#faceless bureaucracy

[hauntedkittennerd]

Can a dissertation mentor fire you? Asking for a friend.

[divinekangaroo]

Forgot that I've also seen:

-Inception (the actors/named characters made so little impression on me that I only knew Arthur and Eames because of peripheral fanfiction flying by, and when I started following PB on tumblr went, wait, what, CM was also in Inception????)

Of cm's back catalogue, I've only seen:

-Sunshine (vague memories of being interested enough to learn his name from this movie alone)

-28 Days Later (had no idea who he was, didn't make a mark on me, didn't connect this guy as the guy who did Sunshine, either - case in point at how the visual rarely sticks with me, at some point in my head I'm busily converting all this into text-only form - the only interest was the concept/framing not the characters)

-Peaky Blinders (had to check if it was the same guy I vaguely remembered from Sunshine, but I did immediately go, this is an interesting casting choice given the storyline, I wonder what he intended by taking this role / they intended by giving it to someone like him)

[tanadrin]

Like, I might ask questions like--how ugly does someone have to be before they deserve reconstructive surgery? How violent does the event that marred their features have to be? How intrinsic? Are genes really intrinsic to who we are? How do we differentiate in a principled way between “mundane” dysphoria (which we call “vanity” and devalue) over “deserving” dysphoria? Is it not equally cruel to look at a trans person, someone whose features have been ravaged by jaw cancer, and someone born to features society as a whole strongly devalues, and say “you just need to learn to love yourself?” And how do we--or more likely, a faceless bureaucracy whose primary incentive is cost-cutting--as an external observer, make a principled distinction between mental states we cannot observe, especially when our judgement is also clouded by what we value, what we think of as “normal” or “desirable” (or “vain” or “silly”)?

(There are more mundane harm-reduction questions, too, like “should people who want crazy body mods have to go to untrained or semi-untrained underground professionals to have them done, or can we let doctors do them without stripping them of their medical license?” Which isn’t relevant to the question of who should pay for it, but it is relevant to the overall question of “what attitude should we have as a society towards bodily autonomy?” Which I think informs the previous question.)

And I think--though I might get shit for this--our attitudes on this question can also be influenced by the disgust responses inculcated in us by society. After all, authentic beauty is something that is treated as being both normative and effortless. So society sneers at (and we are taught to sneer at) anyone who tries to achieve normative beauty through external means (and to treat anyone who aspires to non-normative aesthetics as a lunatic or a freak). They are necessarily shallow, silly vain rich people wasting their money, at best the victims of capitalism or marketing.

But capitalism and marketing didn’t invent beauty standards; they didn’t invent humans wanting attention and validation and sex from each other; they certainly didn’t invent cosmetics, or the desire to look youthful. I think it is often much easier to blame vast abstractions for what are in fact very old, very common human impulses. And I think it’s a little bit cruel to look down on people for being subject to those impulses, given that we are all subject to them to one extent or another.

[dailyanarchistposts]

I.5.3 Would confederations produce bureaucrats and politicians?

Of course, any organisation holds the danger that the few who have been given tasks to perform could misuse their position for personal benefit or, over time, evolve into a bureaucracy with power over the rest of society. As such, some critics of social anarchism suggest that a system of communes and confederations would simply be a breeding ground for politicians and bureaucrats. This is obviously the case with the state and many generalise from this experience for all forms of social organisation, including the anarchist commune.

While recognising that this is a danger, anarchists are sure that such developments are unlikely in an anarchy. This is because, based on our analysis and critique of the state, we have long argued for various institutional arrangements which reduce the danger of such things developing. These include electing delegates rather than representatives, giving these delegates a binding mandate and subjecting them to instant recall by their electors. They would not, in general, be paid and so, in other words, delegates are expected, as far as possible, to remain in their current communities and conduct their communal tasks after their usual work. For the few exceptions to this that may occur, delegates would receive the average pay of their commune, in mutualism and collectivism or, in communism, no special access to communal resources. Moreover, it seems likely that regular rotation of delegates would be utilised and, perhaps, random selection as happens in jury duty today in many countries. Lastly, communes could leave any confederation if its structure was becoming obviously misshapen and bureaucratic.

