#the dissident library

[dissidentlibrary]

That's when I saw the photograph.

Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk

on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard in Paris

were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts

being reviled and spat upon by the mob

as she was making her way to school

in Charlotte, North Carolina.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #72 – Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is not exactly one of my favourite working authors, but at this point he’s probably quite close. Certainly I haven’t yet regretted giving anything new of his I could get my hands on a try – and this is no exception (even if it’s not really that new, given I waited for my library system to get a copy). It doesn’t completely succeed at everything it goes for, but privileging themes over speculative xeno-biology is really a pretty fair choice, and as narratives go it was both fun and compelling.

The story follows Anton Daghdev – dissident, academic, and dissident academic who, for crimes against the Mandate of Humanity, has been sentenced to transportation to an extrasolar penal colony and a lifetime of hard labour furthering the Mandate’s understanding of the alien ecosystem which has flourished there. It’s a life sentence, make no mistake – but the fecund, symbiosis-obsessed ecology of ‘Kiln’ is far beyond anything he imagined when he was put into cryosleep for the 30 year voyage , and that’s before he is introduced to the real prize: Ruins. Real, artificial structures, with ornamentation, power generation, and writing – all signs of an intelligent creator which has entirely vanished from the ecosystem. Anton is caught between a camp that is itself is a horror show, ruled throgh brutality and fear by a commandant who devotion to the Mandate’s doctrines makes any actual understanding of Kiln impossible, and the ever-growing ecosystem beyond the compound’s walls that is forever seeking the right combination of proteins and molecules to form a bridge between species and worlds, ten thousand species of parasites and symbiotes forever seeking promising new hosts.

The book is concerned with several things, but the most obvious and the aesthetically dominant is the whole trope of the ‘death world’ – specifically the verdant and overgrowing jungle variety, where everything is green and beautiful and constantly looking for a way to kill you. A trope that’s always been more-or-less obviously inspired by 19th century European explorers and colonizers experience in the Amazon and Congo, and 20th century Americans in South East Asia – and the book is very interested in the colonial imagery, here. Everyone’s utter horror at the idea of contamination by the environment and its use as threat and punishment to keep the labourers in line is a central organizing principle of camp life. The fact that that the efforts to understand the nature of kilnish life and intelligence has been futile from the word go because of doctrines and assumptions the human scientists are labouring under and their studies has only ever been destructive and useless stamp-collecting is also just a theme running through the whole book.

From a slightly different perspective, this would be a fairly classic sci fi horror story, honestly – a moral atrocity of a scientific mission, destroyed in a fit of destructive karma as its prisoner/slave labour is infected and comes to know the alien life surrounding them in a way no human science could ever hope to. Very gothic, very Lovecraft. The lead archaeologist even gives a more-or-less sympathetic protagonist to tell it through.

As it is, on the level of genre this is basically an anti-cosmic horror story. The alien really is Alien, the world is vast and strange and you can’t really know anyone or anything – which is the trap. It’s not the alien infection that drives you mad, it’s the isolation and solitude of having felt the connection and ability to truly communicate without lies or deception it offers and then losing it beneath airlocks and thick plastic walls. It’s only be true trust and embrace of the most shockingly alien life ever seen – let alone any other humans – that the species can actually be liberated.

It rather reminds me of Last Exit by Max Gladstone that way – basically entirely different genres, but in both manage to make the alien seem truly terrifying and uncanny, and in both cases it’s the obsession with remaining pure and human and trying a sharp border between Us and Them that’s the real source of horror.

The thematic counterpoint here is the Mandate. It’s a totalitarian state in a very old-school, 20th century modernist way. Government through police spies and regular purges, legitimized by a grand historical project which is mostly just keeping everything neat and legible for the benefit of the top of the pyramid. It’s not that there aren’t true believers to the cause of Scientific Philanthropy, but it really doesn’t need that many of them. It rules through self-interest and fear – the tiny impossible hope of actually changing anything, or the absolute certainty of being sold out and swept up by the time your conspiracy has enough people in it to actually change anything. The Mandate makes it impossible to trust or rely upon anyone else, and by atomizing humanity makes it possible to bind them more tightly to the ruling state than ever before. It’s only be really radical – inhuman, really – levels of trust and cooperation and openness among people trying to resist that it can be fought, with its snitches and its tear gas and its automatic weaponry.

So yes, not the most subtle book in the world. But it definitely worked for me, on balance. It’s surprisingly rare to have a protagonist whose a committed political revolutionary on page 1 and never stops being one in damn near any story I come across, so maybe I just enjoyed the rare treat.

Though it does suffer some in the third act. An opinion I increasingly think I have about everything, but still. Kilnish xenobiology and -ecology is for the first two acts o the book is both aesthetically amazing and actually plausibly alien-seeming, but as Anton really understands it does become a bit credulity-stretchingly benevolent and purely symbiotic (not to mention structurally stable and only changing in the particulars across aeons), a few offhand lines about ‘red in two and claw’ aside. The narration also really doth protest too much about how the connection between the Kiln-infected humans totally isn’t telepathy. It wasn’t really a long book (certainly not by genre standards) but the whole final act also did just feel a bit bloated and meandering.

All of which is really just me being incapable of enjoying something without complaining though. If you like old-school feeling sci fi about alien worlds, Big Themes and improbably physically fit scientists, would recommend.

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 1, 2025

I do not much like the destruction of books. As a form of protest, it conjures sinister images from the past, most notably the Pathé news reels of brownshirts and students gathered around a pyre in Berlin’s Opernplatz under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis had raided libraries, universities and other private collections to harvest works by political dissidents, sexologists, “degenerate” artists and any others deemed to be “un-German”. Books by Left-wing authors such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Rosa Luxemburg were publicly incinerated, along with fictional works by the likes of Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. This was philistinism in its purest form.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalise his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lacklustre commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organisation devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalised religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behaviour is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will baulk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalisation of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalisation of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

--

==

"Why can't you just comply with our authoritarian religious codes?"

Because you want me to. Your religious codes are for you, not me.

This is literally terrorism. We are supposed to be afraid of what will happen to us if we don't submit to Islamic totalitarianism. That is reason enough to not just resist, but actively oppose and defy Islamic totalitarian demands.

[aladaylessecondblog]

The Whore AU - Vemyn

Author's Note: Vemyn's into almost getting caught. nsft.

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

The walk from the tunnel under Kogoruhn to Vemynal thankfully wasn't very far, and glad Sadara was of that. The blight winds were even worse inside the Ghostfence than out, and she was happy to get back indoors.

An ash ghoul who identified himself as Dagoth Nilor greeted her, and directed her to the "library," where she found Dagoth Vemyn.

