even the capacity to remember the possibility of escape could at times become an obstacle. The stirring consciousness of escape potential was not very discriminating. More often than not the eager would-be escapers settled for any kind of substitute. A vague concept of navigation cannot become useful without orientation. Even the most eager potential shipbuilders had been trained to believe that they already had that orientation. They were already mature. They hated anyone who pointed out that they might need a preparation.

Bizarre versions of swimming or shipbuilding often crowded out possibilities of real progress. Very much to blame were the advocates of pseudo-swimming or allegorical ships, mere hucksters, who offered lessons to those as yet too weak to swim, or passages on ships which they could not build.

The needs of the society had originally made necessary certain forms of efficiency and thinking which developed into what was known as science. This admirable approach, so essential in the fields where it had an application, finally outran its real meaning. The approach called ‘scientific’, soon after the ‘Please’ revolution, became stretched until it covered all manner of ideas. Eventually things which could not be brought within its bounds became known as ‘unscientific’, another convenient synonym for ‘bad’. Words were unknowingly taken prisoner and then automatically enslaved.

In the absence of a suitable attitude, like people who, thrown upon their own resources in a waiting room, feverishly read magazines, the islanders absorbed themselves in finding substitutes for the fulfilment which was the original (and indeed the final) purpose of this community’s exile.

Some were able to divert their attention more or less successfully into mainly emotional commitments. There were different ranges of emotion, but no adequate scale for measuring them. All emotion was considered to be ‘deep’ or ‘profound’ — at any rate more profound than non-emotion. Emotion, which was seen to move people to the most extreme physical and mental acts known, was automatically termed ‘deep’.

The majority of people set themselves targets, or allowed others to set them for them. They might pursue one cult after another, or money, or social prominence. Some worshipped some things and felt themselves superior to all the rest. Some, by repudiating what they thought worship was, thought that they had no idols, and could therefore safely sneer at all the rest.

As the centuries passed, the island was littered with the debris of these cults. Worse than ordinary debris, it was self-perpetuating. Well-meaning and other people combined the cults and recombined them, and they spread anew. For the amateur and intellectual, this constituted a mine of academic or ‘initiatory’ material, giving a comforting sense of variety.

Magnificent facilities for the indulging of limited ‘satisfactions’ proliferated. Palaces and monuments, museums and universities, institutes of learning, theatres and sports stadiums almost filled the island. The people naturally prided themselves on these endowments, many of which they considered to be linked in a general way with ultimate truth, though exactly how this was so escaped almost all of them.

Shipbuilding was connected with some dimensions of this activity, but in a way unknown to almost everyone.

Clandestinely the ships raised their sails, the swimmers continued to teach swimming…

The conditions on the island did not entirely fill these dedicated people with dismay. After all, they too had originated in the very same community, and had indissoluble bonds with it, and with its destiny.

But they very often had to preserve themselves from the attentions of their fellow citizens. Some ‘normal’ islanders tried to save them from themselves. Others tried to kill them, for an equally sublime reason. Some even sought their help eagerly, but could not find them.

All these reactions to the existence of the swimmers were the result of the same cause, filtered through different kinds of minds. This cause was that hardly anyone now knew what a swimmer really was, what he was doing, or where he could be found.

As the life of the island became more and more civilised, a strange but logical industry grew up. It was devoted to ascribing doubts to the validity of the system under which society lived. It succeeded in absorbing doubts about social values by laughing at them or satirising them. The activity could wear a sad or happy face, but it really became a repetitious ritual. A potentially valuable industry, it was often prevented from exercising its really creative function.

People felt that, having allowed their doubts to have temporary expression, they would in some way assuage them, exorcise them, almost propitiate them. Satire passed for meaningful allegory; allegory was accepted but not digested. Plays, books, films, poems, lampoons were the usual media for this development, though there was a strong section of it in more academic fields. For many islanders it seemed more emancipated, more modern or progressive, to follow this cult rather than older ones.

Here and there a candidate still presented himself to a swimming instructor, to make his bargain. Usually what amounted to a stereotyped conversation took place.

“I want to learn to swim.” “Do you want to make a bargain about it?” “No. I only have to take my ton of cabbage.” “What cabbage?” “The food which I will need on the other island.” “There is better food there.” “I don’t know what you mean. I cannot be sure. I must take my cabbage.” “You cannot swim, for one thing, with a ton of cabbage.” “Then I cannot go. You call it a load. I call it my essential nutrition.” “Suppose, as an allegory, we say not ‘cabbage,’ but ‘assumptions’, or ‘destructive ideas’?” “I am going to take my cabbage to some instructor who understands my needs.”

