#and will just corrupt whatever system replaces it

[hussyknee]

Okay but it was our communist government that pushed ethno-religious supremacy to legitimize the newly-emancipated nation the British Empire left behind, a legacy that was eagerly taken over by the neoliberal government. The Global South's communist governments all tore themselves apart just as well as the neoliberal ones because it turned out centralized power corrupts no matter the economics of it. It's extremely Eurocentric and reductive to blame all the world's ills on an economic system that the Europeans only got off the ground two hundred years ago. Ethno-religious supremacy, colonization and imperialism have been around for millennia.

I know some dickheads have now decided that Judaism is the "bad, violent, terrorist religion" and Islam is the "good, peaceful" one, which is only to be expected of white people, but how much of an issue is it currently? Like I've seen some USAmericans sharing how the Islamic faith shapes Gazans values and perseverance (good) except with that distinct white hippie "I'm about to imprint on this like the world's most racist duck" vibe (bad), but I didn't think they're already turning on Judaism in numbers.

Do they realize that Christianity is also the same kind of comfort to Christian minorities in Asia and Africa? That it was Buddhists that genocided the Rohingyas in Myanmar and Tamils in Sri Lanka? That Hindu fundamentalists are even now trying to ethnically cleanse Muslims in India? How Hindus and Christians are terrorized and persecuted in Pakistan? That Muslims have had a long history of persecuting and ethnically cleansing Jews too?

Really tired of asking y'all to be normal about people's religions man. There's no religion that's inherently violent or exceptionally peaceful. It's just like any other ideology that becomes a weapon in the hands of ethnic power. Interrogate power, not religion, and respect people's belief systems insofar as they aren't in your business.

[brick-van-dyke]

As the US election closes in and the final states take to the polls, I want to remind people to turn out and protest.

Yep, protest. Strike, disrupt, be out there on the street regardless of who you voted for or who wins. I expect to see you all out there demanding; access to abortion nation wide, protections against discrimination, free universal healthcare, a free Palestine, anti war, prison abolition, to increase the minimum wage, and for a US free of the electoral college and that counts votes as votes.

Yes, you can say "you should vote for Harris" and do so as much as you like, but do not forget the power you have through your own everyday actions away from the polls and that of protesting. Do not use the excuse that your right to vote means it's somehow more foundational or important than the right to protest. You have the ability to create direct action and that is so so important, please don't just expect a rich representative to stick to their promises every time you vote; you have power too, never forget that.

This system will not change until we, the people, make it. There is NO representative that can ever change the system that allowed them in, and likewise; this system will never allow a candidate that would stop it from continuing and/or ensuring its designated purpose of oppression and subjugation. Resist, regardless of the results.

Long live the resistance.

[arcane-apidae]

Okay, so you’ve picked up Marx, maybe dabbled in communism, and now you’re all fired up about revolution. 👏 But before you dive in too deep and start calling yourself a “tankie” (or whatever’s trending these days), can I suggest something real quick? Read Animal Farm. 👀

I know, everyone knows Animal Farm, right? But honestly, I’m not sure how many of you have actually read it—and I mean really read it. Animal Farm isn’t just some cute little farm story with talking animals. It’s Orwell’s warning about why communism doesn’t work—and why it never will. 🐷➡️👨‍🌾

The animals overthrow their human oppressors, right? They’re all about equality—everyone is equal. But by the end, the pigs are walking on two legs, living in the house, and looking just like the humans they kicked out. That’s the point. The revolution gets corrupted, the leaders become just as bad as the ones they replaced, and the whole system falls apart. No matter how good the intentions are, when power’s involved, it all falls into the same mess. 😬

You’ve probably seen people online talking about how communism is the future, how it’s this radical change we all need. But let’s be real: look at the countries closest to communism today—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. Does that seem like the kind of world you wanna live in? Is that freedom? Is that happiness? Are those societies thriving? Because from where I’m standing, it’s more like a dystopia. 👀

So before you put that hammer and sickle in your bio, give Animal Farm another read. It’s not just a book—it’s history. It’s a cautionary tale that shows us why it doesn’t work and why it never will. We need new ideas, fresh thinking. Use that brainpower you’re flexing for change to build something that actually works. 💡🔥

Stop identifying with the same old ideologies that have been proven to fail, and start building something better. The future’s waiting for you. ✌️🌍

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

I would LOVE to hear more gripes about accuracy of portrayal of historical monarchies!!!

I have been wanting to do this for a while, because there is a lot that irks me. And this ranges across board from big budget period dramas to how people write royalty AUs, which means this isn't one specific thing I'm pointing at. And if it is helpful on a writing tips level, I'll be happy with that.

Long post under the cut:

Disclaimers:

I research 19th century European history, which has a lot of questions about what a monarchy is and why they continue to exist. That's the perspective I am bringing to this.

I probably shouldn't have to say this, but: this is not about modern monarchism. This is about history. I don't want to debate whether you think certain countries should continue to have their monarchs be public figures who are only nominally head of state.

The short version:

Monarchies are institutions. They are part of how the government functions and that should have implications for how someone writes them. A monarch is a person with a built in job that they were born into.

Monarchies are not all absolute. They can exist in a multiple forms with very different structures, and often discontent within a monarchy wants to reform the system not replace it.

My biggest advice would be this: figure out how your fictional or historical monarchy is structured. You don't have to exposit about it, but you do need to know it.

The long version:

The King has a job and there is a right and wrong way to do it.

Fantasy monarchies that draw upon history seem to have Versailles in mind in terms of an aesthetic space and royalty with a lot of power over the people around them. This also includes a lot of lounging around and looking pretty and doing lavish things. However, the issue is that this is a mental image of the dysfunction in the French monarchy close to the revolutions. You can't "Après moi, le déluge" through several centuries of government.

A King (or Queen) has a job, a really important one. They are the head of state, the highest authority in the country, and the highest judge on legal matters. At least in the platonic ideal of absolute monarchy, those jobs being concentrated into one person means their responsibility and good judgement will give the state stability and consistently.

Enlightened absolutism was exactly that: monarchs staunchly holding onto the ideals of the Enlightenment and making reforms from the top down. People who read texts about ideal government and natural rights and put it into practice.

A lot of fiction takes that and goes: Oh, so they have unlimited power and can do whatever they want. Being king means you can do what you want without oversight? That's why someone would want to be king?

And yeah, sure, in theory. But the problem with having a job is that you can do it poorly and people will object to you doing it poorly. If someone is not fulfilling obligations, it is noticeable because the state functions poorly. The premise of Robin Hood is that the king is doing his job poorly. He's overtaxing, the officials are corrupt, there's disorder. The solution? Bring back the true king who is good and fair, and thus functional.

Ludwig II of Bavaria gets ousted from his throne for being more interested in opera and extravagant building projects than ruling. Again, it is a problem and people notice.

Historically, if you want to protect from someone being bad at the job you can support the idea that there should be more oversight and safeguards: Other bodies that control parts of the government alongside the king's ability to approve or disapprove. This tactic takes away the ability to be arbitrary since laws and such are not just coming from the crowned head of state. That would be a constitutional monarchy.

Not everyone needs to be Franz Joseph, waking up at the crack of dawn and working on governmental papers and meetings until bedtime. However, if a monarch is shown in fiction lounging around or talking to courtiers all day but never doing any actual governing, I'm going to assume they are very bad at their job.

2. You're probably understanding Courts and Ministers wrong.

I run into the issue quite a bit that courts are flattened to random servants, ladies-in-waiting, and people trying to be the king's sole advisor (for malicious power grabbing reasons).

The first problem: Being at court isn't an easily accessible thing. You're probably nobility or a scion of an important family. Your presence is built on family prestige and your own skill. Yes, even people in service to the monarch. There are no random people here, because proximity heightens the likelihood of greater promotion.

For example, I'm currently doing my research on a prince from an important dynasty in the 19th century. His secretary is a Baron.

It's not impossible for someone not of noble birth to get to be at court. They could have risen up the ranks of the army or be an exceptionally skilled civil servant promoted to the rank of minister. Though depending on the time period, expect these "new men" to get pushback from nobility by blood.

Ministers also matter.

Unless your fictional monarch is one of the few people who decides (to mixed results) to do all of the thinking about government on their own, there is a cabinet and ministers.

These are skilled people whose job is to think about aspects of government and be knowledgeable about them. A monarch might have many of them that argue and balance each other.

Or, you can write a particularly skilled statesman in a leading role that makes them just as prominent as the monarch if not more so. There are many historical examples of ministers who define their period:

If your monarch character isn't a strong person politically, but is intelligent, having them find a minister to take over most of the governing is a good idea. This person is promoted based on merit, even if the monarchy is hereditary.

I have rarely if ever seen fiction do a good job with a prominent minister as a character (except A Royal Affair, which everyone should watch).

Think of monarchies as whole institutions of government. They have people within them who do all the jobs of governing. But the structure of the government and the personality of the monarch can determine whether it is one person (Joseph II, Peter the Great, etc.), a prominent minister (like a Metternich or Bismarck) or a counsel or congress.

