#citizenry

[jesusworesandals]

[fuzz-hound]

I want Games Workshop to acknowledge that Necromunda exists more.

So often, GW (Games Workshop) goes straight where the money is. Where are people spending their money? On Space Marines, of course. It's the poster boy of the franchise, so the number one thing that they're gonna do is make as many space marines as they can because it's essentially guaranteed revenue for the company. Every noob to the 40k franchise wants a space marine army. It's just how it goes.

The problem I have is that within the franchise, there's so much more they can do with it than just the most powerful guys in the galaxy. rather than make the biggest, baddest guy in the room the posterboy, the citizenry of the imperium should take center stage to really introduce people to the universe, and to make neofascists understand that THIS IS NOT FOR THEM.

The problem with Space Marines is that they already know everything. They study up on all the enemies of the Imperium, which means a lot of the mystique of the factions is lost. Save for the Tyranids, of course, because they’re from another galaxy so nobody *really* knows what their deal is. If you are introduced to 40K by getting to know a bunch of Mary Sues like the Ultramarines, you wouldn't be remiss for thinking that humanity wins all of the time.

That statement couldn't be further from the truth.

In %80 of battles, wars, and any other conflict in the Imperium, people are fighting tooth and nail for inches of the battlefield, often with catastrophic losses on both sides because of just how desperate and how pissed the factions are at each other. This is one of the main messages that 40k as a whole is directly screaming into people's faces: War Has No Winners. What better way to introduce people to the concept who look at the battles and cant see that about the universe than looking at it from the perspectives of people who are practically destined from birth to lose?

Under the crushing power of the Imperium, scuttling around the piles of garbage, among all the soot and shit and piss and rust that EVERYONE generates; what are their little victories that help them to live another day in the Underhive? What keeps them from driving themselves to drink in a place where it's likely they've never even heard of the Sun before? In a world without hope, what gives them life?

This applies to whatever Cavill's cinematic project is in the universe as well. In order to make people understand that the viewpoint of the protagonist is bad, we have to start small. Dumping an audience in a place where there is practically infinite scale makes it meaningless, and kills off any serious stakes. A Necromunda story is the perfect starting point for people who have no Idea what the word 'grimdark' even means and by keeping it "small", we have a baseline for just how huge everything is.

I just want more Necromunda books, videogames, ANYTHING BUT THE TABLETOP GAME, man! There is SO much potential there for stories that are more than "I am the Big Gun Man!" Gang wars are happening all the time, High society intrigue, Smuggling and illicit stuff?! People love that mafia shit!

[milkydraws8]

various eldruci

[1five1two]

[evilhorse]

And who says citizenry anymore?

[randyite]

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

[gravitascivics]

ROMANTIC LIBERALISM

This blog introduced to its readers the work of Adam Gopnik back in January 2020.[1]  His book, A Thousand Small Sanities,[2] gives, early in its text, a history lesson of how “liberalism,” as a political form of thinking, got started.  He traces the roles that John Stuart Mill and his intimate partner, Harriet Taylor, played.  Skipping their adulterous relationship, their interchange in terms of basic political discourse led to a more formal construct about what political speech and behavior should be and became known as liberalism.

          More specifically, along with a strong stand against slavery back in the 1860s, they also advanced ideals such as claiming the equality between the sexes, i.e., that women were entitled to equal standing in society – including the right to vote.  While racial emancipation was a more accepted ideal at that time, this couple were among the initial advocates for women’s rights and for extending to them the franchise.  And before one ascribes to them the title of extremists or radicals of their time or of some ideology, Gopnik claims they were centrists.

          Gopnik shares the following:

What they were was realists – radicals of the real, determined to live in the world even as they altered it.  Not reluctant realists, but romantic realists.  They were shocked and delighted at how quickly women and men began to meet and organize on the theme of women’s emancipation, but they accepted that progress would be slow and uncertain and sometimes backward facing.  They did more than accept this necessity.  They rejoiced in it because they understood that without a process of public argument and debate, of social action moved from below, the ground of women’s emancipation would never be fully owned by women nor accepted, even grudgingly, by men.[3]

And how does this concern relate to federation theory, the topic of this blog?  It helps explain how the national – in this case, the British – partnership truly expanded as this newer stream of argument, liberalism, took hold among change agents of those years.

