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whetstonefires · 4 years

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"the top three of its forty floors are filled with brass telescopes of every size, pointing in every possible direction, including several that do not exist within the normal three dimensions of space." thats SUCH a cool image / "If any harvest will come." ooh i wonder whats going on / "The roofs are of red tile, the stucco of the houses painted in shades of blue. It stands empty, but has not had time to fall into disrepair." the little bits of detail getting added to the picture im LOVE (1/?)

I’m gonna do these all as one post but broken up for ease of reference, I think.

Thank you! 🥰 Deciding the theme for the Tower and giving it that visual anchor really helped to pull things together. If you consider the whole setup, it seems unlikely the Tower was originally built as an observatory, since those tend to benefit from height (especially if you’re looking around you rather than up, but for the up ones also) and the builders could easily have put it on top of a mountain or at least some hills, but instead put it by the river. It’s above sea level, and it’s away from light pollution, but there were better locations. Nearby.

So either it wasn’t an observatory, and it’s been refitted as one, or they had so many observatories they didn’t care about locating them optimally, there was some other factor making having the tower there important even if it was suboptimal in terms of observation capacity. Or, potentially, it’s been moved since it was built!

:} Yay thank for being interested by the foreshadowing. I tried to put just enough in without actively overshadowing the actual place-setting-up and making the reader impatient with the description.

"If you look through an enchanted telescope you may see trees without needles fail halfway up the nearest of the great peaks, and even these fail before the top, though there is a span of nearly barren stone past that line, before the snow begins." you: mentions different plants living in different climates me: :0 / there's so much good description!! its all so pretty!! (2/?)

sflka;l;jlk i mean yeah, that’s pretty straightforward isn’t it. But! It establishes How Much Mountain it is visually rather than by saying ‘it was a big fucking mountain’ or ‘it was tall enough for the thinness of atmosphere near the top to create a small tundra region.’

o(*￣▽￣*)ブ

<3 Thank you! I kinda cut loose lmao.

"blocks veined with every color, pale blues and purples, reds and greens and golden-duns all mottling toward white and grey and black" god i want to live there so badly!! this tower is meeting all my standards!! cool pretty magic tower with rad telescopes!!! / "make a remark no one present understands about a Doctor named Seuss. His guide, the dousing tracker Amnaphi, will assume this person to be a famous astronomer from his homeland." im love!! misunderstandings about references!! (?/?)

💗💖✨ Yay! That’s an important feeling to create in fantasy, imo. The wanting.

I really enjoyed playing with the standard forms for ‘thing made of marble’ here, because all these marbles really exist, but in spite of the existence of the word ‘marbled’ our narrative uses of it tend to be tied up with Neoclassical aesthetics. So very white and smooth, yeah?

Also idk if it’s obvious to the reader but this Tower is to some degree in dialogue with Orthanc, which made a great impression on my mind as a child as the iconic wizardly tower, and while I don’t disagree with any of Tolkien’s use of symbolism for the purposes he was deploying it, there’s so much potential in Isengard as a setting that LotR had no space to explore, even if Tolkien would have noticed those angles at all.

Like...the parkland around the Tower is shown being despoiled for the orcish war machine and then reconquered by the forest, but of course it wasn’t forest to begin with. What was it for before Saruman lost his shit? Ordered gardens, for peaceful contemplation? Who dedicated the space that way? Who maintained it?

Did Saruman employ a gardener? Did he design his own gardens, or did they come with the keep, which we’re informed was built not by him but by the Numenoreans?

(“I liked white better” is still one of the greatest lines in a fantasy novel, Tolkien does not get enough credit for his contextually hilarious one-liners that rely on pointed code-switching, but Saruman’s evil rainbow oil-slick robes also sounded really baller and it’s kind of a shame they were not attempted for the movie lol.)

The fact that this is a world designed around a kid getting portal-fantasied into it and staying for 30 years really gives me some options which are fun to deploy but also like. Risky lmao. Because it encourages the reader to surface from the setting-logic and apply their own perspective, which can really break up the magic.

Being able to zoom out on the Tower after all that detail and be like ‘it’s awesome but also it looks like something Doctor Seuss would draw’ was fun though.

"Within the even hexagon of its outer wall, the Tower encloses a great parkland, enough that if it was all put under cultivation it could easily feed as many people as could live in the Tower itself." the tower has PLANTS i love it so much / "Ten Years’ Winter" god PLEASE tell me this is going to get into the agriculture and society stuff game of thrones didn't about long winters that would be SO cool / "Watchers of the Stars" AND they have a cool name holy shit (?/?)

Plants are important! As is food supply. As everyone who’s been reading this blog for a while already knows I think lol.

I mean, it’s not about that, really? The Ten Years’ Winter is a historical event--the most recent meteor impact severe enough to have global climate fallout. The dust it kicked up took a while to settle, and the famines were pretty severe.

But the cultural consequences of something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago exist, and are important, including the relationship between governance and disaster preparedness, which varies a lot regionally as you may imagine.

Astronomy has a long history as a wizardly sort of activity in the real world, both because it’s had continual overlap with astrology and just because the process has always been mystical and abstruse. In this setting, with a history of both devastating meteor impacts and being invaded from the Moon, but also actual magic, it’s got more obvious practical importance. Although since neither of these are remotely everyday occurrences, the average person on the street might not agree lol.

So it’s on the one hand a purely descriptive title, and on the other hand a serious boast, suggesting as it does that they are primarily responsible for Watching The Sky For Stuff. While also having broader philosophical implications and just sounding nice lol.

You gotta have good marketing if you want to persist as a wizardly order, because if talented students aren’t motivated to come to you how will you gain new members? Natural replacement is not an ideal strategy to say the least. That’s how you turn into a cult instead of an intellectual powerhouse.

"The northern third of the Tower’s park contains neatly regimented orchards, apples, pears, plums, and a few rows of carefully tended peaches and apricots, all clipped flat against low brick walls angled south and slightly west." hhh t r e e s / "wizards, while enthusiastic about innovation in the abstract, hate change." me too, wizards. me too / "The Tower grounds are filled with refugees." ooh now we get to why everything was empty earlier (?/?)

Trees! Which are also food!

And technology lol. Greenhouses built against fruit walls with good insulation are so much more sensible than ones heated from inside. Obviously as a passive solar-powered technology these only work when the sun is available and not, for example, cut off by a giant dust cloud.

These people are fairly acutely aware of their dependence on the sun and it figures prominently in a majority of their religions and their magical theory, even more than in ours.

There seems to be a mild consensus that the wizards are relatable. In truth: we are all wizards. :D

Yup! At long last lol.

"This division corresponds imperfectly to the usual split of the town by the course of the Meroda." because people!! take comfort!! in what normalcy they can find!! / "Makeshift pallets line the spaces between every fruit wall—the injured are being laid out here, now that the Tower is full, to get the benefit at night of the warmth meant to mature fruit." the awesome magic tower people trying to do everything they can for the injured who come to them for help in case i thought i couldn't be (?)

more in love / "Half of them are making ready to turn south along the Meroda." oh nooooo / "but the Moon People are the successors of the ancient magics, and just because they could not break the walls the last time they came, according to legend, does not mean they have not worked out a method now." im so worried for the people oh no (?)

Yeah! It really seemed natural. But of course they also aren’t recreating it obsessively; lots of people are grouping up with relatives who normally live across the river, or with people in the same line of work on the river, because people also adapt to circumstances.

No institution is ever perfect, of course, but I’m glad the Watchers have come across this way so far. They’re broadly well-intentioned and mostly well-organized.

And they were not ready for this.

A significant fraction of the reason for the order of the Watchers to exist at all, particularly in this observatory with its great eye fixed ever on the face of the green moon, is to be able to warn the world if this ever happens again. But the Moon People knew they were being watched, this time, and they kept all the build-up to mobilization that might have given them away on the far side of the moon until the last minute.

What the Magister is doing, as I hope was made clear or at least successfully indicated--I wish your commentary on the ending had come through!--is summoning what turns out to be an actual child from another world to do hero stuff.

Even if he’d gotten an adult that would be kidnapping someone to help with your problems, a routine element of the portal fantasy whose ethics have been addressed in a variety of ways, most famously ‘is Lion Jesus and always right.’

The reason they need a hero from another world is that the Moon People build a lot of their wards and their offensive and disabling magical attacks around a targeting system based on what planet people are from, because even though they’re originally from the same stock--they’re the descendants of ancient moon colonists who evacuated ahead of a major meteor impact somewhere approaching four thousand years ago--on a magical level having been born and raised on the planet or the moon makes a pretty huge difference.

So no one can get into the place their magic space elevator is anchored and fuck it up so they can’t keep bringing troops and supply in and loot out. Their single supply line is their only strategic weakness, and they’ve taken appropriate precautions.

Getting someone in from a third location is the best idea anyone’s been able to come up with in the very limited time available. Since no one can figure out how to turn one of the Moon People against the cause they came here for, on short notice, when they aren’t even stopping to talk to anyone so far. Like, that’s clearly not going to happen.

Heron Yl Fanult isn’t unaware that it’s ethically questionable, but he’s doing it anyway.

So I’m glad the ominous imminent oncoming of the Moon People can really be felt, because that atmosphere is fairly essential context for the decisionmaking going on at the top of the Tower.

"Young wizards sit in their bunks, six each to rooms that were previously individual, and hold lighting cupped dancing in their palms." a quick break from being worried to point out that this is rad as hell / "some with their heads decorously covered..." cultural differences!! especially with regional purposes like the Hedro!!

Thank you! 😆💖 I thought so too lol.

It also establishes the parameters of the magic system a little more. Throwing lightning bolts is pretty iconicly high-powered, right? And here it’s what most of the student wizards are practicing in anticipation of a battle, because most of them aren’t specced into combat and this is actually one of the easier lethal spells to master, especially if you have an academic background.

‘Electrocute’ isn’t a very flexible spell and it’s easy to lose control of, but it’s actually easier than, say, ‘set on fire to a significant degree in a non-electrical manner’ because concentrating a lot of heat in a certain location takes a lot more brute force than encouraging ionization.

You can pull most of the actual destructive force for the palm lightning spell out of the physical air and/or earth if you grasp the principles, which is much easier than channeling a comparable amount of magic directly because it doesn’t have to go through you.

The limiting factors on magic in this setting are how much power you can tap into and how much of it you can actually use without hurting or killing yourself. It’s not usually a lot, though the amount can be increased by things like choosing your workspace, prepping your workspace, and a whole lot of practice and meditation and things like that.

Magical traditions that get bundled under the heading of wizardry tend to focus on force multiplication, obtaining enough contextual understanding of a subject to make whatever power is applied go further. This means a lot of studying theory and using magic to make observations (such as the existence of microorganisms and their connection to disease) and often results in making clever devices based on what you’ve learned that may not actually wind up being magical at all.

Which is why the solar greenhouse proposal is considered ‘more wizardly’ than the fruit walls, which are wizardly in the first place even though the technology is pretty widespread at this point--it’s carried the principle of minimizing the energy you have to invest to get the result you want to the logical conclusion, where you don’t have to do any magic at all, you just set up the situation and get out of the way and the sun will do the work for you.

Other schools of magic, particularly religious ones, are more likely to emphasize just getting better at handling energy for yourself, which tends to yield a lot more in the way of immediate practical dividends and in a lot of quarters wizards who don’t do something obviously practical like physic or smithcraft with their theoretical background are considered crackpots or dilettantes

An impression helped along by the fact that being taken on as a student of wizardry at a basic level tends to focus more on your reading comprehension than your ability to actually do any magic, so in places where religious and wizardly institutions coexist the most talented students have a tendency to gravitate toward the religious life. This is particularly marked in areas religiously dominated by the Compact of the Golden Circle, wherein full ordination is contingent on being able to pull off certain fairly hefty rituals, so if you aren’t physically or mentally up to that kind of magical heavy lifting your religious career will stall out in one of the lay fraternities. In some of the cities on Sutouchel, the landmass to the southeast where the Compact is based, a slang term for wizard is ‘sanctum washout.’

But of course force multiplication is something that can scale up pretty far, and studying theory doesn’t stop you from also putting work into your practical skills, and not having talent isn’t the only reason someone would choose not to seek out a clerical career, if it’s even an option. Religion along the Meroda is pretty localized; communities tend to have local deities who correspond to a natural feature like the nearest mountain or the river or something, and if that deity rates a fulltime shrine the keeper also tends to be the major local medical provider, and since the wizards got settled in at the Tower it’s become pretty popular for shrinekeeping families to send their kids there for a year or two to get some educational polish in addition to what their parent already emphasized.

So depending on where you live and what your personal experience has been you’re going to have very different ideas about what wizards are good for.

Hrm. I’ve gone on a tangent. But that wound up taking so long you came back! :D I love it when being turtle works out in my favor.

Or was this actually the meta I was supposed to be doing in the first place? Aaaaa who knows.

im fairly confident you said eight asks survived so this is number nine? anyways onwards! "The hale survivors of the First Battle of the Second Descent sit waiting in their leathers, jack-chains and helmets laughably inadequate armor against the coming danger, and yet the best hope now just as they were on Carun Tol once the wizard fell" i have a lot of emotions about how their best bet is also a terrible bet but its all they have (9/?)

Yes 8.

Woo, thank you! ^^ & I love that you described it that way because that also describes the ‘summon alien’ spell Yl Fanult is casting and echoing the same emotional theme throughout the scene was very much the goal here.

"Threads have escaped from the braids pinned across the top of her skull: she has not had the chance to take them down for two days." god just the continuation of how desperate everything is / "He leans forward to peer through the narrow glass that has been turned on its articulated base to face the middle of the room, and relaxes very slightly. At least there has been no catastrophic alteration there, either." what does that one do id assume theres no approching army in the middle of the room -

:D Yeah, the fact that one of the chief medics available is already overworked to the point of neglecting nonessential personal hygiene and the enemy isn’t even here yet I hoped would resonate.

Well, remember how some of the telescopes at the beginning point in directions not included in the normal three dimensions of space? :}

- "trained as it long has been upon the face of the moon" also forgot to mention their enemies being from the moon is Rad As Hell / "He snaps his fingers for a spark that falls into the deep circular groove full of distilled spirits, and steps through that as well. He is not burned." ooooh whats he doing / "At his feet lie a glittering piece of gold ore, a moonstone, and a carefully sanded round of pumice." i see the connection to the moonstone bc moon army but i wonder about the others -

Thank you! It took a fair amount of poking before I decided it was a solid approach; it provides just enough physical alienation that there’s no direct cultural relationship and you can have that ‘everyone in the entire world Disliked That’ vibe, without needing to create any complicated magical and cultural explanation for such a long run of isolationism. They were out of contact because they were On The Moon.

Also I really get a kick out of putting space invaders in a fantasy setting in a way that stops just short of turning into sci-fi.

I’m glad the ritual lead-up is exciting! Even if the foreshadowing wasn’t as obvious as I thought it was lol. That’s fixable.

Gold is for the sun, moonstone is yeah for the moon lol (although in other circumstances people also use jade, because it’s been a long time since the moon was uniformly silver on account of it having been terraformed a few thousand years ago) and pumice is for the world--it’s a stone full of air that floats on water, so it’s popular as an anchoring device for rituals that call on all three local celestial bodies.

"He cannot take much time. He has only until the ring of fire dies." whats he doingggggg / anyways i love this so much!! the descriptions are gorgeous and im so invested in all of everything!! i hope you write more im so curious about it all!!

XD Ok I covered this already, I would have saved it for down here or Been Mysterious if tumblr hadn’t eaten the last few asks the first time lol. Thank you so much again! For encouragement! Before and now! I’ll try! To keep it going!

Here’s hoping this successfully posts, tumblr just kicked me onto New Dashboard again and disabled the turn-it-off button, so now my alternate posting strategy is borked up too. 🤞😅😘

#hoc est meum #ask #worldbuilding #a nonny mouse #the tower of sight #people say nice things #long post #<3

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did-you-reboot · 5 years

Text

Saudade: Chapter 17: Hydaelyn

This chapter of Saudade has a lot of zalgo’d text in the AO3 post because I gotta be artsy fartsy and make it aesthetic, but you can read it un-zalgo’d after the cut. : )

Sysogrant had been overrun by the monstrous, terrifying beasts in spite of everything they had tried, and they had tried everything they could in the short amount of time they had. They had captured one and sent it back to the Akadaemia for study, but it was soon undeniable that nothing short of brute force was going to vanquish the terrors. Athena had sent for the Third and Fourth Complements to clear them out of the city, and for a short while they held the creatures at bay; just as they grew comfortable, however, a larger one emerged, one more monstrous and more powerful than anything they had yet seen.

They felled it at the cost of the entire Third Complement. And even then, their sacrifice hadn’t been enough: when it became clear the city was lost, Sysogrant’s leaders had urged the Convocation to flee—to survive that they might save others. The Convocation made a hasty—humiliating—shameful—heart-rending retreat back to Amaurot, and it was there that the entirety of the Convocation now gathered.

Lahabrea had suggested gathering the Convocation at the Akadaemia rather than their formal assembly chamber in the Capitol, no doubt to have researchers within immediate reach. There, they discussed with increasing urgency the fall of Sysogrant and their options to protect Amaurot and its citizens. The beast they had captured had already yielded useful but troubling information—Lahabrea suspected they were wrought of fear and dread—

Her wound, too, yielded troubling information; it had somehow penetrated far, far deeper than the mere physical—there was a deep ache that seemed to pierce through the surface of her soul. Neither she nor Halmarut nor Igeyohrm could mend the wound nor her eye, and though the bleeding had stopped, it remained open and developed a disturbing purplish sheen. When the meeting was suspended to afford the Convocation a moment of rest, Athena found herself in the Akadaemia infirmary where her face played host to the ministrations of the researchers as they tried to make sense of what the beasts had done to her.

There were a myriad of uncertainties about what the beasts had done, but one thing was clear: there was to be no easy recovery if one was wounded in fighting them.

Finally, when the researchers had finished all their poking and prodding and swabbing, she wearily sent them away to find the Fourth Complement, that they might poke and prod them and gather more information from their wounds. Igeyorhm, though, insisted that Athena spend the night in the infirmary to allow some time to monitor the wound, and though she ached to sleep in a familiar bed, she relented.