The interview with him was short and to the point. There was no one else in the library at present. He would leave the room, after which she was to take a book - any book, it didn't really matter which one - and stand at a table in the corner to read it. Then he'd come back in and do as he pleased with her, while trying not to be seen by any who passed by or entered the room.

She nodded and Vemyn left.

Looking over the bookshelves she finally find a book that looked both small and interesting - The Seven Curses. She wouldn't be doing much reading anyway, once he got started. She carried it over to the table, and opened it.

...through the doors of the unmourned house

where scoffers scoff and schemers scheme

from the halls of the oath-breaking house

rings seven curses of gods blasphemed

She'd heard of these prophecies only a few times, from a customer of hers who had been the type to be deep in his cups and chatty. A Dissident Priest, before he'd disappeared. These things never seemed to turn up at all, he'd said, and if they did they were kept under lock and key, in secret compartments. But House Dagoth had them out in the open.

There was an echo of footsteps, and she kept her eyes on the paper before her.

first curse, Curse-of-Fire

second curse, Curse-of-Ash

third curse, Curse-of-Flesh

fourth curse, Curse-of-Ghosts

Curse of fire, curse of ash. Obviously Red Mountain itself, she thought, that was easy enough. Curse of flesh...corprus. She'd caught it a while back and thought nothing of it, assuming perhaps she'd just gotten lucky enough not to have a serious case. But then she'd learned that ALL cases were serious ones.

Save hers. And THAT, that was a small reason to think she was what Araynys had thought her to be. But once she was out of this she had no intention of declaring it. That was the surest way to get into trouble here.

Curse of ghosts, though, that was one she couldn't figure out.

fifth curse, Curse-of-Seed

Sadara gave a chuckle in her throat at reading those words. She certainly knew what THAT meant...

A pair of hands on her hips, that moved slowly forward and then up, to the neckline of her robe.

"Something funny?" came the whisper in her ear.

"Just reading the prophecies." Sadara replied to Vemyn, who took a firm grip on her breasts. "Seven curses...and one of them is curse-of-seed. I'm not certain I'd call it a curse, though."

"How fortunate for us that you're so open-minded." His tone flattened as he gave a tug to her robe; it was enough for her breasts to pop out over the neckline. In an instant Vemyn's hands were on them again. A growl of desire sounded off in her ear.

"So eager," she teased softly, "I--"

And then, suddenly, a hand moved up to cover her mouth. Someone was walking past the library entrance, meandering practically. Her chest was left bare to the air - even if whoever-it-was came in, they'd see nothing unless they got too close.

(She could feel Vemyn's cock, already half hard, rising to full mast as they waited for whoever-it-was to pass.)

Only when they were safe again did Vemyn move his hands again.

"So close to being caught, weren't we?" she teased, "Surely, they'd have seen me bare, but do you think they would have seen your cock hard like that for me too? Do you think -"

Vemyn groped her a bit longer before moving one hand south, to pull at the knot tied in her belt. It came loose, and the front of her robe opened for him. He let his hand slide slowly over her bare skin, seeming to revel in the touch, until it slipped beneath her smallclothes and his fingers began to probe at the heat between her legs.

Sadara clenched at the table, prompting a short laugh in her ear from Vemyn. He pressed closer - and she pushed back, grinding against his cock with her ass.

"Minx," he accused.

"Professional," Sadara retorted.

Once she was wet enough, he tugged her robe outward, tucking it back. It exposed her leg, and then her ass to the cold air of the room. She shivered just slightly, and bent slightly over the table, waiting. There was the slight shuffling sound of Vemyn adjusting his loincloth, and then suddenly--

She pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle the groan that wanted to slip out. The sudden shift from emptiness to being utterly filled with that cock was overwhelming. Clearly, he was eager - but she thought she might be too, if a year elapsed between each opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh.

"Can't keep quiet on your own, can you?" It was Vemyn's turned to tease. "No. No, of course not..."

It was a steady piston, his thrusts, and Sadara wanted to bring her hand down so she could respond. But he was right - she didn't trust herself not to make noise. The entire point of this was NOT to get caught.

So why--why, she wondered, as his next thrust, hard and deep enough to practically take her breath away, enough that her knees were suddenly weak--did he seem to be working so hard to make her do it?

Part of the draw of it. Easy to keep quiet and not get caught. Harder to do this and manage it.

"You're trying--" Vemyn's pace slowed as he pulled her upright, which let him hit a bit deeper, "--so hard to say nothing, aren't you?"

She nodded, hand still firmly clamped over her mouth.

He whispered a bit longer, words that seemed to touch some deep part of her that craved the praise he was dispensing. Words telling her how good she was being for him, trying to obey his orders, trying to do as he'd asked her. And all the while that cock spreading her around him, stoking the flames in her belly higher and higher.

"Lord Vemyn?"

The voice came from the doorway, and suddenly the orgasm that only a moment again seemed close enough to taste - was denied. Vemyn withdrew from her in a hurry, pushed her robe forward, and she hastily tied it while he adjusted himself.

"Yes?"

"We have new dreamers," came the voice, now more clearly an ash ghoul, "Three of them."

"Thank you, Soler," Vemyn said quickly, "I'll speak to them shortly. For now process them in the usual fashion."

There was a sound of acknowledgement and then of footsteps, as their intruder left.

Vemyn pounced on Sadara the moment he was able. Her robe, untied, pulled open, her pushed down and bent over the table - his cock, spreading her cunt wide around him.

"That--really--excited you--didn't it?" she let herself tease, forcing the moans to stay back. "You almost--seemed like you--wanted to get caught."

He didn't answer. Now those clawed fingers were at the bare skin of her hips, eagerly tugging her back against him, never letting her get completely free of his cock. A moan slipped from her lips, and seemed to energize him further.

"Gods," she moaned softly, "I'm so close."

She slipped a hand between her legs, stroking over her clit; between that and the rapid movement of Vemyn's thrusts, her climax rushed through her like the sudden crash of a wave and dashed her on the rocks below.

"Oh--GODS--" The sound she made now was strangled, broken, and she shuddered around his cock as pleasure drowned her.

A sudden clench--a hot triple pulse, wet inside her--and it was over.

Sadara was left breathing hard, and took a few moments to relax before she let herself get shakily to her feet. Vemyn helped her re-tie her robe, and gave a grin when she turned around. He indulged in a few kisses - riding out the high of that lovely heat.

"You did much better than the rest we've had," he said, "Perhaps next year we should ask you back, provided you've not yet been scared off."

"You all are nothing I haven't handled before," Sadara replied, "Speaking of...I was told Tureynul's next. What should I expect from him?"

"Nothing much, he's quite plain," Vemyn said. "Compared to the rest of us. He simply wants to get off and be done with it, nothing special. Sometimes he wants his whores to sleep beside him."

