#what is the point of democracy if they make decisions that effect everyone that the public does not agree with

[mllemaenad]

Not that you are by any means the worst offender in this regard, but it rubs me ghe wrong way how much leniency the NCR gets when it comes to considering the effects of their actions, and perhaps more importantly, their intentions.

Groups like Caesar's Legion, The Brotherhood of Steel, House's factions, The Unity, The Enclave, and The Institute are treated as villains if anyone is even indireehurt because of them.

If two human surface-dwellers kill each other in Diamond City, people blame the Institute.

If the White Legs emulate Twisted Hair cultural traditions without fully understanding them, Ulysses blames the Legion.

And yet... the NCR is treated by fans as well-intentioned and good-natured despite the harm they cause. The situation in Nipton was the fault of the NCR. Its corrupt Mayor was from the NCR. The Powder Gangers were only in the Mojave because the NCR moved them there.

Vulpes set up his lottery (not that I'm saying it was a perfect solution) to address a problem that had gotten out of hand, a problem downstream of the NCR... and yet most fan discussions blame the Legion for what happened in Nipton.

ThevNCR seems to get a pass because people see their goals as noble... but their goals are to recreate the exact conditions that caused the Great War!

We see the exact same phenomena in pre-war terminals as we do in contemporary NCR. A government more obsessed with maintaining its own power than solving problems, a corrupt justice system that favours the wealthy, an obsession with democracy that makes decisions slow and bureaucratic, and a rapacious desire for resources that leads to expansion and conflict eith other factions.

Why is Caesar condemned for his ego, and his shortsigtedness, but Kimball is not?

Why is Roger Maxon blamed for creating an organisation that has hurt people, but not Aradesh?

Why is Justin Ayo blamed for his secrecy and lack of trust, but not Colonel Moore?

It's a double-standard. Others are blamed for trying something new, the NCR gets carte blanch to repeat old mistakes!

Hi, anonymous person.

So ... I've read this, and I've read it again, and again after that and ... I'm a little puzzled about what's bothering you. The NCR is broadly attempting to feed, clothe and house hundreds of thousands of people ... and fans tend to give them a little more leeway when they fuck up than they do, say, the Enclave, which is a fascist organisation bent on global genocide and this is ... bad?

Honestly not really seeing the problem there.

I've barely written anything about the NCR, and certainly not in depth character profiles of the people you bring up, so I'm not completely sure why this is directed at me. If you're saying that there are fans who refuse to acknowledge that the NCR has flaws ... well, I haven't met those people, but if you look for an opinion on the internet you'll probably find it, so I'm not going to try to claim they don't exist. I've seen people claim women don't play Fallout, which is kind of a problem, from where I'm sitting. :)

But. Well, okay.

It's a double-standard. Others are blamed for trying something new, the NCR gets carte blanch to repeat old mistakes!

Nobody's trying anything new. That's kind of the point here. War never changes. Just to do the main antagonists ...

Richard Grey/The Master is just doing eugenics with a sci-fi twist. He's going to forcibly convert everyone who can be into a super mutant, and prevent any remaining humans from breeding. One of the ways to beat him is to tell him that his "master race" is sterile. It's a horrifying plan.

The Enclave are American fascists. They believe that only their people are truly human and that everyone else should literally die.

Edward Sallow/Caesar is ... I mean he's just cosplaying as Caius Julius Caesar because he thinks it looks cool. That's an actual human being who lived, and who quite famously got stabbed to death. More historical precedent than you could shake a gladius at. Sallow got over excited when he read Caesar's Commentaries and decided he wanted to be Caesar. Presenting "doing ancient Rome" as new is ... certainly something, and particularly hilarious as a plan for a civilisation given the decades long clusterfuck that was the fall of the Roman Republic, plus fun subsequent imperial followups like "the year of the four emperors".

The Institute has just reintroduced slavery, only this time let's 3D print the people instead of abducting them so literally no one will care what we do to them! They also lean into the idea that they are the only real people, although they are not quite as committed to this as the Enclave.

What's new and exciting here that I should be willing to give a try? They're all old ideas, and ideas that seem to involve a lot of genocide, enslavement and general misery for anybody who isn't part of a specific in group.

Vulpes set up his lottery (not that I'm saying it was a perfect solution) to address a problem that had gotten out of hand, a problem downstream of the NCR… and yet most fan discussions blame the Legion for what happened in Nipton.

I ... what? Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you here. The massacre at Nipton was the Legion's fault because they were the ones who walked in there and, you know, massacred people. Mayor Steyn was absolutely engaging in a round of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" and if anybody tries to argue that he was competent I will dispute that wholeheartedly. But there was only a massacre because the Legion actively set one up.

There's political corruption in Nipton, but the problem of the Legion is that they think a lottery that decides who gets beheaded, who gets crucified and who gets sold into slavery is some sort of solution to that problem, rather than an atrocity. That's why they're still the bad karma choice, even if the NCR is kind of fucking things up.

Also ... ha. I promise you imitating ancient Rome is not going to solve your political corruption problems. I mean ... I know Vulpes Inculta makes his little speech, but Rome never did solve the problem of profiteering governors and corrupt politicians. This is not a problem that is going to miraculously disappear under Legion rule. And the idea of Rome somehow getting rid of prostitution is just ... Honestly, Caesar's Legion would be hilarious if you didn't have to have these conversations standing next to people dying on crosses.

If two human surface-dwellers kill each other in Diamond City, people blame the Institute.

... Diamond City is run by the Institute, under the synth-replacement of Mayor McDonough. The leadership actively plays up the paranoia in the city by refusing to investigate disappearances. The particular scene you are describing is paired with one that occurs in Goodneighbor, where the neighborhood watch is able to accurately identify a synth infiltrator – because they are not Institute run.

It's also a feature of gameplay that an inhabitant of one of your settlements may be a synth infiltrator and become hostile to the other settlers. So I'm pretty sure people are blaming the Institute for things they're doing.

If the White Legs emulate Twisted Hair cultural traditions without fully understanding them, Ulysses blames the Legion.

... The Legion massacred Ulysses' people. They enslaved some and crucified the rest along the roadside, like Spartacus's army of old. That's why he's the only one left who understands what the braids mean. His reaction is somewhat unfair to the White Legs, yes, who had no way of knowing what they were doing was wrong ... but I can't see why blaming the Legion would be a problem. They did, in fact, exterminate his people.

ThevNCR seems to get a pass because people see their goals as noble… but their goals are to recreate the exact conditions that caused the Great War!

There's a line I like, that Deacon says in Fallout 4.

I never really much cared for the Minutemen. The idea sounds great. But you give small men big power and sometimes you'll pay for it. –Fallout 4, Deacon Miscellaneous Dialogue

In the context of Fallout 4, the Minutemen are the scrappy underdogs you root for. They're helping to rebuild the shattered settlements of the Commonwealth and they're a potential source of resistance against the Institute. But if you talk to Preston, you get hints of the politics and infighting that brought them down the first time. There's no reason that couldn't happen again. They could become a controlling and exploitative organisation.

Do I think that means you shouldn't work with them? No, of course not. You deal with the situation in front of you. You try to support the people who aim to make life better for everyone.

If we roll back around to the Commonwealth in Fallout 8 or something (assuming I haven't died of old age by then) and the Minutemen have become a military dictatorship ruling the people with an iron fist ... well, we go deal with the fucking Minutemen then.

Deacon's right about the threat, but if you don't take the chance on trusting people, you never build anything.

It's a thing in Fallout. War never changes. There are some truly evil, terrible ideas that turn up again and again and need to be slapped down. But there is no perfect Utopia on the other side of it. There are just communities banding together to try and make it work. What stops them from going bad? Nothing. It can always happen. You make the best choices you can in every story, given what you have to work with.

Or you do an evil playthrough. Your choice. Not my business.

The NCR is supposed to hurt. Watching them fail is supposed to hurt. It's no good if it doesn't hurt. No one cries when you blow up the Enclave. That's a job well done. You can't say good things about them.

The point of the NCR is that you can. They have some runs on the board! Democracy! Agriculture! Education! You want them to make it work. And yeah, it lets you ask much more interesting questions like: how many fuck ups do we let slide?

We don't need the Enclave, or the Legion, to fuck up to know they're bad news. Their goals are bad. We want them gone. But with the NCR ... how much bad are we okay with, to keep the good?

You haven't given me any examples to work with, so I can't reasonably speak to what fans say. But I don't think the games give them any sort of uncritical pass. Fallout New Vegas is ... absolutely about the problems of colonialism and aggressive expansionism. It's very clear that the NCR has not made good choices recently. The game gives you a lot of room to figure out what you want to do about that, and no answer is perfect.

It's only with regard to the Legion specifically that it's an obviously moral choice – and they level the playing field for you there. Both the Legion and the NCR have imperial pretensions, and those are not good. But since that specific thing is the same, well, we're supporting the people who aren't implementing mass slavery and treating women as "breeding stock", right?

If there are people who won't admit flaws in the NCR, well, yeah, I'd call them wrong. But I don't really think it's a double standard to favour a group that doesn't have "wouldn't it be great if we murdered everybody" as a core philosophy over one that does.

[theculturedmarxist]

Our civilization is sick because all its systems ensure that human behavior is driven by profit, and health isn’t profitable. Nobody gets rich from everyone staying healthy all the time. The gears of capitalism will still keep turning if its populace is made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit. Billionaires aren’t made by leaving forests and oceans unmolested, consuming less, mining less, drilling less, using less energy. The economy doesn’t soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony.

If you programmed an advanced AI to arrange human behavior solely around extracting the maximum amount of profit possible using existing technologies, its world wouldn’t look a whole lot different from the real one. We’re being guided by unthinking, unfeeling systems that don’t care about the good of our minds, our hearts, our health, or our biosphere, which will sacrifice all of the above to accomplish the one goal we’ve set them to accomplish.

It’s just a dogshit way to run a civilization. It doesn’t work. It’s left us with a dying world full of crazy morons hurtling toward nuclear armageddon on multiple fronts. Our systems have failed as spectacularly as anything can fail.

It’s simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it’s an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth, but now we’re churning out too much stuff too quickly and society is enslaved by the wealthy. So now new systems are needed.

❖

So much of modern political life consists of the ruling class tricking the public into trading away things the ruling class values in exchange for things the ruling class does not value. Trading revolution for the feeling of being revolutionary. Trading actual freedom and democracy for the story of having freedom and democracy. Trading away the civil rights our rulers actually care about like unrestricted speech and freedom from surveillance in exchange for culture wars about racism and transphobia. Trading real labor for imaginary money. In every way possible we’re being duped into trading away real power for empty narrative fluff.

❖

One part of the problem is that in this mind-controlled dystopia people are prevented from knowing how deeply evil their government is, so the idea of their government surveilling them and regulating their speech and their access to information doesn’t scare them like it should.

This is why it annoys me when people say “Stop talking about the problems, we need to talk about solutions!” It’s like mate, we’re so far from ever being able to implement solutions — we haven’t even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody’s going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend. Systemic solutions are pretty far down the track from that point.

❖

It’s a pretty well-established fact by now that free will doesn’t exist nearly to the extent that most religions, philosophies and judicial systems pretend it does. Our minds are very hackable and propaganda is very effective. If you don’t get this, you don’t understand the problem.

Do a deep dive into cognitive biases and how they operate. Look into the research which shows our brains know what decisions we’re going to make several seconds before the conscious mind thinks we’re making them. You’re going to tell me these are organisms with free agency?

In order to understand what we’re up against you have to understand psychological manipulation, how effective it is, and why it works, because mass-scale psychological manipulation is the primary force preventing the public from turning against our rulers in our own interest.

❖

It seems like a lot of the inertia and self-defeating hopelessness that people have about fighting the machine comes from knowing the political awakenings of the sixties fizzled out, but I don’t think that would be the case if people understood just how much hard work the machine had to put into making them fizzle.

I mean, we all get that the death of activist movements didn’t just happen on its own, right? We all know about COINTELPRO? Known instances where one out of every six activists was actually a federal infiltrator? The roll-out of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed?

The amount of energy the western empire has poured into killing all leftist and antiwar movement is staggering, but people just think the acid wore off and the hippies turned into yuppies and the Reagan administration happened on its own. It didn’t. They had to work hard at that.

The revolution didn’t organically fizzle out, it was actively strangled to death. And what’s left in its place is this defeatist attitude where people want a healthy society but believe it can’t be attained, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We COINTELPRO ourselves now.

People think we can’t use the power of our numbers to force the emergence of a healthy society, and we don’t deserve one because we dropped the ball. But we didn’t knowingly drop the ball, we were manipulated out of it. And the manipulators had to work very, very hard to do so. Those movements died out because the machine understood very clearly that it needed to stomp them out with extreme aggression and knew exactly what it needed to do to accomplish this, while ordinary people did not. It’s not a fair fight if only one party knows it’s a fight.

The machine won one battle and everyone’s acting like they won the war. They didn’t. We can absolutely pick up the fight again, and we can overwhelm them with our numbers. If we had any idea how hard they had to work to win that one battle, this would be clear to everybody.

[misfitwashere]

Donald Trump has crushed his rivals in the Iowa caucuses. Should they drop out and let him take on Biden?

From Quora:

Let’s be honest, we all knew this was going to happen and the entire country and by extension the world were bracing themselves for it. However, the biggest news were the exit polls, 2/3 say they feel Trump won the 2020 election and the Biden Presidency is illegitimate, 44% said they were MAGAS and they would vote for Trump even if he was convicted of a crime.

DeSantis and Haley are road kill at this point. They had their chances, Haley could make it a little closer, DeSantis will stay in only for the inevitable losses to come and drop out within a month, 2 at the most.

The real issue is this one:

Joy Reid accuses White Christian Iowans of wanting to have people of color 'bow down' to them

Reid argued that evangelicals support Trump because they believe 'immigrants' and 'brown people' are 'illegitimate Americans'

Ok so what is it going to be folks. Trump has a 90% probability that he is going to win the Republican nomination, what are the Democrats going to do about it. Trump owns the evangelicals, all the mocking about him not being a Christian, the anti-Christ, none of them give a damn. He is their guy, their Jesus and he can say and do anything that he wants.

The General election effectively began last night.

The Republicans have made their agenda clear. Biden stole the election, doesn’t matter that everyone knows he did not, doesn’t matter how well he has led the country, doesn’t matter that Trump inspired and led an insurrection against the USA, what matters is what they believe.

Now what do the Democrats believe. Don’t even bother trying to convince evangelicals who have their Jesus martyr victim grifting them for money. Don’t think about those MAGA hatted folks, they want Trump.