Hades sat quietly at her bedside with her hand in his as he gently ran his thumb over her knuckles. He remained silent but they hadn’t any need to speak—she felt the entirety of his worry and dread and sorrow and pulled them close so as to share the burden.

And what, really, could be said?

=====

“If we evacuate those who cannot fight, then we may stand a chance. We secure safe zones and form an evacuation plan for the citizens, and then we may fight the beasts as they come without concern for casualties. We fight them with our full strength, and we fight without concern for damage. We fight together—we can do this together.”

Athena cast her eye around her peers, and found all of them bearing some level of doubt and uncertainty.

“To put our people in danger as such...” Emmerololth murmured, a frown on her lips.

“We cannot merely evacuate—we must fight if we hope to have any chance of survival,” Athena said hotly. This argument had been going in circles for nearly a day now, which was taking away what precious little time they had to prepare a full-scale evacuation plan for Amaurot.

Mitron scoffed. “Your words have been naught but lofty ideals better suited for childrens’ bedtime stories!”

She bristled with indignation and made to speak when Lahabrea held up a hand to stop her.

“Enough, Fandaniel. These beasts have emerged from Creation itself, and it is small-minded and pure folly to expect to save our star with brute force.”

“It is not merely force that beats them back! You didn’t fight them—you didn’t feel it! It’s facing—”

“And look what you have to show for it!” Nabriales interrupted. “An unmendable wound, and the blood of the Third Complement on your hands. You would have the blood of all of Amaurot?”

Athena was nearly shaking with rage. How dare he—how dare he—

“I said enough, Fandaniel,” Lahabrea warned.

The silence felt as a thread on the verge of snapping; Athena felt the entirety of the Convocation staring her down—she felt their judgment and their scorn burning into her—

Hades’s voice cut through the tension.

“We must needs rewrite the laws of Creation itself to rid the star of this blight.”

=====

“The nuance is all wrong! It won’t work how you want!”

Athena paced furiously back and forth across the small seminar room where she and Hades were spending the recess whilst Lahabrea addressed the general public and relayed to them the grim news. They were both frayed by the approach of the beasts and the need to enact a plan—more cities were falling, and they couldn’t send aid without thinning their resources to save Amaurot...

“And what would you know about nuance? You merely mend that which already exists!”

She stopped in her tracks and looked to Hades, her mouth agape. The stress was getting to him—it was getting to all of them—but he had not once spoken to her with such a pointedly patronizing tone.

“How could you say that, Hades? Have I fallen so low in your eyes?”

“Your idealism will only ensure the downfall of this star.”

“They are made of fear, Hades! Fear that we as a people have pushed out of mind! You felt it—you felt it! To face them—if we face the fear—”

“Has that wound driven you mad?” Hades asked in disbelief. “You are of the Convocation—you are smarter than this, Athena!”

=====

The Convocation had all but stopped listening to anything Athena had to say.

They meant to summon a god.

They meant to summon Zodiark.

They wouldn’t hear her pleas about the nuance—they meant to sacrifice half their population to summon a god, with all the baggage which would come along with it—and though she could see that Halmarut, Igeyorhm, and Loghrif shared her misgivings, they had obviously concluded that Zodiark was their best option…

“If you will not stand with us, Fandaniel,” Elidibus said after Athena’s latest attempt to interject, “then you may vacate your seat. We have reached consensus, and we proceed with or without you.”

=====

During another recess, she had gone to check the Bureau and found Euneas waiting in her office, biting his nails in his worry.

“Is it true? Are you resigning?” The words tumbled out of his mouth before she could even express surprise at his presence.

Athena sighed and bowed her head.

“What do you think of their proposal, Euneas?” she asked.

“I don’t often doubt the Convocation, Conservator, but...” He trailed off and shifted uncomfortably. “My personal opinion is that the entire idea is mad.”

“As is mine. But they proceed regardless.”

“The Bureau stands with you, Conservator,” Euneas said firmly. “There will still be half the city in need of protection, and we can’t do it without you. Fandaniel or not.”

=====

“I’m begging you—this is a mistake! To create something so far removed—”

“Athena! Your arguments have already been found wanting!” Lahabrea snapped, slamming his fist on the lectern. “If you do not stand with us, then it is time you left.”

The sound of her name on his lips was wholly unexpected and felt as a punch to the gut—she was so startled by the brazen disrespect that she could only stare in stunned disbelief.

For Lahabrea to drop her title…

It was clear he no longer considered her of the Convocation.

She looked to Halmarut and Igeyohrm, their eyes carefully averted—

She looked to Loghrif, his head bowed—

She looked to Hades, sitting motionless and impassive—she knew he could see the plea for help in her soul—she knew he meant to continue, whether or not she came along—

She raised her fingers to her mask and slowly pulled it from her face.

“Then I hereby step down from the seat of Fandaniel of the Convocation of Fourteen.”

And as she set her mask on the table, she looked to Hades one last time in the hopes that he might object—

His silence was all she needed to know.

=====

The star was breaking apart—great chunks of earth had lifted from the surface and the purplish void of the end spread across the sky and it flashed with otherworldly hues as it cracked and cracked and cracked—

Her people had saved who they could but half of Amaurot wasn’t enough to push it back—they could not hold the city together—they could not hold the star together—alone, it was too much to grasp—alone, they could not hold it—alone, they never could have—

An ear-shattering shriek rent the air—rent their bodies—rent their souls—

It seemed to rend reality itself—

And from everything and nothing a form congealed in the shattered sky—

From everything and nothing, somehow both infinite and infinitesimal—

From everything and nothing, Zodiark took shape and reared up in the sky—

There was another soul-rending shriek and the star churned and twisted—the gaping cracks of their doom hidden and obscured as the shape of reality knotted a million times over—

There were screams from her people and from the beasts and from the very star itself—

And then there was silence.

=====

The land was dead

The land was dead and their magic could not breathe life into it

The land was dead and they faced a new kind of doom

The land was dead and they turned once more to the god towering over the land

and she watched as another half offered their lives

and she watched as Zodiark took them

and she cried

she cried

=====

A new sort of life emerged

They were a grotesque facsimile of what life once was—they were small, misshapen, weak—

They were terrified by this sudden existence but they tried to survive because it was all they knew—

They fought and stole and killed and hurt and cried and helped and cared and loved—

It wasn’t their fault

=====

She and her people tried to limit their interactions with the life born of Zodiark—she found they were often sweet and gracious when treated as such but their adoration of the Amaurotines made her uncomfortable—

Regardless, she and what remained of her Bureau tried to keep them safe from the dangers born in Zodiark’s new world

They deserved that much, didn’t they?

=====

The Convocation was not happy to rest with the life given to them by their Lord—

They wished to return their sacrificed brethren, and they meant to offer the life now thriving on the star to the Lord who had already taken so much—

She and those of similar mind protested—it wasn’t fair to take them—it wasn’t fair to raise them for slaughter—

And for once their people stood divided

=====

She couldn’t reach them—they wouldn’t listen—they spoke to her as they spoke to her the day she stepped down—

Within her, they saw what could have been—within her, they saw extinction—

They saw an extinction which was averted by the grace of their Lord—

And eventually they wouldn’t speak to her at all

=====

It wasn’t long before she and her followers were unwelcome in the city

They left to live elsewhere, though she and what remained of her Bureau had contacts who could keep them abreast of the Convocation’s plans, and a question soon loomed over them—

Were they turning their backs on their people by fighting to protect those lives being raised for harvest?

=====

She leaned back against a tree along the edge of a cliff, breathing in the mountain air—it didn’t smell quite right but it was still calming in a way—it was the closest she could get to calming these days…

“Athena.”

It had been years and years and years since she heard her true name—she quickly turned and peered around the tree to see who dared to utter it.

Her heart all but stopped in her chest.

“Hades,” she breathed.

It was Hades—his shape and his face and his soul—

But it also wasn’t.

Though he yet bore the mask of Emet-Selch, his robes were not the familiar robes of the Convocation; sinister spikes adorned his shoulders and long, pointed claws extended from his fingers—

She had suspected there was something odd about the Convocation, and here—the closest she had been to him in years and years and years—she could see that within him there was something else—something unfamiliar—something wrong—

And yet the sight of him reminded her of the profound ache within her—though she felt a deep hurt whenever she thought of him, she had still deeply, deeply missed him—

He approached, slowly but not hesitantly.

“How did you find me?” she whispered when he stood before her.

Her heart was pounding in her chest.

“I received news that you were in the area, so I came to search for you.”

He brought a clawed hand to his mask and pulled it away, and she felt a pang in her chest at the sight of him, at the sight of his eyes—he was so weary, so much wearier than she had ever known him—and in his eyes, she could feel the something else hovering just beneath the surface…

And he brought his hands to her cheeks and gently pulled her close—she had so longed for his touch and couldn’t bear to resist—he pressed his forehead to hers and they both exhaled at the feel of each other—hesitantly she reached her soul to his to feel the bond they had once shared—

There was something else—there was something else—it was subtle and it was dark and it was insidious and it felt wrong within his soul—

She yelped and recoiled from his hands, her eyes wide with alarm. Hades looked hurt by this—he looked hurt and it was heart-wrenching to see and feel his despair but there was something else—

“What was that?” she asked, her brow furrowed.

He seemed confused by her question.

“What was what?”

Dread filled her. She didn’t know how to tell him about the something else or if it was even safe to do so…

When he realized that she wasn’t about to elaborate—that she couldn’t—he held out a hand toward her.

“Come back with me and stop this madness, Athena. Stand with us,” he said. His expression softened, and there was a glimmer of hope in his tired eyes. “I would be better for your presence.”

His face slowly fell as her silence only continued.

“Soon, the star will be ready and we shall have our people back—all who gave their lives to save our star,” Hades said. “All will soon be as it was. We can do it together.”

She stepped back with a shake of her head.

“No—no, I can’t support that. I won’t.”

A shadow of resentment colored his face.

“That flawed life is unworthy of our star,” he said.

“They live, and they are worthy,” she said, clenching a fist. “We’ve lost so much to Zodiark already and I’ll not allow them to be taken so long as I still stand.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You would protect them over the return of our friends? Our loved ones?”

“They don’t deserve what you’re going to do to them.”

He looked disgusted by her words.

“They are hardly worth your consideration—they are hardly worth consideration as life at all.”

In this moment, she could see she would not be able to sway him—

In this moment, she could see the something else—

In this moment, her heart split—

“It won’t work the way you want, Emet-Selch.”

=====

She and what remained of her Bureau—only twelve of them now—desperately considered their options—

To fight the Convocation would be to draw the ire of their people

To fight the Convocation would be to draw the ire of the god they served

And then they wondered—

If they meant to throw their lives away in the end, they wondered if they might fight Zodiark Himself

=====

The Convocation began their prayers sooner than expected, and the only plan they had which had any chance of succeeding was to fight fire with fire—

She and her twelve wept as their followers offered up their lives—

She and her twelve wept as they prayed with a nuance clearly in mind—

They wept as they prayed not for a god but for strength which would allow them to stand against one—

They wept as they prayed not for a god but for the strength to stop Zodiark—

They wept and their tears glimmered as the souls of their friends dissolved along with their whispered goodbyes—

And there was a soul-rending shriek—a shriek of many voices that soon merged as one—

From everything and nothing, their strength emerged—

From everything and nothing, the answer emerged—

From everything and nothing, Hydaelyn emerged—

They wept as they marched for Zodiark under Her Light—

They wept as their souls glimmered and shone as one—

And Zodiark and Hydaelyn clashed—and they clashed—and they clashed—

And the thirteen of them leapt in to fight when the Convocation tried to help their god—

And with each blow to Zodiark, reality twisted and rippled and distorted and was soon too unstable for them to even see who was who—

And soon they were desperately trading blows with indistinct dangerous shapes and they knew not if the blows were even reaching—

And there was a horrific scream from the depths of everything—

Shapes slipped between the folds of reality into the space between—

And reality cracked

And reality splintered

and with one last blow

reality itself was sundered

#rebootwritings #fanfic #ffxiv #ffxiv spoilers #shadowbringers spoilers #long post

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rem289 · 6 years

Text

Response to (idiotic) accusations made by some people against me and especially Aoimotion

(which is why I have to waste time writing this stuff)

Hi guys,

Here I am again, with a "small" update of the journal published a few days ago here on my blog in response to an offensive, derogatory and defamatory post that unfortunately has been circulating for a month without the direct interested, I and above Aoimotion , being aware about it, as we weren’t intentionally mentioned, so we were denied the right to reply.

Of course I took care to reply immediately after discovering it, telling our version of the facts. But the post was soon removed, so all I could read were four short comments left by the owner of the blog on which the announcement was written, @spanish-vega

Needless to say, the cancellation didn’t bring benefits to its victims, since eliminating a post to the source on Tumblr has only the (partial) effect of hiding the identity of its author. Therefore, if you are interested in knowing what I am talking about, a copy of the accusations I’m going to reply to can still be found here.

This only shows how its content was a distorted interpretation of real facts that, once brought to light, irreparably refuted the veracity of the post in question, forcing the author, or more likely: the authors, to eliminate it before taking their own responsibility and have a real confrontation with me. Unfortunately, this action was too serious for me to ignore it. In this regard, I will now proceed to respond to the feedback I received from Miss Vega. There really would not be much to say, given that the comments (written, among other things, under HER OWN post), can hardly be considered an answer, so I will take this opportunity to focus on many issues that are close to my heart.

I want to warn you that in the following part the subjects will change often, sometimes I will refer to those directly involved or only one of them, sometimes to a wider audience, so sorry for this confusion, unfortunately the topics to be addressed are many.

Dear Vega, here we are again. I don’t know whether to feel more sad or worried by the fact that after all the time that has passed and even now that I have placed you before the fact, you say you have not regretted having basically tried to ruin a person's reputation. In part I envy you, I would also like to face certain things with such coldness. On my way I have met many boring and dishonest people, yet I have never dreamed of defaming them publicly, notwithstanding all the evil they had done and the reason I could have. Same for Aoi, of course, who between the two was the most oppressed in recent years. But in your case perhaps, this is the only way to really solve the matter, since the private ways don’t work, or rather, only serve to make fun of me, taking advantage of my honesty and fairness. It’s too convenient to pillory someone publicly and then demand to settle things in private; you all have always speculated on the fact that both Aoi and I are much more mature and discrete than you, so we would never have put ourselves at your own level (or your own pettiness, depending on your point of view). In fact, it was supposed to be like this, but unfortunately my tolerance has reached the limit, you managed to make me infuriate as few have succeeded in my life, so now I will repay you with your own medicine, the only one you know and that maybe have some effect on you.

You affirm that your wish was to make the truth known to the Spaniards, but I think it was more correct to say: "the Spaniards had to know my version of the facts", given that this was the case. Because the intention of the post you wrote wasn’t to inform people, but simply to seek consensus and compassion from them. If you had even had the slightest respect for those who would have read, you should have also involved the parts you accused so that the readers were provided with more complete information and not just your distorted and incomplete version. But I can imagine that, from the perspective of a liar, the idea of acting in conditions of complete incontestability is very appetizing, so I cannot say I'm surprised. Embittered, but not surprised.

You also continue to reiterate: "you know what Aoi did to @landsec (sorry, the tag doesn’t work because this person has blocked me, I will return to this point later)". Obviously I know, as a huge amount of people know, thanks to the political propaganda that your friend has not failed to do. Aoimotion had a heated discussion with him, as a result of which she apologized in spite of, let me to reiterate it once again, the first to be wrong was Landsec, for the reasons I explained in the previous post and that you will surely remember (assuming that you have read them). Too bad that, in addition to this episode of which Aoi has largely repented, for her part there has been no other action directed against Landsec. An intervention, perhaps more "important", happened later on my part. On this intervention, many words were spent in private, with the usual sharing of screenshots, but none in public. Perhaps, if the real problem were the things I myself told Landsec, it would have been more correct to address ME directly to make his grievances, rather than going through a person whose role in this feud is mostly incidental, and certainly not because Aoi or I asked for it. Anyway, some time later the famous translation policy post appeared on our channels. And here Aoi actually made a mistake, the only mistake that could be attributed to her: on DA, she signed the post with her name. She did it out of habit, because it was a few months since the account had passed from being “RemArt” to be “AoiRemArt”, so she tried to point out that it was now managed by two people, not just one. In addition, I let her write the posts because unfortunately it’s known that English isn’t my strong suit, so I agree it’s easy to associate her writing with her name. But it takes a lot of imagination to imagine that such a crucial and important post was written only by one of the two, from a common account, as if I had been watching while she was preparing the crime or, even worse, she had bound me and gagged me to deprive me of any freedom of speech, so she could freely do what she wanted. A fantasy that I prefer to call "convenience". The concepts of the post and the way in which they are exposed have been agreed both by Aoi and by me, as it has always been and as it still is, therefore, whatever offense you may have received in your opinion, be aware that it came fully in the name of both. The only thing I'm so sorry about is that I didn’t stop her right away when I saw that she had signed only on her behalf, because I gave people I thought smarter another opportunity to pour their hatred and frustration on her.

Anyway, I'm sorry to disappoint you, dear Vega, and all the rest of the people who share your thoughts, but even then you totally misrepresented what we were saying. We can only validate the Italian and English versions because they are the only ones edited by the original author of the texts: Aoimotion, who writes them personally and has full control. Since we don’t know other languages outside of these two, we have no tools or knowledge to verify the content of the text with confidence and to consider it 100% faithful to the original, correct or reliable. It’s pure and simple logic, concepts that should also be within your reach.

I’m sorry that my authorization has implied the opposite and has made you consider these texts as official, perhaps better than the original ones. It's probably another thing that I should have explained from the beginning. We don’t want to diminish the work behind it, but yours is still a fan-translation, certainly not considered as an official language released by us. If we did it we would take responsibility for making official a thing we don’t know, it would not be serious on our part.

About this, I take this opportunity to apologize to the translators for not having explained well right away that the first translations were authorized only by me and only by inexperience, due to the fact that I myself felt like I was using borrowed characters and I sincerely regret that all this happened, because if I had been more careful and far-sighted from the beginning, now there would be no translation in the first place and now we would have no problem.

Secondly, after all the conflicts that have existed, and still exist between us, not only I consider your vain attempts to flatter me ("incredible artist", "fantastic person" and so on) extremely hypocritical, but the thing that makes me laugh is how in public you proudly declare that you have no problem with me (feelings that, even if they were true, would not be returned from me anyway), when in private things go in a very different way.