By these methods, delegates to communal bodies would remain under the control of their electors and not, as in the state, become their masters. Moreover, anarchists have stressed that any communal body must be a working organisation. This will reduce bureaucratic tendencies as implementing tasks will be done by elected delegates rather than faceless (and usually unelected) bureaucrats. This means, as Bakunin put it in 1868, that “the Communal Council” (made up of delegates “with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times”) would create “separate executive committees from among its membership for each branch of the Commune’s revolutionary administration.” [Bakunin, No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 155] Thus would no longer be a body of people, a government, separate from the delegates of the people. This, it should be noted, echoed Proudhon’s comments from 1848:

“It is up to the National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power … Besides universal suffrage and as a consequence of universal suffrage, we want implementation of the binding mandate. Politicians balk at it! Which means that in their eyes, the people, in electing representatives, do not appoint mandatories but rather abjure their sovereignty! That is assuredly not socialism: it is not even democracy.” [Op. Cit., p. 63]

Due to mandating and recall, any delegate who starts to abuse their position or even vote in ways opposed to by the communal assembly would quickly be recalled and replaced. As such a person may be an elected delegate of the community but that does not mean that they have power or authority (i.e., they are not a representative but rather a delegate). Essentially they are an agent of the local community who is controlled by, and accountable to, that community. Clearly, such people are unlike politicians. They do not, and cannot, make policy decisions on behalf of (i.e., govern) those who elected them — they are not given power to make decisions for people. In addition, people in specific organisations or with specific tasks will be rotated frequently to prevent a professionalisation of politics and the problem of politicians being largely on their own once elected. And, of course, they will continue to work and live with those who elected them and receive no special privileges due to their election (in terms of more income, better housing, and so on). This means that such delegates would be extremely unlikely to turn into representatives or bureaucrats as they would be under the strict control of the organisations that elected them to such posts. As Kropotkin argued, the general assembly of the community “in permanence — the forum always open — is the only way .. . to assure an honest and intelligent administration” as it is based upon ”distrust of all executive powers.” [The Great French Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 211]

The current means of co-ordinating wide scale activity — centralism via the state — is a threat to freedom as, to quote Proudhon, “the citizen divests himself of sovereignty, the town and the Department and province above it, absorbed by central authority, are no longer anything but agencies under direct ministerial control.” “The Consequences” he continued, “soon make themselves felt: the citizen and the town are deprived of all dignity, the state’s depredations multiply, and the burden on the taxpayer increases in proportion. It is no longer the government that is made for the people; it is the people who are made for the government. Power invades everything, dominates everything, absorbs everything.” [The Principle of Federation, p. 59] In such a regime, the generation of a specific caste of politicians and bureaucrats is inevitable.

Moreover, ”[t]he principle of political centralism is openly opposed to all laws of social progress and of natural evolution. It lies in the nature of things that every cultural advance is first achieved within a small group and only gradually finds adoption by society as a whole. Therefore, political decentralisation is the best guaranty for the unrestricted possibilities of new experiments. For such an environment each community is given the opportunity to carry through the things which it is capable of accomplishing itself without imposing them on others. Practical experimentation is the parent of ever development in society. So long as each distinct is capable of effecting the changes within its own sphere which its citizens deem necessary, the example of each becomes a fructifying influence on the other parts of the community since they will have the chance to weigh the advantages accruing from them without being forced to adopt them if they are not convinced of their usefulness. The result is that progressive communities serve the others as models, a result justified by the natural evolution of things.” [Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom, pp. 16–7] The contrast with centralisation of the state could not be more clear. Rocker continued:

“In a strongly centralised state, the situation is entirely reversed and the best system of representation can do nothing to change that. The representatives of a certain district may have the overwhelming majority of a certain district on his [or her] side, but in the legislative assembly of the central state, he [or she] will remain in the minority, for it lies in the nature of things that in such a body not the intellectually most active but the most backward districts represent the majority. Since the individual district has indeed the right to give expression of its opinion, but can effect no changes without the consent of the central government, the most progressive districts will be condemned to stagnate while the most backward districts will set the norm.” [Op. Cit., p. 17]

Little wonder anarchists have always stressed what Kropotkin termed “local action” and considered the libertarian social revolution as “proceed[ing] by proclaiming independent Communes which Communes will endeavour to accomplish the economic transformation within … their respective surroundings.” [Peter Kropotkin, Act For Yourselves, p. 43] Thus the advanced communities will inspire the rest to follow them by showing them a practical example of what is possible. Only decentralisation and confederation can promote the freedom and resulting social experimentation which will ensure social progress and make society a good place to live.

