#context i live in a country where they're not in use very much presently (so not anywhere where people use them for school)

[howtofightwrite]

Hi! Love your blog, it's such a brilliant resource, thanks so much for writing it.

So, I'm looking for more information on ways that someone would go about breaking someone else's neck. Long story short, it's for a murder mystery situation where I need the investigators to be able to look at the injury on the victims (in an autopsy context, not necessarily on casual examination) and go 'oh, that's a specific technique and it suggests our killer has military or similar how-to-kill-people combat training'. Any suggestions?

A shovel through the spine at the base of the skull?

So, the headlock neck break is basically a fantasy. The amount of force you'd need to actually shatter someone's neck in the way presented would be superhuman. (Which does mean there's probably examples as industrial accidents, but industrial accidents are a somewhat uncommon murder method. Mostly because they're not especially portable.)

Hilariously, there are multiple attempted murder cases, where the would-be killers tried to replicate that neck break, only succeeding in annoy their victims, and telegraphing their intention. So, someone were to try to snap someone's neck that way, it would be an excellent indicator that they had no training what so ever.

There are ways that someone can kill with a headlock, such as a blood choke, but nothing that's going to concretely point the finger at someone with a military background.

Similarly, stab wounds can be very informative about the killer. But all you'll really gather is how familiar they are with human anatomy, and how comfortable they are with cutting people-shaped meat. This won't help you distinguish between someone who's done this before, and someone who's done this before for their country. (Incidentally, “people-shaped meat,” isn't strictly a joke. There are lot of potential careers and backgrounds where you could become pretty comfortable cutting into animals, either live or recently deceased. So, in this specific case, that's more about the mindset. Someone uncomfortable with that level of physicality, is like to leave behind hesitation wounds. These are smaller cuts, sometimes in the main wound channel, indicating that they're not really comfortable with what they're doing.)

So far as it goes, I'm more a fan of just ramming a blade into an artery, rather than slitting their throat. The latter is a lot more work, but the former requires you actually know where to find someone's arteries quickly and efficiently. Which isn't necessarily a sure thing.

Even tool selection won't necessarily tell you much. Someone who's using a military knife might be ex-military, or they could be someone who uses surplussed equipment because it's cheap and relatively reliable. And that's assuming you can concretely identify the knife from the wounds it leaves. Which is also not especially reliable. You can tell how far the blade penetrated, and roughly how large it is, but that won't tell you if it was a bayonet or some cheap gas station hunting knife of a similar size.

Firearms present a similar problem. Once you can track down the gun (if there were any intact bullets to compare, which isn't a certainty), you might be able to match the gun to the wounds. But, examining the wounds on their own (especially if the bullets are gone, or buried deep in the corpse) will only give you an estimate of the bullet's size. Here's a problem with this, did you know that .38, .380, and .357 magnum are all 9mm rounds? They're different cartridges, but the bullets they spit out are very similarly sized. You might be able to make some educated guesses based on the wound channel and burns, but these all fire a round that's roughly the same size. So, when someone looks at a wound and definitively says it was a .38, they don't know that. (Unless they found the shell casing. But even then, you're not likely to find a .38 or .357mag shell casing unless the attacker specifically dropped their spent brass and reloaded, as those are revolver cartridges. .380 is a semi-auto round, so those will get kicked out after each shot. And, yes, before someone complains, there is .357 SIG, that's a semi-auto cartridge. It's 9x22mm.)

Also worth remembering, you can't, specifically match a shotgun's ballistics, assuming the shell was loaded with shot, and not slugs. You may be able to match the mechanical wear on the casing itself to a model (or multiple models in some cases), but not a specific gun.

So, how do you know it was someone with military training? You don't. Learning that someone's been trained to kill is a bit easier to pin down, but the information isn't that useful. That doesn't tell you if they're ex-military, ex-police, or even just the product of an extremely messed up homelife with a prepper parent. Or, even just they got extremely lucky (or unlucky) with a single stab.

Now, it isn't pointless to try to determine that, as it can be helpful later to demonstrate that the eventual suspect had the training to kill in the method that the victim experienced. But it doesn't do much to narrow the suspect pool on its own.

Ironically, the killer not having combat training. So, with things like defensive and hesitation wounds, can be far more useful for narrowing the suspect pool. As an investigator, when you're talking to someone that you're sure has been certified in knife combat, isn't likely to be especially messy with their stabbings. (Though, to be fair, even a trained knife fighter might stab their victim many times, to ensure a faster bleedout, and not all of those hits are going to be especially artful.)

So, that's a long way from, “you can't really break someone's neck like you see in the movies.” You can kill people, and as an investigator, you can make a lot of educated guesses based on what you find at the crime scene. But, “this method means they were militarily trained,” doesn't really mean they were trained by the military.

-Starke

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[lemonhemlock]

Obviously no one can earn the right to forcibly rule over millions but in asoiaf universe wouldn’t you earn the throne through conquest?

Like Aegon the conqueror once did and as Robert Baratheon did?

I mean, I feel like if anyone could compare themselves to a version that was born and raised in Westeros, they would be pretty shocked to see the differences! Does a male feudal lord living in medieval fantasy land with dragons have the same worldview as me, a millennial woman with a history PhD? Um, no. How could he even? I've had access to education and resources he couldn't even dream of, whereas he would have had access to power in ways I couldn't even conceive of. And I think it's insincere to act as if I (or anyone else) would have been this visionary political scientist who'd reinvent the morality wheel and invent a new economic and social system overnight.

What I think is a pretty neutral (?) statement, though, is that many, many polities have come to be as a result of conquest in some shape or another. Pick any country you want, if you look back enough into their history, you're going to find some form of conquest. It's a very common method through which societies have coalesced. That's why, to be honest, I'm not super interested in defending or dismantling Aegon's conquest as a concept. I'm not even sure the author is either - it's one of those things fandom discourse fixates on. None of our characters really have a contrary position to Aegon's conquest? To them, it's like us discussing any other invasion or occupation from our country's history that lead to our ethnogenesis. They're much more interested in what's happening to them now or will happen in the future.

And this is where I come to the part of the answer that's more applied. Clearly, we have reached a point in our collective history where we have decided that conquest is no longer an acceptable form to conduct ourselves on the international stage. Is Westeros there yet? Well, kind of? I think that's where the series is headed. Here is where suspension of disbelief has to come into play when it comes to fictional realms like Westeros, because nowhere in hell is it "believable" that Westeros has stagnated at the same level of feudalism and medieval-adjacent technology for thousands of years, magic or no. So they should have reached the point of rejecting conquest as proper conduct ages ago, but here we are. On this point we should accept it's just fiction.

Nevertheless, even in similar periods of time from our history that correlate to present-day Westeros, not everyone thought the same either. It was a well-known idea that, the bigger the territory, the harder it was to maintain and govern. Look at the many iterations the Roman Empire went through in order to survive. Emperor Aurelian's evacuation of Dacia Traiana is a very easy example of how sometimes holding too much territory can be an expensive hassle.

So, in this context, Aegon was attempting to unify a continent as big as South America. It is rather telling that he left the former kings in charge of their lands and went forward with this descentralised structure, only adding an extra layer of vassalage on top. Life in Westeros didn't really change in any significant way for the common man. They didn't lose or gain any rights and kept fighting and dying in petty wars. Only now they also had the threat of dragonflame over their heads.

But I digress. What I mean to say is that not all noble lords in Westeros would even be in a position to think that they could hold such a large territory like Aegon did. They didn't have dragons. So their cost-benefit analysis would have looked different, perhaps for some it would even have lead towards it being a dangerous, bothersome and expensive endeavour.

As for Robert, he operated in a different historical interval, where the Westerosi were already used to being ruled collectively by a king. And he didn't start from zero, half the country was on his side and had felt threatened or insulted in some way by Aerys. He just had to go because he had become very dangerous. So it was more a conquest of Aerys' remaining loyal lands, if you want to get really technical about it; honestly that's why the term rebellion is much more suited here, even though we can say Robert won the throne by conquest.

Anyway, bottom line is I don't think everyone in Westeros would hold the view that conquest is either inevitable OR that it should be part and parcel of life.

[oro-junestar]

how much more fucking time do i wanna waste on you

"I’m saying that lgb people have the right to freedom of association and political autonomy. Which cannot remain intact with forced grouping with the TQ+." why even cut out trans people in the first place? there is no possible reason that does not have transphobic ideology behind it. the struggles of LGB and TQ+ folk go hand in hand, and we've historically been unified in our struggles for our rights. Don't try to erase that. I wonder, what would you say to the many LGB who are supportive of TQ+?

"And honestly? If a group oppresses another group, that by definition makes them an enemy." There are many straight people who are supportive of us. Are they our enemies too? We're fighting for equality, not superiority. "But thanks for trying to transplain homophobia to me." i'm bi too but ok

"If you did research before running your ignorant ass mouth--" What about right here in the United fucking States where the Republicans are making it harder for us to live by denying our healthcare? What about countries that don't recognize trans people at all, that don't ban conversion therapy, or have heavy restrictions on our recognition? The very fact that surgery is required to legally recognize gender change at all is oppressive because it's a severe roadblock in the transition process, especially for those who can't get it because of financial or other reasons.

"completely disregarding safety and fairness regulations and preventing women from having their own sports leagues" no one is doing that. women's sports is fine. if you did research before running your ignorant ass mouth, you'd find that trans people perform on an equal level as their cisgender teammates and opponents and win and lose just like any other athlete. there aren't any men in women's sports, only cis and trans women. "Nothing is stopping you and other trans identified folk from creating your own sports category." people barely watch women's sports anyway, who would wanna watch trans sports?? funding a separate transgender sports league would unfortunately be a huge financial loss. there's no good reason to even create a separate league anyway, because trans people are doing perfectly fine in sports as they are now.

gender is an artificial concept. We are not assigned our biological sex either, it’s observed. you know gender has always been around and has always had a heavy influence in how society works, don't play dumb. gender has always been separate from sex; for example, why is femininity often attributed to wearing dresses and makeup? not because of any biological reason, that's for sure. and gender isn't observed between our legs, sex is. you need to be able to make the distinction between sex and gender or else you are just delusional.

"Science does not prove that humans can change their biological sex." again, sex is not gender, and sex is irrelevant in most social contexts. when you're talking to a person, you don't look inside their pants to determine whether to call them sir or ma'am, you generally make a guess based on how they present, what they're wearing, what their name is, things like that. "And it does not prove the innate existence of gender." gender is a WELL researched, highly accepted concept across all of health, psychology, and philosophy. gender has always been around us, don't act like you've never seen it before.

"Heterosexuals cannot identify their way into being homosexual" no one is doing that. trans people can be any orientation. if a trans woman likes women, she is a lesbian; if a trans man likes men, he is gay, etc. also nice fucking use of "trans dogma" again even though i've made it clear we are not a dogma, we are human beings.

"So is lgb autonomy and freedom of association" if your sole purpose is to exclude people that you're irrationally repelled by, then is it really "freedom" or is it just that you're an asshole? you have the freedom to say you hate trans people, but that doesn't free you from the consequences of being an asshole.

"You’re saying, essentially, that trans people are infallible angels who can do no wrong and are never homophobic?" nope, i'm saying that this just generally isn't a thing that happens. there might be a few crazies that do i guess, i've never heard of those kinds of people, but you're trying to paint this delusion that ALL of them will screech and call you a bigot if you don't want to date them. i think you're the one who needs to get real. and i never said trans people are "infallible angels", we are human and we make mistakes like any other. you assholes like to paint us all as perverted demons, which we also obviously aren't.

"how can someone misgender you if gender doesn’t even exist? Not everyone believes in gender and you shouldn’t force them to either." hey, question, do you get alot of moss growing under there? do the worms like to come and swing by sometimes? must be cozy living under that rock of yours. the concept of gender has been around for so long, in fact, trans people and nonbinary identities have existed for a long time too. we didn't have proper terminology to describe ourselves until recently because historically we were always labeled as degenerates and sinners, but the vague concept of third genders and gender change have always been around.

"This coming from people who insist on referring to women as uterus havers." nope, we don't do that. not all women have uteruses, and not all people who have uteruses are women. if we want to refer to women who aren't trans, we simply say cis women. if you don't like that label, then you're just an asshole. the Latin prefixes trans- and cis- are opposites; trans means 'on the other side of' and cis means 'on the same side of'. cisgender simply means not transgender, and that's that.