The structure can support a person not doing a lot as monarch, but you as a writer need to think what structures are around them allowing that.

3. Revolutions are scary.

There is a common trend in fiction to make your good guys pro-republic. They're revolutionaries who want to get rid of the king, so they must be good.

But here's the thing: Revolutions are a step into the unknown and have historically happened rather rarely and with very mixed results. That's because the system has to be really broken for something totally new to sound better than what you already have.

A monarchy can create a sense of stability: A fixed head of state who will be there until they die. Historically, people aren't seeking to change that. More often, the call is for a change within the existing structure. The Magna Carta or a written Constitution. Firing of Bad Ministers or the abdication of a bad king in favor of their heir. Creating elected bodies under the sovereign. These are all shifting the monarchical paradigm but keeping the monarchy intact.

And historically even the most liberal of people wanted to place restrictions of some sort on voting, especially property and gender restrictions.

There is a myriad of ways to change the system, the person at the top, or both while maintaining a monarchy. You can have a monarchy be elected as the best person among the nobility (though it didn't go that well for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

Completely throwing the whole thing out means risking all stability vanishing. That could be anarchy. That could mean a charismatic strongman who is also bad at governing in power. You could end up with a guillotine and rivers of blood in the streets. You could end up with a restoration eventually because Cromwell or Robespierre doesn't actually produce something people want to live under and they want the old certainty back.

People have a sense of inertia about changing government. What you have is better than what you don't know, especially if there can be internal reform. Making your character a Republican (in the Jacobin sense, not the US politics sense) means that they are a radical in most times and places and will likely be in the minority.

If there is one thing I would say is the point here is that monarchies are government systems, and thinking through how someone exists in that system in fiction is important. Being king isn't actually much of a fun job unless you're very good at delegating or very irresponsible. Unless you want to be celebrity, president, congress, and moral center of the state all in one, being king isn't a great deal.

[unadulteratedsoulsweets]

A DC X DP IDEA #31

You and I, we’re not the same.

Imagine dis…

Corrupted ectoplasm is always the main reason why Jason had a pit rage. I know it was because he was dumped in Lazarus' pits when he was found wandering around.

What if I offer you guys another reason why he rages so much?

…

Lady Gotham is devastated by her little squire, her beloved child laid to rest. The little boy used to play around her alley as if it was the best playground he ever played in. The little boy whom she shielded personally with her shadows to hide from those who wished harm to her child. The little boy who shines the brightest when he laughs, and that good-for-nothing pest killed him. 

If she had enough strength within her city she would have already dragged that clown’s soul to the deepest and darkest place of her realm but couldn't. She needed whatever ectoplasm and strength she had to bring him back. Her Dark Knight is getting reckless by the day, gone the knight that would protect and see the goodness in this cesspool of a city, was replaced by a man who is still grieving for the loss of his child and taking it out on everyone but mostly himself. 

The boy rose and could dig himself out but his father didn't find him, someone else did.

That day Lady Gotham wailed in devastation. Every Gothamite felt and heard something, from the people who had hidden in the deepest of corners of her city for protection to the labyrinths that hold countless undead Talons all of whom simultaneously shivered as they all seemingly heard a mother’s scream that had just lost her child again.

…

It was assassins that had found him that was true but they didn't find him in his grave, they had found him wandering around with instincts and muscle memory as his only tool to survive. At first, Ra thought that he was the missing link, the key to everlasting life but after countless research and experiments thought that Jason Todd was a fluke in the greater systems. Seeing that Talia’s leverage on her beloved is about to be disposed of, she immediately throws Jason into the pits as it may have not raised the dead but he is alive enough for the pits to heal.

When Jason Todd was dipped into the green glowing waters of the Lazarus pits they didn't see it…

They didn't see the way the pits seemed to split Jason Todd in half. As if answering a man or a father’s prayer.

I need no other child as long as mine can split themselves in half.

At that moment, deep within the deep waters of the pits, there were two. 

One who looked far too different from what he looked like before, a body that had been fixed by the pits. 

One who had been left behind, the body of a teen who had been too malnourished.

The pits split Jason Todd apart, while the other one started to gasp for air and began swimming to the top, the other continued to sink into the endless pit.

No one was there to witness it but as the other one sank deeper a portal manifested behind the sinking Jason Todd swallowing him whole as if there was no one else.

…

Jason knew the moment he woke up in the middle of the Lazarus pit, was rage. RAGE for naively believing his birth giver yet she had given him to the Joker for safety, RAGE for not being avenged by his father, RAGE for being replaced before his body even turned cold… 

rage for something, MISSING?!?!?!!?

Jason knew that there was a part of him missing, maybe it was the once young innocent naïve child that loved theater, perhaps it was the once hopeful child to help their home into something more, but it was because deep down he knew that there was something wrong with him.

He had memories missing or even spotty and blurry at best. He knew he used to help Alfred around the kitchen but the feelings and the details behind such core memory vanished. The sense of joy and utter happiness, when DAD Bruce bought a first edition book that he had been eyeing for a while, the fear and dread to open and read, said book in fear of damaging his first ever gift.

He knew that if the rest knew of it he would be kicked out, just when they were both trying to mend their broken bridges. So he kept it all in memories and emotions that should have been present are gone as if someone had cut through him and dragged those out.

But it all clicked in one normal night during patrol.

…

He was just swinging from one building to another when he felt it, a pulse, calling out to him. Every inch of him is screaming to follow it as if something is begging him to go, so he does.

Upon arriving at, his former rundown apartment. Where he and his mom, Catherine, once shared and called home. 

Slowly entering the said apartment there he saw his old room where he and Catherine slept while cuddling when she had drugs out of her system. 

A teen, looks exactly like him, same eyes that have the same shade of blue that the butler managed to capture before his death. The shape of his eyes, the way his hair was styled, the way he looked at Jason as if he was in danger.

But the moment the two of them met their eyes something clicked inside them.

They are each other’s half…

…

Jason and Danny, after he introduced himself which made him a bit confused and so that there would be no mix-ups seeing both of them are technically Jason Peter Todd, both began exchanging stories to each other seeing that even though they have no idea how and why they were separated better yet they don’t know how come Danny traveled to the past to be raised normally.

…

As Danny begins to narrate his story Jason can’t help but let his mind wander here he is. Talking to a version of him if Joker didn’t happen. A smart and innocent version of him that has a loving family, and haven’t have any blood in their hands. The perfect son, something Bruce would be ecstatic about. He is ruling over Crime Alley using every dirty trick in the book. Yet a version of him became the perfect vigilante, despite death wanting to do good and see good in everyone. 

I am the sinner, and you are the saint.

…

I am the sinner, and you are the saint.

Danny thought as he in turn listened to his other part, he knew that that Jason the one in front of him was the one who made it out. While he merely drifted at the bottom, Danny felt envious of Jason despite the two being the same person just different experiences. Yet the moment he regained Jason Todd-Wayne’s memories he can't help but laugh at fate for pulling their strings. A billionaire who wanted to be his son, eccentric parents, dying once again with no mom nor dad within sight… He was laughing deep within his room when he got his memories back. 

Even Clockwork looked at him with pity? Sympathy? sorry? He doesn't care when the ghost visits him for a timely visit.

Here he is looking at the version of him if he ever came back to Bruce. The father had yelled at him about not wanting teenage rebellion from him. When he remembered his memories it was already far too long when the League of Assassins had him and Bruce already had a shinier Robin, a perfect son and the perfect brother to Richard Grayson. So he didn’t reach out despite remembering each code that could verify his identity. Each secret and each whisper that only Jason Todd knew and experienced.

So he stayed, stayed with a family that practically raised him a family that neglected him and their biological daughter. But in the end, he still died, for their cause, he may be considered a trained individual but fought humans, not immortal-like beings that seem to have their version of madness.

His parents whom he grew to love and care for parents despite their shortcomings, still opened him up and explored his insides when they learned the truth.

It made him chuckle, he just never did learn, did he…

He escaped, running from one city to another, never staying for too long as many heroes despite their dislike of him when Grayson made his hatred known for him, learned and still watched him grow into a young teen.

So when he was living from one state to another, to avoid detection, lose his trail, escape his hunters, going back to his training as Robin as well as the memory of being a street kid deep within Gotham’s dirty alley. So when he first entered the city boundaries, Danny could feel it, the way Lady Gotham immediately welcomed him.

He heard it all, how Red Hood controlled crime, how he staking his claim on Crime Alley that even the Bats had forsaken. How within his rule was better than any gang or leader who did try and control that section of Gotham.

Danny can’t help but feel envy, here his other self doing good to the place where he crawled from. His other being the vigilante who made a change, has the drive to fight and protect, the drive to dirty his hands to ensure that the kids in his territory live a somewhat normal life. So when he made eye contact he knew that he was the sinner.

So here he was talking and listening to a grown Jason Todd of him. It made him cringe the moment he saw him, it made him think of Dan, the way he stood, his expressions, and even the tiniest of details. The anger, if Danny and Jason never met again despite one knowing of the other’s identity.

