#like the point is when we were hired we were given inaccurate information

[gobbluthbutagirl]

talked to both hr guy and the store director about what happened to my poor coworker on thursday and it was kind of funny because literally none of us were there when it happened so we were all going off second- and thirdhand information. but according to them one lead had to go on lunch right when it happened and the other lead was perhaps not aware of the exact nature of the spill(?) when she asked my coworker to clean it up. which i find REALLY hard to believe because that same lead once asked me to clean up vomit while knowing it was vomit so it seems HIGHLY likely that she would ask my coworker to clean up piss knowing full well it was piss. and i reminded hr guy that he told me when i first started that regular team members NEVER have to deal with any type of bodily fluids even from a dog. and that i worked here for 9 months under the impression that this was the case and found out it wasn’t when HE(the same guy who told me i would never have to deal with it!) asked me to clean up dog piss. and that most likely my coworker had never been informed that that was something she’d have to do right up until they made her do it. and also that even if the leads did not intentionally deceive her she would have definitely felt like she was being deceived and in addition to that ESPECIALLY if she felt like she had been tricked into cleaning it up she probably didn’t feel like she was allowed to say she wasn’t comfortable cleaning it up. like i don’t know this girl super well but she’s only like 20 or 21 and really nice and basically does not seem like the type to have the “hey wait a minute what the FUCK” reaction that i had the first time they asked me to clean piss, ESPECIALLY if she didn’t find out it was piss until after she’d started cleaning it. and i told them that they need to get all the leads together and figure out exactly what the plan is for dealing with bodily fluid spills in the future and make sure all the leads are in agreement so that the expectations for what we as cleaners have to deal with are uniform regardless of who the LOD is. and then they need to communicate that to not just the cleaners but EVERYONE because i know a lot of us were lied to when we were first hired. and i also told them that somebody from target needs to reach out to that poor girl who quit and apologize to her because regardless of what the two leads’ intentions were they handled that HORRIBLY and put her in a terrible position. and they did seem to be in agreement with me there so we’ll see

[moon-yean]

could u elaborate what was so bad about the barbarians? i saw the show and thought it was ok but i don't have enough knowledge to know what are the ideological implications of it? sorry, just really curious and wanna learn more

*takes a deep breath* oh boy, where to even begin? Thanks for your question as I might finally get this off my chest! Okay, fair’s fair, anyone who likes the show should look away now because I’m not going to mince words. And I want to reiterate that there were things about the show that I liked, mostly on a superficial aesthetical level. Generally you could tell from the get-go though that the writers are hacks who know nothing about history or good storytelling for that matter. I could’ve dealt with a show that was historically inaccurate if only the character drama had been written well. I might also have enjoyed the show more if the character drama had been mediocre but if there had been a sense of historical authenticity (not accuracy, mind; but still something tangibly more substantial than the patina they tried to throw onto their frankly embarrassingly lowbrow attempt by having parts of the dialogue translated into Latin by an expert and by hiring a good crew for the costume and props design - of the Romans at least... putting lipstick on a pig and all that, although pigs are great and the writing here is not).

Since you asked about the ideological implications specifically, I’ll start with that and work my way towards other criticisms (this is going to be LONG):

19th century nationalism: The story of Arminius and his merry band of brothers who defy the big bad Roman empire is a narrative that became especially popular in Germany in the 18th and 19th century, both with liberal patriotic movements that were advocating for the unification of the “German cultural nation” in a modern nation state (spurred by the Wars of Liberation against Napoléon Bonaparte and French occupation) and later with the völkisch movements where that nationalism segued into the pseudo-scientific racial ‘theories’ of a ‘superior German race’ which in turn was part of the ideological foundation of the genocides and atrocities committed by Germany in the 20th century (not only in WWII, see also the colonial genocide of the Herero in 1904). We cannot disentangle this predominantly racist reception history that re-invented Arminius (”Hermann der Cherusker” - “Hermann the Cheruscan” - or, indeed “Hermann the German” ha!) as the founding myth of a German people from the way this story has been depicted in media, entertainment and culture and, as evidenced by Barbarians, continues to be to this day.

Barbarians pays lip service to the fact that actually there was no German people at the time by having the tribes meet at the Ting in the first episode and have someone outright state it. These kinds of tidbits literally voiced by characters give off a strong whiff of the authors googling something, reading something on Wikipedia, and then putting it in there. I’m sorry (actually not sorry) to come down harsh on this but given what we’re talking about here, that’s just not good enough. It’s an embarrassing level of “writing”. The authors clearly have NO idea what they’re talking about or what they’re dealing with because despite their lip services, they actively reproduce the harmful narratives that were spun around this actual historical event and these actual historical figures in the 19th century. No effort was made to depict anything complex or realistic here. Case in point: Even though there’s a pretense that the tribes aren’t part of the same people, they don’t look much different from each other, they all speak the same kind of modern high German that sounds like they’re at a costume party in the year of our lord 2020 (and in the case of Folkwin, drugged out of their mind; he sounds like a guy who’d throw beer cans at passersby). They come across as basically just being separated by the few acres between their villages. And then when the big bad evil Roman empire wants to squash their resistance (Asterix did it better change my mind challenge), freedom fighter Arminius rallies them together with a heroic speech and they charge at the Romans RAAHWWHR! ... no, just no.

There would have been SO MANY ways to reframe and retell this story in a fresh, new, and exciting way that would have made for amazing character drama. The premise is so good. If we were to look at the basics of what is known, there are so many personal AND political complexities in there that just beg to be coloured in with a little imagination. I just... I don’t even know where to begin to fix the choices that the show did go with since most of them don’t make any sense, don’t contribute anything to the narrative and are just. there. Have y’all noticed that there is ZERO dramatic tension in any of the scenes? Like, what? How?? Culture clash, divided loyalties, identity issues, the way that a militaristic upbringing might warp the mind, feelings of home and belonging and displacement, the return of the lost son, the betrayal of a high-ranking officer, just, there are so many themes that the show could have focused on but it botches all of them, nothing of it feels real, earned, or logical. Characters behave in idiotic ways for the sake of the plot (I wanted to like Thusnelda, I really did, I’m always here for female characters but she was so painfully obviously written by 3 dudes who thought that feminism = praying to the good sisters of the forest and slashing your face aöldksfaökdjf plus the actress could not sell any of it, she sounded ridic).

I’m exhausted just thinking about the many ways in which the writing on the show sucked. Impaired character used as a symbol~ for other characters instead of being a character on his own? Check. Weird mystical shit? Check. Earthbound tribal people who are one with nature? Check. Death on the cross to get that Christian imagery in there? Check. Lack of female characters except feisty!badass!Thusnelda, scheming!conniving!pulling-the-strings!wife, weird!mystical!seer? Check. Varus doing a Herod by demanding first-borns to up the Christian persecuted ante? Check. (All he was missing was the mustache to twirl. Was he even a character? He looked vaguely concerned and sceptical. That was his character.)

Look, the actor Arminius was great but even he couldn’t make sense of any of it. The character work was so shoddy, it was shocking. One minute he’s still all-in with the Romans, ordering lashes for “German” mercenaries without being very conflicted about it, reminiscing with fellow Roman soldiers about the good old times in some fireside bonding, asking his foster father to go home to Rome, and then when bad!dad is like “lol no” (surely they would have had that convo before??? surely Arminius would have known how far his career could go???), Arminius turns around and goes “let’s kill 3 Roman legions!! I’M MAD!!” ... lmao dude, just...

Another favourite of mine: The romance between Thusnelda and Folkwin is supposed to be illicit and against her social status. Does anyone even notice? Does anybody even care? Why did the writers come up with Folkwin in the first place? (His name Folkwin Wolfspeer is a hoot and an embarassment in itself. I wonder whether they used some kind of Germanic name generator. They certainly did use a generic speech generator for the battle speech Arminius gives in the last episode lol)

Back to the topic of a lack of tension. Of course there can’t be any tension if the characters suck. But it’s also because of the design of the scenes and plot points. The cliffhangers are so telegraphed and artificially constructed, it’s almost hilarious. My “favourite” has got to be the one of the first episode: The “hi dad” one. Not only does Arminius go to the village with other Romans in tow who then disappear because nothing in this show makes sense but this kind of revelation also goes against everything we know about good storytelling. There’s a famous quote by Hitchcock and I’ll quote it in full because I think it absolutely applies here (and it is valid for character tension as much as it is for suspense):

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

I hope you can see what I mean here. Barbarians continuously springs surprises on its audience but it has absolutely no tension/suspense in any of its scenes. The only time where the show even comes close to having any kind of genuinely dramatic moment is the conversation between Arminius and Varus where Arminius tries to hide his hurt and disappointment, and all the emotion in that scene is completely due to the actor since the dialogue is fairly idiotic for what is supposed to be the turning moment. Let’s go back to the basics and imagine what the show could have done differently, even allowing for the way in which the writers wanted to tell it (which, as I mentioned, is not appropriately sensitized to the misappropriation of the material in the past - but even if we go with THAT kind of freedom fighter / lost child narrative, it ought to be done well). And here now follows my actual essay of grievances:

The premise of the story, in as much as we know from history, is amazing: An officer of the Roman army, delivered to the Romans by his tribe as a child, returns to the "country" of his birth as part of the invading Roman army which oppresses the natives of the lands. He switches sides, unites different tribes and leads them to a decisive victory against the Roman army in a battle in a forest that lasted for several days and was cleverly planned by the "Germans" who end up outsmarting the Romans who are victims of ambush and the terrain, being split up and stumbling through the forest exhausted and without finding a way back to the other troops (love that the show as we have it managed to squeeze in the cliché "two armies standing on opposing sides decide to just start running towards each other, epic clash, chaos" (which is militarily so fucking stupid and nobody ever did that)).

Anyway, that premise is amazing. You could do so much with it. And if you wanted to make a miniseries about it, the biggest question would surely be: Why did Arminius switch sides? That’s the key plot point. And themes of otherness, oppression, exploitation, identity, and so on, would be a good fit. The first problem with the miniseries is that it has nothing to say about any of that. Arminius doesn’t even feel like the main character (aside from his actor being a cut above the rest). We don’t get to see much of his POV. We don’t get many meaningful conversations between him and Varus (actually just one after which he has a total character transplant). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with characters that don’t add anything in particular to the central plot nor to any of the central themes. Literally, why? 6 episodes is already pretty fucking short to make Arminius’ turn believable, so you’d better spend most of them on him. This is not material for an ensemble show (nevermind that the other characters suck and are not well-acted and written to behave stupidly... that’s just ON TOP of the fundamental issue of this show lacking a POV).

Like, you can turn this into a big Hollywood action movie about the battle or you make it a character drama where the battle is also told from a character perspective (i.e. focusing on the mounting fear and desperation of the soldiers as the battle drags on for days etc but more importantly focusing on why the battle takes place and why it’s important to both the Romans and the “Germans”). As it is, in the show, we don’t get any idea why the Romans are even there in the first place and pestering the people by demanding some tributes. And we don’t get any idea why the Germanic tribes are so opposed to this or why others of them might not be. We don’t get any of the broader political implications, we just get some eagle-stealing pranks (defiance!! cool, just agitate them in a completely stupid and arbitrary way, why don’t you) and a few people executed because the “Germans” were being stupid. That’s not the scale that’s needed here. And I don’t mean that we needed to see mass executions. In fact, I would have preferred if there had been no such hackneyed and emotionally manipulative device.

Arminius is basically absent for all the early encounters of the Romans with the “Germans”. So while we suspect that the mistreatment of the “Germans” at the hands of the Romans would be a strong motivational factor for him, we don’t actually see him witness any of few hints in that direction that we get, so it doesn’t actually matter for his character arc. I have so many issues with how his arc is written. In the first episodes, we don’t get any sense that he’s not a happy Roman. When a “Barbarian” mercenary ridicules Rome, he has him whipped and we don’t get much of a sense that he’s very conflicted about it. Even just moments before he ends up destroying his effigies of Roman gods, we see him trying to get Varus to send him back to Rome. Earlier in the same episode, he prays to those Roman gods. I’m sorry but wtf? How the turntables... If you want to make it believable that he would turn on Rome, why not start with him already being frustrated with the way that things in Rome work? With the way the army is run? And why not give him a careerist streak and make him frustrated that he can’t advance much further because of his lowly birth and background? And instead of Varus being an asshole to him about it (he’s supposed to be his foster father, surely Arminius would already know how Varus thinks about his people and surely he’d already know how far he can climb up the ranks), have Varus be sympathetic but basically like “sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

Arminius betraying Rome shouldn’t be about Varus saying something mean~, if anything a personal connection of his with Varus should just make the betrayal harder and be something that he does despite the fact that there are Romans he cares about. If you start out the show with him already having significant doubts about his place in the Roman army and identity issues, you just need to add something to it that will finally breaks the camel’s back. Have him become increasingly agitated by the way the "Germans” are treated by the Romans. Start the show with him making to leave Rome, someone asking him whether he’s excited to return to his place of birth and him joking about it but obviously being conflicted and then overwhelmed when he actually gets there because it totally destroys his sense of self which he has built for himself (and for which we would have needed to see the contrast, even if just for one scene, of how he is treated in Rome – perhaps snobbed by others, not treated equally in some sort of social setting, could be something subtle – to show us and him that as much as he wishes, he is not and will never be accepted as a Roman).

And then when he gets to the provinces, we need to see that from his perspective. What’s his reaction to arriving there? To seeing the familiar landscapes? (Or maybe he was taken as a younger child and doesn’t actually have that many memories of it but feels a sense of belonging anyway.) There are so many scenes in this show that seem to hint at these things but they are completely random and unfocused and interspersed with the stupid village people shenanigans. Varus talks about burning down villages in retribution. Well, why don’t we see any of that? (Nevermind that it’s comic book villain level of evil, but I’m working with a fix here and not a total rewrite as would be better.) Surely it can’t be too expensive to burn down a few huts in the night. And having Arminius ride along / witness it but not say anything even though we can see these things having an effect on him. As mentioned: The worst offense is the scene when he rides to the village (with other Romans in tow!) and announces “hi dad!” just to have that cliffhanger. Wtf?

Characters doling out information that the viewer doesn’t have is the absolute worst way of telling a story and maintaining tension. It should be the other way around. How about instead you have him be part of a Roman delegation that rides into the village and demands [random, whatever, the fucking eagle if you must keep that shit] and when the Reik (whom the audience already knows to be Arminius’ father) doesn’t want to give it (because he’s not actually a weak fucking clown as almost everyone in the actual show is aside from feisty Thusnelda who’s a fierce~ fucking clown rmfe), the Romans begin beating the dad or whipping him or whatever, completely humiliating him and his people, and we see Arminius on his horse watching the show with growing unrest until the realization really hits him that this is his father (cue flashback to a very young Arminius being dragged away) and the tension keeps ratcheting until he shouts in German “that’s enough” before correcting himself to give the same command in Latin (maybe he still thinks in German, would be an interesting idea) and the Romans look at him with suspicion, like wtf was that, and the "Germans” are like, why tf does this Roman officer speak German, and it’s super awkward and shit and maybe Varus is also there and he looks at Arminius like, oh shit I need to protect my boy he’s actually all up in his feels about these wildlings let’s go back to the camp and have a talk, and so the Romans end up leaving and the “Germans” are like “wait, was that... could it have been.. remember lil Ari who you gave up... but it couldn’t be...” and meanwhile the beaten dad doesn’t want to hear any of that because he actually has never dared hope he would see his son again and also he kind of doesn’t want to see him again because he would be too ashamed to meet his eyes.

And then later we see Arminius pacing up and down in his tent because this won’t let him go, even after he had a talk with Varus, and after some agonizing he steals away in the night to go confront his father (if you want to keep that German mercenary noticing shit, have him notice that). And then we see the father in his hut and everything is quiet and we are waiting for Arminius to show up because we know he’s on his way. But we don’t know whether he wants to talk to his father or just kill him in revenge for the trauma he’s caused him. You’d show the dad and if it were a good actor, you could see so much in his unrest, maybe despite not wanting to think that that guy could be his son, he kind of knows in his heart that it must be and he’s unsettled and whatnot and then we hear someone outside the door and the door opens and there stands Arminius in a cloak and there’s none of that ridiculous music that wants to scream “epic” but falls way short. Have it be quiet. Have Arminius enter and pull back the hood and they just look at each other. And the dad looks like he wants to hug him but he doesn’t move. And Arminius looks like he wants to murder him but he actually moves to sit down, all the while they keep an eye on each other because who knows, they might actually end up murdering each other. That’s the kind of confrontation you need with a reunion like this jfc. And then they talk and it’s an important scene and I’m not going to write it all out but I hope y’all know what I mean.

I feel like you’d have to rewrite this whole show to actually give the character drama the weight that it needs and deserves because what’s happening in the show is dramatic af but you wouldn’t know because it’s so unbelievably stupidly written. I CANNOT believe that when Arminius is back in the village, he’s standing around with Thusnelda and Folkwin in a field as if they’re catching up at a high school reunion. “So, how’s it been?” “My name is now Arminius lol” “You’re kidding lol” ... uhm hello ??? Is this show a meme or...???

Actually as a last thought, I would have kept Arminius’ mother alive and killed his dad. His dad is irredeemable. He gave him away. But if we assume that he never had a substitute mother, then meeting his mother again (who was against giving him away) would make for much more interesting scenes and would also have a much stronger impact on Arminius. I’ll stop now but I just wanted to note how much I hate the writing on this show and everything it chooses to be. Thanks.

[atheistforhumanity]

The RNC is A Cesspool of Misinformation

Throughout the first night of the RNC, speakers mostly stuck to two main themes. Those were praising Trump and vilifying Biden. As is common with conservative talking points, speakers, including Trump, greatly over exaggerated what Trump has done, while telling bold faced lies about what Liberals want to achieve. This post will focus on exaggerated praise for Trump, and a follow up post will cut into lies told about Biden. 

First, let’s talk about how praise for Trump was exaggerated and inaccurate. One data point that is touted again and again is that black employment rates are at record lows. This is a misleading argument used by many politicians, as Presidents have little control over unemployment rates. The Fed Reserve has more of a direct effect when adjusting interest, which can inspire more hiring generally. President Trump did not lift a finger to directly increase black participation in the work force. As you can see from this U.S. Census info below, actually participation in the workforce has only risen slightly in the past few years. 

Similarly, Trump was praised for “ending” policies that unfairly incarcerate black Americans, which Biden put in place. Biden does have a poor history with crime bills that hurt black Americans. However, Trump did not reverse anything. Matter of fact he only signed one bill to help the matter. We also need some context here, because this bill was the result of years lobbying and activism by liberal parties, where Republicans fought against reforms like this ever seeing the light of day. But Trump signed his name to one bill, and State Rep Vernon Jones claimed he ended discriminatory incarceration practices. This is the type of wildly misleading comments the RNC is full of. 

What was unsurprising but radical false was the praise for Trump’s response to the Coronavirus. Donald Jr. praised his father for taking quick action against the virus to stop the spread from China. That’s not true though, because Trump had only put a partial travel ban on China, which still allowed around 40,000 direct flights from China to America. This was back in January when Trump stated, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”  Also, he did not put any ban on European travel in the early periods, and the strain infested NYC was the European strain. Since the beginning of the Covid crisis, Trump has been lying about having things under control, downplaying the seriousness, spreading misinformation. Trump also never ramped up national testing. In fact he held back funding for testing so that numbers would appear lower, then he admitted it. All along the way, Trump has undercut suggestions by medical professionals, contradicted their information, and has created a publicity war against Dr. Fauci. Nothing Trump has done has ever helped the crisis in America. Trump has also been pushing researchers to produce a vaccine and is publicly attacking the FDA for not working on his time table. 

A Dr. Ghali from Louisiana claimed that Trump’s quick action saved his life. Dr. Ghali had a mild case of Covid and was given an antiviral and a plasma infusion, which both gained emergency approval for patients who are hospitalized. However, plasma treatments, which Trump has praised, show very little evidence of actually working.   

Trump himself again made misleading comments about the virus during the RNC. Trump commented on if someone had the virus and then recovered by saying, “That means we don’t have to be afraid of you at all, right?”. Trump is always throwing out his own uninformed and uneducated ideas about how the virus works, which is dangerous because many people take his word over all else. It is not true that once a person has had Covid that there is no risk. There has been confirmed cases of people catching the virus again, with reduced symptoms. As of now, doctors are not completely sure if such a person could be contagious, but right now there is no evidence to show they are not. Furthermore, Trump claimed that America is getting rid of the virus. That’s just not true. We are still an outlier, and are doing horrible compared to move wealthy countries. Instead of the virus going away, we are seeing new outbreaks around the country due to school re-openings and other large gatherings. Trump has always told his followers that things are going much better than in reality. 

These are just a couple of ways that speakers exaggerated or lied while praising Trump. I wanted to focus on the corona response, because this is a major factor in people’s decision making. People need to know that Trump has been nothing but an obstacle to this country responding to this crisis. 

If you have any questions about claims made at the RNC, please send me an ask. 

[bgn846]

Worthy Chapter 8: Falling Apart FFXV A/B/O Promnis

<Previous Chapter 7

Saeva was cloaked in the shadows as she watched Prompto’s house in the dead of night.  She should have listened to her gut feeling regarding Aranea; she’d foolishly ignored it simply because the assassin was a woman. Aranea had nearly killed the little brat when he’d gone outside, but someone had stopped the fight.  Now they’d all piled into the small house and were talking. At least that’s what it looked like from afar. Curse the stupid empire guard that had spooked them. Now she couldn’t hear any of the conversation.

 Something had changed as the occupants were all sitting in the kitchen.  Aranea wasn’t trying to slice the filthy omega’s throat open anymore. Apparently she hadn’t done enough research on this woman. She could easily be swayed, and that was a very big problem.

 Pulling her fur coat tighter around her shoulders, Saeva continued to lurk.  If they left, she wanted to know about it. Though she wasn’t planning on staying outside forever, clearly this pathetic excuse for a paid assassin was spilling the beans.  She had to act fast if she wanted to become queen. The omega and his lowly mother could run to Alban and tell him everything.