[rebelincdk]

Oh, my God...

I'm having a rather interesting debate in the comments section, on a slightly "blasphemous" cartoon drawing, on Facebook. These christian people – I will not name – reveals not to have a strong ability for rational thinking, and have a hard time distinguishing between facts and jokes, i.e. claimed that I was some kind of believer in witchcraft, because I have stated that I was educated at Hogwarts. Take a few seconds to let that sink in. Now you get the level.

Usually I try to avoid these kind of fruitless debates with people living in their own awkward fantasy universe, but in this case it has been aiding me in a direction, that might make me more capable of understanding why the world is in the state it is in.

That kind of people generally makes a few weird assumptions, primarily trying to monopolise love, compassion and moral standards, and putting them into a box with some "family values", blasphemy-phobia, homophobia, and condemnation, without any rational explanation. Welcome down the rabbit hole!

One: They often claim that there's a relation between morals, love and their superstition. You know, like saying that only people with a specific conviction are fitted with emotions and a moral compass.

I'll leave it to the history geeks, and people with some life experience, to have a field day with this argument.

In this particular thread I have been accused of condoling child pornography, because I find it funny that a priest has a hard time nailing Jesus to a cross (IKEA-style).

So some of them actually believe that their own superstition is the only defence against the evils of the world. And they believe that blasphemy is linked to harmfull behaviour, in some way. I should find it hilarious, but it actually makes me sad. It means that they are trapped in this cirkle of misguided bullshit.

Two: Referring to the number of people believing, as a proof of being right. That makes God present and true in the US, and not true in the Scandinavian countries. So God has a limited territory, and is subject to democratic realities. I don't even know how to respond to that.

Three: As a wise man said "Believing in the Bible will make you a believer, actually reading the Bible will make you an atheist". Many of these christians squeezes their faith into the moral values of their surroundings and present life. Jesus was – according to the gospels found in the Bible – a rebel, who would forgive the traitors and sinners, hang out with prostitutes, vandalise the temple, living a very humble life, and claiming to be the son of God. He never condemned anyone to hell (the concept of hell is actually not mentioned in the gospels), and he did not conform to the predominant family values of the time and place. But it is common among religious fanatics to use their faith as an argument for traditional family values, and against prostitution, premarital sex, and a number of other things, that reveals that they have read the gospels with a preconceived opinion.

Every time I read the gospels I think "Wow – this could make a GREAT religion, if the world needed one!" But sadly, even the gospels could have made a religion focused on the open mind, tolerance and forgiveness of the Jesus myth, it has been turned upside down, ever since the Romans took over the religion: Crusades, inquisition, witch hunts, conquistadors, and so on.

I'll make a short detour here, on the subject of prostitutes, as it is quite interesting. If we follow the mindset of this Jesus character, he would (according to the chosen gospels) hang out with prostitutes, even pointing out one as no more sinful than her persecutors, and thereby saving her life. I can not think that Jesus would condole prostitution. That would just be odd. But embracing the people living a misguided life was right up his alley. That is actually characteristically for the legend about Jesus: Embracing instead of condemning. Setting an example instead of blaming. I actually fail to find a single line in the gospels that claims he tried to make them turn away from prostitution.

So if we take this line of thinking into a different context: How to deal with an alcoholic. Sit down and have a drink with him. Befriend him, and show – by example – how life can be improved by drinking in moderation, as blaming and condemning will only have an alienating effect. And behold: Most people working with addicts actually confirms that this is the only way that works. No shit, Sherlock?

Four: Many of them claim that God makes them do good things for the world. Well... Atheist – for example making up the vast majority of the people involved with Doctors Without Borders – do good as well, without the "divine inspiration". As the world shows good people do good things, with or without God. Even good religious people, loosing their faith, continue to do good things (but with a slightly more open mind).

Faith in God has no more claim to charitable behaviour than it has to love.

Five: Many of them claim that rituals are bound to religion. Rituals are – often – a healthy psychological act, but all they see is idolatry, hidden faith or witchcraft.

Six: In their twisted minds many of them compare religion with science, or see a conflict between them. That's like comparing colour with size; it doesn't make any sense. Religion is a faith in a phantom, often referring to books that are very seldom updated and edited to reflect the progress of knowledge and society. Science is simply the collection of our rational observations, and are updated every time we find flaws, at a rate of more than 10.000 a day (if we count all scientific fields). It happens ever so often that science will prove the religious books wrong, simply because the religious books are venturing into areas where they have no function, like human history or natural history. It's like a professor of psychology doing heart surgery.