"That doesn't sound too bad."

[ilikereadingactually]

Alien Clay

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

WOW WOW WOW. WOW. it's been a while since i've encountered a book as surprising as this one. not in a one-big-shock kind of way, but rather a pleasant slow creep of "are we really going there? oh my god, we are." key features of my delight include absolutely perfect use of "unreliable" limited first person narration, and expertly wielded sections of non-chronological narrative.

i've realized that i tend to approach these casual reviews more like a reading journal and i usually don't give any plot synopsis, which is related to how i like to approach books—with enough sense of the vibe to know i might like it, but not much foreknowledge of what it's about. but i've been feeling like maybe it would be useful to other people to have a tiny bit of synopsis, as a treat. so:

the plot of this book in one sentence: a xenobiologist and academic political dissident is sentenced to a labor camp on an alien world, where he is sure to die, but he might get to study alien life forms first.

it's a fascinating read, and feels very prescient right now. the way Tchaikovsky presents the political orthodoxy of this future, and the strengths and weak points of resistance from a perspective inside it, is so striking! and it's all happening inside this quiet growing horror, the source of which slowly shifts and evolves over the course of the book. what a treat to read a novel so fully unified in its themes, on every level of the narrative and even in the structure!

i also have to yell a little about the narrator, Arton Daghdev. he is simultaneously charming and pathetic, wickedly sharp and foolishly soft. his observations and assessments of himself and the people around him, of academia, of oppression and the oppressors, of the alien surroundings, are all so delightful to me and remind me favorably and unfavorably of many academics i know.

a complete stunner of a book, and my takeaway is that i should have been reading Tchaikovsky's books before now, and i will definitely be requesting some from my library.

the deets

how i read it: another e-galley from NetGalley! so close to digging out from the fall backlog i got stuck in!

try this if you: revel in ambiguous morality, have ever experienced academia, dig stories about resisting fascism, love to see a classic alien planet scenario turned on its head, or were into Scavengers Reign.

some lines i really liked: not kidding, i took 17 screencaps of possible inclusions for this section and whittled it down to a few examples of Tchaikovsky's funny and startling prose and incredibly sharp arguments.

Then we start grappling, slinging ourselves back and forth as the rest of the Labour jeer and cheer. He tries to ram a knee right into my academic credentials and I try to yank a fistful of that wiry beard out.

---

Primatt doesn't even look at me. If I'm a personnel file, it's one she hasn't opened. She makes her face into standard-expression-when-confronted-with-authority number seventeen: willingness to be enlightened.

---

And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it's deviation from the truth that lets them do these things. It's the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won't lift a finger, because they've believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead. That there is sufficient genetic distinction to make the call, when in actuality we share the vast bulk of our inheritance with mushrooms. Or else that, because of this kinship with mushrooms, our leaders are justified in keeping us in the dirt and feeding us shit.

---

He smiles thinly. I never saw so thin a smile. You could open your wrists with it.

---

"This could have been your crowning achievement," he tells me. "To contribute to solving the mystery. Instead of which you make it all about politics." Thus sayeth the politician when the scientist ventures an opinion.

pub date: September 17, 2024. GO READ THIS, IM NOT KIDDING AROUND HERE.

[tiger-tail]

Postinggw while um concussed to feed the crows

Jimmy hears Joel murmuring some random song with his headphones on from a few feet away. Joel is sitting across the table from him at a library. Jimmy is reading a very thick book on birds.

Joel looks so peaceful like this, Jimmy has the notion to point this out. Joel wasn't normally this relaxed. Jimmy can catch a few lyrics in his lazy sing-along. It sounds like Pup or Dog Park Dissidents but he's not sure. Maybe it was Destructo Disk?

As Joel starts doing finger drums in the air, Jimmy goes back to reading his book. The current page is about Robins, with a diagram pointing to all the different parts of the bird. Spring was starting to get warm, so of course his yard was covered in robins eating all the crabapples that fell from Joel's tree. He had actually photographed a few of them yesterday.

Robins reminded Jimmy of Joel. They're loud, small, and eat a lot. Robins wouldn't shut up if they knew what was good for them. Joel's humming from across the table gets a little louder. Robins were pretty small, but about average sized for a backyard bird. They're hungry and eat anything they're given. The only thing Joel won't eat is Scott's cooking. He makes a comment every time about how Scott doesn't know better than to not poison him out of distaste.

Jimmy knows better than to comment on Joel's height.

Jimmy flips the page. Mourning doves…

Jimmy is startled near intense enough that he slams the book down on the table. A loud bang and yelp sounds from the opposite side of the table, and the table shakes. Jimmy breathes in and out with closed eyes before peering over…. right.

Joel had fallen over in his chair leaning back. He made no attempt at getting up, clearly accepting his place on the floor. Jimmy scoffs.

He walks over to Joel and pulls the headphones off of the brunette's head. Jimmy gives Joel a glare and shushes him loudly.

Joel's voice is a whisper.

“Not even an ‘are you okay’? I'm heartbroken.”

“Are you okay?”

“It's too late now!”

…

“Yes I'm fine.” He laughs quietly.

Jimmy can hear the music that's blasting in his headphones.

Ah. Nine Inch Nails.

[outeremissary]

I was really sleepy when I was answering asks yesterday and I almost forgot to check if you were doing the problematic oc ask too!

Balth is your oc I’m most familiar with! But if they’ve already been asked tell me about whatever critter is infecting your brain most rn 👀💖

Ahh, I appreciate the ask!! Somehow, no one did ask about him!! At any rate, I feel like this blog is full of Balthazar's sympathetic moments and not his Chaotic Fucking Evil Moments, happy to finally correct that <3

Lies constantly

Vengeful

Selfish

Past history of gold digging

Former con artist

Endorsement of experiments on animals

Enjoys watching other people suffer

Loves making people worse

Willing to sell out friends when they cease to be useful

Told a suicidal man to do a flip on the way down

Made fun of a suicidal man's family's deaths

Invades woman's memories to see her at her most vulnerable, mocks her for it

In general just willing to kick anyone when they're down

Doesn't like Regongar's puns

Profited from infant sacrifice

Murdered his own cult

Lied about having a cult

Problematic trans rep?