Moreover, confederation is required to maximise self-management and reduce the possibility that delegates will become isolated from the people who mandated them. As Rocker explained:

“In a smaller community, it is far easier for individuals to observe the political scene and become acquainted with the issues which have to be resolved. This is quite impossible for a representative in a centralised government. Neither the single citizen nor his [or her] representative is completely or even approximately to supervise the huge clockwork of the central state machine. The deputy is forced daily to make decisions about things of which he [or she] has no personal knowledge and for the appraisal of which he must therefore depend on others [i.e. bureaucrats and lobbyists]. That such a system necessarily leads to serious errors and mistakes is self-evident. And since the citizen for the same reason is not able to inspect and criticise the conduct of his representative, the class of professional politicians is given added opportunity to fish in troubled waters.” [Op. Cit., p. 17–18]

These principles, it must be stressed, have worked well on a mass scale For example, this is how anarcho-syndicalist unions operate and, as was the case with the CNT in Spain in the 1930s, worked well with over one million members. There were also successfully applied during the Spanish Revolution and the federations of collectives produced by it.

So the way communes and confederations are organised protect society and the individual against the dangers of centralisation, from the turning of delegates into representatives and bureaucrats. As Bakunin stressed, there are two ways of organising society, “as it is today, from high to low and from the centre to circumference by means of enforced unity and concentration” and the way of the future, by federalism “starting with the free individual, the free association and the autonomous commune, from low to high and from circumference to centre, by means of free federation.” [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 88] In other words, “the organisation of society from the bottom up.” [The Basic Bakunin, p. 131] This suggests that a free society will have little to fear in way of its delegates turning into politicians or bureaucrats as it includes the necessary safeguards (election, mandates, recall, decentralisation, federalism, etc.) which will reduce such developments to a small, and so manageable, level (if not eliminate it totally).

[flowercrowncrip]

How is he able to afford food/rent/etc without a job? Is he on student loans? I feel like sometimes ppl on loans are intimidated by having to graduate because then forbearance ends and they have to start payments but may not have a good job lined up etc but maybe talking to his financial aid office can help him think thru his options if the issue isn’t disability / mental illness making it hard to find motivation & move forward in life (different set of issues with different solutions needed). The incredibly high rates of loneliness is truly one of the contributors to radicalization in my opinion in addition to the documented health effects etc. Hope he gets better & also snaps out of it / becomes less bigoted

He does have some form of student loan, but mostly he’s financially dependent on our parents and really taking them for granted.

Unfortunately there’s not exactly and equivalent to a financial aid office here – student loans either come from private companies or the huge faceless bureaucracy that is Student Finance England.

Loneliness is definitely a factor though. But sadly I haven’t known how he’s really doing for years – I haven’t had much beyond one word answers from him since I transitioned and that was around 10 years ago.

I think he’s likely to finish his dissertation at the last minute before the deadline and then he has a job lined up after he graduates so he’ll hopefully start interacting with a broader range of people again and have more of an offline social life. But I think we’re always going to be very different people.

[codexmaledictus]

The Burden of Apotheosis

He was once Gorst Calathrax, a mortal man of the Administratum, utterly forgettable amidst the throngs of humanity choking the hive-cities of the Imperium. His life was nothing but paper—a ceaseless bureaucracy of servitude to an Empire that saw him as nothing more than a number. But the Plague God sees value in the overlooked, and where others saw insignificance, Nurgle saw potential.