There are 40% who are now ‘independents’ in the USA, they hold the balance of power. The Iowa caucuses have very few people but they have spoken for the Republicans, they want Trump, they worship and adore Trump. Trump could shoot them all on 5th avenue and they would gladly bow down. That is the GOP today.

Democrats, start your engines. No more whinging about Biden didn’t manage to overturn the Supreme Court decision to get your student loans cut, sorry kids you will have to pay, not as much as he did get you $50 billion back but not enough for you perfect kids. Millennials ditto, your raises were only 20% this year in your nice cushy jobs. Same for you African Americans, you are complaining the loudest, we hear you, you want more but you won’t get more if you don’t get up and vote for Biden, you will get nothing as Joy Reid has pointed out, you are illegitimate Americans to Trump supporters.

Same for you Latinos, you want to ‘bow down’ to Christian evangelicals. How about you classic Liberals, you like that Christian theocracy because if Trump wins it is surely coming. Oh and you Israel supporters bitching and moaning about Biden who is the strongest Presidential supporter of Israel ever, you don’t like him? Think about what Trump will give away.

Ditto to Ukraine and European supporters, you don’t want Trump, then you better wake up. How about those transatlantic Brits, you and the Aussies who are so dependent and deep in on AUKUS and everything else Biden has done for you, time to step up and support Biden.

I could go on but on the other side, the Saudis will clearly screw around with oil to raise the price of gas to push for Trump who will give them everything. They hate it that Biden is focused on renewables and the lies of Trump on Biden and oil? Hahaha what a joke, Biden is pumping more than Saudi the most oil pumped in the history of the world.

Putin is dancing in the street, he feels he just won the war in Ukraine. Make no doubt about it, Putin wants Trump as does Xi Jin Ping and every other authoritarian including Netanyahu. You like war, you like death you like the end of democracy on a global level, vote for Trump. He will take you down with him.

Oh and yes; Lies, lies and more damn lies you can see them coming. Daily, hourly ever more outlandish than the last ones.

This is the beginning of a 10 month campaign, buckle up, it is going to be the wildest and most important one in US history. Not hyperbole, reality.

Let’s get to work and make sure Trump gets crushed right back in November, 2024.

Henry R. Greenfield ·

Former Senior Consultant Global Digital Twin Technology at Integrated Facility Management (2019–2023)

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.2.9 What sort of society do anarchists want?

Anarchists desire a decentralised society, based on free association. We consider this form of society the best one for maximising the values we have outlined above — liberty, equality and solidarity. Only by a rational decentralisation of power, both structurally and territorially, can individual liberty be fostered and encouraged. The delegation of power into the hands of a minority is an obvious denial of individual liberty and dignity. Rather than taking the management of their own affairs away from people and putting it in the hands of others, anarchists favour organisations which minimise authority, keeping power at the base, in the hands of those who are affected by any decisions reached.

Free association is the cornerstone of an anarchist society. Individuals must be free to join together as they see fit, for this is the basis of freedom and human dignity. However, any such free agreement must be based on decentralisation of power; otherwise it will be a sham (as in capitalism), as only equality provides the necessary social context for freedom to grow and development. Therefore anarchists support directly democratic collectives, based on “one person one vote” (for the rationale of direct democracy as the political counterpart of free agreement, see section A.2.11 — Why do most anarchists support direct democracy?).

We should point out here that an anarchist society does not imply some sort of idyllic state of harmony within which everyone agrees. Far from it! As Luigi Galleani points out, ”[d]isagreements and friction will always exist. In fact they are an essential condition of unlimited progress. But once the bloody area of sheer animal competition — the struggle for food — has been eliminated, problems of disagreement could be solved without the slightest threat to the social order and individual liberty.” [The End of Anarchism?, p. 28] Anarchism aims to “rouse the spirit of initiative in individuals and in groups.” These will “create in their mutual relations a movement and a life based on the principles of free understanding” and recognise that ”variety, conflict even, is life and that uniformity is death.” [Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism, p. 143]

Therefore, an anarchist society will be based upon co-operative conflict as ”[c]onflict, per se, is not harmful… disagreements exist [and should not be hidden] … What makes disagreement destructive is not the fact of conflict itself but the addition of competition.” Indeed, “a rigid demand for agreement means that people will effectively be prevented from contributing their wisdom to a group effort.” [Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition, p. 156] It is for this reason that most anarchists reject consensus decision making in large groups (see section A.2.12).

So, in an anarchist society associations would be run by mass assemblies of all involved, based upon extensive discussion, debate and co-operative conflict between equals, with purely administrative tasks being handled by elected committees. These committees would be made up of mandated, recallable and temporary delegates who carry out their tasks under the watchful eyes of the assembly which elected them. Thus in an anarchist society, “we’ll look after our affairs ourselves and decide what to do about them. And when, to put our ideas into action, there is a need to put someone in charge of a project, we’ll tell them to do [it] in such and such a way and no other … nothing would be done without our decision. So our delegates, instead of people being individuals whom we’ve given the right to order us about, would be people … [with] no authority, only the duty to carry out what everyone involved wanted.” [Errico Malatesta, Fra Contadini, p. 34] If the delegates act against their mandate or try to extend their influence or work beyond that already decided by the assembly (i.e. if they start to make policy decisions), they can be instantly recalled and their decisions abolished. In this way, the organisation remains in the hands of the union of individuals who created it.

This self-management by the members of a group at the base and the power of recall are essential tenets of any anarchist organisation. The key difference between a statist or hierarchical system and an anarchist community is who wields power. In a parliamentary system, for example, people give power to a group of representatives to make decisions for them for a fixed period of time. Whether they carry out their promises is irrelevant as people cannot recall them till the next election. Power lies at the top and those at the base are expected to obey. Similarly, in the capitalist workplace, power is held by an unelected minority of bosses and managers at the top and the workers are expected to obey.

In an anarchist society this relationship is reversed. No one individual or group (elected or unelected) holds power in an anarchist community. Instead decisions are made using direct democratic principles and, when required, the community can elect or appoint delegates to carry out these decisions. There is a clear distinction between policy making (which lies with everyone who is affected) and the co-ordination and administration of any adopted policy (which is the job for delegates).

These egalitarian communities, founded by free agreement, also freely associate together in confederations. Such a free confederation would be run from the bottom up, with decisions following from the elemental assemblies upwards. The confederations would be run in the same manner as the collectives. There would be regular local regional, “national” and international conferences in which all important issues and problems affecting the collectives involved would be discussed. In addition, the fundamental, guiding principles and ideas of society would be debated and policy decisions made, put into practice, reviewed, and co-ordinated. The delegates would simply “take their given mandates to the relative meetings and try to harmonise their various needs and desires. The deliberations would always be subject to the control and approval of those who delegated them” and so “there would be no danger than the interest of the people [would] be forgotten.” [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 36]

Action committees would be formed, if required, to co-ordinate and administer the decisions of the assemblies and their congresses, under strict control from below as discussed above. Delegates to such bodies would have a limited tenure and, like the delegates to the congresses, have a fixed mandate — they are not able to make decisions on behalf of the people they are delegates for. In addition, like the delegates to conferences and congresses, they would be subject to instant recall by the assemblies and congresses from which they emerged in the first place. In this way any committees required to co-ordinate join activities would be, to quote Malatesta’s words, “always under the direct control of the population” and so express the “decisions taken at popular assemblies.” [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 175 and p. 129]

Most importantly, the basic community assemblies can overturn any decisions reached by the conferences and withdraw from any confederation. Any compromises that are made by a delegate during negotiations have to go back to a general assembly for ratification. Without that ratification any compromises that are made by a delegate are not binding on the community that has delegated a particular task to a particular individual or committee. In addition, they can call confederal conferences to discuss new developments and to inform action committees about changing wishes and to instruct them on what to do about any developments and ideas.

In other words, any delegates required within an anarchist organisation or society are not representatives (as they are in a democratic government). Kropotkin makes the difference clear:

“The question of true delegation versus representation can be better understood if one imagines a hundred or two hundred men [and women], who meet each day in their work and share common concerns … who have discussed every aspect of the question that concerns them and have reached a decision. They then choose someone and send him [or her] to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind… The delegate is not authorised to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his [or her] colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he [or she] will seek an understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse. This is what happens when true delegation comes into being.” [Words of a Rebel, p. 132]

Unlike in a representative system, power is not delegated into the hands of the few. Rather, any delegate is simply a mouthpiece for the association that elected (or otherwise selected) them in the first place. All delegates and action committees would be mandated and subject to instant recall to ensure they express the wishes of the assemblies they came from rather than their own. In this way government is replaced by anarchy, a network of free associations and communities co-operating as equals based on a system of mandated delegates, instant recall, free agreement and free federation from the bottom up.

Only this system would ensure the “free organisation of the people, an organisation from below upwards.” This “free federation from below upward” would start with the basic “association” and their federation “first into a commune, then a federation of communes into regions, of regions into nations, and of nations into an international fraternal association.” [Michael Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 298] This network of anarchist communities would work on three levels. There would be “independent Communes for the territorial organisation, and of federations of Trade Unions [i.e. workplace associations] for the organisation of men [and women] in accordance with their different functions… [and] free combines and societies … for the satisfaction of all possible and imaginable needs, economic, sanitary, and educational; for mutual protection, for the propaganda of ideas, for arts, for amusement, and so on.” [Peter Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment, p. 79] All would be based on self-management, free association, free federation and self-organisation from the bottom up.

By organising in this manner, hierarchy is abolished in all aspects of life, because the people at the base of the organisation are in control, not their delegates. Only this form of organisation can replace government (the initiative and empowerment of the few) with anarchy (the initiative and empowerment of all). This form of organisation would exist in all activities which required group work and the co-ordination of many people. It would be, as Bakunin said, the means “to integrate individuals into structures which they could understand and control.” [quoted by Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, p. 97] For individual initiatives, the individual involved would manage them.

As can be seen, anarchists wish to create a society based upon structures that ensure that no individual or group is able to wield power over others. Free agreement, confederation and the power of recall, fixed mandates and limited tenure are mechanisms by which power is removed from the hands of governments and placed in the hands of those directly affected by the decisions.

For a fuller discussion on what an anarchist society would look like see section I. Anarchy, however, is not some distant goal but rather an aspect of current struggles against oppression and exploitation. Means and ends are linked, with direct action generating mass participatory organisations and preparing people to directly manage their own personal and collective interests. This is because anarchists, as we discuss in section I.2.3, see the framework of a free society being based on the organisations created by the oppressed in their struggle against capitalism in the here and now. In this sense, collective struggle creates the organisations as well as the individual attitudes anarchism needs to work. The struggle against oppression is the school of anarchy. It teaches us not only how to be anarchists but also gives us a glimpse of what an anarchist society would be like, what its initial organisational framework could be and the experience of managing our own activities which is required for such a society to work. As such, anarchists try to create the kind of world we want in our current struggles and do not think our ideas are only applicable “after the revolution.” Indeed, by applying our principles today we bring anarchy that much nearer.

[radio-to-trenchcoat-demons]

help me is this too much for an essay?? Its about the Haitian Revolution for my history class and im so tired i cant think if i did too much or not:

Jovenal Moise, the 43rd president in Haiti, was assassinated in Haiti on July 7, 2021. He was shot and killed in his own home in Port-au-Prince to which they say a group of Colombian mercenaries was behind the attack, and among them, a Haitian doctor ordering as a plot to become president. Present day photos from Haiti show poverty, burning houses and buildings. There are people covered in soot and ash, and people living in famish and poor living conditions. Buildings are crushed and people look upset and crying. And in 1789, the people of Haiti banded together and began the haitian revolution. They overthrew slavery and were heavily inspired by the recent french revolution. 

So still in 1789, the King and Queen were rich scumbags, who mistreated anyone lower than themselves, leading their land and the 3rd estate to poverty, starvation, and even death. Their monarchy was total control and their word was final, meaning that if you went against their word you were sentenced to death. Punishment was death by axe. They eventually invented the guillotine which proved to be more efficient and effective. The 3rd estate grew tired of the mistreatment and disrespect and revolted. This led to events like the storming of Bastille and the tennis court oath. The declaration of the rights of man and citizen even state  “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” (Avalon Project) This was written by The National Assembly of France in 1789 to fight for freedom under a court of law that they wished to create. This differentiates from the reign the king and queen had over France as opposed to the constitution the 3rd estate wanted to grow to establish personal freedom and separation from the monarchy. The ideas of these overcoming revolutions have traveled and spread due to word of mouth and change in the country. Other countries noticed the change in France and it influenced them to make a similar change in their regime. 

And the difference between the monarchy and the democracy imposes a major discussion. The monarchy was full control, full power, total say. So the French Monarchy held France in total control, and this was kinda ticking off the people of France. But they fought for their freedom, their democracy, where everyone can vote, and can make decisions about major choices in their own community/country. So, naturally driven by the determination of France, Haiti took inspiration from France and began what is known as the Haitian Revolution.

One colonist writes presciently  of the colonists’ dilemma in negotiating with the slaves: “For, if we reward with freedom those who have burned our plantations and massacred our people, the slaves who have hitherto remained loyal will do likewise in order to receive the same benefit. Then nothing more can be said: the whites must perish.” ’ This violence was happening because the slaves and people were fighting for their personal freedom and rights, and that was not being given to them. This violence was used to fight and get a point across, this was the cause and methods of their revolution. 

In conclusion, some may ask, “Was the Haitian Revolution successful?” And you could answer, “Yes”. It made a significant impact on life in Haiti and made a revolutionary change for the whole country. In the end they won independence from France, becoming the first country founded by slaves.

or i dont know if i did too little ;-;

[lil-oreo-crumbles]

so, what is the political system in Septarsis? Historically, I mean?

The short and sweet is this

Septarsis changes political systems based on what’s needed at the time

But here’s the whole thing :)

For most of its history, after becoming a united civilization, Septarsis was a democracy. No one really had more power than anyone else.

Sure, there was an elected Council/Assembly of about 15, but they didn’t hold much true, dominant power nor were any of them a true figurehead. There were terms and limits on how long each individual could serve, and anyone could become one if they were voted in. The Assembly mainly served as the people who ran organizations to run the civilization and came up with laws that everyone would vote on, serving to protect the minority. They valued the voices of everyone, even the tiniest of voices, and the Assembly proved to be a failsafe so minorities would be protected. It wasn’t foolproof since everyone did get a vote to pass new laws and decrees, but it worked enough. The Assembly also worked to keep diplomatic ties between the other civilizations and maintain peace with outsiders. But what’s important is that decision-making was civilization-wide.