Accepted demonic gifts multiple times

Supported two different Lamashtu cults

Really does unconditionally forgive Tristian

Sincerely thinks Tristian did nothing wrong

(except cause problems for him but see two points above)

Funded demonic library

Misappropriation of public funds for personal projects

Harboring smugglers

Has been called the worst and most evil person in the Stolen Lands multiple times

Had a cult dedicated to him being The Worst (until he murdered them, see above)

Recruits enemies terrorizing area to work for him

Leading on poor Sharel

Frequently manipulates others into killing on his behalf

Takes credit for the work of others

Refuses to help with camp chores

Troll alliance

Hates animals

Obnoxious PDA

Abuses aasimar heritage to take advantage of others' trust

The public executions

The secret executions

Comes from working class family, often uses his success to close opportunities for others instead of opening them

Jaethal minister

Belittles Regongar's mental health problems

Ghosts Regongar instead of breaking up with him

Mocks Linzi's writing constantly

Enchantment specialist. Mind control is the way <3

Endorsement of experiments on nonconsenting wererats

Identity theft

Identity theft coverup

Asshole southern elitist, frequently belittles local culture as backwards

Propaganda

Lying to the public about a plague

Gaslighting rioters into fighting each other

24 year old bullying a 17 year old... Lander Lebeda is literally a minor

Plus that's just high key pathetic

The murders

The assassinations

Doesn't like dessert :(

Funding foreign dissidents

Endorsement of troll torture

Bad at communicating emotional needs

Using other people as shields in combat

Will throw anyone under the bus for anything

Really only heals Tristian in combat

Supports filicide for dark ritual purposes

His friendship with Jaethal in general

Problematic bi rep?

Attempted to recreate Bloom

Everything that happened during the Divorce Era

There's probably still a warrant out for him in Absalom

Due to [redacted]

Defacing a priceless historic tome (only known copy)

Anyone can die if it's for Tristian's sake

Sells out allies when they stop being convenient

Surtova supporter

Covering up Lander's death

Lander Undeath Incident

Torture is fine

I'm not even sure he seriously thinks torture works he's just horrible

Bread and circuses babyyyyyy

Mean to Nok-Nok

Literally kicked a dog

And there's an incomplete list of Balthazar Crimes! I'm sure I'm missing so, so much but honestly he's problematic more than he's not so. You know.

[prompt]

[da3drat]

Meri in the library of the dissident priests.

Drew this aaaaages ago and couldn’t decide whether to post it but I thought eh, might as well.

[quietbluejay]

The Buried Dagger Take 2 #6

back in the present, mortarion is not dealing well with poor zurrieq's undeath

except…now one has it's like he was conquered and there's something warpy about it because of the undeath on the command deck, typhon is talking with a bunch of people there's trouble

they can't figure out how it's happening or who would have done it though morarg theorizes it's the alpha legion lmao typhon: u all forgot we're in the warp morarg: u forgot we got gellar fields and now it's time for mortarion to give a fleet-wide speech

mortarion: i'm not dramatic like SOME people

Arzach: dramatic entrance and exit in shadows

the tldr of his speech is it's a total lockdown

I'm not dramatic, he said, like a big fat liar

after the speech, mortarion whispers to typhon for him to get his specialists on the case

however, they get interrupted because one of the ships is going to try and transition back into realspace

end chapter yeah like, genuinely, the moment Typhon killed the navigators, maybe even the moment they entered the Warp, there was no way out of this

unfortunately we're back to terra

Rubio is feeling deeply suspicious because they didn't make him go through the normal security protocols so he goes immediately to Malcador checking out his library lol

flickering light this guy's going for peak drama

there's a velvet bag nearby with some silver coins on it i know what it is but i can't help but make the joke about this being Rubio's 30 pieces of silver rubio explains about the stuff that happened before, malcador makes some cryptic comments much to rubio's annoyance

lol. lmao. "you did exactly what i would have done, but i didn't order it, so it's bad" the foundations of the modern imperium really are found here in malcador Malcador also doesn't know what's up with the sisters also surprise appearance by Ael Wyntor Rubio: wtf. i saw him die. Malcador in his head: NO YOU DIDNT. DONT SAY ANYTHING. Rubio pulls out the recording of the sister(s), the one we left off on last time sounds like an offer of truce huh

over at white mountain, loken is showing garro and the rest a globe where the locations of all the sisters they found so far are marked there's a LOT

and there's no pattern to the disappearances

Garro: I know what it is okay but like, was this all alpha legion stuff? how DID these guys get so organized like lmaooo it's well within the bounds of reason to think there were a lot of discontents with the imperium so that's not a surprise it's the getting them organized that's the thing anyways Garro thinks about his personal lectitio copy

UwU groan the conversation moves on and they thought the imperial cult was a hideout for the horus dissidents which is incredibly hilarious to me but turns out some of the cult instances are but some of them are just…cultists Dr Brell isn't a fan of them lmao meanwhile Loken vibes with the messages and thinks it's Horus asking for peace

everyone: lmao why would horus even ask for peace loken: because somewhere deep down he knows this war is going to ruin us all also lmao, "arrogance" it's not like he's asking for their surrender this is way more diplomatic than that (i mean it's a trap as we all know, but still)

annnd right on cue Mr. Dramatic shows up to say "he's right, you know" i refer of course to Malcador so malcador is going to talk to them. alonnnne

it ends up with Rubio going with him malcador: on pain of death no one disturb me rubio meanwhile is NOT enjoying the psychic dampening here it feels like drowning

all the voices come together to say horus lupercal meanwhile back with the legionaries there's a bunch of cargo ships with horus' banners carrying a load of people who have somehow found this supposedly secret place loken orders them to fire at them they're gonna go out and attack all the people who escaped the ships so yeah back with the sisters, it's a message for Malcador

anyways yup it was a trap

he kills the scientist through the observation glass first for some reason yep rubio was a sleeper agent the whole time somehow

Arzach: One thing that irks me tho is how Swallow is, afaik, the only author to literally torture SoS / blanks in his books. Everytime. May be just a narrative thing but …

Sky: The contrast between the section with the Garro simping and 'Mortarion chooses to be a hero despite everything' is genuinely fascinating Feels like two different books

ok back to Mortarion and you know it's very appropriate i'm doing this book while i have a fever and have been sick for like 3 months (note: I don't have a fever any more! I have the arm problems but I am not sick!!)

he's going to the primarch access only secret room where daemon grulgor is held Grulgor: let me kill for you Mortarion: you'd like that, wouldn't you

Mortarion is here because he's got questions annnnd Grulgor has ✨ answers ✨

Grulgor: yes, and that's why it's so cool! Mortarion: i should kill you rn Grulgor: go ahead and do it, Grandfather's Gift will have me being like the cat from The Cat Came Back Mortarion internally: grandfather… ugh, it's time for some garro simping Mortarion briefly fantasizes about a universe where all this warpy stuff isn't involved in the heresy and garro is fighting side by side with him uwu Mortarion: ok i'll let you free if you give me your oath to obey me

(facepalm)

heh

dumbass and then mortarion…notices something….

next time we're going back to flashback land!

