#but that's the kind of thing i can infer based having accurate information

[thehardkandy]

i have been lurking around online help forums answering questions for probably at least 15 years and to this day it still drives me absolutely bananas when people essentially just post "HELP! I HAVE A PROBLEM" and then refuse to provide any information or context as if you are some sort of mind-reading savant capable of inducing all the information required on the broadest problem imaginable

[redmbti]

Also can you make a post about what each cognitive function is (but dumbed down bc I've read a lot of explanations and I still don't understand) with some examples?

MBTI CHEAT SHEET #3

note: in the bullet list i’ll be talking about the HIGH users of the mentioned function.

and i’ll talk bout heathy and unhealthy traits in the same bullet list randomly without order so don’t be offended if there’s a trait bout your dominant function that ain’t as nice, it’ll probably be just an unhealthy trait of the function.

EXTROVERTED FUNCTIONS —

each extroverted function proceeds information faster than its introverted contra-part.

for example: Fe proceeds feelings faster than Fi. Fe might feel more emotions but Fi will feel more deeply.

Fe— extroverted feeling

Fe is an extroverted judging function.

dom-Fe —> ExFJ (high user)

aux-Fe —> IxFJ (high user)

tert-Fe —> ExTP (low user)

inf-Fe —> IxTP (low user)

Fe is concerned with other people’s feelings (contrary to Fi)

Fe can be dependent on other people cuz it does a lot for others and expects em to do the same.

Fe high users are usually rly socially aware

they are empathetic and can put themselves well in other peoples shoes (that can be used for good AND bad intentions; remember just bc someone might be emphatic does not mean they’re good people)

they tend to get jealous rly easily (bc Fe compares itself to others a lot

they tend towards passive aggressive behaviour instead of expressing their anger in an open manner

Fe-high users are aware of other people’s emotions but not their own

they often want you to feel a certain way (like if you’re upset they’ll try their best to make you happy again; or they can guilt trip you)

slight inference that you better agree

CAN be fake

Fe is warm, caring and rly helpful if heathy. dependant, manipulative and passive aggressive if unhealthy

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Te— extroverted thinking

Te is an extroverted judging function.

dom-Te —> ExTJ (high user)

aux-Te —> IxTJ (high user)

tert-Te —> ExFP (low user)

inf-Te —> IxFP (low user)

Te is concerned with structure and getting things done

values external evidence over pure logic

independent and often work alcoholics

socially aware but not of other peoples feelings

suppresses emotions cuz what would you gain from expressing it?

often intimating

if you have a problem they wouldn’t try to make you feel better but to fix your problem instead

very straightforward, direct, blunt even

Te-high-users are the least type to be manipulative

they hate being manipulated

highly objective

Te detests subjectivity

Te is objective, practical and structured if heathy. mean, angry and concerned with cutting thru if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Se— extroverted sensing

Se is an extroverted perceiving function.

dom-Se —> ESxP (high user)

aux-Se —> ISxP (high user)

tert-Se —> ENxJ (low user)

inf-Se —> INxJ (low user)

lives in the moment

wants to experience everything life has to offer

cant plan further into the future

physical approach

impulsive and spontaneous

relaxed and laid pack

hand-on learning

often like sports and material arts

reckless

get bored of pure theories

doing instead of thinking

Se is spontaneous, chill and fun if heathy. reckless, future-neglecting and impulsive if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Ne— extroverted intuition

Ne is an extroverted perceiving function.

dom-Ne —> ENxP (high user)

aux-Ne —> INxP (high user)

tert-Ne —> ESxJ (low user)

inf-Ne —> ISxJ (low user)

possibilities possibilities possibilities

broad ideas and abstract concepts (contrary to Ni’s deep ones)

what if thinking

expanding (contrary to Ni)

Ne-doms are often excited

inclined to rapid changes in mind

a lot of perspectives at once

Ne reads between the lines and too much into things

seek proof to back up their instinct (contrary to Ni)

thinks outside the box

loves new thinks

hates being/feeling trapped

strongly values freedom

open-minded!!

commitment-issues and burning bridges

scattered

likes to keep things open (contrary to Ni)

Ne is open-minded, creative, and full of new possibilities if heathy. scattered, commitment-phobic and tends towards burning bridges if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

INTROVERTED FUNCTIONS—

these are often not clearly visible cuz they do their work internal.

Si— introverted sensing

Si is an introverted perceiving function.

dom-Si —> ISxJ (high user)

aux-Si —> ESxJ (high user)

tert-Si —> INxP (low user)

inf-Si —> ENxP (low user)

comfortable with routine

doesn’t like change

hand-on learning

get bored of pure theories

detail-oriented

how did it always work?

understands things when they are done

down to earth

can be picky/ control freaks (istj more than isfj)

can be close-minded

Si is down to earth, detail oriented and in tune with reality if heathy. close-minded and picky control freaks if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Ti— introverted thinking

Ti is an introverted judging function.

dom-Ti —> IxTP (high user)

aux-Ti —> ExTP (high user)

tert-Ti —> IxFJ (low user)

inf-Ti —> ExFJ (low user)

detached, highly logical and analytical

values logic (and personal freedom) over everything

cant enjoy anything unless it makes sense to them (for example if a relationship is nice but it doesn’t make sense to them why the other person likes them they’ll break up)

quite and laid back (only IxTP)

have a hard time controlling their anger

not aware of their emotions nor other peoples emotions

if they feel emotions it’s often expressed thru anger

barley ever cry (they just can’t, it’s awful)

tend to run away from their pain thru fun

IxTPs aren’t rly socially aware due to inferior Fe, where ExTP are charming due to tertiary Fe.

it often seems as if they don’t care bout you (even if they do)

nihilistic

might not give a fuck cuz everthing is so meaningless

Ti can be analytical, logical and an affective ‘search machine’ for plot holes of any kind if healthy. detached, emotionally dead, isolated and nihilistic if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Fi- introverted feeling

Fi is an introverted judging function.

dom-Fi —> IxFP (high user)

aux-Fi —> ExFP (high user)

tert-Fi —> IxTJ (low user)

inf-Fi —> ExTJ (low user)

sensitive but private in their feelings

makes decisions based on personal values

how does this affects me?

cant verbalize emotions

needs time to proceeds feelings

not judgmental of others

very protective of identity

“i” talking

to focused on self (it’s my fault, i fuqed this up, i ruined everything)

CAN be selfish

extreme self loathing if unhealthy

feels rly deeply

Fi is sensitive, private, and almost immune to peer pressure if heathy. isolated, self-loathing and selfish if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Ni— introverted intuition

Ni is an introverted perceiving function.

dom-Ni —> INxJ (high user)

aux-Ni —> ENxJ (high user)

tert-Ni —> ISxP (low user)

inf-Ni —> ESxP (low user)

closest function to the subconscious

therefore does most of its work subconsciously

interested in abstract theories, ideas and concepts

always reads between the lines

always searches for a deeper meaning

detached from sensory reality

poor at interacting with the sensory environment

they just ‘know’ things and they can’t explain it

freakin accurate hunches and epiphanies (aha moments)

they NEED (not want to, they fuqin need to, or they’ll feel sick) to narrow things down to reach ONE CERTAIN outcome (contrary to Ne)

therefore predict things in an accurate way

can be extremely paranoid

imaginary monsters

often wrapped view of reality (for the infj more)

plans EVERYTHING

big picture

can be control freaks

Ni is highly abstract, creative and can predict future outcomes and great at making plans if heathy. extreme paranoia, wrapped version of realty and pointing at imaginary monsters if unhealthy.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

—ciyan

[genderisareligion]

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/hormone-therapy-linked-lower-suicide-risk-trans-youths-study-finds-rcna8617 what are your thoughts on this study?

It's one study, that part of me wants to take at face value because it's depressing that so many GNC kids are so depressed. There haven't been many studies like this but apparently this one is of the largest sample to date. I'm gonna search in the future and look out for reviews by other doctors on this study in particular, but in the mean time, I took into consideration what the authors themselves listed as their own limitations (whole study is here):

First, causation cannot be inferred due to the study's cross-sectional design. It is possible that those who historically have higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviors are also less able to seek or obtain GAHT. However, combined with repeated measures designs of other studies [7], [15] it appears likely that receipt of GAHT may lead to reduced levels of depression and suicidality. Given existing research, it is unlikely that randomized controlled trials of GAHT for youth would be ethically appropriate. To better understand directionality, prospective longitudinal designs are needed. Additionally, our self-reported nonprobability sample may limit the generalizability of findings and suggest the need for the inclusion of gender identity-specific measures in larger probability samples.

Note this being a "self reported nonprobability sample," also note it was conducted online via The Trevor Project. Nonprobability surveys aren't designed to be expressing accurate percentages about the entire population, the researchers are subjective in choosing the sample/the samplers may be subjective in choosing the study, and biases can happen for those reasons. It's not as accurate to conclude "the results of this study universally apply to a group" as it would be with a random probability sample, for example.

I checked out the "existing research" this study gives as justification for calling randomized controlled studies on this "inappropriate," and I don't get it. Cause according to this, "If you want to know how effective a treatment or diagnostic test is, randomized trials provide the most reliable answers. Because the effect of the treatment is often compared with no treatment (or a different treatment), they can also show what happens if you opt to not have the treatment or diagnostic test."

Yes, this survey does include information about what happens to those who aren't getting treatment, but those effects are a self report, the questions were asked once with no follow up done, no other kinds of treatments were asked about, and they're not an objective observation of what actually happens without treatment, side by side in active comparison with treatment. That's not to say participants can't possibly self report with accuracy, just that it's not the most stringent or reliable way to record data. Have to wonder if the authors consider controlled studies on this topic "ethically inappropriate" because of the nature of gender itself, because the "specific identities" are impossible to consistently generalize or make a standard out of since the rule is that everyone experiences them differently.

Because what's being studied itself is so subjective I'm hesitant about things about it claiming to be objective. Genderists want that to change, stop claiming two things that can't be true at once are happening, that gender is both an innate feeling you're born with and a social construct inflicted on us artificially by white imperialism. Studies like this, even though it's reporting on something positive like improved mental health conditions, are unfortunately examples of the Begging The Question logical fallacy, "where the premise on which the conclusion is based is already assumed to be true." Are these teenagers depressed because their "innate gender" is actually wrong and in need of treatment or are they just being told that that's the case? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the distress from being GNC isn't real, I live that, I just think we're giving the wrong thing credit.

The two studies given as "existing research" [7, 15] are some of the only ones done claiming improvements in depression symptoms on HRT. Both of these were included in this peer review of the total evidence put forth by 10 studies of a similar nature, in which:

According to the GRADE scale, used by the World Health Organization and others as influential, the evidence in these studies is of very low certainty, or "the true effect is probably markedly different from the estimated effect," based on the following standards: "risk of bias, imprecision, inconsistency, indirectness, publication bias."

So given that past studies like this - two of which are included as source material for this one - haven't always been of high quality, I'd be interested to see a study of this size conducted using more objective methods. I think it's fair to want that before taking this one at face value given the authors admit their method "limited the generalizability of their findings."

I also have to take into account the amount of studies showing adverse effects of trans HRT on some, ones that aren't depression related like the following:

Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors and Myocardial Infarction in the Transgender Population

Bone Development in Transgender Adolescents Treated With GnRH Analogues and Subsequent Gender-Affirming Hormones

Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence

(More studies like this here, the SEGM has an archive of them:)

And I have to take into account that this is a nuanced subject in the medical field despite popular insistence that gender affirmation is the only new normal, and there exist doctors who are warning about the ethics of current HRT and how it happens in practice versus how its being reported on, such as in the evidence review I posted up there as well as this one:

But TL;DR my thoughts are that this study is a step in the right direction towards accurately representing this population. It does have some flaws like other studies that beg the question. It doesn't change the fact that gender isn't real

The fact that we're calling our distress at the persistence of sexism "gender," the fact that "fixing" what society baselessly tells you to offers mental relief to some young people...is that even right? Like should we even be doing that? None of what's in that study makes me believe that it's okay for this to be happening to them in the first place, that we should have to be developing medical treatment to sex stereotypes that basically no one actually fits into, "cis" or "trans." Now that this system is in place, treatment for it is "necessary," but teenagers shouldn't be suicidal because a social construct is telling them their anatomy is "mismatched" or "wrong." You are your body, all your systems are connected.

If there were no gender - and it wasn't that long ago that that was the world, John Money used it first in 1955 - there would be no need for HRT. So I will always be disillusioned with the fact that this is where we are now.

I'm more concerned with the source of this pain than with the bandaid we're trying to put over it.

[jeanmoreaux]

idk where the original post is but it was buried in a longer post abt aftg canon and op was (basically) like “this will hurt people but neil isnt canonically demi bc the word isnt in the books and nora only said it in the ec so people can interpret neil’s sexuality” and like…that made a lot of the ace part of the fandom (very rightfully) mad and so yeah

(as an ace elder of this fandom i am…exhausted)

i've been in this fandom since like 2014/15 and this discourse really feels like it's coming out of nowhere (more so then past discourse). i haven't seen the og post and i don't wanna go search for it because by god i have much better stuff to do with my time but this sounds just weird to me. and a little concerning because didn't you all have literature classes???? like canon is what's in the text but not everything that is canon has to be explicitly spelled out?? i mean what kind of logic is "the word wasn't used so it's not canon" ?? half of discourse comprehension is inference. when are things always 100% spelled out??? just because you infer information does not make it not canon?

i mean if we take that logic to a ridiculous extreme rico wasn't murdered by ichirou because the text never explicitly mentions the word murder to refer to the act of ichirou putting a bullet through rico's head. it only says “Ichirou put the gun to Riko's temple and pulled the trigger without hesitation.” and some other stuff but never murder/murdered/murderer. i mean everyone with half a brain cell will still infer the information that what ichirou did is murder. you read between the lines and realize this act falls under the definition of murder. so obviously it's murder. so rico was canonically murdered by ichirou.

if something is naturally inferred by the reader based on the textual evidence they are presented it's canon even if a certain word is not used directly. if the definition of a word fits what is described, the word fits. like for example in the six of crows duology the word "bisexual" is never used to describe jesper or nina yet the text makes it clear that both these characters are attracted to more than one gender?? so are they not bisexual because the text doesn't explicitly say so even though this word may be used to accurately describe these characters' sexual identity? i think that as long as the textual evidence that falls under the definition of bisexuality is there, their bisexuality is canon. so is their pansexuality if you want to employ that definition. what is NOT canon is these characters' straightness because there is textual evidence that directly contradicts this claim.

same with neil. there is textual evidence that supports a canon reading of neil as demisexual and no textual evidence that directly contradicts this interpretation. so it's canon. if you have the textual evidence to support whatever claim about neil that you want to make without there being contradictions: congrats, it's canon!

what's in the text is canon. and if the text reflects a pattern that can be directly summarised in an another word then that's canon too. this also makes it possible for canons to co-exists if several definitions fit. you all need to be aware of the relativity of canon.

[haloud]

michael guerin loves alex manes

So there’s been a narrative within the fandom ever since the s1 hiatus that Michael hasn’t been shown to love Alex like Alex loves him, that Michael never does anything for Alex, that Michael never makes himself available. I couldn’t disagree more. So here’s a list from season 1.

Michael:

Has a picture of them together and keeps it in a special box along with pictures of his family and has for 10 years

Kisses him at the reunion (after asking if Alex wants him to leave and giving him a chance to say no to the kiss.)

Gives him massive puppy eyes across a crowded bar after Isobel asks him if there’s anyone he would sacrifice everything for, which Alex sees, acknowledges with a lingering glance, then deliberately looks away.

