#it's bullshit because 'political' is actually a pretty broad term?

[georgierre]

.

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

viper jaskier AU teaser

Did you want to read a bit of the setup for my Viper!Jaskier AU? well how about a lovely chunk of the first chapter to tide you over! That sounds like fun, right?

It is not out of edits yet technically, and it is not the entire chapter and I have cut out significant chunks of content so it remains new when I put it on AO3, but I am very proud of it. Please let me know what you think?

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Jaskier had, perhaps, been a bit too rash in storming down the mountain after the dragon hunt, effectively removing himself from Geralt’s life. Geralt from his life. Whichever way you cut it, they aren’t going to be travelling together anymore and… and good riddance, frankly.

Jaskier spent two decades as a stand-in for someone else, and he had borne it for the love of that fucking man, despite what little good sense he had. And in return he gets told off for having the audacity to try to cheer Geralt up after whatever happened with Yen that left him in such a foul and hateful temper? Oh yes, how dare he care about his friend – certainly that deserves sharp words about knowing when to shut up.

It was better than being alone, with the gaping ache in his chest as he tried to find his way to something that would fill the empty loneliness, that he'd felt every time he was without Geralt. But he’s done. He’s washed his hands of Geralt of fucking Rivia, and he’s glad of it.

Except that he’s not. Not really. Jaskier is in the next town down a random road, out of the town Roach had been stabled in at the bottom of the mountain, and his chest aches and aches and aches, the way it did before he met Geralt, the way it did every time they were apart. When he met Geralt it was a revelation how well he could fill that emptiness, and he stayed with the man for twenty years. Twenty. Years. Despite the harsh words. Despite the way he sometimes heard Jaskier and looked as if he’d just eaten a lemon. Despite the fact that Jaskier knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the witcher tolerated Jaskier because of someone he'd already fucking lost.. And then after Jaskier finally lost his patience with it and told Geralt as much, he had the audacity to try to claim that he’d let Jaskier stay for his own sake.

Which, frankly, was bullshit, and Jaskier knows it.

Which is why he is here, two weeks later, in this shit town, spending the last of his coin on another bottle of some sort of local liquor. It tastes like shit, but it gets you completely drunk, which is a good state to be in for the shit songs he’s writing and will never perform.

He says

It’s you and always you

I say

You never really saw me

Jaskier hums a bit, tucked into a table in the far corner of the tavern after having been booed into ending his attempted performance, trying to fit the scrawled (nearly illegible) lyrics to some kind of melody, and takes another swig of the bottle next to his journal. “Nah, that’s shit,” he mutters to himself, and scribbles it out loosely.

Maybe it should be a song that blames himself. He’s the one that turned it into a goddamn argument, after all. Geralt had snapped at him how many times, and he’d never taken it personally, but this time somehow was too much? Especially when Geralt was… already upset. He’s not sure what happened between Geralt and Yennefer, but he knows something happened, something not good, and yet he still pushed, and took it personally when Geralt didn’t respond well. Of course Geralt didn’t respond well.

Honestly, Jaskier only had himself to blame for being alone, after all that.

It’s been two weeks. Two weeks he’s been drunk off his ass and written a complete load of maudlin and frankly idiotic shite. He passes out at the table eventually, face planted into his journal and liquor bottle emptied down to the dregs.

The tavern owner apparently thought it best to let him sleep it off, because it's not until morning that Jaskier's roughly shaken awake and told in no uncertain terms to get out, and that his bardic services won't be needed again. Jaskier doesn't blame him; can’t keep a bard on hand if he largely sings depressing songs, he supposes. 

He starts walking out of town, hoping he actually has all his things, and decides to take stock, even if he's still a bit wobbly. He has his lute, his bedroll, a silver dagger Geralt gave him once "for emergencies", and his bag that mostly just has a change of clothes that probably needs washing pretty badly. A quick subtle smell test (which frankly, Jaskier realizes didn't need to be subtle, as there's no one on the road with him, but old habits and all) verifies that he does absolutely need a bath before he does anything else.

Right.

Geralt is gone. Jaskier has left Geralt. Geralt and Jaskier are no longer... whatever they were. Friends? It seems shallow to call them friends, but they weren't anything else. And maybe the leaving was his fault - Geralt was angry, and upset, and Jaskier knows probably better than anyone how much Geralt doesn't know how to handle strong emotions. Maybe Jaskier shouldn't have left. But he did leave.

They're done.

Geralt is gone.

Jaskier is alone.

It's an awful feeling, being alone, but Jaskier spent twenty years imperfectly filling a role someone else had filled before Geralt ever met him. Trying to fill a hole in Geralt's heart the way Geralt filled a hole in his. The problem is the shape of it: Jaskier's loneliness is broad and overwhelming and he's dealt with it as long as he can remember. Geralt's is shaped like a specific person.

And Jaskier is forty-two. He's too old to trail after a man with no interest in him like a lost puppy. He's too old to keep trying to wedge himself into a place he doesn't fit into, just so he won't feel lonely. He's too old to sit around for weeks crying over a broken heart he saw coming almost two decades ago; too old to be drinking himself to oblivion, and playing nothing but heartbreaking songs. He has the rest of his life to live.

So, metaphorically at any rate, he picks himself out of the dirt, dusts himself off, and keeps moving. He's still living, even if the life he'd built is in ruins, so now he rebuilds it.

[...]

It's been almost two years since leaving Geralt when he runs into the mage in Temeria.

He's played quiet inns and taverns before, and the key to those is generally to work at various familiar and relatively low-key songs until the audience responds, and work from there. But in this town, they seem to not want to engage, and he only plays for about an hour before he gives up, and asks for a meal and some ale.

"I wish you'd played longer," a man says, sitting down across from Jaskier. "You have a beautiful voice."

Jaskier glanced up at him, and considered what might be happening. The man was a bit older than him by all accounts, greying black hair and moderately attractive; his clothes weren't fancy silks or anything, but they looked finely-woven and well-fitted. And there was something about his eyes that set Jaskier on edge.

"Mmm," he said, something clenching nervously in his stomach. "No offence," he says lightly, with effort, "but I have a policy not to fuck mages. Professional courtesy and personal preference. You understand."

"I'm a bit disappointed on principle," the man says, with a hesitant smile. "But no, that's not why I wished to speak to you, Jaskier." 

Jaskier is almost more terrified by that than by the compliment. "I don't know where Geralt of Rivia is, either," he says, trying not to let any panic into his voice and failing miserably. "Haven't seen him in years, actually."

"My name is Doran," the man says gently. "I am a mage, though I'm mostly removed from the politics of the Brotherhood. And I'm not here to hurt you or ply you for information."

"Really?" Jaskier asks, dubious and still rather terrified, if he's being honest. "Not to be rude, but given my experience with magical personages, that seems highly unlikely."

Doran doesn't seem phased, though, and just leans forward. "You've a curse on you, bard. It seems rather nasty, and I... wanted to make sure you knew, I suppose."

Well. That certainly got Jaskier's attention quickly, and he freezes for a moment, his heart clenched. "A curse?"

"A curse," Doran verifies, nodding. "A strong one, too, as far as I can tell. Did you anger a wizard recently?"

Jaskier's pretty sure he hasn't, but he wracks his brain anyway, thinking back and trying to think of any magic users other than Yennefer that he might've pissed off enough to have a strong curse on him that he somehow doesn't know about.

"I... mildly irritated a sorceress nearly two years ago," he offers. "But I'm relatively certain she was much angrier at someone else. We have history, the irritation was mutual. Actually, I was off my game; I was probably more irritated than she was." He's starting to get jittery, turning moments over in his mind, turning himself over in his mind. 

"I doubt that would've been the source then, even for a touchy mage," Doran says thoughtfully. "Casting this curse would've taken a fair amount of effort." Jaskier's food and drink arrive, and he stares blankly down at his stew, his stomach souring. No, definitely not in the mood to eat anymore, and he pushes the bowl to the side.

[...]

"I should put this up in my room, if that's all right?" Doran nods his agreement, and Jaskier heads upstairs to stash his lute safely in his locked room. He pauses before going back downstairs, rests his forehead against the door, and takes a moment to breathe.

He's cursed, with a powerful and unknown curse, that could take effect at any moment, that he'd received at some unknown point in time, and if anything happens to him, Geralt will almost certainly never find out. Jaskier can't even be melodramatic and leave a letter for Geralt, because there isn't anywhere to send it. And it doesn't escape his notice that even now, with the spectre of something awful hanging over him, two years after he'd walked away, the only person he can think of is Geralt.

"Fuck," he whispers into the empty room. "Geralt, I swear to Melitele if this kills me, you'd better find out and grieve me like you were grieving your damn ghost for twenty years."

Then he takes a deep breath, straightens his back, and exits the room.

[...]

Jaskier sits on the cot and folds his hands in his lap to keep himself from fidgeting absently with any of the bottles or dried herbs within reach, like he would when he was six and fifteen and twenty-seven and now forty-four, and he waits.

"I'm making a tea that helps keep my magic focused," Doran says as he uses a small bit of magic to heat the water and herbal mixture he'd made. "Not something I need assistance with, generally speaking, but it will lessen the effort it takes to do, so I can focus my efforts on finding the shape of your curse and how to unwind it."

"That's fair," Jaskier says, jiggling his leg. Now that they were here and talking about magic and curses again, the calm he'd felt from the familiar movements and attitude has melted away entirely, like a chunk of snow on a burning log. "I can't imagine it's particularly easy. Seeing as how it's made of chaos and everything. Does that mean it's against its nature to be focused? I rather imagine it's a bit like my mind most days," he's trailed off into talking to himself, but Doran's standing in front of him holding an empty cup and smiling faintly. 

"I don't doubt it's similar, you seem to be rather chaotic yourself," Doran says, and puts the cup down, pulling a stool over so they're sitting facing each other. "Now, this shouldn't hurt, or feel like much of anything. I'm just looking for the magic of the curse, to try to see when it will activate and what it will do. All right?"

Jaskier lets out an anxious breath and squeezes his hands together tighter, then nods jerkily. It will be fine. And if it isn't, then he'll consider trying to find Yennefer. Doran reaches out and puts his fingers on either side of Jaskier's head. 

And nothing happens. Or, at least, nothing happens from Jaskier's point of view. He can feel this... flutter, almost, at the edge of his thoughts, that he's pretty sure must be Doran's magic, but other than that it's rather uneventful and anticlimactic. So he keeps still for a few excruciatingly long minutes before Doran opens his eyes and lowers his hands, looking solemn.

"Well, that can't be good," Jaskier says, trying weakly for levity and not managing it.

"It's some sort of transformation curse," Doran explains, sitting back on the stool for a moment. Jaskier's fingers flutter against the backs of his hands as he keeps them folded in his lap. "A very strong one. And it was set in place long enough ago that I can't see any part of you that isn't touched by it."

Jaskier's fidgeting stills, and his eyes narrow. "Wait. You mean it's a curse that's been waiting to take effect since I was a child?" 

"It's a curse that's already taken effect since you were a child, by all appearances," Doran corrects. "Whatever the transformation is, you've been living it since before you can remember."

Well. That was more upsetting and complicated than he'd expected.

[...]

He stumbles a few steps away from the door and bends over, hands on his knees, breathing deeply. Faintly he can hear the door close, and a small part of him is grateful that Doran is, if nothing else, polite enough to give him a moment of privacy to try to deal with this.

"Fuck!" he doesn't quite shout, and pushes himself upright, still trying to breathe evenly, so he can pace. "Fuck. Shitting tits, I..." Okay. He needs to not just curse. He needs to think this out, the best way he's ever known how.

"Right, Geralt," he says to no one, to the memory of his best friend for two decades who could barely stand him most of the time. "It seems that I've run into a bigger spot of bother than I thought, and I've been cursed since infancy. A transformation curse, no less, and no idea how it's changed me!"

Hmm, says the voice in the back of his mind, that he's so glad isn't here and wishes were here so badly he aches. It's thoughtful and concerned and definitely paying actual attention, rather than grunting assent while not hearing a word he says. Jaskier can— could tell the difference. Can imagine it.

"I suppose it could be something lovely," he says. "Secret heir to a throne somewhere. Or it could be worse, it's probably worse. Probably had some sort of horrible deformity and my parents were so mortified they cursed me to make me look normal enough for their perfectionistic standards." Maybe it's childish to let that much bitterness seep out in his tone, even if he's not talking to anyone but himself.

Could be, his imaginary Geralt says in this imaginary conversation he's having, and Melitele's tits, he can't even have an imaginary Geralt that is more conversational? But no, he can't, because he knows Geralt too damn well for a chattier Geralt to feel at all realistic. Damn the man.

"Whatever it is, it will change the way I exist," Jaskier continues, to the night air and a memory. "If it's from before I can remember, then it's..." his frantic pacing slows to a stop and his heart stutters. "What if I can't play anymore, Geralt?" he whispers. "What if I can't sing?"

His imaginary Geralt is silent.

But his own mind is not, it never ever is. If he can't play and he can't sing and he has more of his heart torn out of him... he will find a way to dust himself off and keep moving. He always has. He always will. If he stops, he'll drown himself, or find a dangerous lover, or try to help someone he has no business helping. And then he'll burn out the way part of him has been trying to do since he left Oxenfurt that first time at eighteen.

He's Julian Pankratz. He's Jaskier, the greatest bard the continent's ever known. He will survive and thrive after whatever this curse can throw at him.

"Right," he says, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. "Okay."

[...]

:3 (I believe @brothebro, @wingedquill, and @storyinmypocket​ at the least will be interested in this!)

[riotwritesthings]

Undateable

Steve/Tony fanfic, 2.9k, rated T AO3

Prompt: Fake Dating

Prompt found here

-

“This is all your fault,” Tony mutters grumpily as he slides out of the car, pausing just long enough to shoot Happy a quick nod. "Maybe this'll teach you not to say nice things about me in public. Important information for the future."

“I'm still not even sure how we got to this point,” Steve says, still in that vaguely lost tone he's had all day.

The incessant flashing of a million cameras certainly isn't helping with Steve's slightly dazed expression as he clambers out of the car, and a small part of Tony can't wait to see those photos. Most of Tony, though, is just dreading finding out exactly how this is all going to go horribly, horribly wrong. Plus, he just knows Steve is going to look unfairly good in all the press photos no matter what dumb things his face is doing. The suit he's all nicely wrapped up in pretty much guarantees that.

"Let's get this night over with," Tony says miserably, slaps on his press smile, and then drags Steve's giant, dazed ass towards the doors by the arm.

What had happened was Steve, being a big dumb sweet-hearted idiot who didn't know when to keep his damn mouth shut. Namely, when they suddenly found themselves swarmed by reporters just tying to leave the tower to walk to the burger place down the street. Tony had been all prepared to just flash a smile and elbow his was through the crowd, but not Steve, oh no, apparently Steve had had other plans.

Tony had been barely even paying attention to the questions being tossed at him, had zoned out around the time someone had asked asked about his breakup with Pepper for the millionth time. Like that hadn't happened a couple years ago now, like it wasn't the oldest of old news. Apparently the term 'undateable' has been thrown out there, because the next thing Tony knew Steve had been practically screaming into the gathered reporters, ranting about how 'Tony is the exact opposite of undateable,' about how he's apparently 'thoughtful and generous' and how 'anyone would be lucky to have him.'

Tony had nearly tripped over nothing and face planted into the sidewalk, and he hadn't even been sure which part was more surprising, Steve being anything less than polite to the press, or the fact that Steve apparently thinks he's 'a real catch.'

-

“Yes, I remember that,” Steve says, and he doesn't roll his eyes but his face gets that pinched look that says he really wants to. It's too bad, Tony would really love the mental image of Steve going full-annoyed in the middle of a charity gala to look back on and laugh. “And I'm still not going to apologize for what I said, they were way out of line-“

“Stop, you're embarrassing me,” Tony says dryly, and Steve kindly goes along with pretending the sarcasm is real.

“What I'm saying,” Steve continues on, undaunted as he always is by Tony's bullshit, “is that I don't understand how that got us here.”

“Ah,” Tony says, because it's a fair point.

-

That was kind of where the whole thing got a little complicated, and see there was a reason Tony never responded to those kind of digs from the press. Because they always took any reaction entirely out of context, and usually blew it out of proportion too. Which is how 'news' had gotten out that Tony Stark is looking to date again, with Captain America as his confusingly aggressive wingman.

Tony is not, for the record, looking for a date. Not even a little bit, but he couldn't exactly say that or they'd go right back to reporting on how he's obviously still in love with Pepper and wasting away without her. Again, for the record, he's not, but since when has the truth ever mattered to the tabloids? And Tony supposes it's better than the alternative, which would be the press making the wild leap to the (correct) conclusion that the reason Tony hasn't been dating is because he's a little, completely hung up on someone new. Someone tall and blond who does dumb things like yell at the press on Tony's behalf. Maybe. Who's to say, really, because Tony will certainly never tell. Luckily, very few of the least respectable writers had leapt on that theory.