[lboogie1906]

Gisèle Rabesahala (May 7, 1929 - June 27, 2011) a political and human rights activist and councilwoman, was born Marie Gisèle Aimée Rabesahala in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Her father was a non-commissioned French army officer, she spent her childhood in France, Tunisia, and what is now Mali. She graduated from Jean Joseph Rabearivelo High School and earned her Preparatory Certificate. She trained as a Stenographer typist and entered politics when she was 17.

She was employed as secretary to the Democratic Movement for Malagasy Renewal. She helped free thousands of prisoners following the Malagasy Uprising through her articles, bringing attention to their cause and plight.

She became the first woman elected as a municipal councilor. She was a political party leader where she united several competing nationalist organizations, including the Protestant Merina dissidents and communists, to help create the Congress Party for the Independence of Madagascar which she co-founded.

She was the first woman to hold a ministerial position in the Madagascar government. She promoted the language, culture, and heritage of the Malagasy people. She created the Malagasy Copyright Office and spearheaded the restoration of historical sites and monuments such as royal palaces and tombs. She founded the National Library, creating branches of public libraries in 58 towns, and ensured that many books in the library were written in Malagasy by Malagasy authors. She advocated for the poor and underserved.

She was the Deputy Speaker of the Senate. She served as Founder of the Madagascar-Cuba Friendship Association, Grand Officer of the Malagasy National Order, Medalist of the Order of Friendship of the Peoples of the Former USSR, Medalist of the Order of Friendship of the Peoples of Vietnam, the Joliot Curie Gold Peace Medal of the World Peace Council, and the Order of Anna Betancourt Award.

She paved the way for other women African leaders. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[dissidentlibrary]

Heroes

I begin in Septembe, when I go on the road. "The road" means my return to the South. It means, briefly, for example, seeing Myrlie Evers, and the children - those children, who are children no longer. It means going back to Atlanta, to Selma, to Birmingham. It means seeinng Coretta Scott King, and Martin's children.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

#15yrsago Interview with the Chicago Tribune https://web.archive.org/web/20080811084607/http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2008/08/a-long-but-stil.html

#15yrsago Knitting all of Mario level one into a giant scarf https://themarioscarf.blogspot.com

#15yrsago Animatronic waterboarding exhibit at Coney Island https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html

#10yrsago Judge who accepted private-prison bribes to send black kids to jail sentenced to 28 years https://rollingout.com/2013/07/30/judge-must-serve-28-years-after-making-2-million-for-sending-children-to-jail/

#15yrsago The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away — story about geek monasteries for smart people who don’t fit in https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/

#10yrsago Civil Forfeiture: America’s daylight robbery, courtesy of the War on Drugs https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

#10yrsago US Senate IP address linked to Snowden Wikipedia change from “dissident” to “traitor” https://www.techdirt.com/2013/08/05/someone-using-us-senate-ip-address-edits-wiki-entry-to-change-ed-snowden-dissident-to-traitor/

#10yrsago Jeff Bezos’s letter to the WashPo staff https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post-purchase/2013/08/05/e5b293de-fe0d-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html

#10yrsago Why writers should stand up for libraries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vArSULK9Zzk

#10yrsago Ethical questions for security experts https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU-iRcUeA6p6fyEE4qUbSuFMqmSuWjRsL_4/edit?forcehl=1&hl=en#slide=id.p

#5yrsago Facebook to banks: give us our users’ financial data and we’ll let them bank with Facebook https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-banks-give-us-your-data-well-give-you-our-users-1533564049

#5yrsago Betsy DeVos’s summer monstrosity is pure McMansion Hell https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/6/17654434/betsy-devos-yacht-mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Consumer Reports now evaluates products’ security and privacy https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-payments/mobile-p2p-payment-services-review/

#5yrsago Germany’s top domestic spy advised far right xenophobic political party on how to avoid being billed as “extremists” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

#5yrsago On the cruelty of ankle-monitors https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ankle-monitors-are-another-kind-of-jail/

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

[cryptoagorism]

The dangers of the state's monopoly on identity

The state's monopoly on identity excludes vulnerable people from jobs, housing, healthcare and more.

This article originally began as a response to The Reboot's article, which discusses the dangers of perpetual tracking by Google, Facebook and Microsoft. [1]

While the tracking by Google, Facebook and Microsoft is definitely disturbing and can even put people in danger, the state's data economy is even worse, with far-reaching consequences. Few people talk about this, even though it affects millions of people's daily lives.

Via the government ID system, the state exerts a monopoly on identity and an obsession with tracking people from “birth certificate” to “death certificate”. Disproportionate KYC regulations actively exclude people without government-issued ID from necessary services, including jobs, housing and healthcare and even everyday things like online shopping, receiving mail, buying a sim card, doing volunteer work, taking classes, or visiting the gym or library.

Millions of people worldwide don't have access to government ID (the state refuses to print it for them) or can't show ID for safety reasons (e.g. they are a victim of abuse and don't want to be tracked down by the abuser). These people are often already in vulnerable situations (for example: stateless, undocumented or homeless people; activists, dissidents or refugees; victims of domestic abuse or adult victims of child abuse; or adults whose birth was not registered) and exclusion from basic needs makes it even more difficult to survive.

The state offers no alternatives nor solutions – if the state refuses to print a passport, national ID card or birth certificate for someone, this person can't appeal, get help from NGOs or lawyers, or find an alternative way to get ID. [2]

The state's system does not offer a procedure to register yourself, for example if you weren't registered at birth or your country of birth is dangerous to you. There are no steps you can take – no appeals, checklists, regularization, rehabilitation, special circumstances, friendly jurisdictions, nor identity issuer of last resort. You cannot earn access to ID via merit, vouches, oaths, good behavior, probation, community service, nor any other form of effort or compassion. Even if the individual would otherwise qualify for a skilled work, marriage or humanitarian visa and could provide a biometric photo and fingerprints, this is not enough.

Similarly, there are no non-state solutions. NGOs and religious organizations like the United Nations, Red Cross and Caritas don't issue alternative IDs; jurisdictional arbitrage such as Flag Theory requires an existing birth certificate or old passport; and non-government IDs from World Passport or Digitalcourage are not accepted. This lack of alternatives only cements the state's monopoly.

In the 1950s, the United Nations issued conventions on statelessness [3] and refugee status [4], but today countries still refuse to issue IDs for stateless people, people who weren't registered at birth, and people who have fled political, cultural or interpersonal persecution – whether by arbitrarily or discriminatorily denying applications for stateless status, refugee status or delayed birth registration, ignoring submitted applications, or not having a process for applications at all, while simultaneously criminalizing people without a legal identity. [5] In 2014, the UNHCR started a campaign to “end statelessness by 2024” [6], but today it is still impossible to get a stateless or non-citizen passport, and unlike the laissez-passer passports of the past, the United Nations no longer issues substitute IDs, despite that it could help millions of people to access necessities such as employment, housing and healthcare.