 Turning, Saeva carefully picked her way back to the main royal building.  That was going to be the first thing to go once she was on the throne. All of these little concrete eye sores were going to be razed, and a new palatial edifice was going to take its place.   She didn’t care where the brothers moved to, but it wasn’t going to be near her.

 Once inside, she made her way to Alban’s quarters.  The oaf was asleep, of course. That’s all he did: eat, drink, and sleep.  Pounding on his bedroom door for a good five minutes finally roused the man.  He came stumbling out in ugly underwear and blinked stupidly at her. Judging by his scent, he was still mostly asleep.    

 “Saeva?  Whas’ the matter?” he grumbled.

 “That omega is going to ruin my wedding,” she wailed.  “He’s still here, and he’s just going to ruin everything!”

 “Prompto?” he questioned, confused.  “How can he ruin anything? He’s just an omega.”

 Saeva focused on crying and raised her voice.  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me! Why does this always happen? I’m such a fool for thinking I could have a normal life with you!”  She sobbed dramatically.

 Alban woke up fully after the shouting started.  “I didn’t say that! I just don’t understand why you don’t like Prompto.  He’s truly harmless; he never leaves his house and avoids people on purpose.”

 “If you won’t help me, then I don’t know who I can turn to!  Maybe your brother would be more accommodating.”

 “Otho?!” Alban exclaimed. “What would he know about this?  He’s an idiot!”

 “You don’t love me. Otherwise, you’d help me!”

 “I’m trying to help, but you aren’t making any damn sense, woman!” the king huffed.

 “So it’s true you don’t love me,” she gasped.

 “I never said that!” Alban shouted, clearly getting agitated by the turn of events.  “What do you want me to do?” he tried again with desperation.

 “I want you to make that omega go away. He’ll make trouble for us later, I know it.  He doesn’t like me, and he’ll try to craft lies about me.”

 “What kind of lies would he say about you, dear; you’re so sweet,” Alban murmured, calming somewhat as his scent started to show signs of arousal.  

 This wasn’t the mood she wanted the king in, so she tried again to rattle Alban.   “He will come to you and tell you lies - I can feel it! He’s wicked and conniving.”

 “Have you met him?” Alban asked, puzzled.  “He’s just Prompto and not at all like you’re describing. I know him being an omega bothers you, but he listens when you tell him things.  He’ll follow orders.”

 Saeva was beginning to realize that, despite his alpha bravado, Alban was a total and complete pussy.  “I just don’t see how I can believe you love me anymore.”

 “Uh – I can most definitely show you.” Alban smirked as he tried to pose suggestively while leaning on a nearby chair.

 The man looked absolutely ridiculous standing there in his worn underwear and socks.  Who slept in socks but nothing else? “Go get ready for me, then. I’ll be there in a second,” she cooed, trying to hide her grimace.  Fishing her phone out, she made a quick call. It only took a moment of fearful hushed whispering to engage her next pawn. She had to wait and distract Alban with useless foreplay.

    --

   “I don’t see why we can’t simply go to the King and tell him what’s going on,” Soliamare lamented.

 “He wouldn’t believe us mum, he’s got Saeva feeding him lies.  We need to leave first and then talk about what we can do later.”

 “But he’s never been unkind to me.”

 “That doesn’t matter right now. It’s not safe for us to be here anymore.” Prompto groaned while motioning towards Aranea to indicate his point.  “If Nyx hadn’t come by, who knows what would have happened.”

 “I wasn’t going to gut you, kid, I swear,” Aranea offered sincerely.  “I was given inaccurate information about you.”

 “When were you going to figure that out? When I had a knife sticking outta me?!” Prompto exclaimed.

 “Look, despite the way I was coming at you, I wasn’t planning on killing you.” Aranea sighed.  “Shiva’s tits, I can’t believe I’m about to spill my biggest secret. Listen blue eyes, I don’t actually kill my targets.  I arrange for them to disappear instead. I kept getting hired by the bad guys to take out innocent people, so I decided to turn the tables.”

 Nyx finally joined in the conversation.  “Wait -- like witness protection?”

 “I suppose you could call it that. It does pay the bills, and I’m good at it, so that helps.”

 “Since you both are going to help us, what happens next?” Prompto asked quietly. “You said Ignis was coming, right?” he asked hopefully, looking over at Nyx.

 “Yeah, he’s on his way with backup; we need to meet him at that shed on the airfield,” Nyx offered.    

 “When?  Can we leave now?” Prompto asked hurriedly.

 “If you need to take anything, now would be a good time to grab it.”

 “I can’t believe this is happening. Everything was so normal this morning.  There was going to be a wedding and –and there was going to be another female at court.” Soliamare sighed as she stood from the table.

 “Come on, mum. Let’s go get ready,” Prompto urged.  He didn’t want to upset his mother, but they needed to get going.  It was clear their presence was not wanted.  

      --

   Ignis stared out the window of the cockpit with a scowl.  Lucis only had two older model dropships in their fleet. Ignis was currently standing in one, and the other sat a few hundred yards away.  He had seen nothing indicating another trip was ongoing. This could be a very serious issue. There was another visitor from Insomnia in Niflheim.

 “You must not be the only one worried about someone,” Ardyn offered from over Ignis’ shoulder.

 “There aren’t many people with clearance to borrow one of the dropships.  Do you think they are here because of Prompto?”

 “Probably, but not for the reason you think.”

 Ignis sighed.  “That’s not exactly helpful.”

 “Well, you won’t get any answers waiting in this drafty relic. Shall we go snooping?”

 Shaking his head, Ignis turned and trudged down the corridor to grab his coat.  “Please don’t start a war,” he yelled back. Ignis was vaguely aware of Ardyn snickering and commenting that he’d already been there and done that.

 Following Nyx’s instructions from his last visit, Ignis located the tiny shed where Prompto had stashed his bag.  He found it almost immediately due to the sweet smell still lingering on the clothes in the bag. “Can you smell his scent?” Ignis asked, concerned.

 Ardyn shook his head and raised an eyebrow.  “Being an imprint has certain benefits; sniffing your partner out is one.”

 “He may not want me as a partner, Ardyn. I’m an alpha, and he’s scared to death of us. Though I will be curious to see how he reacts to you.”

 “I promise to be on my best behavior.” He partially bowed.  “Now I must ask, where to next?”

 “This is the designated meeting spot; we simply need to wait here.”

 “Oh, how droll.” Ardyn sighed.  “Can’t you use your nose and sniff your omega out?”

 “I seriously doubt there is enough of his scent around for me to even attempt that.” Ignis scoffed.  “Besides, we should stay here.”

 “Nonsense, let’s go hunting.” Ardyn grinned.

 Ignis leveled a glare at him. “You aren’t going to leave me alone until we go find him, are you?”

 “Nope,” he chirped, pushing the door to the shed open again.  “Time is ticking, my dear boy. We must hurry.”  

    --

     Engaging Alban in foreplay was so tiring.  Saeva didn’t want to have sex with him, but she needed it to look like they were about to do the deed.  The canopy bed was a blessing as she was able to duck in and out of the fabric to tease Alban.

 Finally someone started pounding on the door to the suite.   Working hard not to roll her eyes, at being made to wait, Saeva lunged at Alban and started screaming at the top of her lungs.

 Part of Saeva knew she was setting women’s rights back by a few notches with this stunt, but she didn’t have a choice. Their new visitor needed to believe Alban was trying to force himself on her.  Pretending that Alban was the sole cause of her distress, she started crying and wailing for him to leave her alone.

 This was the exact moment Otho came barging into the bedroom.   Alban had started to freak out and was backing away to give Saeva space.  However, it was easy for her to goad Otho into attacking his brother. The damage had been done.

 Gathering her clothes scattered on the floor, Saeva scurried away behind Otho.  “Dear, save me! He tried to force himself on me!” she breathed out excitedly.

 “I did no such thing!” Alban shouted.  “She’s lying!”

 Where Alban was slightly more wary of the world, Otho was headstrong and stupid.  He instantly took Saeva’s word as gospel and rushed the king. Dressing quickly, she began going through Alban’s discarded clothing looking for his knife.  Grabbing the handle with Alban’s discarded undershirt, she edged closer to the brothers.

 Otho was currently beating Alban with his fists and shouting incoherently.  Hovering close, Saeva waited for an opening. This fight needed a clear victor, and she was going to be the one making the final decision.  Running forward when Alban had his back to her, she stabbed him.

 Otho was in such a rage that he missed the move.  Then, like a true idiot, he grabbed the hilt of the knife when he saw it and pulled it out.  Alban merely screamed a second time and tried clutching his back. The blood gushing out broke the spell Otho was under.

 Saeva scurried away from the pair as Otho shouted loudly.  He was staring at his blood covered hands and repeating the word sorry over and over.  Alban tried reaching out to his brother but the man was in a state of shock as he kept babbling.  

 Overcome with adrenaline, Saeva bolted from the room.  She had to get away from the pair of them. She knew the wound was fatal; she’d aimed for his heart and it seemed Otho was in no frame of mind to administer any help.   Otho would be blamed for the king’s death. Saeva simply had to go to the next brother in line to the throne and woo him.

 The poor Niflheim monarchy and this new scandal were going to rock the tabloids.  Saeva was planning on using the public attention to cement her place in the family.  She’d offer support for the death of the king, the trial of the murderer, and the disappearance of their lone omega.  

 Making her way along the corridor, Saeva found the exit door and ran outside to Otho’s apartment. The man had a collection of weapons that he’d gathered over his boring lifespan and Saeva intended to use one in particular.

      --

   Prompto could hear his mother whining about something down the hall.  Shoving one more item in his small backpack, he ran out to see what the issue was.

 “I thought I had them with me,” she moaned.  “Why aren’t they here?”

 “Mum, what’s wrong? What are you looking for?”

 Nyx and Aranea had joined them now, and they all stood huddled around an old desk in the sitting room.  “Of course this would happen now,” she huffed after a moment of more paper rummaging.

 “What are you missing, Majesty?” Nyx asked worriedly.

 “All my important paperwork that I thought I’d removed from my husband’s safe,” she admitted with a blank stare.

 “Do you absolutely need it?” Aranea questioned.

 “I don’t know. Prom’s and my birth certificate is in there along with my marriage license.  I know there are other important things, but I don’t know if they are worth getting.” She sighed.

 “That’s an Ignis question,” Nyx announced.  “He’s due to rendezvous with us in an hour, and I’m not sure I can text him that question without raising suspicion.”

 “Can you try?” Aranea asked with a sweet look.

 Prompto could tell Aranea liked Nyx.  She was always standing way too close to him, and her pheromones were clearly advertising it as well.  He was going to have to remind her again to tone it down. His heart couldn’t take the constant fluctuation.

 Nyx pulled his phone out and winced.  “I’m not sure this will work. Majesty, I’m almost afraid to ask, but where is this safe?”

 Prompto’s mother outright laughed.  “It’s in the basement of Alban’s current residence.  Sorry for the trouble. I wish I’d remembered that I never cleaned that out.  We could be on our way right now.”

 “Let me check with Ignis; he knows more about paperwork than me,” Nyx replied as he peered down and typed out a message.   “We will wait for ten minutes ,and then we are going to Alban’s as a group to get the paperwork,” Nyx announced after he’d sent the message.  

 Barely a minute had elapsed when Nyx’s phone buzzed.  “Is that him already?” Prompto blurted. He was excited that Ignis was helping them, and he felt for the first time a strong pull to be near the alpha.  Prompto couldn’t explain what was happening to his mind, but he knew if he didn’t find relief for his growing panic, he would explode.      

    --

   “Damn!” Ignis huffed angrily as he glared at his phone.

Nyx Ulric 2:35am: Just found out we may need to go to the boss’s office.  They have the only copy of the handbook.

 Sighing heavily he typed a response.

 Ignis Scientia 2:38am:    W      e can go over it together!  

 “Something wrong?” Ardyn asked calmly.

 “I believe they are all headed to the king’s quarters to fetch important documents.  That constitutes as something wrong, doesn’t it?” Ignis asked sarcastically. This was an unwelcome development. They needed to leave quickly not get caught right under Alban’s nose.

 “They aren’t prisoners, Ignis. The queen and her son should be allowed to leave if they like.”

 “Correct in theory, but if Saeva is truly trying to kill Prompto, she won’t let him waltz out of Niflheim without a fight.”

 “Off to Alban’s house!” Ardyn enthused as he pointed towards a clump of buildings in the distance.

 “Six, I hope we ma --.” Ignis paused mid-sentence and inhaled deeply.  “You crazy old coot, you were right. I      can     smell him.” Taking off in a run, Ignis followed his nose toward his omega.  Ardyn was close behind and seemed excited by this new turn of events.

 It was a little surreal running around in the dead of night following a scent.  It was, however, clear as a bell, and he quickly came up to a small unassuming concrete block house at the edge of the property.  The scent was very strong. This had to be Prompto’s house.

 Without hesitation he barreled up the steps to the back door and entered the house.  The lights were on, but no one was there.

 “I believe they just left.” Ardyn offered as he stood near the sink.  “This tea is still warm.”

 Ignis grunted in response and paced from one room to the next. He was taking mental pictures of Prompto’s home life.  It was as comfortable as Nyx had described it, but it lacked something. It didn’t feel safe. “I’m ready if you are.”

 Once more they stole out into the dark, heading toward the king’s residence.  Prompto’s scent was getting stronger, so Ignis knew he was heading the right direction.  Staying hidden near the path, Ignis scoured the building for a service entrance. “I see a door, but there are guards nearby.  What should we do?” Ignis asked of his traveling companion.

 “Hmm—that’s easy.” Ardyn quipped.

 Ignis figured out what was happening far too late.  All he could do was hold his breath and focus on not screaming out loud.  The warp was over in a blink of an eye. Ardyn was supporting his weight as Ignis’ body adjusted to being thrown through space and time.  Thankfully, the door Ardyn had flung them at was recessed so they could hide in the dark safely. “Would – you care to warn me next time,” he gasped.

 “Never - that takes the fun right out of it, Ignis.  You know that. Now be a good crownsguard and get the door open.”

 It took another minute for Ignis to find his balance so that he could focus on breaking and entering.  What had life turned into? Gladio and Noct were safe at home, and he was on an international rescue mission.  He was also sure he was breaking several laws while doing it, and that was slightly disconcerting.

 The door clicked open roughly a moment later, and they both slipped inside.  Finding Prompto and the others was imperative; time was running out.

    --

   “Where’s Ignis?” Prompto whispered as they hurried along the corridor to the basement.

 “He’ll be here soon, don’t worry,” Nyx offered.

 Soliamare had remembered a back door to the building that allowed them access without being seen.  Now, as they worked their way deeper into the bowels of the building, Prompto couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being followed.  “Are we safe?”

 “As safe as you’re gonna get, kid,” Aranea huffed.  “Stop worrying. The sooner we get your important papers, the sooner we can go.”

 Finally, the room in question appeared, and the four went inside to tackle the safe.  “Mum, please tell me you know the code?” Prompto asked with wide eyes.

 “Unless your step-brother has changed it, then yes, I do.”

 Taking a deep breath Prompto watched his mother work the dial on the safe and prayed for it to open.  The sound of the latch clicking open was music to his ears. “Is everything still there?” he asked hurriedly.

 “Thank the six, yes.  I’m so sorry we had to do this.  I was worried about what might happen if we couldn’t prove our identities.”

 “It had to be done, but let’s go before someone actually does find us,” Nyx added with concern.

 The trek back to the main corridor revealed that the exit now had a guard standing nearby. “That guy wasn’t there before, was he?” Aranea whispered.  “Shit, we need to find another way out.”

 Turning back, they quickly descended the steps to the basement once more.  There had to be another exit at the other end of the building. The space was not laid out well, and as they explored, the rooms were getting smaller. It was disorienting.  Prompto glanced over to check on his mother as she clutched their life history in her shaking hands.

 Then, without warning, an alarm sounded upstairs.  All four of them stopped dead in their tracks and exchanged looks.  It didn’t appear that they’d done anything to trigger the alarm, as they were all standing in the middle of an empty room.  “What do we do now?!” Prompto yelped.

 “Run instead of walk. We need to get the hell outta here,” Aranea hissed.

 The next door led to another small useless room, but then their luck changed.  The new room featured an old rusty metal door - one that seemed far too old for the space it occupied.  Nyx and Aranea immediately began working to get the door open. It revealed a narrow, dark passageway leading away from the building.

 Within seconds, Nyx had his flashlight out and was peering into the space.  “Let’s go!” he ordered.

 Soliamare grabbed Prompto as they stumbled after Nyx.  Aranea brought up the rear with her own flashlight. After a few minutes of walking, the corridor opened up into a vast underground chamber.   “Astrals!” Nyx exclaimed. “I didn’t even notice we’d gone downhill,” he added, illuminating the space with his light.  

 “Any idea where we are?” Aranea asked, looking to Soliamare.

 Prompto’s mother shook her head and held him closer.  

 “Come on, we need to keep moving,” Nyx huffed.

 The chamber looked like it could have been grand once.  It almost reminded Prompto of the spaces at the citadel back in Insomnia.   The decayed entrance was blocked by debris. They still needed to find a way out.  “I see something,” Aranea offered as she ran towards the corner to check out what appeared to be a service door.  “Yes!” she enthused. “Look what’s on the other side!” She smiled, pointing.

 The service door opened to reveal a small walkway over a double height space below.  The exciting thing was that at the other end of the metal walkway stood a door with light clearly streaming in underneath it.  They were close to being free.  

 Aranea hurried across first and dropped down to check under the crack of the door.  “It looks good, come on,” she urged, waving her hands.

 Soliamare started out next but stopped midway. She turned partially to look back at Prompto with fearful eyes.  “I can feel it breaking,” she breathed. “What should I do?” The noise of scraping metal soon started to get louder.  The walkway was going to collapse.

 Prompto could see the structure sagging. “Mum!” He started to go towards his mother out of desperation, but Nyx pulled him back.

 Then a flash of blue light erupted next to him and Nyx was gone.  “I’m coming for you next Prompto,” Nyx shouted from where he was working to hand off a very distressed Soliamare to Aranea on the other side.

 “How’d -- how?!” Prompto stuttered.  He wanted to add more, but a loud bang shattered his train of thought.  The shouts of his mother added to the confusion. What was going on? Why was no one moving?   Prompto could tell his body was trying to tell him something, but he was experiencing a massive adrenaline rush.  Was the shock of nearly losing his mother doing this or something else?

 He went to straighten up and a severe pain ripped through his side.  Looking down revealed a dark red stain spreading on his clothes.

 “He dies if you warp anywhere near us,” Saeva offered dryly as she stepped onto the landing of the walkway, her gun now pointed at Prompto’s head.

 “It looks as if you mean to kill him no matter my actions, Lady Saeva,” Nyx spit out.

 “You could survive if you do what you’re told, unlike this filth,” she indicated with a nod of her head towards Prompto.

 Prompto winced at her words and stumbled backwards slightly. He couldn’t support his body much longer.

 “So what you’re saying is that I’ll have to sacrifice myself to save the prince,”  Nyx announced. “That’s my sworn duty, lady.”

 “If any of you attempt to help him, I’ll shoot him in the head.”

 “No!  You can’t do this, Lady Saeva,” Soliamare wailed, “Please let my boy go, he’s never done anything to wrong you.”

 “He dies tonight, and you three will be arrested for treason.   How despicable, trying to overthrow the king. You all sicken me.” Saeva huffed.  

 Prompto’s legs finally gave out, and he fell to the floor with a thud.  The pain that shot through his limbs was excruciating, and he cried out. Looking over at his mother he wished he could hug her one last time.  However, it appeared that Saeva had them truly beat this time. Racking his brain, Prompto tried to think of something he could do.

 Maybe if he kicked Saeva, she would drop the gun, and Nyx could warp over and subdue her.  Prompto wasn’t sure he was able to move like that, as he could feel his body growing cold. He must have been losing a lot of blood for that to happen.  Biting back a sob, he turned away from his mother and looked into the gloom beyond Saeva.

 That’s when something caught his eye.  The dim shuddering movements of the others flashlights kept glinting off something small in the distance.  Straining his eyes, he tried to make out the shape. Whatever he’d seen was moving towards him. Blinking slowly, he worked to focus his eyes, but now all he could see was two small reflections.   His vision was blurring; this was epically bad. If he wanted to take down Saeva, he was losing time. He needed to act now or literally hold his peace forever.

>Next Chapter 9

[mllemaenad]

Cruelty vs Compassion: Cullen and Niall in Broken Circle

Cullen: Uldred tortured these mages, hoping to break their wills and turn them into abominations. We don’t know how many of them have turned.

Irving: What? Don’t be ridiculous!

Cullen: Of course he’ll say that! He might be a blood mage! Don’t you know what they did? 

Greagoir: I am the knight-commander here, not you.

I know much is made of the torture Cullen suffered in the Fereldan Circle. In Dragon Age 2 it is used to set him up as an extremist, and an ally of Meredith. In Dragon Age Inquisition it is used to excuse and moderate his actions in the previous game, and to justify his ongoing persecution of mage characters.

However, I think it’s worth looking at that scene in the original context, in Broken Circle. Here, it isn’t really about Cullen’s pain at all. Rather, it is about establishing him, as well as his fellow templars, as the bad guys of the quest.

Bioware and its grey morality is ... a thing. When it works, it offers layers and complexity to the world and its story. When it doesn’t, it can leave the player frustrated and angry with a story that’s asking them to sympathise with vicious slavers, nobles and religious extremists.

Origins’s take on grey morality is to ... more or less literally let the player get away with murder, if they want. One way or another, you’re going to end the Blight, and then your Warden will either be a dead hero, or the living Hero of Ferelden, who can damn near do no wrong. While in Inquisition, and even DA2, it can be difficult to remain friends with a companion if you take a hard line stance on something they hate, in Origins they rarely have strong reactions to quest-based decisions. And hell, I have the Feast Day pack, so Seanna could disagree with her companions all day and then feed them cake until they loved her again, if she wanted. Origins is big on options; low on consequences.