"Criticizing trans views and policies is not “hatred” or “dehumanization”. It’s called critical thought." if you seek to deprive our ability to coexist with our LGB allies, then what else do you seek to do to us? by your insistence on calling us a "dogma", it's clear that you do not see us as valid human beings. you think that we are somehow an ideology that's imposed on people by the government or something, but we're just people who have been around throughout human history and have been suppressed by your disgusting so-called "critical thought". don't try to dodge your vile hatred with petty wordplay; you are not a critical thinker, you are a reactionary dipshit who disagrees with actual science and philosophy and just wants to see us erased. you are no better than the homophobes you pretend to hate.

By cutting out the TQ+, you also cut out:

-Intersex people

-Two-spirit gays and other culturally connected gays

-Gender nonconforming people

-Those who are questioning their sexuality

-Gays, lesbians, and bi's who are supportive of trans people

-Millions of kind, loving, supportive humans who have gone through indescribable, traumatic abuse and wish to build a safe, welcoming community

Why are you so eager to exclude and belittle people? Why do you tell them they 'don't know what real struggle looks like' when their healthcare, their future, and their lives are under attack? Do you truly value 'love', or do you just want to swat away as many people as possible? Why do you continue to hide under a rock and dig yourself deeper into festering hatred, when you can simply come out and support people who can help you?

Wouldn't it be easier to unite with our trans and nonbinary friends to help defeat the growing threat of genuine fascism in our country? Those conservative Christian nationalists and white supremacists who tell you you're "one of the good ones" would gladly turn around and shoot you in a heartbeat, because when they say they're fighting the 'woke gender ideology', they'll mutter in the same breath that you gays are 'degenerates', 'sodomites', and 'animals'. Why would you side with the villains, who see you the same way they see us?

We cannot let oppression continue in any form. We will all be on the winning side of history as we step closer to ending the cycle of hatred and bullying. Open your hearts and minds and you'll find that the everyone around you is just as human as you, and are more similar to you than you'd think. Trans people are people, just like you, and we need your help and support just as much as you need ours.

Isn't it neat how people who are supportive of all LGBTQ+ identities are also kinder, more loving, more empathetic, and more caring towards their friends and loved ones? Just something to think about.

Love wins. Trans rights are human rights.

[asparklerwhowrites]

Writing Indian characters, from an Indian person

India is a huge country! while most characters in mainstream media are from the 'big cities' i.e Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, etc, there are many, many more places and areas to look at! since India is such a vast country, there is incredible diversity. 19,500 languages and dialects are present, with people of different skin, eye, and hair colors and types! there are, of course, a lot of inherent prejudices present, which I'll address a little later.

#1. Know their roots

There is no 'one' Indian experience. People from different places celebrate different festivals, worship different gods, and speak different languages!

A checklist of things you should know about your Indian character's background, in essence:

Which state and city/town/village are they from?

How many and which languages do they speak, and with what frequency? (Mostly, people can speak at least two languages!)

Are they religious? (more on religion later)

What are some of their favourite memories/moments linked to their culture? (festivals, family gatherings, etc)

#2. Naming your character

Some common names for boys: Aarav, Advik, Shlok, Farhan, Ritvik, Aarush, Krish, Ojas, Zain.

Some common names for girls: Arushi, Ishita, Trisha, Rhea, Riya, Zoya, Vedika, Khushi, Charvi.

Common last names: Shah, Singh, Agarwal, Banerjee, Dala, Bhat, Joshi, Iyer, Jain, Dhawan, Dixit.

Be careful while picking a last name: last names are very much indicators of the ethnicity/community you're from! most older folks can guess the ethnicity of people just by their last name - it's pretty cool.

Naming systems usually follow the name-surname format, and children usually take the last name of their father - but I believe some regions have a bit of a different system, so look that up!

#3. Stereotypes to avoid

This goes without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Being 'Indian' shouldn't be your character's entire personality. Give them traits, feelings, and a purpose other than being a token diverse character. Some stereotypes that are really a no-no when it comes to Indian characters:

Making them good at math and academics in general (my Cs in math beg to differ that all Indians are good at math. often, the reason Indians are stereotyped to be so smart stems from an incredibly toxic and harmful environment at home which forces children to get good grades. unless you've experienced that, its not your story to write)

Making your Indian character 'hate' being Indian (not everyone?? hates their culture?? like there are many, MANY faults with India as a country, and it's important to recognize and take action against that - which often makes us iffy about how we feel about our country, it's genuinely not your place to write about that UNLESS you are Indian. don't bring in 'hatred' of a place you've never visited, and don't know much about.)

Make them scaredy-cats, 'cowards', who are good at nothing but being the 'brain' (I will literally behead you if you do this/lh)

#4. Why India shouldn't be portrayed as 'perfect' either

It's likely that most of you won't be going in SO deep with your Indian character, but India isn't the perfect 'uNiTy iN diVerSitY' as it's depicted in media. There are incredible tensions between religions (especially Hindus and Muslims), and even remnants of the 'untouchable' way of thinking remain between castes. There's a lot of violence against women, and misogyny is definitely something Indians are not foreign to. People with paler skin are considered to be 'better' than those with darker skin (in the older generations especially)

#5. Some common customs

Removing your shoes before entering the house, since your house is considered to be 'godly' and shoes shouldn't be brought inside

Eating dal (lentils), chawal (rice), sabji (a mixture of vegetables/meat that's cooked in different ways) roti (Indian flatbread) is considered to be a full, well-balanced meal and at least aspects of it are eaten for lunch and dinner (if not all four elements)

The suffixes -bhai (for men) and -ben (for women) are added to first names and are commonly used by adults to refer to someone of importance or who they hold to esteem.

However, 'bhai' (which literally means 'brother) is often used as slang when referring to friends or family. Other slang includes 'arrey' which is used to show irritation or 'yaar' which has the same context.

It's custom to call adults who you refer to in a friendly way 'aunty' or 'uncle', like the parents of your friends.

Talking back to your elders is forbidden, especially your grandparents who you have to refer to with utmost respect.

#6. Religions

India is a very religiously diverse country. The most common religion is Hinduism, then Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, and Buddhism. All religions have their own complexities, and since I'm a Hindu, I can tell you a little bit about that!

It's common to have a mandir which is a small altar dedicated to the deities your family worships. (Fun fact - they're usually placed in the East direction because that's where the sun rises)

Most kids can say a few shloks by-heart, which are a few lines of prayer! (lmao I've forgotten most but I used to be able to rattle off at least ten when I was younger)

Most people know at least the general plot of the Ramayan and Mahabharat - two famous epic stories. (I'm not sure if they're inherently 'Hindu' or not)

Many people wear necklaces with a small pendant of the deity they worship!

Common Hindu deities: Saraswati, Ganesha, Shiva, Krishna, Vishnu.

It's important to note that religious violence is a thing. Muslims especially, are oppressed and discriminated against. It's a very, very complex issue, and one that's been going on for thousands of years.

#7. Myth & Facts

India is a very poor country

Yep! Lakhs of people live in villages with no electricity, clean water, or amenities nearby. There's no point sugar-coating it. There are HUGE gaps between the poor and the rich (have you heard of Ambani and Adani :D) and while our millionaires rejoice in their thirty-story mansions, people die of famine, disease, and hunger every day. I am personally lucky enough to be EXTREMELY privileged and attend an international school and live in one of the most developed cities. Most people aren't as lucky as me, and it's a really true, horrifying reality.

Everyone in India is vegetarian

No lmao - while many people ARE, there's a greater and equal amount of non-vegetarian people.

We burn our dead in parking lots

This circulated back when the second wave was going on in India, and the media blew it out of proportion. First of all, what the actual f!ck. Cremation is a Hindu ritual, and by saying that aLL Indians burn their dead you are erasing the other religions here. Secondly, cremation is a sacred ritual only attended by close family of the deceased member. It does not happed in PARKING LOTS. It's a time of grief and loss, not a way to humiliate a religion for the way they treat their dead.

Drop any other questions about India in the comments/DM me!

[angrylizardjacket]

it's in the blood // this is tradition

Summary: Children inherit all sorts of traits from their parents. Not all these traits are good.

"My reputation preceded me before I was born."

[ charlotte & lola au ]

A/N: 2292 words. Halsey's new album killed me on the spot. i talk a lot about the next gen being mirrors of their parents, but i'd like to go into detail about that not necessarily being a positive. @misscharlottelee this made me feel things. i love these kids.

Warnings: overdose mention, addiction discussion, mentions of drug abuse.

Penelope Dingley-Lee

Tommy can count the amount of times he'd seen Razzle truly angry on one hand, and here and now he can see it again, written all over his neice's face. He'd thought she would look like Charlie when she's angry, and occasionally she does, the way her lip curls derisively, dismissively, that's very reminiscent of his cousin, but here and now, her blue eyes are hazy, cloudy, and her lips twist with an irate arrogance that is worryingly familiar.

Angry and high and wearing clothes that don't quite match, in this moment she's exactly her father's daughter.

She's been in the papers again. Her tits have been in magazines again. Tommy bites down on his instinctual desire to repremand her; she'd call him a hypocrite, call him an old man, tell him to keep his opinions to himself while she could still buy his sex tape out of a shady car boot down the street.

Charlie was like that too, on occasion, wit too quick for him to keep up with. When she got into a mood like this, Tommy didn't have to worry so much; usually Razzle would egg her on, but knew when to pull her back.

"It's my god given, motherfucking right to go feral -" he'd heard Charlie back in the eighties holler at three in the morning, high on amphetamines and waving a gossip rag above her head. Razzle would be on the sofa, equally fucked up, but gazing at her like she hung the stars in the sky.

"Lola gets photographed at least once a month stark naked along the strip like it's a sport, why is my Playboy shoot a national crisis?! My tits are fantastic!"

"They are, my love," Razzle nods seriously, and Tommy pulls his pillow from beneath his head, trying to either block out their voices through the thin walls, or maybe smother himself. The girl beside him, the groupie whose name he doesn't know, asks blearily why there's so much yelling. Tommy doesn't answer.

A week later, Tommy is the one to bail out Charlie and Razzle for public indecency, and they're both beaming from ear to ear.

Here in the present, Penny is draped out on the sofa, laughing low and pleased as she watches TV.

"TMZ blurred out my tits," she snorts, "cowards."

"Penny..." he can't help the faintly disappointed notes in his voice when he says her name.

"Thomas, I've read The Dirt," Penny fires back venemously. Hypocrite he hears in her tone, you have no power over me.

There's something hollow in her eyes in the photos he sees of her in the papers. She wears her father's inflluence and her heart on her crushed velvet sleeve, on the arm of a shallow, pretty, band boy who plays badly and loudly. But she laughs louder, though tthe sound is low and unconvincing if anyone bothered to listen hard enough, and Tommy wonders if he has enough dark hair dye left for when that boy breaks her heart.

Jupiter Lee

Tommy is proud to watch Jupiter on stage, but he is afraid.

Their anger is something he remembers from Lola, the way they cling to the past with vitriol echoes their mother, but on stage, they drink up the attention, get high off the love the audience gives, and he sees himself in those moments.

A child of addicts, Jupiter had drawn lines in the sand for themselves that they refused to cross; no alcohol, no drugs, and they'd stayed loyal to that. But highs come in all forms; they simply picked a different kind of poison without realising.

On stage, halfway between the gutter and a god complex, Tommy knows the smile they wear all too well.

Rebellion from Jupiter didn't shock the world like it did when it was Penny's name in the papers. Jupiter's trajectory was spot on in the eyes of the public, but rebellion wouldn't be the thing that broke them.

Once, so long ago that it's a miracle the memory survived, Tommy remembers asking Lola what she would be doing if she wasn't with the band. Lola gave him an easy, bleary smile, laughing sweetly when she told him that one way or another, she'd be here. In the moment it overwhelms him with love. In hindsight it breaks his heart.

"Come on, I think this is inevitable," Jupiter smiles on television as an interviewer asks them the same question; if they weren't making music what they'd be doing, "as if I'd do anything other than this."

'Don't you know where I come from?' is left unspoken, but Tommy still hears it.

He tries to picture himself in a life without the world at his feet the way he has now. No image comes to mind. Nothing else makes sense. Even if he wanted to do something else, wanted to grow up to be something else, he couldn't even begin to picture it for himself, tragedy and all.