The figure you see above was not always the hulking, corrupted nightmare that strides forth as a Death Guard champion. He was one of countless faceless clerks, his days spent hunched over a cogitator, stamping requisition forms for Guard regiments doomed to the Eastern Fringe. Calathrax’s world ended not with an invasion, but with a whisper. When a plague swept his hive-city, he was the last one standing in a vast chamber of corpses. Nurgle’s Rot should have claimed him, but instead, it spoke to him. It told him of a greater purpose.

In his fevered visions, Calathrax saw himself clad in armor slick with disease, his flesh made unyielding by the blessings of rot. He awoke to find himself...transformed. His body swelled, bursting through the meager confines of his Administratum-issued robes, even as his mind twisted to serve his new patron.

On the decayed plains of Thranax IV, he led a host of plaguebearers against the forces of the Astra Militarum, his former comrades. His plague-sword found its mark time and time again, but it was his voice—wet, gurgling, and suffused with Nurgle’s power—that shattered the defenders. With every word he spoke, their flesh blackened and fell away. His triumphs, however, are not merely martial. Within his bloated armor, Calathrax still carries the meticulous mindset of an Administratum clerk. Now he serves Nurgle as a plague-archivist, cataloging every strain of disease his warband spreads.

His corrupted scrolls are whispered to carry blessings of contagion for those foolish enough to handle them. Gorst Calathrax has embraced eternity, not in the Emperor’s light, but in Nurgle’s ever-festering garden. May his story remind us: even the most insignificant of souls can find their purpose in decay. (For those who seek the true blessings of rot, look closely. The pustules in the image pulse with unholy life—perhaps a gift waits for you in their ichor...)

[darkmaga-returns]

The president-elect said ‘the departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled, so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.’

By Doug Mainwaring Lifesite News

November 11, 2024

In a stirring video presentation, President-elect Donald J. Trump issued a 10-point plan promising to radically dismantle and de-weaponize the “Deep State,” and send much of what is left “of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington Swamp” to “places filled with patriots who love America.”

Trump’s announcement sent shockwaves of fear and anxiety throughout the nation’s capital.

As part of Trump’s plan, he promises to “clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled, so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.”

He also proposes to expose the “abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart”; to “establish a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and corruption”; and to “monitor our intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people.”

Once his new administration begins, Trump said he would “push a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.”

[exeggcute]

in hindsight this notion I used to have of corporate environments as a like cold faceless bureaucracy of identical cogs spinning in a huge machine is kind of funny considering how much of the corporate nonsense I've experienced has actually been a rich tapestry of cliques and petty grudges and straight-up mind games. like still a climate of alienation but rooted in paranoia way more than in tedium. maybe it's just a startup thing. in other news my nemesis finally got fired

[theedoctorb]

Lessons Learned from Both Sides of Games

CW: Discussion of harassment, threats, and mental health challenges. I’m a clinical psychologist who has been working at the intersection of mental health and the game industry for just over seven years. My whole job is to help educate companies, communities, and individuals on mental wellness and to bolster that wellness across the entire game space. I was a gaming superfan for my entire life before that. I still have the first sixty issues of Nintendo Power on a shelf. Having spent considerable time in the game industry and even more time outside of it, I thought I might share some insights I’ve learned in the process, especially given how often I see people forget some of these things.  

The People Who Design and Make Games Are People Who Love Games 

The game industry is brutal. It’s hard to find a steady job in it. Many jobs are underpaid and undervalued. There’s chronic gender-based violence, and marginalized voices are often excluded from conversations and representation. Overwork and burnout are so common that they become topics of gallows humor at industry gatherings. While people are trying to change all of this (it’s a major aspect of my job), these are all still sadly true.  

Why is this important? Because it shows that the people who are making your games make games because they passionately want to. In the better part of a decade that I’ve had frank, private conversations with industry employees at all levels, I’ve never met a studio employee who didn’t care about games. They love them. They’re players themselves. It doesn’t matter whether it’s video games or tabletop games, they love games. The vast majority of studio employees I’ve met also care about the community. They just want to make games people enjoy. Does that mean they don’t make mistakes? They do. Most also genuinely care about fixing them and making your game experience the best it can be. They wouldn’t put up with the harshness of the industry if they didn’t! 

