#and then there is the views on freedom

[bread-wizards]

That fireside chat has me thinking about Dorian's views on leadership and how it was influenced by his home and parents.

[dykedvonte]

I think depictions of Anya being cruel to Curly or drawing out his suffering are artful and chilling but completely miss the point of the story and her character.

I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to have that "I told you so" moment with him but not in something callous or cold. Even if that is how it happened, she'd immediately feel guilty cause at that point she's not tormenting her tormenter or even the person truly at fault. She's doing something cathartic, similar to how Jimmy likely hits Curly to release rage he can't against the rest of the crew. She'd see herself as no different when she'd come back from the moment and see Curly cowering at her. She wants someone to take responsibility but how does being cruel to the defenseless help? Why would she want the power Jimmy has over her over Curly?

The idea of her extending someone else's pain is just so against the struggles she already faces and how she can't even bring herself to cause someone pain even to help them. Her very desire is to release herself from her own suffering and I doubt she'd even fine some sort of guilty release in being cruel to another.

[nobeerreviews]

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.

-- Olga Tokarczuk

(Warszawa, Poland)

[beforevenice]

it made me want more of nothing. less of things, more of air and freedom and space and quiet and sunshine.

// katie kacvinsky

[otaku553]

Have you seen this man???

Now you have

[downfalldestiny]

That feeling of pure freedom and serenity ✨ !.

[boanerges20]

Motolove

[mitzi-moo]

My favourite views are between those brown fluffy ears 🏞️

[coochiequeens]

For a community that claims to be so oppressed they have no hesitation to spend time and money over stupid stuff but suing over comments after guy claimed he "identified his dachshund dog as “gender-fluid” and that he had put a dress on the pet" is a new level of waste of time and resources

Elizabeth Pitt made comments that were alleged to have been transphobic during a video meeting last year

Jonathan Ames Legal Editor Monday September 16 2024

Local authority bosses must pay a lesbian social worker more than £63,000 after she was disciplined for having “nasty opinions” about a colleague’s “gender-fluid” dog.

Elizabeth Pitt was reported to managers at Cambridgeshire county council for making allegedly transphobic remarks during a video meeting with the council’s “LGBTQIA+ group” last year.

An employment tribunal heard that Pitt made the comments after a colleague said he identified his dachshund dog as “gender-fluid” and that he had put a dress on the pet to prompt debate. Pitt and another lesbian colleague were reported for commenting on the revelation in a “really aggressive tone”, in which they voiced views that were deemed to be “non-inclusive and transphobic”.

Council bosses banned Pitt from contacting members of the group or attending their meetings. In response, the social worker sued the local authority for discrimination and harassment over her so-called gender critical views.

The tribunal backed Pitt’s claim and awarded the social worker more than £55,000 in damages and £8,000 costs. The judge also recommended that the council change its staff training to include a section on “freedom of belief and speech in the workplace”

Pitt and her colleague were also criticised for having commented negatively on “trans women participating in women’s sports and sharing women’s spaces”.

Evidence submitted to the tribunal showed that colleagues had taken issue with Pitt’s “nasty opinions” and that a formal complaint had been made. At a meeting with council managers, Pitt denied having been aggressive but accepted she could be “direct”. She said the purpose of the group was to discuss that type of subject.

Managers produced a written report that described Pitt as having been “perceived to be non-inclusive and transphobic”. It was also found by the internal meeting that the social worker had “caused significant offence” and been “particularly inappropriate and ill-judged”.

Pitt was told that her comments had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and wellbeing of the complainants”. She was banned from contacting any of the LGBTQIA+ group or attend its events.

That move prompted Pitt to raise the council’s formal grievance procedure, claiming that council bosses failed to explain “why it has been decided that there was an issue with the way my beliefs were expressed”. Pitt argued that the council’s reaction to her expression of gender-critical beliefs legally constituted harassment and direct discrimination.