But that all changed when the Mewmans came.

Since Septarsis is so guarded, they weren’t initial victims of the land stealing, but they were quickly made aware of it. Different monster civilizations had different systems, but even the other democratic-like monsters sent someone to represent themselves and jointly confront this new “Queen” about her… actions. After a lot of back-and-forth, Septarsis decided on a young woman from The Assembly, Adina Kardona, to represent Septarsis.

The monsters tried to calmly reason with Queen Moe about her actions and tried to work out some sort of agreement and land arrangements, but we all know that failed spectacularly. Septarsis lost a LOT of people in the resulting Great Monster Massacre (The GMM as a whole knocked out 60% of the monster population; I’m not sure about Septarsis and their stats yet). Their regenerative abilities only aided them for so long because Moe found a way to counter it and make them killable (it’s a very specific spell that’s long gone, but its effects are still very present within Septarsis).

Anyway, after this devastating genocide, they really needed a strong leader to guide them out of the tragedy of their losses. Adina proved herself to be a strong defensive force that helped prevent a lot more casualties during the genocide itself. She was unanimously chosen to lead the restoration of Septarsis. She was declared the Sovereign (since the Septarians notoriously hate the terms King/Queen).

She reigned for 220 years with her husband and eventually had two children, Seth and (who would eventually become) Zarina. However, the Septarians love democracy, and assumed that her reign would merely be temporary— or at the very least more democratic. Many Septarians still adored her and wanted to keep her as their leader, remembering her fearless and selfless deeds during the GMM (and she was a good enough leader), but the less democratic Septarsis became, the more groups convened and started to get restless. It didn’t help that she was very isolationist and wanted to steer clear of Mewman conflict and wasn’t as active as she could’ve been in Septarsis itself. This increasing tension snapped when one of Adina’s former lovers schemed and plotted to overthrow them. He convened with a group of Mewmans, bringing them to Septarsis and having them kill the elder Kardonas during a weak point. He also had Seth and Zarina taken as captives. Once the job was done, he had every Mewman executed so Septarsis’s location remained hidden.

This enters Septarsis into its dark age under a brutal dictatorship. Many Septarians flee from their homeland because this man, frankly, does not care about the wellbeing of the people at all. He only cares about power, prestige, and revenge. It’s awful. It was not until 209 years later that Seth and Zarina gathered enough of a revolt and killed him. Seth has to pick up the pieces and restore Septarsis to its former glory. He is unanimously proclaimed a hero.

Under Supreme Lord Seth, Septarsis flourishes. He reinstates many of the democratic elements from eons past, including re-instating the Assembly (except he refers to it as the Septarian High Council). The SHC works similarly to how the Assembly did before; it’s just that Seth is the figurehead, with Zarina right underneath him. The SHC and legislation rotate every 25 years, but terms themselves last about 50 or so. They also must be elected to be able to join, but they can come from anywhere.

Seth makes it known that if the Septarians are ever dissatisfied with him as a ruler, he will step down and give way to a new leader or even allow Septarsis to fully return to its true democracy. However, that hasn’t happened. With the Mewman situation at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and a leader who actively does things about it, he’s still held up to the same status. He’s a great leader, far better than his mother, and compromises with his people if they’re in any way dissatisfied. He plays an active role in everything he can and puts power primarily in the hands of the people. Seth can’t just make rules whenever, it has to go through the population and SHC.

He’s a great leader, no matter his own personal views or what Crescenta’s smear campaign wanted to perpetuate. There’s a reason he only lost by a small margin during that rigged election. His reputation as a fair and just leader has spread far beyond Septarsis.

It’s this weird mix. You have Seth and his family with royal-esque titles, you have an elected council of people (who Seth leads) who pass ordinances and laws after voting, and the people themselves not only have opportunities to join the SHC but also are directly involved in voting for things. It’s closest to a republic I guess…. except the leader doesn’t need to be consistently voted in nor does he have limited terms and has been ruling for centuries atp because he’s just the best choice for the job and no one else comes close to competing with him. It functions well, but there’s no clear definition or label for the type of system they have.

I hope that explains it.. somewhat. It’s definitely not full encompassing because there’s a lot of aspects and roles in governments and political systems, but that’s the jist of it, an overview if you will.

Idk how clearly I explained everything but I’ve been looking over this all day and I think this encompasses my vision for the most part.

[hyperfashionist]

A Spoiltastic Journey

Through The Entire Space: 1999 Canon

Up To “Odysseus Wept”

Story 1: Eternity Unleashed

Chapter 12 of 12

It's time for some spoily commentary on Chapter 12 of Eternity Unleashed!

Spoilers under the cut. You have been warned.

Back to Chapter 11 of this story

Back to original post on this story

Return to Series Preface

Forth to Story 2: The Touch of Venus

Chapter Twelve of Eternity Unleashed: A Spoiler-Filled Commentary

The final chapter of Balor's backstory novella is short, and consists of Balor’s musings about what happened to him. 

For the first time, we see a character reckoning with the "immortality" part of Balor's immortality treatment, rather than just the physical invulnerability which has dominated the story so far.

Balor tells himself he’s been set free, and that being caged in a randomly floating asteroid until further notice is actually a win for him. Yes, it’s mind palace time, folks.

He immerses himself in his mum’s paintings, which must be fantastic for his mental health.

He wonders why the women in his life always leave him, and why his friends betrayed him. He thinks he should have tried to be a father to his adopted siblings. He decides children are more malleable when raised by the state, so the family subculture can’t radicalize them.

He contemplates how terror is the ultimate emotion: it’s on, or it’s off.

He gets into bodybuilding.

He hopes maybe an advanced civilization will find him, so he can learn from them, like how to be a better dictator and stuff. If primitives find him, he’ll have to teach them. 

Whatever happens, he prepares for it: “I don’t choose to allow my fate to be decided by others.” He’s *so* close to getting it.

Anyway, there’s Balor, in the BSHCI, with his paintings, in his mind palace, for a super long time. According to the Powysverse Continuity, his incarceration takes place "centuries before" we next see him. Considering the known psychological effects of solitary confinement I'd say the events of Chapter 12 would cover a few years at most, even though Balor perceives the elapsed time to be much longer.

The Progrons' treatment of Balor is very difficult to admire. It seems they have either an extremely cruel, or an extremely improvisational and ignorant justice system to have done this to him. Since the head of the supreme court also seems to be world president, I'm guessing the latter. I don't know how Talian can justify such an action, if he really believes what he says about Balor's being just a man like any other.

Yes, Balor was fixing to do exactly this to everyone who opposed him, but isn't that why we're on Talian's side and not Balor's? What crimes would Balor have reasonably been charged with, since to all appearances anyone with enough power is allowed to do everything he did? And I'm not saying Balor should've been allowed to do all this, but that's exactly my point.

You could argue that the punishment is proportionate in an “eye for an eye” way, if you assume everyone sent into space would also have been in solitary confinement (and yeah I'm not arguing that having a cellmate makes the sentencing fairer, but it would be that bit less cruel).

But why expect Progron to have progressed beyond that concept of justice by now? They haven't even thought up representative democracy, so voting Balor out wasn't an option. You can criticize Talian's decisions, but he didn't make the world, and he's not used to thinking.

---

So anyway, here we are at the end of the first story in the Powysverse chronology. To recap, the first novel ever published in this series was the Balor-centric Resurrection, and Eternity Unleashed is the first part of a three-part book that was published a few years later in order to provide Balor with a backstory. Some flashbacks from the original edition of Resurrection were ported into Eternity Unleashed.

I guess this novella must contain some really important foundation for the worldbuilding of the series, and that will unfold as we go along.

The question is:

Is Eternity Unleashed Good?

The Amazon reviews suggest that some readers loved it. See here. It's highly rated on Goodreads as well.

I didn't really enjoy it myself. The first 88 pages were hard work. After that it became less like homework for me.

In Context

To be fair, the story isn’t meant to be read as slowly as I have done (10 pages a day, or to the end of a chapter, whichever comes first). Nor is the first part of the book meant to be read separately from the other two. And an unbroken tone of solemnity, combined with a slow pace, is something it has in common with Y1; and many readers want to be in that atmosphere again. 

So why didn't I enjoy it? What's wrong with me?

If you have a character we already know we don’t like and - crucially - aren’t rooting for, it’s a bold choice to dwell in his POV and never attempt to make him sympathetic, or have him charm us into forgetting what he’s capable of. I'm certainly not one of those readers that needs to like every major character. But you have to do *something* to make the character and/or the story enjoyable, and whatever that could have been, by page 88 I still didn't have it.

It's not enough to say I haven't read the whole volume. It shouldn't take 88 pages of work before the story started to engage my interest. It’s only my dedication to the series that got me to stick with it that long. 

We have two other backstories of major characters before Breakaway, and Balor's backstory is nearly three times as long as either of those, and I'm not sure it needed to be. There are several places where it gets repetitive.

What Eternity Unbound has going for it is that it's a pretty well-thought-out bit of worldbuilding. I can't say I ever got pulled into Progron, it was more like I was viewing it from a detached perspective. But the fridge logic works, and Balor is a psychologically plausible character on paper.

Gender Balance

NB running total = 28

F running total = 16

M running total = 29

Bechdel Score: 0. Only in Milsa's meeting with her counter-revolutionaries do any two female characters talk to each other, and even then they're talking about Balor.

Milsa does lead the movement to save her planet, though. So there's that.

Back to Chapter 11 of this story

Back to original post on this story

Return to Series Preface

Forth to Story 2: The Touch of Venus

[brettbowden]

Part Two - Wind Weather and Currents

Part Two - Wind Weather and Currents - following on from the recent blog from the interview with Andrew Palfrey. Andrew is better known to the worldwide yachting fraternity as “Doggy”. He will give us the benefit of his vast experience in factoring wind, weather and currents into sailing and its importance in planning the conduct of your race. This is part two in a series of excerpts from an interview I did with the high-achieving sailor, Olympian and coach. FREE BOOK - TIPS FROM SAILING LEGENDS Brett: How do you call wind shifts and what feedback do you want from your crew? How do you handle communication in the boat? Andrew: I might take a little bit of a different path here, because I reckoned you hit on something that's ultra-ultra-important and that something that people struggle to get right, and it's taken me many, many years to kind of think about and work on. Who in the team is strong at what? Where do people's strengths lie? But also, playing your role and supporting those around you. And it all sounds pretty airy-fairy and fluffy, but what it really means is... I'll give you an example. When I was sailing with Iain Murray in the Star, we had it pretty well worked out, what he was responsible for, what I was responsible for, and where the overlaps were. And to start with, we were very weak tactically. And it took a few days of sailing together to kind of put the finger on what was going on. I think what was happening is, from our side...but we hadn't spoken about it, that was the key. But from our side, Iain and I's side, we're kind of probably thinking subconsciously, "Well, he's Cocko. He's one of the best tacticians going around." Well, he used to do the tactics. And I'll call the wind and Iain can do his thing at the back of the boat. Cocko, it turns out, was thinking, "Well, hang on, these two guys are embarking on an Olympic campaign, they probably don't want me to do too much or say too much. I'll kind of let them do their thing and I'll trim the main." Crew Discussion And basically, what would happen, we had really good discussions before the start, but as we approached times where decisions had to be made, we weren't making the decisions. It was all too...there was too much decision by committee. We were just, we were doing some really silly things, tactically, which was having quite a big effect on our races. So I think I said to Cocko something along the lines of, "Look, I'm here to help. You're the tactician. And it's not a democracy, it's not a committee. Decisions have to be made. You're not going to be second-guessed, we're all behind you. So make the decisions, be clear, and if you do the exact opposite of the picture I've just painted, that's 100% fine. There's no problem at all. I'm happy with that. You make the decisions and we can review it later over a beer that night. Why did you want to go that way when da da da?... But there's not going to be bad feelings at the time, there's not going to be second-guessing, and let's just get on with it." And from that point, we turned it around. And I learned a lot from that and I've since had that discussion, I have that discussion with pretty much everyone I sail with. Crew Responsibilities With that comes core responsibilities which, on that side of things, the calling the wind, short-term, having a view of the wind, long-term, and helping make decisions into the top mark and bottom mark based on what we're seeing up the track. So do we gybe or do we go straight out of the top mark? That sort of thing. So when I sail, that's the way we work. It's one guy's responsible for the wind, one guy's responsible for tactics and strategy and the helmsman, we generally try and leave him to steer because as we know, that's a damn hard job to do well. FREE SAILING GLOVES - Brett: Do you take notice of clouds on the course and how do they affect your decision-making? Andrew: Yes, for sure, for sure. I think they're definitely a big part of the overall picture. And so, like I said in the e-mail, it might be as basic as just helping you figure out when a thermal breeze is setting up. Like, seeing the cumulus develop over the land, let's say, just an indicator there's some convection there and the sea breeze is setting up, which maybe, quite, might not really have an impact. If the wind's offshore and it's weakening, that could say, well, this is going to happen in a hurry. Or it could be that it's a squally day and the clouds are coming through pretty quickly and there might be a bit of rain in them or that cold air falling out of them for sure, I think they're going to have a much bigger effect on your mindset and your game plan, or things like that. Or it may well be there's a change in the weather system driven by the synoptic situation and you sort of see some high cloud coming across that you'd seen in the morning in the weather, and that's indicating to you that big picture, "Okay, that's signifying that the gradient winds going to move a little one way or the other," that you'd seen that morning. So I think these things are triggers, to me, anyway. AUSSIE SAILORS - BOOK AND BONUSES Brett: If a front is predicted during a race, does your strategy take this into account? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I have a bit of a routine on a race day which... I quite like getting up early so I've got the time to sift through the internet and the weather and so on. It just goes in, it's just sort of in there, back of mind. Then, there's some recall through the day if it does play out the way you had seen it that morning. And to the person that's only gone into one layer, just the numbers, is going to be hedging pretty hard right. But the person who's done a bit more homework will look up the track and say, "Well, there's no cloud." That cloud's not in evidence. That was the thing that was going to drive it to go one way or the other. So then, half the fleet is jammed up against the windward end of the start line, half of them getting crappy starts because they think they want to go right. Whereas, the people that dug another level, they're getting nice starts a little way down the line and no hurry to tack. And all of a sudden, it didn't go right. You've invested all that risk in something that didn't happen. FREE BOOK - TIPS FROM SAILING LEGENDS

              Read the full article

[goldiers1]

Sec Blinken: Tech Solutions Boosting Democratic Progress

  Exact Speech Given by Secretary Blinken at the Washington Covention Center, Washington, D.C.