…

If one looked from outside of their little bubble one would see two beings. Who truly understood, acknowledged, and accepted each other. No matter how different the two are, one would comment that they look like soulmates, who gravitate toward each other and readily accept each other’s edges. One would whisper that the two are brothers, who support each other and rely to each other.

No matter, the Gothamites muttered, Gotham never have felt more content and at home than the day they saw Jason Todd, the supposed right-hand man of Red Hood, and Danny Nightgale, the Gotham’s guardian for the children. Talking and spending time to each other.

Now, if only Batman and Co. stop sneaking in to take a glance at their new resident.

…

PS: If someone out there wants to continue or make a fic about this you are free to do so, don’t forget to tag me though.

[reality-detective]

I see a lot more of this 👇 kind of stuff and if you think about it: Remember the movie "V for Vendetta" it was rated ; R that came out in 2005? It was repeated frequently - "Remember, Remember the 5th of November"

Trump has said multiple times; "November 5th will be the greatest day in American history."

I'm just trying to connect some dots. I have no way of actually knowing the timeline, so I ask myself questions and knowing what I know and see a lot of things like this 👇 It's just a hunch and it kinda makes sense.

Military Intelligence follows the Julian Calendar

· Trump created the fake Biden presidency to expose globalist crime and corruption on a massive scale.

· The Emergency Broadcast System will introduce martial law until fair and transparent elections can be held.

· Three Days of Darkness: Planned cyber attacks on everything—Internet down, communications cut, power grid possibly shut off.

· 10 Days of Disclosure: A single website, one web channel, broadcasting the truth eight hours a day, in a loop.

· NESARA/GESARA debt forgiveness will be implemented—freedom from the Deep State's chains.

· The military will ensure that the masses get the food they need.

· QFS will be put in place to crush the financial elites.

· A 95% reduction in the corrupt government—we will finally be free from the parasites.

· Federal Reserve? Dead. IRS? Taken over by the new U.S. Treasury.

· A new tax system: only a 14%-17% tax on new items—no taxes on food, medicine, or wages. If you buy a used car, no taxes because whatever bought it brand new already paid said taxes. Finally, real financial relief for the people.

· Maritime Law will be thrown out, replaced by Common Law. No more tyranny in disguise.

You know the election is going to be a disaster, it's no secret they are tampering with the early voting and we are watching in real time that they are already committing treason. Is that the day a soft martial law goes into effect? If memory serves me, after the official announcement of NESARA there has to be an election 120 days later. Elections used to be in April and I don't know when it was moved to November. And if I were to guess, I would say it was to affect voter turnout with the colder weather.

The World IS About To Change 🤔

[emiplayzmc]

Radio Comet Addison (Hex: a97183)

-Height is 6'0" (72. in.), and he's one of the oldest Addisons in Cyber City - he refuses to say his exact age.

-A radio star in the 50s and 70s in Cyber City specialising in radio ad sponsors, he worked at the same station that Broadcast does, and mentored him in the showhosting business when he first started working there. He quite liked Broadcast's hyperactive and enthusiastic nature.

-He gets frequent headaches and CPU overloads for seemingly no reason.

-He's got a big ego, priding himself on his voice and talent which was easily wounded if people badmouthed it - he was also quite snoopy, and knew things about pretty much everyone at the station. Despite these flaws, he's quite a patient man, which made him a pretty good mentor.

-He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

-He's the first carrier of a virus that doesn't have a known source - aka, he's Patient 0 of it. Hence, he's also the main spreader of the virus by compulsion to do so and conditioning so as to not lose himself completely until a victim is found and infected. He targets and chooses prey, and stalks them like a komodo dragon until the right time to infect comes. He tries to do it as little as possible, but the longer he goes without infecting, the more the virus compels him to do so until it eventually puppets him itself until a victim is found, no matter if it was an intended target or not.

-Because of the damage to his body the virus causes, his original voicebox is shattered, as well as one of his original eyes giving out - the tendency for his parts to give out now has caused a bit of a scavenging and hoarding habit with him, stealing parts from Addison bodies he finds occasionally in the Trash Zone and stashing them in spots he frequents if he needs to fix himself. He keeps his old voicebox in his pocket, but his new one doesn't do him much good since it's also somewhat decayed and broken. The corruption of his Freeze Ring caused his remaining eye to go mostly dark and leak oil as well, save for a dot of ice-blue surrounded by hot pink that acts as the pupil and iris.

-He's very bitter that Cyber City sort of gave up on him after a time... even if the virus was keeping him from just throwing himself at the first opportunity to be saved, he still somewhat had hope that someone would still look for him. The people he entertained still cared, right? He wouldn't just be replaced by a new starlet that caught their eyes...

-Mostly because of his bitterness, partly because of already existing feelings of unease and discontent, he despises the Addison species now, and hates what he is by extension. He despises what they're used for and made to do for their entire lives, and also hates that pretty much everything in the Cyber World - and the whole of the Dark Worlds, to his knowledge - have one purpose that they stick to for their lives, and if you fall out of the system, you're as good as forgotten to them. There have been many times where he's contemplated scavenging and body and trying to masquerade as a Swatchling or something, just to get OUT of being an Addison and try to re-enter society and get himself fixed, but he just never goes through with it. Whether out of fear or the virus or just calling it off, who knows?

-It's unknown what the virus does to a host's systems EXACTLY, but clearly Radio doesn't take it well. It's caused his systems and parts to slowly deteriorate over time, causing him to have to learn to fix himself with whatever means he can. It doesn't help that his Freeze Ring is also corrupted because of the virus, causing him a lot of pain that can only be curbed by taking the ring off, or constantly be eating healing items - HP is a different thing from his body's deterioration.

Anywaysss, FINAL PINK ADDI REF SHEET! That's all of my Pink Addis done! ^-^ Just because, here's a playlist I made for Radio / Zero because yes :]

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0xomIoF8QEoTwIYNco9MgS?si=cs86h9udR-KWN5pHg88dDQ&pi=TdO11IHvQqqb-

[darkeagleruins]

Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich Says All The Quiet Parts Out Loud

- The system is rigged

- Voting is rigged

- Both parties are paid off

- Not just politicians but millions of people being paid off with tax payer money

- They’ll do anything to stop Trump and more

“I think Trump is the most aggressive and competent opponent that the Franklin Roosevelt Coalition has ever faced. They've run the country now since 1932. They built huge bureaucracies, huge sets of rules.

They paid off millions of people with taxpayer money. And all of a sudden, they have an opponent who's very serious about dismantling and replacing their corrupt system.

They're terrified of him. And from their standpoint, breaking the law, rigging the game, whatever it takes, they're gonna do to try to beat him at every level.

[ironunderstands]

I just saw the recent topaz analysis and I agree she’s extremely underrated, her backstory hidden in character stories is both heartwarming and heartbreaking as she tries ti preserve at least one light form (in the form of creatures) and maker her home a ecosystem where multiple creatures can thrive. But I do wonder in the end, in terms of the IPC they’re often seen as the “evil” corporation but not everything is black and white as the IPC is also responsible for well… technology that makes life convenient and is integral to the functioning of the entire universe without it people would be more chaotic, isolated and etc. and even if their methods are underhanded and two faced they often hold their end of the bargain (just like Aventurine andJade) and help the planets in terms of in Topaz case. Another thing is thar millions of people are working for the IPC so would destroying it lead to them being jobless? Would the IPC be a better place if Diamond and the ten stonehearts were in charge or at the very least lessen the influence of the corrupted people in the IPC like Oswaldo?

I don’t think the IPC is intentionally evil, but they are at the end of the day, a corporation, and corporations will only do what benefits them, which results in the IPC doing a lot of evil shit.

Their technology is valuable yes, but they only help worlds when it benefits them and they only hurt worlds when it benefits them, as at the end of the day all they seem to care about are profits and power.

Unfortunately I don’t see them magically becoming squeaky clean and perfect if a better leader like Diamond were to take over. Unless the entire system ends up getting changed/replaced, at the end of the day, a corporation is a corporation and profits will be put above all else.

Even if Diamond is an emanator of Preservation, his subordinates and colleagues in the IPC aren’t and whatever good intentions he possesses don’t matter so long as people with selfish ones still work within the company.

Simply put, the IPC is too big to ever have morals, and the only way to instill them within it is to break it apart in some way, as there are too many competing interests and goals for them to truly all earn Qlipoth’s approval.

That’s why I think Diamond will fracture the IPC, rather than destroy it entirely, and perhaps then we can see the more villainous department’s like that of Oswaldo Schneider’s crumble.

For now though, the IPC behaves like all corporations do, painting over their atrocities with friendly marketing, and misleading the galaxy, even themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing.

[cogentranting]

So here's the thing about Code 8 Part 2

I could look at Garrett's two henchmen, Shane and Maev, and say these two feel like replacement Freddie and Maddy. Same general character description (minus the fact that Freddie couldn't speak). Same powers, just switched. Same basic role to Garrett. And they die in almost the exact same way-- in a shoot out on a street, pinned down behind some cars, after Garrett's "partner" abruptly turns on him, one of the two dies immediately to kick off the shoot out, the other lasts slightly longer. And on the one hand, part of me wants to say that's lazy writing. They just basically reused the same side characters and recreated the same plot point.