Council bosses accepted that her gender-critical views amounted to a “philosophical belief” but they argued that the manner in which she and her colleague “chose to promote their views” had been “aggressive and confrontational”.

In his ruling, the judge, Paul Michell, said the tribunal agreed with Pitt’s lawyer that the evidence “unambiguously” showed that “at least part of the reason” for the council’s conduct towards her was her “gender-critical beliefs”. Pitt was awarded nearly £30,000 in loss of earnings and £22,000 compensation for injury to feelings, with interest added.

Michell recommended that council bosses include a section on freedom of belief and speech in the workplace in its mandatory training for staff within the next six months.

A council spokesman said the authority aimed “to create a safe, inclusive and compassionate environment for people to work in and recognise this needs to be balanced with everyone being entitled to express their own views and beliefs”. The spokesman added: “We will reflect carefully on this final outcome, as well as undertaking a review of our policies and procedures accordingly

[cosmic-rains-blog]

Delight in your freedom with me 🩵

[morganafayes]

god im just thinking abt how. merlin is always saying that before he came to camelot he thought he was cursed and he hated his magic because he thought it made him a monster but it was also all he had. and then him telling lancelot in s4 that since he found the purpose of his magic (protecting arthur) he doesn't feel that way anymore. sigh. the way out is just another cage!!!

[pratchettquotes]

The fighting was over in Ephebe. It hadn't lasted long, especially when the slaves joined in. There were too many narrow streets, too many ambushes and, above all, too much terrible determination. It's generally held that free men will always triumph over slaves, but perhaps it all depends on your point of view.

Besides, the Ephebian garrison commander had declared somewhat nervously that slavery would henceforth be abolished, which infuriated the slaves. What would be the point of saving up to become free if you couldn't own slaves afterwards? Besides, how'd they eat?

The Omnians couldn't understand, and uncertain people fight badly.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

[truepinkshape]

Vantage point 🌤🌲

[jerreeeeeee]

i don’t know if i’m ever gonna write the fic but i’ve been thinking abt like. the eternal stockade. the implications. lup, a lich who was trapped in a dark featureless cell for a decade completely isolated with nothing to keep her sanity but her own mind. she has to put people in the eternal stockade. how many liches does she see herself in. how many liches started out just like her. how many liches are truly too far gone. and the only liches we ever see other than her and barry are edward and lydia. they’re certainly evil, but mad? they seem pretty sane. they’re not, like, tattered echoes of souls, they’re definitely still people. even as much of a grudge as lup surely has against them, wouldn’t they remind her incredibly strongly of herself? do they deserve to be trapped just like she was? for eternity? isn’t eternity what turned john to existential despair in the first place?

[grenade-maid]

Signalis, Authority, and History

There's a level of nuance to how Signalis presents the violence of the authority of the nation that doesn't call attention to itself but which I really appreciate. Which is basically just, all the officers and cops and spies who make life hell for people like the Gestalt mine workers, Ariane, and the Itou family--we get little glimpses into who they are in Adler and Kolibri's diaries and despite the propaganda and the authoritative tone they take in official communications, for the most part they don't seem to actually be particularly invested in the hard line of national ideology. They uphold it though, viciously, both because things were worse under imperial rule (we don't get hard details on what it was like but it's mentioned in passing enough that I believe it) and because they're scared that if they don't they will be decommissioned and easily replaced. They are literally stamped out of a production line after all. There's a subtext of well, if I don't do it my replacement will anyway and I'm not trying to die so what's the point of rocking the boat?

I think Kolibri stands out to me most clearly on this because in communications from the block warden regarding Ariane there is emphasis put on how it is unacceptable and suspicious that she should be so interested and invested in art and literature that does not serve the purpose of furthering the goals of the nation. But we know that Kolibris themselves are bookworms, Adlers are fiends for stimulating experiences, and both get miserable FAST when deprived of art and puzzles and entertainment and hobbies. Y'know, just like anyone. Far be it from being a paragon of The Nation only interested in productive labor, we are reminded that the block warden, too, hates this shitty town and wants to transfer but is denied. They're hypocrites, but not monsters, nor brainwashed puppets of the state.