I'm really sorry, Vega, that you spent your time writing a post in defense of Landsec, that you, blinded probably by some feeling that I don’t feel entitled to determine, called "one of the kindest members of this fandom". The same kind member who didn’t stop you when he had to and could do it, but made you cancel the post only when I intervened, exactly after a month. The same kind member who has denied any involvement in your actions, either in public or in private with me (I will spare you the agony of reading his own words because, unlike Landsec and probably many of his friends, we don’t have the same habit of divulging private conversations, even when we could take advantage from them, as in this case), running for cover, reblogging my post as if he wants to declare himself on my side, pleading - we don’t know who - to leave him alone, and discharging all responsibility on you and yours impulsivity, and then, on top of the cake, canceling his reblog just five minutes after doing it. The same kind member that blocked me just two days after the answer to my post in which he recited: "I don’t have any problems with Rem" and "We. Are. Cool. ". I suppose he must have been very afraid of being ignored for the first time by me, after I’ve always endeavored to behave with maturity towards him in an attempt to smooth out the shameful situations created by himself. In light of the fact that I find myself writing this unhappy communication, when I could use my time in more pleasant and productive ways, I gather that I was the only one of us who ever intended to definitively close this story.

Fortunately, before Landsec took his "precautionary measures", I had time to realize that the post in which he announced his retirement (the real one, not the defamatory garbage written a month ago) had been promptly canceled by his main channels. Evidently, when a better scapegoat was presented to him, which would have made his gesture a heroic martyr, he thought well to change the version of events. I could make a lot of comments about it, but I think that's already self-commenting. In any case, a "proof" that this post existed can be found at this link dating back to May 9th, in which it's clearly mentioned the retreat, already happened, of our kind member.

Now you will ask, why insist on this point? In reality it's very simple: the author of the defamatory post, quoted and linked at the top, has accused us, -no, maybe it's better to be precise: only Aoimotion- of Landsec's withdrawal, inserting this accusation even as subtitle of her the post ("Motivo del retiro de Landsec") . But if this post that I found refers to the Landsec's withdrawal on the 9th of May, I can assume that his abandonment was announced at least a few days before the 9th of May. And if the very first private discussion between Landsec and us took place about fifteen days later (in May 23-24th); And if the post about translation policy we made that, according to the opinion of the author of the post, would have completely destroyed the good intentions to continue in the translations of her friend, was published on June 25th, I wonder: itâs possible that these people have the gift of clairvoyance? Or can I just assume that unfounded and ridiculous accusations have been made with the intention of demonizing a person and, at the same time, gathering support and compassion?

Returning to us, always wanting to quote his "hit and run" reblog, in fact it was the same Landsec who writes: "So if you have any involvement with it [your post, Vega], solve it yourself and LEAVE ME ALONE ". So, from woman to woman, I hope that you, Vega, have long thought and drawn your conclusions after this shabby show. After all, he practically left you alone in my clutches, after you had exposed yourself so much to defend him. He didn't even try a second to protect you like you did with him. A kind person like him, does he really deserve your loyalty?

The connections between people are simple as long as they are coalescing in the face of the possibility of slandering, mortifying and tarnishing someone. In that case, people are ready to swear loyalty, support and mutual affection from here until the end of time. As soon as the nuance of reason and congruence is destroyed by the reality of facts, this is how these bonds crumble and change into the vile, filthy and disgusting vault I have ever seen.

That would be great, since everyone is free to build their personal bonds in the way that best suits him/her ... if not that, these same people ready to tear each other if the situation worsens, even find the courage to distort the partnership between me and Aoi, painting it like a toxic relationship in which she manipulates me according to her will, and I'm reduced to a doll that is limited to executing orders or, in the best case, watching while she sows discord and destruction in the name of both.

At this point, you understand that I cannot ignore such a foul-smelling accusation, so let me tell you how things are: none, and again, none of the things I've said or done in the past two years have been influenced by Aoi. Because, you know, I'm also capable of independent judgment (ability that instead of many of you are missing, I noticed) and not only, I'm even able to get angry! I understand that it sounds absurd, so take a minute of meditation to assimilate this information, and then take a few hours, or days, or even weeks, to realize how all the things that you didn't like and that you think damaged you, that you considered more convenient to attribute to my partner, in reality they were the combined and harmonious effect of two minds that have always worked in perfect harmony, without never prevaricate each other. And perhaps, for many of you, the problem has been (and still is) just that. You can hardly forgive me for I have found a partner "out of the group" (who anyway I knew and with whom I had a firm friendship since well before knowing you, in case you didn't know or you were conveniently forgotten) with whom I chose to work closely, a person whom I admire and whom I appreciate, an I'm very fond of, who made me embark on a project for which I decided it was worth it, which goes beyond fame and glory and any other value to which you attach importance. Perhaps many of you have been wondering for months: "Why Aoi? Why not us?", and so, you decided to vent this suppressed frustration on her, when perhaps, and I say perhaps, the person you really wanted to vent your livership was and is me.

I will not deny that, for the short time I attended your group, I appreciated your company. As I told to Landsec in the last message I sent him months ago, there were people among you whom I esteemed and respected and which were pleasing to me, but I always treated our relationship lightly; I never thought there was anything between us that could go beyond kindness and mutual courtesy. We were acquaintances, and nothing more than that, and I'm really sorry if my attitudes (which no doubt were wrong) may have given some of you reason to think otherwise, or in any case to "elevate" our relationship to something more. But this has never authorized you to treat Aoi in the way you did, to denigrate her, to deride her and to accuse her of having performed actions on behalf of both, overshadowing my will and my ideas completely, as if there was no way that I could be something else than what you thought I was. Your myth of Rem always kind, always available and always friendly is an image that you have created of me, which absolutely doesn't belong to me, which I consider incredibly reductive and silly to apply on a person since, sorry if I always repeat the obvious, the reactions are adapted to the situations and you have given me many reasons to be anything but courteous and kind to you. All of this is a mirror of what your real opinion is of us, of the presumption that you have to know two people whom you have always chosen to see only the part that made you more comfortable, and probably even what is the limit of your reasoning ability.

And now I refer directly to the “translators”, I regret to find out that for a long time you have translated comics written by a person you don't esteem at all, as opposed to what you claim to think of me. I sincerely ask myself why you decided to put your blog and your "face" in a story and in dialogues that you thought so bad of, since apparently the only thing that you appreciated the comic were the drawings. Maybe you could create your own comic and think about the interactions between the characters, the story and the dialogues, and translate them into English as it is a far less demanding work than translating into your language.

From this point of view, I understand why you always want to boast about how much effort you make in translations, literally using every possible excuse to reiterate how hard and draining your work is. But then I wonder: if for you to translate from English TO YOUR MOTHER LANGUAGE is so hard, so demanding, then what Aoi should say, as she translates every day from our mother tongue (which I remind you, it's Italian. Maybe it was clear with me but not with her) to English and vice versa, if her work requires to? Iâm sure that you too know that translating from English to your own language is not as difficult as doing the opposite, given that you proclaim yourselves to be certified and expert translators and you, Vega, also defined yourself as a writer, as if this title could authorize you to say all the balderdash that left your keyboard. Aoi has been doing this every day for more than two years, but I don't remember ever having seen her making noise for what she has chosen to do, not even when many people ignored (deliberately or not) her role as author in the comics and she would have all the right to point out that she was the mind behind those stories that everyone liked so much. For this, I cannot help but applaud the despicable courage with which you have diminished Aoi's work, who is a translator like you and even more than you, besides being so many other things that you aren't, and laugh at how you have mortified her while you were doing your master work by basing yourself on a translation that came well before you. Therefore, maintaining the scale of judgment with which you have always judged her contribution to comics: if you want to rate Aoi's work as zero, go ahead. But at this point, following your reasoning, I ask you: how should your work be defined? With a negative number? Or even better, with an imaginary number?

In conclusion, I regret that many people believed in Vega's version, full of holes and inconsistencies, without even ascertaining the veracity of what they were being offered. To believe in facts without evidence to support them is a very serious act, which sets out a very dangerous trend to this day. Dangerous for these people, and also for who / what is found in the crosshairs of such lies.

And speaking of these people, I would like to use this post to respond to some brilliant comments that I found myself reading under Vega's propaganda, released by people who arrived like flies that, attracted by the trash, got themselves gathered around it to feast festively, though mostly, I will do nothing but reiterate old concepts. I will not mention names, because there is no need; in any case, those who are curious can go to read through the comments of the post of which I attached the link above, although I don't recommend doing it to those who are particularly weak stomach.

When you accuse Aoimotion of having had, and still have, a very strong influence on me, there is one thing you're right about: if it was not for her, I would have stopped having any contact with the Zootopia fandom already two years ago. Probably my interest would be exhausted within a couple of comics, or even stripes, given the general attention that I can have in fandom, especially if it's fandom related to films and therefore self-contained stories. But then I met her, who overwhelmed me with her imagination, her enthusiasm and above all her pure and unconditional love for the narration, which pushed me to continue. To make a lot more comics than I had expected, to draw a lot more pictures of Nick and Judy than I would have done alone. 90% of what I have produced, and for which you have idolized me (and given the situation in which I'm now, I wonder how sincere these flattery were), exists because she was with me, by my side, close to every process of creation and always ready to advise me, encourage me and help me. So, when you accuse Aoimotion of having forced me to leave the fandom, you should instead thank her, for holding me into it a lot, so much more than I could have predicted.

When you accuse my style of drawing to be "Zootopian", know that first of all this is just a neologism devoid of any meaning, given that Zootopia itself is a Disney-style film and that then brings the style of his factory. And that just because dozens of artists have thrown into the cauldron called "Zootopia" any anthropomorphic animal their pen has created, doesn't mean that the same applies to me. In any case, know that my style is evolving and will evolve again and again, until finally this latest silly accusation will fall into the pit of the "absurd accusations" that are offered to us every day by this fandom.

When you accuse us of wanting to "steal Jack Savage from Disney", when you even use your time to create meme and "fun" comic of dubious taste, of which only the authors, the stupids and their little friends can laugh, hold on to mind that Jack Savage has always been, and always will be, nothing but a sketch on an artbook with a few lines of background, and that all we have built on him is OURS, including much of his physical appearance (which, like everything that is in this fandom, has soon become a collective good, like it happens in the best communist societies). And that we have the right and the duty to take it back, while you have neither of those to come and tell us something. If, as you think according to the legal knowledge of which you are definitely in possession, what we have in mind to do (which, incidentally, has not yet been disclosed to anyone, then as well as experienced lawyers, you're also skilled Espers able to read our minds; if I had your powers, now I would fight in the biggest tribunals of the world, not brawling from behind a keyboard) is wrong, we will pay the consequences; but if what we are doing is simply a nuisance to you, and it stings you as if you were thrown into a bush of nettles, I'm sorry to say that it is not our problem. Maybe you need to take a break from the internet, as I suggested to Vega and Landsec, to review your priorities and give a little more value of your time. Or you could "give yourself to horse racing", as we say in our parts.

Among other things, while we can afford to take away from Jack any connotation in common with his concept and have our fanbase almost unchanged, if anyone else tried to do the same would find himself in a second to swim in anonymity. I invite you to ask yourself why, and if you can, even to give you an answer. It would be sufficient to explain a few of our apparently incomprehensible reasons, and even the reasons for those whose main purpose in recent months seems to have been to discourage and mock us.

The Jack’s question is very well connected with another theme that we considered closed for months, but that obviously still doesn't really go down to some of you: the alleged plot against our readers, hatched by Aoi and me, which established to introduce our OCs in Black Jack, in order to impose them on you and force you to appreciate them and follow their vicissitudes.

We have always considered this accusation extremely funny (it’s a pity that the harassment we suffered because of it were not) and all in all, putting ourselves in the shoes of the average fan and reasoning (indeed, refusing to reason) as such, the thing could also make sense. So we let it go. This only until the moment we published Black Jack.

Once this comic ended (and even a few months before it ended), we reiterated several times that we would never treat Zootopia again. Of course, you understand that we couldn't write "WE WILL NOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT NICK AND JUDY !!" at the end of each post or as a watermark on the pages of the new comic, otherwise some brilliant mind would have told us that we were paranoid and unpleasant. So, at a certain point, we stopped coming back to the subject.

At this point, as far as I'm concerned, anyone who has continued to follow us after Black Jack, has done so of his own free will. Perhaps it's hard to publicly admit that you find an interesting story that does not have Nick, Judy or the "Zootopia" tag inside; It’s easier not to express yourself, to avoid the risk that some friend, fervent supporter of the fandom (because now there are no longer supporters of the movie but of the fandom), can stone you on the spot. In this way, you have at any moment the possibility of turning silence-assent into fierce indignation, pulling out the fable that someone is manipulating you to force you to follow something you don’t like and don’t care about. I'm sorry if you felt obliged to follow us by some dark force that you could not fight back, it was absolutely not our intention. We have never been interested in gathering as much support as possible (if we wanted to do it, we would certainly emulate some eminent fandom figure who knows how to keep fans tight), what we always wanted is to express ourselves artistically in absolute freedom, and be judged without any "fandomistic" prejudice .

Therefore, I will reiterate it once again:

if you have no interest in our current work and/or continue to follow us hoping that one day we'll rekindle the desire to work again on Zootopia;

if you have decided to follow us because this gives you the illusion that we're still feeding the dunghill that this fandom has become;

if you’re bad and evil in the soul and find pleasure in spitting poison on a couple of artists who didn't do anything wrong (because now, honestly, what have we ever done to deserve certain crap? After all we have given you for a year or more, you should just learn to be quiet) ...

If you're one of these things, more than one or all put together, I warmly and DEFINITELY invite you to vanish and never return.

Regardless of everything, I'm here to reiterate that we will go on, while the best these people can get is to fossilize themselves where they are now. We are trying to do something big and original, bigger than a mere sub-project of another work, more original than creating new animals that stand on two legs and exist somewhere in the universe of Zootopia (without nothing to take away from those who do it, we simply have different ideas and different objectives). And you know, partly we have already succeeded, and I feel once again to thank Aoi about this, thanks to her characterization and her stories wich allows us to give our OCs peculiarity, to distinguish them from the crowd even if some people try always to imitate the character design of others artists. The more time passes, the more people from the fandom stop following us; but for each of them that leaves, two new readers follow us, people who often have nothing to do with Zootopia and its fandom. And if this is not a victory, I don’t know what it is.

Summing up, I would say that perhaps, rather than feeling angry at certain people, the most appropriate feeling here is compassion. But for respect of ourselves, it's right that even the most miserable and vile of individuals will learn what their place is; for how much compassion I can feel for them, I’ll never transact ever before a villainous gesture. Unfortunately, the more falsehoods are propitiated and stacked, the more the truth will be evident and lethal later. The more you are liars, the more you will be hurt when someone puts you in front of the reality of the facts, exposing your slanders for what they really are: snake venom. For this reason, from now on I strongly advise you to dose more carefully your nonsense, in order to avoid having to hide like rats the moment the truth will surface. This is the last thing I will tell you because, after this refreshing parenthesis, I hope I will never again have to deal with any of you, anywhere in the internet.

And if it were to happen, however, I beg you this time to call things by their real name; to strike directly and clearly who you REALLY want to hit, without first making a shield of people who have nothing to do with the problems you may have with someone. In any case, we will be ready to respond, using the most effective weapon in our possession, the truth; Therefore, I sincerely dissuade you from doing so.

#communication

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margridarnauds · 5 years

Note

i know you reblogged the Thing a while ago but aaaa i really love reading your answers so - 002 for lazare, if you wanna?

Thanks! (And seriously, if I’d reblogged it a month ago, I would still be down for answering it; I love talking 1789, especially if it involves my boy.) I feel like I did this some time ago, but also I’ve never stopped screaming about Lazare and I’m not going to stop now.

Be warned: The following is based off of various and assorted headcanons and theories, ergo the canon compliance is, as always, questionable. Since it isn’t like Lazare gets all that much in canon, bless his heart.

How I feel about this character: My baby. My son. My murderous son. It’s funny because, when I first watched 1789, it must have been about 3-4 years ago, because I somehow managed to fall into the fandom just before the Takarazuka version dropped (I seem to recall some of the initial questioning over how Marie Antoinette’s role would be dealt with and expanded), I REALLY didn’t like Lazare. I remember seeing all the fanfic on him (in French, which I read via Google Translate on my college’s computer while I was taking a creative writing class over the summer) and being like “This guy? WHY? HE KILLS PEOPLE.” Ah yes. My 17 year old self was so painfully naive. On so many points. Then, about a year and a half ago, I fell back into Hell after a stream of the Takarazuka version and managed to latch onto him. I really resisted for the longest time, but after about a month, I ended up bonding with him, and the rest is history.

I think that, of all the cast, he has some of the greatest potential, and I really think that Matthieu Carnot in particular did a great job with giving us a variety of interpretations on him.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: For the most part, I’m pretty monogamous to Peyronan. I do ship Artois/Lazare as a purely one-sided thing, purely so that Artois can do a flip when he finds out about Ronan. Olympe/Lazare and Olympe/Lazare/Ronan is right there; it’s pretty much the only way I can actually stomach Ronan/Olympe as a ship, and at one point I had. Words. Written out on that one, though who knows if I’ll ever complete those Words. I’ve also batted around Louis XVI/Lazare as an alternative to Artois.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: I STRONGLY Brotp Solène/Lazare and Olympe/Lazare, as well as Lt. du Puget/Lazare (with du Puget filling in as the father that Lazare SHOULD have had, had things gone better) and Ramard/Lazare. (Toho/Takarazuka Ramard, with the two of them both having to deal with Artois and Ramard still being new enough to the job that he’s not been totally corrupted yet.)