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Thank you.  Well, good afternoon, everyone.  Jeanne, thank you so much for the introduction and for helping to move us along today. And I really want to first extend a very warm welcome to everyone who is here as well as to the many who are joining us online. Not long after its invention, Thomas Edison said of electricity: “It holds the secrets that will reorganize the life of the world.” Today, we are again living through a time when technology is reorganizing the life of the world, the world that we all share. Every country – no matter its form of government, no matter its geography, no matter its size or power – is being transformed by new and evolving tools from biotechnology altering the building blocks of life, to artificial intelligence changing the production of knowledge, to the devices that we’ve all got in our pockets redefining how we relate to each other as human beings. The test we face as democracies is how we can shape this transformation in a way that maximizes its promise, that minimizes its dangers, and reinforces our core values. So, today, what I wanted to do kick us off is to set out a few of the ways that we’re working to try to meet this test, working together in government, with partners in the private sector and civil society – a test that as we meet it today, I think will do much to shape many, many years to come. President Biden likes to say that in many ways we’re at an inflection point where the decisions that we’re making now in the next few years are likely to shape the next decades.  It’s one of those moments that comes along every few generations where we’re really at a point of inflection and our actions are going to make a big difference. So first, we are focused on using technology to try to make our democracies a little bit healthier, a little bit more prosperous, a little bit more inclusive.  We’re building on democracy’s core strengths – our openness, our transparency, our adaptability, and the faith that we place in our citizens to make the system work better, to actually deliver results. Just a few examples of how governments here are using technology to shore up the foundations of democracy, to strengthen its institutions in ways that actually deliver results for people. In the Maldives recently they introduced video technology that allows people to participate virtually in court hearings, freeing up time for judges, reducing costs for citizens. In Estonia, as many of you know, citizens can go online to do everything from registering a new business, to paying their taxes, to requesting refills of medical prescriptions all within minutes. After Malaysia adopted legislation lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, the government was able to automatically register people online who were newly eligible to vote.  Participation in elections shot up 25 percent, giving voice to more than 3 million additional voters. And of course, it’s not just governments that are using digital tools to improve people’s lives.  Transparency advocates are creating open databases that allow members of the public to identify corruption in public works projects. Epidemiologists and researchers are sharing data to accelerate our understanding of deadly viruses and the creation of safe, effective vaccines.  Climate scientists are using predictive models to help farmers make better decisions about when and where to plant, increasing agricultural productivity, reducing hunger. Across these efforts, we’re working to make sure that all people have access to digital tools and their benefits because one of the things that history teaches us is that leaps in technology too often deepen instead of diminishing inequities in our societies. And we have to have that constantly in mind as we look at how we’re adapting and shaping the technologies of our time. That’s why we’re making investments at home and around the world to try to close some of the digital divides – whether on gender, nationality, race, disability, geography, income, or any other factor – that perpetuate a lack of access to opportunity for underserved groups and underserved communities. Here in the United States to take one example, as many of you know, we passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that dedicates $65 billion to ensuring that everyone in our country has access to reliable, affordable high-speed internet – rural, suburban, urban; low, middle, high-income. We’ve already helped millions of lower-income Americans and their households pay their internet bills, because as President Biden says, high-speed connectivity is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. And we’re helping partners around the world broaden access too, like the more than $260 million in financing the United States is providing to help upgrade infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio is in the process of installing 5,000 public Wi-Fi access points, as well as public lighting systems that cut electricity consumption by up to 60 percent, while also lowering costs and cutting their emissions.  And three-quarters of these investments will be made in neighborhoods where people live below the city’s average income level. Second, we’re working with partners to update and establish as necessary rules and norms, so that technology is developed and used in ways that reflect our democratic values and interests. That includes for old technologies, like the internet.  We’ve long promoted an open, interoperable, secure, reliable internet – principles that created the conditions for the internet to grow into a dynamic force for learning, for connection, for economic opportunity. But everyone in this room knows, and colleagues who are joining us online know, that the internet is also growing more closed, more insecure, more siloed by the day.  More countries are putting up firewalls and shutting down access, using the internet to try to control speech, quash dissent, spread misinformation and disinformation. So we are using all the tools in our kit – from software to hardware, from trade to diplomacy – to defend our longstanding vision and stand against these and other threats.  A year ago, we launched the Declaration for the Future of the Internet. It reaffirms our commitment to a single, open “network of networks” that respects democratic principles and human rights.  To date, more than 65 partners and counting have joined us in making this pledge – and taking action to make that pledge real. We also recognize that we have to do better at addressing some of the risks that come with the open internet.  People have important concerns about how platforms collect, exploit, and share our personal data, fan the flames of polarization and extremism, endanger women and girls, children, LGBTQI+ people, and other vulnerable groups. Tackling these and other issues requires a delicate balance of the principles at the heart of our vision – such as between openness and security, between protecting speech and preventing incitement, between fostering innovation and limiting the power of Big Tech. And I think it’s more than obvious to say we do not yet have all the answers.  We’re all working on them, thinking about them, struggling with them.  But we have to engage this. Our people and increasingly our companies are looking to democratic governments to help establish limits for how platforms can collect, use, and share citizens’ personal data.  We have heard that message. That’s why, in addition to using his authority to address these issues, President Biden has been urging Congress to pass strong bipartisan legislation to protect Americans’ privacy. The President has also made clear that we need to be able to hold platforms accountable when they fail to address the harms caused by their technology, from the content they spread to the algorithms that they use. It’s also why we’re stepping up to shape the rules and guidelines around emerging digital tools, like artificial intelligence. The rollout of AI chatbots in recent months has demonstrated how quickly this technology is evolving, how big of an impact it’s going to have on each of our lives. In October, we put out a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights – five principles to try to guide the way we design, use, deploy automated systems in ways that protect our people and defend our democratic values. These include the principle that people should be protected from unsafe or ineffective AI; that people should know when an automated system is being used and understand how it affects them. We’ve also developed a risk management framework to give individuals, organizations, and societies practical guidance on how to measure and manage the risks of automated systems, and make AI that’s safe, that’s accountable, that’s fair, that protects privacy. These principles and guidelines aren’t meant to be the final word in navigating the extraordinary complexities around AI and other emerging tools.  We know the technology is changing too fast for that.  And speaking as someone who’s in government – and again, you all know this, many from experience – government is constantly playing catch-up when it comes to technology. And at a time when things seem to be evolving more quickly than ever before, that game of catch-up is even more intense than ever before.  But we have to find ways to create guardrails that will continue to strengthen and improve – that we’ll continue to strengthen and improve on together with partners. Third big piece:  We’re doubling down on investing in democracies’ ability to lead on technological innovation. Our ability to shape the digital landscape depends in significant part on maintaining our competitive edge in innovation. Democracies’ free flow of ideas and information gives us a built-in advantage, but we can’t take our own dynamism for granted.  We have to continue to find ways to foster it, to catalyze it, to support it, to encourage it. And that’s the basic idea behind the historic investment that President Biden and Congress have made through the CHIPS and Science Act, through the Inflation Reduction Act, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It’s the biggest investment America has made in generations in revitalizing key industries, recharging our manufacturing base, leading the global energy transition, and boosting basic research – something we’ve gotten away from in recent decades – while also bolstering the resilience and security of the supply chains that underpin every single one of these efforts. And we’re not just investing here at home.  We’re laying the foundation for innovation in democracies around the world, because leaps in rights-affirming and privacy-respecting technologies don’t just benefit the countries where they’re invented; they are good for people everywhere. That’s the idea behind the pledge we made at the recent Africa Leaders Summit right here in this Convention Center to dedicate more than $350 million toward digital transformation in African countries, which will unlock catalytic investments from the private sector on the continent. We’re urging allies and partners to make these investments too, because our collective competitiveness depends on it.  And democracies are answering the call, such as the G7’s unprecedented commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars on tech infrastructure around the globe in the coming years. Fourth, we are pushing back vigorously on authoritarian governments’ increasing use of technology to abuse human rights and undermine democracy. That starts with shoring up our resilience against efforts by autocratic governments to sow distrust in democracy, to weaken our institutions, to reach across borders to target people in our countries. A key part of that is countering the disinformation and misinformation that authoritarian governments spread to polarize our societies.  We’re doing that not only by exposing lies and manipulations, but by disseminating the truth through individuals, networks, independent media that local communities trust. We’re taking steps to protect the security of our citizens’ data from authoritarian governments, particularly those with a track record of gathering such information to profile our people, to target those that they see as critics, to steal intellectual property.  Protecting this information is also vital to preventing these governments from exploiting platforms to shape what our citizens see online. We’re working to thwart the efforts of autocrats to use technology to repress people within as well as beyond their borders. Together with 35 fellow governments in the Freedom Online Coalition, we led an effort to develop a set of guiding principles to encourage the responsible use of surveillance technology, to prevent its misuse by bad actors, such as targeting people based solely on their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, political views, or any other classification that is protected by international law. We’re taking immediate steps to translate these principles into practice.  Just this week, President Biden issued an executive order that bans the U.S. Government’s use of commercial spyware that poses a risk to our national security or that has been misused by foreign actors to abuse human rights. And we’re working to help people living under repressive regimes get access to digital tools, including the uncensored internet.  Last September, when the killing of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s security forces sparked months of massive protests, the regime cracked down viciously – killing hundreds of people, imprisoning tens of thousands more, and routinely shutting down the internet. In response, we teamed up with companies and civil society groups to help provide the Iranian people with ongoing access to the internet and other vital communications tools so they could continue to communicate with one another and with the outside world and shine a spotlight on the regime’s abuses. New reforms that we rolled out this week will make it easier for our government to provide similar support for people who are facing digital crackdowns in other countries. It’s not just Iran where the private sector and civil society are working with democratic governments to push back against digital authoritarianism.  Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of last year, businesses and citizens from the United States and other democracies have been on the front lines helping Ukraine defend its independence, its right to exist, its very democracy. These volunteers have helped maintain connectivity for Ukrainian Government institutions and citizens, despite the relentless attacks, providing the Ukrainian Government with free access to a secure cloud to store sensitive national databases, helping to counter Moscow’s disinformation campaigns on social media. Companies and citizens from democracies have come forward because they believe technology should be used to affirm people’s rights, not abuse them; and that it should empower people to define their own path, not allow others to use coercion and violence to choose that path for them. This brings me to a final point that I want to leave you with, and it’s the reason that ultimately we feel optimistic about democracies’ ability to deliver in a period where technology is once again – as during Thomas Edison’s lifetime – reorganizing the life of the world. For all of the challenges that these disruptive technologies present, no system of government is better equipped to drive the forces that they represent in improving our people’s lives than democracy. We excel at innovation.  We’re nimble. We encourage a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to find solutions. We let the best ideas rise to the top, rather than assuming that the best ideas come from the top. We believe our people have a vital role to play in the ongoing process of making our system better, of fixing its flaws. We embrace vigorous and open debate within and across our democracies. And while we democracies may not be perfectly aligned – we may not agree on everything, on how to proceed, we don’t try to be.  Our willingness to try out different approaches – openly,  transparently – lets us learn from one another, lets us adapt, lets us improve. Indeed, on all four of the priorities that I’ve set out today – using technology to improve our people’s lives in tangible ways, establishing rights-respecting rules for emerging technologies, investing in our innovation, and countering authoritarian governments’ use of digital tools to abuse people and weaken democracies – on every single one of those lines of effort, our success ultimately depends on working effectively together. To pass the test, we have to continue to build and broaden coalitions of allies and partners who share our democratic values, who are committed to putting them at the heart of our shared technological future. Whether they’re in government or civil society, whether they’re innovators or regulators, academics or activists, or simply citizens – we’re counting on them, we’re counting on you, to be part of this collective effort. And in fact, that’s exactly what we see in the group gathered at the Summit for Democracy.  And that’s what gives us confidence that our democracies will not only survive a truly unprecedented period of technological transformation, but – but – shape it to the benefit of our people and to people around the world. Thanks so much for being here.  Thanks so much for taking part in the summit, and I’m now looking forward to a conversation with some colleagues.  Thanks very much, everyone.  (Applause.)  Thank you.   Sources: THX News & Anthony J. Blinken, US Secretary of State Read the full article

[grazhelleanne]

Jose Rizal's Point of View about Education

"Youth is the hope of our future," declared Dr. Jose Rizal, expressing his firm belief in the power and potential of the younger generations all throughout the world. Our young can bring about social change and advance societal conditions. Without a nation's youth, we cannot survive. Additionally, they must participate in order for the country to advance and to meet its objectives.

Rizal argues persuasively for the value of education and calls for reforms to both educational practices and school systems. He contended that the carelessness of the Spanish authorities in the islands rather than the Filipinos' indifference, apathy, or laziness as reported by the rulers, was the cause of his country's backwardness during the Spanish era. According to Rizal, the purpose of education is to advance the nation and cultivate the minds of its citizens. Rizal said that education is the only way to free the nation from dominance because it is the cornerstone of civilization and a requirement for social advancement. Therefore, Rizal's philosophy of education is centered on the provision of appropriate motivation in order to support the powerful social forces that enable education to be successful, to instill in young people an intrinsic desire to develop their intelligence, and to grant them eternal life.

No resource is more valuable than today's young when it comes to shaping the future of the world; this is the generation that will handle future crises, run nations, develop legislation, invent, and either uphold or undermine democracies and justice systems. Critical abilities including decision-making, mental flexibility, problem-solving, and logical thinking are developed through education. In such situations, our ability to make rational and informed decisions comes from how educated and self-aware are we. It teaches individuals how to be better citizens, how to land a better-paying job, and how to distinguish between right and wrong. Education both teaches us the value of perseverance and aids in our personal growth. Thus, by being aware of and abiding by rights, rules, and regulations, we can help to create a better society in which to live.

I draw the conclusion that it has been established that a nation's development is mostly dependent on its people and its resources. However, the ability of the people to use the limited resources effectively in order to accomplish a rapid rate of development and innovations breakthroughs depends solely on them. Education is in charge of molding a person, just as individuals are most important in determining the status of a nation. Therefore, education is the foundation of every nation since it fosters a variety of skills, beliefs, and awareness while also being a key factor in technological advancements. A nation's GDP will expand more quickly and its unemployment rate will be lower if it has a higher literacy rate. Currently, nations deal with a number of problems such as terrorism, discrimination, global warming, poverty, and gender inequality. Everyone receiving proper knowledge would help to solve these issues at their source and create a better nation with higher living standards. It has the power to change a person and give them new eyes with which to view their lives. The awareness that education fosters is crucial for maintaining good health and productivity. It offers solutions to significant issues and has the capacity to eventually get rid of all the worries that people now have. Learning how to transform information into knowledge is crucial for problem-solving and the growth of analytical abilities. A well-educated person is healthy, has a wide range of talents, and is aware of what is best for both the individual and the larger community. Proper education eradicates crime rates, poverty, unemployment, diseases, etc. from the country. Education is everything!