The end result of the entire mess, is that the world is now convinced that Tony's looking for love, which could not be further from the truth. He's got all the love he needs, more than enough, so much that he's constantly surprised no one else notices it spilling out of him every time he's so much as in the same room as Steve. Which makes their current situation such a problem.

-

"Aren't you supposed to be mingling?" Steve asks, raising an eyebrow at him as they loiter near the catering tables. "Isn't that what you usually do at these things?"

Tony shoots him a flat look, and then peaks around Steve's broad shoulder, which he is definitely not hiding behind, to eye the circling predators. "No Steve, I'm not mingling. That's the whole reason you're here, to play human shield so I can show my face while only talking to you all night. It's like you weren't even listening to Pepper."

"I didn't understand a word the two of you were saying," Steve confirms easily and hands Tony another plate of tiny shrimp.

"You're lucky you're cute," Tony says sweetly, patting at Steve's cheek with the hand not clutching his third plate of food. And he's really in trouble, because Steve just smiles and there is no way Tony is going to make it through tonight without making a fool of himself.

"Well at least I have that going for me," Steve says with that goofy little grin that always makes Tony weak. The one Tony has been trying really hard not to think of as 'his' smile.

Tony shoves more shrimp into his mouth so he won't say anything incredibly stupid.

-

Tony's plan had been to just ignore all the rumors and gossip, like he always did, but after the third overzealous admirer had to be forcibly carted out of the tower lobby he could admit that maybe things were getting out of hand. And the media was just making it worse, of course, playing it up like some kind of competition; capture the heart of Tony Stark and win instant fame and notoriety.

Tony remains wildly unamused by the whole thing. He had even had to ban the news in the tower after a particularly fictional broadcast had Clint laughing his ass off and Steve nearly putting a remote through the TV. Pointing out that technically this was what Steve had wanted, now people officially thought Tony was dateable again, just seemed to make Steve grumpier, which made Clint laugh harder, until Steve had stormed out of the room and Tony had been left alone with Clint’s cackling. The whole thing is just a headache that Tony doesn't want to deal with, much less know begin to know how.

And then came the charity gala, the one Tony couldn't skip no matter how much he begged and pleaded and reasoned. Pepper had even sounded kind of sorry for him, though she hadn't let him off the hook, so what good did that do him? Because Tony just knew he'd be swarmed with the desperate elite the second he walked in, no way to avoid it. Not without actually finding a date to the thing, which is what Tony had been trying to avoid in the first place.

For all the good that had done him.

-

Hiding behind Steve doesn't work forever, because of course it doesn't. Steve is entirely too friendly and wholesome to keep the wolves at bay for long.

"I hear you're back on the market," the woman says, a small secretive smile on her face and yep, that is definitely her hand on Tony’s ass.

"Technically true, but I assure you, rumors of my appeal have been greatly exaggerated," Tony says with a tight smile and tries to subtly shift away from her.

Its apparently enough to pull Steve's attention away from the conversation he's having with the woman's husband. Or possibly her father. The introductions weren't real clear.

"Time for your speech," Steve says and wow, that is his Captain America voice right there. No one even thinks to protest as Steve expertly extracts Tony from the women's clutches and then escorts him across the room with his huge hand in the small of Tony's back.

It takes everything Tony has not to blush like a school girl being escorted into the prom. He has a terrible feeling that he's failing, and Tony would just like it known, just for the record, that this whole thing was not his idea.

-

Getting called to Pepper's office had felt uncomfortably similar to getting called into the principal's office. Not that Tony would know. At all. The feeling had only gotten worse when he realized Steve was already waiting in the hallway, looking like a confused puppy and Tony definitely hadn't been struck with the urge to pet his head, not even a little bit.

After making them wait for an agonizing ten minutes Pepper had finally let them in, and Tony had known instantly by the look on her face that he wasn't going to like where this was going. And he hadn't, because she'd wanted to talk about the rumors and the upcoming gala, because of course that was what this was all about. Pepper had pointed out there was one rumor that might actually come in useful, and the look she had given Tony was equal parts pity and mocking.

Tony's blood had run cold, and no matter how much he'd objected Pepper had stood firm. She thought it was the best option, no matter how many times Tony had insisted that it was actually the worst option. Poor Steve had just been left looking back and forth between them, confusion obvious on his face, and in the end it had been his downfall.

-

Tony gets up on the stage and he gives the speech Pepper wrote for him. The whole time his eyes follow Steve as he moves around the room, talking and smiling and charming everyone in his path.

It’s disgusting, it what it is, how easy Steve makes it look. Every gala or press event that Tony has to do, he worries that his fake smile is going to get stuck, stretched painfully tight across his face. But Steve is genuinely friendly, and talking to him always leaves people smiling and happy. Not at all like Tony, who at best leaves people confused and a little lost, wondering if they've just been insulted.

By the time Tony's speech is over Steve is waiting by the edge of the stage again, and his easy smile has been replaced by a look of determination. Before Tony can say a word, or maybe ask where the fight is, Steve grabs his hand and drags him over to the slowly filling dance floor. Tony is so busy trying to fight down his sudden and overwhelming urge to blush and stutter that he doesn’t even notice they’re dancing until it’s already happening.

“Um,” Tony says, and now he’s definitely blushing. His head is also kind of spinning, and Tony is totally going to blame it on the dancing, even if they're really just swaying in place. Mostly he's just lightheaded from having Steve's hands on him, Steve's eyes on him, the heavy weight of Steve’s attention focused entirely on Tony. “Wha- what-?”

"Tony," Steve says, voice low, something oddly tight in his expression, "do people think I'm your date?"

Tony blinks at him, clutches a little tighter at Steve’s shoulder because its kind of the only thing keeping him upright. "Wow, you really weren't listening to Pepper's plan," Tony says, and he definitely sounds a little strangled.

-

Historically, people have had a hard time saying no to Pepper. Doesn’t matter if it’s Tony or the SI board of directors, Pepper basically always gets what she wants.

So really, it’s not totally Steve’s fault, that he had automatically agreed when Pepper had turned that sharp smile on him and said ‘Steve doesn’t mind, does he?’ Of course Steve hadn’t been able to argue with that smile, no one would have been.

Tony certainly hadn’t jumped in with any further arguments, and not just because, actually, he would really, really like to take Steve to a charity gala as his date. Or really anywhere as his date. No, Tony hadn’t said anything because he had known there was no way he’d be able to believably object to the plan any more than he already had without giving away how much he secretly, selfishly loved the plan. He’d made some very expressive and unhappy faces though, leaning back where Steve hadn’t been able to see him, and Pepper had steadfastly ignored him.

So really, Tony is right. This whole thing is Steve’s fault. He just had to go be a dumb, sweet hearted idiot, defending Tony to the press, and now Steve has to play fake date / bodyguard to defend Tony from the desperate masses. Except apparently Steve had missed the ‘fake date’ part of the equation, and Tony’s really not sure how he’s supposed to feel about that.

-

“I told you, this is what you get for saying nice things about me in public, now people think you're my date," Tony says and he's aiming for flippant but probably misses by a mile. Because apparently the fact that this was a date, no matter how fake, hadn’t even occurred to Steve, and isn’t that fun? “You can just wait and see how undateable I actually am at the end of the night.”

“Tony,” Steve says slowly, in the special tone he gets when Tony takes a joke too far.

“What?” Tony tries to demand, tries to sound offended, but instead his voice just comes out soft because Tony genuinely has no idea what he did wrong this time. Except apparently trick Steve into a fake-date, and if that’s what Steve is upset about then Tony might actually cry. Because if he can’t even get a fake-date from the nicest guy in the world than maybe he’s even more undateable than he thought.

Steve sighs, leans his head down until their foreheads bump together, and its probably a good thing Steve's eyes are closed, because there is absolutely no way for Tony to hide the way his own eyes have gone wide with shock. “I told you, I meant every word,” Steve says, his voice practically a whisper, and he sounds so sincere and so unexpectedly sad and Tony has no idea what any of it means. “Anyone would be- so, so lucky to have you.”

Tony makes a sound that's supposed to be a scoff, but it comes out sounding weak and strangled. “Aw, come on, have you not even met me?” Tony asks, trying to crack a joke but it doesn't really work when his voice is the thing that cracks.

Steve opens his eyes again and Tony's breath catches almost painfully in his chest. “I know you,” Steve says, voice quiet but firm, like he's saying something terribly important. “I know you, and I- I think you're the most amazing person I've ever met. I just, I wish I could make you see it.”

Tony can only blink stupidly, and he wants so badly to turn this into some kind of joke, but with Steve meeting his gaze steadily Tony can't seem to think of a single thing to say that's not brutally honest. “That’s... really nice,” Tony finally says, his voice tight and he’s really having trouble breathing with Steve all up in his space like this. He’s also having a lot of trouble not reading into the way Steve's face is inches away from his own, smiling at Tony all gentle and fond, spinning him through the end of one song and straight into the next. “Stop it, you’re freaking me out,” Tony insists weakly.

“No,” Steve says, grinning a little wider. His hand on Tony’s lower back feels huge and warm and so, so gentle, his eyes bright and about as happy as Tony has ever seen him. “I’m going to say nice things about you all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Before he even knows what’s happening Tony finds himself blurting out “maybe you should go on a real date with me, see how you feel after that.” The wave of mortification that crashes over Tony almost immediately afterward is almost enough to knock him off his feet, and he might actually fall on his ass if not for Steve keeping him standing.

And Steve just smiles, wide and bright, like somehow he’s the one who’s been waiting for this. "Deal," Steve says, and Tony is left blinking in stunned confusion. "But fair warning," Steve adds with a smirk, "I'm probably going to say more nice things."

"Deal," Tony repeats, a little breathless and a lot shocked, still not sure that this is really happening. He'd pinch himself, but one, he'd have to stop dancing with Steve, and two, if this is a dream Tony doesn't actually want to wake up.

"Good," Steve says, and spins him again.

[bondsmagii]

Whats life like UK?

that’s a very broad question, and I have no idea how to do it justice lmao. I mean, for the most part it’s alright? for me, anyway, and that’s something to keep in mind because I am one person in a whole country. it’s alright. there’s a lot about the country that I’m not happy about, and there is so much to criticise, but like. there’s things I enjoy, too.

there’s a lot going on the UK. it’s a very diverse place, and there’s lots of influence from other cultures and worldviews. the downside to this, of course, is that there’s a not insignificant problem with racism and far-right political groups, but unfortunately that’s hardly unique anymore. most people I’ve met have been very tolerant, and so long as you avoid any middle-aged white people in the Home Counties or rural Lincolnshire, or anyone with a beer belly wearing a Union Jack, you should be alright. politically we’re a mess right now, but we also have some good stuff, like free health care which is something I never take for granted.

the weather sucks. like, that’s a given. it rains a lot, and when it’s not raining it’s threatening to rain. we have a heatwave every year (most people just call it “summer”) and our houses suck in them because they’re built to keep in heat, so basically you just suffer and die for the entire time and everyone is complaining about the weather even more than usual. we do occasionally get some pretty cool wild weather though: we actually get hurricane force storms here, and every so often an impressive snowstorm will show up.

socially we’re a fun bunch. I do like the fact that people in this country are always down for some fun (banter, if you will). we like to get together, we like to drink perhaps a little more than we should, and we’re very good at poking fun at ourselves. the sense of humour in the UK is an acquired taste, and I think that if you’re not used to it it can be kind of a lot, but we really do love snatching ourselves and we really love snatching our politicians. we have a very dark sense of humour, and perhaps a little risqué at times, but I’ve always appreciated it. it’s very useful for when things are tough. 

everywhere has a lot of history. as a historian, that’s obviously something I like. we’re an old country, and the evidence is everywhere. buildings that are centuries old are common in pretty much every major city, town, and even village. castles and manors are everywhere. ruins and ancient sites are everywhere. pretty much every major town or city has its own museum because it’s historically significant. you can dig in your garden and find 1,000-year-old coins. it’s pretty cool. 

we’re a very haunted country, too. ghost stories are everywhere, and pretty much any place you can point to on a map has at least a couple of ghost stories about it. the UK is said to be one of the most haunted countries in the world, and Scotland is said to be the most haunted country in the world, so if you like your paranormal encounters it’s definitely worth coming for a visit. it’s probably got something to do with all that history.

if I could criticise the place with something specific, it would be that we’re not very good at moving out of the past. this isn’t as bad with the younger generations (especially as immigration has helped in terms of the younger generations having more worldviews to interact with) but it’s certainly bad with the older generations, and of course it’s very much seen in policies and government. people in the UK like to find a way that works and stick to it, and we can be very slow to change. even with overwhelming evidence, our politicians and society leaders are reluctant to admit there’s an issue and take action to fix it; there’s still a very “stiff upper lip” attitude that seems to think that enduring a problem is better than preventing it, or acknowledging it and fixing it. I hope this is something that will die out with the older generations. 

there’s also like, a serious class divide. it’s not like it used to be back in the old days, but it’s sure as fuck still not great. there is an upper class here that’s just... kind of backwards, if I’m honest, and there’s a huge divide between the country’s rich and the country’s poor. I mean, we have people living in literal squalor and poverty, especially in the north. you can pretty much draw a line: the south (London and the surrounding counties) are rich, and the further north you get, the poorer it is. the government also doesn’t really seem to give a shit, surprise surprise. in London it’s especially clear. you can have dilapidated council houses (social housing) backing on to literal mansions; you can have huge gated houses with Lamborghinis in the driveway and there’s a homeless person sleeping on cardboard outside. it’s ridiculous, and I don’t know how it isn’t being addressed with more seriousness. 

but really, I don’t think there’s any problem unique to the UK. we have our own variables contributing to why they’re there, but overall most countries deal with this bullshit. there are certainly worse places to live, but the things I love about the country just makes me even more saddened to see the things that I hate about it. I like living here, overall, but I’m frustrated because we could be so much better as a society. but I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and I’m sure that pretty much anyone could say that about their own countries.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Last night I got to thinking, for no real reason, about how the AA6 portion of the Bullshit Defense AU doesn’t have a climactic plot. Like, the AA1 segment doesn’t either - there’s no equivalent to Turnabout Goodbyes, of course - but it’s just really funny after the AA4 and AA5 bits, where they expose Kristoph as the bastard he is, and catch the Phantom, that after all that, the only mildly interesting thing that happens is Trucy gets arrested for murder and Nahyuta has to prosecute his brother’s half-sister and Thalassa calls Retinz a bitch in front of the entire courtroom. 

Like the revolution happened ~14 years ago, Amara’s been back on the throne since, Nahyuta and Apollo have spent half their lives as royalty and Rayfa has never known anything but growing up in the palace a princess with two older brothers and Amara and Dhurke as her parents.

Except then I was like “wait, what if I can figure out drama to happen in Khura’in anyway?” and of course that’s exactly what I’ve done. And it’s too detailed in some parts and broad-strokes in others because, yknow, I worked through it last night and have other fic to write even though I spent all day so far on this uhhh 3.6k “summary”.

-

Ga’ran was not a popular queen for the ~9 or so years of her rule. Really, she’d be outright hated if she wasn’t playing the “my sister was assassinated” card for sympathy. Her criminal justice ““reforms”” are swift and brutal and not only send every defense attorney underground into the rebellion, but also some prosecutors as well, the ones who have concerns beyond simply winning. Among the prosecutors that stay, it’s a free-for-all of making shit up, calling retrials when things don’t go their way, etc etc - hey, if Ga’ran did it in her trial with Dhurke, then they can too!

Plus, Dhurke was quite popular in his own right, not just “Amara was a well-loved queen so people liked her husband as well.” He successfully defended himself from the charges that he was Amara’s assassin - it was Ga’ran calling a retrial, claiming that he forged evidence, that sent him running. And while Ga’ran tried to claim that Dhurke’s disappearance was suspicious, that if he was truly innocent he’d have nothing to fear from a retrial, and while some people accepted that, there were others who thought that Dhurke’s disappearance was actually Ga’ran disappearing him, and her claims that he was still out there leading a resistance were entirely fabricated to justify Ga’ran claiming extra power and cracking down on all defense attorneys and everything else. Which I mean, Dhurke is still out there, but point being, lots and lots of people aren’t buying Ga’ran’s story.

Plus, Inga is embezzling millions of the people’s tax dollars, and that’s not helping this new regime be popular, either.