They play their parts. They let history repeat itself. Jupiter makes mistakes Tommy and Lola had already learned from. Penny plays Jupiter's conciousness until the role grates on her nerves, diving head first into chaos, taking Jupiter with her with little convincing.

Tommy remembers this too.

When the world looks at Penny and Jupiter, they like to remember how Lola was seen as a bad influence on Charlotte, but forget that Tommy would have followed Charlotte in to Hell without hesitation.

Leo "Seo" Sixx

Lola has google alerts set up for her son, Seo, because he disappears for months without warning. Tommy asks how he is, and Lola looks to her phone with a tight smile, telling him that he's competeing in a skateboarding competition in Prague. She learned that from Twitter.

Seo comes and goes without warning, and talks to his siblings more than his parents. He loves them, but he hasn't allowed himself to stop for years. He doesn't know how. Then again, neither did Lola or Nikki.

"Jupiter thinks a lot about legacy, don't they?" He's in Tommy's kitchen, eating a poptart, when Tommy returns home one friday evening. He's waiting for Penny and Jupiter to finish getting ready, the three of them going out.

"Do your parents know you're in town?" Tommy asks with faint amusement, though there's a twinge of guilt in his gut when Leo considers that he should probably let them know. Says he forgot. Tommy's not sure if he believes him; like his parents before him, he tends to leave a lot unsaid. It's part of his charm, the world seems to think, but Tommy knows all to well how deliberate of an act it can be.

"Jup's got all this stuff in their head about legacy and who they should be," he continues his earlier thought, "which I guess makes sense, they tie a lot of themselves up in their identity," he shrugs, then, "I don't know Leo."

Tommy's not sure if he's talking about the grandfather he's named after, or himself.

"You've given this a lot of thought," Tommy says quietly, humouring him.

"I think a lot," Seo responds, "I've been thinking about going back on my meds, its weird being off of them." Of course this concerns Tommy, who knows objectively that Seo isn't his kid, but he's close enough that Tommy feels like he's allowed to be concerned. "I'm worried a doctor's note isn't going to be enough to let me compete at the Olympics on speed," falls too casually from Seo's lips, alarming Tommy in an instant. Though it must clearly show on his face, as Seo breaks out into an apologetic grin, "dextroamphetamine, for my ADHD. I've been trying to wean off it for the Olympics, it's been hard -" but his next words, said so blithe, so casual, have Tommy's heart stopping in his chest as he's thrown back thirty years, "I've been on them since I was like eleven years old; it was great, I could think, like the right amount, but now I... I think everything. I feel everything. Its a lot." He shrugs, like he didn't just become an echo of his father.

Seo's parents both died twice from overdoses, and now their son feels like he can't function without amphetamines.

Objectively Tommy knows that they work for Seo, that he's not abusing them he simply uses them to help him function, but the irony is not lost on him. It's a lot to unpack. He doesn't think to ask about the Olympics; it slips his mind until he sees Seo and a silver medal on his Twitter feed.

Lola calls Tommy in tears. She's proud, but she wishes she'd known, wishes she'd been able to watch it live, or go over and support him in person.

No-one in Seo's life seems to fully know or understand his intentions or actions, no-one can predict his next move. He puts up a bright facade, but like his parents before him, he does not trust the world to know him.

They don't know where he goes in the few months after the Olympics, all they know is that he doesn't come home.

Cerie "CerieThree" Sixx

Since she'd turned sixteen, Tommy has never seen Cerie Sixx without a smile. That is a very deliberate choice that she's made.

She's made a choice to rise above the percieved grime of her origins. She's halfway across the country, smiling for a camera she can control, editing her image before she lets it out into the world. Cerie Three - even the name the world knows reflects this; she's picked apart the context she was born into, disecting it, deciding which was useful to show the world, disposing of the rest.

She speaks warmly to her family, from what Tommy can gather, but the people on the peripheries of their life seem more like associates in the coldest sense of the world. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes half the time when she sees Tommy, and she shakes his hand when her brothers will hug him. The internet is closer to her than he is.

Cerie looks the most like her mother of all her siblings; she's 21, the exact same age Lola was when she met Tommy, but half the time he can barely see the resemblence. Lola had let the world see a villain at that age; Cerie had learned from that, had rejected that, rejected the cold, hard humanity of her mother's fronting. Cerie wanted to be perfect. Cerie had to be perfect, hyper aware of her own image, like her siblings seem to be, but the way she'd so effectively shaped her public identity was kind of terrifying.

Perhaps this was what it was like for people who didn't know Lola, only allowed to know the image she put out into the world, or people who only knew Nikki for his stage presence.

But the more Tommy thinks about it, the more he remembers just how effectively Lola had wrapped the band around her little finger when she set her mind to it, how she talked her way around exectives despite being dressed like she'd woken up in the gutter and fucked up on any number of drugs. Lola understood people, and it seemed Cerie did too.

Cerie Sixx, twenty one, doesn't stop creating content, doesn't stop studying, and doesn't stop smiling. Two of those three things are inhereted traits, inhereted determination, and the third is a choice.

Cyrus Sixx

Though Cyrus had inhereted much of his parent's musical talent, the same way Jupiter had, Cyrus had also inhereted a love of the high life. Even so, he's so full of love, kissing his mother on both cheeks before he goes out to get shitfaced in the bars she was decades before he was even born.

He works hard, at his job, on his music, but his partying matches it just as well. He knows exactly how far he has to fall before he meets the depths his parents' had sunk to, and though he doesn't voice this, his arrogance comes across in his actions.

There'd always be someone to pull him away from swan diving to rock bottom. He takes that for granted, and keeps getting closer and closer.

The only one of Nikki and Lola's children who still lives at home, he's the only one like them in the way they'd feared.

"He's going to have more success than he will ever be able to comprehend," Nikki had told Tommy, the day after Cyrus had been admitted to hospital after staying up for four days while high and obsessing over a song he had been working on. Nikki had found him having a fit after having fallen from his desk chair. Now, sitting on Tommy's patio in the sunset, he looks tired, he looks afraid, "if he doesn't end up killing himself first."

A month ago, the fire department and the police had to pull him, kicking and screaming and bareass naked from a tree in the middle of town. His parents had bailed him out, had felt a familiar sting of guilt as they find themselves reminded of their own youthful exploits. They repremand him, of course, but they both know the only reason they stopped climbing trees was because there had been no-one to pick them up after.

Nikki sees himself in his sons mistakes, but he'd had to learn concequences the hard way.

Tommy loves his family and all it's strange branches, as well as their raucous youth, but his closest friends were some of the most volatile people he'd known, and somehow he'd forgotten that as time as taken people and memories from him.

But these children were made in their image.

[stillness-in-green]

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Two)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

Introduction and Part One

PART TWO: Logistics Problems

The Initial Arrests

Looking over the events above, one thing becomes apparent almost immediately: the only one that involves numbers even resembling those at the villa are the Rice Riots, and arrests there were scattered across two months. The only thing I could find that even came close to the idea of arresting the entire PLF in a day was a mass detainment in India in 2011: in the run-up to a separatist rally[7] that had stated its intention to be a “Million Man March,” police reportedly detained 100,000 people to stop them from attending. To do this, they used auditoriums and stadiums, not actual detention facilities.

And you can see why! We see a few pictures of the Gunga Villa group in the aftermath, but they’re pictures that raise more questions than they answer. Consider this one:

The detainment and relocation of the PLF. (Chapter 296)

This is but the tiniest fraction of the people captured, but every single one of them has had their hands and arms bound. The ones we see in the basement are restrained similarly. Where did all those restraints come from? Who got them all here? Were they, perhaps, made by the man in the center, who conspicuously has lengths of the same restraint wrapped around his wrists? If so, how did he make them all so freely, when most similar quirks we see rely on a certain amount of body mass or caloric intake?

Or take those transports in the background. How many people can each hold, and how long will it take to move a group of 17,000 into secure facilities? How are those 17,000 being kept docile all that time, especially once they’ve been moved onto the transports? Will there be a hero onboard every one, making sure the prisoners don’t get the opportunity to plan amongst themselves? Were there similar transports parked at every other raid site across the rest of the country? Enough of them and their assigned heroes to move the other 98,000 people?

Consider what we know about the Paranormal Liberation Front.[8] While easiest to compare numerically to widespread protest movements, they’re unlike any historical mass arrest in that context because they are, every one of them, combat-trained and ready to give their lives for the cause. There's no one there to tell them all to stand down, at least not that we see give such an order. Trumpet, perhaps, could have, but why would he have done so? Re-Destro gave the order back in Deika, but Re-Destro seems to have lost consciousness following his battle with Edgeshot, and I much doubt he’d have given the same order here as he did when facing Shigaraki in any case.

My Hero Academia has a long history of treating police custody as something like a status effect, like once a villain has been subdued, they’re In Custody, and magically become incapable of attempting to mount an escape. But why should this be so? There’s a relatively common misconception I see in fanfic that the police have “quirk cancellation restraints,” but let’s be clear: no such device exists in the series. This is the ostensible reason All For One and Muscular are restrained so unforgivingly; it’s why the prisoners in Tartarus have guns pointed at their heads at all times. It’s why Overhaul’s drug was such a big deal and it’s why the only way to stop Gigantomachia was to drug him or have Best Jeanist bind him in steel cables.

There is no way to stop someone in MHA from using their quirk except convincing them not to, via diplomacy or intimidation, or rendering them unconscious. Which of those tactics, pray tell, is in use here, such that the enormous numbers of people at issue remain subdued until they can be moved to secure facilities?

The Liberated Districts

Another problem quickly presents itself. We’re told that the PLF’s “other bases” around the country were hit, but we weren’t shown what that looked like. We saw Slidin’ Go and another hero in a prisoner transport; we know from bonus material that people like Class 1-B and Mirio—and presumably any number of other high school hero interns from around the country—were involved in those other raids. Still, we didn’t see what those base raids actually entailed.

That’s not surprising, because “base” is not really a very accurate word to describe the scale of the problem. See, with the intention of the raids being to put a stop to the PLF in one fell swoop, rather than risk a drawn-out conflict with a force that Hawks describes as, “On par with, maybe even greater than,” the power of their hero-saturated society, the Commission would have had to take into account an aspect of the MLA that readers learned about during My Villain Academia: what Trumpet calls “liberated districts.”

Deika was a liberated district—an entire town where an enormous chunk of the population was made up of members of the MLA. Ominously, the fact that Trumpet had a ready term to describe it—“a” liberated district, not “our” liberated district, or even “the first” liberated district—suggests that Deika was not the only one.[9] Further, Curious describes what we can expect the heroes would have to contend with in such areas: people who look like everyday civilians but are actually combat-trained warriors. Combat-trained warriors not gathered in one conveniently isolated compound or solitary building, but scattered across miles of homes and businesses, schools and parks, anywhere that an ordinary person might be found spending their day.

That is an entirely different can of worms than raiding one single building; thus it is here that the logistics really start to strain. Mass arrests of a civilian populace don't work at all the same way as a round-up of people all in a single area—how do you arrest an entire town? Well, there is such a thing as martial law, or military occupation, and maybe those tactics would work if the PLF had sent all their ace combatants to the villa and all the people remaining in the target city were terrified and unarmed civilians who could be ordered to keep inside their houses until further notice lest they start getting shot. That is not at all how the bulk of the PLF—that is, the ranks of the MLA—have been portrayed, though.[10] Again, Re-Destro and Curious characterize their 116,000 warriors as all being trained, combat-ready, prepared to rise up to answer the call. That is not a population that you're going to keep cowed with a certain minimum police presence, especially as time drags on.

Anyway, an occupation is clearly out-of-keeping with how the text presents the operation being run. We’re given no reason to assume other raids were any different than the ones we saw: a team of heroes launches a coordinated assault with a backline set up to catch stragglers. We’re told, after all, that the other sympathizers were “rounded up,” so extended detainment-in-place clearly wasn’t the intention. That just returns us to the problem, though.

According to Trumpet, Deika was 90% MLA. Presumably it was one of their higher-concentration bases, yes, but the situation isn’t any simpler in places that are “only” e.g. 80%, 70%, 60% inducted. It only becomes complicated in different ways.

Imagine a 70% liberated district. PLF-adherents are in the government, the municipal operations, the schools, the stores. How does this town keep running in a state of mass arrest? If the 70% are removed, what are the other 30% to do? Is the town even livable in that state? Will the remainder have to relocate? Can they afford that, and if not, what measures will be taken to help them? How quickly can those measures be enacted?[11]

The liberated districts present a bevy of other problems, too, but we’ll come back to those in Part Three.