Team, F. G. (n.d.). The Youth is the hope of our future: Youth are the future of tomorrow-fairgaze [1 min read]. Fairgaze. Retrieved February 3, 2023, from https://fairgaze.com/fgnews/the-youth-is-the-hope-of-our-future_274751.html

[burningsoftly]

Just so we’re clear, they want to force people to have children but do not give a fuck about making healthcare for parents and children affordable. Do not give a fuck if those children are killed in school shootings. Do not give a fuck if the teachers of those children are living in poverty. Do not give a fuck if those children will have thousands of dollars in debt if they want to go to college. Do not give a fuck if those children and their families can’t afford housing. And do not give a fuck about stopping climate change which is going to cause even greater problems for those children in the future than it already has.

[bluescluelessly]

Tossing the Script out the Airlock (and Good Riddance to it)

[Rating: Teen] || hurt/comfort, suspected infidelity, polyamorous relationships, made up Stewjoni biology because George Lucas didn’t say Obi-Wan wasn’t a little weird and if he’s gonna give his birth planet a stupid name then I’m gonna give him stupid biology tweaks, and use of Dai Bendu, the language of the Jedi (translations at the bottom of the post)

tw: mentions of grooming (because Palpatine)

Ships: Bail Organa/Obi-Wan, Bail/Breya, Anakin/Padmé

Palpatine tries to convince Anakin that Padmé is cheating on him with Obi-Wan. Anakin confronts his friend about it, finds out a bit more than he bargained for, and not at all what he was expecting to. 

°|●.*•

From the Revenge of the Sith Novelization:

“That’s why I put you on the Council. If the rumors are true, you may be democracy's last hope.”

Anakin let his chin sink once more to his chest and his eyelids scraped shut. It seemed like he was always somebody’s last hope.

Why did everyone always have to make their problems into his problems? Why can’t people just let him be?

How is he supposed to deal with all this one Padmé could die?

He said slowly, eyes still closed, “you still haven’t told me what this has to do with Obi-Wan.”

“Ah, that – well, that is the difficult part. The disturbing part. It seems that Master Kenobi has been in contact with a certain Senator who is known to be among the leaders of this cabal. Apparently, very close contact. The rumor is that he was seen leaving the Senator’s residence this very morning, at an… unseemly hour.”

“Who?” Anakin opened his eyes and sat forward. “Who is this Senator? Let’s go question him.”

“I’m sorry, Anakin. But the Senator in question is, in fact, a *her*. A woman you know quite well, in fact.”

“You–” He wasn’t hearing this. He couldn’t be. “You mean–”

Anakin choked on her name.

Palpatine gave him a look of melancholy sympathy. “I’m afraid so.”

Anakin coughed his voice back to life. “That’s *impossible!* I would *know*– she doesn’t… she couldn’t–”

“Sometimes the closest,” Palpatine said sadly, “are those who cannot see.”

Revenge of the Sith, Matthew Stover, p. 250

°|●.*•

This is it. Anakin is going to just… ask him. He’s not sure what he’ll do if he finds out Obi-Wan has been sleeping with his wife, but…

Well, he’ll figure that out if it’s true.

He went to Padmé’s apartment, felt for himself the evidence that Obi-Wan had been there.

Now, he needs the truth. He needs to be wrong.

“So… I heard you spent a late night with a senator,” he asks, trying not to sound overly accusing. Obi-Wan always gives him the benefit of the doubt.

Several emotions flicker across Obi-Wan’s face then. He eventually fixes his gaze on Anakin, a modicum of panic in his eyes. Anakin’s heart sinks.

The next words out of his old Master’s mouth, however, catch him by surprise.

“You… know about Bail?”

Anakin’s eyes go wide. No, he didn’t–

– but he can’t help thinking he knew it, it was a male senator –

– “Bail?” He blurts out, confusion showing. “No, Palpatine said–”

“– Palpatine saw me with Bail?” Obi-Wan asks, his voice rising an octave.

“No–” Anakin insists, hands going up in a placating gesture. “Not– I didn’t know about Bail. I uh. Palpatine told me he heard you were seen leaving Padmé Amidala’s Apartment.” He explains, and some of the worry drains from Obi-Wan.

“Oh,” he says, sounding infinitely relieved. “No, I, er. Well, I definitely haven’t been making ‘late visits’ to Senator Amidala.” He gives Anakin a curious sort of look. “I hear she’s spoken for, not that I would pursue her, in any case. It would be… awkward.”

“Awkward?” Anakin asks, feeling as if he’s missing something.

Obi-Wan gives a tired sort of smile. “Besides the fact that my preference is not for the fairer sex; she once made an advance, and I turned her down.” Seeing Anakin’s flaring temper, he is quick to clarify, “long before your knighting, Anakin. But, as I said, awkward.”

Anakin nods, appeased. Then, he remembers there’s a more important topic to focus on here. “So… Bail?”

The reaction is immediate; Obi-Wan’s face blushing a dark red as he looks away. “Yes, I– if you could keep that to yourself, I’d appreciate it.”

To hell with it, Anakin thinks. “Sure Master, I’ll keep your senator a secret if you keep mine.”

“The fact that you think your relationship with Senator Amidala is a secret is adorable,” Obi-Wan responds, a glint of amusement in his eye. “Half the council is still asking me why they weren’t invited to the wedding; I can’t give them an answer, as I wasn’t invited either.”

Anakin looks shocked by that information, which is truly endearing. “Wait, they aren’t mad?”

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “You proved to me that you could put responsibility over your wife on Geonosis. Relationships aren’t forbidden so long as there’s not an unhealthy attachment involved. Anyways, we’ve always bent the rules a bit for you.”

Anakin feels as if a weight has been removed from his shoulders. A weight that Palpatine put there, he thinks.

The old man has been wrong about the Jedi on two accounts now… why does Anakin hold what he says about the Jedi in such regard?

Perhaps he should fact-check more of the Chancellor’s absurd claims.

“Ah.” Anakin responds intelligently. “… so why does your, um, thing with Bail need to stay a secret?”

Obi-Wan’s red cheeks return once more. “Well. A… few reasons. Not that I think I’d be in trouble for it, but… I’d like to respect Bail’s privacy. He is, after all, Married.”

“Does Breha not know?”

“She knows,” Obi-Wan assures his former Padawan. “I wouldn’t agree otherwise. But that doesn’t mean they want the whole senate knowing about their … arrangement with me; or others.”

Again, Anakin nods to show his understanding. “The less people who know, the better. Right…”

“Exactly.”

“Still,” Anakin starts, bemused, “I didn’t take you for the 'mistress’ type.”

A complicated flurry of emotions cross his friend’s face. “… neither do I,” he responds, a little clipped. “I think of myself more as Bail’s type.”

Anakin realizes how insensitive that came off a bit too late. “I’m sorry–”

Obi-Wan waves him off. “It’s difficult to understand when I haven’t explained. Bail is Bi; he generally prefers men, but his heart belongs fully to Breha. I prefer men as well, and I have… a condition… so we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement, in which Bail and I enjoy one another while on Coruscant, as he and Breha cannot be together as often as they’d like to be.”

Anakin gets all that, he does. But one thing sticks out to him that he feels needs to be clarified. “You have a condition?” Is Obi-Wan sick?

If its possible, Obi-Wan grows more embarrassed. “Well, I’m from Stewjon.”

That clears nothing up.

At Anakin’s clueless expression, Obi-Wan sighs and explains. “Right, quick biology lesson. Somewhere down the evolutionary line, it was decided that Stewjonians need more incentive to reproduce. So, while it isn’t necessary in order to live out a full, average life span, our bodies naturally produce more beneficial hormones during sexual intercouse. This means, the more I…” he pauses, looking displeased by the verbal corner he’s painted himself into. “… get laid, the slower I age, the faster I heal, and the less sleep I need. All beneficial to fighting a war, yes?”

That’s all news to Anakin. Fascinating. “So do you have… other arrangements too?”

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “As of now, just Bail. I could, of course, visit the lower levels to the same effect, but I find it safer and more preferable to have intercourse with someone I like and trust.” Less likely to catch something that way, too.

Anakin nods, strange mixtures of relief and utter confusion swirling in his mind. At least he knows Obi-Wan has no interest in Padmé… but that doesn’t explain the way he felt his presence in the force, in her apartment.

“Okay. Uh.” He hesitates, knowing there’s no real, good way to word this. “Just… to be 100% clear, you’re not having secret meetings with Padmé in an attempt to overthrow Palpatine and the Senate?”

The look Obi-Wan gives Anakin would make someone think he had just grown a second head.

“… no, wherever did you hear such nonsense?”

Anakin rubs the back of his neck, feeling the last bit of worry ebb away. “Just rumors.”

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Truly, the Senate gossip gets wildly out of hand. I’ll admit, I do on occasion have tea with Padmé, but there’s nothing treasonous about friends visiting one another and trading stories and doing each other’s makeup from time to time.” He pauses. “And while neither of us have very high opinions on Chancellor Palpatine’s term, there’s no plot against him, as far as I am aware. We are both just eager for this war to end, and for him to release his emergency powers so the Republic can return to democracy.”

“You think his rule is undemocratic?” Anakin asks, looking appalled by the idea.

“He’s been in power long past his elected term,” Obi-Wan points out. “A new Chancellor should have been elected already. Over this time, he has used the war to gain far more emergency powers than any one person should hold.”

Sensing Anakin’s impending argument, he continues. “… Of course, this makes it far simpler to fight a war; I simply worry that when the war has ended… he won’t give up his power so easily. He has resisted peace talks, and every other attempt to bring this war to an end sooner. So I… have concerns.” He gives Anakin a tired sort of smile. “But last I checked, he hasn’t yet made it treasonous for Padmé and I to exercise our right to free speech.”

“Of course not,” Anakin responds, sounding distracted. He’s always thought having one person to make decisions was a good thing… or, does he just think that because Palpatine has told him it’s a better idea so many times?

He has many things to question. But, more importantly right now, Obi-Wan mentioned make-up?

Anakin shakes himself from his thoughts, giving his friend a curious look. “Uh. Rewind a second. Did you say Padmé did your make-up?”

“And I did hers,” Obi-Wan answers easily. “We both had dates.”

That would explain why they were, in some cases, sitting closer than friends would; as far as he could tell in the force.

“Bail takes you on dates?” Anakin asks, curious but trying his best not to be pushy about it. This is something new, which he never anticipated learning about his Master… he wants to know more, but as a Jedi with his own secret significant Senator, he understands the secrecy.

“Not all of them are Bail,” Obi-Wan answers after a moment, as if weighing how much he should admit to. “But yes, he does. He’s quite a gentleman really; I do look for other potential partners, but I fear he’s spoiled me for most.”

Anakin can imagine; having a Senator as a partner is pretty nice. “The tea is that good?”

“And the company,” Obi-Wan agree, a crinkle at the corner of his eyes. “I’ll admit… I’m glad you know now. I don’t like keeping secrets from you.”

That warms Anakin’s heart, so much that he doesn’t quite know how to express it, so he deflects. “If you have pictures of yourself in that makeup, you better not keep them secret anymore,” he teases with a grin.

the teasing pulls a laugh from Obi-Wan, who shakes his head. “I don’t; but I’m certain Padmé has plenty. I think she even took a few of us the one time Bail stopped by her apartment to pick me up.”

Oh, he is definitely getting those from his wife later. “So Padmé knows about you two?”

“She introduced us,” Obi-Wan admits fondly. “I don’t share details with her, but she’s a smart woman.”

That she is. “Why am I the last to find out?” He protests, trying his best not to let it come out sounding whiny. 

“Because, my dear padawan,” Obi-Wan starts, gently ribbing him. “You are a dear friend, and an unparalleled partner in combat, but you can’t keep a secret to save your life.”

“I can keep a secret!” he argues! “I swear, Master, no one else will ever know. I only talk to you and Padmé, anyways.” He pauses, “Well, and Palpatine.”

“And he mustn’t know,” Obi-Wan insists, more serious now. “Bail is one of the leading senators advocating for clone rights and peace talks, Anakin. He is a good man. And, he disagrees with Palpatine quite often. I shudder to think what the Chancellor would do with this information, should he find out. I wouldn’t put it past him to use it in an attempt to not only discredit Bail, but to berate the Jedi as well.”

“But neither of you are doing anything wrong,” Anakin states, frowning.

Obi-Wan’s eyes close for a moment. “And it’s not wrong for a system to want to remain neutral and out of the war, yes? And yet, Palpatine did everything in his power to try to strongarm Republic forces onto Mandalore, even rushing a vote 3 days ahead of time, without Satine present, based on a doctored holorecording.”

Anakin doesn’t look at it that way… but he’s not going to argue with Obi-Wan where Satine is involved. Though he now questions how romantic their relationship really was, he knows they were, at the very least, close.

“Just please, don’t tell him, Anakin.” Obi-Wan persists, looking up at his friend beseechingly. “If for no other reason than Bail values his privacy.”

“Of course,” Anakin agrees easily. “Like I said, I won’t tell anyone. I just… nobody really talks to me about Palpatine like you are now. I guess most people know he’s my friend and are too afraid to say anything less than flattering… You’re giving me things to think about.”

“I try to be honest with you whenever I can,” Obi-Wan responds cautiously. “You aren’t a child anymore, and though old habits are hard to break, I don’t want to keep sheltering you as if you aren’t a capable adult.”

“I sense you have more to say,” Anakin prompts when Obi-Wan doesn’t immediately continue.

His friend nods, looking troubled. “I know he is a close friend of yours, Anakin, and one of the few people you knew and liked here, after leaving your home. Which is why I–mistakenly, I think–didn’t object to his interest in you. Initially, I had hoped another friend would make your transition from Tatooine to Coruscant easier… but… well. I find the way he treats you… inappropriate. In some cases, predatory.”

And with those words, Anakin suddenly feels on the defensive. No, Palpatine is his friend, like a grandfather to him. He isn’t… predatory, or–

Obi-Wan’s hands are up even before Anakin can think of a rebuttal. “I don’t claim to know all the details… but the fact that when you were younger, you didn’t feel comfortable telling me anything of your activities on your outings with him says quite a lot, Anakin. And more than that, when I started to suspect something was amiss, and attempted to join you on visits with him, or simply ensure you weren’t left alone with him, he used his position as the Chancellor to strongarm me into backing down. It was… is, concerning.”