Additionally, corporations make moves to maximize their profits over consumer demands. Most corporations are – after all – in the business of making money. That still doesn’t negate the fact that they’re generally made up of individuals who care deeply. 

What Goes on Behind-The-Scenes is so Different Than I Thought 

Before I started working in games, I did what so many fans do: think of the companies as faceless entities with malevolent intent and speculated wildly with my friends, reveling in the schadenfreude of corporate trip-ups. What I learned after getting into the industry is that the companies are made of individuals. Some with more power than others. A lot more, in some cases, but it’s still individuals who make our games and make up the companies. 

Some companies are bigger, and that generally brings a slow-churning bureaucracy with a lot of conflicting needs and perspectives. Why don’t you hear about the inner workings of those companies as fans? Because company employees are often under non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and non-disparagement agreements, and companies have designated representatives who speak for them. I’ve lost count of how many times friends of mine have seen fan speculation trending or some “confirmed” leak about their company or project, and they desperately wanted to say, “That’s not how it works! I was in that meeting! It didn’t go like that at all!” but they can’t. Not without risking their jobs and even massive financial penalties for contract breach.  

What’s more, there are often intricate webs of sponsorships and contractual obligations that confound any speed of decision making. That’s at both the creator and corporate level. Even your favorite creators might be under some of the same contracts as employees and have similar restrictions on what they can and cannot say about a brand or company without risking their livelihoods.  

It was both eye-opening and humbling to realize that I genuinely had no idea how the inside of the game-making process worked when I was a fan, despite my Dunning-Kruger-esque self-assuredness. I had no idea the specifics of any one project, which I still generally don’t unless I’ve also signed an NDA for a specific project. There are often too many layers of insider nuance, and much beyond that is pure speculation. 

Rage-bait Fandom is a Thing, and It Actually Hurts People 

Let me be clear about something, I’m not talking about all fans here. I’m not even talking about the majority of fans. I’m talking about a small subsection of fans who – in some cases – literally profit by building content platforms on stoking the rage of the fanbase. They might ostensibly clutch their pearls and protest that they are doing it all for the community they supposedly represent, but then they use their platform to fan the flames of rumor and innuendo. They spread misinformation, and the misinformation does spread. It spreads because it preys on our various biases about corporations as faceless monsters who want to hurt fandoms. It preys on an us-versus-them dynamic. It intuitively makes sense to us. Then our rage escalates because others around us bolster it with their rage. 

Some of these content creators claim to have insider knowledge of a studio when no one at the studio knows who they are, or worse, the people at the studio do know them, dislike them, and can’t publicly say anything to correct the misinformation they spread.  It should be noted that I’m not referring to reputable journalists who engage in due diligence regarding the veracity of anonymous sources. I’m talking about content creators who build their platforms on manufactured rage and misinformation, sometimes even naming names of studio employees – employees who often have no influence or power over the decisions which were made.  

This is where the harassment often begins. Harassment of studio employees is so common in games that it is also periodically the subject of gallows humor at industry gatherings. The problem is that it’s not funny when people receive repeated, unwanted contact from other people. It’s not funny to receive emails and DMs of graphically violent imagery, death threats, or threats of sexual assault. It’s not funny when fans declare that it’s “open-season” on moderators in forums and streams because they’re paid (not always) by the corporation. It’s not funny when friends of mine develop full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder because their private information has been publicly released by angry fans, their families also receive death threats, or the SWAT team bursts through the doors of their house because someone called 911 with a fake anonymous tip.  

Before I worked in the industry, I couldn’t imagine the kind of toll this took on people, because they weren’t people to me; they were a faceless, malevolent corporation. Now I know differently and check in on my friends often, especially anyone whose job is public-facing. Corporate actions can and should be scrutinized (again, part of my job), but scrutiny is not harassment, and harassment and threats are not okay. If you believe harassment is okay, then you’re actively hurting the people who are trying to make the games you claim to love. You’re hurting the games you claim to love. 

Final Thoughts 

What are the take-home lessons I learned in all this time? It boils down to a few things: 

Most game employees love games and just want to make good ones you enjoy. That’s why they are in this difficult industry. 