Detainment Facilities

Let’s look at some more real-world facts and numbers.

As of 2018, Japan had 184 penal institutions, a term which covers prisons, detention houses, and juvenile facilities of either type. There are 70 prisons, 108 detention houses (eight of which are major facilities; the rest smaller branch locations), and 6 juvenile facilities. Their official capacity—that is, the number of occupants they are considered able to house without becoming overcrowded—is roughly 89,000. Their current population is around 48,000.

This puts Japan’s prison density—how close they are to being at full capacity—at 54%. They could not even double their occupancy without becoming overcrowded. Looking back to our PLF numbers, this tells us that real-life Japan could take an influx of 17,000. They absolutely could not take an influx of 115,000.

Here’s another way to look at it: in Japan currently, the rate of incarceration is 38 people per 100,000, in a population of 126 million. Adding the PLF to those numbers would mean they're incarcerating 130 per 100,000—more than triple the amount.

There’s another problem on top of the capacity issue: in Japan, penal institutions are divided up by what kind of prisoner they’re intended to house. Remand prisoners—that is, pre-trial detainees—are to be housed in different facilities than convicted prisoners. Convicted prisoners are sorted further by demographic traits, the type of offense they’ve committed, whether or not it was their first offense, and so on. For example, there’s an entire prison in Chiba Prefecture dedicated to housing men convicted of traffic violations; elsewhere, even murderers are subdivided according to criminal affiliation and likelihood of reoffending.

The relevance here is obvious. The problem isn't merely that there is limited prison capacity, but that that capacity is further limited by what space is available in the correct type of prison. And I am very prepared to bet that All For One prioritized targeting prisons that held violent offenders; he even implies as much when he describes the people he freed as violent escapees.

Speaking of All For One’s prison breaks, let’s take a look at some canonical numbers. They offer both information that mitigates the problems above, but also present new reasons to be concerned.

All For One, the night of his escape from Tartarus, targets seven other prisons, managing to free at least some inmates from six of them. Including the Tartarus escapees, 10,000 convicts are freed.

10,000 from seven prisons. Consider again the numbers above: Japan currently houses less than five times that many in twenty-six times as many penal institutions. In general, prisons don’t hold anywhere near those numbers—the largest one in Japan houses just barely over 2,000; even one that houses 500 is considered to be a large inmate population.[12]

I did some math based on the numbers I had available, and my rough estimate is that, in Japan, about 88% of the carceral population—42,000 people—are housed in the for-real prisons; the other 12% are remand prisoners and a negligible percent are incarcerated minors.

The MHA numbers are wildly, wildly higher. Now, this makes sense. In this post by @codenamesazanka, she notes that the first My Hero Academia movie describes Japan’s crime rate as a somewhat vaguely defined 6%, and estimates that this means the crime rate in MHA’s Japan is seven times higher than in real life—and that this is drastically lower than anywhere else in the world thanks solely to All Might! In other parts of the world, the crime rate is over 20% at minimum. So it seems reasonable to assume that Japan’s carceral capacity has increased likewise. Not, I think, to the degree that they automatically have the prison space to match their crime rate, but certainly more space than in real life.

Assuming, then, that MHA’s Japan has far more and/or far larger prison facilities, that also means they must need that kind of space—which means the space is already in use. Which, again, takes us back to the problem of overcrowding. If not—if the country is easily capable of dumping 115,000 people in prison without even causing a ripple of difficulty—then that implies its own deeply harrowing things about the rate of incarceration in the country. Either way, it sounds like a country that badly, badly needs to find a better way of doing things.

Legal Proceedings

Here’s another issue to consider: the legal proceedings. See, Edgeshot says this:

The hero Edgeshot explains why protecting the country requires these sixteen-year-olds be on the frontlines in a fight with people absolutely ready to kill them. Words cannot describe how much I wanted Re-Destro to knot this guy around a tree. (Chapter 263)

“If any of them get out, they could keep terrorizing other places.”

So assume for a moment that everything went exactly according to plan. Virtually all 115,000 members of the Liberation Front got rounded up, there’s easily enough room for them in Japan’s correctional facilities, and now the entire organization is awaiting trial. What happens next?

The Judicial Process

To provide some context for those of my readers whose only exposure to the judicial process is pop culture depictions, the very first thing that should happen after a person is arrested in the U.S. is a pre-trial appearance, at which people are formally told what the charges against them are and bail is set or denied. Non-violent offenders, provided they have someone able to post bail, are usually able to await their trial date at home, albeit under travel restrictions. Typically this pre-trial hearing should be within two business days; if a detainee hasn’t seen a judge in that time, the prosecutors’ office is obligated to let them go.[13] This doesn’t necessarily mean the person is off the hook entirely, of course; they can be arrested again later. It just means they’re free to go for the time being.

I don’t think for one second that Japan’s legal system can handle processing an influx the size of the PLF in just a few days. For comparison’s sake, in 2018 (the same year all my incarceration numbers come from, incidentally), 206,000 people were arrested in total, for the whole year. So will the overflow just be let go? Released to their homes to wait for the police to come back when they have more time? Yet that doesn’t seem to track with how Edgeshot was talking, does it?

On the one hand, if you look at the numbers from some of my historical analogues, it’s very consistent that only a small portion of people swept up in mass arrests in Japan ever actually reach trial. For the Rice Riots and the March 15 Incident, that portion is about a third—quite sizeable, given the numbers involved—but the others are lower still: the long-term arrests under the Peace Preservation Laws saw only about a twelfth of those arrested actually brought to trial; for the Righteous Army, it was less than a tenth.

Frankly, you don't arrest those kinds of numbers and then actually prosecute all of them; you arrest them to scare the shit out of people, and then you try the ringleaders and whichever others you have the most dirt on. This is the pattern in every other instance that involves over a thousand people being arrested.

On the other hand, even setting aside the fact that people can apparently be dropped in Tartarus without trial now,[14] a significant difference between the U.S. and Japan is that pretrial detention can stretch on and on and on in Japan. Legally speaking, charges should be filed with 72 hours, but prosecutors can request ten more days twice, then repeat the process over by adding other potential charges about which they need to question the suspect. So, yes, I suppose that, if the authorities do have the facilities to keep the PLF in, there’s nothing stopping them from dragging this detainment out indefinitely—it just isn’t very in-keeping with the historical record to do so with all of them.

As you might expect, lengthy detainments are a massively controversial aspect of the Japanese legal system to human rights activists both locally and abroad, since the loophole of detainees not yet having been charged or tried allows police to get around a lot of the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed, particularly the right to legal representation.[15]

So, now that I’ve brought up the right to legal counsel, here’s another procedural issue: due to a generally non-litigious culture and a very difficult bar exam, there's a dearth of attorneys in Japan. Defense attorneys have a particularly hard time; thanks to the presumption of guilt of those arrested by police, and an oft-vicious ostracization of criminals, it's seen as something of a blemish on one's character to willingly defend the accused, so defense lawyers are frequently unpopular and underpaid. I have to assume MHA is facing similar problems.[16] Good luck finding all the people you need to investigate and defend the new glut of people in the system, though!

No, the reason real-life Japan’s legal system can go on functioning even with a shortage of lawyers is, I suspect, that compared to how long pre-trial detention can go on, trials are fairly quick. Legally, they're required to last no longer than a few weeks. There is, however, concern among some in the legal profession that cases are not being examined closely enough, leading to preventable errors and miscarriages of justice,[17] due to both the haste with which trials are conducted and aspects of Japan's “lay judge” system.

Lay judges are a unique feature of Japan's legal system, in some ways similar to—and in other ways very distinct from—a jury of one’s peers. As in a U.S. jury, lay judges are a panel randomly selected from the citizenry to hear evidence and render judgement. However, where jurists are a passive audience to the presentation of the case, only debating the merits behind closed doors after the case concludes, lay judges are encouraged to take active part in the trial process, empowered to question witnesses and challenge evidence. The lay judges are joined by a smaller number of professional judges; a verdict requires a majority vote of the judges' panel, in which at least one vote is that of said professional judges.

As to what this has to do with concerns about justice, consider, if you will, how the requirements of a system that demands active involvement from its participants might intersect with the (self-)perception of the Japanese people as modest and not wanting to “make trouble” for others, particularly when combined with a widespread belief that suspects would not be brought to trial if they weren’t guilty. Additionally, in the specific context of My Hero Academia, consider how bias about villains or “villainous quirks” will influence such judgements.

I’ll talk more about the presupposition of guilt in Japan and how it relates to the treatment of suspects by both officials and the public in Part Three, but for now, let’s consider the trial itself. What will the charges be? What will the sentences be? How long will the PLF members be in prison? And will that time in prison do the slightest thing to prevent them from going right back to what they were doing when they get out? Are they just going to be imprisoned indefinitely? Until they say they change their minds?

When I began my research, there were two main things I wanted to examine in regard to crimes the PLF at large might be on the hook for: membership in an illegal organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism.

Japan and Illegal Organizations

So here’s the thing: Japan doesn’t criminalize membership in organizations categorically. Because of the government’s history abusing laws to crack down on labor organizations and political dissent—e.g. the March 15 Incident—any attempts to legislate the process of banning criminal organizations get significant pushback from freedom of speech advocates. After all, critics say, the police may say that your community activist group doesn’t count as a terrorist organization now, but what’s actually stopping them from categorizing it as such in the future?

Now, that’s not to say Japan doesn’t have ways to regulate such groups at all! I’ll talk more about this later on, but briefly, groups that are found likely to be advocating for “terroristic subversive activity” can be forcibly barred from e.g. printing their organizational material, holding public assemblies, or owning property under the group’s name. One thing that isn’t mentioned in those prohibitions, though, is actual membership in the organization. That’s because, as I said, Japan is hugely gun-shy about criminalizing membership in any sort of organization, even organizations that have been declared criminal.[18]

It’s illegal to pick mushrooms on conservation lands if you’re doing it to raise money for your terrorist organization. It’s illegal to use protest sit-ins against new apartment buildings if you’re doing it on behalf of the mob. But it is not illegal to simply be a member of a terrorist organization or the mob—not even if that group has been formally dissolved by the government.

We can see a few places where this holds true even in the universe of My Hero Academia. The Shie Hassaikai is, like many yakuza groups, under police surveillance, but not barred outright from existing. Likewise, whatever prohibition there might once have been on printing material in support of the Metahuman Liberation Army has clearly lapsed, otherwise Curious would never have gotten away with reprinting Destro’s memoir.

Being a member of the MLA was likely not illegal as such, not any more so than membership in Aum Shinrikyo (currently calling themselves Aleph) or yakuza groups are in real life—they’re surveilled, sure, their activities curtailed, absolutely, but banned outright? Not so much. And membership in the PLF certainly wouldn't be banned even if it were legal to ban such memberships, seeing as it's brand new and, at the time of the raid, would not yet have been targeted for restrictions on its activity, lest such targeting tip the group off that the government was aware of its existence.

Keep that last point in mind; we’ll be coming back to it later, too.

Conspiracy

So, if membership in the PLF isn’t illegal in and of itself, what else can the government use to charge the 115,000 people they preemptively arrested?

Well, in general, for someone to be tried for a crime, they need to be either caught in the act or caught in an attempt. An attempted crime is something that is in immediate danger of happening—for example, if someone tries to kidnap a baby from the pediatric wing of a hospital but is caught by security before they make it out of the building, that’s an attempted kidnapping. An attempted crime may or may not be punished with the same severity as a successfully enacted crime, depending on the nature of the offense and the local laws.

What an attempted crime differs from, however, is a planned crime. If someone was planning to commit tax evasion but decided not to, they cannot be charged with tax evasion. This is how most criminal charges work—you can’t be charged with something you didn’t at least try to do, regardless of how close you came to it, and a policeman who tries to goad someone into such a crime should rightfully be running into charges of entrapment.

There are, unsurprisingly, some exceptions. It’s not uncommon for countries to criminalize planning insurrection or treason, and in cases like that, police are under absolutely no obligation to wait around for an active attempt before they respond. They can and will move as soon as they have sufficient evidence to get an arrest warrant. For lesser offenses, though, the legality of the advance-planning of a crime varies from country to country, and this is where we start getting into conspiracy.