It does, however, tend to give you a broad sense of which would be the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ options in a given quest. Murdering slaves to increase your stats is evil. Saving children from demons is good. Some quests have multiple options, and I don’t necessarily agree with the framing (the morality of The Urn of Sacred Ashes is pretty fucked up, if you ask me), but you can generally get a sense of whether your Warden’s behaviour counts as moral.

Cullen’s torture in Broken Circle, and his reaction to it, exists in counterpoint to someone else’s torture, and his reaction to it. Cullen is a foil to a much more important character: the man with the plan, and possibly the true saviour of the Fereldan Circle – the mage Niall.

Niall: Who are you? Where did you come from? Are you a demon?

Cullen: This trick again? I know what you are. It won’t work. I will stay strong.

Niall: This place drains you of everything ... hope, feeling, life ...

Cullen: Enough visions. If anything in you is human ... kill me now and stop this game.

Unless you actively choose to go back downstairs after completing the Fade sequence (who hasn’t forgotten they still need to fight Shah Wyrd and made a last minute dash to the ground floor at least once?) you’ll likely have these encounters one after the other. Collecting the Litany of Adralla is the last step before you’re ready to take on Uldred.

It’s impossible to miss the parallels in these encounters: both men have been captured and tormented by demons; both are exhausted, despairing and at the end of their endurance; both have been confused enough by demons and Fade dreams to initially mistake the Warden for another spirit.

Niall: I gathered some of my fellows and we obtained the Litany from the stockroom. I thought if we disabled the others, we could throw everything we had at Uldred.

Niall: But I saw my friends fall, one by one, and now it’s my turn.

Cullen: You broke the others, but I will stay strong, for my sake ... for theirs ...

Both have lost the friends they came with, and have found themselves the last man standing against an enemy they have no hope of defeating. Both have, in short, had a really shit couple of days. They’re not equally bad, of course: Niall is being quite literally eaten alive by a sloth demon, and will not survive the day; while no doubt exhausted and distressed, Cullen is more-or-less fine. But let’s not quibble: they’re both in a bad way.

Niall: It is time for us both to be on our way. Remember the Litany of Adralla. The Circle is all that matters now.

Cullen: To ensure this horror is ended ... to guarantee that no abominations or blood mages live, you must kill everyone up there.

And, significantly, both characters advise you on how to complete the quest: Niall wants you to save anybody who’s still breathing; Cullen wants you to murder everyone. Niall’s plea, while impassioned, is also reasoned and well thought out – he came in with a plan, a good plan, and he only needs your help to complete it. He is profoundly dignified, even at the point of death, after days of wandering through the same hellscape you just golem-and-fiery-skeleton-ed your way though. He judges himself for failing to win a battle he should never have had to fight. Meanwhile, Cullen is aggressive and demanding. He rejects any offer of compassion – especially from Circle mage Wynne, despite the fact that she has come to save him – and he doesn’t really have a good argument as to why you need to kill everyone. It boils down to ‘kill them just in case’.

You don’t need to put a halo and a pair of horns on these two to guess who is sitting on which shoulder.

It’s worth noting, at this point, that the choice between Niall’s way and Cullen’s sits against the background of information you’ve gathered as you ascend the tower. Mage wardens will obviously have a little more context for the places and characters you meet, but you don’t need that. The story establishes it on its own: templars are full of shit; mages are pretty awesome.

Greagoir: We saw only demons, hunting templars and mages alike. I realised we could not defeat them and told my men to flee.

Greagoir: They took us by surprise. We were prepared for one or two abominations – not the horde that fell upon us.

Greagoir: No one could have survived those monstrous creatures. It is too painful to hope for survivors and find ... nothing.

When you first enter the Circle you encounter Knight-Commander Greagoir, who makes it abundantly clear that, though the templars are technically trained in dealing specifically with demons and blood magic, they were in no way prepared for any situation involving demons, plural. They cut and run immediately, leaving behind both the entire mage population and their own templar brethren. Greagoir is firmly of the opinion that the situation in the Fereldan Circle is not survivable. Everyone in there who is not a demon is dead.

Wynne: It’s you! No ... come no further. Grey Warden or no, I will strike you down where you stand!

As soon as you step through the doors, you find that he is thoroughly and disastrously wrong. You encounter an entire section that has been successfully cleared and secured. You watch a mage defeat a demon – entirely without your aid. You see that, not only are there survivors, some of the survivors are children.

Greagoir: This situation is dire. There is no alternative – everything in the tower must be destroyed so it can be made safe again.

Wynne: Yes. Even if we cannot eliminate all the demons and abominations, together, we could lead the survivors out.

Greagoir’s plan is simply to murder everyone: to charge in and stick a sword in anything that moves (children included) without any thought of strategy or reason. Wynne would like to be methodical: she would like to go from room to room, killing any hostiles she encounters, and send survivors down to safety.

We already have evidence that Greagoir's assessment of the situation is wildly inaccurate – the mages in front of us. Likewise, we have evidence that Wynne and her people can follow through on the plan: they’ve already cleared this area, and protected the children.

Wynne pairs with Greagoir and Niall pairs with Cullen. The debate you hear at the bottom of the tower is repeated at the top. In both instances, the mages present solid plans to save as many people as possible; in both instances, the templars advocate wanton destruction for no clear reason.

The templars’ argument is further undermined by evidence you find as you climb the tower:

Pile of Rubble in first area after ascending to this level: I have the utmost sympathy for what happened to your charge, but it is beyond the Cicle's ability to anticipate every obscure demise that an apprentice might face, especially involving methods outside the already extensive realm of magical study. We simply don't have the room for additional training facilities, and there are concerns about becoming too inclusive that I will not elaborate on. Your request is denied.

--First Enchanter Sinclair

Pile of Books in next room after escaping from the Fade: If space is your excuse, I will surrender my quarters. If it is about money, I will hire the appropriate people. I will not graduate another student ignorant of weapons that any ditch-digger can shove into his ribs. We teach them to append ridiculous glamours on parade arms, but they don't know simple steel. That is criminal.

--Enchanter Bergin

Pile of Books in room with Blood Mage and Charmed Templars: Notice herewith that the exercise area on the fourth floor shall serve as permanent berthing for the templar garrison stationed at the tower. Since facilities that accommodate their particular training requirements are already on hand, they will be assuming an even closer watch over Circle affairs. Enchanter Bergin's optional weapons training is canceled until further notice. Enchanter Bergin has additionally stepped down from teaching duties.

--First Enchanter Sinclair

– Extracurricular Studies

It’s established that the mages have been actively prevented from learning how to defend themselves. There used to be combat classes, taught by someone named Enchanter Bergin, but he was forced to stop and templars moved in to his space to “assum(e) an even closer watch over Circle affairs”.

Owain: Please refrain from going into the stockroom. It is a mess and I have not been able to get it into a state fit to be seen.

Tranquil: Thank you. That was an uncomfortable experience.

Nevertheless, there are several encounters with mages and tranquil in this quest who are fighting, hiding, resisting torture – still trying to find a way through this nightmare. There are survivors. Despite what the templars tell you, there are people you can save.

Desire demon: We are partners. I give him what no one else can, and through him, I experience what it is to be mortal.

Meanwhile, Cullen outright admits that the rest of his comrades broke (we have only his word that he didn’t, which strangely enough he expects us to accept, while not regarding Irving’s word as good enough), and there are no free templars in the entire quest. They are all possessed or charmed by demons.

Broken Circle is asking you a simple question. Which do you want? Warriors trained in dealing with the arcane and the monstrous who will absolutely scream and run away if the fight gets a little bit difficult? Or civilians with no combat training who have proved to be surprisingly resilient in a crisis?

Strategically, that might be a bit tough: what you actually want is competent professionals, and those are in short supply right now. Morally, it’s an easy call: the mages are heroes, survivors and innocents; the templars are murderous cowards.

Alistair: His hatred of mages is so intense ... the memory of his friends’ deaths is still fresh in his mind.

Wynne: He’s suffered pain and anguish like few have had to endure. That and his lust for revenge have confused the issue –

Cullen: Do not presume to judge me, mage! I am thinking clearly – for perhaps the first time in my life.

Cullen: As you can see, I am in no position to directly influence your actions, though I would love to deal with the mages myself.

To return to Cullen’s motivation – while no one is disputing that he’s had a really bad day (We’re not! We’re all being very understanding about his demands for mass murder!), the story doesn’t actually emphasise his distress very much. That is raised and dismissed. What is raised and accepted is that Cullen is angry. Cullen is vengeful. The mages (some of them, anyway) have risen up, and templar blood has been spilled. Now mage blood must be spilled in return. It doesn’t matter very much if the mages were involved in the uprising or not. He just wants to kill them in an act of revenge.

While we can understand Cullen’s grief over his friends at a personal level, it’s worth considering whether it’s reasonable. We have just established that the mages are imprisoned in the Circle tower, that they have been prevented from learning how to protect themselves, and that the templars have not only abandoned their charges to die, they are actively in favour of murdering them.

Do ... we care that much about their deaths? This looks like the only part of the uprising that went right.

This is like Nathaniel Howe’s distress over his father’s death. Of course you can sympathise: this was his dad. But at the same time, you expect him to look at the evidence, and come to understand that his father was not an innocent. Nathaniel does, because he is a fundamentally decent person. Cullen doesn’t.

Put another way: if you’ve played Fallout 4, you’ll note that the NPC raiders sometimes cry out in grief and distress when their comrades fall in battle. That’s a nice touch on the AI: the raiders are human beings, with human emotions, and the people you’re killing are their friends, their family. But when the battle is done and you walk into their camps ... and you observe the bloody remains of their victims scattered about for decoration ... maybe you don’t feel too bad about making them sad?

Same deal.

The original epilogue for this quest has this:

Templars

Once the tower was rebuilt, Knight-Commander Greagoir stepped down from his post and retired to a life of private contemplation as a brother in the Chantry. His health failed over time, and after refusing treatment, he perished in his sleep. Knight-Commander Cullen was said to be more strict and less trusting of the mages even than Greagoir was. He ruled the Circle with fear.

Mages

The young templar Cullen never quite recovered from his ordeal. After months of attempting to convince his superiors that the tower was still a danger, he finally snapped and killed three apprentices before being stopped by his fellow templars. Eventually, Cullen escaped from prison, a madman and a threat to any mage he encountered.

– Epilogue

Now, I realise the details of this have been pretty thoroughly retconned. There is absolutely no point in bringing this stuff up in relation to later games. However, it is worth looking at the epilogue in relation to the original quest. Regardless of the ending you choose, these epilogues tell you that the real threat was never the mages, or even the demons. The threat was the templars – the individual murderer, or the institution with a cruel man in charge.

The mages are not possessed (at least not in a harmful sense – Hi, Wynne!). They are not evil. But the templars always have power over them, and they can hurt them simply because they hate them. Cullen hates them, and was thwarted in his vengeance. So he hurts them.

Also, if you mash those two endings together and change the location you’ve pretty much got the plot of Dragon Age 2. So the details have changed, but the theme remains the same.

To end: Broken Circle fundamentally lets you choose. You can show compassion to the tortured mages, who asked for none of this, and who were never prepared for this violence. You can accept the aid of their heroes, enact a plan, and save the survivors. Or, you can murder them to satisfy the vengeance of their gaolers who resent having to take any risks on behalf of their charges.

Niall represents that compassion. Cullen represents that cruelty. It isn’t really about Cullen’s tragedy at all. If anything, it’s about Niall’s. And yet, two games on, he is effectively forgotten.

Niall: Dark times, greater acts of heroism, eh? You may be right.

A salute to Niall – who fought for compassion and saved the Circle (at least from my save game) when the templars would have destroyed it.

[scripttorture]

How much do you know about torture apologia at a government level? Like people who are actually paid to torture terrorist? I feel like that is a government-approved thing unless I’m mistaken. How can they not see they’re getting no information or just plain wrong information? And these ‘professionals’ are hiding their mental health problems? Or is the FBI torturing terrorists for information not as real as we are lead to believe? I’ve got a story idea about a victim mistakenly accused.

Thisis a pretty broad question. And it also sounds like it’s trying tostart a debate over getting writing advice. I’m going to give itthe benefit of the doubt and take it at face value as a writingquestion.

Ithink the short answer is essentially: read Rejali. He covers this inconsiderable depth, it’s the last third of his book. I’ll do mybest to summarise his points but I can’t produce 300+ pages ofevidence plus sources on a blog like this.

O’Maraalso talks about it a fair bit and Cobain’s entire book is aboutthe links between torture and the British government. Granted Cobaindoesn’t know a thing about torture but the pattern of legalwrangling and political apathy he records is incredibly valuable.

Thereare a couple of points I think are important going forward.

Thefirst is that although information is often the justification givenfor torture it’s rarely the point.

Somethingcan be justified, ignored or tolerated in someparts of a government and stringently punished in other areas.

Inlarge enough organisations leaders can be genuinely unaware what somemembers are doing.

Sogiven those points let’s start with the second question becauseit’s easiest.

Inmodern democracies people are notpaid to torture. That is not their official role. They are hired asguards, soldiers, teachers, care takers, nurses, doctors, police anda handful of other professions.

Thatis they are being paid for.And it’s not what they’re doing.

Whetherwhat they’re actually doing (torture) is condoned by anyone furtherup the chain of command then their immediate superiors is reallydependant on the circumstances. And very difficult to prove.

Governmentapproval of torture in modern states rarelylooks like top officials saying ‘We torture people!’

Here’sthe kind of phrasing it looks like instead:

‘These particular set of abuses are not torture because-’

‘This isn’t really painful’

False equivalence such as ‘Well I diet voluntarily so starving someone can’t be harmful’

Outright denial ‘Our troops could never do that!’

Ouright denial Part 2 ‘Well no one told us that was happening!’

Shifting the blame ‘Those people are lying to get into the country/get money/get attention etc-’

Shifting the blame Part 2 ‘Those people deserve it because they’re mentally ill/an ethnic minority/poor/violent/look like trouble etc-’

‘Obviously we don’t torture people but we should because it would work!’

‘We need strong measures in these desperate times!’

The sort of political/cultural outlook that links efficiency to ‘toughness’ and sees kindness and compromise as weak

Tortureapologia on the government level thrives on plausible deniability andredefining terms until they’re unrecognisable.

Forthe purposes of your story I think you’d probably be better offstepping back from the FBI.

WhatI mean by that is- if you’ve been looking for sources specificto the FBI that’s why you’re so confused. Those sources arepoorly collated, poorly studied and (personal opinion) deliberatelyconfusing.

Awellstudiedwell recorded example of torture as unofficial-government-policywould be the Franco-Algerian war. And this is alsobeset by confusion because a lotof the sources from the French side were written by torturers tojustify their actions after the event.

Onceagain I’d recommend reading Rejali and for greater context on whathe says Alleg’s TheQuestionand Fanon’s appendices to TheWretched of the Earth.

Yestorture continues because of governmental positions. But that doesn’tnecessarily mean outright orders to torture.

Itcan mean a lack of political will to eradicate torture, ie no one islooking for it. It can mean officials being aware of torture andchoosing to ignore it.

Myimpression is that apathyrather than malice at the top levels is the key. In the worst cases,yes there was outright malice from some individuals within a largergovernment. But it’s the apathy of the majority that allowed forabuse.

Governmentapproval doesn’tlook like a high level official ordering troops to torture.

Itlooks like the state Governor seeing that most of the police in theirstate probably use torture and sitting down to do this calculation:‘Am I more electable next year if I try to tackle this or if Iignore it?’

Italso looks like a Commissioner seeing that a person arrested for anemotive crime like terrorism has been complaining of ill-treatmentand doing this calculation: ‘Do I look better in the public eye ifI seem like I’m standing up for a person from a hated minority whois accused of doing something awful?’

WhatI’m driving at here is that- the reality is a lot more nebulousthen what you seem to be thinking of. Tacit acceptance, differentpriorities, cowardice- are all much more likely then the kind ofscenario where the elites explicitly order abuse.

Ithink I should move on to the third question which is just as tricky,before I get bogged down in labouring the point.

Howdo organisations not realise the information they get from torture iswrong?

Theshort answer is that by using torture they destroy the systems thatallow them to double check information. Because they can’t doublecheck anything they don’t realise that they’re working withincorrect information.

Iwilltell you how that happens but let’s have an analogy first to giveyou an idea of how skewed this makes the base information.

Imagineyou’re looking for information on the internet about something youhaven’t seen but you can’t use wikipedia, any popular searchengines or any official sites. You are going entirelyby searching tumblr. And you can only access the first piece ofinformation that comes up with any tag you search.

Picka popular fandom and imagine the kind of screwed up view you’d getof a character if you tried to find information about them like this.I am picturing the Flash fandom and Captain Cold and imagining justhow easy it would be to walk away with the impression that thecharacter was a main character not a bit part.

Nowlet me show you how including torture in an investigation is theequivalent of blocking yourself from everything but a hellsite with abroken search algorithm.

Sothe first thing to appreciate is that torture breakstrustwith the public. If torture is common place then no matter how‘secret’ an organisation tries to keep it the groups who areeffected find out.

Wenotice when people around us go missing. We pay attention when thereare stories of people ‘like us’ being hurt.

Andwe lose trust in authority. We stop reporting crimes. We stopvolunteering information.

Whichcuts an organisation off from the mainsource of accurate information they can get: voluntary reporting bymembers of the public.

Wedon’t report strange things our family or friends have done if wethink it might get them tortured. We don’t mention that we saw atall ginger man leave a back pack on that street near where the bombwent off.

Frompersonal experience- sometimes you stop reporting things even whenyou’re completely outside the context that taught you organisationscan’t be trusted. I’ve been assaulted in the UK and genuinely didnot consider calling the police. Because I learnt young that policeexist to ‘make people disappear’ and the habit is hard to break.

Thesecond point is that torture produces a lotof lies and human beings generally are terrible at telling whensomeone is lying.

Sotorturers don’t have access to the biggest source of accurateinformation but they dohear a lot of lies.

Thethird point is that when torture becomes part of an organisation thenpeople spend lesstimeconducting genuine investigations and fact checking.

Torturerstend to be pretty arrogant and they usually report looking down onpeople in their organisation who don’ttorture. Basically they seeing doing the hard work of a genuineinvestigation as boring and beneath them.

Thisworks togetherwith the first two factors to make it almost impossible to fact checkthings.

Imaginea group of 50 people tasked with investigating a particular incident.Five of them are torturers, so they’re not actually investigatinganything. This takes our number down to 45.

Thenwe remember that the torturers are generating information, even ifit’s false. Which the other members are investigating.

Let’sgo with low estimates. Let’s suggest each torturer has one victim aday (this is unlikely, real numbers are probably much higher) and outof those they get an average of two ‘possible leads’ each day(this would vary a lot, some victims would say nothing, some mightthrow out as many as twenty names in a day). Let’s also pretendthat a potential lead can be investigated by one person (this isinaccurate, I’d generally expect at least 2-3 people for each new‘lead’.).

We’vejust got rid of ten more people on the first day.

Let’spretend that it takes three days to investigate a lead. This is alsoa very low estimate, properly following up a lead can take weeks.

Withour low-estimate fictional organisation we’ve reduced the amount ofpeople doing useful work to 15 in the first three days.

Fifteenpeople trying to do the work of 50, while the torturers keepgenerating lies that are wasting the time of everyone else.

Thiscripples the organisation’s ability to work as all the time andenergy is going into investigating lies.

Andwhilethis is going on the torturers are still torturing. And they’reassumingthat their information is correct.

Sothey’re generating morelies that supportthe previous lies.

Letme give an example of what I mean.

Saya torturer takes in a random person. This first victim knows nothingabout the terrorist group but if they don’t give a name thenthey’re going to keep being tortured.

Sothey tell the torturer Wednesday Adams is definitely the leader ofthe terrorists in this area.

Nowa genuine investigator is wasting time looking for Wednesday Adams.May be they come back in a week and say that no such person exists.

Bythat point the torturer has been asking a lot of people aboutWednesday Adams. And some of them will have sworn they saw WednesdayAdams, that Wednesday Adams was behind that attack and that she haslinks to this other organisation and also that thing I saw on thenews once and- So on.

Itspirals.

Maybe it gets to the point where the torturer finally accepts there’sno ‘Wednesday Adams’ on the census. But by that point they’vestacked a lot of their personal reputation on the existence of thisshadowy leader.

Sorather than admit they’re just wrong, they assume ‘WednesdayAdams’ is a pseudonym and now they’re asking everyone what herreal name is. Now they have six different possible ‘realidentities’ for Wednesday Adams.

Andthis is how organisations can fail to notice that torture doesn’twork.

Becausethe scale of misinformation is just so huge. Because the amount oftime it takes to provethe information is wrong gives the torturers more time to embellishthe lie.

Becausesuperiors who are genuinely unaware torture is going on in theirorganisations might well look at this torturer, who keeps coming upwith new information, and these ten genuine investigators who comeback with nothing but dead ends, and decide that the tortureris the only one ‘getting things done’.

Itdoesn’t matter that they’re wrong. Because it takes months,years, to prove that they areand everyone in these organisations is under huge pressure to haveanswers now.

OKlet’s move on to question four; mental health problems intorturers.

Firstoff, I have yet to meet a mentally ill person who hasn’ttried to hide their mental health problems at some point. The worldis not very accepting of mental health problems whatever the context.The pressure to hide them is immense. In some places people are atreal risk of violence and abuse if their mental health problems arenoticed as mental health problems.

Inthat context- it isn’t surprising that torturers do try to hidetheir symptoms.

Thetoxic sub-culture torturers tend to produce is- It’s incrediblymacho. It tends to rely on ideas about how the torturers are ‘toughand strong’. It equates violence and lack of mercy with strength.

Itviews mental illness as weak.

Andbecause the people within these groups are violent, because they havea tendency to turn on each other, there’s a huge pressure to hidemental health problems. That’s way before you bring the widerorganisation into the picture.

Manyof the organisations torturers are typically part of actively try toscreen out mentally ill people. Being obviously mentally ill can meanlosing the job.

SoI don’tthink it’s particularly unusual that torturers try to hide mentalhealth problems.

Howsuccessfulthey are at hiding them is a different question and it’s difficultto answer.

Becausea lot of people are moved or dismissed on mental health grounds andthis does notmean they were involved in anything abusive.