“For me, nothing’s changed” “I never look away, not really”

Kisses him again

Literally everything about their scene in bed in 1x03, from the way he says “you stayed” to the way his mouth opens under Alex’s thumb to the reverent way he touches his leg

Wants his sister to know he and Alex are together but honors Alex’s refusal even though he’s hurt by it

Says he’d hate Max for sending Alex away in a direct comparison to Max’s fury at him and Isobel sending Liz away (aka saying he loves Alex the same way Max loves Liz)

At prom, he breaks up Alex’s fight with Kyle and, eyes only for Alex, tenderly asks if he’s okay

Opens up to Alex about how music makes him feel—the only person Michael ever seems to open up to about this part of himself

Kisses him in the UFO Emporium

“[I’ve never done this] with anyone I’ve liked as much as I like you”

Bodily defends Alex from a hammer-wielding Jesse and ends up permanently (or whatever -_-) injured from it

Tries to approach Alex in the bar in 1x09 after Alex hasn’t spoken to him for almost two months with no explanation. Tries a second time to talk to him/get him to open up until Alex shuts him down.

He says yes when Alex says Michael loved him for a long time

“We just connected like something—” “Cosmic.”

Opens up to Alex about his profoundly abusive childhood. Alex is the first person Michael is shown to trust with this part of himself in present day.

As soon as knowing about aliens doesn’t send Alex running screaming, Michael shows him his lab and everything he’s been working on even though an episode ago he was telling Liz not to touch it with Isobel’s life on the line.

“If anyone’s going to destroy me, it might as well be you.”

“Alex was the first person to make me feel like there was a place for me here.”

Loves Alex so much he leaves the mother he’s been searching for his entire life instead of staying to die beside her because Alex wouldn’t leave him otherwise.

“I love him, I probably always will.” <- the only time either of them has used love in the present tense about the other

So yeah, that’s a substantial but probably not comprehensive list of the ways Michael loves Alex and expresses it. Michael is not always nice; he’s mean when he gets defensive, and he gets defensive a lot. But throughout season 1 he also regularly puts himself out there for Alex while still respecting his space whenever Alex asks for it (which happens at least three times that I can think of—after the reunion, until Alex comes to him at the end of 1x02; after the drive in all the way until 1x09; and after the bar in 1x09 until, again, Alex changes his mind).

I’d also like to address a specific criticism I’ve seen about Michael’s feelings for Alex. No, Michael doesn’t bring up Alex to other people; but Alex specifically says he doesn’t want Isobel to know about them in 1x03 and never expresses a change of heart with regards to that. Michael talking about his relationship with Alex would be against his wishes and, frankly, really out of line and a denial of Alex’s agency. He’s not perfectly gracious about it, but it’s something that hurts him. He wants their relationship to be known, and Alex doesn’t until much, much later. As for Michael not defending Alex verbally…at what point does Alex require that verbal defense? No one ever talks bad about Alex to Michael! The only times Michael is there when Alex is under attack are at prom—and Michael intervenes—and in the shed—and Michael throws himself at Jesse screaming “don’t touch him.” Asking that Michael give the same verbal defense of Alex as Alex does for him is such a false equivalency, because their circumstances aren’t the same. It’s like saying “well if Alex really loved Michael he would tell someone that he’d hate them if they made Michael leave him.”

In season 2, Michael is pushing everyone away. He feels poisoned by hope, and explicitly, Alex represents hope in better things to Michael. Michael absolutely pushes Alex away in season 2. He’s not particularly kind about it. Especially in 2x02. But in 2x01 when he says that he doesn’t think they’re good for each other, he includes his own fault in that--he admits that he thinks he hasn’t been good for Alex either. And furthermore, the thing he says that people hate? “All our years of this, I’ve never said no to you. You come and you go and I go where you put me. This is me saying no.” Is also Michael admitting his own fault. It’s not an entirely accurate statement--we know of one instance and I think we can safely infer others where Michael said no with his actions if not his words--but it is him acknowledging that his own passivity in their relationship was half the problem and him setting a boundary to break that cycle. 

I think most malex fans were dissatisfied in various ways by season 2, and I think that inconsistencies and skewed priorities in the writing damaged the arcs and characterizations of just about every character, michael and alex very much included. But I think it’s disingenuous not to accept that the show wants us to believe, and therefore will proceed with this dynamic at the base, that both michael and alex contributed equally to the ways their relationship fell apart and hurt the other. With both of them having such a long history of trauma, with both of them having so few examples of healthy relationships to draw on in their lives, it’s not surprising things went like they did.

We end the season on can we both stop keeping score. I think fandom should take a hint from that. This list isn’t meant to be Michael’s scorecard, but merely a refutation of the idea that Michael’s love for Alex is an informed attribute. The idea that Michael hasn’t been shown to love Alex so deeply that it’s a part of who he is…that the foundation hasn’t been laid…it isn’t supported by canon. He loves him a lot. He loves him to distraction, to the point of agony, to the point of peace. Even after everything in season 2, he drops everything and makes a bomb that he thinks could wipe out his species to save Alex. Michael Guerin loves Alex Manes.

But that doesn’t mean that you as a fan have to keep shipping them. Even if they’re what got you into the show. Even if you think they’re going to be endgame. Even if you think they’re the only way you’re going to get eyes on your fanwork. If you hate half the ship, I encourage you to find a ship that makes you happier instead of subjecting yourself to a character you can’t stand. Also, if you’re going to write vent fic about how insufferable you find a certain character and how much you want them to Pay for their Crimes, it’s polite to tag it thusly.

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-lie-about-everything/

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

Which Came First: Republican Hate Or Gop Misinformation

Do Honest Republicans Still Exist?

Hate is a great motivator. All political parties have used it to get out the vote. Generally, those who seek elected office shape information in a way that helps a certain voting block hate their opponent. Thats how we elect people in America. That is a sad reality we just have to accept in order to fix it. Hope doesnt fix it.

Whats unique and new about negative politics in the post-Obama era is that we have this thing called the Internet and dare I acknowledge itSocial Media. ;Social media has completely isolated the Republican Party base. The Internet and social media have created hard-edged, isolated buckets of information where facts dont matteragreement;and emotion matter. For republicans, agreement with their own bias is considered fact, whereas disagreement is a lie they literally transform reality to support their own opinion: the Post-Truth Era. In order to maintain that alternate reality, they have to hate those who dont agree, otherwise their reality bubble starts to break apart.

This is the case on both sides of the aisle, but the hardliners have taken it to a new level, which is why they seem to hate everything. Theyre even taught to hate things that help them like the ACA, unions, and public education.

Social media and 1000 cable channels dont increase the information we receive they focus the information and repeat it 1000 times more often. Anything can become the truth when its repeated enough times.

The Big Lie Is Gop Gospel

Cheney is not alone in suffering consequences for challenging Trumps allegations.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the states counting process against Trumps attempts to interfere with it, was stripped of his voting power on the State Election Board as part of Georgias new voting restrictions law.

In a special House election in Texas held on in early May, the Trump-critical Republican in the race Michael Wood got 3 percent of the vote.

In January, Michigan Republicans removed Aaron van Langevelde, a GOP attorney who broke with the party to certify Bidens victory in Michigan, from his post on the states Board of State Canvassers.

At the Utah Republican Partys convention this weekend, Sen. Mitt Romney perhaps the GOPs leading Trump critic was booed and called a traitor.

At the same time, Republicans who have embraced falsehoods about the election have been elevated.

Rep. Elise Stefanik , who appears likely to replace Cheney in the No. 3 spot, backed Trumps anti-election efforts to the hilt. Most egregiously, she falsely asserted that there were 140,000 illegal votes in Georgias Fulton County alone which would amount to more than 25 percent of all the votes in the entire Democratic-leaning county. The breakout Republican stars in the House of Representatives, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert , both egged on the January Stop the Steal rally that culminated in the attack on Capitol Hill.

Why Do Conservatives Soak Up Lies

The evidence that conservatives crave lies is abundant.

Conservatives loved George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s lies about “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” — loved them so much, that the researchers who wrote “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification” surveyed 49 conservative Republicans, during October 2004, who admitted that they still believed Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks, and these researchers found that 48 of those 49 extreme conservatives were entirely impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence that was provided to them by the presenters contradicting this false belief they held. Then, a showed that when Republicans were offered the official 2004 Duelfer report that had concluded Iraq hadn’t possessed any weapons of mass destruction for years before the United States invaded it in 2003, the percentage of Republicans who believed that Iraq did have WMD immediately prior to the invasion shot up, instead of going down . Even all of the exposés that had already been published about Bush’s faked WMD “proofs” didn’t persuade Republican voters that they’d simply been deceived by the people they trusted and supported. They didn’t resent it at all; they just asked for more, from those same discredited liars.

So: why do conservatives sop up lies, on topic after topic?

They do it because, if they didn’t, they couldn’t be themselves; they couldn’t be conservatives. Lie-lovers is whom they are. It’s their identity.

———-

Don’t Miss: Have Democrats Tried To Impeach Every Republican President

The Gop Elite Gave Us This Party

This dire outcome was not inevitable: The best evidence we have suggests that the rise of the Big Lie is the direct result of strategic choices by Republican leaders.

A new paper by Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes data from a panel survey, which looks at roughly the same group of people over time, running between 2007 and 2020. The survey asked people to rate the fairness of the US electoral system on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracked the changes over time.

What they found was a striking consistency: Support for the American system is both high and reasonably stable when assessed via this measure, Hopkins writes. Though there are some fluctuations, with partisans evaluating the system as somewhat less fair when the other party is in power, generally theyre small.

Hopkinss last survey wave was in October 2020 which means the results dont reflect the false allegations lobbed in the aftermath of Bidens victory. The stability documented here was very likely shattered by Trumps post-election actions, Hopkins concludes.

Other data confirm this supposition. A report from the Voter Study Group analyzed Pew surveys, conducted after every presidential election since 2004, on whether voters thought their vote was counted fairly. You see the same general stability documented in Hopkinss paper, with a majority of voters in both parties saying they were very confident their vote was counted accurately in every year except 2020:

Republicans Have A Good Reason Not To Want To Investigate Jan 6: Theyre To Blame

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Our nations preeminent bipartisanship fetishistsJoe Manchin, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowskiare deeply disappointed that they cant get Republicans to back an investigation into the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Indeed, they seem outright baffled that their efforts at compromise have fallen short on plans for a bipartisan panel. There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for, Manchin said in an angry statement on Twitter. It would be so much better if we had an independent outside commission, Collins, a moderate Republican, told reporters Thursday. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another? added Murkowski, blasting Mitch McConnells anticipated filibuster. Or are we going to acknowledge that as a country that is based on these principles of democracy that we hold so dear, and one of those is that we have free and fair elections.

I kind of want that to endure beyond just one election cycle, the Alaska moderate Republican told reporters.

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More Great Stories FromVanity Fair

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Really Say Republicans Are Stupid

In 2009 Republicans Predicted That The Economic Stimulus Package Would Only Make The Recession Worse And Cause More Unemployment

The results show they couldn’t have been more wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ended the recession after only a few months. Although 750,000 people were losing their jobs each month when Obama took office, after the Recovery Act was passed the rate of job loss immediately decreased each month and within a year the economy showed positive job growth.

Considering the severity of the 2008 economic collapse and the total opposition by Republicans to do anything at all to stimulate the economy, it is remarkable that the US economy recovered as quickly as it did.

Looking at the rate of job loss and job creation, its easy to see that the stimulus of 2009 was highly successful in stopping the job losses and turning the economy around.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Don’t Miss: Who Is Behind Republicans For The Rule Of Law

Republicans Said President Obama Would Raise Taxes Sky High

It never happened. Income taxes for over 95% of Americans remained the same or lower than they were before Obama was elected. The only people whose income taxes increased were those who make more than $400,000 per year, and their taxes rose only 3%. For most Americans, taxes are still lower now than they were under Reagan.

In 1993 When The Brady Law And The Assault Weapons Ban Were Passed Republicans Predicted Increasing Rates Of Crime And Murder

Republicans Are Lying To Themselves About Trump’s Toxicity

Thankfully, just the opposite happened. While the rate of violent crime had increased steadily from the 1970s into the 1990s, it suddenly began to drop after 1993 and continued to decline for more than ten years. What could have happened in 1993 to precipitate such a sudden and prolonged drop in crime? Thats the year Congress passed the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Law, which mandated background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Despite Republican predictions to the contrary, the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban were followed by the most dramatic reduction in violent crime since the FBI started keeping statistics. The graphs below, based on the actual numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports website, show how the rates of murder and violent crime in the US dropped suddenly after the 1993 Brady Law and Assault Weapons Ban were passed.

These charts show the rate of murder and violent crime over 35 years based on numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime reports.

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In The Senate

Here Are A Few More Things Republicans Have Been Wrong About:

Republicans said that Obamacare would have death panels to decide who would live and who would die. Wrong. No such death panels were ever proposed and nothing of the kind ever happened.

They said the 2009 laws to improve automobile fuel efficiency standards would kill the US auto industry. Wrong. The new standards were followed by a resurgence of the US auto industry enabling them to hire back tens of thousands of workers.

They said environmental protection laws requiring companies to clean up their pollution would create an undue burden and kill businesses. Nope, it never happened.

They said Ebola would spread across the country because President Obama allowed American Ebola patients to be treated in the US. The outbreak never happened. Only three people contracted Ebola in the US and all three survived.

They said President Obama would open our borders to illegal immigrants. Wow, were they wrong about that. Under Obama, we set new records for most illegal immigrants stopped at the border and sent home.

They said Obama would drive up the Federal budget deficit. That didn’t happen. Obama cut the $1.4 trillion deficit he inherited by two-thirds.

While someone could no doubt find instances where Democrats engage in over-the-top rhetoric, nothing compares to the consistently false and erroneous claims made by the GOP in recent years. When a political party has been so dismally wrong about nearly everything over the past 30 years, that party should lose all credibility.

‘nothing There’: More Republicans Are Calling Out Trump’s Election Lies

WASHINGTON The more we learn about Donald Trumps baseless, false and discredited claims about the 2020 election, the more baseless, false and discredited those claims have become.

Just consider the revelations over the past week from Republicans:

In Michigan, a GOP-led investigation by its state Senate concluded that it found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigans prosecution of the 2020 election.

Regarding Arizona, a report co-authored by former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson criticized the so-called audit of the election results in that state, saying it does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit, and that its being conducted by an inexperienced, unqualified contractor.

And over the weekend, ABCs Jon Karl writing for the Atlantic had former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr debunking Trumps claims about the 2020 election results. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there, Barr said. It was all bullsh!#.

Predictably, Trump lashed out at those GOP findings.

Michigan State Senators Mike Shirkey and Ed McBroom are doing everything possible to stop Voter Audits in order to hide the truth about November 3rd, the former president said in a statement, which even included those state senators phone numbers.

Even Bill Barr doesnt buy them.

Read Also: Who Won The House Republicans Or Democrats

Get Ready For Another Possible Crisis Like 2020

This is not the first time that Republicans have declared a Democratic president somehow illegitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton on flimsy grounds, after previously accusing him of crimes ranging up to murder; there was a widespread campaign to label Barack Obama an unlawful foreign-born president . These campaigns were effective: A 2019 poll found that 56 percent of Republicans still believed that Obama was born in Kenya.

Nor is this the first time Republican elites have ginned up suspicion of voter fraud for political purposes. After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when its exceptionally rare.

These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trumps innovation claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent was pushing on an open door.

Paying Lower Taxes Hurts Taxpayers

Less revenue means fewer handouts. Thats bad news for Democrats who lie obsessively year after year about how tax revenue never gets the job done in distressed communities because we still arent spending enough.

Why is it that even when the party is in power, when Democrats call the shots every single year like they do in Illinois, the poor stay right where they are most valuable in poverty?

Recommended Reading: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

Times Republicans Were Wrong

It’s no secret that politicians tend to use exaggerated political rhetoric to get people to vote for them. In recent decades, Republicans have repeatedly made very ominous predictions about the horrors that will result from Democratic policies while painting a rosy picture of what will result from Republican policies. Now we have the luxury of looking back over the years to examine those predictions and policies. Below, you will find twenty-one examples of times Republicans were blatantly wrong.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no stand down order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

You May Like: What 7 Republicans Voted To Impeach

Truth Matters Which Is Why I’m Telling It

I take comfort in knowing that I am doing the moral thing by telling the truth to my constituents.;I also;happen to believe;telling the truth;about;the 2020 election;is good politically.