Conspiracy in the legal sense has a couple of elements: it must be something that 1) two or more people 2) knowingly 3) discussed a plan for, which 4) led at least one person in the group to commit a “preparatory action.” i.e. do something to advance aforementioned plan.[19] All of these elements have to be proven to get everyone in a group on a conspiracy charge, though not all members of a group have to be in on all parts of a plan. If these elements are met, then everyone in the group can be charged with any and all crimes committed over the course of the plan being carried out, regardless of each member’s individual involvement.

What all this means for our purposes is that, because the heroes made the first move, they have to get the PLF on something that is illegal to even plan, not something that only becomes illegal in the attempt.[20] Huge portions of the PLF may wind up being released if the police can't conclusively prove not merely their association with the PLF, but also their direct knowledge of the relevant plans—not difficult for the ringleaders, obviously, but much dicier when you start getting out into the liberated districts. If the prosecution can't prove that knowledge, and lacks confessions otherwise—and as I’ll discuss in more detail later, a confession in and of itself is not considered sufficient; there has to be corroborating evidence[21]—huge swathes of those people are going to get cut loose.

So what are police going to be looking for? What crimes can the PLF be charged with under current law, and what are the sentences for such crimes like?

Prior to 1952, conspiracy was only illegal in the following cases: insurrection, treason, or aiding/abetting/instigating either of the above. Conspiracy to commit treason as a charge is right out—everything the PLF is doing, they’re doing for their own sake and for the sake of the future of Japan, not for the sake of a foreign power. Conspiracy to commit/instigate insurrection is more debatable, but, surprisingly, shakier than it might appear at first. This is because of the specific, legal definition of the term.

Japan’s Penal Code defines insurrection as rioting for the purpose of overthrowing the government, usurping the sovereignty of the State, or otherwise subverting constitutional order. The middle clause, the one regarding territorial sovereignty, is obviously not at issue—the PLF is not attempting to stake out land for a new country and secede. It’s the rest of the description that’s debatably more applicable, but still, to my eye, not an easy guilty verdict.

Firstly, per Hawks’ description of the plan, the PLF at least wants the government and the constitutional order intact enough for the Hearts & Minds Party to “storm the political world,” which to me suggests that their target is public opinion, not the intangible apparatus of the government itself. Further, even if you did argue that their manipulation of public opinion constitutes subversion of the constitutional order, you’d also have to argue the rioting part, and we have no idea whether any of the PLF’s plans actually involved a significant number of people mobbing in public as opposed to e.g. small strike teams.

So is the PLF off the hook? Not hardly! The Penal Code was established in 1907, after all—it’s been expanded lots since then, and those expansions are where the PLF really starts to run into trouble.

The Subversive Activities Prevention Act of 1952 criminalized a number of conspiracy-to-commit crimes—crimes like arson and homicide—if said crimes were to be undertaken “with the intent to promote, support or oppose any political doctrine or policy.” For example, conspiring to burn down a bank was not criminalized. Conspiring to burn down a bank as an act of protest against a new tax law became illegal as all get-out.

This gets us where we need to be for the PLF, as, on top of the crimes laid out in the 1952 act, I am very prepared to believe that acts of villainy (that is, illegal quirk use) in advancement of political ends have been folded into this particular branch of Japanese law.[22] So then, what kind of conspiracy charges are we looking at here, and what associated crimes?

I see two major possibilities at this point, and they hinge on exactly how much the prosecution ties Shigaraki’s attack on Jaku and Gigantomachia’s destruction to the run-of-the-mill PLF member sitting in a backwater town somewhere doing nothing more involved than e.g. quirk training and attending weekly meetings to get updates on where the plans stand for their local regiment’s part of the big push the following month. It’s difficult to say how feasible it is to make that connection—there are provisions in Japanese law for group criminal liability, but they tend to require things like joint actions, or specific knowledge and intent regarding the crime in question.

Obviously, random PLF members nowhere near Machia’s path of destruction didn’t take joint actions to abet it, so the pertinent question is, was Machia going on a rampage part of the plan? How about Shigaraki’s destruction of Jaku? If so, how much did random PLF members know about it? How specific does that knowledge need to be? If, say, the original plan had Shigaraki decaying the greater part of Hosu, does it still meet the specific knowledge requirement if he wound up decaying Jaku instead? If Machia was supposed to stampede across Tokyo, do the PLF members who chased after him count as furthering a conspiracy to do so when he stomped across Osaka and Kyoto instead?

Frankly, I don’t think we can say for sure how much a randomly selected member of the rank and file would have known. Any knowledge they had would have been many steps removed from the people actually making the plan; I would tend to think that the outer reaches of the PLF mostly knew about whatever plan their specific group would be tasked with, but would have much patchier knowledge of plans beyond that immediate sphere. As to how much that matters to the courts? Well, let’s take a look at the final logistics problem: the sentencing.

Sentencing Standards

First things first: I absolutely do not think the death penalty is on the table for the rank and file. People like Shigaraki and Dabi, yes, based on their pre-PLF crimes alone; Re-Destro and the other lieutenants are certainly a strong possibility. But the rank and file? No. Looking at our historical referents, it has never been the case that every single person involved in a mass arrest incident has been sentenced equally harshly, even in the case of the February 26 Incident’s outright uprising against the state! And that was in a time where human rights were considerably less enshrined in the constitution; in the modern day, the death penalty is usually reserved for murder cases,[23] typically only those involving multiple murders or particularly aggravated cases involving torture or ransom.

Whether or not the courts could attempt to punish all of the members of the PLF for all the deaths caused by Shigaraki and Gigantomachia under group criminal liability provisions, the degree of mass international outcry sentencing 115,000 people to death would involve is difficult to fathom. Egypt's 2014 mass trials of the Muslim Brotherhood are a good referent, and they “only” involved about 1,200 people.[24] Multiplying that number ten times over? I very much doubt Horikoshi is prepared to even imply that the system all these cute kids want to grow up and join is anywhere near that grisly and authoritarian.

Anyway, if the MHA government were that quick to hand down death sentences, I very much doubt Stain or All For One would still be alive—or, indeed, that Tartarus would serve much function at all. It's described, after all, as a place that houses those who threaten Japan's security on a fundamental, national level. That's the kind of thing countries keep death penalties around for.

That said, let’s assume for the time being that Shigaraki and Machia will be treated as their own thing, and what the PLF are going to be tried for is more in tune with the plan as Hawks laid it out. Remember again that the heroes attacked preemptively. This means that, in this scenario, all the conspiracy stuff is on the table, but it’s the only thing on the table—because it’s all the PLF had time to get to! There might be a few other charges—for example, if the black market support good proliferation is part of their plan, and the weapon proliferation is already underway, the whole group could feasibly be charged with whatever crime covers illegal weapon distribution. However, whatever crimes those support goods would be used to commit haven’t happened yet, so on that front, the PLF is still only on the hook for planning them.

Here, then, is what the Penal Code and its relevant revisions have to say about conspiracy sentences:

If they do wind up getting the group on conspiracy to incite insurrection:

A person who prepares for or plots an insurrection is punished by imprisonment without work for not less than 1 year but not more than 10 years.

(…)

A person who aids the commission of any of the crimes prescribed above by the supply of arms, funds, or food, or by any other act, is punished by imprisonment without work for not more than 7 years.

So that’s kinda bad! Not as bad as if they’d actually gotten to the insurrection, which is when death penalties and life sentences for ringleaders and key figures start cropping up, but still pretty bad! Seven years in prison is almost certainly enough time for a lot of those people to do some serious reconsideration of their life priorities!

As I already said, though, I think the insurrection charge is shaky. So what if they wind up instead charging the PLF with conspiracy to commit villainy for political aims?

Well, that’s why this whole section is in the logistics portion of this essay, because the sentencing for politically motivated villainy probably looks a lot more like this:

If it’s a crime on the level of, for political aims, preparing, plotting, inducing, or inciting:

Arson, illegal use of explosives, homicide, or robbery involving assault or intimidation: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding five years.

A public disturbance: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding three years.

A hazard for a train, tram, or vessel: imprisonment with or without work for a term not exceeding—oh, three years again.

The assault or intimidation of a public employee in the performance of public duty[25]: spoilers, it’s imprisonment for not more than three years again.

Five years or less. Three years or less.

Is that enough time to make people reconsider their life choices? Especially people who have been raised all their lives to follow the cause of Liberation?

Remember that when the heroes attacked, the intention was a clean sweep, a preventative tactic to stop the villains before they could enact any of their terroristic plans. Yet if they intended to stop things at a point where only conspiracy would be punishable, is three years in prison all that Edgeshot thought these people would be in for when he said that if a single one of them escaped, they might go on to terrorize other places? What was Japan’s government and/or the Hero Public Safety Commission planning to do in three years, or five years, or ten years, when 17,000 to 115,000 people were released en masse from prison, free to return to their lives? It certainly seems like they had more stringent consequences in mind, does it?

Of course, there are other factors to consider.

Lots of these people would, presumably, be up on multiple charges, compounding their sentences. Certainly, if Shigaraki and Gigantomachia are tied to the rest of the group, their tolls of death and destruction could potentially be applied to any and all co-conspirators. And maybe the penalties for conspiracy to commit politically motivated villainy are worse. Maybe the prosecutors will push for insurrection conspiracy charges regardless of their applicability, and the Japanese courts will just let them, because there will be a profound thirst for “justice” after Gigantomachia’s rampage and a few human rights violations or abuses of the law will seem like just what the Paranormal Liberation Front members had coming to them.

Maybe, behind the immediate logistical problems presented by this mass arrest, there are a whole fleet of problems of a different nature.

Next time: let’s talk ethics.

-----------------------------------------------------

Footnotes (Part Two)

[7] Whose supporters were eventually successful, by the way. Look up the Telangana movement.

[8] For example, “Skeptic can access such high-tech satellites that he can get up-to-the-minute views on the heroes approaching Gigantomachia, but he somehow didn’t notice a literal hero battalion bearing down on the villa until they were charging out of the tree line? Seriously?”

[9] Frankly, another 2-3 Deikas is the simplest way to explain how they can have a group that big and still be totally unknown to society at large. Far easier to maintain a cult’s required isolation and secrecy when your strongholds are more “this town and everyone you know and love in it” and less “this fancy resort that everyone has to drive thirty minutes to an hour to get to from the totally normal towns they actually live in.”

[10] And frankly, I don't know that that the, “All their really good combatants are at the villa,” assumption is even justified, given that you'd think the people at the villa for the “conference” are more likely to be the people who are going to be involved in coordinating the upcoming assaults—lots of great combatants, sure, but also people who are going to be doing the organizational work, the supply work, etc.

[11] Presumably, at this point, our hypothetical 30% will be instructed to relocate to one of the hero school shelters, but that obviously wouldn’t have been in the plan from the beginning, given that the shelters were only opened after heroes started retiring in droves.

[12] For comparison, a mid-sized prison is considered by the American Jail Association to have 50 to 249 beds, and we’re way more prone to incarceration than Japan is.

[13] For example, in 2005 in Baltimore, so many arrests were being made based on quality-of-life crimes like loitering that the system couldn't keep up, leading to thousands of people having to be released because they just couldn't be processed in time.

[14] When AFO was first brought in, we were told that his remand to Tartarus pre-trial was without precedent. However, Chapter 297 describes Tartarus as a detention facility that only calls itself a prison—remember, in Japan, remand prisoners are supposed to be kept separate from tried and sentenced prisoners. Thus, Tartarus should be reserved only for those who are sentenced to it, or it shouldn't contain sentenced prisoners at all. But with 297, we find that such is no longer the case, as people can be put there “regardless of their sentencing status.” It's unclear whether this change was a rapid case of slippery slope in-universe or whether it's a simple retcon.

[15] Suspects get one visit from a “duty lawyer” for free during detention, but otherwise, the right to counsel only kicks in after charges are filed, and lawyers are not allowed to be present during questioning.

[16] Among many other factors, it would certainly help explain why All For One hasn't even been brought to trial yet. Hell, we don't even know if he's really been formally charged, though Pixie Bob’s comment back in Chapter 184 could easily be interpreted as meaning that the questioning process is still ongoing. AFO needs a Yasuda Yoshihiro, clearly.

[17] Though both acquittals and convictions can be appealed.