            Perhaps, as Gopnik suggests, their personal romance played a functional role in their thinking over the issue of emancipation and extending the franchise.  They introduced, on a more conscious level, the romantic element of how fellow citizens should, according to their view, engender a more useful mode of thinking and feeling. 

And what one might at first blush consider contradictory, if one’s views of others is based on some level of love, how one views them “jives” with liberty.  That is, it simultaneously beckons people to be themselves but also to be concerned with and to take care of how one is seen by others.  Moreover, this leads to a very essential dispositive stance in a federated arrangement of a partnership; that is, to be disposed to compromise. 

“Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience.  It is a sign of its strength, for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than a recognition that other people have one, too.”[4]  It’s a sense which ties legitimate disagreements beyond the competing interests under debate.  And in that, one can envision a sense of liberty removed from the natural rights – “I can do what I want as long as I don’t deprive others of the same right” – view. 

For as with this more federated view, one is removed from this unattached individualism that the natural rights view promotes.  How?  It is tied to a view of liberty that acknowledges the obligations and duties true love demands.  Yes, this sense of limitation is not mandated by law, but by emotional ties, that loving relationships entail.

Gopnik leaves his readers with an analogy that this blogger wants to share, for it is a bit unexpected.  That is:

Most political visions are unicorns, perfect imaginary creatures we chase and will never find.  Liberalism is a rhinoceros.  It’s hard to love.  It’s funny to look at.  It isn’t pretty but it’s a completely successful animal.  A rhino can overturn an SUV and – go to YouTube – run it right over, horn out.[5]

And with that comparison, this posting sets up the next one; it will look at some of the implications from Mill and Taylor’s thoughts.

[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Turn Left,” a posting, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, a blog, accessed December 30, 2023, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_01_19_archive.html.

[2] Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities:  The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (New York, NY:  Basic, 2019).

[3] Ibid., 11.

[4] Ibid., 12.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[idealog]

I Shall Now Live in Peace and Harmony. If you continue to affront it, you are not welcome in my Realm, or around me or Mine, including My Peace and Harmony.

Thanks,

JESUS

[kesarijournal]

The Irony of Fighting Misinformation with Muzzles: A Witty Take on ACMA's New Powers

Hello, dear readers! Today, we’re going to dive into the rabbit hole of misinformation, disinformation, and the Australian government’s latest attempt to play the role of the White Rabbit, trying to bring order to the information Wonderland. Buckle up because it’s going to be a wild ride!The Australian government, in its infinite wisdom, has proposed to grant new powers to the Australian…

[bunabi]

The Imperial Chantry says ancient elves created blood magic and Solas corroborates this by having experienced opinions on the topic

But the first priest of Dumat says he learned that shit direct from the Big Man himself and he's credited as the first blood mage in history

All I'm saying is: either somebody lying or something going on

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

was thinking it might be time to reread william j. reese's america's public schools: from the common era to "no child left behind" & flipping through the highlights i'd left in it i found this, which did make me laugh:

Critics in the late nineteenth century frequently complained that schools were not as rigorous as when they had attended school. Employers often said that prospective workers were lazy, could not spell, and wrote illegible, garbled prose.

[benevolenterrancy]

torchwood is very lax about uniforms compared to certain other alien monitoring groups

[a-really-bad-decision]

So funny to me when boe calls adepts 'wizards' (derogatory). Like they’re not even wrong, it just doesn’t begin to cover the whole *gestures vaguely at the waking nightmare that is the nine houses' standing army.*

I hear wizard, and the first thing I think is not ‘shock troopers who can suffocate you in putrid, pulsating globs of boiling fat pulled from the mangled remains of your dead comrades’. Or ‘soldiers who you definitely blew up a month ago appearing back on the battlefield with their organs regrown and and a functioning bone arm taped on where the missing limb should be’. Or ‘conquerors who arrived in a space ship powered by an obelisk covered with the ancient script of the unrestful dead and bathed constantly in fresh arterial blood while literal skeletons crawl over the hull like weevils’.