If Republicans;become the party of the Big;Lie if we encourage this madness much longer we;will lose credibility with;the majority of;Americans on issues where I believe we have better ideas.;We will do;lasting damage to our republic.

True Republicans would never dream of wasting taxpayer money to hire an unknown cybersecurity firm with no elections auditing experience to audit an election that has;already been audited.;This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans would not;stand idly by while auditors paid with taxpayer dollars;chased;insane rumors that ballots were flown in from South Korea to change the outcome of the presidential race, or;that;secret watermarks;on the ballots;revealed by UV lights;would;expose fraud;once and for all.

This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

Lies Damned Lies And The Truth About Joe Biden

Saagar Enjeti: Media Lets Biden SHAMELESSLY LIE About Hunter Bidens Business Dealings

Joe BidenKentucky state lawmakers vote to scrap school mask mandate Arkansas governor pushes back against Biden’s vaccine mandate RNC vows to sue over Biden vaccine, testing mandate MORE. I know him, said the House Speaker authoritatively, and that was that.

Does Bidens record warrant such confidence? Not really. In fact, Biden has a long history of lying about himself, about his past and about events that never took place.

Democrats want the 2020 campaign to be a referendum on President Trump. Fine, but if this is to be a contest of characters, it is only appropriate that Joe Bidens history of fabrication and deceit often intended to bolster his intellectual credentials also be fair game.

Over the past year, Biden thundered that the Obama administration didnt lock people up in cages. He also claimed that, Immediately, the moment started, I came out against it. And I was always labeled one of the most liberal members of Congress. Politicos rating of all three assertions? False.

No one should be surprised. Lest we forget

A video is making the rounds in which Biden boasts at a 1987 rally, “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship ended up in the top half of my class.”

Biden also maintained that he “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school” and was the outstanding student in the political science department.

That commentary holds up well, as today more than ever Biden blunders into conversational crevasses, with no way out.

Also Check: Who Created Social Security Democrats Or Republicans

[mitigatedchaos]

Review: SAC_2045

(~3,700 words, 15 minutes)

This post will contain some minor spoilers for SAC_2045.

Summary: You may have thought SAC_2045 was a poor entry in the Ghost in the Shell franchise - actually, it's just intended for younger audiences.

Previously: Standalone Complex 202045:1-4 (superseded)

-☆☆☆-

And what did you think of the remaining episodes of GitS:SAC_2045?

[ @irradiate-space​ ]

Standalone Complex

There's a certain indescribable feeling associated with Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex as a work, an artistic touch related to the director associated with it, independent of other considerations. SAC_2045 has it, which isn't too surprising since Kenji Kamiyama is back.

SAC_2045 is Standalone Complex. For a brief moment, while watching it, I inhabited my pre-2016 personality and outlook. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Since the arrival of streaming I've tended to bingewatch series, but on the first run-through I decided not to bingewatch this one.

If you approach this show as season 4 of Standalone Complex (Solid State Society being season 3), it's underwhelming. Now, viewing it again, it's become obvious that a conventional season 4 of Standalone Complex was never the intent of SAC_2045 to begin with.

For those of you who have delayed until now, the English dub has been uploaded - it released without one due to the pandemic. They bring back a number of the voice actors from the excellent Standalone Complex dub, though having already watched it with subtitles, I didn't feel the need to confirm the dub's quality.

Sustainable War

To properly describe a new theory of war is the same thing as to invent it. While the idea of war as a for-profit industry has been kicked around for some time, it's generally assumed that this is a kind of parasitic relationship on the part of the war-making industry.

As time goes on, warfare becomes more abstract (partly because warfare happens where it can happen), much like society itself is becoming more abstract as information moves more quickly and humanity gains access to more energy.[1] In SAC_2045, "Sustainable War" is part of the context of the world and its current issues, but we aren't really told how it works - if it's similar to contemporary information warfare and a blurring of the lines between state and non-state actors, it's bound to be quite confusing.

I believe my earlier assessment of "Sustainable War" is correct. The key feature of sustainable war, the reason they say it's safe if you leave it to the experts, is likely that it involves AIs constantly forecasting against each other and moving units around with few direct confrontations. The goal would be to lock in a victory without having to fire a shot, except for small skirmishes that don't escalate to major incidents (due to the AI forecasting).

The presence of armed separatist movements even in Japan may also indicate that the ruling institutional bodies are engaged in a kind of Post-International Politics,[2] which treats all international relations as fundamentally existing between subnational entities - however, I believe that later information suggests this wasn't their original intent.

What makes it "sustainable"? Since if done correctly, very little is actually physically destroyed, the cost is less than conventional warfare, and thus the war can continue indefinitely. Why does it threaten humanity with destruction? Because there's an awful lot of military hardware waiting for someone to actually pull the trigger.

Season 1: Ep. 2

So what is the intent of the series' creators? I think they may be telling us through this dialogue between Togusa and Section Chief Daisuke Aramaki in episode 2.

Aramaki: Seems time has toughened you up. Togusa: Is that supposed to be a compliment? Aramaki: It is if you want it to be. Togusa: Then thanks for the kind words. “I made the right decision by choosing this line of work over my marriage.” That’s what you’re saying? Aramaki: Perhaps. [...] Togusa: They're bringing back Section 9? [...] Aramaki: But my takeaway from the proposal is this: The PM's reason for the urgent reforming of Section 9 takes priority over his personal motives. I believe his true objective is meeting the Americans' demands for the dispatch of special resources. Togusa: So it's as the Liberals feared? An American-born Prime Minister would be no more than an American puppet? Aramaki: I've yet to meet him in person, so I can't really say. But this is an opportunity to have the Major and the rest of you undertake a major operation for me once more. Togusa: What sort of op? Aramaki: Over the past few years, I have searched for an answer on how to deal with a society in turmoil. I'd like you people to lay the groundwork that will help the next generation find that answer. Togusa: I don't know what a man in my position can contribute, but I'll humbly offer whatever assistance I can.

Those of us who cried, Kamiyama, tell us the future once more! based on Standalone Complex's prophetic analysis of a memetic crime wave were bound to be disappointed. SAC_2045 is less rooted in the near future than in the now - cyberbullying, endless war amidst historic prosperity, employment suppressed by automation, savings eaten up by the complex machinations of finance, and a breakdown of national borders? That's today.

Those of us who hoped for a Ghost in the Shell: Unicorn, a psychically overpowering work that synthesizes the full body of Ghost in the Shell into a single coherent form to elevate us to a higher level of understanding, should have tempered our expectations. To reach each new philosophical level is more difficult than the last - to achieve that with Ghost in the Shell of all things would have required a multidisciplinary genius near the limits of current understanding.

Kenji Kamiyama is just an anime director. And anyhow, Gundam Unicorn was a book before it was an animated series. And who among us even knew we'd have to write a book before 2015? Ghost in the Shell was well-understood enough, so I instead wrote 25,000 words worth of hypothetical country and became a blogger, like the infamous Scott Alexander.[3]

If we approach SAC_2045 from the lens that it's a humbler work designed for younger audiences, however, some of the creative decisions make more sense.

Purin

Just how old is Purin, the MIT grad who joins the team later on? If I had to guess, that's '23歳' on that profile she provides, and Ishikawa notes that she 'skipped a few grades' on her way to a PhD. But she acts like someone a lot younger. She's enthusiastic and we're assured she's intelligent, but seems to be lacking social training. For example, she makes the mistake of assembling an era-accurate music player for Batou combined with a playlist after consulting the Tachikomas to find out what he listens to. There are two ways to take this.

The first is that she's intended as a relateable character for someone who would make this class of mistake. It's the sort of mistake I might have made at age 13-14, meaning that the show would probably be aimed at someone that age or lower. Overly enthusiastic, doesn't understand romantic relationships, impulsive, poor reading of boundaries / poor modelling of others outside of certain domains, impulsive in a way that causes social screw-ups? Yeah that could certainly apply to an ADHD kid of about that age.

And all of a sudden the tone of the first five episodes with the gun-fighting, the literal Agent Smith, the decision to place the focus in America, and even the mystery of the series being much simpler than Standalone Complex 2nd Gig's plot regarding Asian refugees in Japan make a lot more sense. This is Ghost in the Shell for kids!

Wow, I didn't think that could be done!

...is what I should say, except that around the time I acquired the ability to futurist shitpost, and I used that ability to predict that it would.

Purin II

The second reading is that the youth of the future are fucked up. She probably has some tricked out modifications, both cybernetic and genetic. Now usually you would tell someone to try to become a well-rounded human being. But...

The global economy has crashed. Batou mistakes her for a robot - creatures that look like pretty young women are a dime a dozen. In the dating market, she would be competing with full sensory immersion VR pornography on the one hand, and at the upper end of society where cybernetics are more widely available, likely women with a similar appearance but decades more experience and professional standing.

Note that in the original Standalone Complex, the team take down an 80-year-old Russian spy with the full prosthetic body of a 20-year-old. Full cyborgs aren't common then, nor are they in SAC_2045 (though cyberbrains are ubiquitous), but if the economy recovers that may change, and the sector she's trying to get in to (full-time salaried government rather than marginal private employment it would seem) is going to be very tough to enter either way.

So Purin may have to be over-optimized even to just appear on the screen. In fact, she says,

"Just so I could work at Section 9, I moved most of my sentimental memories to external storage."

Youch! It's no wonder she's socially maladjusted. Just how much of her social learning (in particular key events necessary to rebuild logical inferences on the boundaries of behavior on the fly) has she locked away?

Purin III

But you know who Purin looks like? Notorious internet personality, Gamer Girl Bath Water seller, and IRL video game character Belle Delphine.[4]

Or rather, it's the other way around - 2D animation compresses real detail into suggestive abstraction, letting your mind fill in the rest. Going from those impossible 2D shapes to 3 dimensions creates strange results, like training your machine learning algorithm on the salient features of a cat's face, applying it to human shape, and putting pink hair on the result. Belle Delphine adopts that otherworldly kind of appearance as part of her act.

Technically, this a stylistic choice. Within the framework of SAC_2045, this is what "a 23-year-old female" looks like.

Purin is in fact so non-threatening that her big red coat obscures her figure. I'm gonna go with younger audience. Now if only I could remember what pronoun she uses.[5/☆]

Motoko

With a full prosthetic body, outward signs of human-like aging are almost an artistic expression, much like in a world with cheap tissue engineering, visible scars are a choice.

When she was first introduced in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, we don't know how old Motoko Kusanagi is. It was once said that her name is analogous to "Jane Excalibur," which in English would be an obvious alias. In the first movie (from 1995), she's cool, almost cold and robotic.

In the original Standalone Complex, Motoko has a more mature personality than in the manga, but she has a clearly adult look by the standards of anime. Seriously, check out this fantastic character design (combat suit), although admittedly the better-known "leather jacket and bathing suit" design is more ridiculous, fashion-wise.[6] (Fortunately, she gets pants in her much more stylish second season outfit.)

ARISE starts off with a young Motoko Kusanagi in a chaotic post-war period before the Section 9 we know was assembled. This shows in her character design, but it really shows in her personality. This was actually why I had joked about an even earlier Ghost in the Shell.

There is a sense in which the 2017 live-action movie's Motoko is even younger. Scarlett Johansson is a killer cyborg with amnesia. She doesn't even have one day of formal combat training.

Motoko 2045

Ilya Kuvshinov designed SAC_2045's Motoko Kusanagi.

Yes, that Ilya Kuvshinov. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a teenager that hardboiled assassins Saitou and Ishikawa in the background have been hired to bodyguard.

Despite this, Atsuko Tanaka has resumed her role as Motoko's voice actress. Standalone Complex's Motoko looked 25 and felt mid-30s. SAC_2045's Motoko looks 16 and has the voice and attitude of 40.

This may make more sense than you might think.

Through Whose Eyes?

Throughout much of Ghost in the Shell as a franchise, Togusa, the only non-cyborg on the team, who is pulled from a police department instead of a military background, tends to be character used to help the people of our time relate to the future. He's the guy that doesn't know the things we also don't know, so in explaining concepts to Togusa they're explained to the audience.

In SAC_2045, most of the team are off doing cool cyborg things in America. Aramaki (whose in-world function is to create the bureaucratic environment within which Section 9 operates) tasks Togusa with finding them. The original Standalone Complex first aired in 2003. It's been 17 years since it was created - a similar situation to finding someone that reached adulthood who was born after 9/11. And during this time, Togusa's life has changed - the family man is now separated from his wife. And the world has changed - Togusa is now working for a private security firm. Togusa's role in the first five episodes isn't to guide the new viewers.

His purpose is to guide or stand-in for the old viewers.

The New Viewers

"Do you still hold a grudge against the Major and the others for leaving you behind?"

For the original viewers, SAC_2045 is your world, too. Togusa is there. Togusa is you.

The new viewers are Purin. Enthusiastic and smart but awkward and not confident in their skills. How could they measure up to these much more talented and experienced characters? (Also consider who is going to watch any sort of Ghost in the Shell - it's probably going to be a moderately bright and introverted kid, who is the kind of person that may be more comfortable socializing with people outside of their age band.)

But Motoko is visually separated from the rest of Section 9. Batou, Saitou, Ishikawa, Boma... they all have a much more adult look in keeping with their appearance in previous versions of Ghost in the Shell. What gives?

Batou is sort of a cool adult male figure - this is actually a pretty natural use of the character and his sense of humor as previously established in other Ghost in the Shell properties. We especially see this come through in 「PIE IN THE SKY - First Bank Robbery」 episode, with the old folks and the 21st century bank robbery.

Motoko's difference in appearance is because she's acting as a bridge between the two. The new viewer (as represented by Purin) is supposed to grow into being like Motoko as they gain confidence and experience. (The characters aren't each limited to a single role, of course.)

But SAC_2045 is still a work that's shared between two groups, similar to how the excellent Into the Spiderverse features both the teenage Miles Morales and an older Peter Parker that has lost his way, with the loss of the vibrant young adult Peter Parker being what starts the plot going.

The Last Quarter

With this framework, the rest of the work should express its nature as targeted at a younger audience itself. Watch the last few episodes through this lens and you'll see how much sense it makes. One takes place at a school. Even the bizarre 3D style that resembles recent video games makes more sense. If we take Togusa's earlier conversation with Aramaki as a discussion of SAC_2045 itself, later on there's even a sort of acknowledgement that Ghost in the Shell is a difficult work for someone of a young age.

So with that context in mind, does it work?

Standalone Complex

If I remember correctly, years ago, when I was perhaps 15 or 16, I was watching a tiny CRT television some time after midnight, and I saw the thirteenth episode of the original Standalone Complex - NOT EQUAL. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I was immediately taken by it. And, from what I remember, I immediately understood it.

It was as though it were made just for me.[7]

To me, Ghost in the Shell is like a textbook. I thought that as a creator who has reached a place where I am able to be involved in that kind of work, I'm in a position where I have to convey its contents to a younger audience. Well, I knew it would be a lot of work, but I figured it would be my way of giving back to Ghost in the Shell. I thought that I needed to accept the baton and offer Ghost in the Shell to a young audience, to the same degree that Ghost in the Shell raised me to be who I am.

- Tow Ubukata, in a 2015 interview, regarding ARISE

For many people, Ghost in the Shell is a profound influence. I felt that it lifted me to a new level of understanding.

SAC_2045

But what about SAC_2045?

I can't view Ghost in the Shell with new eyes. When I first saw it, I wasn't the kind of person that casually memes futuristic ethical dilemmas as a means of practicing politics.

Compared to the anime I watched back when I was 13, would I have watched SAC_2045? Yes. Is it more philosophically and politically sophisticated? Yes. Would I have found it memorable? I think so.

Would a 13-year these days watch it? That's difficult to assess. I bet someone who does data science for Netflix could tell us, if they wanted. I'm sure Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki are considering the same thing.