If the religious books – and priests – would just keep to moral guidance all would be fine and dandy, and this argument, or weird comparison, would never be an issue.

Unfortunately they do overlap in one context: The mind. Science dictates an open mind, and religion dictates a closed mind, when it comes to examination. A scientist will accept criticism, or ridicule, with joy and curiosity, while a religious fanatic will often be offended and defensive.

Seven: When the romans took over christianity they mixed it up with the ancient greek concepts of hell and condemnation. If he could, Jesus would rotate in his grave with frustration, I'm sure. Suppressing people with alternating values or natures, such as homosexuals, rock'n'roll fans, premarital sex, and people with different faiths is not suited for people claiming to believe in an all loving, caring, forgiving God. But so it went, in so many cases.

And this makes these seven points the "seven mortal sins" of a large group of christians: They have turned christianity into a tool of evil. Sending their homosexual sons off to "rehabilitation", condemning certain kinds of cultural expression, keeping their children from medical treatment, blowing up abortion clinics, etc. – added to the long bloody history of genocide and persecutions.

But worst of all, there is even a point eight:

Eight: The world is a miraculous place, full of amazing wonders. Every grain of sand, every wave, every breath of fresh air, every tone, every colour, every life, and every BigMac is a wonder. A true miracle! The probability of you being alive, as a result of many millions of generations living long enough to breed with success, on this inhabitable planet, is mind-blowing. You, and everything that surrounds you, are such a miracle that it is impossible to wrap your head around it.

Many of these people claim that it is not a miracle at all, but was simply planed and executed by a higher being. On top of that they try to monopolise the concept of "miracles".

Simple people need simple explanations...

So should we detain them, and maybe eradicate them? Oh, no, that's THEIR way, and we are better than that! We have to treat them with a concept they talk about, but rarely put into practise: Compassion.

Loving my cat doesn't make me love everything it leaves on my doorstep. Compassion for a person doesn't mean that you should condole – or accept – their faith, especially not when it is used for suppression. Keep them in the friend zone, show them, by example, the benefits of a life based on rational thinking, keep an eye on their children, so you can pull them away in case the parents commits some form of abuse.

Thankfully, even some change religion, and some religious people see that as a marker of their succes, truth is that fewer and fewer people in this world are religious, and in some distant future our descendants will live in a world where it is a thing of the past, to be puzzled about.

Like with ancient greek and mayan religions, people will scratch their heads, asking "how could they believe THAT???"

Please note that I have only discussed the gospels that made their way into the Bible. There are many other gospels ("apocryphal") with deviating stories of Jesus of Nazareth, claiming, for example, that he was a prophet (not the son of God), that Mary Magdalene was his "companion" (spouse), and not a prostitute, that he was not resurrected, and so on.

Neither have I dived into the wide array of other texts that make up the Bible, as they are so messy and contradictory, that they don't actually make any sense to discuss. In them you can find arguments both for and against almost anything, from animal sacrifices to pedophilia and slavery. The God portrayed in the old testament is racist, vicious, vengeful and petty, in stark contrast to the conception of God presented in the gospels. You simply can not claim to believe in – or follow – the Bible in its entirety, as you would then be suffering from severe split personality disorder.

[flutteringphalanges]

Summary: It is public knowledge that Zoe Van Helsing is the last of her blood line. Not to mention that, in a sense, Count Dracula is too. However, after an unexpected night of passion, both their lives dramatically change when Zoe becomes pregnant. Two unconventional parents, one extraordinary pregnancy. What could go wrong?

Rating: M

Pairings: Zoe Van Helsing/Dracula implied Agatha/Dracula

Read on FFN and AO3

A/N: Decided to update this really early in the morning. Like, REALLY early in the morning. I’m still half asleep so if this author’s note is wonky, I apologize. Thanks for the support as usual! Feedback is greatly loved and appreciated! -Jen

                                          Chapter Six

Pregnancy, hormones, and dreams-perhaps nightmares if one is so unlucky. Stress plays a major factor. Anxiety weaving itself into the intense sleep waves of one's mind. Such happened to be the case for Zoe Van Helsing as she stood over two empty cribs, the sound of infants wailing all around her and yet, no babies to be found. Panic over-swept her as she desperately searched every corner of the room, the crying only intensifying the longer she looked. And just as she began to feel the very walls start to crumble around her, the scientist's eyes flashed open.