The monstrousness at play is not contained within any particular subset of evil individuals, or even an inherent universal force of evil contained in the broad notion of The Nation. There is no cosmic evil force that makes them all do these things to each other. The monstrousness is within the social systems, the mechanisms of how authority perpetuates on a structural procedural level, held in place by fear and tangible threats of violence, each link in the chain restraining the next through those threats out of fear that if they don't, then they'll be next. Regardless how many, if any, of those people in this chain are true dogmatic hardliners, they must act as such because failing to do so opens them up to danger.

Here then I think of the quote that is so prominent, "Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl", from Lovecraft's The Festival. This is not just a chilling abstract visual that conveniently evokes a mineshaft-- in Lovecraft's story, this line refers to worms which ate the decomposing bodies of wizards whose wretched souls had remained after death, complete with the terrible powers they gained through contracts with demons. Those worms inherited both their power, and also the evil. The Nation, despite having overthrown the Empire, is built on imperial technology, in particular Replikas and bioresonance. So too, then, we can imply that The Nation inherited with those things some of the monstrousness of The Empire as well. There is no end of history, nor clean break with the past, no matter how violently it may seem to be rejected. That which remains from the past--and something inevitably always does--creates the present.

This is a game that is not shy about evoking East Germany. And I think all of this provides a sophisticated picture of repressive authority that we rarely see in fiction of the English speaking world, especially in games. The year the S23 incident takes place is notably 84, but, frankly, I find this to be more compelling and illustrative than 1984 (and I'm a librarian and have taught English classes so I get to say that). Orwell, let's be honest, presents a fairly one dimensional picture of authority, where people seize power and wield it against others out of seeming mustache twirling evil or malice.

Here though we get a more humanistic view. Authority did not come from nowhere and is not wielded arbitrarily out of gleeful cruelty or mindless brainwashed allegiance. People aren't "just following orders". Individuals have rich inner lives. They make decisions, and those decisions are based in the context they're in. Even the decision to carry repressive tools of the past into the present is a decision that was made strategically with the big picture in mind. Nobody woke up and decided to be evil that day. Everyone operates on self interest, and, we must assume, an earnest desire for things to get better. Even the [spoiler] program which served as an inspirational demonstration of The Nation's power, you can imagine the chain of officers and bureaucrats who genuinely wanted the people of the nation to believe in the future, to confidently trust that everyone was working together towards something great and beautiful. And, through a long chain of those people who couldn't say "No" without being decommissioned, we ended up with something unbelievably cruel.

We get to know Adler and Kolibri and the other officers not to say well they're human too, maybe it wasn't so bad that they condemned all those people to agonizing suffering, but to remember that if we keep looking for true monsters we will not find them. There are no monsters and there are no demons. There are only people making decisions. A better world is possible. A better world, where Adler is just a paper pusher who does puzzles after work instead of signing papers to authorize torture, where Kolibris are librarians instead of spies and cops, where EULEs can gossip and play piano and ARARs can do maintenance on facilities that don't contain torture rooms, is one that would not have led to the Ariane and Elster's tragic cycle and ultimate end.

Authority and its attendant cruelty is not contained, radiating forth from The Great Revolutionary and Her Daughter, it is within the social systems of control. When those two women die, that cruelty will continue so long as those social systems continue. Like Lovecraft's worms, no matter how long dead the evil of the past is, so long as it continues to be fed upon, that evil will not only remain, but evolve into something new in the present. A better world can't be achieved through the death of the old world alone, even if violent overthrow is warranted. There is no end of history. There is no clean break from the past.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

so embarrassing how many self proclaimed leftists/communists/anarchists are prioritising individual feelings and identity over structural class analysis based on material reality and dont realise that is in fact liberal ideology lmao