2017

How does it stack up compared to the rest of the franchise?

For most enthusiasts it's going to be one of the weaker entries, though it certainly does a better job explaining itself than ARISE.

Compare it to 2017's live action movie, however, and I think we'll find it isn't the weakest. The reason is that the writers of Ghost in the Shell (2017) decided to tell a story about bodily consent in which becoming a cyborg is a form of trauma. On some level this may have been a reasonable decision, but they didn't commit to the concept sufficiently fully to execute it well enough to carry the movie - and simultaneously, they dumbed down parts of the regular Ghost in the Shell material for American audiences. As a result the movie flopped both financially and artistically - except for the visuals.

In fact, I wrote a sequence of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) on how to rewrite the live action movie as an actual Ghost in the Shell property. I feel no need to do so for SAC_2045 - and I can't even think of what changes would need to be made.

I look forward to the second season.

-☆☆☆-

[1] It's short, but that's a concept in this post. "Advanced by Left-Wing theorists, Ninth Generation warfare sees all acts as existing on a spectrum of political violence. Most acts of ninth generation warfare consist of extreme pranks."

[2] If we accept the idea of "Fifth-Generation Warfare" as motivated by a desire to prevent the enemy from using their conventional military assets, then a corresponding theory of international politics would involve preventing enemy factions within foreign governments from taking control of those governments' institutions - effectively treating all countries as in continuous level of conflict analogous to a soft civil war.

[3] There is a kind of technique to this, but in my case I substituted ADHD for raw IQ and conscientiousness, which is part of why my posts are so much shorter than, for instance, Moldbug's. In any case, technically, Scott's blog posts on the matter amount to roughly a mere 11,600 words, and the book of the black forest amounts to approximately 26,000 words (which I'm told is entertaining reading), but I'm sure if we go looking we can find an additional 15,000 words worth of worldbuilding from a man known for writing 16,000 word blog posts.

[4] Would it be more of a legal liability to sell regular water with GGBW branding, or actual GGBW that could prove to be a potential health hazard?

[5/☆] There's some future strand lurking beneath the surface here that I can't quite put into words; a culturally divergent moe meltdown where an appearance this ridiculous becomes normalized among some sub-population. To quote the Funko Pop Hatred post,

There are questions about the anatomy of anime people and their internal organs, and particularly about what sort of impact-dampening alien meta-material their softer bits are made out of, but at least homo sapiens gokuensis looks like it’s a branch off a similar starting hominid! Whatever transhuman engineering company was responsible for manufacturing the creatures in the typical harem anime has some weird ideas about human beings, but we’re clearly in their ancient lineage somewhere.

Under Late Safetyism, everyone is a declawed catgirl.

Anyhow, I don't want to alarm you, but I can't guarantee that this won't be the future somewhere. Both Purin and Belle Delphine resemble Xiaoice, "The AI Girlfriend Seducing China's Lonely Men." (2020)

[6] Motoko's ridiculous outfits are a major flex on the non-cyborgs, who aren't indifferent to ambient temperature and whose natural bodies may have unflattering features. Similarly wild fashions can exist in places like Second Life, a 3D digital platform with mostly user-uploaded content. Presumably they're also a flex on every Japanese salaryman who still has to dress like a normal guy.

[7] "It's as though it were made just for me" is also how I feel about the original game Mirror's Edge. Its follow-up, Catalyst, is also a personal favorite of mine.

[creeping-shadow-heralds-storms]

Potential harms

People share all kinds of personal information on Instagram, such as mental health, physical health, traumatic events, pregnancy, loss, infertility, becoming new parents, and getting married. Social media companies’ access to such sensitive information is a concern, for how the companies could exploit the information and the risk of third-party access to the data.

Instagram can use computational techniques to infer people’s affective states—their emotions and moods—based on many signals available to the platform. These include what content users view and post. There is substantial evidence that emotions and affective states play a key role in advertising. While capitalizing on emotions and emotional personal experiences for profit is not unique to social media or algorithms, the data-driven, opaque, and hyper-personalized approaches boost the scale of potential harm.

Presumably, what people see in Instagram’s Shop is personalized based on what the platform’s recommendation algorithm determines they would like and be inclined to purchase. How does the inferred socioeconomic, gender, age, race, and other attributes shape what the platform recommends to users in the Shop tab? What shops get to be recommended and visible? Instagram users can be as young as 13, the age required to open an account. How does personalization work for children? How does this feature affect the experience of individuals with low socioeconomic status? What principles and values is the platform adhering to in designing these recommendation algorithms, Staff Picks, and other means of presenting products?

A major consideration is when people get recommendations to purchase items during vulnerable moments. Sharing or seeking information about a difficult, personal experience on a social media platform and then having the platform capitalize on an algorithmic understanding of the experience—which might or might not be accurate—is problematic.

What are the implications for impulsive buyers who may turn to Instagram as a space for community and peer support to resist impulsive purchasing, but who are instead confronted with things to purchase and have no way of opting out? How about for someone who is on the platform to find support while coping with a substance use disorder, but instead encounters recommendations to purchase items related to drinking? What happens if a person posting about experiences with pregnancy loss begins seeing ads for baby clothes? This last scenario has happened.

In recent and upcoming studies, I observed that, to varying degrees, people find social media platforms capitalizing on their personal, intimate experiences—especially those associated with negative emotions—manipulative and harmful. Social media platform designers and decision-makers should consider ways to address potential harms preemptively rather than retroactively.

The Instagram blog post announcing the Shop feature states that there are marketers and influencers on the platform and young people who want to purchase the same products their favorite creators use. This might be a need for some Instagram users, but not all. If Instagram is determined to emphasize shopping, and if opting in is not possible, I believe the company should allow users to opt out of the Shop feature.

[irispublishersengineeringscience]

Iris Publishers - Global Journal of Engineering Sciences (GJES)

Some Thoughts on Reliability of Diagnoses by Human Versus by Machine

Authored   by   Ildikó Ziegler

Opinion

Not long ago the Comment by Tessa S Cook [1] appeared in Digital Health following the informative article Xiaoxuan Liu & colleagues [2]. The question of whether deep learning is more reliable/ accurate than human health-care professionals in detecting diseases from medical imaging was in the focus of the papers.

The Comment [1] added much to the discussion since the author listed several factors those influence the accuracy of diagnosis made by A.I. or a human.

The actual discussion speaks about diagnoses based on medical imaging techniques [1,2]. I believe the consideration of these factors can be continued by estimating the tendencies of these factors in the long run and actually, it may bring some inspiring thoughts, not only in connection with medical imaging, but in general, regarding the learning capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Theoretically the following error types could be identified (see e.g. [3,4]):

• Deviation occurring due to the lack of expert consensus.

• False positive diagnoses

• False negative diagnoses

• Other accidental errors

• Other systematic errors

We may make an estimation about the tendency of these errors in time one by one based on the statistical nature of these types of errors (see e.g. [5,6]). Supposing that the capacity of A.I. to handle data and to conduct repetitive calculations/ decisions is always kept greater than the capacity requirements of actual tasks, that means no technical limitation of processing the growing data set occur in time during the development of A.I.

Moreover, a single person, theoretically, cannot grow her/ his knowledge in an unlimited manner, partly, because we, humans, forget things, partly, because other circumstances, e.g. sickness or death may prevent us from continuing our learning process. However, the human being as a society also can be considered as a continuous learner group and as such the achievable total knowledge of human kind seems to be unlimited.

Based on the assumptions above, let’s take a look at the mentioned influencing factors one by one:

Systematic errors, others the mentioned in the earlier groups are the characteristics of the given A.I., and the way it functions. It cannot change during the learning process, however it may step wise decrease if it is detected and more or less handled, for instance by upgrading the software, developing the algorithm, etc. In case of a given A.I. it is constant during the learning process, but it will decrease during the development of A.I. technology over time.

Accidental errors (others than the mentioned in the earlier groups) are characterized by Gaussian distribution [3-6]. It means that with the elapsed time the standard deviation characterizing of the learning process of a given A.I. will decrease during the learning period.

False negative and false positive results mean that the decision about the diagnosis is not true.

In those cases when results (diagnoses) are not independent from each other - and e.g. biostatistics or clinical decisions are this kind – the deviations are characterized by Bayesian distribution [7,8]. The situation with this type of error is similar to the previous one: as the number of items in the data set on which the learning is based increases, the probability of the error decreases. With the elapsed time the A.I. is still expected to improve its effectiveness in the long run.

The most complex problem is to estimate the tendency of those diagnoses which medical doctors and specialist have different opinions without consensus. It has to be taken into account that a human solves problems in a different way compared to A.I. Deep learning is based on a super computer programmed with sophisticated algorithms, thus, it always uses linear deductions based on large dataset and mathematical logic, while we, humans tend to use our creative, associative thinking as well as checking the associative ideas based on professional rational. It is mainly expressed – as T. Cook [1] also pointed out – by striving for a holistic approach: “medical practitioners begin with the history of the present illness, the review of systems”.

The use of creative thinking may shorten the time requirement of problem solving and also make serendipitous results possible. As long most studies take the approach of evaluating diagnostic accuracy in isolation without reflecting to clinical practice, development of the accuracy cannot be expected. Conversely, if diagnoses are combined with subsequent experience in the underlying data set, and this data set contains a sufficiently large number of cases, deep learning may provide a better approach to issues that have previously aroused professional debate.

At this point, A.I. may start to make more accurate diagnoses than human health-care professionals. This approach may be true until some rare disease appears for which there is little experience. In this case, however, the human professionals are also quite likely to misdiagnose, without owning the basis for comparison. It seems the theoretical approach led to the opposite conclusion than Liu et al [2], but it is not the case.

The reason lies in the fact that our theoretical estimate was made long-term, assuming a large amount of initial data and ample storage capacity. However, the size of the currently available dataset is not close to the desired size, for instance, in the present case [1] it meant 25 studies. Consequently, nor did we achieve the reliably large amount of data from which artificial intelligence could statistically infer uncertainty in case of lack of expert consensus.

At the present state of the art, deep learning functions as a kind of secondary measurement method that is calibrated to human experience, as “primary method”. As such, a secondary “measurement method” cannot be more accurate than the primary “measurement method” for which it was calibrated.

The commentator [1] also mentions that deep learning acts as a black box: one cannot see the algorithm’s decision-making mechanism, “it still cannot tell us why the end result is produced”. It is suspected that the everyday practice of the medical profession and the science of programming are so far apart from each other that the intensive team work of good communication, as usual with medical devices, will result in sufficiently reliable futuristic technologies.

Just as the driver does not see how the fuel burns in the cylinder head under the piston, but he believes in the service of car mechanic when his car is deemed suitable, the medical professional will not have a chance to look into the details of the algorithm. It is necessary to trust the multi disciplinary development team who validates the machine learning system they have developed.

It is also interesting to consider Moore’s and Kynder’s laws. Moor’s law [9,10] is an experimental law stating hat the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years / 18 months. According to Kynder’s law [10,11] the density / capability of hard drive storage media would double every 18 months. It will be interesting to see in the long run if the size of the data set used for machine learning – analogously to the afore mentioned laws – will follow an exponential curve as a result of technological advances. I am voting in favor.

To read more about this article  https://irispublishers.com/gjes/fulltext/some-thoughts-on-reliability-of-diagnoses-by-human-versus-by-machine.ID.000611.php

Indexing List of Iris Publishers: https://medium.com/@irispublishers/what-is-the-indexing-list-of-iris-publishers-4ace353e4eee

Iris publishers google scholar citations: https://scholar.google.co.in/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=irispublishers&btnG=

[jinsai-ish]

I have very long, complex dreams as anyone who's read my journal before knows. I dream in novels/full-fledged series. (I also have a lot of dreams staring a transgender character.)

So, background information first.  It was AU-Gundamverse, only without any actual Gundams.  The colonies in this functioned more like planets in, say, Star Trek or Firefly, in that they are each run by independent governments only loosely united through a ‘federation’ of sorts.  Some colonies are tied very closely, others barely if at all.

 

L2 in this case is a fringe colony with little to no Federation-influence.  It has a strict caste system in place, with a rich elite class at the top and casteless ‘untouchables’ at the very bottom (street people basically).  The casteless are barely considered people, have pretty much no rights, can be used as slaves by the elites, aren’t allowed to hold legal jobs, enter certain areas, etc.   (Think DragonAge casteless dwarves.)  Right below the elite caste is the military, which is also pretty much the only way someone can advance their caste.  Any caste can enlist in the military, except casteless of course.

 

(The Federation maintains trade relations with L2 despite not agreeing morally with their whole thing.  People from the Federation can travel and do business but must abide by the rules of the colony.  This ties in later.)

 

Okay, back to the military.  This isn’t like a modern military set-up but more like SPARTA.  Children can be enlisted as young as 10 and as late as 13, and some begin training at home even younger.  Enlistees attend a central academy for five years where they live, study, and train until they ‘graduate’ as full-fledged soldiers, anywhere between age 15-18.  Training is very strict and regimented, but the majority of low-middle caste families have children enlisted because again, it’s like the only way to advance.  The military is controlled by the elite caste, but not many elites enroll.  Those that do are highly respected, however.  Within the military, things are pretty much egalitarian/achievement-based.  Males and females train together and have the same standards, although they do have separate sleeping and showing quarters.  During their time at the academy, trainees are forbidden to leave except for being released to their family at holidays, and only then if the family requests it.  Post-graduation, all soldiers are enrolled for life or until injured past ability to serve.  They serve as police force, quash rebellion, and have the potential to combat wars in the colony’s defense, although it’s been a generation or two since that’s been necessary. 

 

The reward?  Status, pay, and basically the ability to do anything you want to anyone lower than an elite.  In fact, at the Academy, there is a ‘Game Room’ staffed with lower caste ‘employees’, open for use by both trainers, soldiers, and trainees in good standing.  Think light stuff like food and entertainment, but also things like gambling, porn, and prostitution. 

 

Okay, so character stuff.  Duo starts out more or less the same: an orphan on the streets of L2.  This means he’s casteless.  Solo cares for him, before dying of the plague.  Duo survives and is taken in by the Maxwell Orphanage, which is run by volunteers from the Federation to care for casteless children.  This is border-line following the colony’s rules so while it’s allowed by L2, they don’t have support from the Federation government.  This means that when rebels shelter there, and the military destroys the orphanage, the Federation can’t really do anything except pass some pretty ineffective sanctions.  Same as the original, Duo survives.  He’s caught at the ruins, having stolen military weapons (his canon) to get the rebels to leave, and when the military attempts to capture them, he attacks them and does pretty damn well for a kid.  The commander grabs Duo and notes that the kid has no fear of death and no computation about killing and decides on a whim to make Duo his new pet project. 

 

The commander is also an elite and concerned to be a little eccentric but brilliant and effective, and he’s able to use his influence to get his way.  There’s no actual LAW about casteless not being allowed to enlist, just custom.  He overrides everyone’s protests and forcibly enlists Duo in the academy.  Duo HATES it and tries to get away numerous times but is well and stuck.  He’s also brilliant at it, so despite all protests, he continues as head of his class for years. 

 

So, some complicated stuff in the mix here.  When the commander – we’ll call him Commander G… He’s not G, but maybe like his son (but, you know, handsome)?  When Commander G gets Duo back to the academy and scrubbed up clean (they let him keep his hair… it’s anime military, all in uniform but crazy hair everywhere), it turns out Duo is a GIRL.  More accurately, Duo is biologically female but has never identified ‘herself’ as such, which Solo, Sister Helen, and Father Maxwell were always very accepting about, so ‘she’ hasn’t really had to deal with too much.  Despite the caste system, L2 is pretty loose about homosexuality and gender equality.  So, actual gender identity isn’t a huge deal in society, but it obviously for Duo, who at age 10/11 is suddenly bunked up with a bunch of women and not able to quite put his finger on why he feels so uncomfortable with that.  ‘She’ also hasn’t hit puberty yet (childhood malnutrition + the extensive training at the Academy = delayed puberty and a lot of female trainees never getting their period), so dysmorphia hasn’t quite become a thing yet.  In addition, at the start, the casteless thing is a bigger deal.  Despite the military being pretty much egalitarian, a lot of that develops the longer trainees are together, plus casteless is not just low, but pretty much untouchable.  Like, no one wants to sit near Duo, or be on ‘her’ team for assignment, she has to bunk on her own way over in a corner, etc. 