Olympe and Lazare, in my own headcanon, parallel each other well, with Lazare’s longstanding crush on Artois and Olympe’s on Antoinette. Both of them are fiercely loyal to their respective members of the royal family, both of them distrust the mob and what it’s capable of, but while Artois exploits Lazare for his own benefit, making him into his personal attack dog (you know, In the one scene they have together in canon), Antoinette...doesn’t MEAN to with Olympe, she doesn’t even know that she HAS a crush on her. Antoinette is pretty oblivious to the world around her, bless her heart, but she means well. But still, we see in canon that Olympe sticks her neck out on the line time after time for her sake, before MA FINALLY lets her go. And even then, I go back and forth as to whether she realizes Olympe has a crush on her (and is trying to spare her the pain + the damage to her reputation) or whether she genuinely believes that Olympe has a lover (and genuinely thinks she’s helping Olympe by letting her be with someone she loves, not realizing that the person she loves is...), given that both are pretty devastating in their own ways. Artois, though, would never let Lazare go. Even if he doesn’t personally have any LIKING for Lazare, he’s not going to let him leave him, because he wants that control and his pride can’t stand the thought that Lazare could (1) Move on from HIM and (2) Move on from him WITH A PEASANT. Like, Ronan’s existence is basically the single biggest middle finger that Lazare could deliver to Artois.

Solène and Lazare also have a hell of a lot in common, aside from just...the shit-talking Ronan opportunities. Both of them are the more pragmatic, cynical partner in their respective pairings, both of them pretend to feel a lot less than they actually do, and both of them have reputations of being People You Do Not Fuck With but also MELT for their respective love interests.

My unpopular opinion about this character: This is something I’ve noticed primarily from the French and Russian fandoms (with a LITTLE bit in the Chinese, though I’ve also read fluff in Chinese), but Creepy Crawly Lazare. No. Absolutely no. I once literally started an Angsty Childhood Friends AU fic out of sheer SPITE over Creepy Crawly Lazare. (Not Le Cri, another one that I will unleash when the time is right.) I understand it with the Japanese productions a little bit more, because they tend to deal with a much darker look at him than the French, but I still don’t see Laz...like that. And, for the most part, I tend to favor the interpretations of Laz where he genuinely BELIEVES in the Ancien Régime and has managed to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing. I love the Takarazuka Laz; I love the Toho Laz (I’ve FINALLY warmed up to him. I mean, he replied to my mom on Instagram. How can you not like him if he replies to your mom on Instagram?), but they’re...not MY take on Lazare. I tend to see him as borderline asexual/demisexual as it is.

Relating to that, any interpretation of Laz where he’s a smooth talker. My boy can play the political game as needed, primarily by keeping his mouth shut, but casually giving out pick up lines...no. The only way I could accept this is if he ran to Ramard for help, desperate, and he jotted down all of his favorite pick-up lines (hint: They’re all awful), only for Lazare to blank the second he saw Ronan. I genuinely have a hard time believing he’s had any kind of relationship pre-canon. Like, RONAN’S probably had more experience kissing than he has, and we’ve all seen how Ronan kisses.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: Obviously, I would love canon, mutually consensual Peyronan. I think that all three productions have hinted at it; I don’t think ANY of the Lazares have really played him as Straight™, especially when it comes to Ronan (THE HUG IN THE FRENCH PRODUCTION), but I would actually like to see it 100% canon. Not that that would EVER happen in a mainstream musical, especially in the Japanese productions (not saying there’s NO progress there, because there have been some stupendously gay things I’ve seen via Zuka and Toho, but most of the time it’s either [1] villains, [2] comic relief, or [3] queerbait, with the lead still ending up with the lead female character) but a girl can dream.

Shipping aside, I would genuinely love to see Lazare and Ronan develop side by side as an antagonist/hero pairing. I would love to see Lazare grow increasingly desperate and brutal as the musical goes on (IF and only IF we’re going to have him as the villain and not the antagonist), just as Ronan slides deeper and deeper into the Revolution. I would love to see them parallel each other in various and assorted ways, not the least in their devotion to their respective sides, as both of them suffer from the society they were born in, just in differing ways and extents. On one hand, Lazare never starved like Ronan did, but on the other...he was made into a machine for the sake of preserving the Ancien Régime (and...it does seem like there’s a small amount of canon backing to that one, given some of his lines in Nous ne Sommes.) If you’re going to kick off the musical with the Lazare/Ronan rivalry and Ronan swearing vengeance, then you’ve got to make SURE you carry that one through to the end, even if it’s Ronan ultimately realizing that he doesn’t WANT Lazare dead. I just...need that development between the two of them, since it’s such a missed opportunity in the original. I do give Toho some props for showing SOME of that, as far as explaining why Lazare wants Necker out of a job + having Ronan there during Nous ne Sommes, but still...I need more Lazare development, dammit.

my OTP: Lazare/Ronan. Was there any doubt?

my cross over ship: Lazare/Chauvelin from The Scarlet Pimpernel is, like...my trash crossover ship. Not the least because Ryuu Masaki played both Ronan and Chauvelin in the Zuka productions. So it’s not TECHNICALLY cheating on Peyronan.

Also, guilty pleasure ship I’ve been tossing around: Der Tod from Elisabeth/Lazare. I mean, given how often Lazare’s around dead people, I think it could go swimmingly.

@janetcarter and I also have a longstanding 1789/Terra Nova crossover where the 1789 crew ends up in the colony of Terra Nova and meet some dinosaurs, and in that one Lieutenant Washington and Lazare are a big BROTP, given that they are both staunchly loyal soldiers with ponytails who fall in love with someone on the other side of the conflict and who were massively underwritten in canon.

a headcanon fact: 99% of what I do with him is extensive headcanoning anyway and there are times I almost feel like I run out of headcanons, but Lazare wasn’t given an extensive education, ESPECIALLY not by aristocratic standards. Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton all outpace him there. He never learned Latin or Greek, his only two languages are German and French, because his grandfather went for the Prussian influence with him and he thought that Latin was unnecessary and would lead him to libertinage. His education was strictly kept to what would be immediately useful for his military career. When Lazare is talking about the “high class education” of the revolutionaries in the Takarazuka + Toho versions, he’s not just trying to convince Ronan to join him, he’s also projecting his own deeply buried, unacknowledged envy towards them. It also means that he often finds himself uncomfortable in the intellectually driven salons and court discussions, and his lack of formal court training puts him at a disadvantage, especially since the Comte d’Artois (who isn’t one to TALK there, historically), regularly uses him as the target for his mockery. A solid background at court was necessary to be a good officer and advance, connections were EVERYTHING, and a socially stunted officer was never going to make it as far as someone like, say, Fersen, who could navigate the best of both worlds.

Also Autistic Lazare is very, very important to me as a concept. Whenever I write him, it’s with the idea that he falls somewhere on the spectrum.

Also, bluntly speaking, I have my. Ideas. For what happens to Lazare post-canon, and most of them don’t end well for him, though I truly don’t believe he makes it to the guillotine. I think Toho!Lazare in particular sings his lines in Pour la Peine with a certain resignation.

In a happier timeline, as Lazare gets older, he needs reading glasses and grays quicker than Ronan. Ronan relentlessly teases him about being an old man; Lazare retorts that the reason he has so many gray hairs is because of Ronan.

#long post #lazare de peyrol #1789 les amants de la bastille #one of these days I'm going to compile my various and assorted Laz Headcanons somewhere so I can keep track #vierschanzentournee

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trilobiter · 2 years

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Regarding fandom culture and the impulse to transform source material into something more suitable to the fandom's tastes -

I believe I understand this impulse. Who hasn't enjoyed a story, but wished a few things were different, or at least more fleshed out? A new character here, a sidestory there; even an alternate universe to explore underdeveloped themes. And of course, if you just want to make the characters fuck like action figures, that's fine too.

What I don't get is why this activity should extend to the point of pretending that something is what it is not. And by that, I mean the attempt to impose themes that are not merely underdeveloped, or even absent, but antithetical to the themes of the source material.

Let's pretend there was an Ayn Rand fandom. Not to say there isn't one (there is, and it's not only repellent, but an ongoing threat to the survival of human civilization), but rather that the "fandom" for Ayn Rand's literary works looked like a typical Tumblr media fandom: predominantly driven by the activity and interests of enthusiasts who skew toward marginalized communities and seek to highlight or create representation for those communities in the context of the source material.

(As an aside, I acknowledge that I am tempting fate by speaking of a hypothetical Ayn Rand fandom without looking to see if such a thing exists. If it exists, please have mercy and do not show it to me. If it does exist, in the way that I am discussing it here, then my entire argument is void and you can ignore me.)

Ayn Rand was a miserable author with unfounded pretensions to philosophical depth wrapped in an undisguised contempt for any one she considered a loser. I need not go into depth as to why her works are hostile to the interests of women, or the poor, or any other marginalized demographic. But let us say that a fandom existed, and that this fandom were intent on rewriting books like The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged into works that celebrate and represent the fandom, putting aside anything that they regard as "problematic."

What would be the point? Spite? Spite is an extremely stupid justification to expend significant energy on a hobby. Being a fan should be about celebrating something you love, for the reasons you love it. Trying to make something as profoundly bad as the literary works of Ayn Rand into something you can love, would only give people the wrong idea that her works are not an inherently hostile landscape. This would indubitably lead to more readers of Ayn Rand, and that would not be an ideal outcome.

Having put my trust in the idea that all can agree that attempting to create a fandom that celebrates progressive values out of Ayn Rand's novels would be a dangerous waste of time, my question is: how much like Ayn Rand's works does a given source material have to be in order to make a passionate, "progressive" fandom culture untenable? How odious must the theme be before the consensus arises that engaging with the material is in bad taste?

On reflection, this question is perhaps unfair. Many popular works contain themes which are wrongheaded or regressive. I don't ask the question so that people might get self-righteous about why some one else's chosen fixation is problematic, while their own is good and pure. Most stories are a mix of the admirable and the regrettable, and people are often inclined to compartmentalize, ignore, or simply fail to see when a harmful idea is being aired. It's hard to blame somebody for liking something likable, even if it comes glazed or stuffed with dreck. But surely, there must be a line?

#trilobiter #tumblr #fandom

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cbdxhds387-blog · 4 years

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motorcyclegirlfriends · 7 years

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Sense the SDCC thing, I've been seeing a lot of art and fics that are dragging Kara/Supergirl. Like I get that some people are upset at the actors but the characters have nothing to do with any of this. I started watching the show because I read the comics when I was a kid, I just loved Supergirl as a hero. It's really kind of upsetting. They're treating a character like shit because they don't like something the person who portrays them did.

So this is a long dissection of the current Supergirl fan behavior, but if you’ve been wondering what the hell is going on, you might be interested in reading these concepts.

I understand why you’re upset. I am too, because Kara is such a wonderful character. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a character as much as her.

But there are two things you should realize when seeing this:

1. They never really cared about Kara to being with. Your loved Kara-focused content isn’t changing or leaving, because these people were not making the Kara content. They were likely initially making Supercorp Lena-focused content.

2. It’s not even about her.

I think what a lot of people who are newly joining this SDCC homophobia discussion are missing is that a lot of the most vicious backlash is not from people who are uniquely upset over this issue (though there are certainly people who are- and understandably) but from people who have had consistently overzealous reactions of hate toward actors and characters alike, save their fave (pretty much Katie Mcgrath/Lena Luthor).

On tumblr, and very noticeably in this fandom, there are sections of fans who seem to genuinely enjoy hating things. It’s a sport.

They’re having fun sending the most hurtful things they can think of to actors, and are the quickest to begin making vicious memes and jokes surrounding a negative event, before there has been a consensus within the community of how bad the “sin” was.

The “punishment” begins before the jury is out, and trying to defend those in the situation feels like trying to put a bullet back into a gun after it’s been fired.

(Maybe it’s more like stepping in front of a bullet, because once these few have decided that the target is guilty, they won’t stop, and anyone who disagrees with them is guilty, too. Blogs and actors alike.)

This is partially why my discussion of the SDCC event had a “are they homophobic” slant (other then that I believe the nature of the event itself- if it was homophobic- hinges on the feeling behind the words, unlike most other instances of homophobia. It’s complicated and some people understandably disagree so far, but it’s really how I see it and I’ll be talking more about it a little later in different posts).

People started calling Melissa and Jeremy homophobic right away. Started targeting Kara as a character. Started “spite shipping” Lena and Reign.

Or alternative to these options- immediately fan re-casted Kara as someone else to still be able to ship Supercorp.

From where I stand, if you can so easily let go of this characterization of Kara, you never really cared about her as a character to begin with. If you don’t know that this was The™ person to play Kara Danvers, you’re likely more invested in the role she plays for Lena than for her as herself.

And regardless of gender, I am uninterested in ships in which one character exists for the sake of another. (Lena existing purely for the sake of Kara’s development squicks me, too)

Recasting a woc as Kara doesn’t sit well with me either, for that reason. It’s a similar concept to how Maggie must exist as her own complex and valued person, apart from Alex, because she is a character of color.

I can’t really read the minds of these people, and I guess I could be wrong, but it’s hard for me to imagine actual Kara fans recasting her in this way.

Essentially, a lot of these people, or at least a very vocal minority, are so quick to accept that something horrible has happened because they want an excuse to hate them.

They like it.

Maybe it’s because they’re upset with the way society is and want someone to suffer for it. Maybe it’s because they have unresolved anger in their lives.

But as it stands, it appears as if these people are using moral rightness and social activism as an excuse to be as mean as they want.

And like @youngbloodbuzz said in the link above, you start to look at their past behaviors in a new light. Were they genuinely upset at characters? Actors? Did they really feel like a travesty was occurring? That someone needed protecting?

Or were they just looking for reasons to call someone a “stupid cunt”?

It’s like they’re genuinely thinking, “It’s okay for me to make fun of someone’s physical appearance, call them intense names, make memes about how horrible they are innately, and send them death threats because they said something problematic once that a lot of people will hear.”

Sometimes they’ll call it “coping”, and maybe some people truly believe that makes it okay. But coping mechanisms are not above reproach.

If I hurt someone because I’m upset about something- even if I hurt someone because they did something wrong- it doesn’t erase the fact that I hurt them. We are still responsible to how we react to bad situations. We are still responsible for not reacting in an overly inflated way.

Sometimes people will focus on how those that they’re attacking have more of a responsibility to be good people. That they are but mere bloggers, screaming into the void. They can’t possibly be accountable for how they behave.

“I’m tired of talking about how bad the fans are, we should be focusing on what they did wrong!”

It creates an atmosphere in which an honest mistake from a well known person is much more crucifiable than the purposeful cruelty of the fans. We’re discouraged from criticizing popular blogs because the person they’re attacking has a wider audience and larger consequences for mistakes, as if popular bloggers don’t reach and influence thousands of people and as if we aren’t allowed to shape the way our own community functions.

Meanwhile, people who genuinely value morality and social activism fall prey to this thinking. They’ll even join in on the action, because they think it’s a moral act.

Rebellion, somehow. Righteous fire.

It’s a twisted mindset that spreads because people are afraid to be on the wrong side of morality.

Even people who really think the reaction is “too far” are quiet about it because they agree with the fact that what the offending celebrity did was wrong, and see that the level of vitriol for them now is overwhelming.

This is how I imagine that people who believe Melissa and Jeremy’s words to be homophobic but who do not think a couple of mistakes makes someone pure evil are relating to the current tumblr dialogue:

“Wow this thing was homophobic!”

“Huh, yeah, I agree. Maybe not intentionally, but yeah.”

“That means this person is homophobic!”

“Uh, well, not sure I’d go that far-”

“Oh and look at this other somewhat problematic thing they did a while ago”

“Hmm well that’s bad, but not everyone outside of social activism gets that that’s a bad thing, so I can see-”

“Wow did you hear that this person also has an opinion about the show that I disagree with! What the fuck is wrong with them?”

“Oh. Well I actually agree with them in that situation but-”

“Omg they think that their character is like this! Do they know them at all??? What kind of terrible actor doesn’t know their character?”

“Well that’s a pretty common way that people are reading this character. Just because you-”

“Here’s some conjecture about their personal life that I imagine happened that paints them in a bad light.”

“Well, you don’t know that, but either way you shouldn’t be diving into their personal-”

“Oh and here’s a totally real story from an anon about someone they know who knew this person in the past and says they were a jerk at this one point-”

And it becomes too much. If you don’t really love the actor, really love their character, you either extract yourself from the group or you ignore the opinions you disagree with.

It becomes quite clear that these people want to feel this way and won’t be changing any time soon.

And the more there seems to be a consensus about the issue, the less willing people are to speak out, for fear of rejection.

The Spiral of Silence theory is a good way to explain it:

To avoid isolation, people tend to refrain from publicly stating their views on controversial matters when they perceive that doing so would attract criticism, scorn, laughter, or other signs of disapproval.

Conversely, those who sense that their opinions will meet with approval tend to voice them fearlessly and at times vociferously.

Indeed, speaking out in such a way tends to enhance the threat of isolation faced by supporters of the opposing position, reinforcing their sense of being alone.

Thus a spiraling process begins, the dominant camp becoming ever louder and more self-confident while the other camp becomes increasingly silent.

Importantly, the spiral of silence occurs only in connection with controversial issues that have a strong moral component. What triggers a person’s fear of isolation is the belief that others will consider him or her not merely mistaken but morally bad. Accordingly, issues that lack a moral component or on which there is general consensus leave no room for a spiral of silence.

Additionally, I believe that if someone does speak out against the (perceived) majority, it is most likely to be someone who is very strongly opposing of it.

A person who believes “It isn’t homophobic at all! They are innocent!” is more likely to voice their disagreements than “Okay I agree with your assessment of the situation but I think maybe we’re being too harsh…”

So the “minority”- who could technically very well be the quiet majority (people with middle-ground opinions just don’t get as many followers)- stays quiet.

They might even change their minds to agree with the “majority”, over time.

Believing that the mindset of the group that you belong to is wrong is psychologically uncomfortable, so it is not uncommon for someone to try to adjust their thinking to fit those they feel connected to.

So, eventually, the only people who are speaking at all are those “majorities” who hate these people. Or those who act like they do for notes.

And then this thinking escalates amongst those still talking about it (remember: because it’s fun for them and they want to milk it for as long as possible) and it quickly translates to hating their character, once they’ve temporarily run out of material to be angry with the actor for.

So, back to your concern, how long until, “it’s hard to look at Melissa as Kara right now, because of how I fear she might feel about gay people” becomes something like “Mon-El is abusive, but Kara can choke so whatever” ?

(And on that note, one should consider how much they really wanted to protect Kara Danvers’ characterization from Mon-El’s influence, and how much was just a part of their hate-hobby.)

Maybe it won’t go that far. I hope it doesn’t. I hope people come to their senses about this.

But it’s escalated even since yesterday, when I started making this post. The language being used to describe Melissa when she is speaking normally, about normal things that some people have a difference of opinion on, is abhorrent.