And, that’s news to Anakin. He understands why Obi-Wan hadn’t told him sooner, too. He was a headstrong kid; any attempt to protect him, especially from someone he saw as a friend, Anakin would have just taken as Obi-Wan ‘controlling’ him. He knows better now; after years of being Obi-Wan’s equal. But then, it may have just pushed him away, and further from where Obi-Wan could attempt to protect him.

Still, he feels the need to explain himself. “It’s not– He didn’t do anything… like that…” He starts, floundering a little. “It’s just, I didn’t want to tell you, because he took me places I shouldn’t really be going, and I had fun, so…” might as well come clean now, it’s not like he can get in trouble for it anymore. “He used to take me on trips to the lower levels, like, clubs. And he taught me how to make a chance cube land on the side I wanted, so we would find corrupt senators, and cheat them out of their credits. And, Palpatine said he gave the money to charities, so we were doing good things, you know?”

Obi-Wan closes his eyes, and Anakin is reminded of when he tested his patience early on as a padawan, and his Master would silently count to keep himself calm.

He hasn’t needed to in a long time, not since well before Anakin was knighted.

And despite what the action reminds him of, Anakin knows his Master’s temper isn’t directed at him.

“… Anakin,” he starts, tone gentle but tight. “Please, just. For a moment, put Ahsoka in your place. If she was telling you what you are telling me now… what would you think?”

And Anakin’s gut does a flip, because deep down, he already knows.

He… he knows that Palpatine uses him, says one thing and does another, feeds him constant doubt about his friends, about the Jedi…

He knows this, and yet, no one before has had the nerve to say anything even slightly negative about Palpatine to his face. No one has ever dared do anything but say how great his close friend, the Chancellor, is.

Because like Anakin, people are afraid of him.

He feels a tremble start in his fingers, finally faced to acknowledge how afraid he is. How much it terrifies him to know that Palpatine holds all his secrets, that should Anakin ever be less than his enthusiastic friend, he could be ruined.

He, the hero with no fear… is afraid; a frightened boy in the face of a decrepit old man.

And only now can he show it, in the presence of the only person he’s ever known to have the courage to speak up about someone so untouchable.

As if sensing Anakin’s oncoming panic, Obi-Wan interrupts his thoughts, voice kind and sad. “Anakin, dear one, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He moves closer, and any restraint Anakin had breaks.

He feels 9 years old again, lost and seeking comfort in Obi-Wan’s arms. “I can’t say no,” he whispers brokenly. “Master– Jaieh, I’m terrified of him.”

Hearing Anakin call him Jaieh, like he hasn’t since he was young, since it was too hard for him to call anyone ‘Master’ without dredging up bad memories, Obi-Wan accepts Anakin into his arms, no hesitation or holding back.

Anakin needs support right now, needs to know that he isn’t alone in this, that if he asks, Obi-Wan would walk right into Hell with him. “Enoah foh bika, Anakin.” he promises him, reassures him. “Enoah foh mikeelal.”

“Paienoah kodaih bika,” Anakin says, but it comes out unsure, like he’s asking. Like he doesn’t know if he’s accepted, if he’s really not alone in this.

Obi-Wan’s heart aches, and he holds Anakin closer, pressing a reassuring kiss to his temple. “Haj Dai, Anakin. Paienoah kodaih bika.”

Anakin shatters then– or it feels like he does. So many doubts, so many fears, and Obi-Wan bats them all aside with a few words. Words said so easily, words Anakin feared shouldn’t apply to him.

He cries, his earlier suspicions and anger forgotten, absolved now, as he is faced with the truth that Obi-Wan cares for him; that his best friend is his truest ally, that Obi-Wan accepts him and will always accept him.

As he allows himself to acknowledge that Palpatine is a liar and a manipulator, and he is (and always has been) coming up with vile falsities in his attempts to drive a wedge between Anakin and Obi-Wan; the one person he can rely on absolutely.

And through it all, through his tears and his shattered sense of self, Obi-Wan holds onto him; not judgement or disgust, nothing but kindness and acceptance as he carefully picks up the pieces and helps Anakin piece himself back together.

How he could ever doubt Obi-Wan’s character… he would say he doesn’t know, but he remembers. He knows all the little things Palpatine said, all the betrayals he implied, the way he twisted Anakin’s thoughts to see himself pitted against Obi-Wan instead of regarded with him, as he should. They are a team, The Team.

He should have recognized long ago that their accomplishments aren’t a competition, they are an accumulation of the good they can both do, together and apart.

Anakin may be late, but late is better than never, and he recognizes it now, at his lowest and most vulnerable moment. A competitor wouldn’t hold him and build him back up, stronger than before. A friend does that, a friend and mentor and good person.

When he can speak, albeit in a watery way, Anakin wipes his eyes, face still hidden in his Master’s shoulder. “What am I going to do?”

The answer doesn’t come immediately, and that in itself is a reassurance. Anakin doesn’t want unthought-out platitudes, he wants honesty, and preferably, a plan.

“I don’t know what we can do right this moment, Anakin.” Obi-Wan admits. “He is still the Chancellor… and that won’t change until we end this war. But I can promise you this, my dear padawan, you will never have to go see him alone. You need only ask, and I will be by your side. And as soon as circumstances change, I will do all there is in my power to make sure he never comes near you again, Anakin.”

He sniffles, more reassured by the realistic response than he could ever be by promises that can’t be fulfilled.

“Then we’ll just have to try harder to end this war, huh?” Anakin goes for an optimistic tone, hugging Obi-Wan more snugly.

Another comforting kiss goes to his temple. Obi-Wan is frugal with his shows of affection, so it means all the more now that he is giving them so openly. “We will, Anakin.” He promises, and his voice is so steady, so sure, the rock that Anakin can always lean against. “Together, I doubt there’s anything you and I can’t do.”

“Together,” Anakin agrees, a knot in his very soul coming loose. 

Obi-Wan is right. They are The Team, and that isn’t just a title. Together, they can do anything they set their minds to.

They can defeat Sith Lords, they can end a war, and maybe, just maybe, they can even save Anakin Skywalker’s soul from the Devil.

°|●.*•

Dai Bendu Translations

“Jaieh” || ● Simplified Meaning: Master

Literal Meaning

roots: ‘je’- mystic, ‘ai’- mastery, non ownership. so ‘one who is a Master in the ways of the Force’, implying more like a teacher than an owner.

“Enoah foh bika, Anakin. Enoah foh mikeelal” || ● Simplified Meaning: I am here, Anakin. I am with you.

Literal Meaning

Enoah fo - I am (in a permanent state, not transitive) 

bika- here

[Anakin]

Enoah foh- I am (in a permanent state) 

mikeelal - comitative ‘you’/with you.

“Paienoah kodaih bika.” || ● Simplified Meaning: We are here together, now and forever.

Literal Meaning

Paienoah - We are (in a permanent state, and this has implications for the future)

kodaih - Exclusionary ‘We’ - all of us jedi (exclusionary, implying the inclusion of Anakin in the Jedi and alluding to the exclusion of Palpatine as not a Jedi)

bika - here. 

so essentially, “We are jedi, and we are together, and Palpatine is not, and this matters for the future.”

“Haj Dai, Anakin. Paienoah kodaih bika.” || ● Simplified Meaning: Yes, Anakin. We are here together, now and forever.

Literal Meaning

Haj Dai - literally ‘Force Wills’, a reassuring ‘yes’.

[Anakin]

Paienoah - We are (in a permanent state, and this has implications for the future) [italics stress is on ‘are’]

kodaih - Exclusionary ‘We’ - all of us jedi (exclusionary, implying the inclusion of Anakin in the Jedi and alluding to the exclusion of Palpatine as not a Jedi)

bika - here. 

so essentially, “Of course, Anakin. We are jedi, and we are together, and Palpatine is not, and this matters for the future.”

Thanks to @jasontoddiefor @ghostwriterofthemachine for the translations to Dai Bendu, their fancrafted Jedi Language!

[weil-weil-lautre]

Jürgen Habermas may be the foremost intellectual in Europe. Since the 1960s his scholarship has set research agendas in philosophy, sociology, and history, while his newspaper articles and interviews have steered public debates on topics from the memory of the Holocaust to the Iraq War. He may also be the foremost intellectual of Europe, advocating for the continent’s economic and political integration.

In recent years, as that integration has stalled, one might have expected Habermas’s public interventions to gain in urgency. Instead, the opposite has happened: Although he has been as philosophically and politically productive as ever, his work has seemed to lose its relevance. Political developments against which he has struggled for decades, from populist nationalism to the erosion of the welfare state, seem more intractable than ever, while problems on which his political theory has little purchase, such as the growing influence within Europe of an illiberal and undemocratic China, appear ever more pressing. Still eminent in the academy but increasingly marginal outside it, the theorist best known for his notion of the “public sphere,” in which intellectuals influence politics by shaping public opinion, risks becoming the most compelling counterexample to his own ideal.

Habermas’s scholarly work and political commitments are held together by a worldview that expands on the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Yet, since the beginning of his career, Habermas has been shadowed by doubts about whether this vision can apply to politics. He has cast about for cultural resources, from the heritage of the French Revolution to the power of indignation, to generate a popular will in support of his program.

Since the turn of the century, this search has led Habermas to reconsider religion—to be more specific, Western Christianity—as a possible ally. Culminating in his recent Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Another History of Philosophy, 2019), which has not yet been translated into English, his turn to religion is best understood as yet another attempt to overcome an insuperable contradiction at the very foundation of his philosophical project.

The British historian Perry Anderson once defined the task of Marxism after the collapse of hopes for a proletarian revolution as the “search for subjective agencies” capable of overturning capitalism. Habermas’s growing irrelevance suggests that European liberalism has mistakenly committed itself to a similar project of trying to find volunteers for its predetermined goals—and that this project may come to the same bitter end as communist aspirations. His decline as a public intellectual is more than the product of changing cultural trends or unfortunate circumstances that have thwarted some of his cherished causes. It represents the potential exhaustion of the sort of politics that his career embodies.

In his first major book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas already positioned himself as Kant’s heir. As he saw it, Kant had articulated a system of morality in which all human beings should be treated as free and equal. Kant argued that this system is immanent in the structure of rational thought. All human beings, insofar as we think, are capable of becoming “autonomous” moral agents, recognizing independently that the “moral law” should apply to everyone. From this basis, Kant claimed that liberalism, a political and economic regime founded on the recognition of universal rights ensuring freedom and equality, corresponds to human nature—and that its global spread is the trajectory of history.

Inspired by Kant, Habermas nevertheless recognized several problems in his thought. Kant’s concept of autonomy seemed tainted by a defense of laissez-faire capitalism. People cannot really be autonomous, Habermas countered, unless they have a material basis for living independently. In the modern era, this means that they need the support of a welfare state. Since an expansive government, however, can undermine the independence of its citizens, it is imperative that the latter influence decision-making through voting and debate in the “public sphere.” Only with economic security and political participation can individuals see themselves and others as free and equal.

In the following decades, Habermas devoted his scholarly energies to reconstructing Kant’s account of the moral law, which appears to him as implicit in interpersonal communication rather than, as Kant had it, private thought. According to Habermas, whenever one person speaks with another, this person makes claims about what is true and gives what they hope the other person will take to be good reasons for accepting it. Although we often deceive each other, every conversation is premised on the possibility that human beings can come to an agreement guided by reason, without force or fraud.

As Habermas put it in his 1965 lecture “Knowledge and Interests,” every statement that we make to another person is a “foreshadowing of the right kind of life” (one based on autonomy) and a political demand that we work toward a society in which “communication can become, for everyone and with everyone, dialogue free of domination.”

But there is a tension in this theory. Habermas noted in the Public Sphere that Kant claimed that history would bring about a “cosmopolitan order … under which human beings could really get their right.” But, behind Kant’s “official” teaching, Habermas argued, must stand an “unofficial,” esoteric doctrine, in which instead of waiting for the end of history, “politics had first to push” its way there. In order to work effectively toward the goal of autonomy for all, political action would have to be directed by a collective “will,” shaped by intellectuals “giving guidance to the public.” This “unofficial” Kantian doctrine has been the banner under which Habermas has worked as an intellectual, trying to rally Europeans to the goal of autonomy.

Since the 1970s, Habermas has been concerned by two obstacles to this agenda. The first of these is economic. After the crisis caused by the oil shocks, Habermas came to believe that Europe’s nation-states no longer weigh enough in the balance of the global economy to protect the redistributive policies that make autonomy meaningful for ordinary people. In a globalizing economy, he has warned repeatedly, “Keynesianism in one country” is no longer possible. The welfare state must be recreated at a continental scale.

Habermas’s second problem concerns the collective “will” that is supposed to work toward autonomy. In Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1975), he began to argue that such a will could not be located in any of the historical identities—class, religion, nation—that have organized European politics. Rather it should be found in a new kind of “collective identity” that would “no longer be anchored in a backward glance.” This new identity must be, in fact, not only European but universal, available to every human being without exclusion. Just as social democracy had to be extended from particular countries to a united continent, Europeans had to reimagine themselves as members of a common humanity.

This call for a collective identity that includes potentially everyone was a challenge the ideas of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the Nazi and Catholic political theorist who influenced the thought of Hitler’s regime and postwar West German conservatism. Schmitt argued that politics is founded on a “friend-enemy distinction” defining an in-group against a threatening out-group. He further claimed that modern politics is dominated by concepts derived from Christian tradition—a point, he insisted, that applies even to supposedly rational Kantians like Habermas. There can be no viable form of collective identity, Schmitt suggests, without powerful and potentially dangerous shared emotions and an aura of the sacred.

Habermas has often rejected Schmitt’s “clerico-fascist” ideas, with particular fervor in a 2011 article on Schmitt’s concept of the “The Political.” There he argued that liberal democracies neither have nor require a “religious aura.” They are based on “respect for the inviolability of human dignity,” which, he maintained, is a secular concept independent of any “friend-enemy” distinction. Appeals to collective will should be made on this rational, inclusive basis—or none at all.

Throughout his interventions in European politics, however, Habermas has been unable to stick to this formula. He has often called on Europeans to generate a collective will around a shared past, powerful emotions, and values of heroism and sacrifice, which border on the irrational and quasi-religious forces Schmitt saw as essential to politics. These injunctions, at odds with his own theoretical commitments, have been less than coherent intellectually and less than successful politically. They reveal the inadequacy of what Habermas has promoted since the 1980s as the “collective identity” to replace class, religion, and nation for Europe: “constitutional patriotism.”