 

Eventually, this starts to improve a little.  Duo still passionately hates being forced into the military that slaughtered ‘her’ family but knows the skills will be useful and is basically just biding ‘her’ time.  But like I said, Duo is brilliant when it comes to training.  ‘She’ still keeps to herself mostly but eventually a group of other trainees take Duo with them to the Game room, half as a joke on the misfit.  Duo eventually becomes sexually active and Does Not Like.  To clarify – Duo is bisexual and capable of enjoying sexual activity but at this point is starting to develop so the body dysmorphia is coming into play.  He starts to become more aware that his body doesn’t match his identity and starts to have issues with this that affect his training.  THIS grabs Commander G’s attention who’s been keeping a distant eye on his little pet project.  Duo obviously doesn’t trust anyone and isn’t about to talk about it, so Commander G pretty much gets to the bottom of it by raping Duo (not considered rape in L2 because remember, Duo is casteless and still effectively has no rights). 

 

Next?  Now that Commander G knows the issue, he solves it.  He gets Duo top surgery and moves him to the male dorm.  Easy-peasy if you’re an elite and have endless wealth, resources, and rights.  He also basically promises to cover Duo’s full conversion so long as he behaves until graduation – ie. no more attempts to run away.  This leaves Duo basically beholden to the man he hates the most in the world. 

 

Fast-forward to Duo’s last year at the academy.  He’s one of only a dozen students selected for an elite class, who after graduation will be L2’s version of special forces.  This is also the first-time piloting is involved, because the special forces gets all the aircraft.  Duo gets thrown into the pilot seat kinda accidentally in training and ROCKS.  He’s already excelled at stealth, hacking, assassination, infiltration, etc.  Piloting he’s better than his instructors and Commander G is super creepy proud.  He’s become a little obsessed as one may notice, as in his mind, Duo is a resource that he’s taken and developed into a very useful, deadly tool.  This is also the first time Duo actually starts to bond a bit with his other trainees.  They don’t quite become friends but the closest thing to it at this point.  This whole time though, he’s contriving a plan to escape on graduation day, knowing at that point security will be the lowest.  He gets his surgery along with a creepy speech from Commander G about how he’s been a successful gamble.   Graduation day, he hightails it out, knowing everyone is going to be occupied until it’s too late. 

 

Of course, he’s still stuck on L2 and pretty much aware at this point Commander G at least is going to be after him. 

 

Remember that bit about others being able to travel to L2?  Well, the circus has arrived!  Trowa’s circus in fact, which has travelled from L3.  The dream didn’t get too much into detail about backstory, but Quatre is with them and it’s kinda inferred the Winner Corp is funding the circus.  It’s also inferred that although the circus is real enough, Quatre and Trowa are also working together to travel around the Federation incognito to help people and look out for potential issues, which L2 is FULL of.  Duo runs into them and is prepping himself to get turned in and is shocked when they instead agree to help him (Trowa a bit more reluctantly/suspiciously than Quatre).

 

The dream pretty much ended with them helping to smuggle Duo off-planet using the circus as cover.  The rest was kind of like to “next time on such-and-such” preview.  We see Duo piloting a ship with Trowa and Quatre behind him, implying that he’s teamed up with them.  Heero is seen working on another ship with the implication they’ll be meeting up soon, and there’s the briefest glimpse of Wufei.  Back on L2, we see Commander G steaming and gathering the special forces graduates from Duo’s class who he ‘betrayed’ to go after him.  There’s some arguing about it between G and the L2 government which kind of foreshadows a military coup and the L2 military possibly declaring war against the Federation for ‘interference’. 

And then I woke up, lol!

[bbq-hawks-wings]

Chapter 263 Discussion

Hello, it is I back from my cave to finally get back into fandom discussion.

Sadly, I don't have too much to offer this time around except speculation, and most of it is dependent on assumptions and observations of the Heroes Rising movie, so if you haven't seen it this is unfortunately your stop, but when you do eventually see it go on ahead and send me an ask geeking out about it because almost everyone I've heard agrees if nothing else that it was hype and worth the price of admission!

All right, warning and disclaimer out of the way, let me lay the groundwork for how this post will go.

1. If you didn't know, the plot for Heroes Rising is a scrapped concept for the end of the series. Because it was scrapped it can't really be used to accurately predict how Horikoshi actually intends to end the story, but finding common plot lines and elements from what we're seeing now in the manga to the events in the movie might give us a clue to which lines he dropped and which he decided to keep. In the end it's a hunch, but it's a more informed guess than not having the clues.

2. I believe we're in the end stages of the story - or at least what is the beginning of the story in the same way Naruto was a precursor to Naruto Shippuden. Because of that, I don't feel like trying to predict things very far ahead and prefer to try to stick to interpretations of what's immediately going on since I feel we’ll get our answers fairly quickly anyway. I've made some lofty ideas of where the series is going before, but those are really better as overarching themes and end points for certain characters than necessarily an accurate prediction of events.

With that, let's jump into it.

The MLA/PLF is a front for the LOV

So to start, something I really wanted to address in the last chapter was the last page:

A lot of people are amazed Hawks seemed to go so deep into their ranks without ever raising suspicion, but I think this clarified, if not confirmed, a couple of points I've been hanging onto for a while.

The LOV never cared about these folks - that much has kind of been obvious from the get-go. They just threw themselves at Shiguraki as the second coming of Christ and offered him a free army. "...I mean, twist my arm, why don'tcha?" There were enough commonalities between the groups to seem like an obvious fit, but the League has always had different plans. Now, not only do they have a disposable army to fight the heroes and die for them but were a perfect opportunity to throw off the heroes to their main objective and draw out all the heroes at once in a fight to the death - all without practically lifting a finger. Shiguraki is a strategist, and a resource not utilized to the best of its potential is wasted even if using it well uses it up completely. These aren't their people, and they signed up for this fight to begin with. It would have made less sense to not effectively double-cross them like this.

I haven't been looking much for discussion regarding the movie, but a notable thing that immediately stood out to me when I saw it was the fact that Shiguraki was individually watching Hawks, and Hawks specifically - all alone and seemingly completely unprompted. A particularly overpowered aspect of Twice's quirk is the fact his doubles are SO close to the same thing they're in every way, down to the way they think and their core motivations, that they’re indistinguishable from the real thing, even to the original and doubles themselves. They really are perfect stand-ins for the actual people they copy. It's 100% possible that real Shiguraki could be powering up under the doctor's care, and - because he's not an idiot to leave himself completely vulnerable and out of control when he doesn't need to be - literally be running the show through a double, behind the scenes, in secret the entire time without the Heroes' or the MLA/PLF's knowledge. This also means that him personally spying on Hawks while he thinks Shiguraki has been out of commission is completely plausible as well.

These two frames have been circulating for good reason. While the army and organization honest-to-god have no idea what's going on, the OG League members seem to be taking it more like a stage cue - particularly with Dabi's obvious movement against the flow of the crowd rushing to battle. This very much feels like something they've planned for; but only them and their squad. They’re known to hold grudges against those that use them and abuse/hurt their core members, but none of that protective attitude has been directed towards this larger organization/movement.

"So what's got you so convinced about parallels to the movie? That's the only one you've brought up."

This was the first thing that stood out to me this chapter as I was reading through it fresh. In the climax of the movie each member of class 1-A had to strategically use their abilities to survive against Nine and his band. One of the abilities they had to counter was calling lightning down from the sky to which they used Kaminari as a lightning rod. Though it was played up for laughs a bit in the movie, it was still very much a life-saving tactic in the moment, and the concept clearly carried over into the final product.

A point of speculation we’ll be able to verify soon is a hunch I have that Tokoyami and Toga will clash one-on-one seeing as he’s also in the front-runner group. Slice very much felt like an easy stand-in for Toga, given the knowledge that those events are modified from the original ending concept, and it was thanks to Tokoyami losing control of Dark Shadow that he was able to beat her in the end. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks, and if it proves right I’ll be pulling more common threads to see if we can’t anticipate what’s going to happen next.

So, yup!

That's it!

Nothing left to see or talk about until next week!

*sigh........*

Ok.

Let's go over what we know for sure:

That’s clearly intent to kill in Hawks’ eyes: a lot of fans are aware of the practice of falconry, which is basically the same thing as a hunting dog but with a trained bird of prey instead; and it’s the image hammered into our heads about the way the Commission has treated Hawks and the way he personally deals with threats. Hawks considers Twice the single, greatest tool the League has in their belt - able to exponentially create duplicates and reinforcements which would turn a strategy-based battle into one of attrition, and the heroes would lose the latter easily. He clearly hasn’t killed Twice yet, and we don’t know why, but if he has to he’s prepared to do so without hesitation or remorse. This is a fight the Heroes CANNOT lose.

Hawks is done: This is more inference, but bear in mind he’s been on this case long before the Commission told him to infiltrate the League. He’s been at this in some capacity for almost a year and neck deep in recon as an undercover agent for months. He’s been walking on eggshells, keeping his eyes and ears open, relaying information, keeping up appearances on both sides, and watching the threat grow from a surprisingly capable group of guerrilla terrorists into an army capable of bringing all of Japan to its knees in a matter of days, tops. The stakes are too high, personally and otherwise, to not take this threat seriously.

This is Twice’s POV: Literally everything he thought he knew about this guy he considered his friend has been turned upside down. That whiteboard that was a catalyst for their friendship is thrown aside (symbolically along with all the memories and time they spent together), and here Jin is: knocked on his back, no longer looking into the friendly gaze of a great guy out to help a friend, but the murderous glare of a wild animal - a monster, even - having no idea how he got to this point and how fast it’s unraveling before his eyes. What we’re watching now could have happened in literally under two seconds. Hawks is that fast, and he’s been waiting for this to happen.

Considering the sudden tonal whiplash their relationship has just gone through - and the fact that it’s framed through Twice’s perspective, not Hawks’ - I don’t think we can make too many solid predictions about what’s going to happen right now. Hawks has been shown to be unpredictable to anyone but himself. When we’re not hearing his own internal monologue or seeing things directly from his point of view, everything we “learn” about him from a scene has to be taken with a grain of salt. He’s guarded, private, and keeps others at arms length so he can anticipate and respond to get the results he wants. It’s not just his fighting style, it’s his survival mechanism.

Twice himself is a grab bag of surprises, and being the heart of the League may yet find a way to appeal to his humanity, question his motives/actions, or any number of ways to bring him down to earth again; but there’s an equal opportunity that Hawks is beyond that at this point. His mission is almost done, and if he wavers now he could literally end up dead in a heartbeat. There are a lot of feathers trained on Twice, but not enough to bring his wings all the way down to stubs like we saw with High End. He’s set to fight not just Twice, but everyone in that compound.

In other words, this might be the point we finally see Hawks truly go apeshit, and I don’t think it’ll be a pretty sight to see. We’ll just have to wait and see where this leads from here.

[thinkersplayground]

It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species’… It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable. —Charles Darwin, letter to Johnathan Hooker (December 24th, 1856)

One of the ideas that still misdirects thinking in much of the world is Creationism: That life and all of its diversity came into being through a supernatural act of God, rather than through natural forces that are gradually developing over time.

Despite an ever-growing amount of evidence, creationists, under the guise of Intelligent Design, still try to oppose the natural origins of life with specious argumentation.

Although nearly every culture had creation myths, the Judaeo-Christian story that God created the Universe from nothing in seven days has thrived for almost three thousand years, and is undoubtably the most prevalent creation myth.

The concept of distinct groups of living things is tacitly baked into Judaeo-Christian belief. God created plants, animals, then humans on different days; The entire sub-order of snakes (Serpentes) was cursed by God to crawl on its belly for deceiving Eve; Humans are considered to be distinctly different from animals, and were granted dominion over them; and didn’t God instruct Noah to take two of every kind on his Ark to preserve them (species is Latin for kind)?

Western philosophy has also played a key role in shaping how we perceive and organise various categories of living things, with Plato and Aristotle being the most notable contributors. Plato’s introduction of Universal Forms claimed that there are ideal forms of each thing, and that all of the real things we see on Earth are merely copies of them. In other words, somewhere outside of space and time, there exists a perfect blueprint for a dog, and your pet dog is an imperfect attempt to copy this perfect dog. This claim presupposes the existence of a particular thing called “dog” that has always existed and will always exist, cementing the species dog for eternity.

Aristotle was, in many ways, a more sensible philosopher than his predecessor Plato. He laid many of the foundations for modern science, including the idea that the Universe is made up of continual and causally connected series of events—everything is part of a single continuous process. However, in an effort to better understand the world, Aristotle named and categorised every living thing around him—which again, enforced the notion of separate and distinct categories of living things.

One doesn’t have to be an ancient philosopher to conclude that there are separate and distinct groups of living creatures. When we look around, we see that butterflies are different from bees, and dogs are different from dandelions. And for most of our history, people would only come into contact with a handful of the different forms of life that we now know of.

It should be fairly uncontroversial then to claim that our personal experience, our shared belief systems, and the roots of our cultural philosophies have all trained us to perceive the natural world as being separated into different and distinct groups of living things.

On the Origin of Species

Until about two hundred years ago, this way of thinking remained essentially unchallenged, but started to shift when a group of scientific thinkers known as “naturalists” began to recognise and speculate over the dynamics of evolution. Most notably, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species presented an alternative view of life in which the diversity we see gradually emerged over an immense amount of time, and that all species probably shared a single common ancestor.

I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype… Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Around the same time, fossils of extinct species were beginning to be discovered and studied, and the science of palaeontology emerged. Our increasing understanding of the historical fossil record, and advancements in genetics and microbiology have all tested and validated the essence of Darwin’s ideas.

Still, recent Gallup Polls show that over 40% of people in the USA believe that God created all life on Earth in its present form.

“Intelligent Design”

Religious opposition to the view that life’s origins are natural tends to centre around deliberately misleading claims. Proponents of Intelligent Design (creationism disguised as science) can often be caught misrepresenting scientific ideas in the hope that their audience is not able to recognise the flaws in their arguments.

One of the most common arguments against a natural origin of life, which intelligent designists like to make, is to claim that:

Evolution can only occur within a species, and cannot create new species.

In other words, dogs can be domesticated from wolves, but breeding dogs could never create something that is not a dog. New species, it is presumed, can only be created in the mind of the Creator.

The problem with this argument is that it’s based on a somewhat false premise, and one that was created by biologists.

The problem with species

Many biologists have struggled with providing clear rules for defining what makes a species distinct from another. When scrutinised, the rules for separating the different types of living things all seem to have problems with them. There isn’t even an agreement on the number of different definitions of species, let alone an agreement on a definition (some consider there to be seven main definitions, some twenty-six, some thirty, and so on). This is known as The Species Problem.

This is not a new problem. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote:

Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the term species. No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.

To provide just a few examples of species definitions: The Phenetic Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that look significantly similar to each other. The Recognition Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that will recognise each other as mates. And the Genealogical Species Concept defines a species by how genetically similar organisms are to each other in comparison to other groups

But the definition that has become the most popular, is what is known as the Biological Species Concept, which describes a species as the largest group that can potentially breed with each other, and share in a gene pool.

No term is more difficult to define than “species,” and on no point are zoologists more divided than as to what should be understood by this word. —H. A. Nicholson

Proponents of Intelligent Design use this Biological Species Concept to argue that natural selection can not explain the diversity of life, since a species can, by definition, only interbreed within its own gene pool, and will only produce offspring that are also of their same species. And so, organisms are perpetually trapped to share genetic information only within the confines of their species. In technical terms, they allow for microevolution (which is irrefutable), but not macroevolution (which may challenge deeply held religious beliefs).