So if you’re just trying to enjoy fandom in a peaceful and creative way, I encourage you to watch how the people you interact with react when something negative happens.

Are they disheartened? Crushed? Are they considering leaving the show and it’s fandom? Writing serious essays about how they’re hurt?

…Or do they come alive?

Are they incredibly angry, and then making jokes immediately? Memes and edits and creative content more so than they do on a peaceful day? Do you get the sense that they aren’t going anywhere, for a long time, even though they don’t seem to enjoy anything about the show?

Then you might be better off unfollowing them.

Of course, not everyone who makes a joke about negative things is thus enjoying it. It makes people feel better to make light of situations as well as to express anger, and doing so doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re drama-seeking.

And sometimes people slip into the mob more than they would like to have, retrospectively. Say cruel things that they regret later.

It happens, and tumblr can be a persuasive and pervasive place.

If you follow someone who initially reblogs some slightly overly hateful things, but who then backs off after the first wave, they probably aren’t the kind of person who is fueled by anger.

I’ve seen a lot of people I considered to be level-headed get wrapped up in overly aggressive, black and white thinking during the initial reaction to events.

But then sometimes, a couple of weeks later, they’ll post a tentative “Anyone else still wanna kinda like this thing, even though we said it was bad before?” and they’ll get enough approval via reblogs to feel like it’s okay to go back to normal.

Some blogs quietly sort themselves out, in the end.

And if you’re one of those people who goes overboard occasionally, I get it.

You’re hurt and you didn’t realize that the basis for the fan reaction that you were involved in was morally shallow. That the people you were supporting were not righteously furious, but using righteousness as an excuse to be furious.

But remember the message here: people make mistakes. It’s the patterns that really tell you who they are.

And I think we can be better. Have better patterns, as a group.

In the end, I encourage you to point out when a reaction is too harsh, toward anyone. Even if it’s difficult. Even if you agree that what the person did was pretty bad.

Agreeing that “black and white thinking” is bad can feel like you’re lowering your standards for morality. But I promise, you can still value the things that you value and loathe the things that go against it, without condemning someone’s entire personhood based on a mistake or a handful of mistakes regarding those things.

Even big mistakes.

People are complicated. We are all made up of really good things and really bad things.

It’s easy to believe that someone is wholly bad when they screw up.

The hard part, the part that will ultimately ground you and help you mature, is realizing that someone can have some really bad parts within them and still be good people. (I encourage you to remember that when thinking about yourself, as well.)

The trick is recognizing the difference between when people are making honest mistakes that unintentionally hurt people, and when they’re willfully behaving a certain way because they want to hurt people (or don’t care that they will).

And further, between when people are lashing out because they’re hurt and when people are inventing hurt to be able to lash out.

These distinctions will help you realize who you can guide or trust to work their issues out on their own when they slip up, and who you should distance yourself from.

Some very vocal portions of the fandom are, unfortunately, the latter.

#supergirl #kara danvers #melissa benoist #supercorp #sdcc supergirl #sdcc superfail #Anonymous

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jmkartworks · 5 years

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The Gods of Gravity: A Story: https://ift.tt/310VlSp

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

D.H. Lawrence

Not long ago, the owner of a gallery in which I wanted to be represented visited my studio. She had a discerning eye, a successful gallery, and I respected her judgment. To my dismay, however, her verdict on many of my paintings was this: “Miguel, I love your Imagination and these dream-like paintings are mysterious and beautiful. The problem is, I have no idea how to sell them.”

She was right, of course, dreams are strange. They may be real and compelling to me, but why should anyone else have any interest in them?

And yet, and yet, the wind blows….

Many non-artists assume that painters, writers and composers understand what their own works mean, and non-artists are often surprised that I don’t understand any more about what my paintings mean than they do. I explain that I’m trying to paint some things, or better yet, some forces that I can’t see, but that I know are present. I use colors and shapes to suggest hints, intuitions and glimpses of something invisible. Sometimes the painting is successful, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, like baseball, it gets rained out.

The Gods of Gravity – Oil on canvas – 16 x 20 inches

But even if I don’t understand what a painting means, a story about the thoughts, insights and choices that went into the making of it can be entertaining. The Gods of Gravity, for example, was conceived in Northern Europe, specifically in Iceland and Finland. I had never visited the countries of Northern Europe, but had been awarded a sabbatical leave by Sierra College to do research in Scandinavia for classes I was teaching in Art History and World Mythology. I wanted to answer two questions that had long puzzled me: Other than Edvard Munch, who have been prominent artists in the Northern part of the world? Also: a lot is known about Zeus, Aphrodite and Hades; why don’t we know more about Odin, Frigg and Hel?

So, about the piano: A few short years ago on a warm afternoon in late summer, I limped a couple miles from the Laajalahden tram stop in Helsinki to the home/museum of Akseli Gallen-Kallela in the forest outskirts northwest of the city. (I was dragging my left foot because two weeks earlier, in Stockholm, I had been cursed by a witch. But that’s a story for a different post.)

Gallen-Kallela’s home remains largely as it had been when he died in 1931, with bedroom, kitchen, salon, dining room, and his studio with an etching press and a magnificent grand piano. The piano enchanted me immediately and I spent an hour drawing the sketch you see here. (I added the shoes and candelabra later.)

Sketch of G-K’s Piano – Pencil on paper – 7 x 11 inches

The word “enchanted” is not nearly strong enough. Cellos, bassoons and violins are celestial creations, but pianos are pure magic. I took lessons as a boy, and even though I stopped playing piano in favor of playing baseball, it’s still my favorite instrument. No mornings pass when I begin work in my studio without the presence of Mozart, or Johann Sebastian, or Domenico Scarlatti. In the afternoons it’s Keith Jarrett, Mary Lou Williams and Leszek Możdżer.

There will be more said about pianos in a minute, but first I must tell you about the World of Akseli Gallen-Kallela. The Kalevala, Finland’s national myth, was published only thirty years before the artist was born in 1865. The story unfolds in a beautiful and savagely harsh landscape of dense green forests, snow-covered lakes and fields, and it contains all the elements of epic poetry anyone would want: magical adventures, revenge, incest, betrayals, jealousy, shamans, murder, blood feuds, suicide, child abuse, shape-shifting, fratricide, magic spells, kidnapping, theft, thwarted love, heroes, incantations, death and resurrection, “nameless diseases,” shipwrecks, magical animals, the imprisonment of the sun and the moon, epic battles, virgin birth, sacred groves, a miraculous infant, and so on, all flowing toward a shadowy and inconclusive outcome, as if in a dream. Like the Icelandic Eddas, it exerted a huge influence on J.R.R. Tolkien. It also cast its spell on Gallen-Kallela. On me as well.

Lemminkäinen’s Mother – Tempera on Canvas – 34 x 44 inches

In this painting, one of the heroes, Lemminkäinen the shaman, has been killed by his enemies, his body thrown into the River Tounela and torn apart by the rapids. With a copper rake given to her by a god, his mother dredges every scrap of his body from the depths, stitches them together and restores him to life with the help of honey from a magic bee. (You can barely see it at the bottom of the wavy golden rays that descend diagonally from the top of the composition. In the top left corner floats the ominous Black Swan.)

Intuitively in The Gods of Gravity, I wanted to invoke three levels of existence– the Celestial World, home of gods and angelic forces; the Under World, land of the Dead, the hidden world of treasures humans attempt to extract from it, (and things we prefer to conceal in its depths); and Midgard, the human world between above and below.

The fires bursting out of the snow come from the volcanoes of Iceland. I doubt that anyone knows the exact number of volcanoes murmuring under the surface of the island, but the general consensus is that 30 or so are currently active. Even in Reykjavik I felt a pulse underfoot, as if I were walking on the skin of a drum. Perhaps that’s why I eventually added the shoes, even though I never gave the slightest thought to oxfords or brogans. The shoes needed to be feminine.

Why? I don’t know. I didn’t think about anything: no thoughts, no theories no analyses, no ponderings or musings or ruminations about this or that, no studying, no deliberations. Only the wind.

When the painting first began to gestate, there were no mountains or fires under the piano, only snow as part of the landscape of the forest. Why I added the fissures and smoke and lava, I don’t know. After the painting was finished and I could think about it, I figured that the earth is feminine, we are born into this world through the feminine. The muses, at least in my case, are incontrovertibly feminine, so the font of creativity must be feminine, and for all I know, so is the wind.

In my imagination, the ghostly candelabra lives in the upper world and often casts no shadow into this one. Why only one candle still burns, I can’t say. But it felt to me that, like the shoes, they had to be colored red, blue and yellow as part of a larger rainbow. Also, the legs of the piano had to reflect the colors of the creative forces rising from the Underworld into this world.

The Gods of Gravity – Oil on canvas – 16 x 20 inches

As we all know, pianos are made of wood, so now we come to two totems that are inextricably linked, the forest and the piano. The three-legged monster in Gallen-Kallela’s studio was a rich ivory black, but it didn’t occur to me to paint it in any colors other than as a dark rainbow. I wanted to suggest the creative energies of all Three Worlds: gifts that come to us through the hands of Mozart and Bach and Keith Jarrett.

Alas, the most important totems are invisible. What keeps everything suspended in space? We could call those forces Gravity and Anti-Gravity, I suppose, but those are only words. Except for brilliant souls like the theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, we know as little about these invisible forces as we do about Dark Energy and Dark Matter.

Whether The Gods of Gravity succeeds, or fails, or is only a ragbag of associations–not even a rained-out baseball game–I don’t know. I used to think that I as I grew older I would understand more. But now the opposite is happening: Life is more mysterious, not less. In spite of that, what better subject to try to paint than what exists beyond what we can see? But how does an artist attempt this? Bach and Mozart knew. So did D. H. Lawrence. His poem that began this post is called Song of a Man Who Has Come Through. Here is how the poem ends:

What is the knocking?

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

#johnmichaelkeating.com #blog #art #jmkartworks

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militant-holy-knight · 5 years

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Re-Thinking the So-Called “Islamic Golden Age”

During the Middle Ages, the Islamic world glowed brighter than Europe. Or did it really?

It’s pretty unavoidable to hear the topic of the Islamic Golden Age whenever someone observes how Islamic countries today have lagged behind to everyone else where back in medieval times, Muslims were ahead culturally and scientifically than European Christians. By some measures, it’s an correct assertion because they did have some advantages that their counterparts did not at the time. However, most people tend to exaggerate or give them the wrong credit they don’t deserve. Which is I intend to clarify in this blog post as competently as I can.

Historical Context

To give you a brief overview on the rise of Islam that is closely associated with this period: Shortly after the death of Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphate led by his companions (also known as the rightly-guided caliphs) lasted only 25 years and had only 4 leaders, but succeeded in conquering all of the Levant, Egypt, the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia and Persia. The following dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate formed after the death of the final Rashidun caliph Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law), grew even larger and to this day remains the largest Islamic empire to have existed stretching all the way from modern-day Spain to India.

This is all very impressive for an nomadic people from the desert that had supposedly existed since the Biblical times as descendants of Ishmael but never represented a real challenge to superpowers like the Greeks, Romans or Persians before them. Even more impressive that they’d be considered so advanced compared to other cultures at the same time, in spite of the ideology they created being the most antithetic to science that has ever been produced. It almost looks like it was designed to stump any attempt to better understand our world (pure coincidence, kafir). It achieves this wonderful result thanks to its two fundamental principles.

Divine Revelations Are Superior to Empiricism

From Wikipedia: “Empiricism [says] that all hypotheses and theories must be TESTED against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.” You might recognize empiricism as "the foundation of the scientific method", or "the main reason western civilization invented everything it has invented". Well, Islam rejects it and states that divine revelations MUST have the priority, always and in every circumstance. After all, divine revelations come from the all-knowing, mistake-proof Allah, so of course they can't be wrong. The Quran is right because it comes from the perfect Allah, and Allah is perfect because the Quran says so.

This lovely piece of circular logic lies at the very core of Islam, and if it ever were to be rejected, the entire house of Islam would crumble like a sandcastle hit by a wave. It has influenced every Muslim thought, theory and practice for the past 1400 years, and still does. As a result of this principle, if facts and divine revelations clash, the facts are wrong:

A man came to the prophet and said, 'My brother has got loose motions'. The Prophet said, 'Let him drink honey.' The man again (came) and said, 'I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.' The Prophet said, 'Allah has said the Truth, and THE ABDOMEN OF YOUR BROTHER HAS TOLD A LIE.' (Sahih Bukhari 5716)

What about dangerous shit like putting toxic antimony in your eyes? Lots of doctors say it's bad, even though Muhammad said it was beneficial. This fatwa clarifies the issue:

Ithmid (antimony) is known to be very good for the eyes. […] Trustworthy doctors are the ones whom we should consult on this matter (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/44696/pure-kohl-is-beneficial-to-the-eyes-and-is-not-harmful)

“Trustworthy” is code for “Muslim”. After all, medicine comes from human minds, and human minds are flawed and subject to constant changes, so medicine is also flawed and constantly changing, while revelations come from the perfect and timeless mind of Allah (actual argument you'll hear in debates). Plus, we all know kuffar are all liars hellbent on pushing Muslims on the wrong path. The “revelation over empiricism” principle is at the root of much Islamic (hilarious) retardation. Such as:

Scantily clad women cause earthquakes.

Evolution is a lie from Shaytan.

The Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it

youtube

Still in 2017, a Tunisian PhD student wrote a doctoral thesis that said that the Earth is flat, only 13,500 years old, and the center of the universe. Oh, also relativity is wrong. And Newton too. The thesis (which took 5 years of work) was accepted by two assessors. Only after passing the first approval stage did its retardation come to light (thanks to a leak) and the faculty stepped in to reject it, but it was too late to avoid the media shitstorm. The student claimed that all she did was unmasking the kuffar lies and reshape science in a way respectful of the Quran's divine revelations, so her conclusions were right. Every time it's accused of being an intellectually crippling religion, Islam claims that it's a kuffar lie. In fact, Muslims say, Islam ENCOURAGES rational thought. Problem is, Islam likes to play with words and change their definitions to fit its agenda. In this case, it has traced a fictitious distinction between "critical" and "rational" thought. This glorious essay explains it clearly:

There are two different things; critical thinking and rational or independent thinking. There are categories where the mind should play its role and where it should not poke its nose. The clear and apparent meanings of the Glorious Qur'aan and the Hadith [...] have no place for criticism. Here, rational thinking to find out the depth is not only permissible but also encouraged in Islam [...] but it is not allowed to criticize since the mind has its own limitation as other human faculties have. (http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_351_400/does_islam_permit_critical_think.htm)

Get that? It's fine if you use your brain to analyze the scriptures and understand how to better please Allah and fully respect his rules... but you're not allowed to question them, point out logical or factual flaws, or criticize them because they run contrary to your morality.

This is why other Muslim talking points thrown around in every discussion, like this hadith which supposedly encourages scientific research...

The Messenger of Allah (pbuh) said: Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim.

...don't really mean what a Western reader might think they mean. As explained in this fatwa, “What is meant by knowledge here is knowledge of sharee’ah (Islamic knowledge)”. (See here, which also specifies that hadith is probably false anyway.)

This is what Islam says when they talk about “knowledge”. They mean the wisdom of Allah revealed in the Quran and (through the words and actions of Muhammad) in the Sunnah. Nothing else is worthy of being considered actual knowledge, because science is achieved through the workings of the human mind, which is flawed and subject to mistakes. Muslims always point at past scientific theories that are now recognized as wrong to “prove” that science is inferior to divine revelations, not realizing that the ability to distinguish right from wrong and discard the latter is precisely that which makes science superior to revelations. Science realizes its mistakes and grows, constantly improving. Divine revelations CANNOT change, because that would imply accusing Allah of being imperfect. Which brings us to the second principle.

Progress is Actually Regress

This second principle is a logical consequence of the first. Since divine revelations are perfect and forever valid in every time and place, this means that our scientific, philosophical and moral knowledge have all peaked 1400 years ago, when Muhammad transmitted us Allah's wisdom. Islam calls Muhammad “the perfect man” and considers his generation the best that ever existed:

[Muhammad said:] The best among you (are) the people (who belong to) my age. Then those next to them, then those next to them, then those next to them. [...] Then after them would come a people who would give evidence before they are asked for it, and would be dishonest and not trustworthy... (Sahih Muslim 2535. Also, Sahih Bukhari 6429).

Since the Quran and the Sunnah that Muhammad gave us are perfection, changing a single thing from them is regress, not progress. And it's considered apostasy:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to deny the existence of Allah, His eternality, or to deny any of His attributes which the consensus of Muslims (ijma) ascribes to Him;

to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus (ijma) belongs to it;

to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims (ijma) is part of Islam, even one rak'a [bow] from one of the five obligatory prayers. (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph o8.7)

As a consequence, the role of the Islamic “scholar” is reduced to that of a broken record: all he can and must do is repeat his predecessors' opinions. Old ideas and interpretations of the scriptures are considered more valid than new ones BY DEFINITION. Current scholars simply can't contradict the ijma (the established consensus of ancient scholars we've discussed in the previous lesson). This makes Islamic theology a desiccated corpse.

This is an essential point that western liberals have a very hard time understanding, because they grew up in a culture (ours) where scholars have the freedom, and even the expectation, to subvert old thinking and innovate the intellectual landscape. But Islamic scholars are the exact opposite. Chained by every intellectual restriction imaginable, incapable of denying, questioning, criticizing or ignoring even the smallest rule of Allah or of his prophet on pain of apostasy, the Islamic scholar has the role of PREVENTING innovations. Of preserving Islam during the centuries like a mosquito in amber.

Which is why a fiqh manual of 800 years ago like “Reliance of the Traveller” is pretty much identical to a manual written in 2001 like “A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence”, despite belonging to a different fiqh school. Individual fiqh schools almost can't deviate from each other because of the intrinsic limits of Islamic theology, and indeed, they all agree on the most essential questions: the treatment of infidels, women and gays, admissibility of pedophilia and slavery, refusal of the scientific method, obligatoriness of aggressive jihad even without provocation, etc. All the things that make Islam problematic are clearly stated by every fiqh school.