[18] An “organized criminal group” per Japanese law has a few qualifications to meet. They need to be committing crimes in an organized fashion, obviously, and there are laws determining which crimes qualify, but further, they need to be a sustained organization, one in which members have assigned roles and duties such that those duties advance a common cause sought after by the organization as a whole. Ergo, a yakuza group definitely qualifies, while an impromptu group of people who got together to murder their boss but who have no further common cause afterward does not. Groups like the Metahuman Liberation Army and the Shie Hassaikai obviously meet these standards, but e.g. the League of Villains, lacking much in the way of a common cause or defined roles, might not.

[19] Like buying a ski mask if their plan to rob a bank involves ski masks.

[20] This, obviously, applies only to members of the PLF who haven’t already broken other laws. The League is boned no matter what. Likewise, there are laws against e.g. harboring criminals that could be brought to bear against whoever maintains the villa, and so on and so forth.

[21] Though one huge issue is that other peoples' confessions can be counted as evidence against you, and yours against others.

[22] A highly controversial anti-conspiracy law in 2017 criminalized the planning of a whole array of new crimes, some bizarrely innocuous-looking, but because it was aimed mostly at the yakuza and other groups engaged in human trafficking, the new roster was generally criminalized on the basis that they were crimes intended to gain some material benefit for the organization planning them. The PLF’s plans were going to do a lot of things, but provide material benefit—a legal term for something that has monetary value—is decidedly not one of them.

[23] Though there are 19 offenses for which it is legally invokable.

[24] The greater majority of the sentences were commuted to “only” being life sentences, but that only by virtue of a relatively powerful upper court, which Egypt’s president has been working to diminish ever since. The state of fair trials and humane prison conditions in the country is pretty appalling right now.

[25] Continued, “committed collectively by carrying any deadly weapon or poison, against any person engaged in prosecutorial or police duties, any assistant to such official, any person who guards or escorts persons in legal custody, or any person engaged in an investigation under this Act.” There are a lot of riders on this one.

[impossiblelibrary]

Today's rant brought to you by: Queer Eye Japan, can we all just try to be as kind as they try to be?

After watching the Queer Eye Japan super short season, I wanted to google to see the overall reaction to the show, make sure that my western eyes were correct in seeing the care that was given to the culture. Were cultural taboos, other than being outwardly gay, crossed? So I find this article in the top results and other than the perspective, why tho? Tokyoesque.com had an article with a higher reading level, with surface level appreciation but at least better written.

I can't get over this hate article though. Unfounded, dumb, wrong and incorrect. Do not go forward unless you like that blistering kind of anger from me.

But the reasons just get weaker as the article extends: "Hurts the country it set out to save?" Looking for white savior much? They did not go to save Japan, they gave some free shit to like 4-5 people, think smaller.

Their culture guide wasn't gay enough.

You want to suggest any lgbt insta models or celebrities, use your platform to raises some up?

"There is a growing sexless culture in Japan for married and unmarried people, and it is perilous watching Queer Eye present this without any context behind what is driving this behavior."

Sexiness is what the fab 5 embrace, unfortunately and it was probably discussed behind the scenes of how much talking about sex was allowed or polite and the conversation of not having sex is closer to the tip of the tongue rather than the feeling of sexiness. The West is not the ones blasting that information. It is across multiple Japanese printed newspapers and online stories by now and the "context" is still being discussed and debated amongst Japanese. So I don't think any outsiders should be weighing in or "explaining" this phenomenon. We can repeat what we have been told but guessing at the reasons is not our place. The reasons illustrated by the author of the article seem lacking, a take but not the only one, but who am I to speak on that being in a sexual relationship with someone who pulls from that culture?

Kiko begins to lecture Yoko-san on how she “threw away her womanhood” (referring to a Japanese idiom, onna wo suteru) by going makeup-free and wearing drab, shapeless clothes.

The mistranslation by the subtitles fixed by this author was necessary information. But Kiko didn't lecture her on it, it was brought up by Yoko before any of them arrived, that was her theme, that was what she had decided to focus on. Meanwhile, if you watched Jonathan, he understood there was no time to spend on makeup and skincare so provided her a one instrument, 3 points of color on the skin to feel prettier. That and the entire episode being the 5 treating her like a woman on a date, not trying to hook her up, which is what they did in American eps.

"In teaching a Japanese woman, who already struggles to find time for herself, how to make an English recipe, Antoni is making great TV and nothing more."

So Antoni shouldn't have taught her apple pie because it's too exotic for a Japanese woman. (Can you smell the sexism?)

He didn't make an apple pie, altho Yoko did mention her mother made that for her when she was a kid. He made an apple tartine after going to a Japanese bakery who makes that all the time. Then highlighted the apples came from Fuji in true Japanese media fashion. Honey, American television doesn't usually highlight where the ingredients come from. A Japanese producer told him to do that. So all worries handled within the same ep. She got Japanese ingredients, had the recipe shown to her and then made it for her friends in her own house. Did the author actually watch this show or nah?

"beaten over the head with his western self-help logic. “You have to live for yourself,” he says."

The style of build up the 5 went for was confrontational but in a "I'm fighting for you" way. It's hard to describe, but the best I can say is, a person has multiple voices in their head, from parents, siblings, society, and maybe themselves. By being loud and obnoxious, American staples right there, they are adding one more voice. You deserve this, you are amazing, you are worth it. I know this is against most Japanese cultural modesty, but maybe it shouldn't be.

Sarcasm lies ahead:

Apparently: mispronunciation is microaggressions, not just someone who had a sucky school system. Yea okay, They're laughing at the language not at how stumbling these monolinguals are with visiting another country. Mmhm. Japanese don't say I love you and don't touch and that should stay that way instead of maybe, once in awhile, feeling like they can hug. Yeah, let's just ignore Yoko's break down that she had never hugged her lifelong friend after hugging strangers multiple times. Maid cafes are never sexualized in Japan ever, just don't go down that one street in Akihabara where the men are led off by the hand sheepishly blushing. Gag me. And Japanese men love to cry in front of their wives and would never break down once the wife leaves. I have never seen a Japanese movie showcase that move. Grr.

"I identify as many cultures."

So you're a Japanese man when it's convenient for you to get an article published? Are you nationally Japanese or just ethnically or culturally?

Homeland is an inherently racist word?

"After the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Republican consultant and speechwriter Peggy Noonan urged, “the name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now.”

Yes, let's use a Washington Post article rather than a etymology professor. Yes, the google search results increased after 2001 Homeland Security was used but the word has been around since the 1660s and I've read multiple turn of the century lit on white people returning to their homeland, i.e. the town off the coast they were born in.

"But" is not disagreeing. I think the repeated offender for the author is the not acknowledging the makeover-ees feelings. But, that is how LGBT have decided to deal with the inner voices that invade from society. They are just that, not our own, they are the influence of society, and we can choose, we have to choose, to be influenced by someone, anyone else.

Karamo can't speak about being black when an Asian is speaking about being Asian, even though the Asian gay man was feeling alone. It's called relating bitches, and I'm done with people saying that is redirecting the conversation, it's extending the conversation. That's how we talk, the spotlight is shared, especially when someone's about to cry and doesn't want to be seen as crying, time to turn the spotlight.

The gay monk wasn't good enough, you should have invited the gay politician.

Yeah, causes I'm sure a politician has all the time in the world for a quick stint and cry. They picked a Japanese monk who travels to NY because they had a guest who travels to the West too. Did you want him to stop traveling back and forth? Did you want a pure, ethnic and cultural Japanese gay man who has no ties to the west to talk to this Western educated young man? Seriously?

This is just not how it works in Japan.

Being in a multi-cultural marriage between two rebels, discussions on facets of culture are plenty in my household. Culture should be respected enough to be considered but not held on a pedestal like we should never adjust or throw some things out. LGBT being quiet and private for instance. "Being seen" was Jonathan's advice, and a good one especially for a Japanese gay man that was called feminine since he was a kid. Some gay men can hide, but as Jonathan said, he couldn't hide what he was, he couldn't hide this. So fuck it. Don't hide. It's actually more dangerous for a feminine man to come off as anxious rather than gay and proud. It makes you more of a target if they think you won't fight back. Proud means, Imma throw hands too, bitch.

This is also from the civil rights playbook going back to Black America: never hold a protest or a fight without the cameras, without being seen. LGBT have found the more seen they are, in media, in the streets, the better off we are. When LGBT Americans were being "private" about our lifestyles, we died, a la 1980s. They won't care if you start dying off if they never saw you to begin with.

And hence why I think the author's real anger is from these 5 being seen dancing flamboyantly in Shibuya, in Harajuku, afforded the privilege of doing this safely because of their tourist status, cameras and very low violence rate in Tokyo, loud and obnoxiously. Honestly, they wouldn't have been invited or nominated if they didn't want that brash American-ness coming into their home, just for a taste, at least.

Here's my real anger, my own jealousy: Japan's queer community currently does not have marriage or adoption rights. US does, so we have progressed further. But we are also not that many years from being tied to cow fences with barbed wire, beaten with baseball bats and left for dead overnight. If things are so bad over there, maybe take a few pages from the civil right playbook we took so much time to perfect and produced by the Black Americans who fought first. But so far, I only hear loss of jobs and marriages, which we still have here too. Stop trying to divide us, we are one community, LGBT around the world and we are here to try to help. Take it or leave it, it's not like we're going to go organize your own Pride parade for you.

Rant over? I guess. Is this important enough to be put in the google results along with his. Hell no, anyone with half a mind can see he's reaching more than half the time. And any argument about: this wasn't covered! There are a shit ton of conversations that are not covered in the 45 min they have. They are not a civil rights show, it's a makeover show, doing their best in that direction anyway. Know what it is.

Next blog post, what research I would guess was happening behind the scenes for each of the 5? I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan doing Japanese style makeup there...

[formulatrash]

It's amazing how far Lewis fans will go to defend him. He's posted an anti-vax video for his 19M followers to see, a caption where he accuses Bill Gates of lying about side effects when the trials of this vaccines aren't even over yet, implied they test on Africans because of some racist reason (South Africa volunteered because they're in deep shit) and then says "oops didn't see the caption" only to bang on about side effects like your typical anti-vax mom. He didn't even apologize???

I don’t think he needs to apologise. He reposted something that he should’ve checked the context of more but he clarified his position, we move on.

What he posted was a news segment - yes, editorially I didn’t like the cut of its jib but like, thus is the news media in 2020. Lewis isn’t a doctor and the presentation of the news report was focussed on the side effects, with Bill Gates unfortunately not giving a very good rebuff (they’re a lot milder than being dead, after all) so like. Hey.

He clearly stated he thinks the vaccine is a good thing and will save lives, it is legitimate to express concern over pharmaceutical funding and how the vaccine will be made available to people. Especially in the context of eg: the US healthcare system, whether the development and distribution could end up held to ransom by whoever holds the rights to the vaccine, as has happened in the US with insulin despite that being a relatively old development.

He didn’t ‘go full anti-vax mom’. He watched some news video he probably found in Instagram search. He posted it, maybe he shouldn’t have - but he then clarified his position. Which is more than you can say for eg: many of the other drivers with highly questionable views.

But also I would like to address something specific in your ask. 

The link to racism and testing in Africa is that two French doctors said that that would be a good idea for the coronavirus vaccine, recently, for absolutely racist reasons -

Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris, then said: "If I can be provocative, shouldn't we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?

"A bit like it is done elsewhere for some studies on Aids. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves."

Mr Locht nodded in agreement at this suggestion, and said: "You are right. We are in the process of thinking about a study in parallel in Africa."

which led the WHO to socially distance from them. But nonetheless does reflect the extremely biased, classist and racist attitudes of the ways that western doctors look at vaccine development and whose lives it is reasonable to put at risk. 

(There’s no reason to assume a vaccine would be more effective to be trialled in ‘Africa’ - an entire continent with very varying caseloads per region/country than, say, ‘London’ where we just generally have very high case numbers because of the lack of lockdown procedures and possibility of distancing)

Pharmaceutical developers have used African countries for testing, repeatedly, despite it being called out. The vaccines and treatments developed in these programmes are then rarely available at reasonable prices to the people who have literally bodily tested them. This has created a lot of lack of faith in healthcare, understandably - and should be much better known and people should be angry about it. 

BIPOC have been used as guinea pigs, systemically, over the course of the twentieth century. Canadian indigenous people were used as test subjects for vaccines and gingivitis treatments without their consent in the mid-20th century and concerns about international drug trials in India, as well as across other (almost universally post-colonial) nations have been raised within the 21st century. 