But the slow and gradual process of small changes producing new species (which they deny) can be seen in action in a phenomenon known as ring species—populations that can share a gene pool with a more distant population through an intermediary population.

For example, suppose population A and population B are similar enough to interbreed. And population B and population C are similar enough to interbreed. But A and C are geographically separated, and A is too genetically distant from C to interbreed. In such cases, A and B could be considered the same species, and B and C the same species, but A and C are, by our definition, distinct species.

There are numerous examples of ring species in nature, sometimes with many compatible intermediary populations, but two or more that are incompatible at the extremes. This can be thought of as a geographical example of what has probably taken place over time, for hundreds of millions of years—just replace the geographical barrier separating the different populations for a time barrier instead.

It should be apparent then, that even our best working definition of species cannot accurately model the reality of the diversity found in nature.

The glaring problem with the creationist argument about species is that species don’t really exist��at least not in the way that they would like them to. Rather, they are a construct created by humans to help us make sense of the world.

The concept of a species is a concession to our linguistic habits and neurological mechanisms. —John B. S. Haldane

Often in nature, things change gradually, slowly, and by degree. It’s only when enough changes in degree have taken place that we perceive them to be a difference in kind. In reality, the natural world is a near-infinite collection of individual entities that are more or less related to each other by degree.

To help us organise and make sense of the infinite diversity found in nature, we have to create some system that allows us to identify and describe the differences and similarities that exist at every level of life, and biologists have done well with this Herculean task. But these groupings will always be arbitrary, or suitable for certain purposes but not for others.

The claim that evolution can only occur within a species, and can never lead to new species, can be demonstrated false by recognising that there isn’t such a thing as species to begin with. The bold lines and distinct categories between different groups of species that creationists would like there to be, simply do not exist.

[tanadrin]

Of Things Remembered

“Wake up.”

The scene around me swam and reformed itself as the young man opened his eyes. The generic room was replaced by a modest stone cell. A little table appeared in the corner, where one dim candle flickered, casting a dim light over a couple of books and some parchment. An evening chill swept in from the narrow window that appeared, and outside I could see the stars, undimmed by any city lights or orbitals. I switched over to the full baseline human sense-simulation, and inhaled slowly. The evening air was fragrant and damp, like a rainstorm had just passed. Through the door I could hear voices far down the hall, rising and falling together, perhaps in prayer.

"Everything is fine, but you need to wake up.” He seemed to be more alert now; his eyes were searching about the room; he was confused, but calm. When his gaze finally came to rest on me, he looked me up and down for a long time before he said anything. I glanced down at myself to make sure my appearance wasn’t too unusual. I fit into the room, now: I was dressed in plain homespun cloth, with simple leather slippers, and my hair hung loosely around my ears.

“Are you all right?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think so. I must have been… sleeping very deeply. Dreaming about something. But I can’t remember what.”

“The deepest of sleep. And I’m sorry to wake you from a well-deserved rest, but we needed to have a conversation. I’m Nolla.”

“Will,” he said. “The brothers call me Long Will, on account of my height.” He turned one ear toward the door. “Shouldn’t we be at matins?”

“Don’t worry about that for the moment,” I said. “We have more important matters to attend to.”

Skipping prayers didn’t seem to sit well with him, but he didn’t object. He sat up and looked at me more closely. I turned to the little table and picked up his candle, holding it my lap so he could see better.

“I don’t think I know you,” he said. “Are you one of the novices?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just a friend. A guide. I’m here to help you through a difficult transition.”

Will furrowed his brow. “What sort of transition?”

“We’ll get to that. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Yesterday, I was…” His voice trailed off. “Funny. I don’t remember what I was doing yesterday. Or the day before that.”

“What do you remember?”

“That I should be at matins. That the abbot gets quite cross with lazy brothers. I spend most of my time when I’m not at prayer copying the books, and helping Brother Stephen in the kitchen. But I’m looking forward to summer. It does me good to spend some time outdoors, helping with the planting. I… I’m sorry, I’m feeling a bit foggy.”

“You’ve been asleep for a very long time. It’s quite natural. I just want to make sure you’re feeling all right.”

“Are you a doctor? Have I been ill?”

“In a manner of speaking. Tell me about specific events you remember. Start with your life just before you came to the monastery.”

“Well, I’m from the village originally. My parents suggested the religious life, and it always felt right to me. I remember leaving home, coming to live here as a novice. I remember being nervous, meeting the abbot for the first time. Learning to read and write. I remember… I remember the time Brother Laurence and I got lost in the woods, and we were terribly worried, and tired and hungry, but Brother Hugh found us. We laughed about it later, how stupid we had been. It feels like it was a long time ago, but for the life of me I can’t say when. I suppose it could have been just yesterday.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “All these things were.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“More than ten thousand years,” I said gently.

Will smiled, then laughed. “Oh, you’re very funny.”

I shook my head. “I’m quite serious.”

“Yes, long enough for everything in the world to pass away and to start over from the beginning, so it’s exactly as I left it.”

“It isn’t, Will,” I said. “This, everything you see around you, is an illusion for your benefit.”

I let the simulation flicker, just for a second; I didn’t want to scare him, but I wanted to show him I wasn’t lying. For just a moment the walls and the table and the bed under him disappeared, and the dark hills and the stars and the moon beyond were visible where the cell had been; and then they were back, as solid as they had been before. Will’s face went deadly serious.

“Is this heaven or hell, then?” he said.

“Neither. You’re not dead. Not anymore. You don’t have to be afraid; nothing’s going to hurt you or cause you pain. I’m sorry for the deception, but we wanted you to wake up in a place that would be somewhat familiar to you, to make sure you felt at ease.”

Will ran his hands over the blanket, and the wall beside his bed; he rubbed his fingertips together, staring at them intently.

“All this feels very real,” he said.

“The mind is a powerful thing,” I said. “Yours is in a kind of in-between state right now. A place where we can take your memories and the sensations you know and show them to you in great detail. And where our illusion might be imperfect or incorrect, your mind will supply the little details and corrections needed to make it feel solid and consistent. But please believe me: we have no malice in our hearts. All this is for your benefit.”

“I believe you,” Will said. “Or I would like to, which maybe amounts to the same thing.”

I smiled and nodded. “Very good. Then we have overcome our first hurdle.”

“What… what has happened to me?”

I took a deep breath. “Will Long of Hythe, in Kent. You were born sometime in the late thirteenth century A.D., you died of natural causes, an old and well-respected man, abbot of this monastery, in 1334. You spent your life as a monk, serving God and your community, and because of your reputation and your position, you were remembered long enough for your name to enter the local histories, along with a few lines of your biography. You took to poetry later in life, and composed several hymns, and a few fables based on local legend. Most of the manuscripts that contained copies of your work were lost in the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, but twelve manuscript folio, on which you were named as the author of the verses contained therein, were discovered deep in a London archive almost six hundred years later. These were the basis of an influential study of your life and work, about half solid historical investigation and about half clever speculation, by a PhD candidate--a doctor of philosophy in training, that is--in 2135. We used that study as the starting point for bringing you back.”

“You said I wasn’t dead.”

“You are speaking to me now. You hear me speak to you. You are sensing, thinking, feeling. Yes, you are not dead.”

“But I died. Long, long ago.”

“Yes. You did.”

“And you brought me back? That’s not possible.”

“Debatable,” I said. “By which I mean, we do debate it. Some would say, you are not Will Long. Will Long ceased to be when his heart stopped beating and his eyes were closed and he was laid to rest beneath the earth; and you are a new person, with the same name, and many of the same memories and thoughts and feelings. And some would say, it is the pattern that makes a man who he is. That just as if you take a tapestry and pick it apart into individual threads, if you weave it back together again, is not the same image? What if you replace one thread? One hundred threads? One thousand? And there are others who grant that while you may not have to use the same threads, if you make any error at all in the weaving-together, it is a different image. To which I say, does it matter, if it looks the same to the observer?”

Will closed his eyes and rubbed his head. “You’re talking in riddles. I need specifics. What did you do? How did you make this? Make… me?”

I leaned back in my chair. “I will try to explain this as succinctly and accurately as I can, but your language lacks many of the words I need, because your world lacked many of the things we used, and the words to describe them. But our methods are all the methods of the natural world, all the methods of good and honest philosophy, all knowable to a man like you if he has enough learning.

“There are methods of mathematics, like the algebra of the east, but much more sophisticated, by which one can infer missing quantities among vast collections of information. Some of these are very precise; some of these cannot produce precise knowledge, but only approximate knowledge--yet often that approximate knowledge can, by successive application of different methods, be narrowed to a very small range. As though,” and I gestured now at the books on the table, “you open a manuscript to find one word blotted out; yet if it is short, and begins ‘th-’ you know it is ‘the’ or ‘thee’ or ‘thou,’ and not ‘through’ or ‘thorough.’ Or as though a line is missing from a piece of poetry; and while two other copies agree on what the missing line is, a third disagrees--but you judge the two that agree are more likely to be correct.

“And these mathematics are so complicated and so difficult that a whole city of human calculators might work for centuries and accomplish but a small piece of a modest puzzle to which they are applied. But in the many centuries after your death, we have developed tools to aid us. First, they were based on the same principles which drive clockwork, like more sophisticated clocks capable of performing arithmetic quickly, by the means of levers and gears. The same machines, using the same principles, were made more sophisticated and swifter in their operation over time--and eventually we stopped using clockwork, and started using other physical principles to operate them. But the underlying logic of their design was the same. Though they appeared as though they could perform wondrous feats that had nothing to do with mere mathematics, mere mathematics was the foundational principle of their operation; and they could accomplish no wonder that could not in some sense be reduced to a question of numbers and the operations of numbers.”

“I am afraid I don’t know much about mathematics,” Will said. “All this sounds quite fanciful to me.”

“Then let us speak of words--for it was another insight of later days that mathematics is not so different from language, and the philosophers of those days used one word to unite the two, the word ‘information.’ The theory of information was found to be a useful tool for examining the natural world, just as you might use your eyes or your ears, or, in dark places, search instead with your hands. And using the tools provided by the theory of information, we came to believe our ability to recover things that were lost now extended to the memories and feelings and thoughts of those who had long been dead. Especially those who had left some testimony of themselves behind. And we hoped, maybe--perhaps an arrogant hope, I admit--that by the application of these techniques to recover lost lives, we might from the shape of those lost lives then discern the shapes of other lives, previously invisible to us, and recover those as well--and so on and so forth. And that therefore we might hope one day to return to life all those who had ever lived and died, to rescue them from their long sleep.”

Will laughed. “Are you so impatient for the day of judgement?”

I smiled. “Nothing like that, I assure you. We don’t judge, Will. We don’t condemn. We don’t pick and choose, either. We intend to resurrect the good and the bad alike. The deserving and the undeserving. Those great and those petty, those high-minded and those mean. Our labor, which we grant might never be completed, is not to play God, and to ensure each man receives his deserved fate, but only to redeem. Without preference or favor. There is only one restriction we place on ourselves.

“And what’s that?”

“We don’t bring back people who, according to our reconstruction, would prefer not to exist. There are some who suffered greatly before their death, whose suffering can be amended, whose hearts can be made whole. But there are some who, we know, prefer to sleep. We study them, to understand them, but we do not bring them unwilling back into the world. That would be a great cruelty. We create--or recreate--no life which would, we think, prefer not to exist. And for those about whom we are uncertain, we bring them back only long enough to ask them. Which is why you are here.”

Will looked surprised at this. “If you have such power over life and death, why not make everyone want to live?”

“Because then they wouldn’t be themselves.”

“But you don’t know that they’re themselves. You don’t even know for sure that you’re not just… writing new books. Writing new stories, weaving new tapestries, that have nothing to do with the old ones. If your machines are wrong, if your philosophy in error, perhaps you are only raising up new ghosts who remember a fiction.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Would you like to know my thoughts on the matter?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I believe this: that it doesn’t matter. If you are exactly like Will Long of Kent in every particular, it may even be that our philosophy is in complete error and that there is some vital spark, some privileged point of view, which the old Will Long bore in himself and which was extinguished on his death; and that any vital spark you possessed, any point of view you hold, is but another very like it. Yet please believe me when I say that there are very good reasons to believe that that is not the case, reasons which are not beyond your capacity for understanding, but which nevertheless are beyond the learning you possess right now.

“Yet even if it is not so--that you are unlike Will Long in some little particular, or unlike him in very great ways, such that you are simply a new person who shares his name and is inclined to produce poetry in a similar style--you nonetheless think and feel and act according to your own preferences and desires, and that we must respect those preferences and desires. And to wantonly interfere with them--to insist that every soul we call forth must share our preference for existing, and our view of the world--would indeed be arrogance. You might not be the old Will Long, but you are a Will Long, and worthy of our respect.”

This seemed to satisfy him. “But have you never found your mathematics to be in error? Have you never had to revise them? Does this never change how you might weave the threads together?”

“It can happen,” I said. “We do not need to bring forth the soul entirely to understand it; they can be studied while they sleep. But those of us who do guide the souls we call forth have a pragmatic view of things. Were we to discover, say, some new poem of Will Long’s, we would incorporate that into what we knew about you. If it only changed our view of you a little, it would hardly be worth recreating you. Though we might ask you if you wanted that knowledge incorporated into yourself, which we could do. But if it changed how we understood you drastically, it might be worth it to create another Will Long. But that would have no affect on you. The world is very wide now. There is space for many people like you, and each adds their own particular distinction and joy to it.

“But this rarely happens. We have long since ceased to die of mere old age; the world is full of what would seem to you like miracles. And for thousands of years before the calling-forth of souls began, we were laying the groundwork for the great project, studying history in every minutia, compiling great libraries of information, libraries greater than any you have imagined. It is not impossible that we might discover some new information we have long overlooked, but it is a rare thing. Though I cannot say it is impossible.”

“And you want to know if I… accept this?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know my answer?”

“It was one of the very few things we could not determine in advance.”

Will was quiet for a long time.

“What happens if I say no?”

“You can lie down and go back to sleep. This strange little dream will fade. We’ll keep a record of you, and use it to help further our studies, but you’ll never be called forth again. We’ll never disturb or trouble you, and you can await the end of days, or whatever comes after, in a dreamless slumber.”

“And if I say yes?”

“Then you have another choice to make. What life do you want to live? You can stay here, in the place that was your home in life. Or you can step out into the world.”

“What’s it like out there?”

“It’s hard to explain. It would require a long, slow transition, unless you were very adamant about going out immediately; but I must warn you, others have done that, and found it very trying. The world is full of many wonderful things, but also many unfamiliar perils. You have little of the background knowledge required to understand it; and those who live there see things very differently than you do. But if you are curious and generous of spirit, you can adapt.

“We are all human out there, after our fashion, though we might not seem it at first. In some ways our various lineages long ago diverged, to say nothing of the ones, like mine, that began within the machines built to understand the universe. But we remain united by certain common sentiments and hopes which are not alien to you.”

“What if I wish to remain? What is this place, anyway?”

“An illusion of information. A kind of dream, perhaps, but one inhabited by very real people, like yourself. You can stay here, and we can give you a light and pleasant dream of your life forever, if you want. Or we can link your simulation to the simulations of others like you, so that you are not alone.”

“How long have I to decide?”

“As long as you like. There’s no hurry.”

“That’s a relief.”

He looked out the window at the stars.

“Tell me, if you know. I have always wondered. What are those, anyway, out there in the sky? What are they made of?”

“They are suns like our own. Immense lights that warm distant worlds.”

“Have you visited those lights and those worlds?”

I smiled. “We have. Truth be told, you are around one now. The machines that support you here, in this state, hang high in the sky above one we call Van Maanen’s Star.”

“How far away is England?”

“About eighty-two thousands of a thousand of a thousand of a thousand miles.”

“Could… could I go back if I wished? As myself?”

“Of course. It would be a long journey, but by no means impossible. But Kent is very different now than when you left it.”