Tortureis difficult to prove. Most torturers are not charged. Their crimesare not recorded as part of their record. They are not hired astorturers.

Accordingto the WHO around 10% of the global population has a mental health problem.

Howdo you tell the difference between the people who are just mentallyill, the people who developed mental illnesses because of ‘ordinary’job stress and the people who developed mental illnesses because theyabused others?

Withoutaccurate, fair recording of torture accusations itis impossible to tell.

Personally?I think it’s highly likely that a lot of torturers can’t hidetheir mental health problems well. That they reach a point and have abreakdown on the job. Then they lose their job.

Butall of that can happen with no record of abuse.

Weneed more research on torturers. Desperately.

Andanswering these questions about the circumstances around how peoplestop is incredibly important. It can help us spot them, it can helpus spot people who might be targeted for recruitment by torturers. Itcan help us stop torture.

Andright now there are frustratingly few answers.

Whichleaves the final question- Are the FBI torturers?

Honestly-I have no idea. I am not particularly interested in America orAmerican history. I am not American. I do not go out of my way toread things about the FBI and could tell you very little about whatthey do.

WhatI can tell you is that organisations likethe FBI have usually tortured at some point in their history. Thatglobally the United States has developed a reputation for doublestandards.

ButI can not make a definitive statement on a group I know next tonothing about.

Inorganisations likethe FBI iftorture is going on it’s often not in the entire organisation. Itis often particular branches, particular units, particular areasrather than the whole country-wide organisation.

It’seasy to make broad statements like ‘the Chicago police torturedpeople in 70s’. And that’s not untrue.

Butif we’re being specificit would be more accurate to say ‘there was a cell of torturersoperating within the Chicago police force in the 70s and the widergroup failed to stop them.’

Wasthe entire Chicago police force responsible for the abuses? I wouldsay yesbecause it was literally their job to stop these abuses and they didnot. However they were notall torturers. They were not all actively engaged in torture and Ithink it’s extremely likely that many people at the time simplydidn’t realise what was going on.

Incompetence,not necessarily active abuse.

I’vewritten an awful lot. It should be a start at answering some of yourquestions. But all of these questions are complex and difficult.

Idon’t think, in this case, you can take my answer as a substitutefor wider reading.

Onceagain, Rejali.O’Maraas well.

Allegfor the survivor’s perspective on what both describe.

Cobain,to be taken with a pinch of salt and read afterRejali because Cobain is not a scientist and falls for apologia quitea lot.

You’vechosen to tackle a story that’s going to be a lot of work. Try notto be discouraged by that.

Theseare important stories. And they deserve to be told properly.

Ihope that helps. :)

Edited for typos

Edit 2: @dude1818 That is really not funny and I don’t appreciate you trying to turn discussion of a serious crime into a joke. 

I’m aware of the formatting problem and I’ve been trying to fix it for some time. I’m going to try another fix this week but I can’t actually test whether any of my attempts work because I don’t have a mobile phone. 

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[inbonobo]

this person is #fun, @JordanBPeterson | ContraPoints #philosophy #debating #postmodernism #skepticism

the other criticism I got from the AMA:

besttrousers 856 points 4 hours ago*

Professor Peterson,

Thanks for joining us today!

I’m a behavioral economist who works on labor issues, and I’ve been reading some of your work, such as the Self-Authoring Suite, with interest. It’s helping me think about potential interventions to help unemployed people rejoin the labor force. Thanks for putting it out there!

However, I’ve also been very frustrated to hear some of the claims you’ve made about economics, many of which been inaccurate.

It’s important to be precise in your speech, so I’ll give you two examples, before my question (I apologize for the length, but I thought it was important to provide the original quotes, and a brief summary of why they were incorrect):

Example 1

Here’s an excerpt from your recent interview with Cathy Newman:

Newman: Okay. Sure. But I want to put to you that here in the UK, for example, let’s take that as an example. The gender pay gap stands at just over 9%. You’ve got women at the BBC recently saying that the broadcaster is illegally paying them less than men to do the same job. You’ve got only seven women running the top FTSE 100 companies!

Peterson: Yeah.

Newman: So it seems to a lot of women, that they are still being “dominated and excluded”, to quote your words back to you.

Peterson: It does seem that way, but multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn’t exist.

Newman: But that is not true, is it? I mean, that nine percent pay gap! That’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women!

Peterson: Yeah, but there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but it’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. Like you say, well women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay, well then we break it down by age, we break it down by occupation, we break it down by interest, we break it down by personality.

Your claim that “multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn’t exist.” Is incorrect. For an overview of research in this area, you can see Blau and Kahn’s 2017 review of the literature.

I suspect that you are looking at analyses that include occupational controls (based on what you said in the interview, and tweets like this one).

However, using occupational controls in this way is actually leads to a flawed analysis, as women choose what occupation to pursue. If women are being discriminated against in a given field, you would expect them to be less likely to pursue a career in that field. Including occupational controls will therefor lead to a biased estimate. It’s what statisticians call “collider bias”.

(For details, see the discussion of this issue on page 74 of Causal Inference, or the /r/economics FAQ)

Example 2

In one of your lectures, you said the following:

Because women have access to the birth control pill now and can compete in the same domains as men roughly speaking there is a real practical problem here. It's partly an economic problem now because when I was roughly your age, it was still possible for a one-income family to exist. Well you know that wages have been flat except in the upper 1% since 1973. Why? Well, it's easy. What happens when you double the labor force? What happens? You halve the value of the labor. So now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before. So we went from a situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited to where there they were relatively unlimited and there were two incomes (and so women could work) to a situation where women have to work and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise.

There’s a lot that incorrect here – wages have not been stagnant since 1973 (I suspect you are thinking of household income, which has been more-or-less constant due to compositional changes due to later marriages), doubling the labor force would not halve the value of labor (the economy is not a fixed pie, more workers in the labor force grow the economy).

Most importantly, the premise is wrong. It’s not the case that it used to be possible for households to have one earner, and now it is not. Instead, what happened was we saw dramatic increases in the effectiveness of “household production” (think: laundry machines, clothes that need less frequent repair, microwave dinners). In 1965, the average women spent 32 hours/week on housework, and 10 hours a week on childcare – a full time job!

We aren’t poorer than we used to be, or working more. Instead, we’ve seen people effectively move from one industry (domestic labor) to another (firm labor).

Question

I know you’ve found it frustrating when your research has been misrepresented in the media, so I’m sure you can understanding the frustrations economists have when reading or listening to you misrepresent economics. These are common mistakes (we catalog them all the time over at /r/badeconomics) but also would be pretty easy to correct by talking to an economist, or reading the relevant literature. It's also important not to make such mistakes. Many of your fans have read these and now incorrectly believe that their wages are lower because of women entering the workforce.

What is the mechanism you have been using to check the accuracy of the claims you make about economics – or other fields you are not an expert in? What can we economists (or other experts) do to help you better understand these fields?

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[–]decimated_napkin 179 points 3 hours ago

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I feel like not controlling for occupation when assessing pay differences is more disingenuous than controlling for it. Yes, it's possible that women are choosing to not go into certain fields due to prejudice, but it's also possible that they simply don't like those fields for other reasons. Who are we to say? Since we don't know which it is, it would make sense to me to exclude that division from consideration and go with the method that would generally make the most sense, which in this case would be controlling for occupation.

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[–]wumbotarian 17 points 3 hours ago

I'll note this is an issue for any wage regression. We know education impacts your wage. but how much education you got is a choice. We need to control for the control, which is hard to do!

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[–]wumbotarian 94 points 3 hours ago

When doing a regression, we examine the effects of an independent variable (controls or "right hand side" variables) on dependent variables ("left hand side" variables; in this case, wages).

It is very important that the independent variables are indeed independent. They're not caused by anything else. They're "exogenous". If an independent variable is itself dependent (called "endogenous"), we need to control for that dependent nature with its own independent variables. Otherwise we get fundamentally incorrect results.

Occupational choice is not independent (no choice variable is independent). We can see that the choice of a job would be dependent on preferences for, say, job time flexibility. Or the pay someone gets. If pay is unequal between men and women in a given industry, women will choose based on that pay gap.

Therefore, it is not disingenuous to leave out occupational choice (or other endogenous right hand side variables). You simply cannot do any accurate analysis with dependent right hand side variables. It's not slight of hand done by feminists or anything. It's akin to pointing out that 2 + 2 != 5.

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[–]kmmeerts 7 points 2 hours ago

It's still disingenuous to lump in occupational choice with all the other uncontrolled variables, and to ascribe it to discrimination. The right thing to do would be to control for occupational choice, and to find the effect size of it, just like for every other variable. Only then can you start making hypotheses and finding narratives.

I don't doubt occupational choice is influenced by discrimination, but we have the statistical tools to study it, there is no need to keep it uncontrolled.

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[–]wumbotarian 4 points an hour ago

It's still disingenuous to lump in occupational choice with all the other uncontrolled variables, and to ascribe it to discrimination.

So we have experimental evidence that discrimination exists. While this is not indicative of the wage gap existing due to discrimination, it should update your priors that discrimination is an issue in hiring.

The right thing to do would be to control for occupational choice, and to find the effect size of it, just like for every other variable.

Okay, but as I explained you can't "control for occupational choice". It's a dependent variable. You'd need an instrumental variable that itself is independent.

I don't doubt occupational choice is influenced by discrimination, but we have the statistical tools to study it, there is no need to keep it uncontrolled.

We have the tools but not the variables/data! That's the point.

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[–]Stagnolia 11 points 2 hours ago

This is so awesome, thank you so much for contributing this. I am a STEM student and I love love love science but so far in all of my classes we’ve never dived into the complexity of controlling for dependent variables like this. Your comment was super informative and I’m going to save it to have on hand!

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[–]SuperSharpShot2247 12 points 2 hours ago

Economics doesn't have the benefit of the perfectly controlled experiments hard science does. While there are economic experiments, they're limited to testing economic theory and behavioral trends. For things like gender wage gap, the effect of legalizing marijuana, the effect of education on income, etc, we need highly sophisticated statistical tools to block out the "noise".

This is probably why your STEM classes haven't gotten into this level of control! I'm an undergraduate in Economics and typically we don't even learn the Instrumental Variables (IV) method (I only know it from a special class)!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT INVESTOR

If anywhere should be quiet, that should. By the nineteenth century that had changed. But the techniques for building integrated circuits, and techniques for building a new type of venture firm? They just arrived back from NYC, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior. If the startup can't raise the rest, the lead is out too.1 The other big force leading people astray is money. Now I would guess that practically every Stanford or Berkeley undergrad who knows how to program has at least considered the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. Google, companies in Silicon Valley than Boston, then they're better off in Silicon Valley in the 1960s.2 And this is not a policy question.

So when you get a rejection, use the data that's in it, and the granary the wealth that each family created. The structure of their business means a partner does at most 2 new investments a year, the total cost in stock of a new hire's salary and overhead into stock you should multiply the annual rate by about 1. And VCs who try to compete with angels by doing more, smaller deals will probably find they have to work actively to prevent your company growing into a weed tree, dependent on this source of easy but low-margin money.3 To survive it you need a set of techniques mostly orthogonal to those used in physically getting up and down mountains. Idealistic undergraduates find their unconsciously preserved child's model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. And since I know from my own experience that the rule against buying stock from founders is a stupid one, this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more than others.4 But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them.5

They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of funding is an obsolete one left over from the days when I might as well have sat in front of his client, that he'd screwed up, he instead had to insist on retaining all the draconian terms in it, and not simply write that stocks were up or down, reporter looks for good or bad news there was that day? For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka just in case.6 When you do negotiate with VCs, remember that they've done this a lot more on its design. But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as much.7 We spent three months building a version 1, which we then presented to investors, constantly look for signs of where you stand. For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen. That's why our motto is Make something people want. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world in 587, the Chinese system was very enlightened. It shows no sign of slowing. In a traditional series A round for, say, corporate law, or medicine.8

A big-name firms, but they aren't one another's main competitor. But some spectacular boundary cases like Einstein in the patent office proved they weren't identical. I'm less American than I seem. Deadlock wasn't the only disadvantage of letting a lead investor manage an angel round before going to VCs. You turn the fan back on, and the terms end up being whatever the lawyer considers vanilla. But there is another set of customs for being ingratiating in print is that most essays are written to persuade.9 Why risk it? It will be very valuable to understand precisely which ideas to keep and which can now be reduced to a formula. And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're starting something new, that requires complete quiet. In a typical VC funding deal, the capitalization table looks like this: Starting a startup gives you more freedom and the opportunity to make a small number of expensive ones.10 If an investor gives you specific reasons for not investing, look at your startup and ask if they're right.

There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a few thousand are startups. And so they can try him out—and then a month later as employee #1. It costs you a little more information, and that was called work; the rest of the world in 587, the Chinese system was very enlightened. Make sure if you take the latter route that the lawyer is representing you rather than merely advising you, or his only duty is to the advantage of investors, who have in the past.11 Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun. The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is probably ignorance. And the reason it's inaccurate is that, paradoxically, funding very early stage startups is not mainly about funding.12 Captains of industry issued orders to armies of workers, and everyone knew what they were supposed to do.

Notes

We wasted little time on, cook up a take out your anti-dilution provisions, even if we think we're so useless that in New York, people who said he'd met with a lawsuit just as big a cause as it sounds.

The Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2006. It's hard to say now. Many people feel confused and depressed in their graves at that. So if anything Boston is falling further and further behind.

Predecessors like understanding seem to have fun in college is much into gaming. The empirical evidence suggests that if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices. That will in many cases be an inverse correlation between the two elsewhere, but I think this is also the perfect point to spread from.

In this context, issues basically means things we're going to have been five years ago.

In high school is rounding error compared to what used to reply that they discovered in the back of your last round of funding rounds are at some of those things that's not true. In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by Mitch Kapor, is that they can grow the acquisition offers are driven only by money. 17 pilot in World War II had become so embedded that they cared about doing search well at a particular valuation, that good art is a bit misleading to treat macros as a kid.

This law does not appear to be extra skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. Siegel points out that successful startups get started in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the network level, because Julian got 10% of the things we focus on their ability but women based on respect for their judgement. An investor who says he's interested in each type of mail, I was just having lunch.

For founders who are weak in other ways.

But so many of which he can be fooled by grammar.

A rounds from top VC funds whether it was briefly in Britain in the world, and a back-office manager written mostly in good ways. Back when students focused mainly on getting a job after college, they sometimes describe it as a predictor.

Parker, William R. Copyright owners tend to make that their system can't be buying users for more than most people don't dislike him for a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users comes from ads on other investors doing so much control, and for recent art, they mean. One new thing the company goes public. It should be asking will you build this?

People tell the craziest lies about me. 6 billion for the next uptick after that, go ahead. At one point a competitor will deliberately threaten you with a Web browser that you can do is adjust the weights till the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.

2%. And when they were forced to stop, but unfortunately not true! Few can have a big VC firm wants to program a Turing machine. I wrote the first million is worth more, and partly because you need to be, and when given the Earldom of Rutland.

Thanks to Maria Daniels, Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Sarah Harlin, Savraj Singh, and Geoff Ralston for inviting me to speak.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Apollo Doth Protest Too Much: Our Leon Black-Jeff Epstein Post Elicits Intervention by Apollo’s Flack

Digital Elixir Apollo Doth Protest Too Much: Our Leon Black-Jeff Epstein Post Elicits Intervention by Apollo’s Flack

Many readers have been following with prurient interest the saga of serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein, and in particular media speculation connected to the Very Important People whose names and personal contacts appear in Epstein’s “Little Black Book,” seized by the FBI and currently publicly archived here, courtesy Jon Cook of Gawker. One listing that got a lot of attention was that of billionaire Leon Black, founder of private equity heavyweight Apollo.

After the black book became public, the press dug deeper into the long-standing relationship between Black and Epstein, with the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and more recently, the New York Times weighing in.

In a sign that Apollo is in the public relations version of Defcon 1 over l’affaire Epstein, we got a call and an e-mail from Apollo’s hired mouthpiece, insinuating that we really should have talked to them. Had the PR professional bothered even a cursory look into our work on Apollo or private equity generally, he might have realized that contacting us could be counterproductive, particularly since no financial firm has ever deigned to muscle take official interest in this humble website.1

If you’re up to speed on Leon Black and Epstein, you can skip over the next section.

The Plot Thus Far

It wasn’t just that Black’s name appeared in Epstein’s famed black book. Since 1997, Epstein served as an “original trustee” of the Leon Black Family Foundation. Black has disavowed state filings that listed Epstein as on the board through 2012, years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to solicitation of prostitution. Black claims the state filings were inaccurate and said he asked Epstein to resign in 2007.

This relationship alone is enough to raise eyebrows. Men at Black’s level are hyper-attentive to their personal wealth. The notion Leon Black, who has access to the best tax experts in the world, and himself is a renowned financier, would hire someone with no credentials in tax or accounting to advise on his affairs would seem nonsensical had it not actually happened.

More bad news dripped out. The Wall Street Journal published a long expose, Jeffrey Epstein Burrowed Into the Lives of the Rich and Made a Fortune, Bloomberg reported Jeffrey Epstein Had a Door Into Apollo: His Deep Ties With Leon Black, with insider accounts of how Epstein was permitted to approach Apollo principals to pitch his “tax strategies”. An individual mentioned as hosting one meeting disputed that it had occurred. Black a denial that didn’t address a key Bloomberg claim: that Black had allowed Epstein to solicit senior executives at Apollo. Black merely said that Epstein had never done business with Apollo.2

Black first sent an e-mail to employees, then wrote his investors, then read the employee e-mail as part of Apollo’s quarterly conference call. The investor presentation failed to address a New York Times account that a Black-controlled entity had given $10 million to an Epstein charity in 2015.

In addition to covering this ground in a post last week, we also described how CalPERS has featured in this story:, making pious shows of discomfort and earnestly seeking an explanation. We reminded readers that Apollo was central to CalPERS’ decline, by virtue of Apollo’s and four other investment firms with ties to Apollo’s mind-bogglingly large “pay to play” fees by CalPERS that funded bribes to CalPERS’ CEO, eventually landing him in Federal prison. Using some conservative assumptions, it also looks as if CalPERS was had by Apollo in the deal Apollo proposed to kiss and make up. We’d anticipated that outcome when we wrote about the CalPERS pay to play scandal in 2014.

The Flack Call and E-Mail

We received this voicemail at 10:02 EDT when our post had gone live 4:20 AM:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/voice-message.wav

And this e-mail immediately thereafter:

Hello Mr. Webber,

I left a voice mail message for you at Aurora introducing myself as well. I am the spokesperson for Apollo Global Management here in New York. Always please feel free to call us for fair comment prior to publication. We are always available to talk on a not-for-attribution basis to go over facts for accuracy and context and in some cases offer an on-the-record comment in the face of criticism.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Best, Charles.

Charles V. Zehren | Executive Vice President RUBENSTEIN

This is amusing on so many levels I don’t know where to begin. Zehren makes no formal objection to what’s in our post, but he is trying to sell the idea that anyone who writes about Apollo ought to ring in….to get not-on-the-record comments. When we seek comments on posts with original reporting, we operate only on an on the record basis.

In this case, all of the facts in our piece were previously reported and not corrected or retracted, so there were no “facts to go over”. Since when do op-ed writers, which is the category in which this post would have fallen in a newspaper, check in with the subjects of their op-eds?

But clearly, Zehren lives in a world populated by access and trade journalists who regularly write up big company press releases and planted stories. Those writers are over there.

The “Mr. Webber” is very inattentive. Zehren had just called and left a voicemail for one “Susan Webber,” and he started his message with “Mrs.” Does he think women don’t write about finance, and that Susan Webber is the wife or sister of the moving force behind the blog, who obviously must be male?

Even though Zehren did manage to track down the Aurora Advisors phone number, presumably from our antique website (which I keep up only for its archive of articles in the 1990s and early-mid 2000s), he didn’t look at the bios, where the only Webber is female.

But the really rich part is the notion that Apollo is entitled to a “fair comment”. Did Apollo have any concern for fairness when it bankrupted companies like Caesars, Hexion, and Claire’s, resulting in job and pension losses, including lawsuits accusing Apollo of acting in bad faith, as with CEVA Logistics? How fair was Apollo when it failed to inform investors about termination of monitoring fees and had to cough up a record $52.8 million in SEC fines and disgorgements? Even the normally finance-friendly Matt Levine of Bloomberg fame made clear that monitoring and other portfolio company fees are an exercise in extraction (emphasis his):

The basic idea is that private-equity firms charge their portfolio companies a “monitoring fee” for … monitoring them? It seems silly to insist on a reason. They charge the monitoring fee to get more money. They could charge portfolio companies a Fee For Being Nice Guys, and the portfolio companies would cheerfully pay up….They can send a portfolio company a bill, and then send themselves back some money.

We could go on, but you get the picture. Apollo for once is faced with a problem it can’t solve by using its ginormous checkbook, so it falls back on spurious requests for fairness. Help me.

Moreover, as established readers know, we’ve been writing about private equity regularly and critically since 2013. We’ve published 25 limited partnership agreements, documents the industry implausibly insists are trade secrets in their entirely, including one for a recent Apollo flagship fund, Apollo Investment Fund VIII, L.P., aka Apollo VIII. We’ve had six other posts with “Apollo” in the headline, and also discussed Apollo’s conduct at length in the aforementioned 2014 post on the CalPERS pay to play scandal.

So why the interest now, particularly since Google algo changes have downgraded articles by small sites like our, no matter how on point they are relative to search terms? It’s pretty clear from Mr. Zehren’s dilatory contact that his mission from Apollo entails trying to push the Apollo party line, even to people who a cursory inspection of their record would show they’d be unreceptive and perhaps even annoyed at the re-education attempt.

Maybe Apollo is concerned that Naked Capitalism is about to move up in the Google search criteria.

____

1 There is one exception that proves the rule. We got a call from an in-house lawyer at Oak Hill Capital Partners asking us to take their limited partnership agreement down. It was a very short call. The lawyer’s voice had the tired sound of knowing she’d been asked to do something that wasn’t going to work. My recollection is she tried arguing that the limited partnership agreement was confidential. I said, “Are you kidding? It’s been up for eighteen months.” I said I didn’t engage with lawyers on the phone, that she needed to deal with me in writing and the limited partnership agreements were staying up. I never heard anything more.