So perhaps it is you, anon, who needs some education on that front.

Edit: please note I am very pro the rapid development of vaccines! So much so I was one of the first human test subjects for an ebola vaccine in 2015! I’ve had more vaccines than you can shake a hypodermic at, love a good vaccine. But there is definitely more than ‘no reason’ to think that human testing has often been biased and exploitative.

[xtruss]

Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19

For years, I was puzzled why the Roman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by barbarians. Looking at the West's response to COVID-19, I know now.

Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19

— 25 March, 2020 | RT

Colosseum and Arch of Constantine during the Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19). Rome (Italy), March 19th, 2020

By Dr. Luboš Motl, Czech theoretical physicist, who was an assistant professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. He writes a science and politics blog called The Reference Frame

Many think Covid-19 is some kind of alien invasion that spells the end of the world. But the real threat to us is a much deadlier virus: a hatred of all the values that have underpinned our civilisation for centuries.

For years, I was puzzled as to why the Roman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by communities that were uncivilized by comparison. How and why could mankind’s progress reverse in this way? Recent experience has eliminated the mystery. No special devastating event was needed; the cause of Rome's demise was simply the loss of its people's desire to support their ‘empire’ and its underlying values. And as it was 1,500 years or so ago, so I fear it is now.

The Covid-19 crisis – specifically, the reaction to it – demonstrates that people have grown bored, detached, and easily impressionable by things that have nothing to do with the roots of their society. We are all – or too many of us – fin de siècle Romans now.

A large number of Westerners are happy to accept the suicidal shutting down of their economies to try to halt a virus that predominantly causes old and sick people to die just a few weeks or months before they would have anyway. Just as they enthusiastically endorse proclamations such as that there are 46 sexes, not two; that the flatulence of a cow must be reduced to save a polar bear; that millions of migrants from the Third World must be invited to Europe and assumed to be neurosurgeons; and so on.

The widespread opinion that everything, including economies, must be sacrificed to beat coronavirus is a revival of medieval witch hunts; the sacrifice seems more important than finding an effective method to deal with the problem.

Our increasingly decadent mass culture has gradually become more ideological and openly opposed to the values Western civilization is based upon. And while it boasts of being ‘counter-culture’ and independent, it’s acquired a monopoly over almost all the information channels that determine opinions, including mainstream media and political parties.

Our leaders have become sucked into this group-thinking and happily institute policies that unleash shutdowns that may cause the worst recession in history. Thousands of businesses are closing and long-term prospects are bleak.

Governments are stepping in to pay wages and fund other services. As tax revenue will be virtually non-existent, public debt will soar. Some governments may default on their debts or resort to printing money, causing soaring inflation. These countries may be unable to fund healthcare, their police or their military, and be so weakened they will be invaded by others and be erased from the world map.

That may be a worst-case scenario, but it’s almost certain that the impact of the shutdowns will be a recession comparable to the Great Depression. Yet what do most Western citizens make of it? Well, they are either unaware, uncaring, or they’re happy about it. They don’t seem to appreciate the consequent dangers. Instead, they are more obsessed with the latest celebrity who’s caught the virus.

The consumers of this mass culture haven't built anything like what our ancestors did – enlightenment, the theory of relativity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, major advances in philosophy, science, literature and engineering. They don't have to defend any real values against a tangible enemy, because hiding in a herd with uniform group-think is good enough for them.

Our ancestors had difficult, short lives; they had to work hard, produce enough to survive, fight enemies, and defend what they’d inherited. Numerous lasting values emerged from those efforts. The current generations of Westerners are good only at producing and escalating irrationality and panic.

If a two-month lockdown isn’t deemed enough to contain the virus, they’re happy to extend it to six months, if not years. China decided to impose strict policies, but they were assertive enough to be relatively short-lived; many Westerners want less perfect policies to last for a much longer time. That’s clearly an irrational approach; instead of ‘flattening a curve’, rational leaders (like Beijing’s) try to turn the curve into a cliff. The faster you eliminate the virus, the cheaper it is.

Immortality As An Entitlement

This support for economically suicidal policies didn't start with Covid-19. Westerners have spent recent decades amid a prosperity in which they took material wealth and good healthcare for granted. They forgot what hunger (and, in most cases, unemployment) meant. They got used to demanding ever deeper ‘entitlements’, such as the ‘right not to be offended’.

Activists sensationalised smaller and more implausible threats and demanded that governments mitigated them. In particular, the climate change movement advocated that the 1-2 °C of warming caused by CO2 emissions in a century was equivalent to an armageddon that had to be avoided, whatever the cost.

In this context, it could be expected that the first ‘real challenge’ – and a new flu-like disease is certainly one – would make people fearful. Because if people were led to believe that 1-2 °C of warming was basically the end of the world, is it surprising that they're absolutely terrified of a new disease that has the potential to kill a few million old and sick people?

The existential threat posed by coronavirus – or at least, our irrationality towards it – is greater than the climate threat (though still very small). Westerners who haven't seen any real threats for a long time have developed a condition – termed "affluenflammation" by the American musician Remy – which is a pathological habit of inflating negligible threats. When this inflation of feelings is applied to a real threat, namely a pandemic, they lose their composure.

The context of Covid-19, where every death is presented with horror, makes it clear that ‘immortality’ is just another ‘human right’. This wisdom says that our leaders are failing because they cannot defend this so-called right. But this excessive sensitivity is just one part of the problem.

Many Westerners actively want to harm their economies, corporations, rich people, and governments, because they don't feel any attachment to or responsibility for them. They take security and prosperity for granted. Their money and food arrive from ‘somewhere’, and they don’t care about the source.

And they believe that the structures which allow them to survive – the governments, banks, and so on – are ‘evil’. Some are just financially illiterate. But others know what they are saying, and rejoice in demanding that trillions be sacrificed in order to infinitesimally increase the probability that a 90-year-old will avoid infection and live a little bit longer. They don't accept their dependence on society and the system at all. They don't realise that their moral values, their ‘human rights’, are only available if paid for by prosperous societies.

I have used some dramatic prose, so let me be clear: the scenario I’ve outlined – ending in the suicide of the West – is avoidable, and I hope and believe it will be. I know some who are willing to fight for its survival.

But even if this acceleration towards shutdowns is reversed and countries restore their pre-virus businesses, our world won't be the same. Many people will conclude that the crisis was exciting, and try to kickstart a repetition. The curfew is likely to reduce CO2 emissions this year, so climate activists may try for similar results in the future. Terrorists may deploy some new disease – which, after all, is likely to be more effective than any stabbing or bombing.

It's conceivable that the West’s brush with mortality will lead people to regain some common sense and survival instincts. Perhaps several nations going bankrupt will be a wake-up call. Maybe people will realise that the reaction to the coronavirus was disproportionate. But even if that is so, I’m afraid it won’t be enough.

We need to accept that the positive relationship of Westerners to the roots of their civilization will be still missing – and that this is a virus that poses a much more fundamental existential threat than Covid-19.

[africanfemalearchitects]

AFA Open-Chat Series with Tosin Oshinowo pt.2

Tosin: We are a very interesting conundrum, as a continent. We are a series of ethnicities, that were divided into countries in 1835. There isn't a singular identity for Nigerian, Congo, or Uganda or Ghana. We are a series of cultural groups, who by the lining of a boundary line of a country, have been told 'go, and become a standardized identity'. It doesn't exist. In Nigeria we have so many different cultures, if I go to the North, South or West - even what should have been our vernacular, is not the same. It's based on the terrains, it is based on the people, it is based on traditions.

This question of identity is one that I think is terribly fluid; and we were brought into modernism. Modernism was populated across the whole world not just in Africa, yes, in many terms it took the climate into consideration : modernism in Europe look absolutely different from Modernism in Tropical, to North and South Africa; and there are certain consistencies of modernism. But if we are looking for specific identities: I think we are just beginning to see that.

Covid came in as a material, and completely changed the game everywhere. Most of us, we are still building in concrete; a lot of the West builds with steel and they've got more advanced materials. We are stuck in the materials of early modernism, and we are now beginning to appropriate and create identities based off that. Although no one has really documented here, you start to see elements of identities when you step back; and you've to step back. And it's always at the end of a movement that you can actually see and categorize it as such. If I look at Architecture in Nigeria from the 80's, it's very specific and you can actually categorize it as such: the materials that were used and the scaling of the building tells me that. If I look at a building from the Northeast in Nigeria, you can tell that that was a period: by that type of windows that were used, spaces, and the finishes. We do have something, but it's not that distinct. That kind of vernacular and identity is a transition. But in a world where we have a globalization exposure; somebody who lives in Nigeria wants a house they saw in Florida. You've, then, to find interesting ways to carry that cultural identity in modern-day context. Yes, I do think there are nuances of identity but they're not strong in terms of very-striking particular form. Moderator: With a number of architects in Nigeria, do you visually see an impact of the presence of architects currently in your country?

Tosin: I don't think so, but it's not because there are no architects, but how projects are executed. For example, there was an upgrade of an existing train station that was inaugurated recently by our President. But this was done by Chinese contractors, and it doesn't look anything like where it is located; it could've been a spaceship that was just dropped in. There was absolutely no local context included in it; and even the Institute were not aware. When you look at Singapore, there was a big emphasis on marrying local and foreign architects; and there was a cross of information. You can't improve a profession, if you don't allow them to be part of innovative process. When that happens, what value does it add or make of us, if no local consultancy is involved? That biggest impact to show a strong physicality norm of infrastructure on a government-led project, where the government is not involving local practitioners then you can't see the impact. Moderator: We are dealing with the same issues here in Rwanda, we are struggling to make understand the importance of having an architect in the community. Tosin: As Africans we need to make an effort to upscale ourselves as well. Some areas, some architects are still drawing-by-hand. Who's going to call you when you're drawing-by-hand. There are no excuses today. With the information age, everything is online. If you want to learn something, you can learn it. Software companies aren't accommodating to the situation that we have in this part of the world. If you look at a dollar and naira; the naira is like a nonexistent entity that happens to be a dot in the atmosphere compared to a dollar. When you earn in a country with a slightly lower GDP, if you look at GDP per capita, the reality is that the economy is going to determine how much people can afford to build, and to pay towards professionals' fees. If the software is x amount, how do you expect a local consultant to pay for it? Because in this market you cannot command a high fee. What I'd expect is that for these programmers and software companies were really thinking about the professionals; they would make it affordable for a local person because they won't have to kill themselves to get a Revit license. What you happen to have here in a lot of situations, is that people just use bootlegs; but the problem with that is you're not part of the community. When innovations are happening, when new programs are being added, you're not even aware of that information. Information is there, but that barrier of money is also very present. Moderator: We need to raise awareness of that issue, especially even for students; as soon as they graduate they're not going to be able to afford it right away.

Tosin: They need to scale it for us based on economies. I know the West doesn't consider us. For example, if buying an Iphone in Nigeria is different than buying an Iphone in Europe. Some people's whole salary here is the price of an Iphone and less. And they have a better system on how to acquire these things. We are in a skewed environment, but it is still much better than what it would have been in the 60's.

Moderator: Looking then, architects were sketching to the last detail of a building. Do you think we should still invest ourselves in that way? Tosin: We live in a global world, and Africa is left much farther and farther behind. It's worrying how much attention is not being paid to it. I was looking at a project done by Mass Design and they're doing a lot of work in Africa. One of the biggest selling-point is that they have skills, and exposure to research that a local practitioners doesn't have. This is a good age for an American Firm to give back, and they're a not-for-profit organization and it's of value, with policy about social change. It's a good thing, but the reality irrespective if they were doing it or not, these are necessary projects: schools hospitals, etc.. These are necessary projects irrespective if a foreign company was coming in, it has to be done! But the government are more willing to give that project to a foreign consultant because they have the skills. Even not just the government, a private client in Nigeria will pay a lot of money to a foreign consultant because they believe they are getting the best. What happens to people who are pushing boundaries, who are trying to produce work that is global anywhere? This puts you in an awkward position.