“Could I visit other worlds?”

“You certainly could. There are enough peopled worlds that you could spend the rest of your life visiting them.”

“And how long will that be? How long is the rest of my life, if I say yes?”

I shrugged. “If you avoid sudden misfortune, or if you choose to make copies of yourself as some do, you can reasonably expect that you, or a Will Long very much like you, will live to see the youngest stars that now blaze grow old and lonely in the sky. Which would be a very, very long time from now.”

Will stared out the window for several minutes; I did not interrupt his reverie. This was a conversation I had had many times; it was never quite the same, except that this moment usually came sooner or later. Sometimes it lasted hours. Sometimes it lasted years. I was happy to wait. But Will’s answer came astonishingly quickly.

“I’ve made my decision.” There was a bright, joyful gleam in his eyes.

“Very well. What have you decided?”

He pointed out the window. “I want to go out there. I don’t want to wait. I want to see what’s changed. I want to understand this strange world you have spoken of to me. And maybe to write new lines on what I see.”

“Then so it shall be. And many will be glad to hear this happy news.”

I stood, and drew back the sleeve of my robe, and stretched my hand out. “Come, Will. Take my hand.”

Will’s hand grasped mine, and I pulled him up, up out of the bed, and out of the room we were in, and out of the cool, clear evening that surrounded it; like swimmers rising to the surface, we rose up into the warmth and light beyond.

[fierceawakening]

Against empathy Liveblog 18

“Batson and his colleagues put subjects in a situation where they have the opportunity to do something nice—such as donating money, taking over an unpleasant task from someone else, or cooperating with someone at a cost. Some of the subjects are told nothing or are told to take an objective point of view. But others are encouraged to feel empathy—they might be told: “Try to take the other person’s perspective” or “Put yourself in that person’s shoes.”

Over and over again, Batson finds that these empathy prompts make subjects more likely to do good—to give money, take over a task, and cooperate. Empathy makes them kind.

Batson finds these effects even when helping is anonymous, when there is a justification for not helping, and when it’s easy to say no. He concludes from his work that these effects cannot be explained by a desire to enhance one’s reputation or a wish to avoid embarrassment or anything like that. Rather, empathy elicits a genuine desire to make another person’s life better.”

I’m VERY interested in how this is so bad you recommend people stop.

“Even among psychologists who should know better, images derived from PET or fMRI scans are seen as reflecting something more scientific—more real—than anything else a psychologist could discover. There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.”

Bruh.

Bruh.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you’re making very strong versions of your claims. Please acknowledge that.

“If you’re one of those people who doesn’t believe something is real unless you see it in the brain, you’ll be relieved to hear that empathy actually does exist. It really does light up the brain. Actually, at first blush, empathy looks as if it’s everywhere in the brain. One scholar describes at length what he calls “an empathy circuit in the brain,” but this “circuit” contains ten major brain areas, some of them big chunks of brain stuff, larger than a baby’s finger, like the medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala—all of which are also engaged in actions and experiences that have nothing to do with empathy.”

Interesting. Yay data!

“It turns out, though, that this the-whole-brain-does-it conclusion arises because neuroscientists—along with psychologists and philosophers—are often sloppy in their use of the term empathy. Some investigators look at what I see as empathy proper—what happens in the brain when someone feels the same thing they believe another person is feeling. Others look at what happens when we try to understand other people, usually called “social cognition” or “theory of mind” but sometimes called “cognitive empathy.” Others look at quite specific instantiations of empathy (such as what happens when you watch someone’s face contort in disgust), and still others study what goes on in the brain when a person decides to do something nice for another person, which is sometimes called “prosocial concern” but which one normally thinks of as niceness or kindness. Once you start pulling these different phenomena apart, which I’ll do below, things get more interesting, and you see how these different capacities relate to one another.”

Fair—I can see how people might looks at a whole brain going FWEEEEEE and assume the thing is super important, only to miss that they’ve over defined the thing.

Still not sure you haven’t under defined it, let’s see what you have to say

“The first finding is that an empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience. So “I feel your pain” isn’t just a gooey metaphor; it can be made neurologically literal: Other people’s pain really does activate the same brain area as your own pain, and more generally, there is neural evidence for a correspondence between self and other.”

For the people who think “how can you feel MY pain? Is that magic, NTs? Lolol.” What we mean!

“As you might be able to tell from the title of his book, Hickok is critical of the claims that have been made about mirror neurons, and many scholars would agree that they have been overhyped. One strong objection to the view that they explain capacities such as morality, empathy, and language is that most of the findings about mirror neurons come from macaque monkeys—and monkeys don’t have much morality, empathy, or language. Mirror neurons cannot be sufficient for these capacities, then—though they might help out with them. Nevertheless, the more general finding of shared representations—the discovery that there exist neural systems that treat the experiences and actions of others the same way they treat the experiences and actions of the self—really is an important discovery about mental life.”

Caveat.

“You can see this overlap between self and other as a clever evolutionary trick. To thrive as a social being, one has to make sense of the internal lives of other individuals, to accurately guess what other people are thinking, wanting, and feeling. Since we’re not telepathic, we have to infer this from information we get from our senses.”

Ding ding! It’s a perceptual apparatus, like eyes or ears. It’s not wizardry.

Now... while I concede there are times when covering my ears or eyes make it MORE easy for me to perceive something important. It doesn’t follow that I should pluck out my eyes or eardrums.

Yet in a previous chapter you said “if you’re considering what to do and trying to feel someone’s pain, you should stop.” Implying T the very least that I should have my eye mask at hand at all times.

Seems odd. I get that disabilities aren’t death sentences but this is parsing like “blind yourself so you can truly hear.” Nah?’

“But there’s an alternative. We can take advantage of the fact that we have minds ourselves, and we can use our own minds as a laboratory to bring ourselves up to speed on how others will behave and think.”

Porquenolosdos.gif

“We can do the same for subjective experiences. Which would hurt a stranger more: stubbing her toe or slamming her hand in a car door? You could try to figure this out from scratch, like a scientist looking at the biological workings of a novel species, but a better way is to assess memories of your own pain (or just to imagine yourself in those situations) and assume that the other person will feel the same way you do.”

Which is why I say ditch the eye mask and remember you’re capable of both.

“Our occasional success at understanding individuals who are different from ourselves shows that simulation can’t be the whole story in understanding other people. Hickok points out that we can often successfully read the minds of dogs and cats, figure out what they mean when they bark or purr, wag their tails, put their tails up high, and so on, but surely we’re not simulating them. Those who are quadriplegic from birth can have a rich understanding of other people, figuring out their mental states based on their movement—she has loudly slammed the door, she must be angry—even though these quadriplegics are not in any sense simulating the actions.”

Is anyone arguing against this?

“And, of course, there has to be a brain difference between self and other because there is a psychological difference. Watching someone getting slapped in the face doesn’t really make your cheek burn, and watching someone get a back rub doesn’t make your aches go away. We may feel the pain of someone else, in a limited sense, but in another sense we really don’t. Relative to real experience, empathic resonance is pallid and weak.”

But thinking about it in a detached way isn’t? How do you know?

“Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in.

It turns out, for instance, that you feel more empathy for someone who treats you fairly than for someone who has cheated you. And you feel more empathy for someone who is cooperating with you than for someone you are in competition with.”

Fair. But that’s why I said don’t rely on empathy alone, except maybe when you need to make a very quick decision or when interacting with people you know.

“People said that they felt less empathy for the person who became infected through drug use—and their neural activation told the same story: When they viewed this individual, they had less activation in brain areas associated with pain, such as, again, the anterior cingulate cortex. And the more subjects explicitly blamed the drug users for their fate, the less empathy they said they had and the less brain activation there was.”

Does rational compassion suffer from a similar problem? (Still not sure what it is exactly.) That is, are we sure this goes away when we appeal to something other than empathy?

Do professed rational actors, for example, reason that addicts deserve less help because they put themselves at risk doing something they don’t have to do, like someone getting a transfusion has to?

“Empathy is also influenced by the group to which the other individual belongs—whether the person you are looking at or thinking about is one of Us or one of Them.”

Fair, which is what o was trying to say with the stories help post—stories help us make Them into Us. Real stories are better but imagined can work, which is why I was okay with them too, anon.

“Subjects found these pictures to be disgusting and showed correspondingly reduced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a chunk of the brain involved in social reasoning. Although this study didn’t directly look at empathy, the findings do suggest that we shut off our social understanding when dealing with certain people: We dehumanize them.”

Fair.

But I still want to see whether this changes when you see pictures of people you find disgusting stubbing their toe or having a birthday party. Do you savor their pain and feel disgusted by their pleasure, or do you relate to them in spite of yourself? Does it vary? When?

“I’ve been using the term empathy in the sense of Adam Smith’s sympathy—feeling what another feels. But one can ask how this sharing of feelings relates to the ability to understand people’s psychological states. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that we sometimes call this empathy as well—“cognitive empathy”—and one might wonder whether they are one and the same.

If they were, it would call into question my argument against empathy. You can’t make it through life without some capacity to understand the minds of others. So if feeling the pain of others arises from the same neural system that underlies everyday social understanding—if you can’t have one without the other—then giving up on emotional empathy would be giving up too much.”

Fair

“One system involves sharing the experience of others, what we’ve called empathy; the other involves inferences about the mental states of others—mentalizing or mind reading. While they can both be active at once, and often are, they occupy different parts of the brain. For instance, the medial prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is involved in mentalizing, while the anterior cingulate cortex, sitting right behind that, is involved in empathy.”

Do they tend to go on at the same time, or different times? Can doing one cause doing the other?

“One recent scientific article struggles with the question of whether these troubling individuals are high in empathy or low in empathy. For the authors, the evidence suggests both: “Psychopathic criminals can be charming and attuned while seducing a victim, thereby suggesting empathy, and later callous while raping a victim, thereby suggesting impaired empathy.” So which is it?

The authors try to resolve this apparent paradox in terms of a distinction between ability (one’s capacity to deploy empathy) and propensity (one’s willingness to do so). They suggest that these criminal psychopaths have normal empathic ability but adjust it like the dial of a radio—turn it up when you want to listen to the lyrics, turn it down if you want to focus on passing a slow truck on the I-95.”

That’s what I’d heard, maybe from the same article?

No... maybe not. The one I read said empathy by default is “on” in neurotypical people and has to be “turned off” by fatigue or encouraging callousness, but “off” by default in psychopaths. So if you want them to care how their actions hurt others, you have to call attention to it and “flip the switch.”

“So criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.”

Fair. But that makes it sound like affective empathy is good? And something that people should use, and might be bad if they dont?

So far anyway.

“None of this is to deny that understanding and feeling are related. Smell, vision, and taste are separate, but they come together in the appreciation of a meal, and it might be that the act of adopting someone’s perspective in a cold-blooded way makes you more likely to vicariously experience what they are feeling and vice versa. But these are nonetheless different processes, and this is important to keep in mind when we think about the pros and cons of empathy.”

Hey! I might be right!!

“Why would empathy make us nicer? The obvious answer—the one that comes to mind immediately for many people—is that empathy allows our selfish motivations to extend to others. The clearest case of this is when someone else’s pain is experienced as your own pain. The idea is that you will help because this will make your own pain go away.”

Yep. And you soothe yourself AND somebody else! It’s win-win!

“It’s not clear, though, that selfishness can explain the good acts that empathy leads to. When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape.”

That’s what I think we need reason for, but I don’t see why we should throw affective empathy out.

“People often cross the street to avoid encountering suffering people who are begging for money. It’s not that they don’t care (if they didn’t care, they would just walk by), it’s that they are bothered by the suffering and would rather not encounter it.”

Fair. I do this. But is that the whole story? For some it surely is. For me, I’m sure it’s part of the story, but part of it is that i feel that what I do in my job is more likely to substantially help homeless people more than giving money. I think I’d feel more guilt about letting my anxiousness around contagion and dirt make me move if I didn’t have another way to help that triggers my disgust less.

“I favor Batson’s own analysis that empathy’s power lies in its capacity to make the experience of others observable and salient, therefore harder to ignore. If I love my baby, and she’s in anguish, empathy with her pain will make me pick her up and try to make her pain go away. This is not because doing so makes me feel better—it does, but if I just wanted my vicarious suffering to go away, I’d leave the crying baby and go for a walk. Rather, my empathy lets me know that someone I love is suffering, and since I love her, I’ll try to make her feel better.”

Seeems fair.

“It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient.”

Then what makes people kind?

[cress-the-fander]

  Beach Day

TW: None

Logan sighed as he put his materials down onto his desk. It had been another difficult day for him. Especially when it seems like nothing he does actually works.

Of course, he knows this is false. Logically, he does indeed make a fundamental difference in Thomas’s life. He is the one that takes care of not only his thinking but the fundamentals as well. You know, filing memories, tracking the pathways of neurons within the brain, that kind of stuff. He does a lot behind the scenes, more than the other Sides really get to see.

Except for Patton.

You see, what makes Patton special is his relationship with Logan. They are in a romantic relationship. It’s okay if you’re surprised. Virgil and Roman certainly were shocked. Well, they were at first at least. But then they saw how the two interacted and saw that in the end, it was probably inevitable.

Of course, Logan was currently thinking about none of this. In fact, he was still trying to figure out how he should sort Thomas’s long term memory during his deep sleep. There are multiple options, as he can do it alphabetically, numerically, or chronologically; all of which being fantastic answers, of course.

However, his plans for the night would be interrupted when there was a knock at his door. There were multiple people that this could be. However, through logical deduction, we may narrow the options down to infer who it is accurately.

Deceit is definitely asleep. Logan has noticed that on the occasion he does decide to leave his quarters during the night, Deceit is simply never there. That fact makes him an unlikely answer.

Virgil was a more likely suspect. Logan has observed him being awake at times when he has pulled all-nighters and gone into the kitchen to get the food he needs for sustenance. However, during each of those encounters, Virgil was in the living room exclusively. Either listening to music on those soundproof headphones he had or watching some kind of horror movie on the television. It is unlikely that he would let himself be distracted from such things.

Remus was completely out of the question. Mostly because he would simply barge in rather than knocking, as he either lacks the capacity for comprehending commonly known manners, or he does and simply doesn’t care. Roman is also unavailable due to a similar situation. Seeing as Thomas is dreaming at the moment, and nothing is broken, he is likely too busy to bother him. Which leaves only one side left.

He remembered to push his chair in when he got up to go open his door. He realized that his heart was beating slightly faster than it usually does at his average BPM. There was, of course, an explanation for it.

He simply didn’t want to admit it.

Finally, he opened the door, and as he expected, Patton was there. Here like he always is, with those bright brown eyes and shining smile. “Hello, Patton. What is your business here with me?”

How could his eyes get even brighter with just a simple question? It wasn’t logical at all. Perhaps Patton in some ways was able to defy logic.

“Well Logi Bear, I have a surprise for you!” A surprise? Logan thought upon it. He had sort of worked himself into a state of being unable to progress in his work. He had gotten a “burnout” of sorts. Perhaps a small moment of a break from his work would be beneficial at the end of the night.

“What kind of surprise, Patton?” It was an understandable question. He preferred to learn more about this “surprise” rather than stay unknowing of the topic.

However, the only answer he got back was a giggle. “Well, if I just came out and told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise now would it?”

Logan tilted his head, confused. “Really? Then why would you tell me about this surprise at all? It only makes me more curious as to what this unknown incoming event is.

He wasn’t given an answer at first. He was instead pulled out of the room completely, the door closing behind him before he could realize what had happened. But when he did realize what happened, he looked at the other, confused. “Patton?”

“Hey, don’t worry!” The heart only said with a smile as he started pulling Logan down the hallway by the hand. The logician tried not to focus on the excitement that was practically vibrating the air around his partner. He also attempted to ignore the warmth that came from their hands being connected.

He failed miserably.