2 The Wall Street Journal makes the notion that Black would use Epstein seem not crazy:

Around 1995, Mr. Epstein brought his staff to meet with Apollo Global Management LLC, a private-equity firm run by Leon Black, to pitch his company as an ideal service for Apollo’s wealthy clients, including tax strategy. “He found every single provision that could justifiably be utilized, and he worked with some very smart tax lawyers,” said a person who attended the meeting.

But even then Black would have had access to top tax attorneys; clever tax structuring is a big part of private equity’s returns. So why would he need to pay a markup to get them through Epstein?

The Bloomberg story depicts Apollo’s executives reacting as you’d expect:

Almost a decade after Jeffrey Epstein was first accused of preying on young women, he still had access to the inner sanctum of Apollo Global Management.

Leon Black, Apollo’s billionaire chairman, met with the financier from time to time at the company’s New York offices, and he allowed Epstein to pitch personal tax strategies to the firm’s executives, according to people familiar with the matter.

The executives were puzzled. Why invite Epstein, a registered sex offender since 2009, into one of Wall Street’s most powerful private equity firms? What services could he possibly provide?

Apollo Doth Protest Too Much: Our Leon Black-Jeff Epstein Post Elicits Intervention by Apollo’s Flack

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[aaronheatonwords]

Tacoma

It's difficult to separate a work from its creators, despite the intention of the work itself. While Tacoma isn't a direct sequel to Gone Home, Fullbright's previous release and the breakthrough into the mainstream that these character-oriented experiences have become, it certainly follows in the footsteps of the groundwork that Gone Home has laid in its wake. Where many games would opt for a setting that feels believable enough to be a real place but “gamey” enough to occupy and traverse, Tacoma and other games in this genre trade in a deliberately slow, measured pacing that takes pride in the realism of their settings. Where many games reference and idealize settings for the effect of creating and enjoyable level, Walking Simulators (as much as I hate that term, it isn't entirely inaccurate at this point) trade in environments that are realistic to truly inhabit.

In that regard, Tacoma is a resounding success. By daring to break away from the willfully indulgent nostalgia that many of these games have occupied, whether it's through a time period or a well-established setting like a national forest or a haunted house, Tacoma steps outside of those boundaries in a way that forces the creative boundaries outward. Where the player could before assume the general state of the world, Tacoma raises the challenge of creating an entirely new reality to inhabit, but one that has the same believability as an abandoned mid-90's mansion. There is a tactile, realistic feel to picking up and examining recorded VHS tapes of the X-Files that would be challenging to recreate in a setting that almost literally does not exist, but Tacoma grapples with that problem admirably.

The space station Tacoma, which operates as a glorified shipping and receiving factory, is an incredibly essential character in the game. As it isn't a simple real-world location gone creepy, it requires as much setup as the actual human characters. The player, a third-party contractor named Amy hired to board and investigate the Tacoma, is free to walk and poke around Tacoma as they gain access to new areas. Though only being a setting, it serves as a microcosm of the outside world; before you can begin your adventure proper, you're required to grab a special pair of AR augmentations and sign off on a user agreement which sounds actually pretty scary when you read it closely, though not unlike many of the EULAs we blindly agree to nowadays anyway (use of image in perpetuity across the universe? Really?). From there, the reality of the fiction that Tacoma places itself in becomes horribly real. There is a pervading sense of corporate ownership that runs through the game, hinting at the obsoletion of currency in favour of a system called “Loyalty,” which can be traded between various companies for less than desirable rates that aren't entirely clear to the person making the decision to convert. There are fictional holidays about the advancements (or stagnation, depending on how you view it) of the workforce, which the contractors of space stations take part in. Whether they actually enjoy the holiday or even understand it is played with, and many simply use it as a free day off. Fictional (and real) corporations are named and given histories, and even the technology that powers the station is given realistic uses and limits (try turning a stove or a treadmill on, go for it).

For all of that work, it would have been unfortunate for Tacoma to drop the ball on the human characters which act as the core of the experience. The most realistic space station in the world would be boring to explore if the humanity in the station didn't hold up its end of the bargain. (Mostly) Fortunately, Tacoma delivers the good on its human crew members. Despite being only a couple of hours long, Tacoma boasts six crew members to experience during the journey, and each with their own ambitions, problems, goals, and worries. The amount of characters who seem actually real seems like an odd thing to praise, but in the context of a short video game, it's not something that's seen very often. Fullbright explored plenty of options to bring these characters to life and they're all handled well.

One of the chief ways to explore and learn the characters are the AR recordings, which play out as coloured silhouettes that roam about the environment, almost like a stage play. As you watch these play back, you're presented with a timeline that informs you of how far along in a recording you are, which events of interest are happening, and the ability to scrub through the recording as you see fit. What first seems like a very basic twist on the audio log formula (the ability to manually track your position in a recording) quickly becomes much more complicated, as characters congregate and branch out during the recording. Being a real-time recording of the events of the station in a given area, the recording is not simply of a single character but of whoever was present in the zone during that recording. This leads to many instances of pausing and forwarding tracks to keep up with moving characters, navigating the environment to figure out who was standing where and when, and how to access the AR terminals the game presents.

Right, so another way the game presents characters is through a very indirect method, which is the AR terminals that everyone on board (including Amy herself) has access to. They open in front of characters like a digital book, and have area for email, web browsing, video calls and other computer-like interactions. Any time that a character is using his or her AR terminal during a recording, the player is free to poke around in it as well, though some interactions are locked off as corrupted or otherwise inaccessible. On top of the mostly passive AR recordings and the usual ability to poke and prod and twist and turn every item in the environment, the AR terminals act as a welcome addition to the usual formula of these games and give much needed context to certain characters. Like any media, sometimes there were characters who seemed to be acting entirely irrationally only for me to find well-earned justification in their email log or through a conversation with their partner or child. Adding a layer of context that isn't outright shown is a realistic way to add layers to characters. After all, how many times have you thought someone to be acting irrationally in real life, only to find out later that they were going through trauma or issues in their lives? The AR terminals are a layer of reality, despite being a digital item.

The conventions that Tacoma chooses to engage with and subvert do define a significant portion of my opinion of the game. Being the next entry in the genre from the creators who worked to popularize it, there's a certain notion of conventions being challenged and problems being addressed. With the popularity and advent of this genre, from Firewatch to SOMA to Layers of Fear, comes an expectation of improvement and expansion. Tacoma puts forth ideas that don't always pan out, though a lot of that does come down to individual opinion.

The prevalence of audio logs in the game seems like a very conscious design decision, rather than a creative freedom like Gone Home. Telling a story which has already happened is fascinating in its own right, not entirely disassociated from the strange voyeuristic tendencies that people might have, but because it allows a freedom to explore and inhabit an environment that was very lovingly crafted. While a game like Bioshock (which members of Fullbright have worked on) leans on tension to keep the player moving, games like Gone Home are fully propped up by their narratives and environments. In this case, Tacoma is full of very compelling people who participate in an event which seems equal parts terrifying and thrilling, guided by an AI whose intentions are not entirely clear (as is the case with so many AIs in fiction). Despite the joy of picking through drawers and bookstacks on the space station, I found myself something wishing that I could have inhabited a character who lived through the events of the space station. It speaks to the strength of the dual narrative style that Gone Home and Tacoma utilise that I want to experience both stories, though whether or not your story is the more interesting one is entirely a matter of personal opinion.

Similarly, the world around the Tacoma is so well-realised, even through snippets of emails and advertisements and AR terminals, that there's a part of me which wants to dive deeply into the universe outside of the airlock and find out who the tertiary characters and big players in the ecosystem are. Subtle hints like the faded American flag in a certain character's office or the constant reference to a competing company within the Tacoma stoke the fires of my interests so much that being a passive observer feels like a step back from what could have been. The art design is immaculate and the trail of breadcrumbs left for the player to follow through the station paint such a vivid world that I wish I could have either taken a step down, into the events of the Tacoma itself, or a step up, into a more wide-reaching political thriller.

Despite this, Tacoma succeeds whole-heartedly at what it does. It exposes an extremely believable world in microcosm, one that seems to respect all current avenues of political and social reality while presenting a very real picture of where it might go, and fills that opening with characters who feel motivated and clearly grounded without degenerating into two-dimensional caricatures of what a person in space might look or act like. As a follow-up to Gone Home, it smartly engages and subverts what it needs to by twisting the environmental storytelling model into an interactive and immersive space while ditching what isn't required, which is a faithful recreation of a time that's already passed us by. That's not to say that it diminishes what Gone Home accomplished, but it stands to prove what can be done when you look at a genre as a feeling and an idea, instead of a list of bullet points that need to be hit. I come away from Tacoma disappointed that its world isn't more immediately accessible, but very happy with the story it tells within the confines of its universe.

[homoliberation]

Just an Advertiser or a Founder?

Adding Insult to Injury: A Statement by Jearld Moldenhauer on the Founding of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), Canada’s First Gay Student Organization

🔥 Jearld Moldenhauer.com 🔥

Introduction 

There may be few people out there seriously interested in knowing how the Toronto modern gay movement came into being. But it is a story worth being told - accurately - and, as the founder of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), I am particularly well informed to do so. 

If a Torontonian, or any other Canadian for that matter, had been able to establish the details of a factual and politically objective history, at some point during the last 41 years since the founding of the UTHA (in 1970), there would be no need for me to write this. But alas, this has not happened. 

Large urban cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia have all had hefty tomes about their local gay history published over the past several years. For example, San Francisco has had many books and films centered on the life and death of Harvey Milk. It also has a Gay Museum. Even Buffalo has a book chronicling its lesbian history. There are now also several volumes exploring the gay history of Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Australia. I start by mentioning these efforts only to put into perspective the shortfall in documentation about the gay movement in Toronto and in Canada generally. 

This lack of any seriously researched information on the earliest post-Stonewall event in modern gay Canadian history made it necessary for the Ontario Heritage Trust (OHT) to conduct its own research into the founding of the UTHA. Amanda Robinson, a history graduate student at York University, was hired by the OHT to carry this out. However, by the time the U of T and the Ontario Heritage Trust had finally decided on a plaque as a way of commemorating the founding of the UTHA, there had already been a number of misleading pieces of journalism written that attempted to tell the same story. The latest of these appeared in the University of Toronto Alumnae Magazine in June, 2009. 

On a more positive note, Canada has at least three decent gay and lesbian archival projects of which I am aware. An example of one, online, is Rick Bébout's website, which is still the only serious attempt to capture Toronto's gay history, starting in 1970.

In addition, during the past year (2011) or so, a few university students have published research papers on some of the historical aspects of The Body Politic. 

(Personally, I have long lamented the apparent disinterest in a broad-based oral history project which recorded the lives and social dynamic of the homosexual working class, the class which seemed to dominate the Toronto scene when I first settled here.)

My Own Liberation 

The story of my own gay activism began at Cornell University in 1967. I had come out in my second year in 1965 and I spent much of 1965-67 immersed in the reading of books related to the history of sexuality. I wanted to understand why it was that society had placed such strong taboos on homosexuality, making it both a criminal act and a mental illness. The more I read, the more radicalized I became. Of course, this was during the 1960s, a time of prominent protests by the Counterculture in America, fueled in part by the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. My generation was open to questioning most everything and this encouraged me to develop an analysis of sexual repression and oppression in Western society. 

In May of 1967, The New York Times ran a front page article headlined "Columbia Charters Homosexual Group". After reading the piece, I contacted "Stephen Donaldson" (AKA Robert Martin), the student who had founded the group. His organization, like the ones founded later at Cornell and U of T, was called "The Student Homophile Association" (or League).

During the following year, I made a few trips from Ithaca to New York City: (1) to explore the Village scene, (2) to see Martin and (3) to attend meetings of the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO). It was there that I first met Franklin Kameny, Barbara Gittings and Foster Gunnison, the leaders of ECHO. I admit that none of these activists really excited or inspired me as these older homophile leaders were far too conservative. Even Martin himself proved to be an army/navy "brat" whose sensibilities were quite disparate from mine. 

Nonetheless, I went back to Cornell and made the decision to form a local student gay organization. The Cornell Homophile League was officially recognized in May of 1968, more than a year before Stonewall! The Cornell story is a separate one with many tales worth telling (some of these can be found elsewhere on this blog.) However, for the purposes of this document, it is sufficient to say that I arrived at the University of Toronto with a "founding" event already under my belt. (For some reason - I suspect nationalism - almost no Canadian reference ever mentions my international activism.)

Ian Young 

I should start by admitting that I had no previous idea about exactly how Ian Young characterized me or the founding of the UTHA ... except for what can now be found on the record. Generally, I found these public comments both inaccurate and deceptive. He may just have ridden the wave of misinformation flowing from some poor journalism or perhaps he simply took advantage of the group's own weak sense of history. Once an erroneous wave of reporting is established, it is indeed relatively easy for an individual, especially a writer, to embellish some points and to diminish others for that person's benefit. 

However, this is my written record; my response to Mr. Young's quotes found on both Rick Bébout's website and in the U of T Alumnae magazine article by Anne Purdue ... and I wish to state, unequivocally, from the outset, that Ian Young had no part in the founding of the UTHA.

Furthermore, he was not at the first meetings attended by a handful of friends and the people who responded to an ad I had originally placed in the student newspaper, The Varsity, soliciting members for a new gay group on the U of T campus. Philip Atkinson, my oldest Toronto friend, attended those first meetings in "the cave", as my off-campus McCaul Street apartment was humorously referred to. He was considerate enough to respond to my written questions about those foundational gatherings and he attests to the fact that Mr. Ian Young was not in attendance. (That interview, conducted through an email exchange, is available upon request.)

Let's now proceed to examine some other assertions that can be found in a couple of Ian's quotes that appeared in Anne Purdue's article: 

"My first meeting with Moldenhauer was not at a party. I must have been given his number by a mutual acquaintance; I phoned him and he asked me to come see him at his place of work at the U of T. I remember very clearly that the first time I met Moldenhauer, he was vivisecting a dog. You don't forget something like that!” 

"We were never friends. As a long time antivivisectionist, my first encounter almost led me to have nothing to do with him, but I thought, 'well, I'm going to have to work with lots of diverse people in this cause, so I'd better get on with it.' Still don't know whether that was wise or not.”

These are outrageous statements! I was "vivisecting a dog"?!? Yes, I worked for a physiologist who used dogs in his experiments but there were very few operations ... and they took place in a surgery room into which Ian Young (or anyone not connected to the staff) would never have been invited. Yes, I would have given him my phone number(s), possibly those for my home and work. And yes, he probably did call and then visit my laboratory, but he certainly did NOT attend any surgical procedures. I assume he concocted this tale to elevate himself morally. And I note that he refers to me somewhat bluntly and disparagingly as only "Moldenhauer", not "Jearld" or "Mr. Moldenhauer". In my mind, this was Ian's attempt at a form of highhanded distancing and at expressing disdain for me, a lab technician who spent most of my days analyzing the digestive juices of Dog A, B, C and D.

He goes on to state that "We were never friends." The truth is we had been friends (of a sort) in the months before I went ahead with the founding of the UTHA. (I believe we met in one of the many Yorkville "hippy" cafés of the time or perhaps at the somewhat experimental Rochdale College). Our friendship was based on a mutual interest in both boys and gay literature. I was even invited to at least one of Young’s 'tea parties' out in Scarborough, where he lived with his parents. And as you can see in the accompanying photograph(s), Ian also sat for one of my portrait shoots. 

I also remember that, on one occasion, Ian even brought the controversial Canadian author Scott Symons and his young lover, John, to my basement apartment on McCaul Street. They had just recently returned from Mexico where they had fled following a RCMP arrest order after the publication of Scott's homoerotic novel, Place d'Armes. (Decades later, Scott would come into Glad Day Bookshop ... but only occasionally. He never bought anything and, oddly, he even appeared to be disinterested in the books. He just took up space, sitting in the office, smoking foul smelling Gitanes and asking to look at pornography.) Later, Ian introduced me to Norman Elder, another born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-hismouth Anglo Canadian homosexual. Interesting people ... even more so after Young published accounts of their lives ... but rather bizarre individuals, born with a deep sense of entitlement, something far different from my own class origins. I am unaware that either of these two personalities ever really contributed anything to their local gay community.

So much for the queers from English Canada's ruling class! 

(I only mention these episodes to counter Ian's dismissive statement about our shared history.) If I recall correctly, Ian was born in London, England but grew up under the Apartheid system in South Africa. Because of his upbringing, he possessed strong racist views by the time we met and, once these became apparent to me, it was I who ended the "friendship". (In fact, back then, my closest friend in Toronto was a black American draft dodger from Ohio, named John Mitchell. I once witnessed Ian and John getting into a dangerous physical fight in my McCaul Street apartment, after Ian had started spouting his views defending segregation for privately-owned businesses, such as restaurants.)

Of course, I had discussed the Cornell gay group with Ian and told him about my plans to start a similar organization at U of T. He actually spoke with me about trying to link this as-yet-to-be-founded gay group with the Don Andrews/Edmund Burke/Western Guard crowd to which he was connected. This, combined with the altercation he had had with John, made me want to distance myself (and keep any gay projects I had in mind) from Ian Young. Imagine if the first Canadian gay group of the post-Stonewall period had been exposed as having Right Wing or racist ideological connections ?! I was schooled by the analysis of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Unsurprisingly, Ian Young was an ardent follower of Ayn Rand and her 'cult' of selfishness and greed. (She was the heroine to so many in this shallow culture.) Again: despite our mutual aesthetic and cultural interests, once I realized where Ian was coming from, the relationship ended.

There are other Ian Young comments in Ms. Purdue's article that are calculated to further pull an obscuring scrim over reality: "I wanted to change things" he says, reflecting on his student days at U of T". Funny, I do not recall him ever joining any activist gay political organizations in Toronto during the early 1970s. (He did not even bother going to an important gay rights demo in Ottawa.) Ian was interested in Ian ... and in advancing his career as a writer. And this did not include involvement in political activism or any civil rights organizations.

So what exactly were his "student days" at U of T ? When we met, he had no official standing at the university and, in fact (according to Ian), he had dropped out of the Undergraduate Program the year before. Indeed, if Ian Young had had some legitimate affiliation with the University, I would have reluctantly involved him from the beginning. To my knowledge, Ian never returned to U of T in any capacity, except to attend UTHA meetings once I had submitted an amended "Statement of Purpose" to the Students' Administrative Council/SAC (derived from the Cornell document ... which, in turn, had been influenced by the one at Columbia University). We were then granted official status as a student organization, thereby allowing us to list our meeting time and to place announcements in The Varsity newspaper. However, from his first attendance at a meeting, and throughout our shared history with the UTHA, Young never stopped trying to attack and undermine my position within the organization. Sadly, Charlie Hill (see below) always just sat there, passively letting Ian spew his negativity towards me ... again and again.

Young also said that he wanted to be a teacher "but, in those days, you couldn't be openly gay and teach at any level". This was probably true at stuffy old U of T or in the secondary school system. I admit that this posed and still poses a major challenge. Nevertheless, I remember that, at Cornell, the most popular professor on campus was about as "openly gay" as could be. His lectures were a "camp" highlight ... and he could always be found cruising the student bars at night. [Unfortunately, he was also a very self-oppressed man and taught a course in "deviance" using Irving Bieber's - no relation to the Pop Star! - classic text on homosexuality as a mental illness and homosexuals as mentally sick ("Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuality"). Indeed, pressuring him to stop using that book was the one political action undertaken by the Cornell Homophile League when I was at the helm.]

To conclude my remarks about Ian, I wish to add that I do not think he maintained many of the political ideas that defined his arched personality/identity back in the early 1970s. There have been indications that he has since shed at least some of his Right Wing and racist views. 

It is also true that, back in 1970, my seeing his (then vast) gay library was something of an inspiration for me, both in finding my role as a gay bookseller and as a serious book collector. And, as that bookseller, I always respected his published efforts and treated his books in the same even-handed way that I did all the titles I promoted and sold during my career. But, as far as the University of Toronto Homophile Association goes: he was a joiner, never a founder.

Charlie Hill 

Charlie Hill and I met a few days after The Varsity ad was published. It had been a simple ad; my way of reaching out to a student body I barely knew. It asked those "interested in discussing the establishment of a student homophile association" to contact me. I provided my home phone number and, when a few people did call, they were invited to my apartment to discuss launching the group.

Charlie and I had spoken in the notorious UC washroom after an "encounter". The UC washroom was probably the most famous place in all of Toronto for a "quickie" (to say the least). It was almost always busy: not a day went by when it didn't see some sex action from students, Faculty, Staff, Queen's Park employees and "townies". I even met George Hislop there as well as a few well known people from the "Arts Community". If there ever was a cauldron for this nascent local gay movement, it may well have been that famous loo.

Unlike other similar underground venues, however, people actually carried on conversations from time to time ... so it served a social function at a time when there were few places - outside of a limited bar and dance club scene - where queers met and talked. And that is exactly what happened between Charlie and myself. He simply asked me if I knew who had placed The Varsity ad. When I told him that I had, we ended up further discussing his student status and I invited him to come to the meetings held in "the cave". Because I saw myself as an organizer/founding force and because I was neither a student nor a 'power broker', Charlie seemed to be a good choice to act as Chairperson for the UTHA.

Once word got out about the University's recognition of our new group, The Globe & Mail published a letter whose author stated that it was a mistake for SAC to have recognized it. As the group's founder, I wrote a reply. Anne Purdue's article quotes from my letter: "If the homophile represents a challenge to society, it is only that he promotes an increased freedom of expression between human beings." This was pretty basic stuff, reflecting my larger worldview. However, my boss at U of T, Dr. Roy Preshaw, then called me into his office to inform me that the old gentleman who was the Chairman of the Physiology Dept. had seen the letter and had asked Dr. Preshaw to dismiss me ... which he did.