This is all background to say, when Amara announced that she was alive, that Ga’ran framed Dhurke for the fire, that the people of Khura’in welcomed her back to the throne with open arms, even if she was no longer a goddess in their eyes, having admitted that she had been fooled, that she had been wrong, and that she made a terrible mistake in trusting her sister and not just her family had suffered for it, but the whole of the country had.

As part of their legal reforms, to clean up the mess that Ga’ran made of the courts and the country, Amara eliminated the death penalty. After Inga signing off on every execution warrant without caring, after Ga’ran wielding death sentences to defendants as a weapon against defense attorneys who she saw as threats to her political power - how could she continue to allow it, no matter the crime, no matter how clear the evidence and proof, when her people, because of the cruelty experienced within their living memory, will always be wondering, fearing, that their queen allowed the execution of an innocent? 

Which means that Ga’ran was not executed. Some of people of Khura’in were understandably crying out for Ga’ran’s blood, and treason is a capital crime, but Amara’s kind heart never wanted to see her sister dead at her word. And outlawing such a punishment, no exceptions, means that she could point to that and say - “I am not allowing my sister to escape justice. What I am doing is not adhering to her kind of justice that so ruined this country and so many lives. No more of that, ever.”

(Amara knows, of course, that Ga’ran was not trying to murder her; because Amara knows that Ga’ran cannot channel spirits. And Amara knows, of course, that if Ga’ran was capable of channeling, Amara would have burned to death in that blaze. Ga’ran kept her alive because she needed her. It wasn’t love. It was necessity. But in Amara’s heart of hearts, down in the core that still hurts no matter how many years have passed, she still loves her sister. Her own sister. Her little sister. How could she sentence her to death? How could she see that through?)

-

And this is all not to say also, that there weren’t a handful of people who had preferred Ga’ran’s rule. They were corrupt and power-hungry prosecutors, or grifters also involved in embezzling tax dollars, or so on and forth. That kind of people. And while Amara and Dhurke and Datz try their hardest to root out those people, get them properly punished, return what they’ve stolen from the country, they’re also busy with, like, everything else, fixing and reforming the justice system, reinvestigating every case Ga’ran oversaw to exonerate every innocent convicted under her rule, making reparations to the families of any innocents executed. Some of the people who were profiting most from Ga’ran’s rule slip through the cracks because of what Amara prioritizes. And they aren’t exactly happy at all about Amara being queen again.

But it’s pretty hard to get anyone else on your side when the country is just relieved that they’re not going to be convicted of a crime after a sham of a trial where they have no defense and the prosecution is making up evidence, so life in Khura’in goes along well and peacefully for more than a decade, with only the briefest, barest whispers of discontent from the sort of people who honestly deserve to be discontent because they’re greedy assholes.

-

Trouble begins to kick in after Rayfa’s fourteenth birthday. (This is, by the way, her worst birthday ever because Apollo always comes home for her birthday and Nahyuta is always around, except Apollo got blown up a week before, and his best friend is in the hospital in a coma from being stabbed, and Nahyuta ran off to LA after him to make sure he’s alive, and they’re still there, Nahyuta trying to help Apollo and friends wrap their heads around the absolute catastrophe that began with the Space Center bombing and is still happening.)

She’s been doing the Divination Seances for over a year, though rather sparsely and only on trials where either Nahyuta and/or Dhurke is there. But now she’s performing them more frequently, and also Nahyuta isn’t around because he’s planning to spend the short long-term in LA. (“Everything Apollo has told you about how fucked up the American legal system is true, and then some,” Nahyuta says. “They need all the help I can give and also a lot more.”)

Rayfa becoming more of a public figure, though, is something of a catalyst. It’s been so long that most of Ga’ran’s supporters have either left the country for somewhere they can be corrupt without the Queen’s right-hand man personally showing up in their houses to casually threaten them with a knife, or just given up. Except Ga’ran, languishing in prison, certainly has not given up, and her first real plan in fourteen years is to begin undermining her sister’s rule simply with rumors. Put some cracks in the foundation. Ga’ran is good at getting into people’s heads, and she hasn’t really managed to sway some of her guards to her side, but she has instilled some doubt in Amara in them, and she can work with that. She’ll create more doubt about Amara’s capacities as queen.

Whispers start going around the capital, and then out of it, that Rayfa isn’t actually Amara and Dhurke’s daughter, that Dhurke is a blight on the bloodline and no daughter of his could channel, and Rayfa is Ga’ran’s daughter, stolen from her when Amara reclaimed the throne. Critically, Ga’ran was never exposed as not being able to channel spirits; she was already guilty of arson, prosecutorial misconduct, and high treason, and that’s just from the time of the fire to when she was crowned, not even getting into everything she did as queen. She’d done enough to rot in prison for life without Amara announcing that she’s also an illegitimate queen. She was an illegitimate queen enough because Amara was still alive and the crown belongs to the eldest sister. Amara, at times too kindhearted, keeps her little sister’s secret.

So Ga’ran’s still in contention for the throne, technically, kinda, if she can pin the fire and Jove’s death on someone else again, if she can throw someone under the bus for her decisions as queen with the DC Act - ah! Inga! You’re still alive, too, rotting in a different prison! You’re a good scapegoat! There, another step of the plan figured out.

Ga’ran’s not planning on asking anyone to assassinate Amara, not yet. She wants to get her hands on the Founder’s Orb first, get that spiritual power, and then she can take out Amara, secure in the knowledge that she can prove herself a valid queen.

For now, she’s just testing the waters by claiming that Amara is a daughter-stealing whore who’s been taken in by Dhurke’s wily defense attorney lies just like the rest of the country. And probably other, increasingly outlandish rumors, that no matter how ridiculous they are, are enough to set Amara on the defensive and make people start to wonder about the functionality of the royal family. That she had Nahyuta exiled for [insert any number of stupid reasons here] and the “he went to America to visit his brother” is a cover story so that nobody realizes how much turmoil there is in the palace. That Apollo isn’t an adopted orphan but is Amara’s illegitimate son with Datz and that’s why he so rarely comes back from abroad, because Dhurke doesn’t want him around.

(“Listen,” Dhurke says, and everyone knows whatever he’s about to say is gonna be stupid as hell. “If Amara wanted to cheat on me with Datz that’s her prerogative because I’m pretty sure I’ve probably cheated on her with Datz?”)

(Amara sighs. Datz starts laughing and nearly chokes on a bite of apple.)

Then they find out that the Founder’s Orb has been stolen, and this crop of sudden, weird rumors comes into perfect clarity. Certainly they have an idea that Ga’ran was behind it in some way, especially given the claim about Rayfa, but they couldn’t figure out why beyond her being bored. Now they know what they’re seeing. Death by a thousand lashes, or a thousand little rumors adding up with this very big Founder’s Orb matter to paint a picture of Amara being an idiot and a fool and untrustworthy and a backstabber, and her rule as ineffective, if Khura’in’s greatest treasure went missing under her. And they know what they say about the Founder’s Orb, its ability to grant spiritual power to anyone, and they know that yes, yes, this is Ga’ran having bided her time, finally striking back.

But they don’t know how she’s getting word to her people - they don’t know who “her people” are - they don’t know where the Founder’s Orb is. They have nothing to tie back to Ga’ran, nothing but their very logical suspicions, but they don’t know what to do with that. They can’t make another case against her just on that, not without being hypocritical to the ideals and principles they’ve reformed their legal system on. And Datz would go and personally guard Ga’ran himself and put her in solitary where he’s her only contact to the outside, to know for sure no one can talk with her, but that would mean leaving Rayfa and Amara, and he also doesn’t trust anyone besides himself to properly bodyguard them, now, so it’s just a fucking mess.

Helping them investigate the stolen Orb are Maya and Misty - Maya, who’s been back for a few months after going home when the courthouse bombing happened, and Misty who came to visit her daughter what felt like 10 seconds before this shit started. Maya can play the bumbling tourist really well, and she understands Khura’inese much better than she speaks it, while Misty feigns not being able to understand or speak anything - she’s rusty, certainly, since it’s been so long since she herself visited Khura’in for her training, but she knows much more than she lets on.

Then Beh’leeb Inmee, who in her free time was looking into the Founder’s Orb matter along with her husband, is accused of murdering a monk, and everything really starts spiraling to shit. Beh’leeb, with investigation assistance from Maya and Dhurke, successfully proves that it was self-defense, and her attacker was someone else who’s been caught up in this Founder’s Orb theft and what’s looking more and more like it’s gonna be an attempted coup. And probably sooner rather than later.

Misty returns to LA, with Rayfa who is using a forged American passport - Datz has a fuckton of contingency plans, let no one ever say he’s only an idiot - under a fake name with the surname “Fey”, posing as Misty’s niece. With the situation in Khura’in becoming more dangerous for the royal family and their closest friends, Amara and Dhurke and Datz decide the best thing to do is get Rayfa the hell out. She doesn’t want to go, which is why Misty goes too - both to make sure she does in fact leave, and to protect her if it comes to it. Maya absolutely refuses to leave, though; come hell or high water she wants to help her distant cousins sort this out, and Misty can’t physically drag her away. So Maya stays.

Apollo and Nahyuta, meanwhile, know that it’s getting to be a mess back home, but they don’t realize how much of one until Rayfa shows up on the doorstep, jet-lagged and exhausted but still absolutely livid that she’s been dragged all this way. She wanted to visit LA but not like this, dammit!

Meanwhile, back in Khura’in, two very important things happen. Ga’ran escapes from jail. And Datz finds out where the Founder’s Orb went: to Kurain Village. Maya immediately tells Mia, who tells Apollo and Nahyuta and Rayfa, and when Misty tries to stop them Mia’s like “hey Mom remember the time that instead of talking to me you nearly got yourself killed for Maya’s sake? Yeah you aren’t allowed to tell us what’s good or safe for me or them. We’re going up to the village to get that Orb, see you later.”

So Mia, Apollo, Nahyuta, and Rayfa go on a family bonding train ride up to Kurain Village. There, they find the same canonical situation - the Orb hidden and Dr Buff dead. Nahyuta and Apollo go spelunking and nearly drown again; Rayfa hangs out with Pearl and gets more quality bonding time with another of her distant cousins; and when the boys get back thoroughly waterlogged but with the Orb, Atishon shows up to tell them that they’ll see him in court for the Orb - they’ll see him and his attorney. Mia.

The royal siblings understandably demand to know why Mia has turned on them. Atishon says it’s because she’s seen the light and knows what’s best for both her village and their kingdom. Mia doesn’t look them in the eyes. Rayfa curses out Atishon in Khura’inese, and watching his reaction, Apollo realizes: he doesn’t understand a word of it. He tries to catch Mia’s eye, tries to indicate in some, any, way, and then he asks her again, “Why?”

And she answers, with a very broken pronunciation and accent, but still understandable Khura’inese: “My sister.”

“What did you say?” Atishon demands, and Mia lies, “I told them to fuck off, since they aren’t getting the mesage in English.”

They know Maya; Apollo least, but Nahyuta got to know her pretty well on their trip to LA from Khura’in back in December, and Rayfa was, just a week or two ago, seeing her investigate the missing Orb, and vehemently protest returning to LA when she could help find the Orb and help her family, the ones here with the crown, being undermined by a sister. (It hits close to home for Maya, still.) They know Maya is on their side. They know something’s damn wrong. They call Datz and ask him to find Maya because something’s happened.

In court the next day, it’s Apollo and Nahyuta, with Rayfa in the gallery behind them sometimes shouting at them, up against Mia and Diego. Someone casually observing could be forgiven for thinking Diego doesn’t have a clue what’s happening and is accidentally undermining Mia’s case. He actually does know what’s happening and is actively undermining Mia’s case, per her request, because he can play the idiot better than she can, drag this out longer without Atishon getting suspicious, give a little more time for Maya to be rescued. And they don’t hear back about Maya, but they do prove that the Orb needs a spirit medium, and Rayfa knows Ga’ran’s secret, that she can’t channel. Amara’s the only other medium in the country; Maya’s got to be safe.

Atishon gets arrested for murder, and Apollo, Nahyuta, Rayfa, Mia, Diego, and Misty rush off on a plane Franziska gets for them to Khura’in. Mia is biting her tongue the whole time trying not to make a jab about what happened the last time Diego and Misty banded together to save Maya. (She’s really, really trying.

“What’s the plan? Get stabbed and stranded on top of a mountain again?”

Fuck, she was trying.

Instead of answering, Diego takes out his phone and starts sending a message. “Lana and I bet on how long it would take you to say something.”

“I’m going to break your fucking neck, Diego.”

“Not hers?”

“She’s not the one who stabbed my mother on a snowy mountaintop and spent 36 hours feeding my little cousin snow and cold gravy.”

“That’s because she was in prison at the time!!”

“Why is every family I’m part of so fucked up?” asks Apollo, who neither knows this story nor wants to know.)

And honestly I don’t have details that worked out of what goes down when they get back to Khura’in. Maya is rescued. Ga’ran tries some bullshit, but in this universe the only thing she really has going for her is charisma and a handful of supporters. She doesn’t have the throne, she doesn’t have murders to frame Dhurke and Amara for. (Unless she had one of her people murder Inga in jail and tried to blame it on Datz. Ooh, actually that could be a fun plot.) She’s been proven to have committed murder (Jove). If she can be queen, it’s only as a tyrant, having killed everyone in her way, but she’s still got a handful of people who are willing to kill for her. They can put her back in jail, as they should, but she’ll still have her people. They have to get rid of that factor, soundly ruin her so that no one would ever believe her whispers of temptation for power and riches.

So Apollo and Mia realize that the way to take her down is still with the Founder’s Orb. She can’t channel. If they just announce that fact, her supporters aren’t going to believe them. If Amara announces it, same thing. But what they can do is bait her with the Orb and the Holy Mother’s face, forcing her to completely humiliate herself in front of the whole country, proving once again that she has absolutely nothing to offer anyone.

(Also side note, this would be the first time that Apollo and Nahyuta and Rayfa have ever met their aunt, and it’s to find that yeah, she’s as awful as all of Datz’s stories that Amara claimed were slightly exaggerated.)

The Orb goes back where it belongs; Ga’ran also goes back to where she belongs, which is jail, along with everyone who was willing to do murder for her and break her out of jail. The rumors about how the royal family is actually a dysfunctional shitshow are soundly quashed by seeing Apollo and Nahyuta and Rayfa return with the Orb to support their mother and stop their aunt. (Actually  the stupid rumor about Apollo being Datz and Amara’s kid doesn’t quite die, but the fact that they’re no longer under siege and struggling to plug the holes and expose Ga’ran’s plotting means that it’s honestly kinda funny now, to most of them. Apollo’s mortified and wishes that Dhurke and Datz would stop joking about it. They will not.)

Anyway after that, everything calms down in Khura’in again and Pearl and Trucy and Thalassa fly out to Khura’in so that they can all meet the rest of their family, and the biggest problem anyone has is Nahyuta has to decide whether he wants to stay home and help prosecute the people involved in this shitshow, or return to LA and help his new friends there with their perpetual shitshow.

[redcurrents]

Social Anarchism, Individualism and Lifestyle Politics

This is a talk I gave around 2016. As such the writing style is the same as speaking rather than aiming to sound academic. Since this talk was given if I have any reflection I think I was far too fair on individualist and lifestyle politics. But that reflected my attempts to engage the broader ‘anarchist movement’ in Australia at the time, which I now think was basically a waste of time. I should have argued more directly for a platformist/especifist & syndicalist forms of organisation.

Lets start here;

It’s the symbol associated with anarchism... We see it everywhere from actual anarchist propaganda, to graffiti, to printed on t-shirts at kmart. Most here probably know this, but it’s not an A in a circle, it’s actually an A in an O. It means, 'Anarchy is Order', which is one of those wonderful juxtaposing quotes Proudhon used. What he meant is that anarchism will be a highly sophisticated, highly organised and well developed social order. A social order based on the maximum of human freedom, federalism, socialism, equality and development.

Proudhon was the first person to ever use the label anarchist, back in the 1800's France. It’s with him that the confusion between social and individualist anarchism immediately starts. See, he was certainly a type of socialist, he was totally against the exploitation of labour, and he developed an economic system called mutualism based on free contracts between producers, meaning both collectives of workers and small craftsmen would have equal freedom in the economy. This is a bit divorced from the anarchist communism that has become the main tendency since then, but it certainly laid many of foundations. He was anti-state and anti-authority, though sadly he never extended this to women. His ideas on economics and social reconstruction were so popular its said some people in the Paris Commune had little copies of 'What is Property' they used to carry around in their pocket (don’t quote me on this actually happening!), and his economic theories some influence on even Marx. Some people like to argue that he was more of a precursor to anarchism, theres some truth in this – in that his politics where not totally coherent or developed to what is specifically anarchism today. But he did, and was the first, to use the label.