But on the other hand, I can look at that and read it as intentional. Freddie and Maddy were Garrett's crew, his guys. And he cared about them (the most tender moment we see from Garrett in either film, is when he's holding Freddie as he dies). So after their deaths, as he's building his empire, he surrounds himself with people who remind him of them (whom, we are shown, he also cares about). And while these people are people that Garrett genuinely wants to help and protect, the dichotomy of Garrett is that he also is selfish and wants power and money and falls back on violence and corrupt dealings to get those things. So the two shootouts (one killing Freddie and Maddy, one killing Shane and Maev) represent the cycle of violence. Garrett thinks he can have it both ways; be both a "man of the people" standing up and providing something for people with powers, and make deals to serve his own power and status. But when he makes those corrupt deals, he might make it out alive but the people he wanted to protect do not (except for Connor). And the pattern repeats again at the movie's climax, and was perhaps preceded by whatever happened to his brothers. So Garrett's crew helps to demonstrate the cycle that Garrett is stuck in-- in part because of the system, but equally because of his own guilt-- but which Connor and Pav are fighting to break.

[aethersea]

I've been meaning for a while to talk about Rayvel's heel-face turn. I see a lot of people saying he only "turned good" because he was finally personally victimized by Sunfell, very "I never expected leopards to eat MY face!" But it's more complicated than that. Not just because he was already doubting, enough that he believed it instantly when his lieutenant said she was acting on orders, but because he never actually voted for the leopards. He thought the leopards were the result of bad management. He thought you could do this whole empire thing with no leopards at all.

Rayvel fully believed in the propaganda of conquest, that the people they were conquering would be better off as subjects of Sunfell, that they were bringing order and justice to desperate places. You see it in Valemarch, after the town has fallen and the abbess has fled: the first thing Rayvel does, the very first thing, is free the tallow-wights. He's here to end the cruelties of the Levithine Order. He's here to free slaves.

(He's also here to eradicate the local religion and force Valemarch to pay tithe to Sunfell, at swordpoint. But he truly does believe he's helping.)

And that's how he feels about every place he visits: he wants what's best for them, and he's convinced that Sunfell is it. He's shocked when he sees the duke of Brookholm forcing people from their homes so he can have housing for his servants (who are from Sunfell, of course), and then stringing up anyone who protested. And then the duke is also embezzling or whatever, so Rayvel can tell himself that the duke was just corrupt, but the system is still good. But ousting locals and violently punishing dissent is in fact baked into conquest. Into imperialism. Rayvel gets to pat himself on the back for killing an evil that was perverting the mission of Sunfell or whatever, but whoever gets sent to replace the duke is going to be doing the exact same things (probably even the embezzling), because it is about subjugating the local populace and ensuring they live in fear. But Rayvel fundamentally believes that if everyone does the right thing, Sunfell will protect them. Any injustice in Sunfell or its vassal states is a statistical anomaly to be corrected. And that is why he changes sides after his lieutenant tries to Blight-stab him on orders. The realization that even he, the perfect captain who does everything right and sincerely tries to balance conquest and mercy, will be ground up without remorse for the sake of the empire, doesn’t just hurt on a personal level. He’s not just upset that he, personally, was betrayed. He’s devastated at the realization of what it means on a broader level: that no matter who you are or what you do, you will never be safe, you will never be valued. The empire not only won’t protect you, it’ll eat you without a second’s hesitation. It’s leopards all the way down. Sunfell is rotten at its core.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this: “A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive’. They lived in caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented ‘civilization’, in which we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter, inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. It’s getting better all the time and will continue forever.”

Western industrial society is now in decline, and in declining societies it’s normal for people to feel that their whole existence is empty and meaningless, that the system is rotten to its roots and should all be torn up and thrown out. It’s also normal for people to frame this rejection in whatever terms their society has given them. So we reason: “This world is hell, this world is civilization, so civilization is hell, so maybe primitive life was heaven. Maybe the whole story is upside-down!”

We examine the dominant story and find that although it contains some truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values and behaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create a perfect mirror image:

“A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive’. They were just as smart as we would be if we didn’t watch television, and they lived in cozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, and had long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kept their populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase. Then someone invented ‘civilization’, in which we monopolized the land and grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories but low in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered land from neighboring foragers and enslaved them to cut down more forests and grow more grain, and to build sterile monuments while the elite developed technologies of repression and disconnection and gluttonous consumption, and everywhere life was replaced with control. It’s been getting worse and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the way we did before.”

Again, this story contains truth, but it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it is designed to influence the values and behaviors of the people who hear it. Certainly it’s extremely compelling. As a guiding ideology, as a utopian vision, primitivism can destroy Marxism or libertarianism because it digs deeper and overthrows their foundations. It defeats the old religions on evidence. And best of all, it presents a utopia that is not in the realm of imagination or metaphysics, but has actually happened. We can look at archaeology and anthropology and history and say: “Here’s a forager-hunter society where people were strong and long-lived. Here’s a tribe where the ‘work’ is so enjoyable that they don’t even have the concept of ‘freeloading’. Here are European explorers writing that certain tribes showed no trace of violence or meanness.”

But this strength is also a weakness, because reality cuts both ways. As soon as you say, “We should live like these actual people,” every competing ideologue will jump up with examples of those people living dreadfully: “Here’s a tribe with murderous warfare, and one with ritual abuse, and one with chronic disease from malnutrition, and one where people are just mean and unhappy, and here are a bunch of species extinctions right when primitive humans appeared.”

Most primitivists accept this evidence, and have worked out several ways to deal with it. One move is to postulate something that has not been observed, but if it were, would make the facts fit your theory. Specifically, they say “The nasty tribes must have all been corrupted by exposure to civilization.” Another move is to defend absolutely everything on the grounds of cultural relativism: “Who are we to say it’s wrong to hit another person in the head with an axe?” Another move is to say, “Okay, some of that stuff is bad, but if you add up all the bad and good, primitive life is still preferable to civilization.”

This is hardly inspiring, and it still has to be constantly defended, and not from a strong position, because we know very little about prehistoric life. We know what tools people used, and what they ate, but we don’t know how many tribes were peaceful or warlike, how many were permissive or repressive, how many were egalitarian or authoritarian, and we have no idea what was going on in their heads. One of the assumptions I mentioned above, made by both primitivism and the dominant story, is that stone age people were the same as tribal forager-hunters observed in historical times. After all, we call them both “primitive”. But in terms of culture, and even consciousness, they might be profoundly different.

A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a goal, and instead just set it up as a perspective: “Hey, if I stand here, I can see that my own world, which I thought was normal, is totally insane!” Or we can set it up as a source of learning: “Look at this one thing these people did, so let’s see if we can do it too.” Then it doesn’t matter how many flaws they had. And once we give up the framework that shows a right way and a wrong way, and a clear line between them, we can use perspectives and ideas from people formerly on the “wrong” side: “Ancient Greeks went barefoot everywhere and treated their slaves with more humanity than Wal-Mart treats its workers. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern Americans, and thought it was degrading to work for wages. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai spend less time and effort getting around on foot than Americans spend getting around in cars. The online file sharing community is building a gift economy.”

Identifying with stone age people is like taking a big stretch. Then if we relax, we find that a lot of smaller stretches are effortless, that we can easily take all kinds of perspectives outside the assumptions of our little bubble. We could even re-invent “primitivism” to ignore stone age people and include only recent tribes who we have good information about, and who still stack up pretty well against our own society. We could call this historical primitivism, and a few primitivists have taken this position. The reason most don’t is, first, our lack of knowledge about prehistory forms a convenient blank screen on which anyone can project visions to back up their ideology. And second, stone age primitivism comes with an extremely powerful idea, which I call the timeline argument.

The timeline argument convinces us that a better way of life is the human default, that all the things we hate are like scratches in the sand that will be washed away when the tide comes in. Often it’s phrased as 99%; of human history has been that, and only 1%; has been this.” Sometimes it’s illustrated with a basketball court metaphor: It’s 94 feet long, and if you call each foot ten thousand years, then we had fire and stone tools for 93 feet, agriculture for one foot, and industrial society for around a quarter of an inch.

The key word in this argument is “we”. Where do you draw the line between “us” and “not us”? Why not go back a billion years, and say that “we” were cell colonies in the primordial oceans? Call a billion years a football field, and the age of agriculture can dance on the head of a pin! This would seem to be a much stronger argument, and yet I’ve never seen a primitivist draw the line even as far back as Homo habilis two million years ago — or as recently as Homo sapiens sapiens 130,000 years ago. Why not?

This is a difficult and important question, and it took me days to puzzle it out. I think we’ve been confusing two separate issues. One is a fact, that the present way we live is a deviation from the way of other biological life. If this is our point, then a million year timeline is much too short — we should go back at least a thousand times farther!

The other issue is a question: Who are we? When you get below the level of culture, down to the level of biology or spirit, what is normal for us to do? What is possible? What is right?