As Zoe slowly sat up, ignoring the pain in her lower back, she wondered if she was still asleep. The wallpaper. The carpet. The furniture. None of it belonged to her. It wasn't until the bedroom door creaked open and a familiar set of dark, brown eyes met hers that the true reality came crashing down like a tsunami. Count Dracula smiled at her, but the expression leaned more towards amusement than to friendliness.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up." He commented as Zoe scrambled backwards, bumping against the headboard. "I just finished making breakfast-"

"Why am I here?!" The woman snapped, cutting him off. "What...Did we…"

"I assure you there was no sex if that's what you are getting at...which was, in my opinion, much unfortunate." The vampire smirked as he moved over to where she sat. "You wore yourself out last night crying-I suppose human hormones are complicated like that." He sighed, taking a seat on the edge of the mattress. Zoe only slid away further. "Anyway, I thought it best to let you sleep here rather than risk you driving back home all tuckered out."

"If you're expecting a thank you out of me, I'm certainly not going to give you one," she frowned. "That act was nothing more than a scheme on your part."

"Must you always assume the worst intentions, Dr. Van Helsing?" Dracula scoffed, rolling his eyes. "And I wasn't anticipating on one. Now, how about you straighten up and have something to eat? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you don't plan on staying around?"

That was a correct assumption on his part. Ignoring his question, the researcher climbed off of the bed. As exhausted as she still felt, the motivation derived from not being here pushed her forward. Zoe felt Dracula's eyes watch her as she strode out of the room. She tried not to look at the hot breakfast he had set out on the table. Eggs. Toast. Bacon. Christ, did it smell good. Maybe if she swiped one strip…

Swallowing hard and shaking her head at the thought, she grabbed her purse and went straight for the exit. The vampire didn't stop her as she left-much to her surprise, and Zoe couldn't help but wonder if the entire neighborhood heard the echoing bang as she slammed the door behind her.

                                                        XXX

"I'm not sure how you want to proceed with this further, Dr. Van Helsing, but based on what the Jonathan Harker Foundation was built upon and the current situation, I'm not sure where we stand at this point."

Zoe stared idly at the basket of fruit and muffins that sat in the center of the conference room table. Though they would look positively appetizing in any other situation, right now she wasn't hungry. Far, far from it. Her stomach twisted into knots as Bloxham watched her with keen interest. Part of her had known this moment would be coming from the very beginning and yet, she still didn't feel prepared for it.

"Dracula has yet to cause any sort of known threat," Bloxham continued. "And without any means of interacting with him-studying him, the purpose of this facility has been deemed…"

"No longer necessary," Zoe finished quietly. "So, in other words, you are saying that it's in our best interest to shut down the Harker Foundation." She paused, trying to remain level headed. "And fire everyone involved."

"That's not what I was getting at." Bloxham sighed, folding her hands onto the table. "Look, Zoe, we've been weighing some options and maybe there's a chance to save the place. To keep some of our employees employed." The scientist tried to force a smile onto her face. It wasn't working. "We've been talking to other companies who might be willing to buy the institution. Use it for their own research purposes. They have no idea what we've been doing, but this place...it can be used for good. State of the art practices even."

Mina Murray. The money her family had invested into the Foundation. Created. Everything in the name and memory of her beloved Jonathan Harker. Now no one was left to put up a fight to save it. No family left. No heirs. What remained left to those dedicated to discovering who and what Count Dracula was and is. With him out of the picture, there truly was no Foundation. And it was becoming clear things were beginning to fall apart.

"Dr. Bloxham, we're talking about letting go several dozen people!" The scientist exclaimed, looking around the room at the others who sat silently. "There has to be another way. Think of the Murrays…"

"We've exhausted all options, Zoe," the other woman said solemnly. "I don't like it anymore than you do, but what choice do we have? And the money supporting this place. The Murrays were quite wealthy, yes, but we are looking at eventual bankruptcy. The only reason we've kept going is on the whim that Dracula was still out there. Which he was. But due to legal issues and without him...we have nothing." Bloxham frowned, her lips pursing slightly. "We need to consider selling the lab and the potential that comes from that. This could be what we needed all along."

"But you don't know that!" Zoe countered angrily. "Please, there has to be something we can do." She didn't like to beg. To seem visibly weak. But she thought of Meg. Of Jack. Of all of her other colleagues who might be out of a job. "There has to be some other option."

Options. Suggestions. The scientist's mind was racing. Anxiety building from the pit of her stomach and flowing up, up, up to the inside of her skull. So tight. So much pressure. Zoe massaged her temples trying to ignore the many eyes that were fixated on her. It was always one thing after another. Always. And finally, when a dreaded thought came to mind, she bit the inside of her cheek.