Before him we had William Godwin and Max Stirner, both libertarians certainly, both anti-state, but neither used the term anarchist, and this is important, because alot of individualists certainly like to base their ideas on Stirner. I'm not going to talk about Godwin, but i'd like to point out that Stirner really was more like an early existentialist, his radical 'freedom' was entirely about the ego and the mind, and was anti-everything. There wasn't a trace of positive content in his ideas (besides affirmation of the ego, and this extremely undeveloped ‘Union of Egoists’), which were also pretty racist if you take the time to read The Ego and His Own. About the best thing he had to offer was a critique of state-socialism, and that’s not saying alot.

Anyway after these three “Anarchism” definitely had a name and existed in the world as a political ideology.

Since the birth of Anarchism people have often found it quite hard to define a coherent theory of anarchism; Chomsky always uses that quote 'Anarchism has a broad back, like paper is can endure anything.' And Rudolph Rocker believed that anarchism was something of a tendency in human nature towards egalitarian non-hierachical forms of social organisation. He also believed it was the inheritor of the best parts of both Liberalism and Socialism, the ‘descendants’ of the Enlightenment. Emile Armands Individualist manifesto entirely bases its definition of anarchism around freedom from any social constraint. While from people like Bakunin and Malatesta we see that anarchism is a very specific political philosophy based around class struggle, with the realisation of libertarian socialism as the goal. They use examples like the Paris Commune to point to future potentials, but recognise that anarchism is a modern political philosophy that started with Proudhon and the French workers movement. In modern attempts to look back at anarchism we see both these kinds of definitions in action. Authors like Peter Marshall in his 'Demanding the Impossible' takes the opposition to state as the only requirement to anarchism - and often Marxists who like to have a crack at anarchism use this weak definition too. Modern authors like Van Der Walt and Wayne Price will however often present more coherent and consistent understandings of anarchism.

So basically we kind of have two fields; Social anarchism and Individualist anarchism. Social anarchism sometimes gets referred to as organisational anarchism, and individualist anarchism kind of leads on to what often gets called lifestyle anarchism today. Within both fields we can find a whole range of ideas on both strategy and economics. Still we can somewhat represent where the ideas and who represents them sit.

Obviously we could add hundreds more authors into these fields, but it’s a basic illustration.

So, lets kind of compare the two and I think it will lead us to a better understanding of how anarchism manifests in the world today.

I realise here I am presenting these fields as something of strawmen. But this is not an academic essay and there is only so much time.

As you can well imagine by its name, individualist anarchism starts, and ends, with the demand of maximum liberty for the individual. There are to be no fetters on the development of the so called natural qualities of the individual, and while they think everyone should be free, it really begins with personal struggle and ends with the individual. The only freedom you have is what you can take. Society is also as much a crushing source of authority as the state. There are to be no programmes set for what anarchism might look like, because everyone has different wants and needs. Rebellion is emphasised over revolution – revolution will either lead to a new state or to a new social tyranny. Despite rhetoric against capitalism, market economics are permissible provided there is no boss-worker relationship (although sometimes that’s ok too!.) It is this retreat into the self that actually shares a lot of parallels with new age spirituality, with existentialism and most importantly with neo-liberal capitalism. It’s this abstract opposition to 'the state' and 'society' that allows authors like Peter Marshall to give the nod towards people like Thatcher and Friedman as being somehow libertarian.

Individualism did not have much influence during the emerging the working class, nor did it do much to shape collective politics of rebellion. Individualists often expressed their 'anarchism' and 'freedom' through forms of dress, individual acts of insurrection, and living in small communities of other radicals only. While today we use the word ‘insurrection’ to mean something like when a community/class violently attacks a regime/authority, the connection between the term insurrection and anarchism actually comes from Stirner, who believed revolution was impossible, and that individual 'insurrection' was the only tactic that would keep authority at bay, however temporarily. It was during times of severe social repression, when little other avenue for struggle existed, that individualist anarchism did come to attention - usually with assassinations and bombings - this image of the anarchist bomb thrower still exists. Terrorism became, and to a large degree remains, the peak form of struggle for this tendency. I don't want to say much on it, but I believe that the terrorist and guerilla war is a Leninist strategy, not an anarchist one, despite the flowery rhetoric.

This still happens today. Not long ago some group let off a bomb in Chile at a church, and a year or two ago some insurrectionists kneecapped the CEO of a Nuclear Power company. The targeting of the Nuclear CEO has obvious reasons - the church not so. They issued a massively irrelevant manifestos crapping on about religious feeding the people bullshit. Not exactly a material analysis of religion. The most famous example of this strategy today would be Conspiracy of Fire Cells in Greece. They’re a group known for robbing banks, having shoot outs with police, and bringing ‘left wing terrorism’ back to Europe. They’re all arrested now, and have been involved in struggles for prisoners’ rights and hunger strikes over the last few years.

If you're interested in the terror question, and the rather bold statement that terrorism is a Leninist strategy, i'd highly suggest grabbing a copy of "You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship," quite a famous essay written by an Australian libertarian socialist group.

So then, what’s social anarchism?

Taking the concept of freedom as the basis of anarchism, I want to start with a quote from Bakunin, he says;

"The individual, their freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa; society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the greater their freedom - and the more they are the product of society, the more do they receive from society, and the greater their debt to it.

Here we find a definition of freedom based entirely on social bonds - what Bakunin is saying is that we are all products of social development – it is through relationships and education we find the ideas, motivations and influences that will make us free. Without the development of all, without equality, we will never know real freedom. The more free the person beside you is, the more free you are. Social anarchism is therefore inherently committed to collective methods of organisation - be it through things as various as unions, affinity groups, syndicates, communes, or whatever. Social anarchism also collectivist in economics. We have had Proudhon, and the Spanish economist De Santillian. But ultimately social anarchists owe a great debt to Marx for their understanding of economics - it's over questions of political organisation that we divide.

It’s this freedom through solidarity that found such fertile ground in the workers movement. The ideas of social anarchists, particularly Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta flourished in many parts of the world, namely Spain, Italy, Argentina and China, and had profound influence on the mass anarchist organisations that were to develop. We often sell ourselves short as anarchists today, because much of our history is lost, and because our movement is so small and insular we often feel like a subculture. But when it comes to history, remember we are talking about a movement that affected the lives of millions of people. These were no small propaganda groups or insurrectional cells. These were mass organisations that had obvious anarchist politics. Maybe not all 2 million members of the CNT or the FORA were anarchist – but anarchism had an influence on their lives.

So in comparison, while social anarchism first found its roots in the federalist sections of the international, in the Paris commune, and in the emerging union movements, it is fair to say that Individualism came to prominence when anarchism lost its connection with the working class, and interestingly has largely been a phenomenon tied to the USA and Europe, and Russia. While also in places like Korea, South America, and parts of Africa where anarchism has had periods of significance, individualism has been for the most part irrelevant (feel free to correct me if you’ve come across individualist literature from these parts of the world!) Perhaps the tactic of insurrection by small groups and individuals had some grounding, but its irrelevance seems to be the broader rule. This loss of social influence for anarchism in most countries has never been recovered. The withdrawl of self-styled anarchists from social movements for activities that don't require long-term commitment, thinking, responsibility or coherence is a serious problem if we ever want anarchism to be a philosophy that can change the world again.

Members of the Korean Peoples Assosciation in Manchuria. From 1929-31 Manchuria ‘was Anarchist’, a little remembered period of history.

It’s pretty clear that the irrelevance of a coherent and social anarchist philosophy is also tied to the reactionary and conservative societies we live in. Despite efforts to break out of the leftist ghetto, much like our socialist mates, today we remain largely irrelevant. The anarchist principles of federalism, direct action, anti-parliament politics, and mutual aid are barely connected to a class struggle that is largely institutionalised. With no solid, commited organisations to use our tactics, we don’t feed back into the movements, we don’t test our ideas and fresh activists are few and far between. It’s a two way street. The end result of this isolation can often be liberalism dressed in radical clothing, and the dominance of ‘lifestyle anarchism’ is basically the black flag version of the socialist politics that believes in the revolutionary potential of Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA and Jeremy Corbyn.

Anarchists today are finding our way back to relevance in struggle; in a number of places around the world anarchist organisations and movements are beginning to flourish again. Greece, Ireland, Brazil are a few examples.

I found it illuminating that in this Workers Solidarity Movement talk about the growth of anarchism in Ireland, Andrew Flood says that as anarchists have regained their social relevance over the last two decades, they went from the stereotype of 'punks and people dressed in black' to 'looking like your everyday person', and that about that time the media began to have to acknowledge that anarchism was actually a factor in Irish political life. The Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation in the USA is another wonderful example.

I want to give a historical example of anarchism finding its feet in a concrete situation. It is an example of anarchism feeding into a movement, and developing as a result. Actually, it’s the worlds first example of specifically anarchist organisations doing just such – for all its many limits, there are many lessons to be learnt; I just finished reading Makhno’s account of the revolution in the Ukraine, and during some of the most intense periods of social upheaval he expresses extreme frustration with the revolutionaries in Russia. He points out that the combination of armchair intellectualism and obsession with aspects of theory – like the proletariat over the peasantry means that they're entirely ignorant of the revolutionary and of the practical means these anarchists can take to expand the revolution. This isn't just frustration with individualists either, this is with anarcho-syndicalists, communist and whatnot. He points out the inflexibility of anarchist theory at this time can't deal with practical situations. For example when he was elected leader of his particular battalion he had to give orders right- and he recognises that most anarchists don't believe in giving orders or leaders or whatever. And he expresses that he felt quite uncomfortable with the role he was given. But they were fighting a war. An actual revolution. Not having accountable roles or rules is crap, and I think this is a frustration because of the individualist influence. Just because anarchists didn’t believe they should ever be told what to do, doesn’t mean they can’t develop structures of collective responsibility.

Nestor Mahkno, (elected) leader of the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine

Anarchists have leaders. This is something that modern anarchism really struggles to acknowledge. Just because we refuse to put a label on power doesn't mean that it doesn't exists. Let’s consider this quote from Bakunin;

“Nothing is more dangerous for a man’s private morality than the habit of command. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits.”

So what makes anarchist 'leadership' special is that what we are actually wanting to achieve is to create structures that limit the concentration of power. Informality does not do this. This is a serious danger that exists in individualist and lifestyle anarchism. Rather we should look to have strict mandates given by the collective to their delegates, when assemblies are not practical. That’s why we try to rotate roles - to assure one person doesn't end up with too much power, and to assure that everyone develops skills keeping the field more even if you will. Individualism doesn’t address this. Actually egoist individualism like Stirners ends up justifying power over other people – hardly an anti-authoritarian philosophy. If you ever get a chance I recommend reading 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'by Jo Freeman.

As I said, this delegate-mandate-rotate structure is actually infinitely more anti-authoritarian than not having any kind of accountability. Bakunin talked about this, the CNT knew this, the anarchist army in the Ukraine knew this (though it wasn’t great at it.) But it's quite lost these days. Obviously, how we structure this leadership isn't the same as socialist groups - there are practical things that differentiate us here. At any rate - that is a topic for another time.

So I want to skip back to individualism, I want to explain why I believe often the result of individualist philosophies put into practice can be damaging to social movements, how they often become anti-social rather than anti-capitalist. I think this confusion that starts from the concept of imminent rebellion against authority, meaning that things that aren't actually anti-authoritarian can end up with tacit anarchist support.

Groups like Crimethinc tend to border this line, advocating and fetishing sub-cultural practices as anti-capitalist in and of themselves with little conceptualisation of how they assist in the struggle against capital and the state, if at all. Squatting, sabotage, petty-crime, theft, arson, and assassinations all register in the arsenal of insurrectional-individualist tactics. Actually, I think this is the definitions of the vague term we throw around; ‘lifestylism.’ Precisely this fetishisation. A comrade has raised with me that it is perhaps not only that, but it’s the result of despair at the failures of long-term organising that leads to believing only immediate actions and ‘living politics’ can be revolutionary.

Crimethinc, elevating great ways to get arrested to a lifestyle.

It’s not that say social anarchists don’t use tactics like insurrection, sabotage etc too. But what is to be considered is if the action is beneficial or negative, collectively empowering or just alienating and anti-social.

For example, tactics like sabotage have often been used during union campaigns, the IWW was pretty famous for this. When used as an individual tactic, workers often risk alienation from others, punishment from the state, a waste of comrades resources who bail them out or organise legals. Individuals may get a small benefit from stealing, squatting, living on the dole as a ideological choice etc, but there are always consequences. So when sabotage is done collectively, it can be a powerful tool against the boss, especially so because everyone has each others backs, and the decision to take action has been made together. It’s the small sums of collective actions that become a movement.

Consider;

"Shoplifting, dumpster diving, quitting work are all put forward as revolutionary ways to live outside the system, but amount to nothing more than a parasitic way of life which depends on capitalism without providing any real challenge."

Obviously with this quote we don't want to conflate what it takes to ensure survival under capitalism, or to demonise people who are unemployed or anything ridiculous like that. Rather whats being said is that if you have the option to make these choices, if you can always move back in with your folks or whatever, you're not actually contributing to anti-capitalism - you're just living out some kind of radical liberalism.

The rich, politicians, anyone in a position of power surely has plenty of time for people who become 'non-participants' in the system. They do not actually challenge power, they do not help organise collectivelly, they may create small concessions and 'spaces' of existing without the yoke of capitalist burden, but the ability of this to both spread and become empowering has to be considered. The truth is, you cannot, ever, completely drop out of capitalism or get saway from the state. People in power are afraid of the Assata Shakurs, the Malcom X’s, the union organisers, the organisations that demand and fight for collective rights. Not hippie communes.

I'm not saying everyone who's doing some kind of activism has to rush out and form an anarcho communist collective, join an organisation or start towing a political line – I’m not here to say 'hey, you should join X because we have the best politics ever! Actually what’s more important as anarchists is that hopefully you go away with some ideas about organising yourself- what i'm saying that there are differences in ideas and hence organisational methods that have very real impacts on the effectiveness of our activism.

It's been pointed out plenty of times that activists who have no 'home team' will often find they've put incredible amounts of energy into a single campaign, sometimes for years, but when it ends - those lessons are lost, there is no where to keep moving, there is no collective development of knowledge that comes from critical reflection on what you've been doing. Unlike individualists would believe everyone is an island, we are all socially formed, and it’s through society we find our freedom. Anyone who thinks they can come to the perfect answers alone, that they can live outside and beyond society is a joker. Here’s an anecdote; did you know its not common for anarchists in the Uruguayan Anarchist federation to talk in first person? They're so adamant that every individual’s personality is a product of collective development that to talk in third person shows humility and acknowledgement of each’s contribution to one another. I'm not suggesting that we stop talking in first person but I think that such humility is quite an inspirational revolutionary value.  

I think what individual libertarian/anarchist activists who aren't in organisations do though is help the development of libertarian values. By participating in social struggles as anarchists we hope to help build a culture that empowers from the bottom up. And developing an anarchist culture is really important. We want to have our own morals, different to those advocated by a capitalist and statist society - we want a world without patriarchy or racism, and conscious cultural reconstruction is important if we understand that there are forms of exploitation and repression that are reinforced by more than just capitalism.

I think the strength of actions by anarchist individuals is more like a reproduction of ethics, rather than any programmatic revolutionary strategy. Because we recognize that there are two levers of power in society right - the state and the point of production, you could maybe say that the third is the social reproduction of capitalist relations - and that’s where community organising is important. We can't and don’t just fetishise the workplace. We are not marxists and we don't agree that societies problems are limited strictly to the superstructure of production (not that they all do! It’s hard to avoid strawmen in such a broad piece of writing.) Anarchists know power exists in all social relations, we have talked often about the centre and the periphery of power. And knowing that centralisation creates power we acknowledge that we can't ‘take the state’ – that’s completely against anarchist strategy and understanding of how society works - what we do want to do is build counter-power to where capital and oppression are created. That’s absolutely key to overthrowing this society. And that’s not done by throwing a bomb into a bank, it’s done by organising workers and communities.

Many people today are drawn towards anarchism because it offers space to individuals who feel marginalised by predominant social constructions. When you identify as an anarchist its okay to be totally yourself. But we have to acknowledge the whole idea of the individual against society is absurd - anarchism IS the single most social political philosophy - we believe in a world of completely free and equal individuals - how can we be anti-social, unless you're you think society and the state are the same?

What I think is useful from here is to talk a little about how there are differences in tactics, politics and strategy. Now this is pretty key and will lead us onto a bit of discussion about particular things anarchists today are into. To be honest, the useful terminology for this distinction was only just brought to my attention by another comrade.

Firstly; we have politics. This is the level at which we identify the philosophy we believe in - which is anarchism. So starting from the vision of building a world without states, capitalism or authority we have to decide on the appropriate strategies for making that happen.