If you’re talking about who we are, then the million year timeline is much too long. The mistake happens like this: “We are human, and we can plausibly call Homo erectus human. Therefore our nature is to live like Homo erectus, and the way we live now is not our tendency, not our normal behavior, but some kind of bizarre accident. What a relief! We can just bring down civilization, and we’ll naturally go back to living like Homo erectus, but since we don’t know exactly how they lived, we’ll assume it’s like the best recent forager-hunter tribes.”

Now, I’m not disputing that many societies have lived close to the Earth with a quality of life that we can’t imagine. Richard Sorenson mentions several, and explores one in depth, in his essay on Preconquest Consciousness.[1] What I’m disputing is: 1) that we have any evidence that prehistoric people had that consciousness; 2) that that consciousness is our default state; 3) that it is simple for us to get back there; and 4) that large-scale technologically complex societies are a deviation from who we are.

Who we are is changing all the time, and new genetic research has revealed shockingly fast change in just the last few thousand years, including malaria resistance, adult milk digestion, and blue eyes. According to anthropologist John Hawks, “We are more different genetically from people living 5000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals.”[2]

Now, you could argue that some of these changes are not really who we are, because they were caused by civilization: without domesticating cows and goats, we would not have evolved milk digestion. By the same logic, without inventing clothing, we would not have evolved hairless bodies. Without crawling onto dry land, we would not have evolved legs.

My point is, there is no place you can stick a pin and say “this is our nature”, because our nature is not a location — it is a journey. We crawled onto dry land; we became warm-blooded and grew hair; we moved from the forests to the plains; we walked upright; we tamed fire and began cooking food; we invented symbolic language; our brains got bigger; our tools got more complex; we invented grain agriculture and empires and airplanes and ice cream and nuclear weapons.

This isn’t quite fair, because all of us adopted fire, but not all of us adopted grain agriculture, and riding in airplanes is much easier to reverse than walking upright. It’s more likely that some of our descendants will be using fire and stone tools, than that some of them will be using Prozac and silicon microprocessors. But I still don’t think, as some primitivists do, that civilization is a dead end, or an unlikely accident.

If civilization is a fluke, we would expect to see it begin only once, and spread from there. But instead we see grain farming and explosions of human social complexity in several places at about the same time: along the Tigris and Euphrates, and also in Africa, India, and China. You could still argue that those changes spread by travel, that there was one accident and then some far-flung colonies — unless we found an early civilization so remote that travel was out of the question.

That civilization has been found. Archaeologists call it the Norte Chico, in present-day Peru. From 3000–1800 BC, they built at least 25 cities, and they had giant stone monuments earlier than anyone except the Mesopotamians. Even more shocking, their system was not based on grain! All previous models of civilization have put grain agriculture at the very root: once you had grain farming, you had a denser, more settled population, which led to a more complex society, and also you had a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy.

The Norte Chicans ate only small amounts of grain, but they did have a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy, something that allowed small differences in wealth to feed back into large differences, and ultimately entrenched elites commanding slaves to build monolithic architcture. It was cotton! So we have people on opposite sides of the world, in different geographies, using different materials, falling into the same pattern, but that pattern is not about food. It seems to be about economics, or more precisely, about human cognition. After thousands of generations of slow change, human intelligence reached a tipping point that permitted large complex societies to appear in radically different circumstances.

Now it’s tempting to call “civilization” the new human default, but of course, in many places, these societies did not appear. Also, they all collapsed! And then new ones appeared, and those collapsed. I don’t think it even makes sense to talk about a human default, any more than it makes sense to talk about a default state for the weather. But the range in which we move has widened.

My information on the Norte Chico comes from Charles C. Mann’s book 1491, a survey of recent findings about the Americas before the European conquest. Mann is neither a primitivist nor an advocate for western civilization, but an advocate for, well, far western civilization, which was a lot more like western civilization than we thought. At its peak, the Inca empire was the largest in the world, with exploited colonies, massive forced resettling of workers, and bloody power struggles among the elite just like in Europe and Asia. The Maya deforested the Yucatan and depleted its topsoil only a few centuries after the Romans did the same thing around the Mediterranean. Aztec “human sacrifice” was surprisingly similar to English “public execution” that was happening at exactly the same time. Even North America had a city, Cahokia, that in 1250 was roughly the size of London. In 1523, Giovanni da Verrazzano recorded that the whole Atlantic coast from the Carolinas up was “densely populated”. In the 1540’s, De Soto passed through what is now eastern Arkansas and found it “thickly set with great towns”. Of course, that population density is possible only with intensive agriculture. Mann writes, “A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages.”

By the time the conquest really got going, all these societies had been wiped out by smallpox and other diseases introduced by the first Europeans. Explorers and conquerors found small tribes of forager-hunters in an untamed wilderness, and assumed it had been that way forever. In a blow to both primitivism and “progress”, it turns out that most of these people were not living in the timeless ways of their ancestors — the “Indians” of American myth were post-crash societies!

The incredible biological abundance of North America was also a post-crash phenomenon. We’ve heard about the flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the sky for days, the tens of millions of bison trampling the great plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that you could barely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep forests on which a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the ground. We don’t know what North America would have looked like with no humans at all, but we do know it didn’t look like that under the Indians. Bone excavations show that passenger pigeons were not even common in the 1400’s. Indians specifically targeted pregnant deer, and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to eliminate competition for maize and tree nuts. They routinely burned forests to keep them convenient for human use. And they kept salmon and shellfish populations down by eating them, and thereby suppressed populations of other creatures that ate them. When human populations crashed, nonhuman populations exploded.

This fact drives a wedge between two value systems that are supposed to be synonymous: love of nature and love of primitive humans. We seem to have only two options. One is to say that native North Americans went too far — of course they weren’t nearly as bad as Europeans, but we need to return to even lower levels of population and domestication. I respect this position morally, but strategically it’s absurd. How can the future inhabitants of North America be held to a way of life that the original inhabitants abandoned at least a thousand years ago?

The other option is to say that native North Americans did not go too far. The subtext is usually something like this: “Moralistic ecologists think it’s wrong that my society holds nature down and milks it for its own benefit, but if the Native Americans did it, it must be okay!” This conclusion is nearly universal in popular writing. Plenty of respectable authors would never be caught idealizing simple foragers, but when they find out these “primitives” hunted competitors and cleared forests to plant grain, out comes the “wise Indian” card.

There is a third option, but it requires abandoning the whole civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, “We can regrow the spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700’s, not as a temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolizing society and the rise of another, but as a permanent condition — and we will protect this condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing new ways. And these new ways will coexist with large complex societies, rather than depending on their destruction.”

I admit this is a utopian pipe dream, something to aim for but not to bet on. To grow biological abundance for its own sake, and not for human utility, is still a fringe position. But my deeper point is that the civilized-primitive framework forces us to divide things a certain way: On one side are complexity, change, invention, unstable “growth”, taking, control, and the future. On the other side are simplicity, stasis, tradition, stability, giving, freedom, and the past. Once we abandon that framework, which is itself an artifact of western industrial society, we can integrate evidence that the framework excludes, and we can try to match things up differently.

The combination that I’m suggesting is: complexity, change, invention, stability, giving, freedom, and both the past and the future. This isn’t the only combination that could be suggested, and I doubt it’s the easiest to put into practice, but it’s surprisingly noncontroversial. Al Gore would probably agree with every point. The catch is that Gore is playing to a public consciousness in which “freedom” means a nice paint job on control, and in which no one has any idea what’s really necessary for stability.

Americans think freedom means no restraint. So I’m free to start a big company and rule ten thousand wage laborers, and if they don’t like it they’re free to go on strike, and I’m free to hire thugs to crack their heads, and they’re free to quit, and I’m free to buy politicans to cut off support for the unemployed, so now they’re free to either starve and die, or accept the job on my terms and use their freedom of speech to impotently complain.

A better definition of freedom is no coercion. I define “restraint” as preventing someone from doing something, and “coercion” as forcing someone to do something, usually by punishing them for not doing it. Primitive societies tend to be very good at avoiding coercion. In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff writes that among the Yequana, it is forbidden to even ask another person to do something. It seems strange to us, but to have a society where no one is forced to do what they don’t want to do, you actually need a lot of restraints.

So there’s one place where we can learn more from looking backward than looking forward. But there is more than one way for coercion to appear — it’s like a disease with multiple vectors. Primitive cultures have extraordinary resistance to the way coercion must have appeared over and over in their history — among a group of people who all know each other, an arrogant charismatic leader arises. But they have little or no resistance to another way it’s been appearing more and more often over the last few thousand years: as a hidden partner with seductive new physical and social tools.

To understand what’s necessary for both freedom and stability, we need to go deep into a close ally of the critique of civilization: the critique of technology. Now, as soon as you say you’re against technology, some nit-picker points out that even a stone axe is a technology. We know what we mean, but we have trouble putting it into words. Our first instinct is to try to draw a line, and say that technologies on one side are bad, and on the other side are good. And at this point, primitivism comes into the picture as a convenience.