Fucking wizards. Love it. Keep being irreverent you crazy bastards.

[laguzmage]

See on the one hand this is like the third us presidential election I've seen since becoming politically conscious that's had an "If Republicans win they have a 10 point plan to enact religious fascism, for real" scare but on the other it's really killing me how every single Project 2025 line that gets out on socials is like "And then we will activate the national guard to sweep for wokeoids and gays" and we're all standing around like haha yeah idk if voting even matters anymore

[cream-and-tea]

heyyy don’t mean to bother you but did you know that um. You, now - the ones listening to my idling progress from back home in Glottage - you’re telling yourselves; Val cannot possibly be growing angry over something like this. How dare she? The hypocrite. How can this thing, this monster, this battle-saint, possibly find any kind of righteous anger in her twisted and repurposed heart for the lives of the fallen foe? How does our terrible Val think she can justify any kind of anger at the sight of the flattened and buried corpses of enemy civilians and enemy children, when we’ve already been listening to her murder police officers, soldiers and townsfolk single-handedly in turn? How can she be furious when we’ve heard her butcher her way through the little old ladies of the CLS in the hopeless effort to murder her own faraway mother? (Mockingly) See? You can be sacred and yet self-aware. Yes, I am culpable. I am dreadful. I have been responsible for great atrocities and I will commit a great many more before I’m done. And still - I am growing furious, as I walk through the devastation of this town. Because the wound of Sutler’s Weald is not like any wound I would make. It’s clumsy, it’s crude. It’s thoughtless. I begin to tell myself, as I walk - I wouldn’t have murdered them like this. I would have been kinder. I would have killed them quickly or gracefully, and there would have been beauty and strangeness in the manner of it. And even that’s all deception, even if I had been cruel and slow and lingering in the massacre of these innocent people, upon my whim - I would at least have looked them in the eyes, and I would have borne the weight of my cruelty. If they’d asked me to, I could have killed this town beautifully. And I’d have borne witness to the horror, and I’d have rejoiced in it - and it would have been considerably less vile and ugly than this. The ones back home, the ones who are listening in, I don’t think they know what they’ve done here. The line of connection between the victim and the victimiser, the sacrifice and the god - it’s long, and tangled, and indistinct. A god should not be able to avert her eyes. What a terrible thing it must be, to be monstrous and not even know it. And even if all of this is lies, even if I am just as bad and just as careless as the people back home who did this to Sutler’s Weald… …well, then, let me hate them, pure and simply, for being just as bad as me, because people - -people should be kinder than the gods that eat them. The town square is largely intact. A few burning cars, a single shrine and statue to some goddess of victory, her snapped-off arm raised in imagined triumph. I sit down upon the pavement in the ruined heart of the town, and I tell the dead people of Sutler’s Weald beautiful lies. I tell them that they survived, in their hundreds - miraculously and inexplicably, dodging the bombs. Not a single victim, not one death. An act of divine mercy. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that they were buried properly, according to whatever rites or customs they happen to cherish. When that doesn’t work, I try and turn them into my mother again, in the hopes of making the dead people hateful to me. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that I’m sorry. I tell them I wish they still had ears to become all the wondrous imaginings I had in store for them. I tell them… …that all things considered, they deserved a better avenging and foreign god, a better tormentor, a better oblivion, than the one that was forced upon them. (With cold fury) I tell them- I will find a way to give them something better.

[orkneyism]

AITA for throwing a spring party for myself (25F) and my friends (My Loyal Subjects) on the anniversary of my husband's (28M) mass killing of infants? It's also the birthdays of my oldest nephew-in-law and friend (24M) and my youngest nephew (8M) who survived the said massacre attempt?