So, strategy. Here’s where we do maybe the most reflection - what does our society look like? What kind of changes do we need? How could we start making them happen? Are we insurrectionists, are we syndicalist, are we into community organising, should we be concentrating on propaganda? There is alot to be figured out.

Finally; tactics. The tactics we employ are the specific details of the strategy we decide upon, as in, what particular actions we undertake to implement the strategy. For example if you did believe you needed an insurrection, you might form a cell that wants to annihilate capitalists and cops or something, I dont know. If you chose syndicalism you might look at what industries are most important to organise in right now, and if you want to start a specifically anarchist union or if you want to radicalise existing ones by building shop stewards networks and advocating wildcats. Within social anarchism there are a variety of ideas about strategies, these are just two, very different and broad examples.

The problem in Australia seems to be that our movement is so confused, so unsophisiticated that we don't take the time to work our way through these considerations. We as the collective that is anarchism in Australia tend to fetishise one or the other, or completely muddle them up. Remember here i'm not just talking about individualists; most anarchist groups in Australia are completely guilty of this too. But at the same time, I think what we like to call 'lifestyle' can be traced back to the early individualism, where personal rebellion and individual, violent insurrection are considered as the total strategy against the state.

All the same, I want to look at a few places where we see the confusion at work. Firstly i'm going to talk about squatting.

So squatting is a tactic, yea? But if you believe that it’s inherently political, you're going to get stuck repeating it over and over when it's not the right strategy, or when you can't do it, where are your politics? This kind of thing happens all the time. It's a really big problem in the environmental movement. I'm not really involved in that anymore but it's kinda where I started back in Newcastle, and I saw a fair bit of this confusion.

Squatting is not really a huge thing in Australia, though I do know a number of squatters and there are a few in Melbourne - it's a much bigger thing in Europe. Many anarchists seem to consider squatting as a lifestyle choice (though there are some, i'm sure, who do it because they haven't any other option - I know at least one person who fits this category.) There’s a difference between a choice and survival here. Living in a squat would appear to give people the space to exist outside typical property relations, maximising personal freedoms and somehow 'propagate' the idea that squatting is an option to the broader community. There is an element of truth in this, but it's actually extremely limited.

Creating 'liberty' for oneself doesn't necessarily mean it creates it for others, sometimes it can even limit the freedoms of others. Squatting isn't necessarily one of those times, but it's not as helpful a tactic as other options. There is a difference between punks who want to live in a squat cause its free and they can have parties, and a squat that’s used as an accessible social center that, for example, that helps house refugees. The first is fine; it doesn't really matter to anyone except the landlord. But the second has collective and social power. I'd argue that as anarchists this is exactly our task. We don't just want revolution for ourselves, we want it for everyone.  

To turn a squat into a viable social center it seems obvious that it needs resources, organisation, community outreach, and importantly the backing of other social groups willing to defend it when eviction time comes. I believe this is a task for anarchist organisations. Lets look at WSM in Ireland for a second, they're an anarchist group who doesn't operate, control or dominate any squats. What they do however, is help initiate them, have activists involved in their on going upkeep and daily activity (one squat in Ireland that has a few WSM members used the workshops to build heaters to send to refugees in Calais), and defend them and their autonomy against repression from the state. They also organise forums and do the important task of political propaganda helping legitimate squatting as a strategy against capitalism. I use WSM as an example of this because they're particularly successful - they have an anarchist publication reaches thousands of people monthly, and they have public attention for being at the forefront of several social movements. Imagine what such a powerful anarchist organisation can bring to the defence of autonomy?

On the other hand - it doesn't take an anarchist organisation to make squatting a valid social project - im just pointing out what I think tasks of anarchist are.

EDIT: Since this was written the totally super awesome squat project in Bendigo St, Collingwood has popped up! This occupation was organised by the Homeless Persons Union of Victoria, and is drawing attention to the rate of homelessness in Melbourne compared to the enormous number of empty homes. This is a fantastic example of the social value of a squatting project.

Lets look at Social Log Bologna in Italy for a moment. This was a squat that is now quite a large social center. The site itself used to be a postal facility. The people who set it up were autonomist marxists, and you know what - they didn’t just use it for themselves -now it’s entirely self-run by refugees! It had enormous social potential and outreach. A while back the cops tried to shut it down - look at how many people turned out to protect it!

This wasn't just a venue for gigs - this actually demonstrated that when we get rid of fucking capitalism - there going to be so many creative things we can do with the economy to make sure everyone has everything they need. It was also the result of serious planning and looking at the specific things the working class of a particular area needed at a particular point in time.

Some of the local community coming to defend Social Log from eviction.

So then I’d like to ask; “what is a squat compared to a rent strike?”

This I believe is where we begin to see real collective action forming. Rent strikes aren't a thing here anymore, but Australia does have some history with them. Actually, I almost never hear people talk about them! If you don't know what a rent strike is, it's basically like this; the community in a particular area organises against inflated rents and evictions, you hold some mass meetings, do some propaganda and whatever, maybe you target on the basis of community, maybe you target a particular landlord, but you get to a point where collective power is established and people stop paying rent. When the cops turn up, you picket in defense of whoever they try and evict, maybe you go hassle the state department or the rental agents or something. Not really something we're in a position to do now - but worthy of remembering this exists for when struggle around housing intensifies even more. If you want to look at historical examples, i'd suggest Scotland during the 30s' and Italy in the 70s'. There is a pretty good article on libcom.org about the Italian rent strikes - which were significantly influenced by the autonomia movement. For those that don’t know, Autonomia was/is a branch of marxism that started to question the significance of the party, started including feminism and talking about 'social reproduction' and all that. It reproduced a lot of the problems of Leninism, and some of the problems of unorganised Anarchism, but has some very valuable lessons to draw from.

What makes rent strikes so much more powerful is that, unlike squatting, they're a viable tactic to a huge portion of the population. Squatting is unavailable to so many people, for so many reasons. There are only so many places, its unsuitable for families, for people who need to keep stuff secure for work or whatever, for people with disabilities, for people who want to be guaranteed a hot shower. For those who require stability and security, things we all deserve, squatting is not a real option. Even for many of Australia’s homeless squatting wouldn't be viable - what’s deserved is secure housing. Wouldn't it be better if we could organise a mass renters and housing movement committed to direct action and direct democracy, with total autonomy from political parties and the upper classes? Social movements provide the space to lay the real foundations of a society built from the bottom up.

Let’s look really quickly at another places the anarchist movement finds itself sometimes fetishising tactics rather than politics. Sections of the anarchist left often have an idea that they can provide social services purely because it seems ideologically sound. Services that have often been won by the left are now provided by the state and far better than what we can do. Why would anyone want to go to a dodgy anarchist day care in a squat if there’s a nice clean one run by professionals and provided by the state?

I think a relevant example can be Food Not Bombs. I’m not here to have a go at people doing FNB. I’m just raising it as an example we can relate to! FNB is a sweet idea, you get the food that Woolies or Coles or whatever were going to throw away - cause you know, capitalism is extremely fucking wasteful. Or you take what you've grown at your co-op or whatever, and you turn it into a feed and put it on for free in a park or down a street in the city and give it out to whoever needs it. You produce some propaganda around it that points out that capitalism is fucked. Rad, this is actually a great idea. Practical things like this is the way we make our politics seen, the way we prove we can do things differently, the way we prove we have something to offer, and we have a way to talk to people that can be way less alienating than shoving a newspaper in someones face. (Note; Anarchists need a newspaper. I’m pointing out that there are ways of doing things that are less alienating, and that we believe in ‘propaganda of the deed.’)

But you know, taking into account the politics, strategy, tactic formula... is this the best thing to do in Australia? There are loads of charities and even state institutions that feed the homeless. Sometimes you're competing with mega churches and the state! In a society where *most* people have what they need to eat, then maybe resources are better put into something else? That’s where you go back to your politics, look at the concrete situation, start talking about a strategy to build anarchism and then figure out what tactics are going to be effective. If we were in say, Greece, where the soup-kitchen idea is really important, then fuck yes anarchist should be setting up Food Not Bombs or whatever name you wanna give it. That’s exactly our territory and the perfect place for demonstrating alternatives. There’s a Marx quote I like, "every real movement is worth a dozen programmes." Anarchism is meant to be connected to the real needs of the people - actually anarchist organisation exists to support the real struggle, not to establish socialism by decrees. The principle of mutual aid comes from was the early workers movement, not Kropotkin. It wasn't some ethic dreamed up by intellectuals. Early anarchist movements were dealing with the lack of social services, they were dealing with real social needs.

So what I’m saying is that now when we establish these mutual aid groups, filling these 'holes' in social needs isn’t a great idea if they have been filled by capitalism and the state, because until anarchism becomes a large and organised social force, we can’t really compete with capitalist or state facilities without wasting a large amount of our own time and resources. We’re far better off organising workers to struggle in those sites and to take them over.

So at the current state, I think we need to stop and reflect where anarchism needs to go. What are our politics? What strategies have we got to make anarchism relevant? Do they reflect how Australian society looks today? We can't just take the CNT model from 36 Spain and make it happen here, we're sure as fuck are not going to the hills to start a peasant Insurrectional Army.

To summarising a few points, let’s start with this contradiction between individual and social anarchism.

Anarchism is really the most completely social philosophy - we seek a world based on solidarity, mutual aid and co-operation. How these values could go hand in hand with anti-social elements is beyond me. We are anti-capitalist, because capitalism is toxic for a healthy social system, not because we're angsty teenagers.

To consider how we want to see a future influenced by anarchism, we need only take a moment to look at the past. There have been times anarchism has been a fruitful social ideal, and during those times it’s only ever been the social and well-developed anarchist organisations and movements that have made an impact; the CNT/FAI in Spain, the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine, the FORA in Argentina, FAU in Uraguay. There has never been a 'Union of Egoists', armed terror groups like Conspiracy of Fire haven't started a revolution, assassinations by individualists have only brought down the states wrath on broader society. Individualist anarchism cannot achieve what collective organisation can. Individualism is the result of bourgeoise and liberal tendencies, it is the dreams of intellectuals trying to mix itself with workers struggles. In contrast, social anarchism comes from the real social struggles of the lower classes.

We certainly believe in building the new society in the shell of the old, and this involves individual action and development, but its always connected to the realisation of a real communal society. Small organisations that fulfill immediate needs, like Co-operatives, affinity groups, etc, have been important parts of working class culture, and their general demise has come hand in hand with repression and co-option of working class movements. Models and examples help point the way, they demonstrate that another world is possible, but again these are models of communal action - we are not led to the revolution by the image if the anarchist bombthrower, by Stirners unlimited Ego, or by this terrible 'temporary autonomous zone' idea. We're led by images of the Paris commune, the Russian Soviets, the Spanish syndicates, the Hungarian workers councils, even today glimmers of hope exist in the new communal structures in Chiapas, the grassroots councils of Syria and the TEV-DEM in Rojava, not for the political forces that defend them, but the practical institutions of counter-power that are building a new social life.

The considered undertaking of practical activity, connecting it to a broader political programme, and the building of dedicated anarchist organisations will only strengthen our ability to make a difference and increase the scope of human freedom both in the here and now, and to lay the preperation for a revolutionary situation. I'd urge any who believe anarchism is achieved by autonomous, atomised and unorganised individuals to seriously reconsider how they believe revolution is possible, and if it is, what it will take to get there. But for anarchists in dedicated organisations, it is worth a reminder that actions undertaken by the working class will not come with a perfectly worked anarchist line or program, that developing ideas takes time, that the revolution is messy and slow, that patronising or dismissing peoples genuine individual needs and concerns is not a helpful attitude. But if we stick to our guns, to our morals of solidarity, co-operation, equality, and autonomy that we will sow the seeds of freedom today, so that tomorrow we may have truly free society. I don’t know about you, but I want to take this really seriously, I want to live to see anarchy. If we refuse to acknowledge the lessons of the past, if we don’t take on the lessons of the past we will just let the state continue to exist, either in its capitalist or socialist form.

[theresgloryforyou]

This is an interesting read, and there’s truth in it, but oh, so much to unpack here.   I’ll give this segment a shot, since it’s been awhile since my shot at Jacobin’s bullshit, and I see a similar self-serving strain here:

“As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need intersectional resistance,” [Charles] Derber said. “At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the ’60s, fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders. Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these issues within the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as siloed group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with gays.”

*cracks knuckles* Okay, first off, “The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed” is one of those sentences that should make everyone cringe.  Accuracy would require you to write “Women realized their issues were not being addressed”, OR, better yet,  “Women’s issues were not being addressed by the left.”

Also, white people slinging around the word white is fucking obnoxious.  Stop doing that.  We see you.

So this “Intersectional Leftist” proceeds to individuate a systemic problem and then structure his paragraph so he can blame WOMEN, and black folk and gays, for making an “intersectional”, “universalizing” movement fall apart?  If it was so fucking intersectional and universal how did that happen then?  Girls are irrational?  We just got our little feels hurt?

The loss of this intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within capitalist structures.

NO ONE WAS FOCUSING ON ALL OF THE OPPRESSED THAT WAS THE PROBLEM YOU WALNUT.

“Let’s take a modern version of this,” Derber said. “Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said ‘lean in.’ It captures this identity politics that has become toxic on the left. What does ‘lean in’ mean? It means women should lean in and go as far as they can in the corporation. They should become, as she has, a major, wealthy executive of a leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all that got erased.”

Sheryl Sandberg is corporate America, not “the left”.  She’s not engaged in “identity politics”, she wrote a successful pitch to non-leftist women, who are the majority because shits like you try to speak for “the left” and none of what you say applies to any of us.  She’s no more a feminist than you are, and feminism is not what created identity politics.  LIBERALS hijacking the conversations of various groups and pandering to them is what created identity politics.  LIBERAL DUDES created identity politics. 

And “But all that got erased” is insulting to every leftist woman and, again, is a stellar example of why women decided to organize without y’all.  You’re writing from the position of The Imagined Leftist Default, thinking you call the shots and everyone else is supposed to go along with you, when really you and your kind were the cause of the problem, you didn’t go along with anyone else.  You wanted to rule the roost, and being challenged by females, by lesbians and gays, by Black folk and Natives and Hispanics and Asians, none of that was anything you could handle.  You kicked US out, and you’re still doing it.  Let’s continue:

“The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements,” Derber said. “This is very connected to moral purity. You’re concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You’re competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You’re just concerned about getting your fair share.”

“People in movements are products of the system they’re fighting,” he continued. “We’re all raised in a capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it’s not surprising. And it has to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements has been brought up in systems they’re repulsed by. This has created a structural transformation of the left. The left offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It’s largely an identity-politics party. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn’t offer a contextual analysis within capitalism.”

I like the way you stuck “moral purity” in there but never followed up on it.  It’s like a buzz word to signal to readers that not getting on board with your program is a mere prudishness, like there’s something wrong with aiming for morality.

Liberalism, which is a fundamentally capitalist and therefore oppressive ideology, seized on the failure of Leftist males, and in many cases the specific choice to refuse to include marginalized groups and women, in leadership, in organizing around our specific issues, in any way at all.  Liberals saw an opportunity to peel off support from those groups.  If the Left was so solid and really were fighting for the oppressed, the oppressed wouldn’t have split into groups both leftist and non in an attempt to survive.

The majority of Americans were never leftist in the first place.  That non-leftist women, for example, saw themselves in the more liberal iteration of “feminism” but not at all in “Intersectional Leftism”, is not surprising, because y’all ain’t as “intersectional” as you claim to be.  After all, you’ve casually co-opted the term “intersectional” without crediting the orgin of the idea behind it, and are using it to actually mean “Solidarity”.  Which you do not feel or show towards women who don’t submit to your leadership.

All of this recapitulates Jacobin’s ignorant hit-job attempt on Radical Feminism:  “come the revolution, men will magically become enlightened and”  and there the sentence has to end because actually no, patriarchy pre-dates capitalism, capitalism is predicated upon patriarchy, and men, especially leftists, I mean, I can hear it now:  “But we did so MUCH for you, babe!  We supported birth control access and abortion, dollface!”  Mmmmmm-hm.  From the goodness of your darling hearts, I suppose, but to continue:

Derber, like North, argues that the left’s myopic, siloed politics paved the way for right-wing, nativist, protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of Trump.

“When you bring politics down to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you lose that systemic analysis,” he said. “You’re fragmented. You don’t have natural connections or solidarity with other groups. You don’t see the larger systemic context. By saying I want, as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you’re legitimating the American empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you say I want the right of a gay person to fight in combat with the Nazi soldiers?”

“I don’t want to say we should eliminate all identity politics,” he said. “But any identity politics has to be done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy. That’s been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep conversation about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It’s just been erased. That’s why Trump came in. He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing identity politics built around nationalism, militarism and the exceptionalism of the American empire.”

“Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse,” Derber said.  Hold up Imma stop you there.  Identity politics is NEOLIBERAL, or more simply LIBERAL discourse.  Don’t go dragging the “right wing” into this.  Right wingers don’t give a fuck about women or gays or most certainly anyone other than the Great White Race.  So you are wrong.

But more to the point, hilariously in light of, again, Jacobin and pretty much every single leftist organization out there right now, Radical Feminism is the Feminism that focuses on the larger political economy and on systemic oppression and on class based oppression.  An actual Radical Feminist, in her siloed identy-politcs clubhouse according to this article, would never frame lesbians joining the military as a victory for women.  Yet Radical Feminism has been thrown under the bus by leftists for post modern identity politics.  So when you attack women for rightfully organizing apart from broader leftist movements, because you can’t use our free labor and our numbers and all the heavy lifting in the background that women traditionally do in leftist movements, but you don’t actually support Radical Feminists as leftists who have analytical and philosophical similarities with Marxists and socialists of all stripes, I mean, I’m getting a pretty mixed message here.  I’m getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to pitch in for the good of the whole and we’ll sort you girls and your problems out later, but right now everyone else is more important than you.  And I’m also getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to shut up and embrace whatever we tell you to, including a movement based exclusively in individualism, identity, appearance, and gender, ie non-leftist non-materialist things we cannot analyze and that actively undermine you and your scant rights, or you’re not one of us. 

“It focuses on tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It’s scary.”

“How much of the left,” he asked, “is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that we’re fighting?”

ALL OF IT, pal.  The entire left is reproducing patriarchy.  Which I, as a leftist woman who is a radical feminist, am fighting.  So how exactly do you, a leftist with a platform, propose this gets fixed?  With women, yet again, agreeing to put our needs on the back burner for you?  That’s worked so fucking well for exactly NO WOMEN, and we aren’t a little teeny siloed group.  We’re half the fucking earth’s population.  I’m not saying every woman is a Radfem, more’s the pity, I’m saying Radical Feminism is the only Leftist Feminism, because sure the fuck “Socialist Feminism” is just third wave feminism with the words “economic justice” and “praxis” thrown in for dramatic effect.

Leftists need to get their shit together.  If Mr. Intersectional Leftist Man Chris Hedges had his shit together, for example, and other Intersectional Leftist Men had their shit together, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because Intersectional Leftist Men would organize with Radical Feminists, as our backup and labor.  This would go a long way to creating functioning solidarity.

But what these guys actually want is to continue to be in charge and call the shots, and for women to obey them and quit thinking for ourselves.  What else am I to take away from this self-serving shit?

I like Chris Hedges at times, he is capable of brilliant exposition and analysis-- this article is not an example of one of those times.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING CAPS

It could be because you're living in the future. It's obvious why investors delay.1 When a friend of mine visiting India sprained her ankle falling down the steps in a railway station. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. An Operational Definition. Will your blackberry get a bigger screen? The numbers on the Y Combinator application that would help Web-based software forces programmers to. Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother.2

The conversations you overhear tell you what to do anymore. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in any really bold undertaking, merely deciding to do it all yourself.3 4%? Not as a way to get startup ideas is to work with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, just like the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, which is one of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. Venture funding works like gears. After ten weeks' work the three friends have an idea. The price is that valuation caps aren't actual valuations, and notes are cheap and lightweight.4 Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.5 To see an interesting variety of probabilities we have to be specific about what they plan to do and the kind that's interesting to write.6

What problems? It gives us an excuse for being lazy, the others would be more fun. But should you start a startup than just start it. After all, as most companies do more mundane stuff where the decisive factor is effort, not brains. Riskier Strategies are Possible Risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. By similar comparisons you can make yourself nearly immune to tricks. Is an inbox the optimal tool for that? Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. The big dogs don't have to be called Ajax.7 If you can't, your plans may not be able to flip ideas around in one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of ideas doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of possibilities is so large that you can. And this turns out to be. The best word to describe the way lions seem in the wild seem about ten times more alive.8

They don't even get a shot at being really big. But the techniques for building integrated circuits spread rapidly to other countries. But there is little ambiguity about what it means to be a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you have a lot of lies to get us mentioned in the press or a blog on the firm's site, they're probably better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it.9 The VC funds that don't adapt won't be violently displaced. Depends on what you want.10 A rounds. Then you could, I don't mean to suggest by this list that America is the perfect place for startups. Detox A sprinter in a race almost immediately enters a state called oxygen debt. And there is no way they'd have grown up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that they value open-mindedness they don't know what they're doing, it's better to play it safe.

Make Web sites for galleries—that's the ticket!11 Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. Everyone makes up their own deal terms. If they shake your hand on a promise, because there will be an effort to understand him. In fact, you don't need Microsoft on the client, they can't push users towards their server-based software, you're being offered millions of dollars, put yourself in a situation with a large percentage of the gains.12 Html 15. Investors like it when voters or other countries refuse to bend to their will, but ultimately it's in all our interest that there's not a single point of attack for people trying to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.13 Instead of treating them as virtual words. If you're not omniscient, you just stop working on it till you've launched.

Really, it's Apple's fault.14 If you feel exhausted, it's not uncommon for investors and acquirers. Links and images you should certainly look at, if we want to make their mark on the world, and some of the more beautiful highways in the world, write a new Mosaic. Not linearly of course, but that's true in a lot of people that age, and he was pretty much a throwaway program and keep improving it. A lot of the same words as my real mail. Reminder: What I'm looking for are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. Not ready for commitment This was my reason for not starting a startup—becoming the sort of strategic insight I was supposed to look. I learned something valuable from that. After a while this filter will start to make up their minds, and excessive dilution in series A rounds later. What I'm telling you in advance: raising money is not like some of the least excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple years by me. If you want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose job is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, the co-founder as the best way to do this.

If they even say no. To see how, envision two things: a the amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you or it tricks you. Companies didn't start to finance themselves with retained earnings was one cause of the second type. But it could be shipped to Europe. The stock of a new medium is usually underestimated, precisely because it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do something that will still look good far into the future, so far that if you have the hackers, who are trying to compete with Silicon Valley. But they work as if they got the answer to this question. Most startups that raise money do it more. And I've met a lot of servers and a lot of money to us. If you raise an excessive amount of money in one family's bank account, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?15 Football players like to win by making great products.

Notes

I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and b made brand the dominant factor in deciding between success and failure, just as on a saturday, he wrote a prototype in Basic in a situation where the acquirer just wants the business, and B doesn't, that he had more fun in this, but the distribution of good ones, it will seem more powerful sororities at your school sucks, where many of the political pressure to protect one's children seems weaker, judging from things people have to decide between turning some investors away and selling more of the first abstract painters were trained to expect the second component is empty—an idea where the ratio of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making a good product. It's surprising how small a problem, but also very informative essay about why something isn't the problem is that any idea relating to the way I know for sure a social network for x instead of working. And starting an organic farm, though. Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp for, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and no one would have a different attitude to the way I know it didn't to undergraduates on the other team.

I'm thinking of Oresme c. If by cutting the founders' advantage if it were.

Then when we got to the same, but they start to get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, in Galbraith's words, of the fatal pinch where your idea is crack. The Old Way. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to measure that turns out to be the right direction to be an inverse correlation between the two elsewhere, but when companies reach a given audience by a factor of 20. Mueller, Friedrich M.

And if they want impressive growth numbers. In high school. There are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. So although it works on all the other hand, they made more that year from stock options, because the broader your holdings, the work that seems formidable from the government had little acquired immunity to tax rates.

A from a company's culture. It's hard to mentally deal with them.

Stone, op. 03%. In the beginning. I wrote this on an IBM laptop.

But it is very common, but also like an undervalued stock in that. Did you just get kicked out for doing badly and is doomed anyway. And that is actually from the CIA.

Steve hadn't come back. For example, I was just having lunch. A friend who started a company is common, but suburbs are so intellectually dishonest in that sense, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and domino effects among investors.

Founders rightly dislike the sort of wealth for society. But a couple predecessors. Some of the most accurate way to tell VCs early on.

Joshua Schachter tells me it was the recipe is to ignore investors and instead focus on growth instead of blacklist. There need to go out running or sit home and watch TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, but that's a pyramid scheme. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in a cupboard saying this is mainly due to I.

Articles of this essay, I advised avoiding Javascript. This is an acceptable excuse, but Google proved them wrong. Nor do we draw the line?

Financing a startup.

One YC founder who read this essay wrote: After the war, tax rates. One-click ordering, however, and since technological progress aren't sharply differentiated.

Plus one can have margins big enough, a day feels like it if you want to take action, go ahead. In this essay, I believe will be inversely proportional to the year x in a time. Philadelphia.

A from a mediocre VC. This approach has not worked well, so if you're not sure.

Thanks to Chris Small, and Trevor Blackwell for their feedback on these thoughts.

[violetsystems]

#personal

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks in terms of work.  It is a little surreal to identify as working for yourself.  I ran into one of the people who hangs out on this block.  I’ve known them for years in passing.  There’s a gang of people who hang out in the alley underneath the subway tracks.  They asked what I had been doing.  I replied I work for myself now.  My office is officially my kitchen.  It look out at those very tracks. They film Chicago Fire and PD on my block often.  I don’t watch either of those shows but it can have a Hollywood backlot kind of feel.  Most of the street level communication I have resembles grittier parts of New York.  There’s no one dominant kind of person on the block.  People tend to keep to themselves but know vaguely what the other’s deal is.  There’s a sort of hidden network of communication maybe.  A block culture.  That can get a little hard to read the further you get away from your safe zone.  I’ve travelled all over the world at this point by myself.  I started travelling to Asia back in 2011 with the intention of networking.  Later in 2014, I revisited making music particularly with a Chicago form of street dance called footwork.  Footwork at the time was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.  But the root of it was buried under layers of white dominated dance music.  In 2015, I decided to say fuck it and try to organize a music tour for myself.  I tried with people in my own city but their personal agendas always eclipsed my basic plans.  There was a bass driven night in Chicago at the time called Coldtech.  It had a sister night in Melbourne.  I tried to organize a tour that passed through on my way from New Zealand.  I went to New Zealand to visit a friend.  I ended up going out on a few dates then ghosted the final night.  Somewhere in there I got detained in customs and accused of being a gang member.  I eventually ended up in Japan where I met Jake Innes.  Jake was an anime nerd and video game freak.  He knew the Coldtech people but was more like me.   Out on his own trying to use his passion to promote something he loved.  Culture.  Just like punk back in the day, you could count on that culture in a pinch to survive.  We travelled all over Japan for a few days.  Jake was my translator.  I was guided to amazing food.  Amazing spots to shop.  We talked about what moved us.  I had come up with this dumb ass phrase at the time.  Yolonet.  A sort of blockchain word of mouth.  Jake had a lot of trust with people.  He was friends with Lil B after all.  It didn’t really matter who he was friends with to me.  I am a very genuine and transparent person.  You have to be when you’ve wasted so much time on liabilities.  You never expect those to turn out to be past friends.  After reading all this depressing news about the entropy in the job search, I felt down.  You don’t expect your professional contacts to just disappear without a trace.  I barely have the connections on professional social networking to prove it.  Those people never reach out.  Never ask how my employment is going.  Don’t even realize I work for myself.  And yet the block knows.  Jake knows too.  In fact, the last two releases I put out just for fun were purchased by him.  The only way I am connecting to people I can depend on is through culture.  Something I can trust beyond politics, sooth saying, and employment fraud.  

There’s people outside of that Yolonet who have gone dark.  Entire segments of ex-friends who memorialize people who have long died while pretending I just vanished from the face of the earth.  It’s been surreal to watch.  Much more disorienting to live.  And yet, I am still here and surviving.  The people in my dash are much realer and emotionally satisfying to me than the people who forgot about me.  And the mystery of why is a little harder to detangle.  I was reading a book about Chinese director Jia Zhangke.  He was talking about how as a kid the only way to escape the place you grew up was to join the army or go overseas to school.  It’s the same if not worse here.  America talks a great game about freedom but it’s at the expense of the coffers of the military industrial complex of world war two.  Thank the baby boomers for that.  It benefits mostly the rich and generationally wealthy first.  Wealth connects and is rewarded by those connections in America with more wealth.  People who have Military family ties seem to always fall victim to the state’s own hidden expectations of connection, opportunity and ability.  Hunted by recruiters since there’s little actual income to go around.  The rich are hording it without paying taxes.  So the military often bullies people into the reserves when there’s no valid occupational work or space on corporate payrolls.  Fight their wars as a gateway into a career in cybersecurity I’m already overqualified for. My current state of wealth is due to a benefit known as a pension.  This is to say I actually worked for it.  And this is also to say I’m not exactly retired by choice.  But I worked with a lot of people I knew for over twenty years.  I literally got people jobs at that place.  My ex girlfriend for one.  That ended horribly.  The other people I helped out to try to connect ghosted me out of guilt presumably.  And so the only people I seem to be able to rely on are in the culture I have built or connected to myself.  This blog has been one of those lifelines in ways I am not at liberty to divulge at times.  There’s people I have better friendships through a click of a button than I’ve had ever in my life.  I used to try to explain these things to people.  And generally my exile from anyone in real life giving a fuck is a harsh lesson in the reality.  People don’t actually listen.  They don’t actually communicate in anything other than comparison and contrast and monetary valuation.  I was reading how a person just literally asked to buy the rights to one of Elon Musk’s tweets for 7777$.  How a sentence from a billionaire is worth more than my pain in this entire process or the lives of the worker’s in his factories even.  We just got six hundred dollars.  That should be enough for us.  But I wasn’t valuable enough to insure past October even though I was paying the premiums.  It would seem the real world’s network isn’t very reliable or at least focused on something so out of sync it seems comically evil.  What can I rely on?  It seems a lot.  I never have felt alone in the last year or so.  Ever since Valentine’s day really.  Sometimes you can show you care by not even saying a word.  Words are worthless when you can buy them for seven grand I guess.  It’s the action of caring and attention that counts.  If you built a foundation on people who didn’t care, your path ahead will be volatile at best.  If you limit someone based on your fear of them outshining you, the results will be constantly mediocre.  And many times, later in life you find you’ve outgrown these limitations people envision you in.  And through that worthless feeling you seek out something true.  You take the once in a lifetime risk to set up your own network.  To leave the baggage and the past behind and see it for what it really is.  Your self worth is no longer shackled by people’s envy, jealousy and active sabotage.  You are a defective crash test dummy that served it’s purpose for capitalism.  Or you can leave the car wreck behind and opt out of the American social experiment entirely.  It’s a free country after all.