At the time, I neither asked for, nor received, any overt support from Charlie or the group. It was a fledgling organization still learning to find its way and, internally, the waters were already murky thanks to Ian Young's obsession over my leadership. And so I paid the high price for taking the initiative in founding and then defending the UTHA ... but, with this turn of events, I was left alone - 'high and dry' - to deal with the results. 

[I recently tried to get answers to a few questions that I had for Charlie, to feel out his position and memory of these events. I wrote him, hoping for his support but, ultimately, I got the sense that nothing had changed about Charlie's wishy-washy ways. He wrote back once and I could see that he was waffling, claiming an uncertain memory. My follow-up e-mails to him then bounced back and I can only assume that they were being blocked ... Well, at least he is consistent.]

Forgive me if I admit that, after reviewing Charlie's comments in Anne Purdue's article, I felt that some of them were embarrassingly shallow. When she asked "the Curator for the National Gallery and a member of the Order of Canada how he mustered the courage to be the leader of the Homophile Association", he replied: 'Anger and irritation.' " OK. I know all about anger, but I still don't understand what he meant when he said that he had been irritated. (I get irritated waiting for the TTC, or for any number of reasons ... such as having to constantly defend my role as "founder".) He goes on to speak about "coming out" and "being out" and says: "We were an invisible minority and, as long as we were invisible, people could make up their own theories about us." Well, hurrah to all that!

So: Three talented people, all successful in their own right. Charlie Hill ... the author of a well reviewed book "The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation", published in 1995. In 2001, he received The Order of Canada for his book and for his long career as a curator at the National Gallery. Ian Young ... the author of some 10+ books. And Jearld Moldenhauer ... in his youth, a firebrand who established many gay organizations and institutions internationally.

The Researcher, Her Conclusions and Freedom of Information 

I first heard about the "Plaque Project" in an e-mail on March 18th, 2011 from David Rayside, who immediately assumed that the news would "make me smile". (Rayside was formerly the Director of the Bonham School for Sexual Diversity Studies at U of T). He quickly sent a second e-mail to inform me that similar messages had been sent out to Charlie and Ian. Yet another e-mail followed and I started to see the writing on the wall. He referred to me as someone who had "placed that first ad" and I began to sense that the University's version of the historical record was about to reduce me to an "advertiser" for the group rather than its founder.

Even before Ms. Robinson began her research on the project, I sensed in what direction things would be heading and I wrote to tell her: "I truly would rather be left out, denounced or simply ignored rather than be framed within a dishonest rendering of historical fact." (OK. I am not known for mincing my words. Needless to say, many have recoiled at my bluntness.)

On September 27th, David forwarded the Ontario Heritage Trust's Invitation. I wrote back asking about the wording on the plaque and was informed that the "plaque's text is not being revealed to anyone prior to the actual event." I reminded David that, a few months earlier, I had written a polite inquiry to Ms. Robinson about the conclusions of her research and she had responded in an ambiguous way. That had sent another signal that something was afoot. David responded that he had "considerable faith in the preparatory process used by the OHT." Writing him back, I declared my own lack of faith in the "system" ... and I think with good cause as there could be no healthy reason to withhold the wording from me except to prevent a response. (It was not as if there was some sort of national security threat here.) In his next e-mail, David ended the communication rather haughtily by stating "I see no particular advantage in continuing this exchange."

How I Received the Press Release and the Plaque's Wording.

On Oct. 14th, a friend sent me the Press Release about the Plaque's unveiling. No one officially associated with either the OHT or the SDS sent this public announcement to me. A few days later, on October 19th, another friend sent me the precise wording of the actual plaque. So much for courtesy and officialdom! So there it was: my name as "advertiser" in the Press Release but no specific recognition on the plaque itself (in fact, no names appeared).

All of this felt like déjà vu, reminding me of an award the old Gay Academic Union had presented, some decades ago, to "Glad Day Bookshop", instead of to the person who effectively was Glad Day Bookshop: me. The human being behind the organization seemed to matter less than the name of the organization proper. (Why not be as impersonal as we can!?) Obviously the people who make such decisions have no idea how this makes the person - the legitimate founder - feel ... the person who did the hard work and paid whatever price for these groundbreaking initiatives. Or maybe they do it intentionally ... as a way of negating the individual. Somebody should ask them.

During my communications with Ms. Robinson, I took what I considered a straight forward factual path. I assumed that, as with any researcher who was up to the task, once any facts were disputed, she would investigate further and, in this case, I would hear back from her. (How else can a person doing historical research proceed otherwise, assuming they ARE 'up to the task'?) When, after several months, I had heard nothing whatsoever, it became obvious that either the wool had been pulled over her eyes ... or it had been decided that the "safest" path to proceed on would be to leave all names off the plaque, even if this diminished the role of the legitimate founder.

Founder or Advertiser? 

The title of "Founder" has a basic enough definition in the Oxford dictionary: "A person who establishes an institution or settlement." So it's the idea and implementing of that idea that makes one a founder. In psychological terms, founders have special qualities that followers do not have. They have the guts to take on the world and to try and change it. This requires not only unusual courage but also a heavy component of naïveté, something you often find in youth. Take me away from the UTHA, (or Cornell SH, or Glad Day Toronto and Glad Day Boston, or even from The Body Politic and the CLGA) and what do you have? I believe that it is obvious that founding the basic institutions of the gay movement was my special talent, my contribution to the evolution of the culture. Why then, I wonder, have I had such a hard time getting the simple credit that is due?

[As a small additional note to this "founding" issue, I refer people to a website from Thunder Bay, Ontario call "Ebb and Flow - The Seventies." 1974 

“Lakehead Gay Liberation (LGL) was formed in Thunder Bay at Lakehead University, sparked by a visit by Jearld Moldenhauer (of Glad Day Bookshop fame). LGL was recognized as an official club by the Lakehead University Student Union (LUSU). In February, a live interview aired on CBQ radio. The group was short lived as most members left for Toronto that summer, and attempts to revive it in the fall were unsuccessful.”

This specific visit had happened on a National Tour sponsored by GATE Vancouver and GATE Toronto. I had been sent by train west from Toronto to rally the troops in any and every city I was invited to, in order to forge a national front for the "Movement". Yes, this particular group, LGL, was apparently short lived but it marked the beginning of gay political awareness for the Thunder Bay community and they were kind enough - and upfront enough - to remember this history. Their historical memory and honesty does not go unappreciated.]

So what was gained by mentioning my name in the Press Release but excluding it from the plaque? The avoidance of controversy? The conclusion - or at least the one I feel they reached - was that it was better to deny the person the honest credit he deserved rather than to pass judgment on the other (misleading) accounts of what had happened.

As I said in Anne Purdue's article: "Somehow I don't expect to receive an apology 40 years later." First off, they would have to acknowledge the true reason for my dismissal. Apparently no one wants to do that. After all, these days, is any Canadian university anywhere willing to admit that it fired, without cause (other than homophobia), the founder of a gay group ? I somehow doubt it. Yes, U of T may not be what it was back in the early 1970s ... but that's all the more reason for finishing this chapter honorably.

During the 1970s and up until the mid-1980s, there seemed to be no question about who had been the actual founder of the UTHA. Sometime during the 1980s, I was even invited to give a talk about the gay history at U of T (as I remembered it). In 2005, the group - now called LGTBTOUT (what a mouthful!) - had a major 35th Anniversary Party at the ROM. I had, of course, heard about this but had NOT been invited. Closer to the event, I became aware that Ian Young was being touted as the founder of the group. About two days before the celebration, someone from the organization finally contacted me and invited me to attend. (Feeling insulted, I did not do so.)

That was the beginning of this serious distortion of UTHA history ... later reinforced and amplified by the Alumni magazine article. None of this really surprises me when you consider that members of the Executive Committee of the current group do not even use their last names on the LGTBTOUT website. When I asked about this some years ago, I was told that it was a "tradition". If so, it's a sad one. Apparently, whatever we gained from 'Gay Liberation' and the central role of being "out" have been diminished for some time now. If this phenomena is widespread - and not just present at one of Canada's major universities - perhaps it partially explains the increase in gay-related bullying and in the continued high suicide rates of gay teens. One has to ask where the leadership is from people at such a major university when they so fear for their careers as to opt out and become the anonymously named Jane D. or John Q. ?

Egomaniac or Deserving Activist ? 

I have become so very tired of being put on the defensive about my role in the gay movement in Canada. This has, no doubt, something to do with why I no longer live there. People should ponder the fact that some of us early activists paid a price for the public positions we took. In my case, the price was a rather heavy one although one I took in stride. 

(Not only did U of T dismiss me but, a year later, the Toronto Western Hospital did the same after I brought Issue One of The Body Politic to work. The next year, I got a job working for the City of Toronto as a gardener. Once I was established and past my probationary period, I gradually came out, once again, by bringing gay newspapers to work to read during break times. Despite my good standing, I was not only fired but was sent to work in isolation for 2-3 weeks at the Woodbine Beaches before they officially terminated me.)

After this introduction to the real world, I decided to build Glad Day into a real bookstore ... instead of operating at half throttle from my home. It was the silver lining in a cloud of some despair. Eventually, I developed myself into a professional bookseller with an encyclopedic knowledge of most every title and author who ever addressed homosexual topics. That career lasted from 1970 - with the inception of Glad Day out of a backpack - to the year 2000, when I closed the successful Glad Day Boston.

However, little did I realize that, within a few years of starting the Yonge Street store, Canada Customs would begin seizing and censoring gay and lesbian literature. What started as an "irritating" occasional event grew into an all-out assault by 1985, with Mulroney's internal Memorandum D-9-1-1. People know something about the court battles (such as the one over "The Joy of Gay Sex") but I doubt that they have any idea about what this "war" costs, not only in legal fees but also in its psychological impact on someone just trying to do his job as best as he can. Until 1991 - when I finally wearied of these "Customs" battles - it was a daily fight for survival as all the power of the State was unleashed upon a tiny business in an attempt to destroy it.

Glad Day Toronto is now the world’s oldest surviving bookshop, specializing in gay and lesbian literature. In its time, it hosted readings and book signings by most of world’s greatest living gay and lesbian writers including Christopher Isherwood, William Burroughs, Edmund White, Michel Tremblay and Jeanette Winterson.

As far as my ego goes, I think it's both pretty humble and low key. My class origins are lower middle class, something that helped me break through the barriers middle class and upper class individuals often find impossible to transcend. In sheer biological terms (my area of study), I saw myself as a sort of "sport", a hybrid with the right combination of genes, class and education to push my society a tiny bit forward.

I can remember when I was just 14 years old and my grandmother gave me - at my request - the Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson ... Thoreau's "Walden Pond" also arrived in my hands soon thereafter. So, at a very young age, I was schooled in the principle of selfdetermination, with a belief in one's own intuitive grasp of reality. Given the battles that I have had to fight against an array of opponents, I feel these imbedded ideals have served me well. 

Jearld Moldenhauer  Fez, Morocco October 30, 2011

The above text is in the process of being published as part of a larger autobiographical account. All photos by Jearld Moldenhauer are copyrighted.

🔥 Jearld Moldenhauer.com 🔥

[death-knight7]

Six Names (Complete)

the single part version for those who want it.

5 Years ago

4 days before the siege of Tanaran

The Six were gathered around in the command tent of The Hunters Kin camp, dim lantern light glowing from the post above them and their map as they all looked at in silence. They were all here for a reason, the best in their positions and the generals most trusted among The Kin. In a few days a bloody battle would be fought and it was doubtless that at least one of them would die in the siege. It was their oath in the end however, so what was there to do?

At the head of the table was High General Frode of The Hunters Kin. Frode The Bloody some had come to call him. One of the most dangerous men in the north when it came to skill both on and off the battlefield. His great sword, Calder, had become a signal for many things in the north, most of them being a swift retreat or a resounding charge that would end many lives on either side. Though, if you asked him, it was just a sword he could hold in one hand and swing as if it were a knife.

To his right was Liza The Mountain, The Generals second in command and rightly so. She was known for her persistence in battle and the way the legions of shield men under her command had never faltered in their advances or budged in their defenses. Un-moving and solid, as if both she and those under her command were living mountains.

Next to her was Gallow. His true name had been lost long ago. Some say he was a criminal on the run and has hidden his name ever since, others say he lost it in a game of Olesian five card draw and took the name Gallow as a name to go by. Either way, it suited him well. He was the commander of the scouts and spies that had made the Kin famous. Their intelligence flawless and often caused the battles to turn around on a coin. Other than the general himself, Gallow was to be feared, not for his skill in blade or bow, but for the amount of time it could take for him to frame you and have you sent to the Gallows. Gods knew how many people had been unfortunate enough to meet that end when the High Lord commanded it.

Whistling a dandy and making light of the situation beside Gallow was Nez The Eye. They came from nowhere it seemed like, a light breeze strolling into town with quiver and bow, jagged pointed ears ruined after some scrap that either went poorly or fairly well offering their service to the highest paying client. When the General had caught wind of them, he jumped on the opportunity to hire them. The Kin lacked good marksmen, and Nez was the best there was in the north.

Then there was Ozman Stag or Mighty Stag, a brute of a man that, just in looks, could make a grown man weak at the knees and wet with piss between the legs. Stag was the head of the infantry regiments within the Kin and often rode in beside the General during the charges and sieges, just as he would in this one. Rumor had it that he and the general met each other in a bar fight and nearly killed each other during it. Ozman won and dragged the General home out of respect. The two have been friends since then.

And finally, to the left of the general, was Dok. No one knew anything about Dok, Not even her real name or where she was from. Her accent changed with each sentence, constantly hiding her true one and hiding behind a mask. She was a killer, born and bred. From the looks of it she had started well before the general had when it came to soldiering and didn’t care to hide it, often boldly going against the plans laid out and making them better without saying a word in the middle of a battle. It had never gone ill before, so no one judged her for it, at least not after the first five times she had saved their asses from getting handed to them.

“So…we’re charging right?” Stag asked as he looked from the map and towards the General who gave a heavy sigh in return. “What are we going to charge at Ozman? 50 foot high walls with archers raining down hell from above or the iron door that keeps us from entering the city?”

“Could be worse.” Stag said, shrugging

“How?” Raide asked as he rubbed his face. Nez chimed in this time “The walls could be 60 feet high and the door could be steel. Enjoy the little things Rai.” They says as they took a bite of an apple and smiled smugly at the rest of the table. Raide scoffed and leaned back in his seat and looked to Gallow. “Do you have anyone inside yet?” Gallow gave a toothy grin and smiled “’ve got 8 ‘f my people there as we speak. ‘aven’t got any reports yet, but ‘m ‘specting some soon.”

“Soon needs to get here quick then, we’ve got four days until we start the siege. The more we can get from the inside of the city the better. Liza, Ozman, how goes the training of the levies? Are they battle ready?” Ozman and Liza shared a quiet look before Liza spoke up “Not necessarily…”

“Even a little bit?” Raide asked, rubbing his temple as he mouthed the answer Ozman gave “Not in the slightest. Poor bastards can’t tell a lance from a spear. The most use they’re going to end up being are arrow holders during the siege.” Raide groaned and shook his head then stared back at the map again.

The Kin and himself would be attacking from the southwest while Hallard would move in from the north west, having Tanaran be the victim of one of the most savage and blood thirsty pincer maneuvers that would go down in the history books. Traitors would get their due in Olet. Especially ones that turned over lives for coin. All six of them knew that and all six of them had their ways of feeling about it, most of them being along the same line.

Karma is a bitch, and it bit them all in the ass eventually.

1 day before the siege of Tanaran

Everyone has their own preparations before they go into battle. Most are the same, a stiff drink with friends and goodbyes said just in case they wouldn’t see the next day. For the Kin it wasn’t much different. For an army who had been known to do the impossible because they were lucky, they never knew when the luck would run dry and if most, if not all of them wouldn’t see the next sunrise.

For The Six, things were slightly different.

The General would sit in his tent, his guards dismissed, open for any visitor who would like to share a drink with him and talk about anything. Things before the war, back home, anything to ease the mind. Plenty of wine to be shared too, which is what most came for. Not that he paid any mind. When traffic slowed he’d grab his violin and head to the center of camp and play for anyone who would listen.

Liza wouldn’t be seen for most of the day. Often a mile or so away from camp running through her drills nearly non-stop until her hands bled and her shirt was soaked in sweat and even then not stopping till the sun had set and the moon had risen. Then, she would head to wherever the majority of The Six had gathered, that often being at the command tent to share one final drink before the fighting started.

Gallow would spend the day reading reports from the people he had in place over endless amounts of coffee. Everything had to be right for the fight. Nothing out of place, No casulties caused by inaccurate information or by misreading a sentence. Everything had to be right, then he could sleep easy, knowing that he had done all he could do and would be ready for the battle more than most. Or just as ready as everyone else, depending on how good the information was.

Nez would bring life to the camp, often making impromptu drinking games and tournaments for the soldiers to participate in. They would start out slow at first, but as more people joined, the livelier the camp got. Those who had instruments would bring them out and play lively music, sometimes the General himself would play among them. The cooks would break out the rest of the ale and food and serve it to those who wanted it in huge portions or as much would allow for the time.

Stag was often found with the rowdiest of the infantrymen. Drinking, fighting, singing poorly and having a good time with all those involved. He often helped Nez set up the tournaments and drinking games. He ended up being half hungover by the time he woke up for the fight. Not that it mattered, he’d sober up by the time he saw the enemy.

Dok was ordinarily seen on the outskirts of the camp on her own. No one dared ask what she was doing because they were never sure if they would like the answer and those that did ask usually weren’t given one, only a quick glance and she was back to sharpening her sword or drinking her own wine. The elf had her ways, whatever they were, and they worked.

They had finally gathered in the tent, some drunk, some tipsy, some completely sober, all ready for a fight the next morning. The General had his violin strung playing it absent mindedly with his feet on the table as Nez whistled a melody in turn, matching the song Raide played. Gallow and Dok sat quietly, Gallow dozing to the song as it was played. Dok actually smiling for once as she sipped her drink. Liza and Stag closing their eyes and relaxing for once for the day.

They needed this. Everyone does.

Day of the siege

after the citadel had been taken.

Casualties: 45,000 soldiers, 15,000 civilians,

upwards of 5,000 MIA

Raide walked through the streets dragging the bloody mess that was Stag behind him. He was dead already, missing an arm and a leg and had bled out ten blocks earlier. He himself was close to Stags fate, a long jagged scare through his armor and chain mail, bleeding profusely. If he was going to die, it wouldn’t behind the walls of this goddamned city, not like Stag, not like the rest of them.

Soldiers both friend and foe ran past him, either in retreat or chasing after someone. “Always moving to the next fight right Stag?” No answer. Why would there be? The dead tell no tales other than the one of how they died. His vision began to fade, it was slow but it was happening and then he noticed a still body in an alley way.

It was Dok.

He set Stags body to the side and approached her, or rather, stumbled over to her and checked to see if she was alive. She was. She raised her head, a weak smile spreading across her face as she recognized Raide.

Odd. He had never found Dok attractive in anyway. Mainly because he liked to keep things professional and he knew so little of her too. But now, things we’re different. They were both dying even if he was the one standing with a god smacked look on his face.“Eve.” She whispered after a moment shifting and wincing slightly, pressing her hand against the several wounds in her stomach. Eve? What?

Oh

“A good name. Though I think it’s a bit late for introductions Dok…Eve.” Raide said as he leaned against the wall, his vision was fading a little faster now. She chuckled and shook her head then eyed Calder for a moment “General…Raide, I don’t want to die in this damned city, at least not like a dog like I am now. Put me down. Let me die to someone I know and trust.” another short chuckle or a cough, it was hard to tell now “I’m too much of a coward to do it myself.”

It was almost surreal hearing that. Dok…Eve, the one who came third in his cabinet, a soldier above Raides years, asking him to finish her off. It was an honor but at the same time a shame, he wasn’t sure if sweat got into his eye or he had begun crying.

It was probably both.

Raides grip tightened around Calder and held it up to her chest and looked into her eyes and gave her one small, sad smile before saying “Regroup with Stag on the other side alright? Poor bastard is probably going to have a hard time getting used to up there.”

“Understood general. See you there when it’s your time.” she closed her eyes and leaned back relaxing before looking at him one last time and nodding. Raide thrust the blade into her heart, making sure to do it quick so she didn’t feel anything. She let out one final breath and she was on the other side.

Raide walked back out of the alley with her body on his shoulders and started dragging Stag back towards the door of the city. That damn iron door.

Nez appeared a few hundred yards ahead shouting something. His name? He couldn’t tell. He could hardly tell where he was going anymore, much less hear anything. He stumbled down to one knee, losing his grip on Stag and Eve, their bodies falling next to him. Before he got one last look at Nez as they closed in on the three of them.

He could rest now. It was a long day.

[kansascityhappenings]

Facebook rumor about white vans is spreading fear across America

https://newsource-embed-prd.ns.cnn.com/videos/newsource-video-embed.js

Terrifying rumors initially propelled by Facebook’s algorithms have sparked fears that men driving white vans are kidnapping women all across the United States for sex trafficking and to sell their body parts. While there is no evidence to suggest this is happening, much less on a national, coordinated scale, a series of viral Facebook posts created a domino effect that led to the mayor of a major American city issuing a warning based on the unsubstantiated claims.

The latest online-induced panic shows how viral Facebook posts can stoke paranoia and make people believe that spotting something as common as a white van, can be deemed suspicious and connected to a nationwide cabal.

“Don’t park near a white van,” Baltimore Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young said in a TV interview on Monday. “Make sure you keep your cellphone in case somebody tries to abduct you.”

The mayor said he had not been told of the apparent threat by Baltimore Police but said it was “all over Facebook.”

Matthew Jablow, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department, told CNN Business on Tuesday that while the department is aware of posts on social media it had not received “any reports of actual incidents.”

Indeed, while there is no hard evidence of any such phenomenon in Baltimore, unconfirmed reports of suspicious white vans in Baltimore and other cities across the US have been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook in recent weeks and have been seen by potentially millions of Facebook users. At least one person who drives a white van has reported being harassed for it as a result of the rumors.

Baltimore City Councilman Kristerfer Burnett, co-chair of the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative, told CNN Business that he worried that the panic about white vans would distract from the wider issue of human trafficking.