"What if I could…" She began, not even sure if it was in her best interest to continue. "...What if I could convince Count Dracula to come back on his own free will. To allow us to learn more about him without defying his rights by locking him up?" Absentmindedly, a hand rested on her stomach. "Would the Harker Foundation be able to continue as it was?"

The other people in the room exchanged glances, their eyes flickering between each other and Zoe. Surely questions would be aimed in her direction like arrows from a bow. She remained still, poised. If she had to think of a reason, she could do so on her feet. The scientist was creative like that. Even if the situation was a lot more severe than others she'd faced before. If they knew her secret...she didn't want to think about that. Need to think about that.

"You truly believe you can convince the vampire to return?" Bloxham ventured, the tone low. Calculated. "And how, pray tell, do you think you can manage a feat like that?"

"If I can do it," Zoe responded. "Will the Harker Foundation remain in our hands?"

The other woman was silent for a moment. "Maybe arrangements can be made." She looked to the others who all nodded in agreement. "Alright," Bloxham sighed. "Dr. Van Helsing, if you can somehow manage Dracula to return on his own accord, perhaps there is hope for this place."

A small flicker of a smile twitched briefly on Zoe's face. "I can promise you my very best," she stated. "Count Dracula will return." Or so she very much hoped.

                                                           XXX

The Count's dark eyebrows narrowed as he studied the pamphlet in his hands. Every so often he'd glance up, meeting Zoe's gaze as she stood in front of him, arms folded. Finally, he delicately folded the flyer closed and held it out towards her.

"Yuma, Arizona…" He said slowly, a small smirk crossing his features. "Planning a vacation are we?"

A second unexpected surprise. When the researcher had randomly showed up at his doorstep without so much as a text, he had been somewhat caught off guard. But now she'd presented him with information about a state. A place not even located on their continent.

"Actually, more so of a move." Zoe replied simply, noticing the amusement on the man's face fade to confusion. "I was doing some research and learned that Yuma is, in fact, the sunniest place on Earth. Sounds quite lovely actually. Not that you'd understand."

"So, you have a sudden desire to move across the world?" Dracula inquired, an eyebrow cocked. "Might I ask why?"

"Well…" She pretended to muse. "There's the weather...an added bonus. But more importantly, and I'm sure your lawyer Mr. Renfield has you all caught up on this, but the Harker Foundation's doors are threatening to close."

"Oh my," Dracula's voice dripped with sarcasm. "What tragic news! I must say it's such a shame really. You all appeared to be working so hard. These things happen I suppose." He interlaced his fingers and gave them a loud, sickening crack. "So you now want to go to Yuma?"

"I'm going to need a job," she shrugged. "And The University of Arizona is currently looking for a medical research professor. I'm sure Dr. Bloxham will write me quite the recommendation letter." Zoe smiled as the corners of Dracula's lips turned just the slightest bit downward. "A change in scenery might do me some good."

"And what's to stop me from following you?" He countered, tone much more serious now. "I'm not afraid to go after you, Zoe. I told you, I will be in my children's lives."

"Oh I know." She answered calmly. "But it'll be just a little more difficult with it always being so sunny." The scientist patted her stomach lovingly. "Did you know sunlight actually has positive effects on pregnancy? Physical and mood wise? You know, the more I think of it, the more Arizona really calls out to me."

"What do you want, Zoe?" Dracula's voice was flat. Irritable. "What are you getting at?"

"The Harker Foundation can't continue without you." Zoe said, momentarily dropping her act. "Without you, we'll be forced to close our doors and open to someone else. A lot of people will lose jobs. People…" she paused. "People I care about. So I'm asking you to come back on your own terms."

"Why would I want to do that?" He scoffed. "So I can be your lab rat?"

"It won't be like that," she promised. "I…" Zoe averted her eyes, not wanting to meet his. "I won't let that happen. And I think you very well know I won't." The researcher inhaled, closing her eyes. "You want to be in their lives. You've shown that. But if that's the case then you…You're going to have to be in mine too." God how she hated the sound of that. "And if even the smallest molecule in you has some care for me, you'd do this. For them. For me."

There was a long pause. Silence heavy between them.

"If I agree to attend whatever it is your beloved Foundation wants, you won't move to Yuma?" Dracula watched her as he spoke, trying to read her face for a reaction. "Your idea of family commitment is quite strange, Dr. Van Helsing."

"We're not a family," she frowned. "We're not...look, think of this as quid pro quo. Just over and over again. Nothing more." Zoe let out a long sigh, running a hand through her hair. "Do we have a deal?"

Dracula pondered her words before nodding. "I think that's reasonable."

For the first time since she arrived, Zoe gave a genuine smile. "So we have a deal."

And a very odd one at that.