The baby boomers did have an answer to all of this.  Shut up and take their money because they know what’s best.  My dad would always say later on in life I’d understand Republicans.  Maybe I’d even want to become one.  Like many Republicans from the suburbs, he’d never be caught dead in the rougher areas of the city much less outside of the country.  I’ve never seen any politicians talking to people on the streets in passing.  I’ve never seen anyone answering, speaking for, or actively working on this privilege that acts like a monkey on my back.  I’m an only child.  When my parents die, my bloodline is some bullshit.  I’ll most certainly have to deal with some estate affairs on either side.  But when I die, who knows where my legacy will go.  Will I get married?  Will I have children?  Will I be able to fulfill my role in the helping America achieve it’s desired GDP?  I can’t even count on my government during a Pandemic let alone to hold people accountable for crimes.  Will I die alone, invisible, broke but talked about on the Internet.  Will people watch my life until the very end to see the tragedy unmatched to their own?  Are people just drunk on making me some sort of talking point?  The gossip will never end.  The sad truth of the last five to ten years for me is simple.  There is an opposite to block chain.  A network of people who only cover for themselves and their lies.  The great lie as they spoke of in Germany did something horribly foul.  A lie when it gets out of control.  A lie when it eclipses the truth.  When every word out of your mouth is gaslighted to protect an entire ecosystem that feeds itself and protects the criminal.  When your very presence needs to be edited and erased to continue the engine running.  A great lie can tear a hole in the very fabric of reality and the truth of a narrative.  And it can suck somebody so far out into space that they have to terraform a whole new network of support.  These days the writing is on the wall.  We trust everything and doubt further.  I have only had the luxury of looking to myself for answers.  I have other inspiration.  The best inspiration if you ask me.  But I keep that to myself for fear of breaches in trust.  But it’s no lie what I believe in.  A freedom that allows love to bloom.  A freedom that values people for what they do in deeds not speculation.  A freedom that is accountable in broad daylight and answers for what it represents.  Opportunities that exist outside of war economies and mark to market accounting.  Making art that connects people without controlling the dialog.  Being part of a culture and democratically so without disrespecting the read receipts.  I’ve been real for longer than most people have been breathing.  Not long enough to claw my way out of the designs these dinosaurs outspend me on.  But the one thing I know going forward is that you cannot get anymore hardcore of a foundation other than being true to yourself.  And I’m proud to surround myself with people who are true to me.  Wherever the fuck you may be.  You all live deeply inside my heart.  And that’s something there’s no price on to betray.  So let’s stop speculating and let’s live in the moment.  I built this Yolonet for us.  And instead of hello world.  Let the first words be simple.  I love you.  World peace forever.  Drink some water.  It’s your human right.  <3 Tim

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

[news4dzhozhar]

Perhaps you know the scene: someone, usually a young person, is facing a grand dilemma. It’s something serious—dire. She’s scared to even talk about it. The stakes are just too high. Perhaps it would involve admitting something about herself she hasn’t come to terms with yet, or that even discussing the issue could have severe repercussions for someone she cares about or any other number of more or less infinite possibilities. But the dilemma isn’t going to go away on its own. She needs advice, or at the very least to talk to someone. So she ends up presenting it as a hypothetical (“say there was this person…”) or that she “has a friend” facing a tough choice. Ironically, she has to provide herself with at least the illusion of distance to take that all-important first step towards actually meeting this problem. This scenario is so typical it’s cliché, but that does not mean it lacks value. In fact, it just might hint at a strategy that could prove incredibly useful right about now. But this is all very broad, so let’s make it a little bit more specific & talk about evil. Specifically, humanizing evil. As you are probably aware, the New York Times took a crack at doing so less than a week ago & it did not go well. At all. But even though the results were a hot mess, their intentions were not off-base. “What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life & the people who inhabit them,” Marc Lacey wrote in the New York Times’ response to the neo-Nazi fluff piece backlash, and he’s not wrong. There is no comfortable way to discuss the everyday humanity of people who do awful things—the “banality of evil,” as it is often called—but for a whole host of reasons that people more knowledgeable than me on the subject have elaborated, it is an extremely important that we do anyway. Not so that we can excuse their behavior, but precisely the opposite. When evil is only something other people do when evildoers are supposed to look evil—remember the backlash Rolling Stone got their “glam” “rock star” cover photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?—it makes for dangerous oversimplification. I agree with the arguments regarding an over-emphasis on the perpetrators as opposed to those whose lives were taken or irrevocably damaged by these horrific crimes. In the Rolling Stone controversy, there were plenty of commentators who primarily took issue with the magazine marketing Tsarnaev as a “hero” as opposed to primarily arguing that they should have highlighted the victims over the perpetrator. The issue is, of course, that evil can look like a hero, or a cool guy, be present in someone who also helps old ladies with their shopping & recycles & donates money to charity. Well duh, you might be thinking. But this still presents a huge problem in how we understand the evil that directly affects our ability to deal with it. Consider the past few weeks. How many times have friends & colleagues of men accused of sexual harassment & assault presented defenses based on the fallacy that “because X has been a good friend to me & such a nice person & done A, B, & C, there is no way X could have done this terrible thing”? From Lena Dunham defending Murray Miller to David Yates defending Johnny Depp, it’s the same argument. Based on the idea that a person who does something terrible must be so fundamentally different from “good” people that they — knowing an accused person & having not sensed this core wrong-ness from him — are sure that the accused could not have done the terrible thing. In other words, it’s based on nonsense. So yes, we should “shed more light, not less,” on why people do the terrible things they do, the many forms evil can take & how and why poisonous ideologies take root in certain people’s minds. To provide an analogy in a subject I have studied more in-depth; it’s like dealing with a disease. If you don’t understand how the pathogen in question works, attempting to come up with a treatment is like trying to hit a bulls-eye in the dark when you have no idea where the target even is. It’s theoretically possible but highly unlikely. But exploring & coming to understand what makes that pathogen tick is something that must be done carefully. And, partly due to the risks involved, such exploration is often done whenever possible through the use of non-pathogenic model organisms—a solution that serves the same basic function as a conflicted youth presenting her dilemma as that of a friend: the individual in question can take a precautionary step back while still being able to investigate underlying mechanisms. The news has no precautionary step back. It deals directly with real people in the real world & interacts directly with real events as they unfold. And when you start profiling real live neo-Nazis & name-dropping all these actual neo-Nazi leaders & organizations, you are giving them all free press. Not even the cleverest journalist can avoid that. “But it’s bad press,” you might argue. Well, late night TV didn’t emphasize the Trump campaign from its earliest days & CNN didn’t air Trump’s 2015 rallies in unprecedented excess because they thought he was the best man for the job. Their coverage contained no endorsements but it was still coverage. Of course, there’s no way of demonstrating exactly how much all this free press & airtime contributed to Trump’s success but it’s pretty safe to say it didn’t hurt his campaign. Perhaps news media isn’t always the best place to do these explorations. After all, there is an alternative, a place that allows for a step back from the real world while still enabling the exploration and investigation of incredibly important political, ethical & philosophical concerns: fiction. Perhaps we need that step back, the distance & arguably even the limitations provided by a fictional context in order to be able to discuss these matters that are so fundamentally important but incredibly volatile. Cinema, at its best, is in a sense a safe space to feel unsafe & be made uncomfortable. A means through which we can be challenged and challenge ourselves & how we understand & interact with incredibly complex ethical, philosophical & political situations. While I love movies that leave me feeling warm & fuzzy inside, I have chosen to dedicate so much of my time—and my life, really—to cinema because of films that have left me uncomfortable or unsettled, that have challenged my beliefs and ultimately broadened my understanding of both myself and the world. Films like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Get Out, American History X, and Fritz Lang’s M. Cinema, at its best, is in a sense a safe space to feel unsafe and be made uncomfortable. Movies have the ability to be one of the best, safest, and most accessible ways to foster discussion of hugely important but volatile matters. Fiction filmmakers trying to tackle huge ethical dilemmas aren’t working with real-life neo-Nazis with their own agendas. They aren’t leaving real-life victims in the dark by focusing on the story of the perpetrator. Yes, of course, these stories can still be told exceptionally well or abysmally or anything in between, and there are still stakes, they’re just somewhat lowered. But wait, you might be thinking, what about a film like Griffith’s Birth of a Nation? That one sure did a lot of harm. Well, the thing about Birth of a Nation and others of somewhat of a similar ilk like Triumph of the Will is that they are fiction masquerading as truth. Remember that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson commented that Birth of a Nation, the most successful propaganda film the KKK never paid for, was like “writing history with lightning.” This is utter bullshit, but it did hefty damage nonetheless. What I’m talking about is exclusively fiction that calls itself fiction. There are issues that need discussing and debating, and we need to figure out a way to talk about these matters far more productively than we have of late because the growing polarization that has made it nearly impossible to hold productive discourse is quickly becoming the problem to end all problems. It makes just about every other problem out there even worse. As much as I love movies, I’m not saying they have the potential to cure all the world’s ills. What I’m saying is that they can provide a context in which we can discuss the questions and concerns at the heart of various issues while also taking a step back from them, and that is something we ought to embrace wholeheartedly.

[ay201920review]

SC1101E review

Semester taken in: AY2019/20, Semester 1

Assessment:

Tutorial attendance and participation: 15%

Tutorial quizzes: 10%

Midterm 2: 20%

Written assignment: 25%

Final exam: 50%

Lecturer: Dr Lou Antolihao, Dr George Baylon Radics Tutor: Dr George Baylon Radics

Overview: This module introduces you to different sociological perspectives and tries to get you to think from the viewpoints of different sociologists and theorists. Each week you are given a new theme to which you are expected to be able to apply these perspectives.

Workload: Tutorials are every other week, and usually we were emailed a brief set of questions to think about which we would discuss in tutorial. Dr Radics would ask each group to share their thoughts so you can't get around at least bullshitting some answers.

Lecturer: Dr Radics was very funny and made the topics very interesting. He taught the first half of the semester, and the second half was taught by Dr Lou. Most of my classmates and I thought Dr Lou's teaching style was a little bit dry. I can't really explain it, but his lectures were hard to follow. Still, he teaches the more confusing topics like political economy, so definitely attend the lectures even if they're boring. Neither lecturer just reads off the slides either, so you're at a definite disadvantage if you skip.

Tutor: Dr Radics was my tutor, so the same comments as above still apply here.

Readings: There is a reading every week, and the content of the readings will come out on the final exams, so you should read them. The first reading, The Sociological Imagination, is honestly really difficult to read (i.e. boring), but they get better as you progress towards the end of semester. You're also asked to buy a textbook by Joan Ferrante, but you can download it digitally or something if you really want. The textbook chapters are kinda long and can be dull if you're taking notes as you go but they're a goldmine for ethnographic examples to use in the final exam. They also explain the same concepts that are in the lectures, which can be helpful.

Project: We were asked to create a timeline of major events in our lives based on the sociological imagination, and examine how major events in Singapore's history affected our lives (foreign students were allowed to use their native country's history instead). I actually found this really difficult to do because I was constantly stumped trying to think about things that actually impacted my family in a meaningful way lol. Plus the word limit's pretty low (which could be good for you if you don't write a lot, but I'm long-winded, as you can tell...). Anyway, I half-assed it, but I did all right in the end.

Exams: There isn't a sociology midterm, but there are two pop quizzes given the week before recess week and the week after it. They're 5 multiple choice questions. They aren't particularly hard, but if you don't know how to answer them then that means you should probably go do your readings again. The final exam wasn't MCQ for our cohort. It consisted of 10 short answer questions ("critical definitions") and one essay. I didn't find this that difficult because I've taken a subject that's basically this before, but I know a lot of people who came from JC found it kinda hard. For critical definitions you're asked to briefly define a term and maybe give an example to illustrate. I don't recommend dwelling on this too long or you'll run out of time. The essay requires you to go more in-depth and compare and contrast different sociological perspectives with definitions and examples from your readings, so please please please do your readings.

Should you take this module?: I honestly did enjoy this module, but because the scope of the module is really broad it could become a pain to study around exam season. If you're pretty left-leaning politically and enjoy reading you'll like the mod, but if you aren't a writing or reading person I wouldn't recommend it.

Expected grade: B

Actual grade: A

[sigmastolen]

oh jeez i didn’t even tell y’all about the rest of yesterday’s fuckery

many dumbass patrons including people who refuse to understand that we have limited hours and who “couldn’t get through on the phone so decided to just come by” (well, sir, i literally said when i recorded the phone message that if you couldn’t get through you should try calling again and now that you’re here at the pickup station you still have to call us from your cell phone bc the employees outside have no access to your account to find your books and check them out to you) (incl. one lady who didn’t have a phone on her and one of the pages let her borrow her phone to call us and got roundly chastised bc she was getting her respiratory droplets all over your phone, page c, you’re 80 damn years old what are you doing)

i’m weeding the children’s nonfiction and i withdrew a dorling-kindersley book of “stories from the jewish bible” that hadn’t circulated since 2013 and i’m very annoyed about it because i distinctly remember leaving it in last time bc we have basically no other books of jewish stories in the mythology/religion section (compared with like 8 books of christian bible stories and 2 dozen books on greek myths and literally nothing on islam or eastern religions), but it’s also pretty obvious to me that it hasn’t circulated because there’s something that feels pretty antisemitic about calling it “the jewish bible” when actually, dk, it’s just the old testament and they’re literally drawn from the king james bible and i am 100% certain that repels our actual jewish patrons who want to read stories from their own culture to their children, because they are presumably the same jewish patrons who donate picture books about jewish holidays and cultural practices to us all the time (i always add them and they circulate well)

comrade y keeps sending me the videos she’s making to promote her latest event and the latest one features a professor who is part of the planning committee (who have not been pulling their weight tbh) and not only is it 4 minutes long and boring as fuck, but it also doesn’t address any of the things they need the public to know, and also this particular dude has been treating her extremely poorly and i am very angry about it

i had a public breakup with the book i was reading during lunch (well, public meaning in front of my boss and clerk t).  it was the war of art by steven pressfield and my bassoon teacher recommended it when i was in college and i never got around to reading it then, but it crossed my desk on its way to a patron last week and i was like, hey, maybe i should finally read this, so i checked out one of our other copies.  pressfield’s viewpoint is Very Christian, which made me wary because that’s Not How I Roll, and honestly i think his take on talent being an innate gift and calling from god is complete bullshit, but i was willing to soldier on bc of my teacher.  anyway, in the first section he’s laying out all the obstacles to creation, one page each, sometimes only a paragraph or just a sentence, and i having more than a few “ok, white dude” reactions, but on page 24 he starts in on his stance about mental illness being invented to sell medicine and how medicating blocks the call of your soul to make your art and i was just fucking done, you know?

my boss was trying to figure out how to host a zoom meeting and invite other people to it and she copied the invite link to the clipboard, but then she was like, “okay, now where did it go? where’s the clipboard?” and i told her, “the clipboard is the holding space where everything you copy or cut goes, now you can paste the link wherever you want” and she either wasn’t listening or refused to understand because she kept muttering to herself about it and i could not and my shift was over so i just walked my ass away

i know my coworkers’ hearts are in the right place and i agree in broad terms with their politics (thankfully), but all of them are Older White Ladies and they’re very limited to that point of view and i am frankly too tired and too angry to do more than scream inside my heart and have meaningful eye contact with the visiting clerk and page, who are people of color in their 20s, and make vague noises when i am expected to.  i love them but i don’t have it in me.

had to take YET ANOTHER stupid survey for work with that same inane gender question and so i wrote them YET ANOTHER essay in the “another gender not listed” box about how ignorant (at this point, deliberately so) the choices are

also i overslept my alarm by an HOUR this morning so it’s shaping up to be a banner day for sure

edit;; this survey again

[mystery-moose]

5, 11, 13, 24, 27 lmao

You think picking hard questions will stop me YOU ARE WRONG

5: Top five formative books?

I, Robot and Caves of Steel, both by Isaac Asimov, were extremely foundational for me. They basically influenced everything I’ve ever thought was cool. Neuromancer by William Gibson formed my undying love of cyberpunk (and showed me sci-fi could have some truly poetic, evocative prose) while The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett is what established that I love established romantic relationships in which both parties are super in love and give each other endless shit. And The Long Goodbye is maybe one of my top two favorite books of all time. (It’s the best novel of the 20th century. Come at me.)

11: What are you planning to work on next?

Pffft. What AREN’T I planning to work on next!

At the moment, honestly, I’d like to get the bones of this Magcretia project finished. It’s so close, I just… haven’t been able to sit my ass down and pound out the last couple chapters of it. After that, it’s gotta go through a beta or two before I even come close to publishing it.

Following that… well, school will have started, and I’ll be taking a Creative Writing class, so who knows! In terms of fic, though, it’ll either be more of AMatMMP (which is gonna be fucking stupid long based on what I’ve written so far) or Shelter. I’d love to start posting Shelter, just because it’s the ultimate final form of my brand of bullshit. We’ll see.

13: Describe your writing process.

HA HA HA HA HA what process.

Seriously, it’s like, put on some chillstep and start pacing until I have a scene plotted out in my head. If it’s not chillstep, it’s something thematically or tonally appropriate to whatever I’m trying to write. Usually movie soundtracks or some such. When I’ve got the scene in my head, I need to immediately write it down, if not the scene the itself then a rough sketch or outline. If I don’t, I’ll remember the broad strokes, but never the details – specific gestures or lines of dialogue that I like at the time.

That’s… pretty much it. I’ve plotted out 50k+ fics this way, in bits and pieces over the course of days or weeks. I’m terrible at outlining, always have been, but I’ve been doing it lately because I recognize that I need to write SOME stuff down when I get it stuck in my head, before it leaves.

24: Do you remember the moment you decided to become a writer/author?

No specific moment. I just remember realizing that I loved watching movies (and reading about them – Roger Ebert was a huge influence on me as a teenager), loved reading books and comics, loved playing games, and was fascinated by the storytelling in all of them. Originally I thought about being a filmmaker, but the politics of Hollywood and all that put me off. Writing prose seemed like the next logical way to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Games writing interests me too, but I haven’t done much with it – I should play with Twine more, try and do some interactive fiction.

27: Every writer’s least favorite question – where does your inspiration come from? Do you do certain things to make yourself more inspired? Is it easy for you to come up with story ideas?

I mean, define “easy.”

My process as mentioned above is basically what I do to try and inspire myself. Other than that… I find reading great books actually gives me LESS inspiration. It’s very demoralizing, like “I could never even approach this, why bother?” Whereas great movies or comics or games get me all pumped up to try and write something! I don’t know why that divide exists, in my brain. But it super, duper does. Reading mediocre or bad books actually helps me more, but unlike movies or even games I can’t read bad books for long. It simply takes too much time and effort, unlike a bad movie you can just let wash over you and enjoy it, y'know?