“We need to make sure accurate information is out there especially because Baltimore is a hotbed of human trafficking in the country,” Burnett added.

He said the rumors had spread mostly through Facebook, “which I think is sort of telling given the national conversation around Facebook’s ability and inability to control the spread of inaccurate information on their platform.”

In Georgia, police investigating reports of suspicious white vans have asked the public to call 911 rather than post on social media.

Going viral

Sightings of “suspicious” white vans in Baltimore have been reported on Facebook for years. For example, CNN Business found one 2016 post from a woman who warned there was a white van outside her home and that people should be careful because there was “a guy in a white van kidnapping kids.”

Contacted by CNN Business Tuesday, the woman said she had no specific evidence to back up the claim but that she had heard it “plenty of times” and was only trying to warn her friends who have children.

While that posting barely received any attention, there has been a flurry of posts about white vans in Baltimore over the past month that have gone viral on Facebook and Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

On November 13th, Saundra Murray, a Baltimore resident, posted photos of a white van outside a gas station to Instagram. Murray said two men in the van would not stop staring at her while they were in the store. Murray told CNN Business she had seen the men in the store before she knew they were in a white van. She said she didn’t report the incident to police “because I didn’t have much information to report but I did want to make the [Instagram] post to let people know what is going on.”

Murray said she had seen reports on social media of suspicious white vans but she thought people were exaggerating — mysterious white vans are a “big thing in movies,” she thought, and believed that might have added to the exaggeration.

However, after her experience, she now believes the men and the van are “part of a bigger story, I don’t think they are two random guys.”

Baltimore Police has received no reports of actual incidents.

Murray’s post racked up more than 3,200 likes on Instagram. A few days later, on November 17, another woman in Baltimore posted screenshots of Murray’s Instagram post to Facebook. That Facebook post had been shared more than 2,000 times by this Tuesday.

A separate Facebook post from another woman in Baltimore on November 18 that was shared more than 5,000 times showed a stock image of a white van and warned: “When you come out into the mall parking lot, and you see a van like this parked next to your car, DO NOT GO TO YOUR CAR.”

The post claimed that sex traffickers had “these vans rigged where they lock from the outside, and, once inside, you can’t get out.”

But the posts were not only going viral in Baltimore. A Facebook post from a man in South Carolina on November 15 showed a photo of a white van with two external locks. The photo appeared to have been taken from Snapchat.

“IF U SEE ANY VANS LIKE THIS CALL 911 THIS IS UTILIZED FOR SEX TRAFFICKING,” the Facebook post read.

The post was shared an extraordinary 151,000 times.

Beyond Facebook

To help tackle its misinformation problem, Facebook has hired third-party fact-checkers. On November 21, one of the company’s partners, Lead Stories, ran a fact-check that said people don’t need to be particularly concerned just because they spot a van with external locks.

Lead Stories pointed out that external locks on vans are commonly used by construction workers who keep expensive tools in their vehicles.

The fact-check has been applied to some Facebook posts about white vans, meaning Facebook users who try to view those posts will be alerted that the information is false.

But while that might help slow or stop the spread of such posts in the future, it can’t undo the damage done or prevent the information from going elsewhere. On Tuesday, screenshots of the Facebook post were circulating through an email listserv for parents in a New York suburb, CNN Business learned.

The biggest concern, of course, isn’t just fear-mongering on Facebook, but how it can spread to the real world. In Detroit, a home improvement specialist told local media in late November he was harassed for driving a white van after he said speculation about white vans went viral on Facebook in the city.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/12/05/a-facebook-rumor-about-white-vans-is-spreading-fear-across-america/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/12/05/facebook-rumor-about-white-vans-is-spreading-fear-across-america/

[thewalkingsnapplecap]

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Who Started the Flat Earth Conspiracy Theory?

Contrary to popular belief, a decent percentage of the human population has known definitely the Earth was roughly spherical for over two thousand years. Hardly impressive, as noted in our BrainFood Show podcast, bees also use this fact in their own absurdly fascinating navigation and in communicating directions to other bees.

As for humans, we took a little longer to realize this, with Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) generally credited with being the first known person to have suggested a spherical Earth, though the idea didn't exactly catch on at this point. Aristotle (4th century B.C.) agreed and supported the hypothesis with observations such as that the southern constellations rise higher in the sky when a person travels south. He also noted that during a lunar eclipse the Earth's shadow is round. Much more definitively, the 3rd century BC head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes, built on their ideas and managed to calculate the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. How? He simply used the knowledge that at noon on the Summer Solstice there was a well in Syene where the sun shown directly down to the bottom, with no shadow. Thus, at noon on Summer Soltice he used a rod to measure the angle of the shadow made in Alexandria and found it to be about 7 degrees or about 1/50th of a circle. With this information, he now just needed to know the exact distance between Syene and Alexandria to get the circumference of the Earth (about 50 times the distance between Syene and Alexandria). He hired a survey crew, known as bematists, to measure the distance, which they found to be about 5,000 stadia. He then concluded the Earth must be about 250,000 stadia around. Depending on which stadion measurement he was using, his figure was either just 1% too small or 16% too large. Many scholars think it likely that he was using the Egyptian stadion (157.5 m), being in Egypt at the time, which would make his estimate roughly 1% too small.

Moving on to the so called Dark Ages in which Christianity supposedly squashed such outlandish ideas as a spherical Earth, the truth is actually the opposite. In Christian medieval Europe, 7th century Catholic monk and scholar Bede produced an influential treatise that included a discussion of the spherical nature of the world. This work, The Reckoning of Time, was copied and distributed to clerics across the Carolingian empire. Later, in the 1300s, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy also describes the Earth as a sphere and again nobody seemed to have a problem with this.

The Catholics and later other branches of Christianity weren't the only religious sects that seemed to have its clergy and scholars almost universally think the world was spherical. The Islamic world also concurred. As historian Jeffrey Burton Russell sums up,

With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.

Beyond the academics of the Western world, even the most empty headed sailor knew the Earth was spherical simply by the fact that ships disappear over the horizon with the bottom first and then the mast the last to be sighted. A similar effect is observed when spotting land from a ship. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize the sea's surface must curve continually.

Despite this, there really still is a tiny percentage of the populace of the developed world who believe the world is flat.

You might at this point be wondering just how many? While internet comment threads make it seem as if the percentage is large, the reality is probably drastically less. (Comment trolls gonna troll.)

As for some numbers, according to a 2018 poll run by the massive market research firm YouGov, the 8,215 responses which were chosen to have a high probability of accurately representing the wider adult populace, showed,

84% of respondents said they have always believed the world is round

5% stated "I always thought the world is round, but more recently I am skeptical/have doubts",

2% stated "I always thought the world is flat, but more recently I am skeptical/have doubts"

and 2% went with "I have always believed the world is flat".

The remaining 7% stated "Other/not sure".

While the good people at YouGov certainly know their stuff with respect to getting accurate data that represents the wider populace, we were curious as to what a larger sample of our own audience would reveal, though with the caveat that a general internet poll can sometimes be notoriously inaccurate. But for the curious and for whatever it's worth, our poll asking more or less the same questions received over 72,000 votes. What were the results? Approximately

96% of respondents stated they "firmly believe the world is round",

1% went with "I used to firmly believe the world is round, but now have doubts"

1% voted for "I firmly believe the world is flat"

0% stated "I used to firmly believe the world is flat, but now have doubts"

1% noted "I am not sure what I believe on this issue."

These numbers seem surprisingly reasonable for an online poll when compared to something a little more rigorously implemented like the YouGov poll. While our numbers skew more towards Round Earthers, this is perhaps to be expected given we know definitively that our audience skews towards being much more educated than the general populace.

And just because we were curious about the many, many online trolls who, as stated, it's our pet hypothesis are actually making it seem like there are a lot more Flat Earthers than there actually are, we did a follow up poll which got 54,000 votes. For whatever it's worth, in this one, approximately

9% of respondents stated "I believe the world is round, but sometimes say online it's flat"

2% stated "I believe the world is flat and advocate this position online"

The remaining 89% stated "Neither applies to me."

(And, yes, we know those numbers don't add up to exactly 100% in either case, but YouTube's polling system rounds to the whole number, so here we are.)

Those numbers out of the way, this finally brings us to who started the relatively modern Flat Earth movement and how on God's oblate spheroid Earth this movement is actually growing in an era where nearly all human knowledge is almost literally at everyone's fingertips?

The genesis of the modern Flat Earth Society started in the mid-19th century thanks to one Samuel Rowbotham of London, England. Dropping out of school at the tender age of 9, Rowbotham would eventually become convinced, or at least claimed he was, that not only was the Earth flat, but that everything we see in the heavens is actually only a few thousand miles from the Earth- stars and all. While his ideas were absurd for an incredible number of reasons, even given the technology and scientific knowledge of his era, what Rowbatham had going for him was he was reportedly incredibly quick on his feet in debates and an extremely charismatic speaker, able to twist the words of even the best academics. It didn't matter if he was actually right or not, only that he was better at convincing laypeople than the academics he regularly debated, or at least good at creating reasonable doubt. As noted by a contemporary article published in the Leeds Times,

One thing he did demonstrate was that scientific dabblers unused to platform advocacy are unable to cope with a man, a charlatan if you will (but clever and thoroughly up in his theory), thoroughly alive to the weakness of his opponents.

Besides making a small fortune public speaking, he also wrote various works including a book aptly titled Earth Not a Globe. Rowbotham ultimately created the Zetetic Society, which, besides advocating for a flat Earth, also advocated that only facts one could prove themselves could be accepted as true. On the side, Rowbotham also began going by "Dr. Samuel Birley" and making money selling people on cure-alls and life extenders of his own invention, among other such activities.

While by the early 20th century the society he started had gradually faded into even more obscurity than it already was at its peak during Rowbotham's lifetime, all was not lost. The truth cannot be killed so easily! In 1956 when mankind was on the verge of putting a satellite in orbit, Samuel Shenton of Dover, UK, came across the former works of the Universal Zetetic Society, the successor to Rowbotham's, and was hooked. He then established the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS) which adopted some of the ideas of the Zetetic Society before it, most notably, as you might have guessed from their new name, that the Earth is flat.

Of course, his timing wasn't exactly ideal given the launch of Sputnik in 1957 which, beyond being in orbit, put out a signal that anyone with a little know-how could track, very clearly demonstrating the spherical nature of the Earth.

This didn't faze him in the slightest, however. He simply noted that satellites circled over the disc of the world and that, "Would sailing round the Isle of Wight prove that it were spherical? It is just the same for those satellites."

When pictures of the Earth were taken from space clearly showing the planet's spherical nature, the man who strongly advocated trusting what you can see with your own eyes stated, "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye."

When astronauts came back still believing the Earth wasn't flat, he went with the catch-all explanation for any conspiracy theory when no other suitable explanation can be thought up- "It's a deception of the public and it isn't right."

Despite the giant, roughly spherical mound of evidence staring the members right in the face, including the variety easily confirmed by anyone with a modicum of knowledge in physics, the society did not die completely, though by 1972 had dropped from a peak of about 3,000 members down to around 100 spanning the globe.

That same year Shenton died and Californian Charles Johnson more or less took over the remnants, creating the International Flat Earth Research Society of America. Johnson also advocated that there was a global conspiracy with regards to the very flat Earth, not just today, but spanning millennia. To quote him, this was a conspiracy that "Moses, Columbus, and FDR all fought" against. Beyond that Columbus most definitely thought that the Earth was roughly spherical, simply misjudging its circumference, we're guessing Moses didn't have to fight anyone on this one as the Ancient Egyptians firmly believed in the concept of a flat Earth, as did seemingly the Hebrews around the time he supposedly lived.

So what exactly do the world's governments and countless scientists and high school physics students throughout human history have to gain by convincing people the world is spherical instead of flat? Well, Johnson advocated that this is a tool used by scientists to get rid of religion. Of course, as noted, Christian scholars throughout history on the whole advocated for the very spherical Earth and we're not aware of any major religious denomination the world over today that goes with the flat Earth model, so no apparent conflict... But, hey, we guess Eratosthenes must have really had it in for those Ancient Egyptian and Greek gods...

In any event, despite Johnson's less than compelling arguments, over time this new society actually gained followers up to a peak of about 3,500 members under his leadership. Disaster struck, however, when a fire at headquarters destroyed some of the records of membership in 1997. Ultimately Johnson himself passed away in 2001 and the society was temporarily just as dead.

All was not lost, however, as there is no medium greater than the Internet at giving humans ability to discover the truth in anything for themselves... if we weren't all so lazy and our monkey brains not so chock full of cognitive biases.

And so it was that in 2004, one Daniel Shenton created a discussion forum home for the mostly dead Flat Earth Society and by 2009 a new wiki website was created in its place, with the society slowly growing from there to apparently around 500 members to date. There are also many Flat Earth pages and channels on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube sometimes exceeding 100K members or subscribers of a given page, channel, or profile, for whatever that's worth.

In the latest incarnation of the society, as with their forebears, the modern group strongly advocates for only accepting that which you can see with your own eyes and prove with your own efforts. As they note on their website,

The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the Sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world. This is using what's called an empirical approach, or an approach that relies on information from your senses. Alternatively, when using Descartes' method of Cartesian doubt to skeptically view the world around us, one quickly finds that the notion of a spherical world is the theory which has the burden of proof and not flat earth theory.

As for the model of the Earth they go with, while there is some dissension among the ranks over exact details, the current belief advocated by the Flat Earth Society is that the the Earth is disc shaped. The North Pole lies at the center of this disc and there is an ice wall surrounding the outer most parts of the Earth that keeps the oceans contained. This wall is nearly impossible to reach owing to the fact that NASA is closely guarding it, ensuring no one ever gets close enough to see it for themselves. NASA also is extremely active in generating satellite photos of the Earth and generating other data all meant to keep people believing in a spherical Earth. Seemingly the Google Earth team must be in on it too, clearly abandoning the company's long held unofficial mantra of "Don't be evil."

As evidence of this conspiracy and how far reaching it is, they also point out on their website that the United Nations emblem strongly resembles the Flat Earth Society's view of what the Earth actually looks like.

(We guess clearly showing the logo design team, led by industrial designer Oliver Lincoln Lundquist, in 1945, didn't get the memo that the true shape of the Earth was supposed to be a secret. You had one job Lundquist!!!

To be fair, however, when his team designed it, it was originally just supposed to be used on the badges at the United Nations Charter signing conference, so only for people who already knew the Earth was flat... Fun fact, Lundquist did, however, make up for the screw up by later designing the classic blue and white Q-tip box.)

In any event, you might at this point be wondering how the Flat Earth Society believes commercial airlines and ships the world over continue to seemingly travel in one direction and manage to circle the globe. Well, this is because these ships and planes are literally circling. They state, "circumnavigation is performed by moving in a great circle around the North Pole."

As for how the ship and plane captains don't seem to be aware of this, in modern times it's because GPS devices and autopilots are designed in software to simply make it seem like the craft is circling a globe and not continually turning slightly. Of course, it's not clear how they account for people tricking themselves when navigating before or without GPS, which has only been ubiquitous for a couple decades or so. (See: Who Invented GPS and How Does It Work?)

There's also the fact that fuel burn on these ships and airplanes are carefully calculated, particularly important for planes where weight and balance is always an essential consideration if one doesn't want to die a fiery death. Thus, if they were really traveling in the way the Flat Earthers claim, the fuel requirements would be different, sometimes vastly so. (No surprise here that Big Oil must be involved...)

As for, you know, the whole day and night thing, this is explained on their website "The sun moves in circles around the North Pole. When it is over your head, it's day. When it's not, it's night. The light of the sun is confined to a limited area and its light acts like a spotlight upon the earth... The apparent effect of the sun rising and setting is...a perspective effect."

How exactly the light from the Sun only works as a spotlight isn't clear. It's also not clear how the phases of the Moon and lunar and solar eclipses work given this spotlight model and given they believe the Sun is always above the Earth...

Moving on- as for the many people who claim to be able to see the curvature of the Earth when on high altitude commercial flights, well, the Flat Earth Society, who advocated trusting your own senses over what anyone tells you. tells these people, to quote, "Quite simply you cannot... the windows on commercial aircraft are small and heavily curved. Even if they flew high enough for a person to see curvature, it would still not be visible to passengers."

As for the issue of someone with even a half way decent telescope being able to see the spherical nature of other planets in the solar system, including them spinning away, the Flat Earth Society claims,

Planets are orbiting astronomical objects. The Earth is not a planet by definition, as it sits at the center of our solar system above which the planets and the Sun revolve. The earths uniqueness, fundamental differences and centrality makes any comparison to other nearby celestial bodies insufficient - Like comparing basketballs to the court on which they bounce.

As for how gravity works in the flat Earth model, it turns out that, "The earth is constantly accelerating up at a rate of 32 feet per second squared (or 9.8 meters per second squared). This constant acceleration causes what you think of as gravity. Imagine sitting in a car that never stops speeding up. You will be forever pushed into your seat. The earth works much the same way. It is constantly accelerating upwards being pushed by a universal accelerator (UA) known as dark energy or aetheric wind."

You may have spotted a problem with this explanation given the whole issue of eventually exceeding the speed of light. In fact, if constant acceleration at 9.8 meters per second squared, it would only take about a year for the Earth to reach the speed of light.

Well, they've got you covered, explaining: "Due to special relativity, this is not the case. At this point, many readers will question the validity of any answer which uses advanced, intimidating-sounding physics terms to explain a position. However, it is true. The relevant equation is v/c = tanh (at/c). One will find that in this equation, tanh(at/c) can never exceed or equal 1. This means that velocity can never reach the speed of light, regardless of how long one accelerates for and the rate of the acceleration."

...

Anyway, as to what lies below the Earth, this is heavily disputed among Flat Earthers. But it doesn't really matter as you can't get there anyway. You see, to quote Flat Earther Robbie Davidson in an interview with Forbes, "We don’t believe anything can fall off the edge, because a big portion of the flat earth community believes that we’re in a dome, like a snow globe. So the sun, moon and stars are all inside. It’s very high but all contained inside. So there’s no way to actually fall off of the earth."

Given it only takes a modicum of effort to disprove pretty much everything said on their website and prove definitively for one's self that the Earth is roughly spherical without needing to trust any scientist or government, you might think the Flat Earthers just aren't trying. Well, you're kind of right, but there are exceptions! Case in point- limo driver Mike Hughes who managed to raise about $8,000 thanks to a Flat Earth fundraiser. Why? To build a rocket to reach the heavens with to once and for all prove the Earth was flat.

Reportedly the final hilariously fitting steam powered rocket and launch platform cost around $20,000 and took about ten years to build. With it, Hughes managed to achieve an altitude of almost 1,900 feet, which while kind of impressive for an amateur built home made rocket that could carry a human, was nonetheless not able to achieve his objective of getting him to space.

If only it was possible to build more powerful rockets... Or if there existed a balloon designed to be able to soar into the heavens with some sort of device on board that could capture and store what it sees through an eye like apparatus... Or, stick with us here people, if a human going along for the ride was a requirement to show NASA hadn't tampered with this futuristic visual capture device, some sort of bird-like machine that could carry humans above 1,900 feet...

On that note, for a mere $12,000-$16,000 Hughes could have purchase a charter flight ticket to not only take him higher than altitudes of 1,900 feet, but also take him to Antarctica to see the massive ice wall for himself. Or if the Flat Earth society wanted to pool together their resources, for prices from $25,000-$70,000 they could charter a flight to the South Pole itself. Though, a thing they don't tell you on the vacation package brochure is that while you can go visit the South Pole, NASA subjects everyone that does to severe mental retraining to ensure all memories of the ice wall have been erased and replaced with pleasant, but very wall free, recollections.

All joking and head scratching aside, it's always important to note that many of the core psychological quirks that see Flat Earthers intractably convinced the Earth is flat in the face of all evidence to the contrary exist in all of us. Monkey brain gonna monkey. We further all have many beliefs we firmly cling to just as tenuously supported by our level of knowledge on a subject, though thankfully for most of us the absurdity isn't quite so easy to spot, allowing us to safely continue to think of ourselves as superior to mere mortals with alternate ideas...

In the end, we all firmly believe many things that aren't true at all and no amount of evidence could ever convince any of us to change our minds on some of these things. Food for thought.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

Who Started the Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theory?

What Causes the Smoke Trails Behind Airline Planes High in the Sky?