This doctrinal rigidity is also the reason why the objection “anybody can write a fatwa” is not a valid reason to reject its content. First of all, no, not anybody can write a fatwa. You need a specific license to issue them (not even Osama bin Laden was considered a qualified jurist - he was a businessman - despite issuing two fatwas in the late 90s calling for war against the USA). But the most important point is that fatwas are NOT PERSONAL OPINIONS of the issuing scholar. They're always expression of orthodox Islam. They MUST be, because Islamic scholars can't state their personal opinions if they differ from the orthodoxy. That would be apostasy. Proof is that fatwas are always very well sourced with a profusion of sahih hadiths and Quranic verses (ayat). To reject a fatwa, you need to explain why the hadiths and the ayat it's based on are not valid. Good luck.

This rigidity also invalidates the common objection “but there is an imam in [liberal country] who says [liberal opinion which contradicts orthodox Islam]”. Some Western imams even claim that homosexuality is fine. In Germany they have a female imam who spouts all kinds of liberal feel-good stuff, and is portrayed by the media as the face of “modern Islam”. The problem is that in this case we are truly talking about ENTIRELY PERSONAL OPINIONS, which not only are not supported by the holy texts, but directly contradict them. So what these liberal imams say (either out of ignorance or because they're looking for attention), doesn't change Islam in the slightest. Orthodox Islam still states that gays must be killed and that women can't be imams. The principle is very simple: if a fatwa or a statement from a Muslim scholar are supported by sahih hadiths, excerpts from the Sirat and/or (not abrogated) Quranic verses, they're theologically valid, otherwise they're not. It should be obvious, but liberals don't seem to get it and regularly choose to believe only the unfounded claims and to ignore the theologically solid ones.

As we were saying, according to Islam itself, our understanding of Islam (and therefore of the universe and of morality) is constantly DECREASING instead of increasing. The further we go from the time of the Prophet, the more we deviate from the perfect path. This view is in direct opposition with the Western one, which considers every scientific discovery an improvement. The time of the Prophet was considered the best period of time in existence, which explains why groups like the Taliban want to revert whatever societies they operate to one from 1400 years ago.

“But wait”, you might say. “Muslims are not like the Amish, they don't seem to have any problems using technology. They gladly and immediately accepted our cars, fridges, electricity, computers, automatic rifles and cellphones. How can you say they're against scientific progress?”

Once again, Islam avoids this schizophrenic contradiction by playing with words, twisting concepts and, if it needs to, inventing new ones. Islam distinguishes between IDEOLOGICAL innovations (bid'ah), which are negative until proven otherwise, and MATERIAL innovations, which are positive until proven otherwise (proof that can only be found in the scriptures, of course, not derived by logic or facts):

Allah's Messenger (pbuh) said, "If somebody innovates something which is not in harmony with the principles of our religion, that thing is rejected."» (Sahih Bukhari 2697)

[Bid'ah] means anything that is not referred to specifically in Sharee'ah, and for which there is no evidence (daleel) in the Qur'aan or Sunnah, and which was not known at the time of the Prophet and his Companions.

At the same time, it is quite obvious that this definition of religious inventions or innovations, which are condemned, DOES NOT INCLUDE WORDLY INVENTIONS [such as cars and washing machines, etc. – Translator].» (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/864/bidah-hasanah-good-innovations)

Muslims always quote this hadith where Muhammad said:

Whoever starts a good thing and is followed by others, will have his own reward and a reward equal to that of those who follow him.

...and this should prove that Islam just LOVES innovations. Problem is that once again Islam gives a different meaning to words. As clarified in the above quoted fatwa:

From the context of the story, it is clear that what is meant by the words "whoever starts a good thing (sunnah hasanah)" is: Whoever revives a part of the Sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh), or teaches it to others, or commands others to follow it, or acts according to it so that others follow his example. [...] It should be clear from the above, with no room for doubt, that the Prophet (pbuh) was not allowing innovation in matters of deen (religion)

So only teaching somebody an islamic rule that he might not know is "a good thing". To sum it up: ideas, theories and philosophies which were “not known at the time of the Prophet” are bad, but “wordly inventions” are good. This very convenient distinction allows Islam to take all the fruits of the infidels' work, all the electronics, the factories, the medicines, the weapons, etc., while rejecting their ideas, which have the naughty tendency of disproving some part or another of Islam's “perfect” revelations. As a result, Islam creates very obtuse but dangerous cultures.

Islamic societies are scientifically stagnant, because science is first of all a specific MINDSET that says everything can and should be questioned and nothing should be accepted without valid evidence. You simply can't do science without this mindset, and Islam utterly kills it... But Muslims are also armed with all the latest gadgets and convinced they have the right to own them (since the kuffar were created to serve Muslims, their achievements are gifts from Allah to them – actual argument I've heard) and even to use them against the same kuffar who created them.

What About That “Islamic Golden Age”?

That Islam inevitably generates scientifically infertile cultures might appear like a preposterous statement. In which case, you're probably squealing: “But what about the Islamic Golden Age? Without Islam we wouldn't have our science because Muslims were inventing shit and Wakandin' around while our ancestors were still in caves and didn't even know how to bathe” yadda yadda. This apparent contradiction ceases to exist when we realize that the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” never existed. At least not as it's commonly meant, as a time when innumerable Muslim scientists were creating whole new scientific disciplines and discovering the secrets of the cosmos.

What REALLY happened was that Muslims invaded and conquered scientifically advanced but militarily weak societies like Persia, India and eventually Greece, and then absorbed all their useful infidel knowledge. The “Islamic Golden Age” should be more accurately called the Greek-Hindu-Persian-Dhimmi Golden Age, since it started when in the 9th century caliph Abu Jafar al-Mamun ordered that all the scientific and philosophical treaties written by the infidels be translated in Arabic (which is actually commendable considering some of his predecessors burned down the Christian Library of Alexandria or erased whatever traces of Zoroastrianism in Persia by destroying pretty much all its sacred texts and killing all their priests). All the translators were Christians or Jews (like abbott Probus of Antioch and Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son) which translated and released into Islamic societies the works of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Galen, and many other Greek mathematicians, thinkers, astronomers and doctors.

Many Indian discoveries were also appropriated by Islam. Like the number zero, invented by Brahmagupta in 628 AD and described in his book “Brahmasphuta Siddhanta”. Or the so called “arabic numerals”, which Muslims keep telling us we owe to them... even though they were invented in India in 700 AD. (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Indian_numerals.html) Arab societies don't even use our same numbers, but very different ones. Islam even brags about giving us coffee, even though it was already well known by their black slaves. Yeah, Muslims had black slaves. Oh, they had so fucking MANY black slaves.

This massive translation enterprise had the positive effect of preserving many treaties that otherwise we might have lost, but the Islamic Golden Age didn't really generate anything new. Consider this: Pre-Islamic India was renowned for its universities: Takshashila, Vikramashila, Nalanda, Ujjain and other places attracted students and scholars alike from far and wide, much like the United States of today .After the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, not a single center of learning (other than Islamic seminaries) was established for over seven centuries.

In 1400 years, Islam produced no relevant scientific discovery, no new paradigm, no major breakthrough, no revolution even remotely comparable to the Copernican or the relativistic one. Or the germ theory of diseases. Or the Newtonian laws of physics. Or the atomic theory. Or the discovery of continental drift. Or the taming of electricity. Or the development of the theory of evolution. Or the periodic table. Or the discovery of DNA. Or, hell, the goddamn SCIENTIFIC METHOD, which Islam keeps rejecting to this day. And of course, even in the philosophical, political and social realms, Islam has rejected every major breakthrough, from freedom of speech, to inalienable human rights, to the idea that authorities should not be above the law, to independence of scientific research. Hell, they didn’t even make any military breakthroughs: the Turks may have used gunpowder to take Constantinople down, but they were given by the Chinese, who discovered it ages ago while the Europeans improved it, many, many times and now we have modern weapons because of them. For a religion that revolves created around and for warfare, that is quite an unimaginable slip up.

As we've seen, fiqh manuals state clearly that denying the smallest rule of islam is apostasy. But they don't stop there: even believing that natural phenomenons might have causes which don't depend on the will of Allah is enough to be considered an apostate:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to believe that things in themselves or by their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah. (Reliance of the Traveller, Shafi school of law, paragraph o8.7)

The same manual, on paragraph o8.1, adds that apostates must be killed. The other fiqh schools agree:

Maliki school: Malik Ibn Anas, “Al-Muwatta”, book 36, paragraphs 36.18.15-16. (PDF:http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Al-Muwatta-by-Imam-Malik.pdf)

Hanbali school: Saleh Al-Fawzan, "A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence", Al-Maiman Publishing House, Riyadh, 2005, Vol. 2, Part X, chapter 9, pp. 637-8.

Hanafi school: Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, “Bahishti Zewar”, Zam Zam Publishers, Karachi, 2005, p. 375. (PDF:https://archive.org/details/BahishtiZewar_201307)

See also this fatwa: http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/34653

How can you have science when you get killed for even attempting to understand the world without assuming the existence of an omnipotent puppeteer directly controlling every atom? The Islamic concept of the universe is that of an ultimately unknowable concoction whose workings depend on the whims of Allah. The universe might respect the laws of physics 999,999,999 times in a row, but there's never any guarantee that on the one billionth time, Allah wont decide to violate them. So every conclusion reached by observation and experimenting is inevitably uncertain. This view of the universe is in direct opposition with the western one of an ordered machinery that can be understood and predicted by analyzing it with our reason.

In 14 centuries, Islam produced nothing besides some minor advancements in optics, algebra, astronomy, medicine and trigonometry, and some new words: nadir, zenith, elisir, assassin, algebra, etc. (Note: algebra was invented in India and developed by Europeans, Muslims simply invented its name.) Not a very impressive trophy room for such a massive culture, so widespread, so old and which counted untold billions of followers since its birth. I wonder what could've caused this intellectual drought...

How About Any Scholars?

Muslims love to name-drop lots of amazing Islamic scientists which supposedly taught us lowly infidels all our science. Too bad basically none of those were actually Muslims. They were heretical thinkers which achieved their results precisely by REJECTING Islam's suffocating dogmas. And sure enough, if they lived even today, there would have been calls for their deaths.

Avicenna (Ibn Sina): He credited his achievements in medicine and logic to Aristotle and Hippocrates. His theology was a fusion of Plato’s and Islam. He denied physical resurrection and thought prophets were simply "inspired philosophers". Also, he believed Allah only knew the universal principles of the workings of the universe, but couldn't or didn't care about controlling the small daily events in our lives, which denied his omniscience. (Arthur J. Arberry, “Avicenna on Theology”, John Murray, 1951.) For these ideas, he was accused of blasphemy by Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyyah (both of whom are considered the most influential Islamic theologians today) and other major scholars, who considered him even more deviant than the pagans who opposed Muhammad! Nowadays, the Muslim scholars who aren't too busy taking credit for his discoveries are busy accusing him of apostasy and forbidding Muslims to respect him. (See for example: https://www.bakkah.net/en/the-reality-of-ibn-sina-avicenna-famous-scientist-and-philosopher.htm)

Averroes: Also strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Dared to say that truth could also be discovered using reason and logic and not only the holy texts, and that Muhammad's way of treating women was disgusting. Was accused of blasphemy, persecuted and forced in exile by the Almohad Caliphate in the 12th century. He also wasn't considered a Muslim in his time (before Muslims started to feel the need to repaint their blasphemers so they could have some scientist to brag about).

Abu Bakr al-Razi: Often considered the best Muslim thinker who ever lived, he called himself a disciple of Socrates and Plato, denied that the world was created from nothing, that faith is superior to reason, that Muhammad only taught the truth, and that revealed religions in general are of much use, besides igniting avoidable conflicts for retarded reasons. He considered them needlessly nitpicky and irrational. He had the balls to write 3 books on the subject:

"The Prophet's fraudulent tricks",

"The stratagems of those who claim to be prophets",

"On the refutation of revealed religions".

He also called the Quran "a collection of absurd fables". Was obviously accused of apostasy and NOT considered a Muslim, despite his titanic testicles. (Source: Deuraseh, Nurdeng, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Works of Abu Bakr Al-Razi and Al-Biruni", 2008, Journal of Aqidah and Islamic Thought, 9:51–100.)

Al-Sarakhsi: Philosopher. Studied the Greeks and dared to apply rationality to the study of the holy books and to deny the veracity of prophets. Was executed in 899 AD for apostasy by the Abbasids.

Al-Farabi: Philosopher. Thought that reason was superior to faith and that the body couldn't resurrect. Was accused of apostasy.

These were only the most famous (and most name-dropped) """Islamic""" thinkers, but the trend should be evident. Some heretics managed to get away with it because the ruler at the time wasn't too stringent about following Islam himself and preferred to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Islam wasn't imposed with the exact same severity in every Muslim culture and in every age. Others had to spend their entire lives using deliberately ambiguous language in their writings in order to maintain plausible deniability. Others still simply hid their heretic work while fronting as strict Muslims. The intellectual sterility of Islam is made evident by the fact that his ideas about the scientific method were completely IGNORED by Islamic societies, and continue to be so.

With very few exceptions, like the historian Ibn Khaldun, the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, the polymath Al-Tusi and a few others (whose actual faith we have no way of knowing since they weren't suicidal enough to openly reject Islam), every supposed Muslim genius was actually not a Muslim at all, according to Islam's own rules. To do good work, they needed the freedom to explore new ideas, and to have that, they had no choice but to reject Islam's stringent limitations. They were persecuted, exiled, tortured, killed and had most of their work burned by the same kind of obtuse Muslims whose intellectual heirs now brag about the very achievements they couldn't destroy. As Ernest Renan said:

Whatever science managed to flourish within Islam during the Middle Ages did so IN SPITE of Islam, not thanks to it. Giving Islam the credit for these discoveries would be like giving the Inquisition credit for Galileo's. (Ernest Renan, "Islamisme et la science", lecture given at the Sorbonne on march 29, 1883)

Apologists always blame the Crusades and the Mongol invasions for ending their Golden Age. But even before Mongols sacked Baghdad (the intellectual capital of the Islamic world) in the 13th century, and before the Crusaders took Jerusalem, Muslims could never really achieve any scientific breakthrough in their centuries of almost uncontested hegemony. Maybe because Muhammad really hated people who questioned his divine revelations and tried to improve on them, and has explicitly forbidden it:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, “Leave me as I have left you (i.e., do not ask me questions that go beyond what I’ve already told you). For those who came before you were doomed because of their questions and differences with their Prophets. If I forbid you from doing something, then abstain from it. And if I command you to do something, then do of it as much as you can." (Sahih Bukhari 7288.)

Just asking questions about something is enough to make that something haram (forbidden) even though before it was allowed:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, "The most sinful person among the Muslims is the one who asked about something which had not been prohibited, but was prohibited because of his asking." (Sahih Bukhari 7289.)

This obviously made Muslims fearful to question and to investigate. As Rodney Stark said:

What killed Islam's science was Islam itself. How can you do research in biology, chemistry, physics or philosophy, when the law explicitly forbids it?

Unlawful knowledge includes:

philosophy;

the sciences of the materialists.

and anything that is a means to create doubts (n: in eternal truths) (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph a7.2)

This little paragraph is enough to kill any hope of scientific development and to qualify Islam as the most backward religion currently in existence.

Imminent Christian Apologetic

For all the shit people give Christianity and accusing us of “holding back progress”, the development of Western civilization is intrinsically tied to it. The first modern universities established in India after centuries of Muslim occupation were made during Anglican British rule. The Jesuit order were regarded the Catholic Church’s best educational system in its most innovative thinkers and their suppression was considered an unmitigated disaster for Catholicism. The Earth being spherical was already a consensus among Christian scholars before Galileo Galilei (which I will get to it in the future). Even things we take for granted like question marks, upper and lowercase letters were created as a result of Charlemagne’s policy to make his people literate. Muslims themselves benefited from their Christian dhimmis translating texts for them. It was Christian scholars like Mendel, Copernicus, Bacon, Magnus, Ockham and countless others that developed biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, their Muslim counterparts were too busy memorizing doubtful anecdotes about Muhammad, even more doubtful “divine revelations”, and writing obsessively detailed rules about the most mundane daily act, from the right way to sit to how to wash your ass. The difference is striking, and mostly due to the Christian view of the cosmos not as something subjected to the whims of Allah, therefore unpredictable, but as a collection of stable, harmonic mechanisms which could be studied and understood. An act which, rather than irritating God, would reveal His glory. Even during the so-called Dark Ages, Christianity was still doing seminal scientific work while Muslim clerics today issue fatwas against building snowmen because it's an act of creation which challenges Allah's power (Drawing pictures or creating sculptures is considered illegal because muh idolatry).

Conclusion

Islam's problem with science, which unfortunately is the most basic belief at the core of the entire doctrine is therefore unfixable: the belief that Islam is PERFECT. This inevitably creates a mentality where science is impossible, because progress and research are seen as not only useless but harmful. A step back from the perfect path. When Muslims claim to believe that the universe is ordered and harmonic, what they mean is that every atom is under the complete control of Allah, so there is no chaos. The Islamic Golden Age is a giant meme, they were only ahead of the Europeans during the Middle Ages because they stole information from the peoples they conquered rather than producing anything new and was the job of infidels to do that shit for them. It’s no wonder that Islam's scientific progress stopped so abruptly once they exhausted the Indo-Greek bag of gifts they stole with their bloody wars of conquest and even now, rather than training actual scientists, Islam is too busy misunderstanding science (and Christianity for that matter) in an attempt to prove the “scientific miracles” in the Quran (like a Grand Mufti who insisted the Earth was flat and the Sun rotated it, only changing his mind after a Saudi prince who went to space told him himself), while at the same time accepting all the useful trinkets and rejecting the ideas and the mindset which generated them.

This intellectual poverty, inability and unwillingness to question old dogmas and research new ideas are inevitable in a culture ruled by Islam, and explain why the entire Muslim world, with all its 1,7 billion people, is still so insignificant in the scientific community, and can claim virtually no achievement to its name. In its entire history, Islam has produced only three Nobel prizes in scientific disciplines: Abdus Salam (physics), Ahmed Zewail and Aziz Sancar (both chemistry). Not surprisingly, all three of them received their education and did their research in Western countries. I will also make an separate blogpost in the future showing how the Islamic world “rewards” the geniuses it produces.