[trashmenofmarvel]

Homeward, Part One

Pairings: Ward x friend!Reader, Danny x friend!Reader

Prompt: Reader is an abusive relationship with a member of the Hand and seeks out her childhood friends for help. (submitted by @rune-of-a-writer)

Warnings: Swearing, Implied Emotional Abuse, Angst

Word Count: 1,869

AO3

Master List

You promised yourself you could handle it. You swore things would get better. That you could make them better.

The universe had decided to take your determination and throw it back in your face, spiteful and cruel in its mockery. Maybe you truly had done something to deserve it.

No… that felt like bullshit. Which is why when your boyfriend, after too much beer and too much pent-up aggression, had shoved you against the wall and growled what a nagging, stuck-up bitch you were, you had turned and left the apartment without a word. Insensate to his alcohol-fueled screaming.

He didn’t bother chasing after you. He knew you’d be back. You always came back. Where else would you go?

You rubbed your arms as you walked down the sidewalk, surrounded by crowds of strangers even this late at night. You hadn’t had the wherewithal to grab your jacket, your phone, or even your wallet. There had been no time; the surge of anger and sharp hatred had threatened to erupt from within your chest, and you’d rushed out the door before the situation escalated.

Not because you still cared about your domestic partner. That time had passed long ago. But lashing out at a member of the Hand was a surefire way to lose a few fingers, toes, or worse.

Your options were limited and decreasing as the minutes ticked by. There were a few places still open where you could take shelter from the biting wind. But that would only solve the immediate problem of being exposed, and do nothing for the long-term crisis that had become your existence.

No. This was going to end, one way or another. Tonight. You were sick and tired of the anger, the terror, the shouting. Something had to give, and with the ways things were going, it would be your sanity or your life.

Turning left along the next avenue, you changed course as you grit your teeth against the chill, steeling yourself for what was to come. It was going to be painful in a way that only emotional vulnerability could be. Even though objectively you understood you had nothing to be ashamed of, it didn’t damper the heat in your cheeks.

There was one place you could go. One person you could turn to. It was just a matter of swallowing your pride and asking for help.

With no money for a cab or the train, you used the only transport available to you: your feet. After a half hour of walking, the tip of your nose numb from the wind, you deeply regretted not grabbing your wallet.

Hell, you regretted a lot of things at this point.

After forty-five minutes of brisk walking, you were there, thankful that you didn’t have to travel to another borough. Standing outside your destination, you craned your head backwards to take in the well-lit, ornate face of the towering building, gut sinking as you immediately felt like an outsider. The doorman who opened the entryway once you approached stared at you with a dubious expression. The man at the security desk gave you an even more suspicious glance.

“Can I help you?” he slowly inquired, taking in your wind-swept appearance and lack of appropriate clothing for the autumn air. Not to mention your thin sweater, faded jeans, and careworn shoes.

“I’m here to see Danny Rand?” you responded, internally wincing from the lack of firmness in your voice, presenting the request as a question. “Is he in?”

The man stared at you. “May I have your name, please?” and you nearly sighed with relief, giving him your name as you nervously brushed your hands against your jeans. You’d been to the building only once before, soon after Danny’s miraculous reappearance. It had been a much happier visit then. A blip of brightness in your world of gloom and doom.

You just hoped he was here. Sure it was getting pretty late, but if history was anything to go by, your childhood friend tended to prefer the open-air of the parks, rather than be cooped up in a skyscraper residential complex.

The security guard made the call to Danny’s apartment while you looked around the lobby. All soft gold and gentle rose red, with white veined marble blanketing the floor, causing you to fear scuffing its reflective surface with your old tennis shoes. The lobby itself was more grandiose than anything you had ever lived in. Hell, the revolving door itself was probably worth more than a year of your rent.

“He will see you now. Do you know the way?”

You gave a small jump, heart beating faster in your chest as you turned your attention back to the guard.

“Ah, yes. Thank you,” you responded once your voice and manners had returned to you, giving him a nervous smile before quickly walking to the bank of elevators, eager to be away from the two pairs of eyes that bored into your back. They felt like a silent accusation.

You don’t belong here.

On the elevator ascent, you rubbed your palms together as you attempted to calm your nerves. Now that you were actually here, you were questioning your decision with growing anxiety.

It wasn’t really that bad, was it? Your boyfriend had never really hurt you. Sure, he lost his temper sometimes, and he scared the hell out of you with increasing frequency, but there were moments when he was the person you remembered from the beginning of your relationship. Sometimes it wasn’t so awful, and at least you never had to worry about money problems or being evicted from the cramped Manhattan apartment you shared. If it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t have had snowball’s chance in Hell of living close enough to see the Manhattan skyline, let alone live within it.

Something he aggressively reminded you when you dared to express any unhappiness.

Before you were ready, the elevator chimed and the doors parted smoothly. You stared at the small but still extravagant elevator bank, wondering what the hell you were doing there.

“This is a mistake. A stupid, stupid mistake,” you muttered to the empty space. You stared at the keypad, fingers itching to press the L button and flee from the building as fast as possible. But the elevator doors seemed determined to outwait you, remaining stubbornly open, and eventually you caved.

Danny’s apartment was at the end of the hallway – a glorious corner abode you had marveled at with your mouth gaping open (to your eternal embarrassment). The Rand’s had always been incredibly well-to-do, but you’d forgotten what this sort of wealth looked like over the past fifteen years. And this apartment outshone even the Rand family home on Gramercy Park where you had spent a lot of your childhood.

You had a feeling the exquisite apartment hadn’t been his idea. Danny had almost seemed more embarrassed than you, and it lent credence to the crazy tale that he’d spent the last few years living in a monastery. It was a fantastical, outlandish story, but you didn’t really care. He was taller, broad-shouldered with a scruffy beard, but he was the same Danny Rand you had known as a kid. The same boy who would always pick stranded slugs off the sidewalk and carry them to safety, or found birds unable to fly and kept them in a warm box until they could be given to a rehabilitator.

It was that natural instinct to take in wounded, pitiful creatures that you were counting on now. You knew he wouldn’t turn you away. The problem was: did you really want to drag someone with such a sweet disposition into your personal nightmare?

Already you were losing your nerve and preparing to turn around as you approached the door. It gripped you with abject terror, the idea of rapping your knuckles against the smooth wood in order to announce your presence.

But then the door opened, and all hope of fleeing burst like a soap bubble.

An earnest face, topped with gentle, golden curls and set with sympathetic blue eyes made you freeze like a deer before an approaching car. Your muscles tensed as one, fully locking you into place, and you didn’t breathe again until a bright, beaming smile broke out onto that tanned face. He called your name, and the delight in his voice made you immediately regret coming.

“Hi, Danny,” you responded through the tightness of your throat, and from those two words his smile began to fade. Already, your efforts to appear normal were gloriously failing.

“Hey, haven’t seen you in a while. You… Jesus, you look like you’re freezing,” he said with furrowed brows, moving forward to stand before you as you had yet to approach his door from the middle of the hallway.

You opened your mouth to say “I’m fine,” but the words stuck somewhere along the way. Either the lie was too big, or you didn’t have the strength to tell it. Instead, you stared at him mutely, pleading with your eyes; for what, precisely, you weren’t sure.

He seemed to understand, or at least sensed something was amiss, as he placed a gentle hand on the back of your shoulder. “Why don’t you come in? Warm up, at least. You really do look cold.”

Cold. Yes. That was a polite way of describing your silent helplessness.

But you let him guide you forward, muscles slowly loosening with each step, as if those few feet into Danny’s apartment somehow set you at a greater distance from your problems than crossing several state lines.

Danny shut the door behind you, and you felt a sensation you hadn’t experienced in what felt like a lifetime: safety.

The air rushed out of your lungs, and you began to believe that maybe you had done the right thing.

“Would you like anything to drink? Water? Coffee? Tea, maybe?” Danny asked as he walked past you in the brightly lit entryway, his eyebrows still knit in concern but his tone still warm and friendly.

“Uh. Sure. Tea sounds great.” Your voice sounded almost human as you spoke, and the smile he rewarded you with did more to calm your nerves than should have been possible. Certainly more than you deserved, considering what you were about to drag him into.

“Oh, if there’s one thing I have, it’s tea. Go ahead and take a seat while I put on the kettle.”

You thanked him, and the words felt like they were meant for much more than just the tea. He gave you one last smile before retreating in the direction of the kitchen.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, you told yourself. You didn’t even have to tell him much. Or anything at all. Just being in the presence of your childhood friend was enough to make you truly believe everything would be all right.

The peaceful warmth spreading through your chest abruptly died as you entered the living room, the soothing calm replaced by the paralytic tension of muscle. A tall, dark, and very lanky figure currently occupied one of the armchairs; the last person you would have expected to be in Danny Rand’s apartment.

Next Chapter

[tricky-pockets]

About the Trump survey

I know I’m late to this, but I want to talk for a few minutes about the recently-issued ‘Official Trump Law and Order Survey’ and how it’s a spectacularly shameless propaganda generator. Poor survey design gives you useless data. Intentionally poor survey design gives you propaganda.

There’s a blow-by-blow commentary below the cut. It’s long. I couldn’t help myself. You don’t have to read the whole thing. Maybe read Stanley’s How Propaganda Works instead. 

Still with me? God, I’m so sorry.

The first thing to notice about this survey is that all of the questions are yes/no. If a respondent is somewhere in between complete agreement and complete disagreement, dichotomous questions force them to either (1) misrepresent the strength of their position or (2) leave the survey incomplete. This has a filtering effect. People unwilling to commit to an extreme view are unrepresented. It also results in overestimation of the strength of respondents’ support; people who slightly lean ‘yes’ are given as much weight as those who lean strongly toward ‘yes’ (which is, of course, the goal).

I suspect there’s also a priming effect going on, especially in the first question:

Do you believe that Keeping America Safe should be President Trump’s #1 priority?

The phrase ‘keeping America safe’ is broad enough that it’s hard to disagree with. We’re not told what exactly they mean by the phrase. The respondent is free to interpret it however they want, but their answer will be used to support the administration’s specific interpretation. This question is the easiest to agree with, and that’s why it’s at the beginning. The goal is to get people to agree with increasingly extreme statements. If you start with the most extreme question, you scare people off. If you start with something like the above, people are not only more inclined to continue the survey; they’re inclined to continue agreeing in order to be consistent.  

Do you stand with President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

This is vague. It forces you to agree with ALL of the ‘efforts’ or none of them, without bothering to mention what ‘efforts’ we’re talking about. It’s also a loaded question. In order to even answer the question, you have to take the following as facts: (1) President Trump has made efforts to restore law and order, and (2) ‘law and order’ has been diminished. It’s like asking someone “Do you still take PCP every Saturday night?”

Do you agree that rioters and anarchists should be punished accordingly?

It’s very convenient that the question doesn’t mention what, exactly, an appropriate punishment would be. This is another one where every interpretation that gives a ‘yes’ will be counted as support for an unstated interpretation by the administration. This is also a double-barreled question, in which ‘rioters’ and ‘anarchists’ are lumped in together (not to mention, they’re both pretty loaded terms). ‘Rioter’ refers to an action or set of actions, but ‘anarchist’ is a political position. We’re being led to conflate the two - a very sneaky way to get people to say that there are some political views deserving of ‘punishment’.

Do you agree with President Trump that Democrat leaders who are letting their communities be destroyed need to crack down?

Another loaded question. You are forced to accept as facts that (1) there are communities being ‘destroyed’, (2) destruction is attributable to Democrat leaders, (3) Democrat leaders are not taking action, and (4) ‘cracking down’ is the solution. We aren’t told what it means to ‘crack down’, but we did just read a question about punishing rioters and anarchists. The ordering is intentional.

At this point, I’m going to stop pointing out inflammatory language; it’s in every question. They’re all leading questions, phrased such that disagreement sounds absurd at best.

Do you agree with President Trump deploying the National Guard to communities where Democrat leaders have proven ineffective?

Again, this assumes that (1) there are Democrat leaders who have ‘proven ineffective’, and (2) President Trump has deployed the National Guard to only and all communities where this is the case. It deliberately excludes communities with Republican leaders, whether the Republicans have ‘proven ineffective’ or not, implying that the only ineffective leaders are Democrats. That’s the only reason to include the word ‘Democrat’ at all. If you phrased it as ‘where leaders have proven ineffective’, you’d still be able to claim support for Trump, but you’d lose the condemnation of Democrats specifically.

This is also a great example of why the ordering of the questions is relevant. It doesn’t actually indicate what these leaders have proven ineffective at, although of course we know; we’ve just had questions about preserving law and order, cracking down, and punishing people. It also makes it sound like Democrat leaders are ineffective in general, not just in regards to this one unspecified issue.

It’s worth noting at this point that the word ‘protest’ doesn’t appear once in the survey, nor is it ever stated what exactly people are ‘rioting’ about. (As a side note, I’m not terribly impressed with a lot of Democrats right now, but that’s personal and beside the point.)

Do you support President Trump’s fearless resolve when he walked to St. John’s Church - a historical church that was set on fire the night before by rioters?

WOW leading/loaded question. WOW. I mean, wow. Holy fuck. I’m going to go get the Emergency Gin. I’m not touching this one. Jesus.

Did you know that Joe Biden’s campaign staff is financially supporting rioters?

We’re just calling all protesters ‘rioters’ now. This is an unclear question. If people say ‘yes’, how is that going to play in the “analysis”? “When polled, 99% of people already knew this thing”? Even if we accept the claim, there’s no good reason to measure people’s awareness of the claim. Even if you had a good reason to measure awareness of the claim, this wouldn’t give you anything useful. (Did you know X? Well, I do now). This is going to be used to say “X% of people know that Joe Biden’s campaign is financially supporting rioters.” And X% of people said they know that thing because you just told them the thing. People believing a claim is not adequate evidence that the claim is true; it might just indicate that PROPAGANDA IS HAPPENING. This is a fucking insidious attempt to insert BullshitTM into the body of things that ‘everybody knows’ and convince dissenters that they are a tiny tiny minority and possibly crazy.

Again, there’s no way to disagree with the claim. There’s vagueness around what ‘financial support’ consists of (donations to bail funds? or a countrywide campaign to arm the antifas?) and who ‘campaign staff’ consists of (Joe Biden? his higher-up organizer people in an official capacity? volunteers who do activism work unassociated with the campaign?)

Do you agree that the Fake News is biased against President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

See comments on the first question regarding these unspecified ‘efforts’.

What’s going on with the capitalization here? Is it a heavy-handed attempt to legitimize the phrase ‘fake news’ - make it sound more like a real thing? It’s not just ‘news’ that happens to be ‘fake’; it’s a proper noun indicating that Fake News is...what, an organization? We can say anything we want about the Fake News because ‘the Fake News’, a monolithic entity, isn’t real. It’ll be vacuously true.

Honestly, I don’t know where to end with this one. If the news is fake, it’s biased against Trump. If the news is biased against Trump, it’s fake. There can exist no criticism of Trump that is legitimate; any opposition is the Fake News. This is a propaganda machine.

Do you believe the Fake News should be held accountable for their bias against President Trump?

In the last question, we asked you if the Fake News was biased. In this question, we’re assuming you said ‘yes’. We won’t tell you who exactly the Fake News is. We won’t tell you what their bias looks like. We won’t tell you how we’re proposing to hold them accountable. Dissent is illegitimate and punishable, in the same way that certain political beliefs are worthy of unspecified ‘punishment’.

I suspect that the ‘Fake News’ questions are at the end just in case you need a reminder that President Trump tells the truth and everyone else is a dirty liar. In case this disgustingly biased survey raised any tiny little whispers of alarm in your head. Don’t listen to the alarm. Remember who tells you the truth. Remember how everyone is out to get him because he’s the only one who tells you the truth. You’re not one of those people, are you? Of course not.

It’s so easy to look at this and discount it because it’s so obviously bullshit. That’s why it’s dangerous. We live in a country where this psycho garbage is coming from the establishment in power. Every time something like this goes out into the world, the window of what’s socially acceptable shifts a little closer to fascism. Propaganda isn’t just people saying bad or wrong shit; it’s manipulation that makes it harder and harder to even engage in political discourse. It’s not about what’s true or false; it’s about what serves the President. The goal is to create a climate in which accuracy is irrelevant, critical source evaluation is impossible, and legitimate dissent is discredited. This is how it fucking starts - this “affirm your unquestioning loyalty to our Glorious Leader and punish the opposition as enemies of the State” bullshit.

As a final note, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that the survey does not confirm your email address; it’s not constructed to discourage anyone from submitting duplicate responses. All it asks for is a name, email address, and zip code. So, uh...you know what to do. Especially if you’re one of those kpop weirdos (whom I love very much).