This condemns individuals purely and permanently to their circumstances of birth, which they could not influence and cannot change. As an adult, there is no way to enter the system. If you were born in the wrong place (e.g. stateless, refugee, dissident) and/or to the wrong people (e.g. child abuse, cult, no birth registration), there is no way to rise above your situation through effort, determination nor compassion.

The state's monopoly on identity is therefore an unethical, fatalistic single point of failure.

Even for individuals with ID, the name that the state prints on their ID may not correspond to the name that they use in real life, which could put them in danger. [7] Many countries restrict or even ban legal name changes, which endangers victims of abuse (such as adults who escaped from child abuse, domestic abuse, cults or gangs), who use a self-chosen name for a fresh start, to feel human, to recover from trauma or for physical safety reasons. [8]

As government ID is not universal and does not signify security or trust, government ID requirements only disproportionately and unfairly exclude people from services. [9]

Returning to the topic of “surveillance capitalism” – People can choose to stop using Google, Facebook, Windows or stock Android. There are many alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, Mastodon, Linux and custom ROMs such as Lineage or Graphene. There are also ways to protect your privacy, such as reducing usage of social media, using a VPN or Tor, using a burner phone, using a pseudonym, or using cash or crypto instead of credit cards. [10]

In comparison, when the state coerces the vast majority of employers, landlords and hospitals to require government ID, there are only a few gray market alternatives left (e.g. under the table work, informal rentals for cash, doctors who accept out-of-pocket payments). [11]

It is a stark contrast: If you don't use Facebook for privacy reasons, you can still find different ways to keep in contact with friends and local events. If you can't rent most apartments because the landlord requires a passport or driver's license, you are very lucky if you can find a room in a shared apartment where your roommates deal with the contract for you and you pay rent to your roommates in cash. One thing can be an inconvenience, one thing can cause homelessness.

Many people believe government ID is the only way to trust that “someone is who they say they are”. [12] If someone admits that they don't have “proper ID”, they are often seen as untrustworthy, hiding something or even dangerous. [13] The equation of “ID = trust” not only leads to social stigma and exclusion, but can also lead to poverty and homelessness [14], threats of violence, or even indefinite detention (in many countries, cops can demand ID without a reason, and detain the individual until their legal identity is known – which can mean indefinite imprisonment for people who were never assigned a legal identity [15] [16]). Rather than “innocent until proven guilty”, this creates a situation of “guilty and no way to prove innocence”.

If innocence is not based on your actions, but purely on possession of government ID, it creates an impossible scenario when no jurisdiction agrees to print ID for you – from stateless people who literally have nowhere to go, to refugees who can't return to or interact with their country of birth for safety reasons, to adults whose births were never registered, to victims of child abuse, domestic abuse or cult abuse who don't use their birth name due to decades of trauma or worse the risk of being tracked down and returned. Instead of blaming authoritarian countries, uncooperative bureaucrats, abusive or neglectful birth parents, violent ex-partners or sociopathic cult leaders, the victim is blamed, distrusted and considered as a criminal.

In an ideal world, people would be judged on their actions and intent, rather than on circumstances of birth and decisions of bureaucrats. For housing, only your ability to pay rent would be relevant. For a job, only your skills and work ethic would be relevant. For healthcare, only your medical condition would be relevant (it would be against the Hippocratic Oath to deny medical treatment to people without ID, especially if they are paying out-of-pocket in cash).

For identity, it would be enough to say your name, get a vouch from a friend, landlord or employer, link to a social media profile, or use a non-government photo ID (such as from Digitalcourage or World Passport, which does not require birth registration or citizenship and allows self-chosen names).

For authentication, you would use a password or PIN (e.g. SMS code to pickup mail), physical key or card (e.g. mailbox keys, membership cards) or a cryptographic keypair (such as in PGP, Bitcoin or Monero).

For trust, word-of-mouth was the primary method before government IDs were invented (and made mandatory) in the 20th century. [17] [18] [19] Nowadays, word-of-mouth includes vouches from friends, online reviews, social networks, web-of-trust and memberships. Cash deposits and escrow systems (e.g. Bitrated) would protect against scams, theft or damage.

This meritocratic, non-government market is not theoretical. Permissionless free markets exist today – under the names of agorism [20], informal economies, black and gray markets, parallel economies and Second Realms – and offer hope and a means to survive to people in need. [21] [22] While NGOs have tried in vain to convince the state to print IDs for vulnerable people, these independent markets take a practical, grassroots approach to help people access work, housing and healthcare, even without government-issued ID. [23]

These free markets offer a way for people to take control of their situation. Human rights activists have campaigned since decades, while individuals have been left in limbo or excluded entirely from society, purely due to bureaucracy. In the 1950s, the United Nations called on nation-states to print IDs for stateless people, unregistered people and refugees – but seventy years later, the situation has only become worse, as more daily life necessities require government ID KYC every year, yet nation-states still refuse to print ID for millions of people.

Even worse, these people are not being accused of a specific crime and there is no real justification to deny printing IDs for them – their only “crime” is the vicious circle of not having papers because the state refuses to print papers for them. You would think economic exclusion – banned from employment, housing, healthcare, education, banking, travel, contracts, mail, sim cards and more – would be a punishment for only the most severe of crimes. But for stateless people, refugees, victims of abuse and people who weren't registered at birth, it is a punishment for being born. In this unforgiving situation, the informal economy provides an essential lifeline and way to survive.

Some examples include under-the-table work, informal apartment rentals, health clinics run by volunteers and anonymous sim cards. Most informal, agorist markets are local, based on word-of-mouth with cash-in-hand payments. The internet can also offer a place for an uncensored digital economy – such as for global trade [24], remote work, activism, fundraising [25] and community building – while cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Monero offer a way to send and receive money online without government ID or a bank account [26] [27] and withdraw to local cash when needed [28].

There are many reasons why people participate in agorist markets. It can be quicker and easier to rent out your spare room for cash, pay a doctor out-of-pocket instead of dealing with public health insurance, or hire an online freelancer for crypto. Bureaucracy doesn't just shut people out of the market, it also takes time and money to fill out forms, deal with months-long wait times, pay extortionate fees, and apply for government permission (which may be denied for arbitrary or discriminatory reasons). Agorism cuts the red tape, enabling people to access what they need in a truly free market.