There are often things going on behind-the-scenes that we don’t know about, and that often confounds processes. 

There’s a whole sub-industry regarding manufactured fan rage, and it hurts people by tacitly (or overtly) encouraging harassment.  

Corporate decisions can and should be scrutinized, but harassment and threats towards individuals are not okay.   

It’s still sometimes hard to let go of my previous biases, especially when companies make decisions that hurt the community, but I’m fortunate to be surrounded by people who are willing to say, “Hey, maybe we take a breath and think this through?” or even, “I think you’re wrong here, and here’s why…” That way, I can channel my anger in more productive ways that don’t hurt others, especially given most of us who are fans share the same goal: wanting the games and community to be as amazing as possible.  

[sistersorrow]

Every culture eventually creates myths to explain things they don't understand, so let me share with you a story from my people: the myth of the Electricity Man, Jimmy the Intern

My country's electrical infrastructure is, to put it lightly, dogshit, being prone to electrical faults, failing (and occasionally exploding due to people siphoning oils) transformers, and simply not being able to meet national power demands, necessitating blackouts in some areas so others can have power

The problem is that the people in charge of all this lack any transparency, so these outages are never announced beforehand and could very well be likely

With no real way of predicting if or when these outages would occur, the people at my senior school all eventually came up with a character to give a face to the faceless machine of bureaucracy: Jimmy the Intern

Jimmy, as the story goes, had a little office with a big switchboard, with some switches controlling power for entire regions, while others were for individual houses, and it was Jimmy's job (which paid poorly if at all) was to be the sole decider of who got electricity and when

If the power went out, that was merely the will of Jimmy

If the power kept flickering on and off, Jimmy was bored, or maybe having problems at home and taking out his frustrations on his fellow citizens

If the power came back, but a really low voltage, Jimmy spilled his coffee on the switchboard or something

Like Santa Claus, you could have messages forwarded to Jimmy asking to bring the power back, and he'd often listen (this was an explanation for a common phenomenon we'd notice where the authorities would claim the outage was due to a fault, but then power would come back minutes after we'd call asking what the fuck was going on)

Some claimed that there were dances one could do to appease Jimmy, but this was deemed heretical as most of us were minors at the time and while Jimmy was an instrument of our oppression, he was not the kind of creep that would make kids dance for his amusement

Then, one day many years ago, there was no power outages for two whole weeks, only to suddenly go out around 16:00, and the next day when we gathered to discuss the Jimmy and his ways, we were all in agreement: Yesterday was the day that Jimmy died

Realising the evils he had committed, Jimmy the Intern locked himself in his office and refused to turn off the power, and the government, being filled with the kind of people who handed control of their electrical infrastructure to Just Some Guy, unlocked the door with a spare key, shot him 57 times in the head, and gave the job to Johnny the Intern

After that, the joke just kinda fizzled out, and Jimmy the Intern, the Electric Man, no, the Electric SAINT, went into the dustbin of history

[tremorsmackenzie]

i feel like there is a pretty big difference between how shield is portrayed in the movies vs aos, even before hydra revealed itself.

the movie version of shield is a secret, faceless, powerful global organization tasked with worldwide threat assessment and response for extranormal technology and individuals, employing thousands of agents and equipped with advanced technology. it has far reaching powers to accomplish its mission, can ignore any law that stands in its way if it judges it necessary, and enjoys far reaching trust and allyship by most nations and leaders across the world. the principle it was founded upon was protection, and this is its main objective, even if it results in sometimes near-authoritarian measures of threat prevention.

the agents of shield version is by comparison a lot warmer, more approachable and sympathetic. basically a worldwide spy organization made up of sometimes ruthless, but mostly goodhearted agents that operate out of goofily named bases like the hub, the fridge, the sandbox, the lighthouse, etc. their job is to keep watch on powered individuals and alien technology and to contain or destroy it if its too dangerous. theyre allowed to maintain bases on several continents and are constrained by a sometimes unwieldy bureaucracy that forces them to occasionally cut through the red tape to accomplish the mission. their task most of all is the protection of mankind, which sometimes forces them to place that mission before themselves, their family, or their fellow agents. there is real comradery between agents, and doing whats right is often valued a lot higher than strictly following orders.