Habermas developed the concept of “constitutional patriotism” during the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) of the late 1980s. During this period, West German conservative politicians and historians argued that their fellow citizens nursed a morbid sense of shared guilt over the crimes of the Nazi regime. Thinkers like Ernst Nolte insisted that Germans must develop a more positive national identity. These appeals often descended into downplaying the Holocaust, shifting the focus to German victims of Soviet reprisals, and they accelerated a rightward shift in the political culture.

Habermas was the most vocal opponent of this trend, and he cemented his status as a leading figure of the German center-left. Breaking through debates over historical guilt, he argued that his countrymen ought to shift their attention, and their affection, to the West German Constitution of 1949 and the broader European liberal democratic tradition on which it was based. They should find their identity in a “constitutional patriotism” potentially open to all human beings, rather than in positive or negative feelings about their national history.

While the Historikerstreit positioned Habermas as the champion of a post-national, progressive West Germany, he overplayed his hand. As the East German government collapsed in 1989, he insisted that “constitutional patriotism” meant that German reunification must not proceed on the basis of national identity. Rather, citizens from the former communist state should join West Germans to draft a new constitution, so that all could feel united by agreed-upon civic values, rather than their unchosen ethnic heritage. This proposal found little support, a failure that bitterly disappointed Habermas. In an interview given in 1993 (in The Past as Future), he complained that post-reunification German politics was based “vague appeals to national feeling” instead of constitutional values.

Rather than deciding that constitutional patriotism could not serve as the sort of collective identity his Kantian politics required, Habermas shifted focus from Germany to Europe. Since the days of the Historikerstreit, he has argued that Europeans should see themselves as united by the legacy of the French Revolution and should formalize their identity by creating a new constitution for a supernational European state, one that would transcend economic and legal integration to create a democratic policy. This decadeslong campaign seems from the perspective of the present like a larger-scale version of his unsuccessful intervention in German reunification. Both have been dogged not only by the resistance of public opinion and political elites, but also by an incoherent view of history.

While his ideal of collective identity seems to require Europeans to reject what he once dismissed as the “backward glance,” Habermas appeals to the legacy of the French Revolution in terms that echo the radical nationalism of 1789. In an essay written on the eve of its bicentennial (“Popular Sovereignty as Procedure”), he argued that what had begun with the fall of the Bastille was not over, “[r]ather it is a project we must carry forward in the consciousness of a revolution both permanent and quotidian.” The “ideals of 1789” must inspire passionate identification and deliberate action in the present. Otherwise, they “will not take root in our souls.”

With such language, Habermas spoke the language of the revolution’s leaders, who had tried to make the values of human rights and democracy part of what they called moeurs, or social practices and emotional experiences. Their efforts could be violent and illiberal. Creating a new civic religion centered on the rights of individuals and a passionate commitment to the nation led, for example, to the persecution of Catholics.

Although he has shied away from the revolution’s violence, Habermas has often described 1789 as the genesis of modern Europe and argued that a sense of connection to such historical events is vital to the “constitutional patriotism” he favors. In a 2001 talk at Washington University (“On Law and Disagreement”), he said that “citizens must see themselves as heirs to a founding generation, carrying on with the common project.”

It is by no means obvious, however, that citizens of contemporary Western democracies see themselves as heirs of the revolution. As Habermas noted, European countries today are receiving more and more non-European immigrants with different worldviews, creating “divided societies” without a “strong value consensus.” It is doubtful whether young people in Europe today will learn to think of themselves as the heirs of 1789 if they do not come to identify with a culture, nation, or civilization that transmits this revolutionary heritage to them.

In an increasingly diverse Europe, ties of symbolic filiation are fraying. As Habermas’s own emotionally laden rhetoric of inheritances, legacies, and heirs suggests, the abstract civic ideals written into a constitution have meaning for citizens only to the extent that the latter already feel themselves to be part of a community to whom those ideals are addressed. So Habermas’s references to 1789 as a point of identification for Europeans contradict his own political theory—and Europe’s social realities.

No more coherent are his frequent appeals to the collective emotion of “indignation,” which he imagines all of us feel when human dignity is violated. The idea of indignation allows Habermas to imagine collective political action might be possible in the absence of traditional identities. In 1992, for example, after incidents of violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany were answered with mass protests, Habermas wrote to Die Zeit in support of demonstrators’ post-nationalist “indignation” on behalf of newcomers.

But indignation does not necessarily serve liberal, cosmopolitan ends. In a 1963 article in Merkur magazine, Habermas denounced the West German state’s campaign of repression against homosexual Germans, which he saw as fueled by homophobic “moral indignation.” As he insisted that people’s private sexual practices should be protected from the indignation of their fellow citizens, however, he argued that “not all indignation leads to witch-hunts” and that “political enlightenment also requires moral motivations.” But in the absence of shared values about the sorts of practices that our feelings about “human dignity” commit us to defend, indignation carries the risk of degenerating into a just such “witch hunts”—or into impotent moralizing.

The latter was the tone that Habermas struck during the Iraq War, castigating the George W. Bush administration for its violations of international law. He saved his most strident criticisms, however, for European leaders, who were unable to develop a united foreign policy as a counterweight to U.S. power. In a 2003 open letter (“February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together”), he deplored this “shipwreck.” Habermas was to some extent concerned by the split between the historic member states of the European Union and the new members from Eastern Europe, which generally fell into line behind the United States. But he was most animated by the failure of Germany, France, and Italy to turn their diplomatic corps’ outrage over U.S. policy into something more substantive. He was also, however, embarrassed and compromised by his own previous support for NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign in Serbia, which had begun without authorization from the United Nations. He struggled to explain why that apparent breach of international law had been acceptable, while U.S. action in Iraq was not.

Habermas found signs of hope, however, in the “power of feelings” that had inspired millions of Europeans to protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But this indignation could not give force to European foreign policy. Without the orientation provided by shared values and a common identity, popular feelings lack the sustained motivating power to shape elites’ behavior. And the United States is hardly Europe’s worst problem. In recent years, as Russia and China have made their influence felt in Europe, often exploiting the same divisions between Western and Eastern countries on which the Bush administration played, neither the threat of division nor popular disgust for Moscow’s and Beijing’s human rights abuses has seemed effective at moving Europe’s leaders toward a united foreign policy.

The legacy of 1789 and the feeling of indignation are not sufficient to produce the collective will that Habermas sees as essential to the realization of the Kantian ideal. In moments of frustration with the halting progress toward European integration, he seems to recognize this inadequacy, and he calls upon supplementary virtues of “heroism” and “sacrifice.”

However, there is no place for these values in Habermas’s theory. Indeed, he often speaks of them with contempt, associating them with the worst excesses of nationalism. In a characteristic moment, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he scoffed at Americans’ references to first responders as “heroes.” The “connotations” of heroism, he warned, evoke troubling political memories for a German. Quoting Bertolt Brecht, he concluded, “Unhappy is the country that needs heroes.”

Habermas did not recall that in The Inclusion of the Other (1996) he had demanded European leaders make a “heroic effort,” sacrificing their national identities and short-term interests for an integrated supernational polity. Later, in his On the Constitution of Europe (2011) he again summoned Europe’s “frightened” elites to show “courage” and bemoaned their inability to deepen the European Union’s cohesion. Europe is indeed “unhappy” if its future depends on intellectuals’ ability to coax elites into living up to values of heroism that they themselves despise.

The legacy of the French Revolution, mass emotion, and virtuous elites are only some of the incoherent and ineffective cultural resources that Habermas has drawn on in support of his Kantian political ideal. Such resources are supposed to motivate European citizens to forge a common will, while enabling them to break with historical forms of collective identity. None of them, however, seem to function in the absence of the traditions that Habermas intends them to replace. In an implicit admission of this failure, Habermas has turned in recent years to Christianity as another such resource.

In his recent Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Habermas argues—in a version Schmitt’s claims that he once vehemently rejected—that Christianity has been a historical source for many of liberalism’s core concepts. He insists that Christians today can contribute to the liberal project by “translating” Kantian imperatives into religious language and inspiring believers to advance liberal ends.

Much of Auch eine Geschichte can be seen as a quarrel with Schmitt, but also with the French sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). The latter argued that politics is always underwritten by a sense of group identity generated in collective rituals through which individuals unite in a group defined by its allegiance to something “sacred.” A liberal democrat and Kantian like Habermas, Durkheim posited that human rights can only be cherished and defended by citizens who are united by a national identity indistinguishable in its intensity from religion.

Habermas notes that Durkheim called for the “renewal of solidarity” through emotion-generating collective rites, such as Bastille Day parades, in order to rescue liberalism from “the abyss of anomie,” or the decline of binding social norms. Yet, Habermas insists that while Durkheim’s ideas may have applied in ancient societies, they are not relevant today. His turn to religion will not go so far as to admit, as Schmitt and Durkheim do, that liberal democracy must itself be a kind of collective faith if it is to survive.

Habermas’s turn to religion is unlikely to offer a more successful prop for his “unofficial” Kantian politics than his previous appeals to 1789, indignation, and heroism. Even as he invokes Christianity as a means of evoking a collective will, Habermas continues to hold at arm’s length the idea that liberal democratic states must actively generate strong allegiances to a shared identity that is smaller than all of humanity. Instead of calling on the state to foster a form of patriotism more robust and less inclusive than Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal, Habermas appeals to religion, as he once appealed to history or emotion, to supply the willpower still absent in his own system. But the post-Reformation Christianity, filtered through Enlightenment philosophy, that he promotes as a resource for liberalism is already much more culturally specific and less inclusive than he acknowledges. Many Christian theologians, such as John Milbank, reject his instrumental conception of their tradition.

As Habermas reaches unconvincingly for Christianity as another stopgap in his search for a new form of post-national collective identity for Europe, Schmitt’s influence continues to grow. In a 1985 essay on Schmitt, Habermas asserted that his nemesis was unlikely to ever gain a wide readership the English-speaking world. Since the 1990s, however, Anglophone scholarship has been marked by a Schmitt revival, first led by figures on the left such as Chantal Mouffe, whose ideas have also exercised a great influence outside the academy, inspiring left-populist parties in Europe such as Podemos and La France Insoumise. More recently, right-wing imitators of Schmitt’s theologically inflected fascism, such as Adrian Vermeule, have risen to intellectual prominence, and perhaps soon to political influence.

More troublingly, Schmitt has become a major point of reference for leaders of the rising global power. China’s use of Schmittian theory to justify its recent crackdown in Hong Kong has been widely noted, but, as Gloria Davies warned in her 2007 article “Habermas in China,” if Schmitt has taken off in China, this is in part Habermas’s fault. Widely read in the 1990s and early 2000s by reform-minded intellectuals, Habermas sparked outrage when he seemed to violate his own cosmopolitan liberal theory by endorsing NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which infamously destroyed China’s embassy in Belgrade.

Habermas’s most widely read article in favor of airstrikes against Serbia, “Bestiality and Humanity,” was structured by claims that Slobodan Milosevic’s regime was committing crimes against humanity—and by an attack on Schmitt, who had dismissed the idea of crimes against humanity with the phrase, “humanity, bestiality.” Outraged Chinese intellectuals such as Zhang Rulun countered that by supporting the violation of Serbian sovereignty, Habermas was more like Schmitt than he realized. Zhang argued that Habermas had revealed Western liberals, for all their talk of “democratic procedure” and “dialogue,” had no more respect for international law than the “rogue” states they wanted to bomb.

Zhang has revealed a fact about Habermas he has often been at pains to conceal, if not escape: That behind his liberal veneer is an emotional and ultimately irrational heart. But what afflicts Habermas is less hypocrisy than self-denial—a lack of self-knowledge that has made it impossible to avoid a drift toward political irrelevance. What remains to be seen is whether the same is true of Western political culture writ large.

[theculturedmarxist]

The University of North Carolina has rescinded its offer of a tenured journalism professor position to the author of the New York Times '1619 Project' after an intense backlash.

Instead, UNC officials confirmed this week that Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the 2019 series which 'reframed' American history to focus on when the first Africans arrived to Virginia as slaves, will join its faculty this summer with a five-year contract.

That means one of the New York Times's most vaunted reporters who the newspaper has doggedly stood by even as the project has come under withering criticism by historians for its inaccuracies didn't qualify for a permanent appointment.

The university's Hussman School of Journalism and Media had announced late last month that Hannah-Jones had been tapped for its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship. 

The news was swiftly condemned by conservative political groups with links to the UNC Board of Governors which oversees the state university's 16-campus system, according to NC Policy Watch.

Among the loudest critics was the The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, which argued that Hannah-Jones is unqualified for the position because her 1619 Project was 'unfactual and biased'.

The conservative watchdog group said her hiring signaled 'a degradation of journalistic standards, which should deter any serious student from applying to the journalism school'.

The 1619 Project proved a cultural lightening rod, drawing criticism from some historians who said it was a cynical view of American history - and also contained inaccuracies and generalizations.

The backlash over Hannah-Jones' hiring proved fierce enough to cause UNC to dramatically reduce its offer to a mere five-year contract - with the possibility of tenure after that but no guarantee.

A member of the Board of Trustees at UNC's main Chapel Hill campus explained the decision to NC Policy Watch, saying that it all came down to politics.

'This is a very political thing,' said the trustee, who asked to remain anonymous. 'The university and the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors and the Legislature have all been getting pressure since this thing was first announced last month.

'There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.'

'It's maybe not a solution that is going to please everyone. Maybe it won't please anyone. But if this was going to happen, this was the way to get it done.' 

Susan King, the dean of UNC Hussman, called the decision 'disappointing'.

'It's not what we wanted and I am afraid it will have a chilling effect,' King said, according to NC Policy Watch.  

Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor at Hussman, also condemned the controversy over Hannah-Jones' hiring.

'Obviously, they knew the hiring could be controversial,' he said. 'But I think it's all quite silly to be honest.

'Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the most prominent journalists in the United States, frankly in the world, today and [is] doing exactly the kind of work that is necessary to help the US come to terms with its racial history.

'She's an alum we're frankly quite proud of and should be. We've had her in to give numerous talks over the years. Like her work, they've been rigorous, historical, investigative, and it makes a strong and forceful argument for coming to a full understanding of the US's history to move forward from there.'

Hannah-Jones has not publicly commented on the news that she will no longer be eligible for tenure.  

In a statement on April 27, Hannah-Jones said her UNC courses would teach how to write stories that are 'truly reflective of our multiracial nation.'