But you know what? Maybe refuting the so-called Islamic Golden Age is an exercise in futility because as Salafism proliferates and festers in the Islamic world, they don’t really genuinely care about that period (they only use it to rub in the face of infidels and make up for their loss in prestige) because this era as its understood peaked during the Abbasid Caliphate. The only period they most want to emulate is one of Muhammad’s time and the Rashidun Caliphate (the so called “rightly guided”) - i.e. the one where Islam was mostly spread by the sword - since all the following ones: the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans were considered “corrupted” and “non-Islamic”. You might be familiar with that better as what Taliban and ISIS were trying to do. So yeeeeahh....

#history

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emmagreen1220-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on Mythology.net

New Post has been published on https://mythology.net/mythical-creatures/megalania/

Megalania

If you were to adventure into the backcountry of Australia, you might happen across cave paintings made by the early Aboriginals. There would likely be many different stories painted on these walls, but one of the most fearsome would be that of a giant goanna (the native term for an Australian monitor lizard).

The goanna portrayed on the cave walls is massive compared to the average human and would have been considered to be a fearsome predator. Many who have studied these drawing feel that they have identified the inspiration for the paintings – the Megalania Prisca. This creature is the largest known terrestrial lizard known to have existed. It was thought to have originated about 2 million years ago and died out nearly 23,000 years ago which would have coincided with the arrival of the early Aboriginals. Experts claim the creature went extinct long ago– but many who live in Australia claim to have seen the mighty lizard in modern times.

What is a Megalania

Megalania Prisca (also called Varanus priscus) is a giant monitor lizard that is thought to have once roamed the wilds of Australia. This creature was giant in size and is thought to belong to the Toxicofera clade. This means that it likely had venomous glands inside its mouth that it was able to use to help it capture prey. The Megalania is known to be a carnivore and had large, serrated teeth inside its mouth that would have made it a fearsome opponent. It is known to have powerful muscles and would have been able to accelerate to impressive speeds, though it is doubtful that the creature would have been able to keep up with animals that were equipped for running long distances on land.

In spite of this, it is likely that the Megalania didn’t struggle to find prey. The lizard is known to be enormous. It is thought that the average Megalania could have easily reached 15 to 20 feet in length and is speculated that the largest Megalania could have reached 35 feet or more in length! This means the Megalania could have weighed up to 8,300 pounds when it was full grown. Any animal this size would have been a sight to behold, but the powerful build of the Megalania and its carnivorous status would have made this creature one of the most fearsome predators that early humans would have encountered.

In many Aboriginal stories that have been handed down through oral record and cave paintings that have been discovered, it is suggested that some of these reptiles were capable of bringing fire and other destruction along with them. Additionally, the fossils of these creatures suggest they were not purely terrestrial creatures, but may also have aquatic abilities. This thought is supported by an Aboriginal tale that speaks of a Megalania Prisca who wandered into the ocean.

The story claims that the Megalania Prisca happened to wander into the ocean and began to swim. While in the ocean, it was attacked by a Great White Shark and the two creatures began to fight each other. The Megalania was able to overcome the shark and dragged the carcass of the Great White back to shore. The story ends with the depiction of the Megalania feasting on the carcass of the shark.

The above story is apparently relatively fresh among the Aboriginal peoples (within a few hundred years) which leads many people to believe the Megalania has yet to go extinct. What’s more is that there are supposed sightings of the creature dating from the 1800s all the way up to present day. These stories have brought excitement among cryptozoologists who believe that it is only a matter of time before the carcass of one of these beasts is found and able to be studied.

Despite these stories and supposed sightings, however, the majority of experts who don’t recognize cryptozoology maintain that the Megalania died in the Ice Age along with many other terrifying Australian creatures. These experts believe the stories of giant lizard attacks are much more likely to be Komodo Dragons or some other related monitor lizard species.

Still, there remains a significant number of Australians who believe the Megalania still exists and is just as deadly as it was some 20,000 years ago. There are also stories among locals that suggest the Megalania might not be confined to Australia alone. One story from a French priest traveling New Guinea in the 1960’s suggests that the Megalania’s existence may have a much farther reach than the continent of Australia.

There continues to be much debate over the possibility of Megalania surviving into modern times, though several theories have been proposed for how the beast could have survived undetected.

Characteristics

Physical Description

Megalania is most notably known to be a reptile that was terrifying in size. The creature is thought to have averaged lengths between 15 and 20 feet while the biggest of its kind could have been up to 35 feet in length. There is, however, some debate over the size of the Megalania. Some scientists believe the creature couldn’t be any more than 11 to 15 feet at its largest size. This argument has been largely contradicted by fossil findings, though no concrete answer to how big the Megalania Prisca grew has been settled on.

One of the most notable features that has been gleaned from the discovered Megalania fossils is the impressive jaws of the beast. The serrated teeth would have easily sliced through skin and would have caused impressive damage to animals with soft and largely unprotected skin. It is also hypothesized that the sharpness of the teeth, combined with the crushing power of the jaw muscles would have had little problem slicing through bone.

There is also evidence in the creature’s mandibles that the lizard may have also had some sort of venomous glands inside its mouth that helped it take down prey more easily. It is thought that this venom acted very similarly to that of the Komodo Dragon. This would mean that the toxins would have acted as an anticoagulant which would have caused their prey to bleed out faster.

Little else is known about the creature from fossils alone other than its sheer size. From what we know of the fossil record of the Megalania, the creature would have towered over the average human and may have reached lengths comparable to modern day school buses. At its largest size, the Megalania could have reached lengths up to 35 feet in length and could have weighed as much as 8,300 pounds.

There are also features of the Megalania fossils that suggest the creature might not have been a purely terrestrial creature. Some features of the skeletal structure suggest that the creature may have had some aquatic capabilities as well.

Much of the information that has been gathered through eye witness accounts suggests the creature to be just as fearsome in physical appearance as it is in the fossil record. One account by a group of teenagers suggests that the creature may have scales that resemble an armored pattern to serve as skin. Information gathered from multiple accounts suggests that the beast is rather bland in color and can easily be mistaken for fallen trees and other dark debris.

The lizard is thought to be able to reach fairly impressive speeds, though if its anatomy remains similar to other monitor lizards, it is unlikely that the creature could maintain a long distance chase. It is much more likely that the Megalania would prefer to lay in wait for its prey and capture it with sudden and definite movement.

Personality

The Megalania is known to be a rather fearsome carnivore and would have served as an incredibly difficult adversary to overcome.

There is a story of the Megalania that tells of the creature’s encounter with a Great White Shark. The Megalania came out on top and then proceeded to drag the shark carcass to shore and feast on the remains. This would suggest that the Megalania was an extremely aggressive creature and likely considered to be one of the great apex predators of its time.

Based on the perceived anatomical structure of the creature and our knowledge of modern day monitor lizards, it is unlikely that the creature would have been able to sustain a long distance chase despite its ability to accelerate quickly. This suggests that while aggressive, the Megalania would be more likely to lie in wait for its prey and then ambush it quickly.

Meglania Sightings

Giant Lizard in Euroa

In 1890, there were apparent sightings of a large reptile (supposedly a lizard) that terrorized the town of Euroa, Australia. There were many eyewitnesses that claimed they saw a large lizard raiding farms and killing livestock. The consensus among the eyewitnesses was that the creature was at least 30 feet in length and had an intimidating anatomical structure.

French Priest in New Guinea

In the 1960’s a French Priest reportedly ventured into the wilds of New Guinea with a Native to spread the teachings of Christianity. While traveling on the river, he spotted a giant lizard laying on a fallen tree. He asked the Native tour guide to stop, but being frightened the guide continued past the creature in great haste. The curious priest returned to the site the next morning to measure the tree. To his shock, the tree was 40 feet in length and the lizard had been almost identical in length.

Normanby Range Sighting 1968

There are stories of a soldier who came forward to report a sighting of what appeared to be Megalania tracks during a training exercise he and his unit completed in the Normanby Range in 1968.

Part of their training exercise required them to traverse through a perilous section of swamp area. While hiking through the swamp, they found drag marks that eventually led them to the carcass of a cow. The cow appeared to have been killed somewhere else and dragged a considerable distance before being viciously torn apart and devoured. After a quick search, the unit found lizard tracks nearly 2 feet in size and tail markings that appeared to come from a reptile. They hastily left the area, as it appeared the cow had not been there long.

Tracks in Moruya

In the winter of 1979, a farmer in Moruya, Australia reported sighting a giant lizard that he believed to be at least 20 feet in length. Upon investigating, he found tracks that had been left behind and called Roy Gilroy (a cryptozoologist dedicated to exploring the unexplainable in Australia) and had him investigate. Many of the tracks had been damaged or lost, but Gilroy was able to make a mold of one of the tracks that was still intact.

Many years later in the winter of 2008, Gilroy was able to find another similar set of tracks. These tracks were found about 185 miles away from the town of Moruya. He was able to make casts of these tracks as well and found them to be nearly identical to the tracks he had originally casted in 1979.

Queensland Farmer

At some point in the 2000s, a farmer in Central Queensland is reported to have found a cluster of unusual bones on his property. He believed he had made a significant discovery and gifted the bones to a university in Brisbane.

Allegedly, these bones were quickly determined to be Megalania but the discovery was supposedly ‘hushed up’ soon after it had been reported. This is supposedly because the creature’s bones were dated to be no more than 300 years old – a startling discovery.

If the skeleton really was only 300 years old, it would mean that the Megalania survived long after the Ice Age and it wouldn’t be surprising for the creatures to still exist today in the Australian outback.

Parthenogenesis

One of the biggest issues scientists have with the possibility of a Megalania existing in modern day times is the lack of evidence of the creature. Many argue that the Megalania would have to sustain a population size that would have been bound to have been discovered in modern day if they had survived the Ice Age.

However, recent studies of Komodo Dragons may provide an answer for how the Megalania could have continued to survive into modern day. This theory could also explain how the Megalania could have survived with lower population sizes than originally anticipated by scientists.

Parthenogenesis has been observed among Komodo Dragons as a way of preserving the species and avoiding extinction. Through this process, female Komodo Dragons are able to reproduce without having a male fertilize their eggs. This was observed when Komodo Dragon eggs were able to hatch even though no fertilization had occurred.

It is important to note, however, that this process can only happen for one generation. The resulting offspring from parthenogenesis is all male hatchlings which means a female is still necessary to produce eggs. Hypothetically, this time span should be more than enough for the population to grow to a sustainable size again.

Because Megalania is thought to closely resemble the Komodo Dragons of modern day, it is possible that the Megalania is also capable of Parthenogenesis.

Explanation of the Myth

While many people continue to deny the possibility of a Megalania existing in modern day, there seems to be considerable evidence that would support a slight possibility for the survival of the creature. Many people who believe in the Megalania often voice theories like parthenogenesis when discussing ways the creature could have survived into modern day.

There are also people who believe the Megalania could have survived outside of Australia as well. They often point to Indonesia and surrounding islands as a possible answer because many of the islands are uninhabited and largely unexplored.

Others are quick to point out that while Australia has been mapped out in its entirety by aerial shots, there is still much land that hasn’t been explored on foot. Much of this land is largely inaccessible by foot or with machinery, but it wouldn’t be impossible for megafauna like Megalania to exist in these regions.

Regardless of whether Megalania has managed to exist into modern days or, if as experts claim, recent sightings are more likely to be Komodo Dragons or other similar monitor lizards, Megalania continues to be a point of fascination for all. It may be unlikely that the largest terrestrial lizard survived past the Ice Age, but it is undeniable that Australia continues to reveal some of the most terrifying beasts known to man.

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kingmindint · 6 years

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Security for Permissioned Blockchains

The heart of each blockchain is a protocol that agrees to the order and security of a transaction for the next block. The following article deals with how to preserve the integrity of this chain. So-called permissioned blockchains are growing in popularity.

All the more so as companies use the blockchain trend for themselves and at the same time want to keep the “lid on it”. Unlike the non-Permissioned site (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum), the permissioned blockchains are known to the participants and can be given specific privileges and privileges. Permissioned blockchains are controlled by an approval authority that grants permission to each of the participating nodes. Only those who are authorized can access the transaction network.

If you look for concrete examples in a hyped technology such as the Blockchain, they are mostly permissoned blockchains. The approving entity can be a consortium of companies, but also a single organization. The following article deals in particular with the security implications of providing authorized subscribers with a clear block chain and provides recommendations for secure provisioning.

For this it makes sense first to clarify what is meant by the permissioned blockchains and how the terminology is used.

What a permissioned blockchain is

At the heart of each blockchain is a protocol that agrees to the order of new transactions for the next block, the so-called consensus. Transactions can be any kind of information. The consensus is a binding agreement between all validated nodes. Every computer that connects to a blockchain network is called a node, or node. Within the blockchain, the consensus mechanisms ensure the integrity and consistency of the data. It is therefore crucial that this process runs safely.

In the so-called “non-permissive” blockchains, the consensus is typically the attempt to solve a difficult mathematical problem in exchange for a comparatively low financial wage. The validating nodes first collect all known transactions, select an order, and begin solving the task of the block. Without access restrictions, the consensus mechanism is correspondingly simple, which among other things increases the transaction speed. The downside: Basically it’s pure gambling who makes the race in the end. Although there is a certain probability that it will be those who have a higher computing power. The consensus protocol can withstand severe attacks on the chain (up to 50% of all nodes can be malicious). However, this is at the expense of transaction speed and confirmation.

For example, Bitcoin handles individual transactions within one second, but the confirmation can take more than an hour. In permissioned blockchains, the consensus runs more orderly, and the reviewers take turns suggesting a block, which the others subsequently release. So the process is much faster. Permissioned blockchains therefore achieve a high throughput rate for transactions, which are often confirmed immediately. This type of consensus is generally based on the belief that more than two-thirds of the nodes are trustworthy.

Security challenges with permissioned blockchains

The term blockchain immediately conjures up a certain image – that of decentralized control and added value through security. Large non-permissioned blockchains such as Bitcoin and Etherum are now well known to the public. And sometimes, this phenomenon also affects companies that plan to use permissioned blockchains.

One thing to understand is that by lowering the number of subscribers and relying on trusted auditors, the security requirements and challenges are more similar to those of traditional IT systems than those of large blockchains.

Imagine a permissioned blockchain being set up between five leading banks. In a five-node blockchain, this means that four of them (two-thirds of them) need to be trusted and behave correctly in order for the consensus to succeed.

Essentially there are two reasons when nodes do not behave the way they should behave. Their legitimate owners have dishonest intentions or the knots have been compromised by an attacker. The first case is about preventing price collusion and blackout. In the second case, protecting the nodes’ private keys and ensuring that they are only used to sign messages in line with the consensus protocol. It is equally important to protect the private keys of Blockchain accounts. These keys are used to sign a transaction and prevent unauthorized cash flow from the account in question. Unauthorized access to these keys would result in assets being unlawfully transferred between the participating banks. It can be costly to solve this problem and worse, unauthorized access can jeopardize the existence of the entire project.

Finally, there is the linchpin of the entire system, namely the bowl set, which authorizes the participants in the first place. If an attacker has access to these keys, for example, he is able to authorize new validating nodes. For example, an attacker controls enough voting rights to potentially damage or even destroy the entire chain.

What to do about the threats?

While public blockchains rely on the sheer number of nodes for their security, permissioned blockchains have to resort to other methods. These include methods of hardening blockchain, for example, through proprietary private key environments, and processes and methods for secure operation of the blockchain itself.

Private keys used by validating nodes should also be physically protected. This is done by technologies such as hardware security modules (HSMs). HSMs ensure that the private keys can not be read from server memory if the node has been compromised. It is even possible to protect the actual logic of consensus with HSMs. This method ensures that the data in question actually conforms to the consensus protocol before being signed with the key. A classic application example is to prevent double signing, such as forking. Our research team has published an open-source example of this technique using a popular permissioned consensus engine.

If you want to protect the private keys of the blockchain accounts, you should choose a potential risk based approach. For wallets (digital folders), which represent only small values, usually simple methods, such as an HSM USB stick with a switch, can be used to authorize transfers. In the corporate environment with corresponding values, it is advisable to use commercial HSMs and if necessary to distribute the subscription obligations to different authorized signatories.

Securing private keys within a blockchain is much easier than protecting any other type of public key infrastructure (PKI). In spite of everything, that is also a kind of PKI. Unlike the usual perception of blockchains, permissioned blockchains rely on a PKI that issues credentials to their respective participants. And every single transaction can be checked and confirmed immediately with reference to the corresponding trust anchor. It is obvious that the keys in question need to be protected like any other similar trust anchor – via HSMs, the distribution of drawing tasks, auditing and so on.

The future of the permissioned blockchains

At the moment, Blockchain’s hype is showing no sign of weakening. We can probably expect that projects using the permissioned blockchains will soon appear in the industry news. When it comes to developing and implementing such projects, safety should be taken into account from day one. As always, when a new technology is about to conquer the markets, safety is often postponed in favor of speed. So it is likely that not only will there be a rise in such projects, but also more vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities in consortium blockchain implementations.

If the hype has dropped a bit, fewer projects may be commissioned. But at this time, we have certainly already received good and workable recommendations for blockchain users from corporations such as Accredited Standards Committee X9 and ISO / TC 307.

from German: https://www.it-daily.net

image by shutterstock

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enchantingtigerbarbarian-blog · 6 years

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Chapter 17 - ABROAD AND AT HOME

ABROAD AND AT HOME

On May 12, Roger Ailes was scheduled to return to New York from Palm Beach to meet with Peter Thiel, an early and lonely Trump supporter in Silicon Valley who had become increasingly astonished by Trump’s unpredictability. Ailes and Thiel, both worried that Trump could bring Trumpism down, were set to discuss the funding and launch of a new cable news network. Thiel would pay for it and Ailes would bring O’Reilly, Hannity, himself, and maybe Bannon to it.

But two days before the meeting, Ailes fell in his bathroom and hit his head. Before slipping into a coma, he told his wife not to reschedule the meeting with Thiel. A week later, Ailes, that singular figure in the march from Nixon’s silent majority to Reagan’s Democrats to Trump’s passionate base, was dead.

His funeral in Palm Beach on May 20 was quite a study in the currents of right-wing ambivalence and even mortification. Right-wing professionals remained passionate in their outward defense of Trump but were rattled, if not abashed, among one another. At the funeral, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham struggled to parse support for Trumpism even as they distanced themselves from Trump himself.

The president had surely become the right wing’s meal ticket. He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority. He was the exuberant inverse of everything the right wing found patronizing and gullible and sanctimonious about the left. And yet, obviously, Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control. Nobody knew that as well as the people who knew him best.