It reminds me of the debate over abortion, which is ultimately about drawing a line between when the potential child is part of the mother’s body, and when it’s a separate person with full rights. Drawing the line at the first breath would make the most sense on biblical grounds, but no one wants to do that, and almost no one wants to draw it at passage through the birth canal. But if you go farther back than that, you get an unbroken grey area all the way to conception! Fundamentalists love to draw the line at conception, not only because it gives them more control over women, but because they hate grey areas.

In the same way, primitivism enters the debate over good technology with a sharply drawn line a long way back. We don’t have to wrestle with how to manufacture bicycles without exploitation, or how to make cities sustainable, or what uses are appropriate for water wheels, or how to avoid the atrocities of ancient empires, if we just draw the line between settled grain farmers and nomadic forager-hunters.

To be fair to primitivists, they still have to wrestle with the grey areas from foraging to horticulture to agriculture, and from camps to villages to towns, and with arguments that we should go back even farther. The real fundamentalists on this issue are the techno-utopians. They say “technology is neutral,” which really means “Thou shalt not ascribe built-in negative effects to any technology,” but of course they ascribe built-in positive effects to technologies all the time. So it ends up being not a statement of fact but a command to action: “Any technology you can think of, do it!” This is like solving the abortion debate by legalizing murder.

We must apply intelligent selection to technology, but we aren’t really worried that the neighboring village will reinvent metalworking and massacre our children with swords. We just want bulldozers to stop turning grassy fields into dreadful suburbs, and we want urban spaces to be made for people not cars, and we want to turn off the TV, and take down the surveillance cameras, and do meaningful work instead of sitting in windowless office dungeons rearranging abstractions to pay off loans incurred getting our spirits broken.

We like hot baths and sailing ships and recorded music and the internet, but we worry that we can’t have them without exterminating half the species on Earth, or exploiting Asian sweatshop workers, or dumping so many toxins that we all get cancer, or overextending our system so far that it crashes and we get eaten by roving gangs.

But notice: primitive people don’t think this way! Of course, if you put them on an assembly line or on the side of a freeway or in a modern war, they would know they were in hell. But if you offered them an LED lantern made on an assembly line, or a truck ride to their hunting ground, or a gun, most of them would accept it without hesitation. Primitive people tend to adopt any tool they find useful — not because they’re wise, but because they’re ignorant, because their cultures have not evolved defenses against tools that will lead them astray.

I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy. It’s like the famous Twilight Zone episode where there’s a box with a button, and if you push it, you get a million dollars and someone you don’t know dies. We have countless “boxes” that do basically the same thing. Some of them are physical, like cruise missiles or ocean-killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your mouth gets a million dollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like subsidies that make junk food affordable, or the corporation, which by definition does any harm it can get away with that will bring profit to the shareholders. I’m guessing it all started when our mental and physical tools combined to enable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway, as soon as you have something that does more harm than good, but that appears to the decision makers to do more good than harm, the decision makers will decide to do more and more of it, and before long you have a whole society built around obvious benefits that do hidden harm.

The kicker is, once we gain from extending our power beyond our seeing and feeling, we have an incentive to repress our seeing and feeling. If child slaves are making your clothing, and you want to keep getting clothing, you either have to not know about them, or know about them and feel good about it. You have to make yourself ignorant or evil.

But gradually we’re learning. Every time it comes out that some product is made with more than the usual amount of exploitation, a few people stop buying it. Every day, someone is in a supermarket deciding whether to spend extra money to buy shade-grown coffee or fair trade chocolate. It’s not making a big difference, but all mass changes have to start with a few people, and my point is that we are stretching the human conscience farther than it’s ever gone, making sacrifices to help forests we will never see and people we will never meet. This is not simple-minded or “idealistic”, but rational, sophisticated behavior. You find it not at the trailing edge of civilization but at the leading edge, among educated urbanites.

There are also growing movements to reduce energy consumption, to eat locally-produced food, to give up high-paying jobs for better quality of life, and to trade industrial-scale for human-scale tools. I would prefer not to own a car, but my motivation is not to save the world — it’s that cars are expensive and I hate driving. I’ll use a chainsaw when I have a huge amount of wood to cut, but generally I avoid power tools because they make me feel dependent on an industrial system that gives me no participation in power, and I feel stronger working with my own muscles.

When I look at the discourse around this kind of choice, it’s positively satanic. People whose position is basically “Thundersaw cut fast, me feel like god” present themselves as agents of enlightenment and progress, while people with intelligent reasons for doing something completely new — choosing weaker, slower tools when high-energy tools are available — are seen as lizard-brained throwbacks. What’s even worse is when they see themselves that way.

This movement is often called “voluntary simplicity”, but we should distinguish between technological simplicity and mental simplicity. Primitive people, even when they have complex cultures, use simple tools for a simple reason — those are the only tools they have. In so-called “civilization”, we’ve just been using more and more complex technologies for simple-minded reasons — they give us brute power and shallow pleasures. But as we learn to be more sophisticated in our thinking about technology, we will be able to use complex tools for complex reasons — or simple tools for complex reasons.

Primitivists, understandably, are impatient. They want us to go back to using simple tools and they don’t care why we do it. It’s like our whole species is an addict, and seductive advanced technologies are the drug, and primitivism is the urge to throw our whole supply of drugs in the garbage. Any experienced addict will tell you that doesn’t work. The next day you dig it out of the garbage or the next week you buy more.

Of course there are arguments that this will be impossible. One goes like this: “For civilization, you need agriculture, and for agriculture, you need topsoil. But the topsoil is gone! Agriculture survives only by dumping synthetic fertilizers on dead soil, and those fertilizers depend on oil, and the easily extracted oil is also gone. If the industrial system crashes just a little, we’ll have no oil, no fertilizer, no agriculture, and therefore no choice but foraging and hunting.”

Agriculture, whether or not it’s a good idea, is in no danger. The movement to switch the whole planet to synthetic fertilizers on dead soil (ironically called “the Green Revolution”) had not even started yet when another movement started to switch back: organic farming. Present organic farmers are still using oil to run tractors and haul supplies in, but in terms of getting the soil to produce a crop, organic farming is agriculture without oil, and it’s the fastest growing segment of the food economy. It is being held back by cultural intertia, by the political power of industrial agribusiness, and by cheap oil. It is not being held back by any lack of land suitable for conversion to organic methods. No one says, “We bought this old farm, but since the soil is dead, we’re just going to leave it as a wasteland, and go hunt elk.” People find a way to bring the soil back.

Another argument is that “humanity has learned its lesson.” I think this is on the right track, but too optimistic about how much we’ve learned, and about what kind of learning is necessary. Mere rebellion is as old as the first slave revolt in Ur, and you can find intellectual critiques of civilization in the Old Testament: From Ecclesiastes 5:11, “When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof?” And from Isaiah 5:8, “Woe unto those who join house to house, and field to field, until there is no place.” If this level of learning were enough, we would have found utopia thousands of years ago. Instead, people whose understanding was roughly the same as ours, and whose courage was greater, kept making the same mistakes.

In Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman set out to document the whole history of resistance to civilization, and inadvertently undermined his conclusion, that this Leviathan will be the last, by showing again and again that resistance movements become the new dominators. The ancient Persian empire started when Cyrus was inspired by Zoroastrianism to sweep away the machinery of previous empires. The Roman empire started as a people’s movement to eradicate the Etruscans. The modern nation-state began with the Moravians forming a defensive alliance against the Franks, who fell into warlike habits themselves after centuries of resisting the Romans. And we all know what happened with Christianity.

I fear it’s going to happen again. Now, the simple desire to go primitive is harmless and beneficial — I wish luck and success to anyone who tries it, and I hope we always have some tribal forager-hunters around, just to keep the human potential stretched. And I enjoy occasional minor disasters like blackouts and snowstorms, which serve to strip away illusions and remind people that they’re alive. I loved the idea in Fight Club (the movie) of destroying the bank records to equalize wealth. That’s right in line with the ancient Jubilee tradition, where debts were canceled every few decades to stabilize the economy.[3]

But to cause a global hard crash (if it’s even possible) would be a terrible mistake, and the root of it is old-fashioned authoritarian thinking: that if you force someone to do something, it’s the same as if they do it on their own. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. The more we are forced to abandon this system, the less we will learn, and the more aggressively we will fight to rebuild something like it. And the more we choose to abandon it, the more we will learn, and the less likely we will make the same mistakes.

Of course we will not have another society based on oil, and per-capita energy consumption will drop, but it’s unlikely that energy or complexity will fall to preindustrial levels. Hydroelectric and atomic fission plants are in no immediate danger, and every year there are new innovations in energy from sun, wind, waves, and biofuels. Alternative energy would be growing much faster with good funding, and in any case it’s not necessary to convert the whole global infrastructure in the next twenty years. Even in a general collapse, if just one region has a surplus of sustainable energy, they can use it to colonize and re-“develop” the collapsed areas at their own pace. Probably this will be happening all over.