It's sort of a homecoming for Hannah-Jones, who is a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant recipient. She got a master's degree from Hussman in 2003.  

'This is a full-circle moment for me as I return to the place that launched my career to help launch the careers of other aspiring journalists,' she tweeted on Monday. 'I'm so excited to continue mentoring students from the classroom and for all I will learn from them.'

She said she'd still be at the New York Times where she wrote the 1619 Project, which was published in 2019 as a collection of essays, photo essays, poems and short fiction stories.

She joined the New York Times in 2015 after working at ProPublica, the Oregonian, the Raleigh News & Observer and the Chapel Hill News, according to a release from the school.

Teaching at UNC is a sort of homecoming for Hannah-Jones, who graduated from Hussman in 2013.  

Hannah-Jones became a household name in journalism with the 1619 Project - which was slammed by former President Donald Trump as 'totally discredited' and part of the 'twisted web of lies' that has caught fire in American universities that teach American is a 'wicked and racist nation.'

Trump formed a '1776 Commission' in response to teach 'patriotism.' It released a report this year before being ended by President Joe Biden.

The series 'reframed' American history to have it start in 1619, when the first slaves from Africa arrived to Virginia, instead of 1776, when the founding fathers declared independence from Britain.

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote that slaves laid the foundations of the US Capitol and built founding fathers' plantations. She said the 'relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies' made Wall Street and New York City the financial capital of the world.

'Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they'd been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire,' Hannah-Jones wrote.

'But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage,' she said. 'Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country's history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.'

The project heralded by some and criticized by others, including a number of historians and Trump, who adamantly opposed the idea that it should be taught in classrooms.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz criticized the '1619 Project', and some of Hannah-Jones's other work, in a letter sent to top Times editors and the publisher, The Atlantic reported in December 2019.

The letter, which was signed by other scholars James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes refers to 'matters of verifiable fact' that 'cannot be described as interpretation or "framing''' and says the project reflected 'a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,' The Atlantic reported.

Wilentz and the other signatories demanded corrections.

Trump called it 'revisionist history' and threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that used it.  

Republican lawmakers in a handful of states, including Iowa and Missouri, are continuing his fight to ban it from schools.

Bills were introduced in those state legislatures that would punish school districts that use the '1619 Project' by cutting federal funding.  

A major critic of the project has been The Heritage Foundation, which says it 'has been tireless in its efforts to debunk the radical and anti-American positions taken by The New York Times and the '1619 Project.'

One of The Heritage Foundation's articles pointed out post-publication edits that the Times made, including changing a in Hannah-Jones' leading article in the series to say that 'some of' the colonists fought the American Revolution to defend slavery.

'The editors called this a 'small' clarification, and it was indeed very small, although considering that the 1619 Project's full-throated commitment to demonstrating that American history can only be explained through the lens of slavery, this correction appears nothing short of essential,' Heritage policy expert Jonathan Butcher, a senior policy analyst for Heritage's Center for Education Policy, wrote.

One of the project's supporters, Seth Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown University, wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post that the project 'is a testament to patriotism, not a repudiation.'

Rockman wrote that history is 'an ongoing conversation in which trained professionals and multiple publics wrestle with the meaning of the past' and disagreement is desirable 'as it shows us that something important is at stake.'

He said there are warranted criticisms that 'we should spend our time debating,' for example the project was 'insufficiently attentive' about how the Native Americans lost their land.  

Trump suggested, however, that the project's teachings were dangerous.

'Critical race theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together,' he said, according to the Atlantic. 'It will destroy our country.'

Hannah-Jones, meanwhile, said on Twitter that 'history, in general, is contested.'

'The project unsettled many. I think that is good.'  

[scripttorture]

Is there any evidence for torturers going easier on victims that look like/remind them of people they know (family, friends), or by that point do they lack the empathy required to make that kind of a connection?

I’d say there’s no evidence for or against. So far as I know it’s not something that’s been asked in any consistent fashion. I can think of isolated cases where people mentioned these moments of recognition, but no deeper discussion of whether it effected their actions.

 There isn’t a lot of research on torturers. And that means that the quality of evidence available is… not great. I feel like it’s best to be open about that and work with what we’ve currently got.

 There aren’t a lot of studies. Sample sizes are typically small, Fanon saw two torturers and for a long time he was the only mental health professional who talked about torturers specifically. Part of this is lack of interest/funding. Part of it is low conviction rates. And it probably doesn’t help that a lot of what is out there is untranslated, behind paywalls or both.

 I draw on anecdotal evidence as well as studies because there are lot more interviews with torturers (usually by journalists) then studies. I try to make it clear when I’m referring to anecdotal evidence and when I’m drawing my own conclusions based on the information I have.

 Having said all that: I would say that there isn’t any evidence that torturers lack empathy, or that they have any sort of mental illness before they start torturing.

 For a start the organisations they’re part of actively try to screen out people with mental illnesses or low empathy. They’re seen as more difficult to control.

 Fanon’s work explicitly links his client’s mental health problems to their ‘work’ as torturers. Anecdotal evidence from interviews with torturers and their families/friends consistently describes them as healthy before they started torturing others. This isn’t the same as lacking empathy but it is relevant to the bigger picture here.

 Because one of the other things that comes up consistently in studies and interviews is the way social circles pressure torturers into continuing.

 Torturers create- effectively a sub-culture within larger organisations. Rejali describes it as hyper-masculine and toxic. They seem to primarily socialise with each other and they collectively… feed into this really unhealthy set of behaviours and beliefs.

 They see themselves, individually and collectively, as incredibly important. As doing the ‘real work’, the tough jobs, the things that keep everything else running. They encourage this bloated and deluded sense of self importance in each other. They take an adversarial approach to authority, pitting themselves against management/higher ranked individuals who ‘don’t understand how things really work’.

 But they’re also acting in competition with each other because torture is a zero sum game.

 For insistence: imagine an investigation into a road accident where the car that hit someone is abandoned. Multiple people working on the investigation will all have an opportunity to earn praise/reward for doing a good job. The person who finds finger prints on the steering wheel and the person who finds a witness to the accident are both seen as doing something useful and productive.

 In torture only one person can really be responsible for forcing a confession or ‘getting’ the sort of false information that torture produces. Which means that rather then working together torturers are competing with each other.

 You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with the question. I think the question reflects a completely understandable and normal misunderstanding about why torturers keep torturing.

 My impression is that empathy has very little to do with it because for the torturer it isn’t really about the victims, or at least it’s not just about the victims.

 It’s about supporting their social standing within this toxic sub-culture. And about supporting their own self image, which becomes increasingly wrapped up in the idea that they’re ‘good’ at inflicting pain… something it’s really impossible to be good or bad at.

 They know that if they stop it will be taken as a sign of weakness by their social circle. They don’t want to experience the resulting social censure or sometimes threats and violence. Refusing to torture, or holding back is seen as a betrayal of the group. Which is taken pretty seriously when everyone involved knows they’re committing a serious crime. By this point the other torturers are just about the only people they’re socialising with and since we’re social animals the idea of losing our entire social circle is really terrifying.

 Some of them genuinely seem to believe that brutality will get them the results they want and they frame themselves as going against natural humane feelings for the ‘greater good’.

 Stopping or refusing is more then an individual act of empathy here: it’s a big risk from the perspective of the torturer.

 None of this means you shouldn’t write a torturer choosing to stop, or to be moved by empathy. But I think it’s important to understand it isn’t the only factor at work here.

 These people are stuck once they start. Their social circle, self worth and physical safety are (from their perspective) bound up in continuing to torture.

 And that’s something we don’t tend to see in our fiction. I personally think that this omission really skews the way torturers are depicted; it leaves authors grasping for increasingly ludicrous motivations and personalities to explain ‘why’.

 I’d encourage you to try and get a sense of this toxic sub-culture in your story, especially if you do want to write a torturer having this moment of empathy. Partly because it gives a better sense of the reality of torture.

 But partly because I think it would make for a better story; it gives the decision to stop weight because at comes with consequences and personal risk.

 If you want a more detailed overview of this toxic subculture your best bet is Rejali’s Torture and Democracy.

 I hope that helps :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[torispn15]

Warning long post ahead:

I have heard a lot from the news and from articles today. It can drive you crazy. So, I´m channeling my energy into explaining a couple of things about our (the US) political and economic system. It´s not perfect, as I put more emotion into this post than just straight logic. I have taken a politics 101 course and did a lot of studying and I am using basic common sense and empathy. At first I am talking about the Capitol incident and then it expands into more detail. If you don´t want to read, that´s cool. (I am not really gonna branch out into other countries on this topic. The main focus is the US) Anyways, here it is:

"A political philosophy and movement that is sceptical of authority and rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. Anarchism calls for the abolition of the state, which it holds to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful."

Does this sound like the behavior of the people that stormed the Capitol? No. It sounds like the opposite of what they want. I´ve seen a lot of news networks such as NBC, call the fascists, anarchists. That, above, is the description of anarchism.

Anarchists reject any hierarchy. They, the fascists, want government and they want Trump. So, calling them anarchists is very very not accurate.

"A form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy. They believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties."

Does this sound more like the behavior of the people that stormed the Capitol? Yes. It does. That is the description of fascism.

"A fascist state is led by a strong leader such as a dictator and a martial law government composed of the members of the governing fascist party to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society."

Remind you of anything??

Now, read this:

"Advocates the abolition of the state, capitalism, wage labour, social hierarchies and private property (while retaining respect for personal property, along with collectively-owned items, goods and services) in favor of common ownership of the means of production and direct democracy as well as a horizontal network of workers' councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"."

This sounds way better than the first two, right? This is the description of anarcho-communism. Which is what I, personally, align with most.

What about this:

"An economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics include capital accumulation, competitive markets, a price system, private property and the recognition of property rights, voluntary exchange and wage labor. In this market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by every owner of wealth, property or production ability in capital and financial markets whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets."

This is the description of capitalism, which is what we have now. But, what you have to understand is that capitalism usually leads to fascism. Late-stage capitalism is fascism. One core idea of fascism is capitalism. Which is one of many reasons why it´s terrible. Also, you live here. You know how bad capitalism is. It´s why you can´t afford to buy medicine or go to the doctors. It´s why people die of starvation. It´s not because people don´t work hard enough. There are people who work three jobs who are still low-income individuals and families. It´s because of capitalism. It doesn´t give you any freedom. It is the opposite of freedom. In the "land of the free" we have a political and economic system that enslaves us. Think about that. Think about how much freedom you actually have.

When all of this is put into frame, what are your thoughts? What sounds like a place you want to live in?

The way we are now, the reason why most of the garbage in this country happens, you can connect that to capitalism. You can trace what happened at the Capitol today to fascism and capitalism (Which are basically the same thing).

A lot of Americans work minimum wage jobs. Minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, on average in the US. Assuming you work 40 hours a week, that equals 2,080 hours in a year. Your hourly wage of 7 dollars would end up being about $14,560 per year in salary. Even if you got $15 an hour, working 37.5 hours a week, you would still only make $29,250 a year. $15 an hour isn't enough to secure affordable housing in most US states. Nationally, someone would need to make $17.90 an hour to rent a one-bedroom apartment or $22.10 an hour to cover a two-bedroom home. In order to live comfortably, you´d have to get extra hours or a better job. Extra hours, is just slaving more of your life away to the point where it won´t matter how much money you earn. And it is very hard to get a job. Even if you go to college, you aren´t owed or guaranteed a job. You slave you life away. And none of this takes into consideration family members. None of this takes into consideration any children or people living in the household. You have to struggle all the time under capitalism.

You are in the top 1.8% of americans if you make more than 400k a year. So, no, not everyone or anyone can be rich or live nicely here. America loves to brand itself as a free country and the land of opportunity but, it has shown that is anything but. 30 million people in America, do not have health insurance. Do you know how much medical care costs without insurance? No one should struggle for basic medical care. Every human being deserves the basic necessities to stay alive. Every single one of us shouldn´t have to pay for food or water. We shouldn´t struggle to afford putting food on the table working two jobs while the millionaires and billionaires who sit on a yacht all day, who don´t earn a single cent, never have to worry about that. You wanna know how they make that money, you wanna know who gives them that money? You do. Your hard work and nights away from your family, earns them that money. That is your money. The system is set up for people like that to succeed and keep succeeding. The rich keep getting richer while you stay the same or even lose money. Does that sound fair or just to you? Life isn´t fair, no, but this isn´t life. This is a man-made system that we can fix. We built this and we can tear it down.

So stop being a bootlicker and sucking off capitalism just because there´s a small chance that, maybe, you will get rich. If you´re black in America, you have a 15.1% lower chance of becoming a millionaire than a white person in America. If you are white or asian with a college education, you have around a 20% chance of being a millionaire. But, if you can´t afford college, and you only have a high school diploma, your chances drop to a 2% chance. And most people who are rich in this country didn´t start out with a start-up company and worked hard. No. No. The majority of millionaires and billionaires did either one of these things or all of them:

⬤ Got lucky. By means of gambling, lottery, ⋆cough⋆ making a sex tape and it getting traction ⋆cough⋆...... things like that.

⬤ Scamming someone. By means of ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme, advance-fee scam, credit fraud, identity theft... things of that nature.

⬤ Other illegal shit. By means of embezzlement, hacking, robbing, selling counterfit goods (which can also fall into the scamming someone section), etc... you get the point.

And that doesn´t include being born into money and not paying any taxes as well. It usually doesn´t have shit to do with working hard. If working hard made you a millionaire, a hell of a lot more people would be rich af.

There´s also a lot more factors and circumstances to take into account. Even if I had time to explain, I probably couldn´t because, well, frankly, it´s impossible to go into every factor or circumstance especially since, I couldn´t possibly know every single one. This is a very basic and general post and I tried my best to explain some stuff. (some of the figures and percentages might be off by a percent ot two but, that´s easily searchable)

I do encourage researching, actual research. Because I, nor, anyone on this app are the authority for any topic. Never take anyone´s word for anything, especially not on this app of of all places. Please study and research. When you research, it is very important to check out the websites and sources for too much bias and make sure to fact check, such as comparing it to other websites and sources. Or maybe you could read different books about economics or politics and things of that nature. But, even for books, always fact check and check for too much bias. You can easily fall into traps if you don´t. I just started listening to an audio book titled: Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman. I am trying to learn more about anarchism and other political philosophies as well. I am most certaintly not a "political person" but, I do love to learn and I do love human beings and believe that human beings deserve basic rights which makes me interested in learning about different ways to improve our way of life.

So... that´s it.... I hope y´all have a goodnight/evening/morning! 💛