Ailes’s wife, Beth, had militantly invited only Ailes loyalists to the funeral. Anyone who had wavered in her husband’s defense since his firing or had decided that a better future lay with the Murdoch family was excluded. This put Trump, still enthralled by his new standing with Murdoch, on the other side of the line. Hours and then days—carefully tracked by Beth Ailes—ticked off without a condolence call from the president.

The morning of the funeral, Sean Hannity’s private plane took off for Palm Beach from Republic Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island. Accompanying Hannity was a small group of current and former Fox employees, all Ailes and Trump partisans. But each felt some open angst, or even incredulity, about Trump being Trump: first there was the difficulty of grasping the Comey rationale, and now his failure to give even a nod to his late friend Ailes.

“He’s an idiot, obviously,” said the former Fox correspondent Liz Trotta.

Fox anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle spent much of the flight debating Trump’s entreaties to have her replace Sean Spicer at the White House. “There are a lot of issues, including personal survival.”

As for Hannity himself, his view of the right-wing world was shifting from Foxcentric to Trumpcentric. He did not think much more than a year would pass before he, too, would be pushed from the network, or find it too inhospitable to stay on. And yet he was pained by Trump’s slavish attentions to Murdoch, who had not only ousted Ailes but whose conservatism was at best utilitarian. “He was for Hillary!” said Hannity.

Ruminating out loud, Hannity said he would leave the network and go work full time for Trump, because nothing was more important than that Trump succeed—“in spite of himself,” Hannity added, laughing.

But he was pissed off that Trump hadn’t called Beth. “Mueller,” he concluded, drawing deeply on an electronic cigarette, had distracted him.

Trump may be a Frankenstein creation, but he was the right wing’s creation, the first, true, right-wing original. Hannity could look past the Comey disaster. And Jared. And the mess in the White House.

Still, he hadn’t called Beth.

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” asked Hannity.

* * *

Trump believed he was one win away from turning everything around. Or, perhaps more to the point, one win away from good press that would turn everything around. The fact that he had largely squandered his first hundred days—whose victories should have been the currency of the next hundred days—was immaterial. You could be down in the media one day and then the next have a hit that made you a success.

“Big things, we need big things,” he said, angrily and often. “This isn’t big. I need big. Bring me big. Do you even know what big is?”

Repeal and replace, infrastructure, true tax reform—the rollout Trump had promised and then depended on Paul Ryan to deliver—was effectively in tatters. Every senior staff member was now maintaining that they shouldn’t have done health care, the precursor to the legislative rollout, in the first place. Whose idea was that, anyway?

The natural default might be to do smaller things, incremental versions of the program. But Trump showed little interest in the small stuff. He became listless and irritable.

So, okay, it would have to be peace in the Middle East.

For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it’s bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself. In this formula, there is always a series of middlemen who will promise to help you cut the corners, as well as partners who will be happy to piggyback on your grandiosity.

Enter the Crown Prince of the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, age thirty-one. Aka MBS.

The fortuitous circumstance was that the king of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, was losing it. The consensus in the Saudi royal family about a need to modernize was growing stronger (somewhat). MBS—an inveterate player of video games—was a new sort of personality in the Saudi leadership. He was voluble, open, and expansive, a charmer and an international player, a canny salesman rather than a remote, taciturn grandee. He had seized the economic portfolio and was pursuing a vision—quite a Trumpian vision—to out-Dubai Dubai and diversify the economy. His would be a new, modern—well, a bit more modern—kingdom (yes, women would soon be allowed to drive—so thank God self-driving cars were coming!). Saudi leadership was marked by age, traditionalism, relative anonymity, and careful consensus thinking. The Saudi royal family, on the other hand, whence the leadership class comes, was often marked by excess, flash, and the partaking of the joys of modernity in foreign ports. MBS, a man in a hurry, was trying to bridge the Saudi royal selves.

Global liberal leadership had been all but paralyzed by the election of Donald Trump—indeed, by the very existence of Donald Trump. But it was an inverted universe in the Middle East. The Obama truculence and hyperrationalization and micromanaging, preceded by the Bush moral militarism and ensuing disruptions, preceded by Clinton deal making, quid pro quo, and backstabbing, had opened the way for Trump’s version of realpolitik. He had no patience with the our-hands-are-tied ennui of the post-cold war order, that sense of the chess board locked in place, of incremental movement being the best-case scenario—the alternative being only war. His was a much simpler view: Who’s got the power? Give me his number.

And, just as basically: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Trump had one fixed point of reference in the Middle East, it was—mostly courtesy of Michael Flynn’s tutoring—that Iran was the bad guy. Hence everybody opposed to Iran was a pretty good guy.

After the election, MBS had reached out to Kushner. In the confusion of the Trump transition, nobody with foreign policy stature and an international network had been put in place—even the new secretary of state designate, Rex Tillerson, had no real experience in foreign policy. To bewildered foreign secretaries, it seemed logical to see the presidentelect’s son-in-law as a figure of stability. Whatever happened, he would be there. And for certain regimes, especially the familycentric Saudis, Kushner, the son-in-law, was much more reassuring than a policy person. He wasn’t in his job because of his ideas.

Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly drive a Trojan horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships. This presented a do-over opportunity for the world in its relationship with the United States—or it did if you were willing to speak the new Trump language, whatever that was. There wasn’t much of a road map here, just pure opportunism, a new transactional openness. Or, even more, a chance to use the powers of charm and seduction to which Trump responded as enthusiastically as he did to offers of advantageous new deals.

It was Kissingeresque realpolitik. Kissinger himself, long familiar with Trump by way of the New York social world and now taking Kushner under his wing, was successfully reinserting himself, helping to organize meetings with the Chinese and the Russians.

Most of America’s usual partners, and even many antagonists, were unsettled if not horrified. Still, some saw opportunity. The Russians could see a free pass on the Ukraine and Georgia, as well as a lifting of sanctions, in return for giving up on Iran and Syria. Early in the transition, a high-ranking official in the Turkish government reached out in genuine confusion to a prominent U.S. business figure to inquire whether Turkey would have better leverage by putting pressure on the U.S. military presence in Turkey or by offering the new president an enviable hotel site on the Bosporus.

There was something curiously aligned between the Trump family and MBS. Like the entire Saudi leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education outside of Saudi Arabia. In the past, this had worked to limit the Saudi options—nobody was equipped to confidently explore new intellectual possibilities. As a consequence, everybody was wary of trying to get them to imagine change. But MBS and Trump were on pretty much equal footing. Knowing little made them oddly comfortable with each other. When MBS offered himself to Kushner as his guy in the Saudi kingdom, that was “like meeting someone nice at your first day of boarding school,” said Kushner’s friend.

Casting aside, in very quick order, previously held assumptions—in fact, not really aware of those assumptions—the new Trump thinking about the Middle East became the following: There are basically four players (or at least we can forget everybody else)—Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The first three can be united against the fourth. And Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given what they want with respect to Iran—and anything else that does not interfere with the United States’ interests—will pressure the Palestinians to make a deal. Voilà.

This represented a queasy-making mishmash of thought. Bannon’s isolationism (a pox on all your houses—and keep us out of it); Flynn’s anti-Iranism (of all the world’s perfidy and toxicity, there is none like that of the mullahs); and Kushner’s Kissingerism (not so much Kissingerism as, having no point of view himself, a dutiful attempt to follow the ninety-four-year-old’s advice).

But the fundamental point was that the last three administrations had gotten the Middle East wrong. It was impossible to overstate how much contempt the Trump people felt for the business-as-usual thinking that had gotten it so wrong. Hence, the new operating principle was simple: do the opposite of what they (Obama, but the Bush neocons, too) would do. Their behavior, their conceits, their ideas—in some sense even their backgrounds, education, and class—were all suspect. And, what’s more, you don’t really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.

The old foreign policy was based on the idea of nuance: facing an infinitely complex multilateral algebra of threats, interests, incentives, deals, and ever evolving relationships, we strain to reach a balanced future. In practice, the new foreign policy, an effective Trump doctrine, was to reduce the board to three elements: powers we can work with, powers we cannot work with, and those without enough power whom we can functionally disregard or sacrifice. It was cold war stuff. And, indeed, in the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great.

* * *

Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.

In the first days of the administration, Mexico blew its chance. In transcripts of conversations between Trump and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that would later become public, it was vividly clear that Mexico did not understand or was unwilling to play the new game. The Mexican president refused to construct a pretense for paying for the wall, a pretense that might have redounded to his vast advantage (without his having to actually pay for the wall).

Not long after, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a forty-five-year-old globalist in the style of Clinton and Blair, came to Washington and repeatedly smiled and bit his tongue. And that did the trick: Canada quickly became Trump’s new best friend.

The Chinese, who Trump had oft maligned during the campaign, came to Mar-a-Lago for a summit advanced by Kushner and Kissinger. (This required some tutoring for Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as “Mr. X-i”; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him “she.”) They were in an agreeable mood, evidently willing to humor Trump. And they quickly figured out that if you flatter him, he flatters you.

But it was the Saudis, also often maligned during the campaign, who, with their intuitive understanding of family, ceremony, and ritual and propriety, truly scored.

The foreign policy establishment had a long and well-honed relationship with MBS’s rival, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN). Key NSA and State Department figures were alarmed that Kushner’s discussions and fast-advancing relationship with MBS would send a dangerous message to MBN. And of course it did. The foreign policy people believed Kushner was being led by MBS, whose real views were entirely untested. The Kushner view was either, naïvely, that he wasn’t being led, or, with the confidence of a thirty-six-year-old assuming the new prerogatives of the man in charge, that he didn’t care: let’s embrace anybody who will embrace us.

The Kushner/MBS plan that emerged was straightforward in a way that foreign policy usually isn’t: If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want. On MBS’s assurance that he would deliver some seriously good news, he was invited to visit the White House in March. (The Saudis arrived with a big delegation, but they were received at the White House by only the president’s small circle—and the Saudis took particular note that Trump ordered Priebus to jump up and fetch him things during the meeting.) The two large men, the older Trump and much younger MBS—both charmers, flatterers, and country club jokers, each in their way—grandly hit it off.

It was an aggressive bit of diplomacy. MBS was using this Trump embrace as part of his own power play in the kingdom. And the Trump White House, ever denying this was the case, let him. In return, MBS offered a basket of deals and announcements that would coincide with a scheduled presidential visit to Saudi Arabia—Trump’s first trip abroad. Trump would get a “win.”

Planned before the Comey firing and Mueller hiring, the trip had State Department professionals alarmed. The itinerary—May 19 to May 27—was too long for any president, particularly such an untested and untutored one. (Trump himself, full of phobias about travel and unfamiliar locations, had been grumbling about the burdens of the trip.) But coming immediately after Comey and Mueller it was a get-out-of-Dodge godsend. There couldn’t have been a better time to be making headlines far from Washington. A road trip could transform everything.

Almost the entire West Wing, along with State Department and National Security staff, was on board for the trip: Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, Joe Hagin, Rex Tillerson, and Michael Anton. Also included were Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary; Dan Scavino, the administration’s social media director; Keith Schiller, the president’s personal security adviser; and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. (Ross was widely ridiculed for never missing an Air Force One opportunity—as Bannon put it, “Wilbur is Zelig, every time you turn around he’s in a picture.”) This trip and the robust American delegation was the antidote, and alternate universe to the Mueller appointment.

The president and his son-in-law could barely contain their confidence and enthusiasm. They felt certain that they had set out on the road to peace in the Middle East—and in this, they were much like a number of other administrations that had come before them.

Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal,” he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

“He believed,” said the caller, “that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie.”

* * *

On the empty roads of Riyadh, the presidential motorcade passed billboards with pictures of Trump and the Saudi king (MBS’s eighty-one-year-old father) with the legend TOGETHER WE PREVAIL.

In part, the president’s enthusiasm seemed to be born out of—or perhaps had caused—a substantial exaggeration of what had actually been agreed to during the negotiations ahead of the trip. In the days before his departure, he was telling people that the Saudis were going to finance an entirely new military presence in the kingdom, supplanting and even replacing the U.S. command headquarters in Qatar. And there would be “the biggest breakthrough in Israel-Palestine negotiations ever.” It would be “the game changer, major like has never been seen.”

In truth, his version of what would be accomplished was a quantum leap beyond what was actually agreed, but that did not seem to alter his feelings of zeal and delight.

The Saudis would immediately buy $110 billion’s worth of American arms, and a total of $350 billion over ten years. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs,” declared the president. Plus, the Americans and the Saudis would together “counter violent extremist messaging, disrupt financing of terrorism, and advance defense cooperation.” And they would establish a center in Riyadh to fight extremism. And if this was not exactly peace in the Middle East, the president, according to the secretary of state, “feels like there’s a moment in time here. The president’s going to talk with Netanyahu about the process going forward. He’s going to be talking to President Abbas about what he feels is necessary for the Palestinians to be successful.”

It was all a Trumpian big deal. Meanwhile, the First Family—POTUS, FLOTUS, and Jared and Ivanka—were ferried around in gold golf carts, and the Saudis threw a $75 million party in Trump’s honor, with Trump getting to sit on a thronelike chair. (The president, while receiving an honor from the Saudi king, appeared in a photograph to have bowed, arousing some right-wing ire.)

Fifty Arab and Muslim nations were summoned by the Saudis to pay the president court. The president called home to tell his friends how natural and easy this was, and how, inexplicably and suspiciously, Obama had messed it all up. There “has been a little strain, but there won’t be strain with this administration,” the president assured Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the king of Bahrain.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, “You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” (To Sisi, Trump replied, “Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man. . . .”)

It was, in dramatic ways, a shift in foreign policy attitude and strategy—and its effects were almost immediate. The president, ignoring if not defying foreign policy advice, gave a nod to the Saudis’ plan to bully Qatar. Trump’s view was that Qatar was providing financial support to terror groups—pay no attention to a similar Saudi history. (Only some members of the Saudi royal family had provided such support, went the new reasoning.) Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN quite in the dead of night, would force him to relinquish the Crown Prince title, which MBS would then assume for himself. Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered this: “We’ve put our man on top!”

From Riyadh, the presidential party went on to Jerusalem, where the president met with Netanyahu and, in Bethlehem, with Abbas, expressing ever greater certainty that, in his third-person guise, “Trump will make peace.” Then to Rome to meet the pope. Then to Brussels, where, in character, he meaningfully drew the line between Western-alliance-based foreign policy, which had been firmly in place since World War II, and the new America First ethos.

In Trump’s view, all this should have been presidency-shaping stuff. He couldn’t believe his dramatic accomplishments weren’t getting bigger play. He was simply in denial, Bannon, Priebus, and others noted, about the continuing and competing Comey and Mueller headlines.

One of Trump’s deficiencies—a constant in the campaign and, so far, in the presidency—was his uncertain grasp of cause and effect. Until now, whatever problems he might have caused in the past had reliably been supplanted by new events, giving him the confidence that one bad story can always be replaced by a better, more dramatic story. He could always change the conversation. The Saudi trip and his bold campaign to upend the old foreign policy world order should have accomplished exactly that. But the president continued to find himself trapped, incredulously on his part, by Comey and Mueller. Nothing seemed to move on from those two events.

After the Saudi leg of the trip, Bannon and Priebus, both exhausted by the trip’s intense proximity to the president and his family, peeled off and headed back to Washington. It was now their job to deal with what had become, in the White House staff’s absence, the actual, even ultimate, presidency-shaping crisis.

* * *

What did the people around Trump actually think of Trump? This was not just a reasonable question, it was the question those around Trump most asked themselves. They constantly struggled to figure out what they themselves actually thought and what they thought everybody else was truly thinking.

Mostly they kept their answers to themselves, but in the instance of Comey and Mueller, beyond all the usual dodging and weaving rationalizations, there really wasn’t anybody, other than the president’s family, who didn’t very pointedly blame Trump himself.

This was the point at which an emperors-new-clothes threshold was crossed. Now you could, out loud, rather freely doubt his judgment, acumen, and, most of all, the advice he was getting.

“He’s not only crazy,” declared Tom Barrack to a friend, “he’s stupid.”

But Bannon, along with Priebus, had strongly opposed the Comey firing, while Ivanka and Jared had not only supported it, but insisted on it. This seismic event prompted a new theme from Bannon, repeated by him widely, which was that every piece of advice from the couple was bad advice.

Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea; even the president seemed sheepish. Hence, Bannon saw his new role as saving Trump—and Trump would always need saving. He might be a brilliant actor but he could not manage his own career.

And for Bannon, this new challenge brought a clear benefit: when Trump’s fortune sank, Bannon’s rose.

On the trip to the Middle East, Bannon went to work. He became focused on the figure of Lanny Davis, one of the Clinton impeachment lawyers who, for the better part of two years, became a near round-the-clock spokesperson and public defender of the Clinton White House. Bannon judged Comey-Mueller to be as threatening to the Trump White House as Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr were to the Clinton White House, and he saw the model for escaping a mortal fate in the Clinton response.

“What the Clintons did was to go to the mattresses with amazing discipline,” he explained. “They set up an outside shop and then Bill and Hillary never mentioned it again. They ground through it. Starr had them dead to rights and they got through it.”

Bannon knew exactly what needed to be done: seal off the West Wing and build a separate legal and communications staff to defend the president. In this construct, the president would occupy a parallel reality, removed from and uninvolved with what would become an obvious partisan blood sport—as it had in the Clinton model. Politics would be relegated to its nasty corner, and Trump would conduct himself as the president and as the commander in chief.

“So we’re going to do it,” insisted Bannon, with joie de guerre and manic energy, “the way they did it. Separate war room, separate lawyers, separate spokespeople. It’s keeping that fight over there so we can wage this other fight over here. Everybody gets this. Well, maybe not Trump so much. Not clear. Maybe a little. Not what he imagined.”

Bannon, in great excitement, and Priebus, grateful for an excuse to leave the president’s side, rushed back to the West Wing to begin to cordon it off.

It did not escape Priebus’s notice that Bannon had in mind to create a rear guard of defenders—David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, and Jason Miller, all of whom would be outside spokespeople—that would largely be loyal to him. Most of all, it did not escape Priebus that Bannon was asking the president to play a role entirely out of character: the cool, steady, long-suffering chief executive.

And it certainly didn’t help that they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill.

In the end, nine top firms turned them down.

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