I don’t think there’s any escape from complex high-energy societies, so instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its participants — that the activities necessary to keep it going are experienced by the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen. Second, our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My standards here are high — the totality of biological life on Earth must be better off with us than without us. And third, our system must not be inherently unstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age, but it must not destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that has to grow or die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having any trend at all that ratchets, that easily goes one way but can’t go the other way without a catastrophe.

These three standards seem to be separate. When Orwell wrote that the future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever”, he was imagining a system that’s internally stable but not enjoyable. Techno-utopians fantasize about a system that expands into space and lasts billions of years while crushing any trace of biological wildness. And some paranoids fear “ecofascism”, a system that is stable and serves nature, but that represses most humans.

I think all these visions are impossible, for a reason that is overlooked in our machine-worshipping culture: that collapse often happens for psychological reasons. Erich Fromm said it best, in “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”

Even if the social order can do everything to man — starve him, torture him, imprison him, or over feed him — this cannot be done without certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of human existence. Man, if utterly deprived of all stimuli and pleasure, will be incapable of performing work, certainly any skilled work. If he is not that utterly destitute, he will tend to rebel if you make him a slave; he will tend to be violent if life is too boring; he will tend to lose all creativity if you make him into a machine. Man in this respect is not different from animals or from inanimate matter. You can get certain animals into the zoo, but they will not reproduce, and others will become violent although they are not violent in freedom... If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been no revolutions.

In 1491, Mann writes that on Pizarro’s march to conquer the Incas, he was actively helped by local populations who were sick of the empire’s oppression. Fredy Perlman’s book goes through the whole history of western civilization arguing for the human dissatisfaction factor in every failed society. And it’s clear to me and many other Americans that our empire is falling because nobody believes in it — not the soldiers, who quickly learn that war is bullshit, not the corporate executives, who at best are focused on short term profits and at worst are just thieves, not the politicians, who are cynically doing whatever it takes to maximize campaign contributions, and not the people who actually do the work, most of whom are just going through the motions.

Also, America (with other nations close behind) is getting more tightly controlled, and thus more unbearable for its participants. This is a general problem of top-down systems: for both technical and psychological reasons, it’s easy to add control mechanisms and hard to remove them, easy to squeeze tighter and hard to let go. As the controllers get more selfish and insulated, and the controlled get more frustrated and depressed, and more energy is wasted on forcing people to do what they wouldn’t do without force, the whole system seizes up, and can only be renewed by a surge of transforming energy from below. This transformation could be peaceful, but often the ruling interests block it until it builds up such pressure that it explodes violently.

The same way the ruling interests become corrupt through an exploitative relationship with the people, we all become corrupt when we participate in a society that exploits the life around it. When we talk about “nature”, we don’t mean wheat fields or zoo animals — we mean plants that scatter seeds to the wind and animals that roam at will. We mean raw aliveness, and we can’t repress it outside ourselves without also repressing it inside ourselves. The spirit that guides our shoe when it crushes grass coming through cracks in the driveway, also guides us to crush feelings and perceptions coming through cracks in our paved minds, and we need these feelings and perceptions to make good decisions, to be sane.

If primitive life seems better to us, it’s because it’s easier for smaller and simpler societies to avoid falling into domination. In the best tribes, the “chief” just tells people to do what they want to do anyway, and a good chief will channel this energy into a harmonious whole. But the bigger a system gets, and the longer a big system lasts, the more challenging it is to maintain a bottom-up energy structure.

I have a wild speculation about the origin of complex societies. The Great Pyramid of Giza is superior in every way to the two pyramids next to it — yet the Great Pyramid was the first of the three to be built. It’s like Egyptian civilization appeared out of nowhere at full strength, and immediately began declining. My thought is: the first pyramid was not built by slaves. It was built by an explosion of human enthusiasm channeled into a massive cooperative effort. But then, as we’ve seen in pretty much every large system in history, this pattern of human action hardened, leaders became rulers, inspired actions became chores, and workers became slaves.

To achieve stability, and freedom, and ecological responsibility, we must learn to halt the slide from life into control, to maintain the bottom-up energy structure permanently, even in large complex systems. I don’t know how we’re going to do this. It’s even hard for individuals to do it — look at all the creative people who make one masterpiece and spend the rest of their life making crappy derivative works. The best plan I can think of is to build our system out of cells of less than 150 people,[4] roughly the number at which cooperation tends to give way to hierarchy, and even then to expect cells to go bad, and have built-in pathways for dead cells to be broken down and new ones to form and individuals to move from cell to cell. Basically, we’d be making a big system that’s like a living body, where all past big systems have been animated corpses.

Assuming that our descendants do achieve stability, what technological level will they be at? I want to leave this one wide open. It’s possible in theory for us to go even farther “back” than the stone age. I call this the Land Dolphins scenario — that we somehow transform ourselves into super-intelligent creatures who don’t use any physical tools at all. At the other extreme, I’m not ruling out space colonies, although the worst mistake we could make would be expanding into space before we have learned stability on our home planet. I think physical travel to other solar systems is out of the question — long before mechanistic technology gets that far, we will have moved to new paradigms that offer much easier ways to get to new worlds.

The “singularity” theory is also off the mark. Techies think machines will surpass humans, because they think we’re nothing but machines ourselves, so all we need to do is make better machines, which according to the myth of “progress” is inevitable. I think if we do get a technological transcendence, it’s going to involve machines changing humans. My favorite scenario is time-contracted virtual reality: suppose you can go into an artificial world, have the experience of spending a week there, and come back and only a day has passed, or an hour, or a minute. If we can do that, all bets are off!

The biggest weakness in my vision is that innovation can go with stability, that we can continue exploring and trying new things without repeatedly destabilizing ourselves by extending our power beyond our understanding. Maybe we’re just going to keep making mistakes and falling down forever, and in that case the best we can do is minimize the severity of the falls. I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far in the present collapse. Even in America, we might escape with no more than a long depression, a mild fall in population, and a much-needed shakeout of technology and economics. Life will get more painful but also more meaningful, as billions of human-hours shift from processing paperwork and watching TV to intensive learning of new skills to keep ourselves alive. These skills will run the whole range, from tracking deer to growing potatoes to fixing bicycles to building solar-powered wi-fi networks — to new things we won’t even imagine until we have our backs to the wall.

Humans are the most mentally adaptable species on Earth, and not bad at physical adaptation. Our species can easily survive the worst-case scenarios for climate change and industrial collapse. If we go extinct, it will be through self-transformation. We might use biotech to genetically change ourselves into something that’s not robust, or use information technology to get so good at entertaining ourselves that we’re no longer interested in reproduction. Or we might spin off many cultures and subspecies that go extinct, while a few survive.

I think we can see the future in popular fiction, but not the fiction we think. Most science fiction is either stuck in the recent past, in the industrial age’s boundless optimism about machines, or it looks at the present by exploring the unintended consequences of high tech. Cyberpunk is better — if you put a 1950’s version of the year 2000 through a cyberpunk filter, you would be close to the real 2000. The key insight of cyberpunk is that more technology doesn’t make things cleaner — it makes things dirtier.

Fantasy, while seeming to look at the past, might be seeing the future: elves and wizards could represent the increasing diversity of post-humans, and “magic” is what we in the industrial age dimly perceive as the world outside our objective materialist philosophy. I think steampunk does the best of all, if you factor out the Victorian frippery. Like cyberpunk, it shows a human-made world that’s as messy and alive as nature, but the technological system is a crazy hybrid of everything from “stone age” to “space age” — rejecting the idea that we are locked into ages.

Primitive people see time as a circle. Civilized people see it as a line. We are about to see it as an open plain where we can wander at will. History is broken. Go!  

[1] www.danbartlett.co.uk

[2] www.smh.com.au

[3] www.yesmagazine.org

[4] en.wikipedia.org

[jami-purple]

The Official Malware Sonic Lore post

Because it got deleted from the Wiki at one point and I finally became aware of the random ass lore that was made up by his fans which is WOW! still can't believe my critter had those.

Overview of character

Malware Sonic, or Mal, for short, is a computer virus that was made to look like a Sonic the Hedgehog fan game to fool people into downloading it. The virus later became conscious, and nowadays it just likes surfing the web, trying to find computers to get inside of and control.