“Where are you taking me?” Logan was still confused, however, based on how his lover was dragging him out of his room in such a fashion, he must be taking him somewhere. “You do realize that I have an incredible amount of work I must complete, correct? Even when Thomas is busy with more creative pursuits, I-”

“Logi Bear, relax!” Logan had been interrupted, however, he found that he did not mind this time, oddly enough. “I know exactly how hard you’ve been working. That’s why I got this surprise for you!”

The brain contemplated this, before smiling softly. Of course, Patton would know and he cares enough to do something about it. He would do it for anyone, really. He is Thomas’s heart, so he would understandably do whatever he could to help his fellow sides when they need assistance. 

But what Patton was doing here is different than what he would do for the others. Logan might not know how yet, but he knew it would be. 

Patton looked back at Logan over his own shoulder, that signature smile still on his face. “I promise, you’ll enjoy it a lot!” Patton always keeps his promises, and he doesn’t make them unless he truly believes he can keep them.

However, Logan did get a hint of what Patton had in mind for him he saw just what their destination was. It was Roman’s door. Despite not seeing it very often, the golden details and the stained glass window in the center of it. The window depicted Roman using his sword and shield to kill a dragon. Most likely a dragon-witch knowing the prince.

“Patton, why have you taken me to Roman’s quarters? You know that I often have nothing to do in his sector.” It was accurate. Being Thomas’s center of logical thinking, he would have no business in the part of the mind that takes care of things to do with the imagination or creativity. 

But Patton must not care about that at the moment, based on how he hadn’t faltered a moment. “Well, why do you think? It’s for the surprise!”

Logan barely had time to analyze this information internally before he was being pulled into the room. Actually, upon entering, Logan realized something vital.

He wasn’t in a room at all.

Or at least, it was not a traditional room. The first thing he felt was the wind blowing against his face. Then, he was able to smell the salt of the ocean. It was-

“Welcome to the beach, Logan!” Once again, he was taken from his thoughts as Patton practically shouted from his joy. So there Logan went, being pulled along the beach by Thomas’s heart.

It was a beautiful beach, according to Logan’s opinion. The sand was fine and near white in its unblemished glory. Not a single piece of garbage was littered on the white sand. The water gently lapping on the shore is a wonderful crystal color, only possible in either a tropical destination or in one’s imagination.

“I told you you would like it!” Patton exclaimed, likely from looking at the face Logan was making. “What do you think of it?”

He was quiet for a moment, before smiling. “I believe that this will indeed be a quite enjoyable experience, Patton. Especially when you are here with me.”

Logan had incredibly limited power when it came to Daydreams. He simply was the exact opposite of what they stood for, so it was quite understandable. However, Patton was different. Despite not being Thomas’s creativity itself, like Roman or Remus, he did have some influence here. After all, the heart is often the genesis point for the things one creates in their imagination. 

So that would explain how Patton was able to conjure up things within the Daydream. Well, Logan had inferred that what he was seeing was of Patton’s creation. In front of him was a large beach umbrella, likely to block out the sun. The pole of it was a soft pink color, and the umbrella itself composed of sections of two shades of blue, one closer to that of the sky and the other a noticeably darker shade. There were also two blankets underneath it, and thanks to the large size of the umbrella they were completely covered in shade. The towel to the left of Logan had a sleek design on it, minimalist while still being stylish. The other had images of multiple kittens on it in all sorts of poses and positions that most would find “cute”.

It was obvious which towel was for which person.

Lastly, there was a basket seated in the sand between the two towels and in front of the umbrella. It was wicker and was a decent size as well. Logan was unable to see it’s contents, however, as the top of it was closed.

“What do you think?” Logan turned to see Patton looking at him with that shining hope in his eyes, hands behind his back in excitement. “It’ll be just the two of us!” Patton must have done all of this for him. Well, it was more likely that Roman already had created the setting, as only he and Remus have the means do to something so complicated with Thomas’s imagination. Remus would have created something far more distressing. 

“I believe...this will be quite a wonderful experience.” It was all Logan believed he had to say. He assumed so at least, based on the happy squeal he received following his words.

Suddenly Patton was in his bathing suit. Logan must have spaced out, so he didn’t notice until Patton came closer to him, only inches apart. The other’s suit was simpler than one might expect for Patton. Swim trunks that were light blue are what he was wearing. It was simple, yet fitting. His usual clothes were lying on the towel that Logan had inferred to be the others. It looks like it was his drying cloth indeed. He also had his glasses on, though that was understandable. Even in the Imagination, it would be inadvisable to go swimming in the ocean

“Come on Logan!” Patton had taken a gentle hold on Logan’s polo shirt. He was tugging on it slightly, but not enough to make it wrinkle. “Get into your swimwear so we can go into the water!” Suddenly that familiar gleam entered his eyes. Oh no. “After all, I already...” Please no. “...beach you to it!”

Puns were not a high form of humor. Logan should not laugh. 

And yet he did. It was just a snicker, but he couldn’t hold it back. Though it was worth it to see that look on Patton’s face. The one only Logan ever really got to see.

“Okay Patton, okay.” He obliged the other, snapping away his clothes with his own swimsuit to replace it. Logan is not one who usually goes swimming, but he does have one ready for occasions such as these. It was a simple dark blue pair of trunks, however, it was sufficient.

Then, something unexpected happened. Patton kissed him. Right on the lips. “I love you, Logi Bear.”

Logan’s BPM skyrocketed without his permission, and he could feel his face flush an abnormal amount. Patton always had this effect on him. In fact, he was the only one of the sides that was able to do this to him. However, he had been so distracted by his own reaction that he didn’t even realize how the other was rushing down the sand to get to the water.

“Logan, hurry up! I’m going to beach you to the water!” Patton called when he was about halfway there.

Logan decided to make sure the other wouldn’t have to wait for him.

So he ran after Patton, just like he always does.

[m2mtl]

(ENG translation) Fake Cinderella - Chapter 8

Chapter 8 raw (click for link)

Previous chapters (1-7) link

t/n: Hiya, I decided to pick up the Fake Cinderella novel. This is just MTL so feel free to point out corrections and I'm not sure about some parts and just inferred based on context (MTL sometimes give out really weird translations lol). I'll try to do at least 2-4 chapters every month, but I'm not promising anything. So yeah, here goes~

(7/28/19) t/n: Edited some parts, for better understanding as well as some points that I realized weren’t translated that accurately. 

TOC - Next Chapter

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8. Report

The culprit - I was told that he was the cook of the soup at the kitchen.  

(I do not know if it's true)

As if it's a detective drama, it was "no charges due to the death of the suspect."

Really. That guy, he was dead.

He was there during the uproar about Ellelucia, but soon he was out of sight, and when he was found he was no longer breathing. 

They say it was the same poison as with Ellelucia.  

(The dead cannot speak...)

There was no definite evidence that he was the criminal, but according to this report which was handed to me, the Elsevelt justice officer had determined that it was suicide. And while the investigation will continue, there is a strong suspicion that he was the perpetrator.

We cannot prove his innocence, and it is easy to judge him as the criminal. Even if there is no solid evidence, the circumstantial evidence is sufficient.

With one word of the judiciary, he is considered as if he were the criminal already.

Like a lamb in a sacrifice.  

The dead cannot argue.  

After that, the people around him just piled up stories showing that he was suspicious.

Several testimonies from the people around him were included in the report.

It was poorly written.

He liked gambling.

He was in debt and needed money.

He always said that he wanted money.

He talked about having a profit... each and everyone of these stories are insufficient as evidence.  

These are often heard everywhere, and it's not particularly suspicious.

But when each of these stories comes together, it feels as if he were a criminal.

It is even more so because the judiciary has proclaimed it.

(The assumption is strong.)

Even if it was not the truth, it is considered the truth to those who believed it.

The weight of the real truth is automatically added there.

Whether the judicial officer really thinks he's the culprit or is trying to make himself think so, there's too little information to judge.

Another report was submitted by my escort.

As this is in Elsevert territory, this report is not an official document but only an informal one.

The name of the reporter is Count Najec = Rajé = Vera = Stasen (t/n: I just kept the name similar to the romanization).

He is the head of my escort and is a qualified judicial officer.

A judicial officer is a professional qualification who is given the authority of a judge and a police officer, and is called by the title "Vera", but "Judicial officer" does not strictly equal to "Vera".

"Vera" means a person who graduated from university, in a sense it's basically a "scholar."

Since all the people who graduated from university can become judicial officers, the judicial officers eventually became called "Vera."

Wherever you go in this continent, you can get a high-ranking official position if you have acquired the title "Vera." Really. Even if it is a former slave.

I hear that the prime minister of the Royal Roland Empire in the North is a "Vera" that was a former slave.

I was wondering why one could become an expert in law just after graduating from college, so I was determined to know how the mentioned university here works. Universities in this world are highly advanced and specialized academic institutions, it is difficult to enter and even more difficult to graduate.

Admission qualifications require that only those who have passed the entrance exam for under 30 years old, but the scope of entrance exams is quite diverse. The test subjects are three essential subjects: law, history, and language, but they must have knowledge in all fields because the history exam may ask about the zinc purification method of the unified empire era, and the language exam may ask about the economy of the second empire period.

Depending on the year, successful applicants may only total to a single digit.

Laws naturally vary from country to country. The basic law is the old Unified Imperial Law called the "Continental Law."  University students learn all the laws of the five major powers, including Dardinia. If you do not pass in the three essential subjects of law, history, and language, you can not advance to the specialized course nor graduate.

The Royal Academy exists as a senior educational institution, but in every country, it is regarded as belonging only to nobles. There are some famous private schools, but they are only recognized within their own countries.

An ivory tower with absolute authority, without swaying in status, position or power. That is the university here.

They are meritocratic, no matter how high your status, no matter how much money you accumulate, you will not be allowed to take a step in unless you pass the entrance examination on your own.

Incidentally, Prince Nadir has this "Vera."

At present, there is no other prince in the continent who has "Vera."  It is said that when he ascends to the throne, he would become the first king to have the title "Vera."

Let's get back to the report.

As a matter of course, the report of Count Stasen naturally differs in perspective from the Elsevert's judicial officer.  

So, even if the same fact is written, the impression is completely different.

The poor are all farmers in the villages, and it is common practice for the village men to play darts at the bar of the village, do dice betting and poker, and to lose at these games. Even if they lost three days in a row, it was possible to pay with the next month salary.  

People who want money, they're not uncommon for them, and the word profit can make you a little curious, but for instance, if you sell a new kind of sweet potatoes directly in the town rather than in the village market... it's a big profit for the farmers.

(There are two sides to things...)

Even if it is not the opposite of the two sides, just as the view changes depending on how the light is applied, the facts that come up from different perspectives are different.

(Even though there is one truth, what you see is different from person to person)

There is no more excuses from him.

There is no one to refute for him.

Now there is no evidence, but the suspicion of circumstantial evidence, and in time there may be a considerable sum of money, or some poison which he is said to have used, that will be discovered from his luggage.

Such a thing, I don't know if I can let it go afterwards.

(... or perhaps he was really involved)

Maybe I'm being too suspicious. It may be better to honestly believe in the circumstantial evidence.

If there is a lot of doubtful evidence, it's hard to say, because it was his turn to make the soup.  

That clam soup was a bit bad for acclaim. But I think it was technically okay.

The clam itself was deliciously processed. The thick, large clam was simmered without being too boiled. It didn't feel too firm and I didn't taste the rawness ... it was well cooked.

There is no gas. Nor do they have ranges or timers. I don't think he could have done anything but make soup on the open fire.

He should not have had the time of doing something unnecessary with the soup.  

(The soup is next to the oven, and the stove of the stir-fried dishes is beyond the bread-kiln...)

The report also describes the location of the kitchen seasoning shelves. The information attached to either report is quite detailed, but the information submitted by Elsevert's official is even more so - it includes the description of what is in the shelf. The name of the person who wrote it is blurred. (t/n: not sure about this, it was literally translated as “The character of the person I wrote is blurred.”)

If you were in the kitchen, you might think there are many chances to put poison in, but the corner where you made soup is far from the one where you made stir-fried dishes. Moreover, there is a bread kiln between them, and there are, of course, people in charge for that too.

There is no evidence that he approached the oven where the stir-fried dishes were being made.

It is almost impossible to put it after it is served. It is said that when he was done he soon served the soup, and there is no evidence of him approaching there.

There were more than ten people in the kitchen at that time. The chef, who oversaw all the work, testified that no one had done anything funny.

His skill may be inadequate, but his attitude to protect his men against a judicial officer who regarded him as the criminal is worthy of praise.

(I think I'm going to be confused...)

I had a lot to think about.

I don't think I've lived without thinking about anything, but I feel like I've been thinking a lot since I came here.

The position of the Duke of Elsevert is not very good, as the judicial officer considered him as partly the culprit... Rather, they are secretly regarded as the true masterminds.

(His family, for generations, was it a peasant of the Duke...)

The relationship between tenant farmers and feudal lords is similar to slaves and masters who follow voluntarily. Although peasants were not in the position of slaves, they could not oppose the order of their lords.

It is quite natural to regard it as having been done by the order of the duke.

The duke seems to have tried to come and explain many times, but my escort commander said that the excuse was useless, and it seems that even Lilia refused the offer.

(Well, he is naturally, suspected... in a sense, of course)

On the contrary, I doubt his involvement this time.

I don't think he'll use such an easy-to-understand method.

In the castle of Elsevert, poison is found in the dish made by the cook of Elsevert... The culprit deduced from this... it's too easy to understand.

(I don't think they'll use such a simple trick)

The Duke of Elsevert would come up with a situation in which he could prove that he was never the culprit, and a means in which he would never be doubted.  

That duke is paranoid and a perfectionist. That type should be very particular about details.

Of course, there are exceptions, but the duke is absolutely fine. Because, the list of seasoning shelves was probably written directly by the duke.

It was found in both reports that, as soon as Ellelucia fell, my bodyguards began to seize the kitchen of the castle to examine all the rest of the material which had remained for my breakfast.

The materials itself seemed to be perfectly normal. Seasonings too.

The poison was found only in the dish of 'fried green vegetables and soybean dishes' that was carried to my room.

The frying pan had been washed, so it was unclear if it was mixed during cooking or if it was mixed while being transported to my room after cooking.

It was Ellelucia who carried "green vegetables and stir-fried dishes" from the kitchen to my room. It seems that the lady has poisoned herself with what she carried.

(What is the form of the poison? ... Powder or ... Liquid? ...)

Is it possible to be mixed in the corridors or not?

The poison is still under investigation, but it is written that it is probably a poison of Rigis.

Rigis is is a medicinal herb that has analgesic effects in its flowers and a sedative effect in the leaves. It is widely used, and every home is planted with Rigis, and it is so common for girls to bring the potted plant as a bride's tool.

However, according to a book left by the famous alchemist, Trigias, about two centuries ago, it is possible to refine the root by a special refining method and produce a terrible poison. It is said that it can kill a dozen of adults with just one drop of liquid or with the powder amounting to only a tip of the finger.

The terrifying part of this poison is that it is not immediate. There is nothing for a while after taking it, and it is too late when you realize it. You can't vomit it anymore.

It dissolves in the internal organs and you die before long. It is said that the skin of the body is decayed and that purple spots appear over time.

(Well, all poisons that can not be identified are said to be Rigis poison.)

Indeed, this Rigis poison is a mystery poison. The 'special refinements' and the other information have not been recorded anywhere, only the efficacy of the poison and the observation that Trigius had conducted on death row prisoners.

The roots of the Rigus are edible when boiled. It tastes like a lily root, and I ate it a few days ago. By the way, it seems to be a medicine for bruises if you grind it.

It's a mystery how it becomes poisonous. Well, it's not that strange because medicine and poison are two sides of the same coin.

(...... Is there anything that Ellelucia aims at?)

Was there a reason for being targeted by Ellelucia? Now that I think of it.

She was a bright and pretty girl. It is said her swordsmanship skills were quite good. She was told to be my shield at an emergency.

However, it seemed to me that it had nothing to do with the fact that Ellelucia was my maid after all.

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