[rabbiteclair]

many of the groups from receptions, especially later in the game, are used to explore/demonstrate the kind of forces that can limit, coerce, or influence a person's free will even in a 'free' society. For example:

A lot of the earlier receptions: factors of money or prestige.

The Thumb: social hierarchies.

The Index: faceless inhuman systems such as government bureaucracies, corporate policies, etc.

Liu Association: interpersonal relationships and one's own sense of duty.

8 o' Clock Circus: evil clowns

[quantumized-insanity]

I hate you faceless bureaucracies I hate you endless hold lines I hate you compartmentalized systems I hate you automated call directories I hate you planned obsolescence I hate you warranties and insurance and systems that have no people and no accountability and no way to tangibly handle problems. I hate living in this Kafkaesque nightmare with upbeat crackly elevator wait music with automated options. I hate you capitalism I hate you capitalism I hate you capitalism I HATE YOU CAPITALISM

[amrv-5]

HI PARKER!!! trope meme ask:

time loops/time wonkiness, modern AU, noir AU (I know the answer but STILL), genderswap/genderfuckery, major character death, there was only one bed

LISAAAAAAAA these are all so GOOD????? THANK YOU!!!!!!!! This is JUST what I needed to focus on rn AHHHHHH. So good. So good. All answers are MASH btw of course. I got a one track brain rn:

Time loops/time wonkiness:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

Yes. Yes. Love. Yes. Figurative time loops or time dilation or whatever? Where it just FEELS like things are taking forever but they aren’t? Love it. Literal time fuckery? Love it even more. I particularly love to think about the idea of a time loop in MASH as it relates to the sort of meta-angle of syndication. The idea that these characters are all, in some way, trapped reliving the same days of the war over and over for as long as we are watching them…that’s the stuff. Invokes something interesting to me about viewership / media voyeurism that I haven’t really pulled apart but. Fun. Makes me think. Love to play with. Ripe for tragic effect in-fic, fascinating at a meta-level. Fun fun fun fun fun.

Modern AU:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

Hard no, I say, writing one. 

To be fair I only started playing with the idea to see if I thought it could be done. Generally my opinion of a modern MASH AU is that it divorces the characters from the circumstances that shape them so entirely that it might as well be playing with OCs. They are so deeply the products of their time and place that I really hate to see them taken out of their context. 

…That said, I’m finding that the modern AU I was chopping at started to work when I shoved them into a desperate modern situation. Instead of sticking them in the front lines of a land war, I shoved them into the front lines of modern American health care. Hawkeye and BJ as trauma/CT surgeons fighting a losing battle against the crushing bureaucracy of the American medical industry kind of…works? IMO? Not nearly as well as their original context, but it does allow Hawkeye to be desperate and angry and disgusted by the perversion of his profession for the profit of massive corporate interests, and it lets BJ be silently resigned to hell, and the both of them are trapped for a certain number of years in a way by medical debt and the fact that what the hell do you do if you quit being a surgeon, when so much of your life and identity revolves around your career? It works because it lets them field despair and lean on each other and shove against massive faceless machines of injustice that profit off exploitation of their skills. Tl,dr; I’m a hypocrite for disliking modern AUs, it’s true, I admit. I'll never say never, but it'd have to be done really intentionally to appeal to me, I think.

Noir AU:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

LOVE!!!!!!!! LOVE!!!!!!!! I think it’s soooo sexy. I love noir, I’m a huge Raymond Chandler fan, and kind of subscribe to his writing approach in that frequently vibes and images are more the point of noir than watertight plot. There is very little I enjoy more than the type of stylized, image-focused writing that noir invites. I’ve been hacking away at a noir Beejhawk AU (AS YOU KNOW!!!!!!!! AH!!!!! I am working on. So many things. Help) and a consistent source of fun has been writing these smoky, dim, tense, sexy, ambient scenes where everybody’s circling each other and nobody is on quite the same page. Lots of Hawkeye standing around being lean and sharp and clever and melancholy, and lots of BJ being, and I’ve code-named him the Jackal in this fic where he’s a rouge and disillusioned beat cop with a gun to his head, sort of gleefully sadistic in moments. We know he’s got an in-canon capacity for violence that concerns and upsets him, and it’s been fun to let him take the limiters off and go a little wild with it. And of course how does guilt come back into play, because you KNOW it’s going to be there for him. Waiting. Always. Especially when he initially meets Hawk as a bit of an antagonist figure. God I gotta get back to writing this.