As the state continues to ostracize and even criminalize vulnerable people, agorism provides not only hope of inclusion and equal opportunities, but a practical, proven solution which works today. For universal and safe access to daily needs such as employment, housing and healthcare, it is important to build and use agorist markets that are immune to the state's monopoly on identity, invisible to the state's data economy, and free for everyone to use.

The following books, articles and podcasts provide more information about agorism, as well as practical examples:

“An Agorist Primer” by SEK3 Book: https://kopubco.com/pdf/An_Agorist_Primer_by_SEK3.pdf

“Second Realm: Book on Strategy” by Smuggler & XYZ Book: https://ia801807.us.archive.org/34/items/second-realm-digital/Second%20Realm%20Paperback%20New.pdf

“Crypto Agorism: Free markets for a free world” by AnarkioCrypto Video: https://tube.tchncs.de/w/tPvohTaiocfg5LEsFjGqHN Slides: https://anarkiocrypto.medium.com/crypto-agorism-free-markets-for-a-free-world-d9c755e6ef11

“Fifty things to do NOW” by The Free and Unashamed Article: https://libertyunderattack.com/fifty-things-now-free-unashamed

Vonu Podcast Audio: https://vonupodcast.com

Agora Podcast Audio: https://anchor.fm/mortified-penguin

Monero Talk Podcast Audio: https://www.monerotalk.live

Hack Liberty Forum Link: https://forum.hackliberty.org

Sources:

[1] https://thereboot.com/why-we-should-end-the-data-economy/ [2] https://anarkio.codeberg.page/blog/roadblocks-to-obtaining-government-id.html [3] https://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/protect-human-rights/ending-statelessness/un-conventions-statelessness [4] https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/1951-refugee-convention [5] https://index.statelessness.eu/sites/default/files/UNHCR%2C%20Faces%20of%20Statelessness%20in%20the%20Czech%20Republic%20(2020).pdf [6] https://unhcr.org/ibelong/about-statelessness [7] https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/2021/whats-in-a-name-the-case-for-inclusivity-through-anonymity [8] https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2274/identity-discrimination-and-challenge-id [9] https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2018/12/18/establishing-identity-is-a-vital-risky-and-changing-business [10] https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html [11] https://anarkio.codeberg.page/blog/survival-outside-the-state.html [12] https://sneak.berlin/20200118/you-dont-need-to-see-my-id [13] https://vonupodcast.com/know-your-customer-kyc-the-rarely-discussed-danger-guest-article-audio/ [14] https://www.statelessness.eu/blog/each-person-left-living-streets-we-are-losing-society [15] https://www.penalreform.org/blog/proving-who-i-am-the-plight-of-people/ [16] https://index.statelessness.eu/themes/detention [17] https://dergigi.medium.com/true-names-not-required-fc6647dfe24a [18] https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-measure/ [19] https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550 [20] https://anarkio.codeberg.page/agorism/ [21] https://libertyunderattack.com/fifty-things-now-free-unashamed [22] https://medium.com/@Kallman/a-21st-century-introduction-to-agorism-5dc69b54d79f [23] https://kopubco.com/pdf/An_Agorist_Primer_by_SEK3.pdf [24] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/kyc-free-bitcoin-circular-economies [25] https://kuno.anne.media [26] https://c4ss.org/content/57847 [27] https://whycryptocurrencies.com/toc.html [28] https://blog.trezor.io/buy-bitcoin-without-kyc-33b883029ff1

[fobnsfwdoodlesbackup]

pride asks woo !!

12, 15, 25

and for 35:

how do you deal with frustrating people like homophobes and transphobes or people just being generally shitty towards the lgbtq+ community?

Answers under the cut!

12) Name some queer artists/bands or songs you like most:

Dog Park Dissidents!!!! June Henry!!! Against Me!! Fall Out Boy!!! I definitely recommend finding as much queer music as you can, it's incredibly impactful to engage with art that shares your experience.

15) How has your identity changed overtime?

Overtime the main change is just that I've gotten more comfortable gobbling up any labels I want haha. When I was a teenager I identified as Bi, and then later as Pan. I came out as trans when I was 14 and that hasn't changed, but to me it coexists with identifying as lesbian/sapphic/dyke. Oh reclaiming of dyke/faggot is also a more recent change. Relating to the point below!

25) What queer discourse frustrates you the most?

The thing is. Queer history has to be sought out, and so many young queer people (or older, sure!) don't really have context around queer community struggling together and being intertwined. Discourse that feels very on-paper to me such as transmascs and lesbians not sharing community, bi vs pan, or discourse that weaves in other kinds of oppression like cis gay men being transphobic/misogynistic/racist etc. is frustrating. Our struggles are all woven together, and so is our liberation. And so is everyones!! Seeing in fighting online about how to appeal to cishet people or who's allowed to use what terms or be in what spaces feels like we're going backwards sometimes. We have important things that can be learned from one another, we have overlapping experiences and battles, we have been called overlapping slurs, and we must help one another to get anywhere in this god damn world. Talk to queer people that are older than you, younger than you, live in different parts of the world than you. Read anything you can online or at the library about queer history. We're all in this thing together and you can disagree with someone and still be in community with them.

35) How do you deal with frustrating people like homophobes and transphobes or people just being generally shitty towards the lgbtq+ community?

If it's online block their ass. Some Marco lore is that a guy in highschool stalked me for about 7 years and posted details about me on 4chan including pictures of me and where I went to school and worked. Just because I'm trans. Block them. I do think there is some value in arguing online, to practice getting uncomfortable and to signal to others that there's someone on their side, but I wouldn't recommend it generally.

A lot of my answers here are going to intertwine, but the best thing I can recommend is a robust support system. Friends, family, coworkers, pets, therapists, etc. Having people who love you helps with emotional battles, and with physical safety.

[justforbooks]

In December 1968, a plane carrying Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes touched down in Prague. The two authors had come to show solidarity with Czechoslovakia’s writers and to discuss the year’s historic events: how the hopes of Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring had ebbed into the interminable autumn of the Soviet patriarch.

Their host was the Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera, who has died aged 94. Mindful of the need to talk freely, Kundera took his guests to a sauna, the one place in the city impossible to bug. As the steam rose and their bodies began to overheat, the visitors asked where they might sluice off the sweat. The Czech led them to a back door opening on to a hole in the frozen Vltava. He motioned towards the river and they clambered down, expecting him to follow. But Kundera remained on the bank, laughing as these hothouse flowers of Latin-American literature emerged like popsicles from the icy waters.

“The second Czech K”, as Fuentes called Kundera, in 1968 had a growing reputation as poet, dramatist, essayist and intellectual. His first novel, The Joke (turned down initially for opposing official ideology), had finally been published the year before, gaining cult success, but this moment when socialism with a human face met the “threatening fists” of power was decisive, providing not just the setting for his best known work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982), but the governing theme of his oeuvre: how to be a novelist in an age when “political demagoguery has managed to ‘sentimentalise’ the will to power”.