The Mysterious Black Goo of Venezuela: La Mancha Negra

The Secret Society of Journalists Known as the Order of the Occult Hand

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[thewebofslime]

Executives at the news company Axios were outwardly unperturbed when Jonathan Swan, one of the Politico-for-kids site’s star reporters, attracted widespread condemnation last November for gloating about getting President Donald Trump to consider ending birthright citizenship. “Our profile is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to have more cool successes,” Axios editor-in-chief Nicholas Johnston told staff later. Executive editor Mike Allen acknowledged that Axios had, perhaps, erred ever so slightly, but seemed otherwise unconcerned with the criticism. “You can’t buy the amount of public exposure we got this past week for our journalism,” he wrote. That may be true. What you can buy, however, are the services of a verbose, relentless Wikipedia editor willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that that public exposure is as flattering as possible. So, Axios did. Axios may not have expressed its worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who’s now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com, to do damage control. Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign — if largely flattering — stats about Axios’ accomplishments) in February 2018. A week after Swan’s Trump interview aired, Sussman was hard at work on the reporter’s Wikipedia page, arguing that the entry was unfair to Swan and used “sensationalistic language” instead of the “dispassionate voice” Wikipedia requires. To correct the issue, he suggested a total overhaul of the description. About a month later, Sussman proposed a list of extensive edits to Swan’s page. Some were clearly in service of his original argument about the Trump interview; others, such as his suggestion that Wikipedia editors add an “Awards and Honors” section, seemed focused on promoting Swan himself. He also asked editors to remove a sentence noting that Swan had once incorrectly reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned. Sussman then suggested the following paragraph be placed in its stead: On September 24, 2018, he was the first to report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned and published the Rosenstein exit statement that the Justice Department sent to the White House. The story was later updated to clarify that is was uncertain if the White House had accepted the resignation, which it ultimately did not. Swan later said he had given the resignation story unwarranted certainty. Most of Sussman’s changes were approved. The vast majority of the people who propose and make changes to Wikipedia are volunteers. A few people, however, have figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia’s supposedly neutral system to turn a profit. That’s Sussman’s business. And in just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. Wikipedia Editing For Fun And Profit! Wikipedia’s rules can feel dense and impenetrable and are phenomenally boring to talk about, but it helps to know a little about the site’s structure to understand exactly what Sussman does. So bear with me. One of Wikipedia’s more well-known rules is its prohibition on editing pages that you have any sort of direct connection to. This, along with the fact that it’s humiliating to get caught editing your own Wikipedia page, is usually enough of a deterrent to companies and public figures looking to inject a positive spin. But those looking to get around the site’s conflict of interest rules aren’t totally without options. Anyone, even someone financially tied to the subject in question, is allowed to merely suggest edits in the hopes that a less conflicted editor might come by, agree, and implement the changes for them. This is where a paid editor like Sussman comes in. On his website, Sussman identifies himself as “a journalist, lawyer, academic and technology entrepreneur” who “is often called upon in ‘crisis management’ situations where inaccurate or misleading information has been placed in a Wikipedia article, potentially creating severe business problems for its subject.” And because Sussman is open about what he’s doing, he’s forced to play by Wikipedia’s rules, which means disclosing his affiliation every time he suggests an edit on behalf of a client. One risk, he warns clients, is that “an experienced Wikipedia user might check the Talk page of the article” (the section attached to every article where editors discuss issues or concerns that come up) and discover that an editor with a conflict of interest had made his mark. In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid Sussman to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. In a phone call with HuffPost, Sussman repeatedly emphasized that: 1) There was no story here; 2) Everything he does is aboveboard; 3) The real problem is the paid editing that goes undisclosed. “I am not the one sucking in the business,” he said. “The ones sucking in all the business are the firms who, when they get a call, say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ And they just take it down and they don’t do a disclosure.” Edits made by someone with an undisclosed conflict of interest are certainly rampant, but once discovered, those illicit edits are reversed. Sussman’s suggestions, because they’re allowed within Wikipedia’s guidelines, can have much more lasting influence. Although he’s only technically allowed to suggest changes on a subject’s Talk page, Sussman has an impressive track record of getting edits approved on behalf of his clients. The Players Although Sussman declined to provide a complete list of clients, the fact that he’s required to disclose who signs his paychecks means all that information is out there somewhere — and just takes a little digging to find. In addition to Axios, HuffPost found Sussman making edits on behalf of Facebook, NBC and casual racism depository Nextdoor. NBC confirmed its relationship with Sussman in an email to HuffPost. A spokesperson for Axios also confirmed its relationship with Sussman, adding, “Axios hired him to correct factual inaccuracies. Pretty sure lots of people do this.” Facebook and Nextdoor have not yet responded to requests for comment. Facebook’s PR agency paid Sussman to tweak Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s page. Those successful (if mild) changes weren’t the totality of his Facebook work, though. He also spent over a year lobbying Wikipedia’s editors to create a page for Facebook’s global head of PR, Caryn Marooney, despite being repeatedly turned down over her lack of notability. But Sussman, to many editors’ dismay, is indefatigable, and he eventually triumphed. NBC, too, apparently decided to put Sussman’s service to use in the aftermath of The New Yorker’s bombshell Harvey Weinstein report and, later, the allegations of sexual misconduct against Matt Lauer. Several NBC employees, including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and NBC Chairman Andy Lack, benefited from Sussman’s intervention, too. In one proposed edit, Sussman attempted to argue that on NBC News’ Wikipedia page, the mention of criticism directed at NBC over its handling of Matt Lauer constituted a violation of Wikipedia’s rules, since “it does not summarize the opposing point of view.” Here’s the paragraph Sussman took issue with: Ronan Farrow’s story about the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations was developed at NBC News in 2017; the company chose not to publish it and Farrow took the story to the The New Yorker which published it after the New York Times broke the story. The NBC News organization was criticized for not publishing the Weinstein story and were further criticized when news broke of the sexual harassment claims against Matt Lauer. And here’s just some of what Sussman proposed instead: Today Show host Matt Lauer was fired in November 2017, about 36 hours after a formal sexual misconduct complaint was lodged against him. Some said the issue was well-handled because Lauer was fired swiftly and management began an organization-wide discussion of sexual harassment, but others were critical of NBC for not knowing about Lauer’s alleged behavior. In other words, the criticism Sussman includes in his “more balanced approach” is, essentially, that people were mad over the fact that NBC is not omniscient. (That is not what they were mad about.) Just the other week, Sussman proposed that editors remove a portion of Chuck Todd’s page that mentioned a potentially embarrassing 2016 Daily Caller report about an invitation found in the leaked emails of former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. According to the invite, Todd and his wife had hosted a dinner for Hillary Clinton’s then-communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and her husband. Sussman asked that editors remove any mention of the report from Todd’s page because Wikipedia had previously (and correctly) determined the Daily Caller to be an unreliable source and, according to Sussman, “it is not sourced elsewhere.” This, however, is untrue. The invitation was reported in both the Observer and The Florida Times-Union, in addition to the invitation’s appearance on WikiLeaks itself. But because Sussman’s stated complaints all aligned with Wikipedia’s guidelines, the section was removed. How To Win Arguments And Exhaust People Sussman’s main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn’t work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there’s little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman’s arguments. So he usually gets his way. In January of last year, for instance, you would have found this section on the page for NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Sussman took exception to the section, explaining why in a punchy 700-word screed, which masochists can read here. Assuming you are unable to make it through that, though, Sussman’s argument is, essentially, that this allegation doesn’t deserve its own section, that the citation on the first sentence doesn’t support the sentence’s claim, and that the last sentence is unsourced. That first citation linked to Ronan Farrow’s October 2017 New Yorker story detailing the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which does indeed fail to mention Oppenheim or NBC. However, HuffPost reported later that month that Oppenheim had made the decision to kill Farrow’s story at NBC ― a fact Sussman conveniently omitted while picking and choosing from Wikipedia’s catalog of rules to build his case. After a bit of a back-and-forth between Sussman and an editor who goes by Jytdog, Jytdog appeared to become fed up with Sussman’s needling, writing that “the current content is fine. NBC news owns plenty of platforms to broadcast its PR about not getting this story. The article communicates that they had it and did not publish it.” The discussion of Sussman’s suggestions quickly becomes hard to follow —Oppenheim’s Talk page is currently about 12,000 words long. The actual entry is less than one-tenth of that. Ultimately, though, a comment period was opened to discuss the section, and despite Jytdog’s urgings, a majority of editors decided to leave the information off Oppenheim’s page. A bit of digging into the editors that voted to oppose the section, however, reveals a peculiar little pattern. Like Wikipedia’s subject pages, each editor also has his or her own general page, in addition to a corresponding Talk page. Looking through the Talk page histories of the editors who sided with Sussman reveals that Sussman directly petitioned a number of them to weigh in. When viewed in Wikipedia’s user logs, it looks like this: Again, because Sussman has a conflict of interest as a paid consultant, Wikipedia’s rules forbid him from making edits to one of his client’s Wikipedia pages directly. The only way Sussman can make good on his promise to his clients, then, is by enlisting sympathetic editors. Editors who side with him are usually burdened with more requests down the line. Although Wikipedia doesn’t technically forbid reaching out to others to ask for their insight, it does forbid petitioning editors to weigh in “with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.” Editors will periodically catch on to Sussman’s activities and admonish him on his Talk page. Posts calling attention to Sussman’s lobbying of other editors rarely stay up for more than a week. According to his Talk page history, Sussman deletes criticism frequently and any record of it in his user logs often gets buried by his prolific posting and editing. Usually, though, these warnings against Sussman’s petitioning are ignored. Last May, for instance, Sussman proposed that a section on the page for Nextdoor “about a misdemeanor traffic offense by Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia should be removed” for irrelevance. The CEO’s “misdemeanor traffic offense” was originally charged as a felony hit-and-run after he allegedly swerved unexpectedly into another lane of traffic, caused a crash, and bolted. The charges were only reduced after Tolia claimed not to know that he was supposed to stay at the scene of the crash. Sussman solicited input from a number of editors, and the section was ultimately removed. On Sussman’s website’s FAQ page, he notes that even when he requests changes, “the article looks exactly the same” to an outsider. His success rate, he brags, is 100 percent.

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Western Control Services

Debt collectors like Western Control Services cannot harass you over a debt. You have rights under the law, and we will stop the harassment once and for all.

THE BEST PART IS…

If Western Control Services violated the law, you will get money damages and they will pay your attorney’s fees and costs. You won’t owe us a dime for our services. Plus, some of our clients also receive debt relief and cleaned-up credit reports. You have nothing to lose! Call us today at 888-572-0176 for a free consultation.

Who is Western Control Services?

Western Control Services is a third-party debt collection agency based in Englewood, Colorado. Founded in 1988, WCS primarily provides educational, legal, and medical collections and is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

Western Control Services’s Address, Phone Number, and Contact Information

Western Control Services is located at 730 W Hampden Ave #306, Englewood, CO 80110. The main telephone number is 303-761-6102 and the main website is http://western-control.com/.

Phone Numbers Used by Western Control Services

Like many debt collection agencies, Western Control Services may use many different phone numbers to contact debtors. For an advanced search, visit www.agrussconsumerlaw.com/ and click “Number Search” in the “Lookup” dropdown menu. Here are some phone numbers Western Control Services may be calling you from:

303-761-6102

303-762-7567

888-494-9592

Western Control Services Lawsuits

If you want to know just how unhappy consumers are with Western Control Services, take a look at the lawsuits filed against the agency on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (“PACER”). PACER is the U.S.’s federal docket which lists federal complaints filed against a wide range of companies. A search for the agency will display 15 lawsuits filed in the U.S., and these typically involve violations of consumer rights and/or the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).

Western Control Services Complaints

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) is a federal law which applies to everyone in the United States. In other words, everyone is protected under the FDCPA, and this Act is a laundry list of what debt collectors can and cannot do while collecting a debt, as well as things they must do while collecting debt. If Western Control Services is harassing you over a debt, you have rights under the FDCPA.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) protects you from robocalls, which are those annoying, automated, recorded calls that computers make all day long. You can tell it’s a robocall because either no one responds on the other end of the line, or there is a delay when you pick up the phone before a live person responds. You can receive $500 per call if Western Control Services violates the TCPA. Have you received a message from this agency that sounds pre-recorded or cut-off at the beginning or end? These are tell-tale signs that the message is pre-recorded, and if you have these messages on your cell phone, you may have a TCPA case against the agency.

The Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA) protects electronic payments that are deducted from bank accounts. If Western Control Services took unauthorized deductions from your bank account, you may have an EFTA claim against the agency. Western Control Services, like most collection agencies, wants to set up recurring payments from consumers; imagine how much money it can earn if hundreds, even thousands, of consumers electronically pay them $50 – $100 or more per month. If you agreed to this type of reoccurring payment, the agency must follow certain steps to comply with the EFTA. Did Western Control Services continue to take electronic payments after you told them to stop? Did they take more money from your checking account than you agreed to?  If so, we can discuss your rights and potential case under the EFTA.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) works to ensure that no information reported to your credit report is false. In essence, it gives you the right to dispute those inaccuracies that you find on your credit report. We’ve handled many cases in which a debt collection agency reported debt on a consumer’s credit report to obtain leverage over the consumer. If Western Control Services is on your credit report, they may tell you that they’ll remove the debt from your credit report if you pay it; this is commonly known as “pay for delete.” If the original creditor is on your report rather than the debt collector, and you pay off the debt, both entities should accurately report this on your credit report.

Several states also have laws to provide its citizens an additional layer of protection. For example, if you live in California, Florida, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wisconsin, you may be able to add a state-law claim to your federal law claim above. North Carolina, for example, has one of the most consumer-friendly statutes in the country: if you live in NC and are harassed over a debt, you may receive $500 – $4,000 in damages per violation. We work with a local counsel in NC and our NC clients have received some great results in debt collection harassment cases. If you live in North Carolina and are being harassed by a debt collector, you have leverage to obtain a great settlement.

How do we Use the Law to Help You?

We will use state and federal laws to immediately stop Western Control Services’s debt collection. We will send a cease-and-desist letter to stop the harassment today, and if Western Control Services violates the FDCPA, EFTA, FCRA, or any state law, you may be entitled to money damages. For example, under the FDCPA, you may receive up to $1,000 in damages plus actual damages. The FDCPA also has a fee-shift provision, which means the debt collector will pay your attorney’s fees and costs. If you have a TCPA case against the agency, we will handle it based on a contingency fee and you won’t pay us a dime unless you win.

THAT’S NOT ALL…

We have helped thousands of consumers stop phone calls. We know how to stop the harassment and get you money damages. Once again: you will not pay us a dime for our services. We will help you based on a fee-shift provision and/or contingency fee, and the debt collector will pay your attorney’s fees and costs.

What if Western Control Services is on my Credit Report?

Based on our experience, some debt collectors may credit-report, which means one may mark your credit report with the debt they are trying to collect. In addition to or instead of the debt collector, the original creditor may also be on your credit report in a separate entry, and it’s important to properly identify these entities because you will want both to update your credit report if or when you pay off the debt.

THE GOOD NEWS IS…

If Western Control Services is on your credit report, we can help you dispute it. Mistakes on your credit report can be very costly: along with causing you to pay higher interest rates, you may be denied credit, insurance, a rental home, a loan, or even a job because of these mistakes. Some mistakes may include someone else’s information on your credit report, inaccurate public records, stale collection accounts, or even being a victim of identity theft. If you have a mistake on your credit report, there is a process to dispute it, and my office will help you obtain your credit report and dispute any inaccurate information.

REMEMBER…

If a credit reporting agency violates its obligations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you may be entitled to statutory damages up to $1,000, and the credit reporting agency will be required to fix the error. The FCRA also has a fee-shift provision, which means the credit reporting agency will pay your attorney’s fees and costs. You won’t owe us a dime for our services. We have helped hundreds of consumers fix inaccurate information on their credit reports, and we’re ready to help you, too.

Complaints against Western Control Services

Based on 17 reviews on Google, Western Control Services receives a 1.2-out-of-5 rating. Here are some of the reviews on Google:

“We have been in a long, very difficult dispute. This is the worst, morally corrupt company that I have ever had to deal with. Reps that we’ve spoken to with this company have gone as far as insulting me and my family. We were able to get some attention from the original creditor and they are trying to help at this point – however, the original creditor no longer even works with this company, which complicates the situation even further.”

“This is one of the most unprofessional groups of people we’ve worked with. My husband found out he had a bill that went to collections, apparently it happened during a time when we were moving and the bill slipped through the cracks. He called today wanting to pay his debt off and requesting that the account be removed from his credit report since we were not properly notified of the debt and was told they would not remove it. A manager named Frank berated him asking “how do you know to pay your rent each month, you don’t get a bill for that?” And Frank was the third employee who spoke to him that way!!! If you want your customers to be treated with dignity and respect DO NOT HIRE THIS COMPANY, they are uneducated bullies.”

“This company was listed on my credit report after I filed bankruptcy and they refused to remove the debt after the discharge notice. I called and first they acted like I couldn’t be verified as myself after I answered questions and gave them all of my information. Then they said they couldn’t find anything under my social security number. I ended the call and called back. Went through all the questions again and this time they said they saw the debt but were no longer in charge of it even though their name and phone number are listed on the credit report. Then I was given a phone number that was disconnected and told that was who was in charge of the debt now.”

What Our Clients Say about Us

Agruss Law Firm has over 825 outstanding client reviews through Yotpo, an A+ BBB rating, and over 110 five-star reviews on Google. Here’s what some of our clients have to say about us:

“Michael Agruss handled two settlements for me with great results and he handled them quickly. He also settled my sister’s case quickly and now her debt is clear. I highly recommend Michael.”

“Agruss Law Firm was very helpful, they helped me solve my case regarding the unwanted calls. I would highly recommend them. Thank you very much Mike Agruss!”

“Agruss Law Firm was very helpful to me and my veteran father! We were harassed daily and even called names for a loan that was worthless! Agruss stepped in and not only did they stop harassing, they stopped calling all together!! Even settled it so I was paid back for the problems they caused!”

Can Western Control Services Sue Me?

Although anyone can sue anyone for any reason, we have not seen Western Control Services sue consumers, and it’s likely that the agency does not sue because they don’t always own the debt they are attempting to collect, and would also need to hire a lawyer, or use in-house counsel, to file a lawsuit. It’s also likely that the agency collects debt throughout the country, and it would be quite difficult to have lawyers, or a law firm, licensed in every state. However, there are collection agencies that do sue consumers; for example, Midland Credit Management is one of the largest junk-debt buyers, and it also collects and sues on debt. Still, it is less likely for a debt collector to sue you than for an original creditor to hire a lawyer or collection firm to sue you. If Western Control Services has threatened to sue you, contact Agruss Law Firm, LLC as soon as possible.

Can Western Control Services Garnish my Wages?

No, unless they have a judgment. If Western Control Services has not sued you, then the agency cannot get a judgment. Barring limited situations (usually involving debts owed to the government for student loans, taxes, etc.), a company must have a judgment in order to garnish someone’s wages. In short, we have not seen this agency file a lawsuit against a consumer, so the agency cannot garnish your wages, minus the exceptions listed above. If Western Control Services has threatened to garnish your wages, contact our office right away.

Western Control Services Settlement

If you want to settle a debt with Western Control Services, ask yourself these questions first:

Do I really owe this debt?

Is this debt within the statute of limitations?

Is this debt on my credit report?

If I pay this debt, will Western Control Services remove it from my credit report?

If I pay this debt, will the original creditor remove it from my credit report?

If I pay this debt, will I receive confirmation in writing from Western Control Services for the payment and settlement terms?

These are not the only things to consider when dealing with debt collectors. We are here to help you answer the questions above, and much more. Whether it’s harassment, settlement, pay-for-delete, or any other legal issue with Western Control Services, we at Agruss Law Firm are here to help you.

Top Debt Collection Violations

Debt collection laws provide a laundry list of what collectors can and cannot do while collecting a debt. Based on our years of experience handling thousands of debt collection harassment cases, here’s what collection agencies most often do to violate the law:

Called you about a debt you do not owe.

Called you at work after you told them you cannot receive calls at work.

Left you a message without identifying the company’s name.

Left you a message without disclosing that the call is from a debt collector.

Called third-parties (family, friends, coworkers, or neighbors) even though the collection agency knows your contact information.

Disclosed to a third-party (family, friends, coworkers, or neighbors) that you owe a debt.

Contacted you after you said to stop calling.

Threatened you with legal action (such as a lawsuit or wage garnishment).

Called you before 8:00 AM or after 9:00 PM.

Continued to call you after you have told the collector you cannot pay the debt.

Communicated (phone or letter) with you after you filed for bankruptcy.

Failed to mark the debt on your credit report as disputed after you disputed the debt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to pay your fees and costs for helping me with my consumer rights case? No. We handle consumer rights cases based on a fee-shift provision and/or a contingency fee. That means either the other side pays your fees and costs, or we take a percentage of your recovery. Whether it’s a fee-shift case or a contingency-fee case, we don’t get paid unless you get paid, and you’ll never owe us a penny for our time.

What are the damages I can get under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act? If a collection agency violates any section of the FDCPA, you are entitled to damages up to $1,000.00. You may also be entitled to actual damages if the violation caused you out-of-pocket expenses. For example, if a collection agency threatens you with legal action to induce you to pay the debt, you may be able to get your payment back as actual damages.

What are the damages under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? You can get $500 per robocall, or $1,500 per robocall if the robocalls were willful. In any type of settlement, Defendants often pay much less than $500 per call. However, if there are 50 calls at issue, even at $250 per call, your case could settle for $12,500.00.

What type of debt is covered under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act? Only consumer debt, such as personal, family, and household debts. For example, money you owe on a personal credit card, an auto loan, a medical bill, or a utility bill. The FDCPA does not cover debts you incurred to run a business, or debts regarding unpaid taxes, or traffic tickets.

Does the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act apply to banks or credit card companies? No.  Only third-party debt collectors are bound by the FDCPA. Original creditors, such as banks and credit card companies, are not bound by the FDCPA.

Are there state laws that protect me from original creditors? Yes! Several states also have laws that provide its citizens an additional layer of protection. If you live in California, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wisconsin, you have additional state-law rights.

Are mistakes on credit reports common? Yes! Are you one of the 40 million Americans who have a mistake on their credit report? Mistakes on your credit report can be very costly.  Along with causing you to pay higher interest rates, you may be denied credit, insurance, a rental home, a loan, or even a job because of these mistakes. Some mistakes may include someone else’s information on your credit report, inaccurate public records, stale collection accounts, or maybe you were a victim of identity theft.

What do I do if I have a mistake on my credit report? If you have a mistake on your credit report, there is a process to dispute them. My office will help you pull your credit report and dispute any inaccurate information. If a credit reporting agency violates its obligations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you may be entitled to statutory damages up to $1,000.00, plus the credit reporting agency will be required to fix the error.  The FCRA also has a fee-shift provision, which means the credit reporting agency pays your attorney’s fees and costs. Therefore, you will not pay me a penny for my time. To speed up the process, please get a free copy of your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. You can also learn more about the FCRA and your rights at http://www.agrussconsumerlaw.com/practices/common-credit-report-errors/.

Share your Complaints against Western Control Services Below

We encourage you to post your complaints about Western Control Services. Sharing your complaints against this agency can help other consumers understand what to do when this company starts calling. Sharing your experience may help someone else!

HERE’S THE DEAL!

If you are being harassed by Western Control Services over a debt, you may be entitled to money damages – up to $1,000 for harassment, and $500 – $1,500 for illegal robocalls. Under state and federal laws, we will help you based on a fee-shift provision and/or contingency fee, which means the debt-collector pays your attorney’s fees and costs. You won’t owe us a dime for our services. We have settled thousands of debt collection harassment cases, and we’re prepared to help you, too. Contact Agruss Law Firm at 888-572-0176 to stop the harassment once and for all.

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