If we don't upscale ourselves, we are going to get further and further behind. Those who have the choice, will rather not use local consultancy. This is not just based on being a good designer, it's about being conscious of what's happening globally. It's about exposing ourselves on technology, and innovation; and bringing that into your work as well. Moderator: It's a competitive market. Tosin: Yes, and I think this is something architects don't realize: you can't tell anyone how to spend their money. It is a market and it's an open market. The sooner we realize that we must equip ourselves with skills to stay ahead, then we will put ourselves in a better position. Moderator: I hope students are listening. Get into the most complicated and innovative way of design and build, and excel in that; and do something that local markets aren't doing currently. I have been 5 years in the career, and I know, I'm still far and I'm pushing myself to learn and excel at these. I'm really glad you highlighted it. How would you advise women architects to invest in their career? Tosin: I think everybody needs to understand the importance of strategies in life, and not just in the profession - especially; as a woman. How many children do you want? Do you want children? Have you thought about how you'll balance life with having children with work? Will there be a point where you'll focus more on your children? Will you be doing half and half? Everybody's approach is different, but you must be intentional. You can't just let life happen to you. You have to decide, 'what do I want?'. When I look back in 30 years, what do I want to have achieved? If you don't have a class strategy or a plan, then that's the beginning of failure; because life will happen to you. And there's no right or wrong. But whatever decision you make, you must make a conscious decision. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, there's nothing wrong with that - but decide that's what you wanted. If you want to be a working professional with working children, decide that's what you want, and again, there's no right or wrong. For any person who's at the beginning of their career, look at your goals, and make conscious decisions. And follow through! Life will change your plans. I always get confused when I see people letting life just happen to them. How did you not think? And the sad thing is life is very short. I'm 41 now. I see people who are 26, and I tell them, go turn the world! And they' tell me they don't have the time. You have all the time in the world. The older you get, the more you realize that this journey is very short. I'm already half-way, and eventually things are going to start working properly. I've 20 years of professionalism, I've done half of it. Am I happy with the decision I made? Will I continue on this path? Even on my journey, I'm conscious of the decision, I've made, and what I'm trying to achieve. And ultimately, one of my biggest goals is I want to leave a legacy of work. And this is just for me, it might not be somebody else's plan. But I want my great-great-grand-children to know that their great-great-grand-mother added value. I don't want my country to put a plaque on my name, but my children's children who did not meet me, know that their grandma was hard-working. That for me is enough, and that means that I have done my job.

Moderator: Definitely, and I'll check again, but I haven't seen another African woman who has been featured this much, either on Archdaily or other things as well. You are being intentional. Tosin: Yes, even as a practice now, when I see what I've achieved, I wonder what can I achieve on a global stage? How do I start building networks, and tactical points on how I can build a project in this region? It's no longer impossible in mind. And I've realized that there's so much you can do, without being in a fixed location. I realize now I can work in a global capacity. BurnaBoy won a grammy. For Nigeria, that means a lot. Talent has no geography. If you're good at what you do, the world will come and look for you . Moderator: You have to have a target. As an architect, do I want to stick to what's existing or do I want to do more than that? Tosin: There's nothing wrong with that. Because everybody can't be the super-star; that's the reality. There has to be a place for everyone. Just be intentional. And as you excel, you can check where you want to go next. We all have different paths. Moderator: Whichever level you're at, try to improve what's existing and make an impact; and that's what our career is about. What can architects do, to improve Gender Equity in the profession? What are males can do to level your ground? Tosin: We don't live in Utopia. If you are waiting for people to give you a seat at the table, go and take the chair yourself. No one is going to handle you anything. We have this problem in Nigeria, everybody is waiting for government; what can you do, yourself? Don't wait for anyone. Do what you can do within the limits of your environment. People who are successful do not wait for hand-downs, as they do not get you anywhere. We are born into different situations. Moderator: What practices can someone do professionally and personally to find their niche in the architectural field.

Tosin: That's a very open-ended question. Look at your strengths and your weaknesses. Make sure you try to amplify your strengths. As a professional, you must need balance. Moderator: What career advice would you give to fresh graduates? Tosin: Go work for someone first. Learn the ropes. It's a lot easier to start under tutelage of somebody else. Learn from somebody else's mistakes. When you have gained a certain level of confidence, you can step out on your own. Moderator: What thoughts would you like to share with the world, about the importance of inclusivity? Tosin: I don't like to wait for the world, but the profession could be more inclusive, not just for the female architects but for the African architects, in general. We have always been at a large disadvantage, as innovation is happening in the fourth revolution, we are getting further and further behind. I'm very conscious of it, because I'm paying attention. For the example I gave of Autodesk, actually looking at the realities of our economies of scale, and pricing the software to something that we can afford, would be a massive help. Those are things we don't control.

Moderator: I think we have got everything covered for this interview, Tosin; I can't thank you enough. Tosin: I also want to thank you. I started following you because particularly I was interested to see what other women were doing. I was pleasantly surprised that I'm not alone in this. It's nice to see other people doing interesting things as well; and it's a warming feeling to know that you're not alone. And I really enjoy your Instagram Page. Moderator: Thank you very much. How accessible are you, and how can young architects reach you, for mentorship and more career advices? Tosin: It's becoming a little difficult to be honest. I do have some people I do mentor now. I have someone I mentor from Bahamas, London, and in Lagos. It's becoming a little difficult with everything that I'm handling. If you send me an email, and you have a very specific question, I'll always answer because I know the importance of the people who also supported me when I was a young professional, and please be very specific. Moderator: On this topic, I actually love this mentorship rotation you do on your sites Tosin: On Thursday's every two weeks, I try to carry people along. I was actually surprised about how many people followed with a thousands of views on Instastory. Even highlighting the sites that way online is useful. If you're interested, please continue to watch that. I didn't realize it was a thing, but I know it's a thing. Moderator: It's very much a great thing you're doing! Thank you so much for your time Tosin, if we have more questions we will cover them in other series in the future. We are thankful to have you as an advisor, and your enthusiasm is really great for us - I wouldn't be here otherwise. Tosin: And keep it up as well! Thank you so much for having me! Thank you for reading and to everyone who participated in this live and is supporting this platform and helping it grow. Written & Edited by Lise Isaro, founder of AFA. Published 21 August 2021

[snarktheater]

Series review — Quantico (Season 2)

So this is…something that happened. Yup. It sure is something that happened.

Just to be clear: this review is probably going to go off the rails a little bit. Because let's be real, there isn't one show on television right now that is as interesting as an individual piece as the sharp, sudden turn that American television as a whole has taken in its winter/spring 2017 season. So I'm gonna talk about that.

Last year, I didn't give Quantico a lot of attention. It was among my favorites, but it was hard to really talk about without spoiling it, and so all I could say was that it didn't fail in the classic ways that tends to happen (you know, racism, sexism, that sort of things).

Luckily, this year, I do have a few things to say about Quantico's second season itself. While the show does mostly retain its strengths, it has definitely struggled with its plot. I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually a conscious decision, because as we reach the final third of the season, the main plot that had been the central focus of the season (an attack on a G20 summit) is abruptly wrapped up. The show's formula of following both a major crisis in the present and following the protagonists' training and how it ties into that crisis is chucked to the garbage, and instead we get a singular plot line. It deals with the consequences of the previous events, but still, the change is jarring.

And that's where the real-life stuff becomes relevant. I mean, we are in a post-Trump election world, whether we like it or not. And while all media is inherently political (by virtue of representing world views from the creator(s)), suddenly a lot of the media has become intentionally political. It's hard to know how much of it is pandering and how much is genuine.

For instance, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD repeatedly using buzz phrases like "fake news" in its third seasonal arc (which, incidentally, deals with an alternate reality where fascist Hydra took over the world post-WWII) teeters on that edge, and it's hard to tell which one it is. Mostly because while the story's concept is definitely an apt metaphor for the current political climate. And I want to thank whoever made this line happen:

But that said…the show doesn't really go anywhere with it. It's saying Nazis are bad, and fascism is bad, and bad guys must be defeated. It creates an implied link between Trump, nazis, and fascism. But it falls short of adding anything constructive to the conversation beyond that. It feels very "white person calling themselves woke", in that it's only the basic stuff. Aside from the metaphor, it stays too confined within its own supernatural narrative to add anything of value.

It's clearer in a show like Supergirl, ironically, where our fascist is an alien invasion that only starts in the penultimate episode of the season. I guess it's a case of "less is more", because it still gives us this speech, which in my opinion beats all of Agents of SHIELD's "Agents of Hydra" arc in one moment.

“Resist these invaders. They come with empty promises, and closed fists. They promise to make our world great again. They think they can con us.”

Like…it's actually almost laughable how on the nose it is. It doesn't even completely work within the context of the show, because the villain isn't really trying to con people, nor do they come with empty promises beyond "accept enslavement and you will live". But at the very least it's trying to be relevant to its audience, which is kind of the most important part when you do something like this. (Speaking of "on the nose", the season finale is titled "Nevertheless, she persisted", which is just amusing to me)

Of course, Supergirl had an advantage on SHIELD. It's a show that started its pilot discussing feminism, and has consistently come back to it, including discussions of intersectionality. That it gets political now isn't as sharp a turn, and the writers are clearly more comfortable with it. I mean, this is a show set in a world where the POTUS is a woman (and an alien, but who's counting).

But then we get back to Quantico. That show was also political from the start, which also questioned sexism and racism with its pilot. To boot, it doesn't have to deal with a supernatural plot to divert its attention from its message. You don't need to make a fascist metaphor when you can just have…plain old fascism as your villain.

And they went there. In its final third, Quantico's second season focuses on our protagonist setting up a task force to fight a shadowy conspiracy of people from the high spheres of society aiming to take down the current government, instate one of them as the POTUS, and…well, profit from it. While the "conspiracy" part is (arguably) fictional, and it's based on forcing the current president to resign because the previous season just had a presidential election in its epilogue, it's otherwise a pretty clear parallel to Trump's rise to the presidency and the people who chose as members of his staff.

And yet, the show's writers have proven to be way too optimistic. The conspirators are actually competent at their work (also, for some reason, capable of holding their own against trained FBI and CIA agent in hand-to-hand combat, which is kind of weird to me), both in their business and as people who want to run a country. They also seem to genuinely believe to be doing what is best for the country, even if that happens to be having them be in charge of it. I don't think I'll face a lot of pushback when I say that that is clearly not something that can be said of the Trump administration. And if you are a person who wants to argue with that fact…how the hell did you find this little blog? (Also, don't bother)

And then there's the season finale. Spoiler, I guess, but this is where that ironic optimism becomes the most obvious. Because that episode's resolution relies on two things: 1) the protagonists, in an act that they are aware is treason, leak information to the Russian intelligence so they can pressure the Trump analogue in compromising himself; and 2) once said Trump analogue is shown to be compromised to the Russian intelligence and willing to bow down to their will, he immediately, unilaterally loses all support, leading to impeachment being drafted almost at once.

Ironic, considering what news broke out on the exact same day that the episode aired, and how little reaction there was from the Republican base since then.

But even with all of that, the show still does an impressive job with its portrayal of a Trump metaphor. In particular, it continues what it did in its first season with debunking the amalgamation of Islam with terrorism, and showing how that amalgamation serves very specific interests. And, perhaps most important of all, it finally takes a definitive stance on what was probably one of the show's biggest flaws: the fact that spy work, while it can be useful, will ultimately only serve the people in power, no matter who they are. Transparency is the only way to let people have agency in the democratic process.

So the show spent two seasons telling us that the characters have to "do what they must" and "work in the shadows". And while it did also point out that intelligence agencies needed oversight, it's in the finale that it gets its best moment. Warning for spoilers (and if the video gets taken down, let me know).

"This country will not fix itself in the shadows anymore. The light is all we have, and the truth is all we can trust. So resist. Fight back."

Note that, just like Supergirl, the show uses the #Resist hashtag that's gotten so popular. Still on the nose here, but it works much better in context. After all, the context is basically the same as ours.

So…yeah, the season ends up being structurally weak because it made such a wild departure before the end. It's still highly enjoyable, but honestly, at this point…I think it's way more important than it is good or bad.

Do I think it's a must-watch? Well…maybe, maybe not. I still recommend watching the show, but don't do it for the political message. You can just get that anywhere on social media too, or just by staying informed. But I think it's an excellent move to reach the people who do watch the show. So there is that.

Someday, someone much better versed than I am in analyzing pop culture will look back at how American television changed basically overnight and derive much deeper conclusion from it than I could. In the meantime, this is my little contribution to the pile.

And yeah, hashtag or not, you should resist. All of us should.