Genderswap/gender fuckery:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

YES!!! No. Yes. [Parker is picky as usual alert] SOMETIMES I love it and sometimes it’s meh. I LOVE it when it seeks out to agitate borders of heteronormativity and make things queer. I think it’s soooo fun to get into characters’ psychology (obviously) and I love how many ways that gender swapping or gender fuckery can open itself up to questioning characters’ internal biases and assumptions. If it's just to make a gay ship straight w/no underlying interest in how that would change things, then nah.

That said I think BJ and Hawk are both sooooo fun to get genderfucky with. I think BJ is fun to use to see how he reacts to tearing down some of his intense 50s gender role feelings, and Hawkeye and his whole breeding kink (sorry) etc., so much fun. Drag is fun, gender fuckery is fun, crossing borders is fun, violating gender norms rules and is so cool and fun. I love queer people actually. Love to see it in fic. GET WEIRD W IT! I’ve decided this is actually a solid yes now that I’ve typed it out. GET WEIRD!!!!! I WANNA READ IT!!!!

Major character death: 

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

NOOOOO AUUUUUGHHHHH. I will personally probably never write it (if it’s not temporary a la vampire!Hawk fic), but I think it CAN be done well but ouuuughhhhh. Hurts. Makes me soooo sad. I’m sure I’ve seen it done well but ohhhhhhhhhh.

There was only one bed:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

Answered elsewhere but. I’ll say again that I FUCKING LOVE IT. Love pics that really delve into physical affection and one bed is soooo great for just. Everything about that. Accidental cuddling. Sharing space. Waking up wrapped in each other…..ooohhhhhhh I love. I love. 

Thanks AGAIN for this ask it was soooooo fun to get to really sit down and think through these!!!!!!!!!!!

[feotakahari]

I can’t relate to this. The things that kill people are either human or impersonal, like a drone operator or a faceless bureaucracy. Some people like to pretend they’re the inhuman personal as a form of self-delusion, and many people (myself included) write the inhuman personal as a punching bag in fantasies, but when the inhuman personal uses more believable characters as their punching bags, it feels more like the offender’s fantasy than the victim’s.

The idea of something that could hurt others in a personal and malicious way, but could never die from choking on food or falling down a staircase, is like a basilisk to me. I can’t function while believing in it, even in the context of suspension of disbelief.

How Horror Helps With Processing Grief and Trauma, S.F. Whitaker

[darkmaga-returns]

This plan should keep him fully occupied on the home front:

Truth Justice ™ @SpartaJustice

THE END OF THE DEEP STATE: President Trump’s Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People.

Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is.

First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left's political enemies, which they're doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.

Third, we will totally reform FISA courts which are so corrupt that the judges seemingly do not care when they are lied to in warrant applications. So many judges have seen so many applications that they know were wrong, or at least they must have known. They do nothing about it, they're lied to.

Fourth, to expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart, we will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and corruption, and there are plenty of them.

Fifth, we will launch a major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the fake news to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy. When possible, we will press criminal charges.

Sixth, we will make every Inspector General's Office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the Deep State.

Seventh, I will ask Congress to establish an independent auditing system to continually monitor our intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people, or that they are not spying on someone's campaign like they spied on my campaign.

Eighth, we will continue the effort launched by the Trump administration to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington Swamp. Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out. And I mean immediately out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.

Ninth, I will work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate. So they deal with these companies and they regulate these companies and then they want to take jobs from these companies. Doesn't work that way—such a public display cannot go on and it's taking place all the time, like with Big Pharma.

Finally, I will push a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.

This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore government that is controlled by the people and for the people.

Thank you very much.