For Kundera, who once defined himself as “a hedonist trapped in a world politicised in the extreme”, and whose novels are replete with bodily pleasures and humiliations, the lyrical intoxication of poet and revolutionary were dangerously allied. From the start, being funny was a serious business. In The Joke, a man sends a postcard with the mock salutation: “Long Live Trotsky!” The irony is lost on the censors, the result disastrous. Similarly, the stories that make up Laughable Loves (1963-68), move in a blink from farce to horror: the book was completed three days before the Russian invasion.

Like many intellectuals, Kundera was involved in the movement to create a de-Stalinised socialism. At the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1967, Kundera gave a rallying speech arguing that Czechoslovakia’s existential precariousness (frequently overrun, its language threatened) placed it in a unique position from which to address the 20th century, but this could be relished “only [in] conditions of total freedom”.

However, after the invasion, his belief in the possibility of change unravelled: he lost “the privilege to work”, his books were removed from libraries and, by 1970 and “normalizace” – the policy of undoing Dubcˇek’s reforms – he could no longer publish.

His Kafkaesque view of power led to disagreements with the dissident playwright Václav Havel, whom Kundera attacked for encouraging the illusion of hope (“moral exhibitionism”) in a situation where history preordained defeat.

Only apart from the fray could you record your testament: this is how the novel faces power, he argued famously, with “the fight of memory against forgetting”. Havel, who remained in “the country of the weak” (as Kundera described it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), was jailed and then fought to lead a new Czech nation in the successful Velvet Revolution, admonished him: history is not a clever divinity playing jokes on us – we are “creators of our own fate”. But Kundera had long since left the stage.

At about this time, he had started being translated abroad, a “traumatic” experience for him: he accused publishers in the west of acting like Moscow censors, when they, too, tried to “normalise” his work to fit western standards. But in 1975 he took a job in France at the University of Rennes, and four years later his Czech citizenship was revoked. He took French citizenship in 1981.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), the first novel to come from his exile – essayistic, multi-storied – stages a battle between devilish anti-meaning and the angelic one true idea of communism. Kundera pictures these celestial figures laughing in the face of one another, a murderous dialectic against which the writer, with his love of variety and inconclusiveness, has no defence: “the terrifying laughter of angels … covers my every word with its din”.

His writing contains much of this dark laughter, strewn with gags, pranks and paradoxes, and there are good reasons for this. He exploits the vein of black comedy that central European history gives its writers as a birthright, but more ambitiously it is humour, originating in the laughter of Boccaccio, Cervantes and Rabelais, that he sees underpinning the European novel, and which he argues, in four volumes of essays, has shaped western consciousness.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz thought “humour … the great invention of the modern spirit”, and for Kundera nothing better disseminated this idea than the generations of novels that flowed from Cervantes, producing an art of ambiguity and polyphony. These novels gave rise to our understanding of what it is to be an individual, Kundera argued, and with this, the idea of “human rights”.

All of which perhaps explains why some critics find his writing too didactic (“all talk and no story”). For all Kundera’s engaging intelligence, John Updike also felt a “strangeness that locks us out”.

Unlike Márquez, or Salman Rushdie – the company to which Kundera aspired – there is no sign of the shaman, no risk of being thought a sham. Perhaps his refusal to fall for anything – neither politics’ nor poetry’s intoxications – his pedagogic desire to disabuse, and his view of the novel as a supremely moral and rational art, leaves Kundera, peculiarly, a novelist disinclined to enchant.

For some though, such as the writer Geoff Dyer, Kundera’s importance lies precisely in this extension of the novel into meditative interrogation, by which, Dyer thinks, he “recalibrated fiction to create forms of new knowledge”.

Born in the Moravian capital Brno, Milan was the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera, a pianist, composer and musicologist who was head of the Janácˇek Music Academy. The son also studied composition, and music was a lifelong love, often summoned in his novels and essays. At Charles University in Prague, Kundera studied literature and aesthetics and, like most of his generation, was caught up in the great postwar euphoria, attracted to the possibilities held out by communism, after the blight of Nazism, of a Czech society reborn.

The Russians liberated the country in 1945 and nobody was surprised when, the following year, the Communist party won 38% of the vote and formed a coalition government. Kundera joined the party (“I too once danced in a ring. It was the spring of 1948,” he confesses in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and some of his poetry displays the kind of lyrical enthusiasm he would later decry.

He switched his degree to film, but in 1950 was expelled for “anti-party activities”, an incident that gave birth to The Joke. Allowed to return to his studies, he rejoined the political fold in 1956, remaining in the party for the next 14 years. His freewheeling, speculative manner as a teacher of world literature at the Prague film school from 1958 until 1969 influenced many Czech new wave directors, Miloš Forman among them.

Living in exile in Paris, Kundera revised into French all his works written in Czech, then set a novel in France, Immortality (1988). The same year, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was adapted for film, directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, and Kundera found celebrity as an author, a status he was not entirely comfortable with. He began writing in French (despite which, he won the 2007 Czech state prize for literature). Slowness (1996), Identity (1998) and Ignorance (2000) were well-received, though none had the impact of the earlier Czech works.

In 2008, after an investigation, an accusation was made against Kundera in the Czech magazine Respekt. It was claimed that in 1950 he gave the name of Miroslav Dvoracek to the police. Dvoracek, a pilot, had escaped from Czechoslovakia but returned as a western intelligence agent; he was subsequently arrested, narrowly escaped the death penalty, and served 14 years in a labour camp.

Kundera denied that he was the informant and a group of writers including Fuentes, Márquez, Rushdie, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee came swiftly to his defence in a letter declaring him the victim of “orchestrated slander”.

Havel said he thought the way events unfolded too “stupid” for Kundera to have been involved, and that his old friend and adversary, who had scrupulously kept away from the media, rarely giving interviews, had “become entangled in a thoroughly Kunderaesque world, one that he has so masterly managed to keep at a distance from all his real life”.

The following year, Kundera published Encounter, a series of essays, some going back 20 years. In one, discussing Bohumil Hrabal, the author of Closely Observed Trains, Kundera reiterates his view of the relation of politics and art, and his belief in the pre-eminence of the novel in the struggle for human liberation: “One single book by Hrabal does more for people, for their freedom of mind, than all the rest of us with our actions, our gestures, our noisy protests!”

His final novel, The Festival of Insignificance, was published in 2015. Four years later, his Czech citizenship was finally restored.

He is survived by his wife, Vera Hrabankova.

🔔 Milan Kundera, writer, born 1 April 1929; died 11 July 2023

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