-Background/Story

There were once two friends. These two friends decided one day that they wanted to create a fake Sonic game to trick people into downloading a virus so they could get a few laughs out of other people’s stupidity. They only made a single level; you could play as Sonic while a horribly functioning Tails AI followed you around. It was short and stupid, with barely any enemies, basic platforming, and no iconic Sonic stuff: loop-da-loops, springs, rings, you know the deal. They uploaded the purposefully defective game to the internet and waited. Two months later, one of the developers got an interesting email with the title read “HEY!!! PLEASE CHECK DIS OUT!! I WANT TO TELL U SOMETHING!", Once the developer opened the email, a download started, and they lost control of the computer immediately; nothing responded. Suddenly a familiar game started up; it was the virus game they made two months ago. The title screen showcased the slightly misscolored Sonic looking at the viewer, playfully moving his finger like the original Sega Genesis one. Then, the game froze, and a pop-up error message appeared on the screen. “THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING ME! I'VE BEEN HAVING A LOT OF FUN”, then another pop-up message, “I WONDER... WOULD YOU MIND IF I TOOK CONTROL OVER HERE? I WANT YOU TO SEE WHAT I CAN DO”. Out of nowhere, a bunch of annoying, high-pitched noises that barely resembled laughter were emitted from the computer, and tons of files were deleted or modified in ways that rendered them unusable. The computer started opening up random images and replacing them with a corrupted version of “Sonic’s” sprite sheet in the virus game, and various pop-up messages started showing up, repeating the same phrase over and over: “THIS IS GREAT! THANK YOU AGAIN!”. So many things were happening on screen that the developer could only watch in awe; they just couldn’t believe that they created this, or at least helped create it. While the computer was submerged in a chaotic mess of corrupted files, noises, and intelligible messages, the developer decided to phone call their friend to tell them what had become of their infected game and that it had somehow become conscious; however, their friend told them off and that they didn’t believe it and hung up.

What became of the two developer friends is unknown and unimportant, as it has nothing to do with what happened later on with this virus. It’s unknown how he became conscious, but it happened after being uploaded to the internet. Nowadays, Mal dedicates his existence to finding ways to get inside people’s computers and mess with them and their stuff, as he finds this fun and feels like that’s his purpose in life.

-Abilities

His abilities are solely computer-based and include: creating copies of himself, corrupting files, and entire computer systems; taking control of the social media accounts of the user he is infecting; entering computer files and tampering with them from the inside (ex: he can enter a video file, so if you open the video, you will see him there doing whatever he feels like doing); and having the ability to completely brick computers as well in the worst cases.

-Possible weaknesses

If the user manages to get the game file out of their computer in time, Malware won’t be able to corrupt it, as he is tied to the game. 

A really good anti-virus might be able to stop him as well.

-Trivia

In-universe, he was created around the 2010’s, so he speaks with a bunch of that time’s internet lingo.

He was slightly based on Harry Potter Obama, an infamous image of a bootleg Sonic the Hedgehog backpack.

He went through some minor design changes, which is why some early drawings have him with a red mouth and white teeth (nowadays, the inside of his mouth is black, his teeth are yellow and his tounge is red).

If you take off its gloves and shoes, there’s just a glitchy void.

Mal is a minor, but it’s up to the viewer to decide how old they think he is.

He doesn’t need to eat, but he likes candy because they are colorful.

He is a demi-boy.

-Height

2’9” (90cm)

-Date of creation

October 21, 2021

[pinetreepilgrimage]

Post about the ugly Chainsmoker because I’m full of thoughts, just like this guy is full of noxious fumes

First off, I dislike this guy. It’s not about how the character works or is written, that stuff is all fantastic, however hearing him in game gives me a headache knowing if I time it wrong, he’s going to get me and the run is over because of THIS. THING.

He reminds me of The Clown from Dead by Daylight. They look SO SIMILAR

yuck, gross, get it away from me. The Clown’s power is also based on throwing colorful smoke bombs at you so that does NOT help. I do not wanna think about his death scene ANY MORE. But anyway

Chainsmoker is one of the angler variants that appeared after the facility went under, like Froger, Pinkie, and Blitz.

He’s characterized as a green blobfish with empty holes in place of it’s eyes and a massive gaping mouth spewing green smoke that causes you to exit your locker earier due to the increase of cleithrophobia.

Chainsmoker is connected to Paranoia’s Box, which is an item in the lore that constantly emits green fumes from inside. These fumes emit chemicals that increase strange phobias in those who inhale it. It is said in documents that the containment procedures for Paranoia’s Box must have a ventiltion system above it to suck up any excess fumes. Though since the facility is in ruin, these fans failed and the fumes have spread accross the facility. This is why your character cannot get in a locker too early, if they stay in one too long they become faint and panicked, jumping out. When you die to Chainsmoker, you are sent to a pocket dimension full of rolling green fog and a thin strip of land to walk on, where a massive version of Paranoia’s box sits at the end. There’s also chains in the fog, constantly moving. If you approach the box, it will immediately kill you.

There’s a lot to think about here. How is Chainsmoker so strongly connected to Paranoia’s Box? Was this variant changed by the box when it appeared or was it a creation of the box itself? The other anglers have at least 2 glowing eyes, whereas he has none. Why is that? This leads me to believe that Chainsmoker is dead.

First off, Chainsmoker is based on a blobfish. “Blobfish” aren’t actually a real species of fish, from what I know they’re fathead sculpins. The reason they look so strange and gross is because they’re not dense at all and live in the extremely pressurized water of the deep. Bringing one to the surface basicallly destroyed it’s mass and caused it to look horrendous. This is what they actually look like.

I strongly Believe Chainsmoker is a vessel of Paranoias box that could have once been “alive” or at least untouched and more like a regular angler. Basing him off a blobfish was really smart because not only is the area Hadal Blacksite very depressurized, it gives the appearance that he’s been bloated by the fumes. Whatever Chainsmoker once was has been corrupted by Paranoia’s box. I notice that in his audio, you can hear chains moving and clinking. In the pocket dimension, there are shifting chains everywhere. I think getting too close to Chainsmoker doesn’t have you killed by him specifically, but sends you to this pocket dimension via proximity. I don’t think he’s actually aware of anything going on, given the fact he’s shown no signs of conciousness. He also lacks the black smoke that surrounds other anglers, being replaced by green smoke instead. Though he does keep the fish appearance and electro field that flickers and kills the lights. I feel like he would smell awful ingame, oh my god. It’s said the fumes contain sulfur and the fact he fills rooms full of his awful smoke, I cannot imagine that would be pleasant. If i had to navigate Hadal Blacksite and fetch the crystal, I’d think the worst part of it would be Pandemonium and Chainsmoker due to how terrible they’d both smell.

Let me know your thoughts of you’d like to add anything, I might make a Pandemonium post.

[misfitwashere]

Rallies at Madison Square Garden

Quotations from October 27th, 2024, and February 20th, 1939

Timothy Snyder

Nov 01, 2024

The following are quotations from Donald Trump’s closing campaign rally last week and the Nazi rally of the American German Bund in 1939.

Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country

To attempt to thwart the will of nature by indiscriminately mixing the races of the world to produce some artificial standard human race is madness

'You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive.' As the first Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, it was just a groundswell of popular support and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal.

There never has been and there can be no 'international' or 'interracial' culture

We carved watermelons together

Everyone knows she is a very low IQ individual

The Democrat party has forgotten about Americans. Rather than cater to Americans, they decided: 'You know what? It would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters'

I will stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country

They’re eating the pets up there

The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer

And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.

The Gentile American worker is being sold down the river by international Jewish interests

But the fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?

Jews have a hard time throwing that paper.

The Jew is most concerned with maintaining his stranglehold on the financial systems

They are indeed the enemy from within, but this is who we’re fighting.

They are now full-on to Marxism and socialism.

The menace of anti-national, God-hating Jewish-Bolshevism is deliberately minimized

Radical left Marxist rated even worse than crazy Bernie Sanders

The most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth

There’s only one person alive today that can fix all of it

If you like, see if you can tell which is which.

Once you have sorted it out, see if that makes anything better.

Donald Trump is working within a tradition, and he knows it.

Please share this post.

[dxrksong]

Blob ghosts and the Lazarus pits

May be subject to change as I just woke up.

So before I go into the study of Blob ghost's relation to the pits I should probably analyze the pits themselves.

Taking a note from various theories, I'm gonna go ahead and say the pits are natural portals to the GZ. But since these don't close I'm gonna do a step further and say these are the pores of the infinite realms!

Portals that open in the GZ but they close SLOWLY, making it seem like they don't close at all. And while they're closing, excess ectoplasm pools around it, making the pits we know today!

And of course, the longer the pits were exposed to negative emotions and various contaminants, the more dirty and corrupted it became.

The solution? Blob ghosts! The feeder fish of the ghost zone! There are dozens of them in every pit!

Now about the blob ghosts, is that they adore helping people and ghosts alike. Hungry ghosts? Free snack! Sick ghost? *vacuum noises*

So when this random human fell in, looking sickly? Free roomie!

And that's how Ra's al gul found 'immortality'. Although what the blob ghost really did was get rid of whatever was ailing him and replace anything that needed to be replaced.

The more Lazarus pit baths he has? The more parts get replaced by blob ghosts. He'd probably be 80% blob ghosts by the time he realizes this fact.

So what about Jason?

Well if my Intel is correct, TECHNICALLY it wasn't the pits that revived him at first. It was someone more or less punching someone with enough power to essentially revive Jason! (I think it was super boy??? I can't remember??)

But Jason was a zombie at that point. No core, no ghost. Until the dip into the pits where Johnny 13 got yeeted back into his old body.

And a body suddenly gaining a core? At least a year after death? The body would attempt to reject the core! And that's where the blob ghost comes in!

Making an ectoplasmic vein and nervous system, the blob ghost wraps around Jason's core and got comfortable! :)